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Fire of a Thousand Suns (IV)
 

I. I probably don't pimp out my Twitter as much as I should - there are some people who have so many followers that it just befuddles me.

However, if any of you decide you no longer want to follow me after this morning's tweet, I fully understand:

Is there a laxative in Red Bull that they forgot to mention? I can't work out if I've been sitting on a toilet or a Foreman Grill.

Anyway, the reason why I'm labouring you with that awfully sloppy (aha ) piece of information is because I've been thinking an awful lot about food and the specific effect it would have in relation to in-game performance.

Obviously the actual effect would not be that significant, but we're all in the business of eking out a win by the margins - keeping a 1%-2% advantage and letting that snowball over the course of a game kind of thing.

I've collected a bunch of anecdotal experience over the years that's led me to believe that the topic warrants further investigation.

For example, anybody who has a brain knows what the effect of having a large, greasy, fatty meal from KFC or McDonalds is. It sits on your stomach, makes you feel bloated and does the opposite of giving you energy (even though you consumed half a day's worth in one burger). People at ACL Melbourne can probably attest to the experience, since KFC seemed like the only viable option (even though Pinder and myself discovered a completely baller cafe and I later found a pretty sweet noodle house).

Obviously this doesn't prevent you from winning or losing, but it definitely has a temporary effect on how you feel - which has an impact on your mood as well. Being in a good or bad mood affects people differently in-game, but people who are happier - I've found - tend to be a little more alert, don't get on tilt as easily, are a little more creative and less troubled by their surroundings.

I'm talking from LAN experience as far back as 2003. I can't pinpoint why this seems to be the case; it's probably largely mental, although there must be some sports science somewhere that could pinpoint specific foods that would have a mental boosting effect. Blueberries perhaps?

As a side note, I've been buying a lot of healthy foods lately just because they're, well, healthy, but also because they're damned cheap. Punnets of strawberries are going for less than A$2 at the moment - cheaper than boxes of Pizza Shapes in some cases (as a random example). All you have to do is dunk them under water, cut them in halves and offer them around - a great snack, low in kilojules, little bit of natural sugar and sweetness and you don't feel like a fat bastard for the rest of the day.


II. There's a saying that the good die young, evidenced by the wonderfully enchanting voice of the woman above, Eva Cassidy.

Cassidy died at the ridiculously young age of 33 after what was first thought to be a malignant melanoma spread to her lungs and bones. Despite aggressive treatment, the cancer quickly spread and she passed away shortly after, although not before giving a final performance at the Bayou where a benefit concert was being held in her honour.

The song's particularly important since it gave a lot of singers an alternative way to perform the classic by changing the emphasis in the chorus; Judy Garland's version, which is held up as the gold standard for Over the Rainbow, shifts up a notch during "somewhere". They're both beautiful pieces and it's a wonderful exercise in just how much difference a minuscule adjustment can make.


III. For a continued lesson on the rewards for doggedly following your passion over an extraordinary period of time, OverClocked ReMix is probably one of the best places to go.

There used to be a time when music in video games was sneered at. Hell, there was a time when sound in games were laughable, only because the prehistoric hardware of the time was capable of outputting little else than the grunts of neanderthals (and not too well, I might add).

If you watch the video, you'll learn a bit about OCR's history. It's not just a website dedicated towards updating classics from the late 1980s, but more of a reinterpretation of some of your favourite songs - or what you'll usually find, songs that become your favourites when you realise just how good the compositions are.

And these fans don't **** around either. Spend some time on their forums and you'll learn what a proper debate looks like. They take their craft seriously, agonising over the form, flow and arrangement of every single instrument, every single note and the pacing of it all.

The website is a proper testament to the power of the internet - the ability to bring together groups of people from around the world who have a unifying passion, merged into a powerful entity that has a life-force all of its own.

If you're bored with your current playlist, you'd be surprised at how many good tracks you'll find at OCR. Don't let the game names (Donkey Kong LOL how could that music be good - banish thoughts like these) put you off.


IV. People who knew me before SC2 have heard this story a million times, but most of the crowd here hasn't and it's not too bad so I'll share it again.

About seven years ago Electronic Arts ran a competition in conjunction with Alienware to give away one of their beastly Aurora desktop PCs - which were selling for A$4000 a pop at the time - every day for a month. I can't remember what the original reason for the competition was, other than the fact that EA's hub website had only recently launched that year and they were running major giveaways on it pretty much every other week.

The competition was a simple referral job. Enter the contest and you get one entry and a referral link. For every five people that click on the link, you got an extra entry in the draw. Get all your friends to click on it and you get more chances, right? It's easy!

Well, as all of you sceptical folk know, most people began recruiting everyone who wasn't their friend to help out.

Back in the day I was still using mIRC on a regular basis (I got onto Austnet waaaaaaaaay back courtesy of my brother - Madlibs were the ******* shit) so I started spamming the link around there to try and get some hits. I saw an old Quake 3 player do it a few times - noetix or his brother incognito, can't remember which one entered - and figured it was worth a shot.

But I only got about 50 or so referrals, which obviously wasn't going to cut the mustard. So I decided to, as a friend of mine would occasionally say, pull out a dippa special.

The picture you see above is a screenshot from Counter-Strike 1.6. In case you didn't know, it's also a pretty bloody good score (getting over 20 frags in a 15 round half is usually a good result).

So I figured it was time to bait some stupid Americans.

Gotfrag was the major eSports website in America back in the day and one of the largest in the world (Sogamed, that heaven of ASCII art, was one of the major ones in Europe while Pantheon eSports - which was revived recently - ruled the roost locally). I made a thread there with a pretty simple idea: highest score ever.

I took the screenshot above and dumped it into TinyURL. I then took my referral link and shortened the URL for that as well, and when I made the thread I listed it as the following:

-LEGIT LINK HERE-
and
-REFERRAL LINK HERE- (but both as TinyURL so they looked legit)

My logic was simple: people would click on the first link, see the high score and automatically click on the second, as their bullshit barrier would be weakened after seeing the screenshot.

Seeing the score mentally legitimised the second link, and because American internet was still ridiculously fast compared to Australia the referral would load and register before anyone had a chance to react. Free entries for me!

Except as it turns out, Americans were really ******* stupid.

They kept debating my score. Some of them start attacking me personally saying how much of a scrub I was. One player in CAL Invite (highest online league at the time) started exploding at me with both barrels. The thread got up to 60 posts and nobody had mentioned the second link. What the hell?

I checked my referrals - over 1000 clicks. I figured that was probably enough - I didn't want to go over 9000 and score a disqualification from the admins - so I started responding in kind. That CAL-I player got a particular forum humbling as I took pains to explain how much of a massive fuckwit he truly was, and took note to thank him for his efforts in helping my Christmas become that much better.

Eventually everyone clued up - it took 3 days for admins to close the thread and issue a ban, and people were still posting - and the clicks came to a halt.

As it turns out, however, I'd done enough to win. My little act of skullduggery meant that three days after Christmas, the largest delivery van I'd ever seen in my life pulled up on the dirt road outside my house and delivered what also happened to be the largest case I'd ever seen in my life.

Fortuitously, my mother happened to have a friend over at that time. She wasn't particularly knowledgeable about technology, but even the rest of my family were impressed with the present I'd managed to win for myself. (Even the LCD monitor could do 75hz, which back in 2005, was ******* brilliant - LCDs were honestly awful to play FPS on back then. I've still got it too - my mum's been using it for the last few years.)

Naturally, my mother's friend wanted to know how I'd pulled off the achievement, so I let her know. I'm not sure if my delivery was off, but for some reason she later told my mum that it might be a good idea not to get on my bad side.

Still not really sure how she arrived at that, but hey, it's not like I gave a ****. I'd just won a A$4000 PC.


V. I've been playing a lot of mobile games lately in my spare time - on the crapper at work, on the train, lying in bed and just whenever I have a bit of downtime that's away from the PC at home.

But it's only recently that I've just clued onto why I'm enjoying them quite so much.

The progress in smartphones is truly remarkable over the last few years. My brother and I were commenting just the other day how it's crazy that the camera in my Galaxy S3 has more functionality than my Canon 7D in terms of the software. The sensor's obviously streets behind, and you can do everything and more with the DSLR's with the right software and know-how, but the progress over the last couple of years compared to anything else is, well, ridiculous.

Even the hardware itself has been staggering. My phone has a 1.4ghz quad-core processor. I'm still running a quad-core in my desktop PC and that only became viable about three years ago for enthusiasts - you know, the ones who don't go out and spend A$2000 on the latest brick passing off as a graphics card.

The games are starting to step up pretty quickly in quality too. The image above is a picture of the iOS/Android version of Death Rally, the top-down racer made by the developers of Alan Wake and Max Payne 1/2. Remedy recently rebooted the series, and you can pick up the PC version pretty cheaply on Steam.

But what's really gotten to me over the last week or so is just how similar the quality of games is now to the titles I used to enjoy as a kid, back when I was still the "younger brother" (he didn't die or anything - he just got his own PC) and I was marooned to what we called the P133 with the Turbo button (apparently it underclocked to a 486 DX/66 or something crappy when you turned it off).

Since that machine obviously couldn't handle a lot of newer titles, I loaded it up to the hilt with abandonware. I became a massive fan of Home of the Underdogs, probably the most comprehensive collection on the internet of games that were no longer available at retail.

The site got hit a couple of times by ambitious Americans determined to maintain their owners' copyright even back in the late 1990s - when online distribution methods such as Steam were a pipe-dream - despite the fact that purchasing the game was actually impossible in some cases. There were still thousands of games available for download, though, thanks to the tireless work of one woman in Thailand who continue to not only grow the site with his own funds, but inspire a community that would also add to its vast resources by meticulously researching, reviewing and collecting an assortment of materials such as cheat sheets, PDF versions of manuals and guides for the list.

Sarinee Achavanuntakul eventually gave up the gig and the site collapsed into mediocrity towards the late 2000s, but the inspiration that she'd generated over a decade resulted in three offshoots spawning up towards the turn of the decade. Only two are still in existence today, and the collections are nowhere near as vast or well-researched as they were before.

The market today is also much more accommodating for these small titles. It's possible to reboot older games on mobile devices - Another World and Death Rally are great examples - or simply provide the original versions through mediums like Steam or the excellent Good Old Games. I guess in one way, this was really what the abandonware movement was all about. One of the strongest arguments in support of what was effectively piracy was the fact that even the developers would rather their games be preserved and enjoyed by newer audiences, instead of being left to rot on a shelf in some shitty store that no-one would visit.

And now a happy medium has been found. People can still enjoy the originals the way they were meant to be played through DOSBox. Mobile games can even help fund remakes or new interpretations of the game. The blood and sweat of developers - and these people work ******* hard, frequently sacrificing their own health to meet deadlines - doesn't have to fade away in vain anymore.

I wonder what Sarinee thinks of the gaming world today. I like to think she'd be happy. I know I am.