dubiouslog

it’s like 43°C today (110°F) and the clothes hung outside now smell like burnt

also, this is a conversation that actually happened

me: I’m moving
Jeel: where
me: (zone)
Jeel: it doesn’t exist

something different for once

This morning I bought a new mouse, but it sucked so much that I ended up opening again the old one to see if there was really nothing that could be done.

TURNS OUT THERE WAS

the component themselves were working, as evidenced by the fact that, once I opened the mouse, I could use the switches to click. The problem was that, since the left button is subjected to a lot of stress when I paint, draw or play, the trasmission part connected to the plastic body had worn out so much that it was pulverized in places and it was no longer reaching the switch. I put some duct tape on it and now it makes contact again :D

WHEEEEEEEEEE

ALSO TONIGHT I MET DAEVION: YESTERDAY WAS A BAD DAY, BUT NOW I’M HAPPY

my mouse died :( it was a fine guy, spent seven years of life under my right hand. It began to have problems a few months ago, but I opened it and fixed it; however, I knew that its end was drawing near. Yesterday evening, the left button seemed to jump while clicking, and this morning it completely stopped working. There’s nothing I can do for it now. I unplugged it, but I always keep reaching for it and feel disappointed when my hand grabs the air. I’ll just put him on a shelf and let it rest.

I guess that tomorrow I’ll have to look for a substitute. It will be hard, though. It had just the right shape, size and weight for my tiny hand. And it was good-looking too, with its sides and bottom translucid and showing part of its inner workings. I don’t know if I will be able to find a worthy replacement for it in my parents’ tiny town, and if I won’t I’ll have to just buy the best approximation I can find and then look for a better one when I’m at Jacopo’s.

bawwwww my moooooouse

if I can choose the right style in which to develop it, this will become AMAZING
(Jacopo: of course this has low priority, I was just sketching stuff)

Yesterday morning, I was peacefully doing my business on the computer when my sister stormed in with a triumphant expression on her face and a CD in one hand. “Look at what I found!”.
The CD with the green label which she was now waving in front of me was a compilation of PC games from the mid-nineties; an old friend which introduced me to classics such as Duke Nukem II, and many other games whose names had been long forgotten. As I opened the small leaflet that came with the case, I began reading the contents, and stopped at a name.
“Mystic Towers”.

Mystic Towers falls right in the category of the incredibly obscure PC games from the early nineties. It’s kind of amazing how many games were produced in that era and how little we remember of them - I guess it’s the fate of most things that happened in the immediate pre-internet. As such, it should come as no surprise that, except for a few download links and a handful of screenshots, googling this game brings very few interesting results.
Undeservingly so: Mystic Towers is one damn good game.

Mystic Towers

Genre: Adventure
Platform: PC (DOS)
Released in: 1994
Developer: Animation F/X, Apogee (current 3DRealms)
Publisher: Apogee

Mystic Towers’ star is an elderly wizard in retirement by the name of Baron Baldric (”a Baron Baldric game”, reads the subtitle in the intro screen) who is sent on a quest to free the Lazarine Towers from monsters using the magic of his ancestors. Although he’s the good guy, he’s miles away from being an archetypal hero. I mean, among his idle animations we have him picking his nose or scratching his package. And since we’re already talking about it, this must be said: other than having a variety of amusing quirks, he’s also amazingly well animated for the time; in fact, everything that moves in this game does it with style, and what doesn’t is still very pretty to look at -  even fifteen years later.

The game’s premise is that, every time Baron Baldric enters a tower, he has to destroy all monsters and the monster generator in each tower in order to collect the red exit key and progress to the next level. There are 12 towers in total; each one of them has 15 monsters living in it distributed through 5 floors with 9 rooms each. Easy enough, one would think. Of course, this is just the top layer underneath which we have an amazing gameplay depth. Although most rooms look very similar to each other, the puzzles they offer are always different. For example, some rooms have teleport panels which, if activated with the proper spell, allow Baron Baldric to jump to another place in the tower. However, the spell itself may not be in the same room as the panel. Another room may have a switch for a door that’s out of reach; you’ll then want to look for an item on which to climb, or alternatively for a Levitate spell. Some rooms have coin-operated machines which will power up your weapons or give you some more to use; others have power-ups such as a magical shield or an invisibility cloak, while others yet are marked by runes that indicate the presence of something hidden in that room.

Another part of the exploration is keeping Baron Baldric alive and in good health. There are three life bars on screen: one health bar that is affected by damage from monsters and traps, one hunger bar and one thirst bar. Were Baron Baldric left without eating or drinking for long enough, his health bar would begin to deplete and he’d eventually die. Of course. Luckily, food and drinks aren’t hard to find; however, there are some you’d better off not touching - picking up a poisonous mushroom will cause instant death. There are also some beverages which will make Baron Baldric drunk and that you may not want to drink if a monster is nearby (if you’re alone, though, go for it - the result will be priceless).

As for the monsters, there are dozens of different creatures to be found. Each monster has its own area which won’t leave and, even before entering its domain, its presence is signaled by a portrait of said monster in the top right corner of the screen. All these warnings are justified by the fact that monsters in Mystic Towers are really more like area bosses, and fighting them consumes a lot of spells and energy; so, if you feel like you aren’t ready to face a monster, you can just walk away. Most early levels monsters can damage the player only when coming close to Baron Baldric; as you progress, you will find more and more monsters with ranged attacks.
On a related note, the designs of the monsters are amazingly creative. For example, look at the little blue guy in the screenshot here. It’s called an Azurblast, and it’s…a duck robot on a wheel? How cute is that?

In spite of the game being very slow-paced, it never comes to the point of being boring, and even though there’s a lot to look for in each room, completing a tower doesn’t take more than 20-30 minutes. It’s kind of amazing, actually - most jprgs turn me off because they’re so slow, and this game manages to keep my interest perked while being slower by several orders of magnitude.

When I first played this game, I thought it had no soundtrack except for the sound effects. Replaying it now, I found out that it does have a soundtrack, so I think it was just my audio card that was not supported. It was either that or the version of the game I had. Whichever my problem, it makes me sad that I couldn’t get to listen to the soundtrack before, because it’s gorgeous. It has only a few pieces, but they are all beautiful. The two exploration themes are especially interesting in which they loop only after 12-13 minutes and have an amazing variety. If you’re curious, the soundtracks are here and the one I like most is this one. If it weren’t for the sound quality, I would have never guessed it was videogame music. It doesn’t sound like something that’s made to be in the background - it goes from slow and atmospheric to fast and intense and has a serious drums line in some parts. Definitely not what you’d expect from videogame music, and especially not from such an old game.

Every game has its flaws, and Mystic Towers isn’t immune from flaws. The biggest one is probably that, after a few towers, the room layouts begins to get repetitive. Not the puzzles, just the graphics. Things get confusing when everything looks alike. In the few reviews I managed to find for this game I’ve also found some criticism towards the fact that fighting monsters is underwhelming and requires no strategy - and it’s true, but I can’t find anything bad in that. I think this game is really more about solving puzzles and exploring the towers than fighting the monsters. That could be just me, though.

Mystic Towers’ greatest charm is its unique feeling. Once you’re acquainted with it, you can’t mistake this game for anything else. It belongs to its own genre. It’s sad that it never left the obscure status - it could have been a classic.

If this is the first time you learn of the existence of this game, go play it now. It can be downloaded here (for free, since so many years have passed) and runs just fine with DOSbox.

Other reads on Mystic Towers (lol, who am I kidding, these are probably ALL of them):

• Answers
  
• Wikipedia
• Mobygames
• This blog post

This concludes my review for this game. Now I can stop pretending I’m a srs bzns blogger. No, wait, I’m making a new tag just for this kind of posts.
In any case, goodnight.

“and when you will return to the waking world, paint with the colours of the world we created”

please put these to good use! no credit needed!

that’s the artwork I was talking about the other day :> If you remember his first pic, you may notice the lack of the bionic hand; he still has it, though - it’s just that he can swap his “normal” right hand (which is still bionic, mind) with the other one. How would you like to roll in bed while asleep if your hand was made of knives? also, washing his dishes. even if his dishes were unbreakable, it would have still been a symphony of horrible screeching noises. D:

When I first introduced him, I stated that he would have been a villain in my story. Since then, he’s turned into the main character. I’ve figured out his whole backstory and the reason why he chose to go cyborg, but I can’t really disclose the details since that will be the focus of the plot. I also previously said that his story would have taken place in an alternate present; it will actually take place in the year 2076. Or, at least, that’s when Hydride becomes a cyborg. He’d be 25 or 26 by then, being born on August 31, 2050.

In the year 2076, the Earth is mostly at peace, the poor are few and everyone has stopped polluting the planet. This turn of events, however, doesn’t happen because everyone suddenly decides to be nice. In the twenties, scientists from all around the world are warning the leaders that, if pollution levels aren’t lowered in the next ten years, the sea level is going to rise causing a global-scale catastrophe. The governments hush them; however, these warnings reach the people, who get more and more alarmed. In 2028 the disaster happens, and the aftermath is colossal. There are riots everywhere and most governments and all kinds of powerful lobbies are taken down. Anyway, the world recovers pretty fast from this blow, and in twenty years most things are back to normal; the new governments are of course a lot wiser than their predecessors, and won’t repeat their mistakes. At the time in which the story takes place, we have a world in which Europe has turned into a federal nation, the Middle East is powerful and no longer a war zone, Africa can finally fend for itself, Asia is very powerful and North and South America are more or less the same as now.
Between the sixties and the seventies, groups of scientists are focusing on the research of cybernetic parts for a better treatment of diseases; as such, many private clinics are opening up just about everywhere in the world. This also means that people cannot just go YOU CHOSE TO BECOME A MACHINE! PFEH! on people with bionic parts because they are most likely people who suffered from terrible injuries and it’s not really their choice. However, this is not true for everyone; some clinics allow healthy people to have implants built in them for cosmetic or other reasons.

As for Hydride, he belongs to this last category. He chose to become a cyborg for his own reasons, and his friend John (you’ll see him later) helped him throughout this process. Hydride’s implants may look flashier than needed, but that’s because he designed them himself and he likes to wear them like a modern-day person would wear a tattoo, and he likes it when people look at him funny.
Of course, Hydride is also not his real name; it’s his Internet handle. His real name is Robert Cross. He adopts his nickname when he becomes a cyborg, although I can’t say a lot more about it right now. Another information that I have to put down but that I can’t really write about is that he’s an hacker. I’ll just leave this here.

A few notes about his appearance:

• The wires look metallic, but they’re actually elastic and very resistent. Not a good idea trying to cut them - they’re so sturdy you’d break your scissors.
• You’d think that with those wires he’d be always tripping, but no. At this point, they’ve become a part of himself. His proprioception includes the wires.
• The arrow-shaped piece below his neck is an exposed part of his inner workings. It’s on the outside because it’s the intersection of several parts and it would be too bulky to be placed beneath his skin.
• The top wire on his left arm goes into the back of that open collar.
• The wire which goes behind him begins in his right shoulder. In a profile, you’d see that the front wire and the back wire pierce him like they were a single piece, though they’re not. I should really draw him like this.
• The wires in his pants. I know. I know. But I just can’t say where do they go. Let’s keep this secret. At least for a while.
• I already wrote that he’s wearing glasses instead of having his eyes fixed because he likes how they look on him. Other than that, they’re actually part of his head. When he has to take them off, they slide into the sides of his head. They are also water-repellent. By the way: Denise! I just discovered that this technology is ALREADY being used on glasses. I saw a few water-repellent glasses in a shop earlier today :D wow, the future is apparently NOW.

As for what concerns his ethnicity, Hydride is half-arab. In his first pic he was white; scratch that, I like him better like this. I have yet to decide where will this story take place, but whatever.
His personality, well. The pose should already say a lot. The only non-spoiler information I can give for now is that he’s insane. Not crazy or weird, insane. As in, his reasonings are not of a sane person. There is going to be a lot more subtlety than just that, though; we’re talking about a grey character here. His development is also going to be a crucial point of the story, so you know.

And that’s all for now. Whew.

Wanted to post this like nine hours ago but then I tried to upgrade Wordpress. Turns out it was a terrible idea, since I was able to fix it only a few minutes ago. Serves me right. If it’s not broke…

ANYWAY WALLPAPER MEME BECAUSE OF KATE

• Anyone who looks at this entry has to post this meme and their current wallpaper on their LiveJournal.
• Explain in five sentences why you’re using that wallpaper!
• Don’t change your wallpaper before doing this! The point is to see what you had on.

• It’s Mirror’s Edge art and I love Mirror’s Edge to pieces. And even if I didn’t…just look at it. That thing is gorgeous.
• It’s so empowering, yet soothing at the same time. If I’m feeling nervous or angry or something like that, I stare at the wallpaper and I feel instantly better.
• The composition makes the screen look wider.
• It’s dynamic, but not messy. And all the icons I have on screen match the colors in the pic in a way or another.
• Look, I can put my to-do list in Faith’s bag! :D