Here’s a little snippet of one of my songs (still a rough draft):

You can almost smell the elevator, right?

One of the interesting things about the time limit is that it’s forcing me to go with whatever comes out of my head. This is not a particularly exciting piece, but without anything better to work on I just hit record and starting banging it out. As things progressed I started adding in some fun little bits, like those 2+3 groupings at the end of the A section. It’s still nothing great, but I’m warming up to it. I’m hoping I can do the same with the other ideas I’ve had (which, incidentally, are less Musak-sounding).

I’ll try to update a couple more times over the course of the project.

We now know we have the power bend the law to our will, and to make legislators respect our values, if we can just coordinate our efforts and focus our attentions. But there are many issues which have to do with the soul of our nation that may not galvanize a redditor who’s only concerned with legislation that might interfere with watching movies online.

- Anil Dash, “The History, and Future, of Web Protest”

• Bastion, Supergiant Games
• Dragon Age II, BioWare Edmonton
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Bethesda Game Studios
• Portal 2, Valve Corporation
• Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, Capybara Games

Five albums from 2011 that I enjoyed:

• Artificial Heart, Jonathan Coulton
• The Harrow and the Harvest, Gillian Welch
• Helplessness Blues, Fleet Foxes
• Revelator, The Derek Trucks Band
• Rocket Science, Béla Fleck & the Flecktones

This is what it looked like outside:

And this is what it looked like outside in 2005:

I think New England is trying to tell me something.

(Click images to enlarge.)

Oh boy. Let’s see what we’ve got here:

• The game is, inexplicably, Backgammon II: a video game sequel to a board game that I had never played.
• One of the advertised features is “No Backgammon I!” Maybe I realized my cross-media sequel was a little strange; maybe I just liked the word “backgammon.”
• Backgammon II is a product of The Software Toolworks, an actual company. (They were the original developers of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and Chessmaster.) And it’s clearly a PC game, too; note the menu bar and arrow keys.
• The gameplay “screenshot” is completely mystifying.

An options menu. You can choose your font in this game, kind of like how you can choose the color of the text boxes in EarthBound. Here the player has selected “Out-of-Control-Whip,” which looks pretty good.

Aha — Backgammon II is a racing game! There’s only one car on the track, so this must be the time trial mode. No points yet, or bonus points, but it seems to be pretty early in the first “session.”

The two noteworthy elements on this track are the DEATH ZONE and the railroad crossing. There appears to be further DEATH on the railroad track, foreshadowing the dangerous train in Mario Kart 64’s Kalimari Desert.

Action shot of a sweet-ass jump. (Note the narrowly avoided arrow-tipped obstacle! I bet that’s the kind of style you need to earn those bonus points.)

In addition to driving, the car appears to be attempting echolocation for some reason. I probably stole that from Ecco the Dolphin, which I somehow never got the hang of as a five-year-old.

Man, I sure like to write the name of the game, don’t I? Here the B in “Backgammon” seems to have sprouted a beefy arm, Trogdor-style. Look at all its majesty!

I’m not really sure what’s going in the actual picture. Based on the arrow this is probably a top-down view of YOU driving — with art potentially inspired by Tommy Lasorda Baseball — but I can’t place the large object in the center. Something to stay away from, I guess!

This is where Backgammon II takes a turn for the WTF. It seems that we have abandoned the driving genre for a gruesome bastardization of Let’s Make a Deal. Here the player has been presented with two doors, EXIT and WEPONS, and must choose one. Here he has chosen incorrectly, and lies dead in a pool of his own blood.

I suspect my influence here was Alex Kidd in Miracle World, the first video game I ever played. The boss battles in Miracle World were literally just Rock Paper Scissors, and if you lost, you died. In retrospect it’s a wonder I didn’t give up on the medium right there.

Here the player wisely chooses EXIT over WEPONS, and seems to be leaving. There are also a shit-ton of arrows all of a sudden, one of which is pointing to…the reappearance of the title of the game! Man, this is so much better than the first backgammon.

An overhead map of a race course. Probably one of the later ones; those loops in the latter half of the track are pretty gnarly. (The two words are “GRASS” and “GRASS” backwards — God only knows what backwards grass does.)

These look like the WEPONS that kill you if you pick the wrong door. The sword is pretty standard and the “cracked gun” doesn’t look too threatening, but the slingshot shoots actual arrows! As does, of course, the Bow ‘n’ Arrooww, which is frankly a better name for a weapon than half of what I see in shipped games.

The combination of weapons and racing makes me think I was influenced by Road Rash, but the timeline is wrong; the first game I played in that series was Road Rash 3, and I would have been older by the time that came out. I’m left to conclude that adding weapons was my own idea, because shit just needed to get a little more real.

Finally, we have this — an exit sign, a sign with some palindromic numbers on it, and what appears to be an enormous half-buried volleyball, or an origami sunset, or maybe some kind of Tetris variant played in a semicircle. Who the hell knows. Maybe this is a puzzle you need to solve in between racing, killing stuff, and trying not to get WEPONed by doors.

On the first page of my fifth grade yearbook, below a disappointingly fuzzy class photo, is the heading “SOMEDAY I’D LIKE TO BE” followed by the best jobs our young minds could dream up: Olympian, President, architect, marine biologist. (Actually, now that I look, there are no fewer than five prospective marine biologists. I guess there were a lot of Seinfeld fans in my class.)

My ideal job, of course, was “make video games.” I wonder if anyone who saw this thing thought I had a ghost of a chance.

I also recommend the supplementary podcast episode, which is freely available and features further discussion of Hale’s signature role, Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard. In the podcast, Bissell offers this interesting explanation for why he chooses to play as female characters in games (a preference I increasingly share for reasons that I’ve not been able to articulate):

I can say, for me, I play as a woman because it adds an additional layer of fiction onto the fictional experience. I don’t play games to feel empowered; I play games to be part of an experience involving characters that I’m not. And so taking a woman actually, you know, exaggerates that quality of games that I really like. But I think a lot of young men play action games for, you know, a kind of very facile sense of empowerment. And that’s lamentable, but it’s unavoidable. You know, eighty percent of people pick the male Shepard even though in my humble opinion — and in most people’s opinion — Jennifer’s performance is quite a bit more affecting than Mark Meer’s. Which is a — Mark Meer’s is a good performance, don’t get me wrong. But Jennifer’s really touches something, you know, a little bit more fantastic and moving, in my mind.

(This also echoes an old Escapist piece from Kill Screen editor Chris Dahlen.)

For the more proletarian-minded, there are the modest little burgs of Cambridge and Somerville, where everyone dresses like the proprietor of his or her very own meth lab. If you wonder how a people can live like this, well, it’s Jurassic Park for fashion troglodytes: life finds a way.

(Via N’Gai Croal.)