And Today's WTF song is...

...from Japan, of course!

Mr. Kalinin Knows His Miners Well

A man from Slovakia seems to be selling acrylic paintings depicting various 8-bit videogaming icons on his website DigitalRetro.org. He seems to be especially fond of Manic Miner. The paintings are for sale for about 300 EUR each.



The one on the right is called "Teleport Error 01".

Matthew Smith Is One Crazy Hippie. Also, He's A God.

"I was 17 when I wrote Manic Miner"... "I think it's going to get to a stage where one person can't write a whole game"...

Give Him Five

It's time to upgrade your operating system:

In Soviet Russia, People Have Too Much Time On Their Hands

Someone from Russia (who has only the faintest knowledge of English) sent me a video recording of a complete play-through of my Tetris 2 game. It's over 4 hours long and he did it without any cheats, which I thought to be impossible (that's why the game insults you when you finish it).



You can download the compressed video file here. It's only 15 MB long but beware: The RAR archive uncompresses to more than 4 GB of AVI!

One Lazy Sundany Afternoon In Philippines Prison...

Sweet Lo-Fi Music From YUO

Download some free (legal) minimalistic electronica. There's also a music video.

The band is called "Fuck Yuo I Am A Robot".

I Remember When These Bands Were Cool

When talking with younger people, it occured to me that most of them never heard about the lesser known bands I grew up with and loved some 15-20 years ago.

I don't want to preach and explain to you how much more interesting these people were (are!) in comparison with Britney Spears and how much more fun they had with their own images. I just present three of them over here and - if you are interested - you can find more about them on Wikipedia, YouTube, The Pirate Bay etc., etc...

First, there is Yello (and their "Oh Yeah"). These two guys probably invented techno and serious syntesizer/sampler programming.



Then, we have Army of Lovers. You probably heard "Crucified" because it's sometimes played even today, but they had many more hits and - in their case - you really have to see their music videos.



And, finally (for today), here are The Sparks and their "When Do I Get To Sing 'My Way'?". Of these three, they are the most versatile. The carreer of these two brothers spans several decades and several wildly different musical styles. They influenced the Pet Shop Boys and they wrote a song for Hong Kong action director Tsui Hark (who can't even speak English, let alone sing!), called I'm Tsui Hark!

My Dinner

The Yes Man

Salvador Dali on "What's My Line" game show. (Real, not any kind of fake / joke.) The audience laughs because they see him and know who he is.

Two Drunk Robots In 96KB (!) Hungarian PC Game

The world needs much more games like Sumotori Dreams...



P.S: To access the "hidden mode", at the start menu, try throwing the cube between two rightmost pillars to destroy one of the specific "walls" in the right corner of the ring.

Quarter Of A Century Already?!?

Oh my God.

It's now 25 years since ZX Spectrum, the best (certainly the most accessible) home computer ever, was released.



I remember when I got mine (after I've already played with it for countless hours at my friends'). I was getting up at 5AM, before school, just to play a few rounds of Jet Set Willy. I remember learning the machine code and reading through the paper print-out of Spectrum's ROM before going to sleep.

I am amazed I still have the basic hex opcodes burned deep inside my skull. I think the screen contents was loaded from tape like this: DD 21 00 40 11 00 1B 3E FF 37 C3 56 05. That should be "LD IX, $4000; LD DE,$1B00; LD A,$FF; SCF; JP $0556".



The Spectrum (and its clones) was around for many, many years and this allowed the programmers to squeeze out every last drop of its potential. This will never happen again. Flight simulator. Word processing. Shaded vector realtime graphic. Five-channel sound with volume envelopes and modulation using one-bit software operated D/A convertor. Full-screen software scrolling with masked sprites at 25 FPS. All that in 40 kilobytes of RAM with 3.5 MHz processor...



(This is me in 1987, digitized on the screen of ZX Spectrum. In realtime. At 0.2 FPS.)

Lucy In The Sky With William Shatner

Just to be clear:

This bizarre cover of "Lucy in the sky with diamonds" was recorded by William Shatner several decades ago along with other cover versions of similar epic proportions. It was not meant to be funny.

The animation was done recently and is supposed to be funny.

Shouldn't You Drive a Taxi Instead of Reading This Blog?

I swear this happened between me and an unconspicuously looking taxi driver today (it was in Czech, of course):

Taxi driver: "Have you seen that new Fabia? Bitchin!"

Me: "I know it's a model of car but you really didn't pick the right topic for this conversation, as I am not even sure which pedal does what in a car. If you want, I can talk about movies or computers with you."

Taxi driver: "Oh yeah, I've done some IT shit some time ago but about the time they released Linux Kernel 2.2, I said fuck it, there is no money in this, and started driving a taxi."

Also, he played the games I wrote for ZX Spectrum in the 1980s.

On a different note: This is how unknown girls whom I get heart-shaped lollipops from look like, which means I am probably luckier than most of you (but not lucky enough).



And that's all I'll say about that.

Like Crack, Only Cheaper

Another stop during my investigation into MMORPGs: Maple Story. This is an amazingly popular MMORPG supposedly with over 50 millions of players worldwide! In contrast, World of Warcraft "only" has about 8 million players. So why did you never hear about it? Because it's originally Korean and was only released in English about a year or two ago (after already being a hit in other Asian countries).


What's interesting is that Maple Story has deliberately pixelated hand-drawn ("8-bit retro") graphics and the game is presented as 2D side-scroller (also very "8-bit retro"-ish). In other words, it's exceedingly cute and clean, with no bothersome 3D controls.

It's fairly standard fare. You have to download about 500MB client (Windows only!) and then kill hundreds and thousands of monsters in what basically looks like cute shareware scrolling game. There are all the usual shops with equipment, teleports, leveling up, special events etc...

You can play for free but if you want to own a virtual pet or some extra special equipment, you have to pay in cash.

The problems: Some English texts look awkward and have errors in them. The instructions are sometimes insufficient. For example, I didn't know that there are different worlds and your character cannot be moved from one world to another. That means, after I reached level 16 (after 15 hours of playing) in the "Bellocan" world on "Maple Global" server, I discovered that my friends are in fact playing in different world and if I want to meet them online, I have to start playing in their world, with a different character, from scratch. The different worlds seem to be completely similar in their contents. They only exist in order to handle the amazing number of people playing. And still, some locations seem rather crowded (and this is in the newest, the least populated world).

Again, as with Second Life, I don't expect to devote my life to this game. But if you don't know what to do with your spare time and you like big-eyed pixelated sprites, you might give Maple Story a try.

By the way, if you enjoy larger pixelated things for your apartment, you might enjoy www.pixelblocks.com.

Super Columbine Massacre

There is an interesting new RPG game for Windows called Super Columbine Massacre. It's freeware.


It uses the retro 8-bit-like RPG engine (in fact, it was created using RPG Maker) and allows you to experience the killings at the Columbine High School and the events that followed (going to Hell, meeting Pikachu, Santa, Nietzche and Satan, etc.) from the perspective of two young killers.

I'd probably be interested in the game in any case because ANY game about Columbine massacre has to be super-bizarre, but this one is also interesting social, political and/or artistic statement. If you don't own Windows or if you suck at RPGs, you can see the whole game being played (and finished) here:



The sensation of seeing cute 8-bit sprites re-enacting situations and dialogues from that fateful day is something you don't experience often in the videogames...

Aural Torture

Another blast from the past! A nice person sent me an MP3 of an old song I programmed for Commodore Amiga in 1991 (and I thought it was lost forever). Note that this music is "oldskool" even by 1991 standards (it uses synthesis, not samples) and might be unbearable for most people.

My even older songs (for ZX Spectrum) can be downloaded here, their recent remixes are here (except for "hubbard_bytefest.mp3" which is, of course, originally by Rob Hubbard, not by me).