Did anyone grow up with this game? Because it's impossible.  kjorteo and I go co-operatively through this murderous artefact of pain distilled into cartridge form, a tragedy in three acts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xhTttTVOiY

Having grown up on the PC, I've never played Super Metroid before. Recently, the game suddenly landed in the hands of a large number of stupid people via its release on the Virtual Console, which led to a load of posts on Twitter by idiots who can't get past the first obstacles - or so it seemed... to prove or disprove this, I decided to play through the game myself to see if I could do any better.

I've put together five episodes so far, through a lot of experimentation and panicked screaming, and I've got up to getting some super-bombs and the ice beam. I aim for about an hour or so of gameplay edited down to twenty-minute episodes, as exploration-based games compress down amazingly when you edit them down to just the interesting or relevant bits (particularly with me at the controls).

Wish me luck!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYskLMl1jS8

I just remembered about this submission from... dear god, almost four years ago where I put out a call for questions and then did a recording of my answers. My confidence in my own voice has improved a lot since then, so here is a second invitation :)

Ask me anything - is there anything you want me to say/read? Any questions that you have about Britain or about my life in America? About my work, computers, music, or anything else? Submissions will be open until I get my act together and start answering them - I'm at your command (within reason)!

It's the new year! I'm only nine days late. This year, I will post some music - it would be unwise to make any other promises :)

For those of you who have heard of the spectacularly psychotic pigeon-em-up Hatoful Boyfriend, a sequel called Holidaystar was released on Christmas Day. And I've been part of what you might call a voiceover project for it with (which is really just a gathering of friends willing to get their sanities kicked in by pigeons with a set of videos being produced as a sort of side effect)  kjorteo,  budgebin,  ravenworks and Xaq. I play a murderous partridge and sleepy mathematics-teacher quail, and these two character descriptions don't even come close to describing the amazing storytelling of the game - the interplay between the entire cast is wonderful.

We've just finished doing the first story of four in the game, and you can witness the madness here!

Well... where do I start, honestly? What an... absolutely sensational weekend, not to mention a comprehensively exhausting one. I'm not sure I can sum it up in any way that comes close to doing it justice, but I'll see what I can do.

My visit to Furfright 2012 was from Thursday to Monday, and I'd been looking forward to it since January when I found out the main hotel was already booked solid and was kicked into making arrangements. After thinking about it on and off throughout the year, the day finally arrived, and after putting in a rather more full day than I had intended at work, I left Boston at two o'clock to pick  kjorteo up at Bradley airport.

This was something that I'd been massively excited about, because we had been talking since 2006 and had vaguely been talking about one coming to meet the other at some point in our lives for a very long time, but due to distance and time, had never done it. It's a really odd experience to see someone you've known for so many years and suddenly be talking to an unfamiliar physical person, and when I was standing waiting at the gate it occurred to me that the last photograph I'd seen of him had been from about four years ago and that I might not even recognize him. I was assessing everyone as they stepped through, scanning for the criteria of tall, glasses, long hair... but when I saw the St Pigeonation's bag, I knew that this was it.

And so we drove gradually down to the hotel through the rush-hour traffic, passing the title screen of Tetris on the way, which was a bit of a surprise, while he phoned his mother to let him know he had arrived safely and introduced me as Dr. Murderbeaks. We were staying on the same floor of the Courtyard hotel just down the road from the convention hotel, and the people I was staying with -  susi,  scani and  darknessfalls - had already arrived, so he joined us in our supply-gathering and registration trips for that first night, a bond between two groups of friends that sort of knew each other that would only strengthen as the weekend went on.

Last year, I chose to arrive on the Friday and missed nearly an entire day of the convention - in retrospect I've no idea why. This time, we were around for the opening ceremonies, which included a fantastic video on Furfright's history and a tribute to the War Dogs charity which was extraordinarily moving until they put it on a bit thick at the end. (Nevertheless, it didn't stop us from going out and looking for a charity bucket-wielding squirrel immediately). After that, we wandered the dealer's area for a while, with me trying to be a little more daring about the commissions that I got this time - including one from  jerberjer, a fellow MMF user and the only other one I know who is into both groups). I had to pick and choose very carefully, though, as everyone's artwork of these characters is so overwhelmingly fantastic - and I have a few things that I really can't wait to be posted back to me.

 budgiebin arrived with her boyfriend and the rest of her group that evening - she had been very generous in providing us with pancake-muffins and other assorted oddities to keep us alive, and the three of us had a couple of group photos taken on the next day to commemorate the meeting of just over 50% of the Hatoful group in the same place. That night, though, we went to play Apples to Apples in the game room with somebody who looked disturbingly like Boris Johnson, and then skipped to one of the improvisation panels and took part in a few games during which I think I served a jar of fresh-plucked eyeballs to someone (therefore really not helping my reputation at all). It was all going very well until some fat bastard got a bit loud and pushy near the end, but even he saved himself by coming up with some great lines out of nowhere during the final game.

Oh, and we played a network game of Etrian Odyssey 3 - the game only allows you to choose one character from each contributing party. But we still got through some of the lesser bosses - mostly with Kjorteo's shogun Felix actually doing the work and my monk Bernard providing barely-required support magic.

Saturday was the night to remember! I was up to attend the rehearsal for the Masquerade - after seeing it last year, the idea of performing in it myself wouldn't leave me alone, and I had been practicing a routine since the start of October (and frankly writing it since the drive back the <i>previous</i> October). Kjorteo was with me again that morning, as he was unable to be at the Masquerade due to the writing panels which took place that evening. As I had an act that required no setup at all, I was first in the run-through, which didn't help my nerves, but it did mean that I got to perform when people waiting in the queue still had their attention on the stage and I felt I got a good reaction from them. The rest of the acts were a rather remarkable mixture of styles and, er, approaches that really defy description - I didn't get to see the finished articles myself, but I'm looking forward to the eventual convention DVD.

So after that we went and took part in the Dixit event, and then... some other things must have happened in some sort of order - it's sort of frightening how quickly this is becoming a blur even now. That evening at 7pm, though, it was time for the real thing, and I arrived in the backstage area to find not only that I had been selected to come on right after the opening band, but that I had been listed simply as "British standup" on the board because the Masquerade people had apparently forgotten my name - and I quickly worked this new detail into my act as I paced up and down reciting it to myself among an extraordinary menagerie of costumes and performers, in between talking to  kiffakitmouse and  sedge and  asianeko, who reassured me as to how nice my accent was - a lovely gesture!

I had been nervously preparing for this event for ages, but as soon as I got out on stage, it felt so right - I was suddenly able to engage with the audience, and if you will forgive the rather crude vernacular, absolutely fucking slaughtered them. The reaction was better than I had ever imagined, and because the act had evolved slightly every time I had told it since the start of the month, I found myself able to come up with a lot of responses to the audience's reactions on the spot - a massively unusual experience for someone who usually considers himself less than average at stringing sentences together. About two minutes before I went on, I realized that I could leave my phone recording in my pocket to capture the experience, and so I have put up this official pirate version of my own performance here. I've also made a complete transcription below, purely for reasons of vanity.

Meanwhile, Kjorteo was attending the writing panels, where he had experienced similar breathtaking success when he presented the first page of his novel to a panel of fellow authors. I had known that he was going to get a good reaction, but from what I heard, they were hugely enthusiastic beyond all expectations - I had forgotten that very few people had actually read it before, and I'm hoping that this will serve as a huge boost towards him getting it finished. That was an extraordinary night for both of us.

After that, Susi, Scani and DF went to the evening dance, but being so exhausted, Kjorteo and I retired to our respective rooms for the night. I would get to see a lot more of them the next day, when we went out to the teppanyaki restaurant that we had been so impressed by last year, and I spent the day hanging around with that group. Things got a little dodgy in the evening because news of the impending hurricane was beginning to bear down on us and we had to quickly reorganize Kjorteo's flight, but I was quickly reassured when we were able to book a taxi so easily at the front desk of the hotel - it felt like there was a solid plan again, for the time being.

With people rapidly going home to avoid the hurricane, the remainder of us united in a doodling session around a table in the common area, where I tried figure drawing, got about as far as an arm and then just filled the page with whatever was in my head resulting in something that looked like I'd turned up to an exam on magic mushrooms. I presented this to Kjorteo, and he gave me his own sketch of me on stage, along with a rather beautiful picture of a red panda that he'd got as part of a lot in the charity auction. DF contributed a truly horrifying Silent Hill version of a Hosiehoosie, inspired by me getting one a bit wrong and accidentally creating a monster.

And as Kjorteo left to sleep before his early flight, the whole weekend was topped off when Susi and DF tattered the few remaining scraps of my reputation by convincing me to come out and dance with them in my rabbit pyjamas. A lot of photographers were around and I fear that next year I may be Furfright promotional material... but somehow, in that hotel that hovers on the border between dimensions for a few days a year... everything felt right. Perhaps because I wasn't even the weirdest-dressed person in the room.

I completely messed up my food and sleep schedule in a way that I hope not to do again... I don't know if it's just that I'm getting older or the combination of performance and travel nerves that got to me, but I was glad to find that the morning after I got home, work had no Internet access, and so I took another day to recover in some way mentally and physically. It was a wonderful experience to be around everyone like that for a moment in time - we'll have to do it again next year and hopefully bring more friends in as well. I'm already thinking about my next performance in the Masquerade...

---

Hello! Hello, good evening... oh...! Belic wasn't joking about these lights, I can't see! It's... but... I... oh, there are millions of you! Oh, I should have thought of this before coming on stage.

"Welcome to the sardine can!"

Oh, thank you so much. Ah... yeah. My name is DavidN... and you have never heard of me.

[No!]

Oh, well, that's very generous of you, thank you... I am so unknown that when I arrived this evening, I found on our board that we have backstage listing the order of acts, the Masquerade people had forgotten my name since the rehearsal and had listed me as "British Standup Guy". This... the reason you have never heard of me is that I am a Furaffinity musician.

[A couple of whoops]

Thank you for sounding impressed... and when you submit music to a furry site, you have to accept that your submissions are up against submissions that are a little more visually distracting in nature. We have... we have a whole section on the front page, but above us are the stories, above that... what is the first thing you see when you enter Furaffinity?

[General chorus of "Porn!"]

Artwork! Artwork was the answer I was looking for, but it... that's fair to say, it's artwork of a very specific genre. And it's how we're wired to work - as soon as people see that, their eyes are locked to it like the laser targeting system on a set of boob-seeking missiles. And everything below that might as well be on Mars for all anyone cares about it.

So, er, I'm not performing music tonight - this is... this is a confessional as to how I now find myself on stage talking to a variety, a rainbow of woodland creatures... and their human counterparts. Er... 2006 was a very big year to me because that was when I moved from Scotland to America, and I discovered Furaffinity, someone recommended that I post my music there... and within two years I'd fallen so in love with the creativity and enthusiasm of everyone - of everyone out here that I had my own character drawn, and this is how I present myself all over the Internet now.

2011 was a fun year because I'd made friends on the site, and they convinced me to come to my first furry convention... it was Furfright last year, and, er...

[Smattering of appreciation]

The... the fursuits were what I remember the most from that because, er... even when I was in the community before, I thought that fursuits were slightly s... frightening things. Because when you see them in photos they have this frozen serial-killer grin and boggle eyes... if you go around like that in real life you get locked up. But just watching them... hug people and interact with them and drink water by shoving bottles into their mouths like this... it's... it's a magic experience. I didn't know how to talk to them at first. At first I was like a 14-year-old talking to their first girl. I was going up to them and offering them chat-up lines like "Ah, hello! Er... nice ears! Uhhh... I like the shape of your head!" And even... even now I'm used to it one year on, I still feel slightly like I've just in a... in a "This is what happens when you take drugs" commercial.

But... no, I'm really pleased to be here - I'm really pleased that you corrupted me. Er, congratulations for that...

[Uproar and "One of us!"]

Don't applaud that! It's a dangerous... it's a dangerous hobby to have sometimes, though, because particularly in university I was... I was terrified that somebody would discover the files that I had squirrelled away on the computer. Has anyone ever been caught with furry artwork? ...I see a hand vaguely up through this supernova of a light on the stage. Ah... so who caught you?

"Uh, actually it was in the middle of my sociology class, my instructor..."

What?!

[Most is inaudible under laughter] "I was bored!"

I... I... I had an entire routine prepared - this is much better! What...?

"Not the adult work!"

Oh, okay - so... how did you explain it? Who caught you, exactly?

"My sociology instructor - she started asking me questions after class, that was pretty much it."

Asking you questions, asking you for... all right. That's fair enough. I will... I will trust that you handled that maturely and in an adult fashion and... I trust you. I also have a getting caught story. Uh... okay, picture this scene. It is mid-afternoon on the day after Christmas. I'm lying around on the sofa - I haven't bothered to get dressed. And suddenly the doorbell rings. And I think... I think it must be the UPS man dropping off a late package, because I'm not expecting anyone - he'll have just come to the door, dropped it off and gone. You've seen the Youtube videos - he just flings it over the fence.

So I think... I think I can get up - I'm not really dressed - but I can open the front door, I can get the package, I can close the door, it will be one smooth manouevre, and nobody will see me. I go to my front door and I open my front door... on the other side of my front door is a rather beautiful strawberry-blonde student girl who is thinking about renting the apartment next door and has come to ask me questions about living in the area. She is getting a great introduction, because at this moment I am dressed as a rabbit.

[Sensation]

My... my wife, as a bit of a laugh that Christmas, had bought me a set of rabbit pyjamas... and I was wearing them 'cause I wasn't expecting anyone. But this - this isn't the end of this story. This story has multiple layers, and it improves as it goes down - like a delicious lasagne... or Dante's Inferno. The second... stratum... of this story is that this rabbit costume came from a shop that did not do men's sizes. This rabbit costume has a distinctly pink flavour to it. It has a circle on the tummy as a sort of rub-target. It has long ears that sprout down off a hood... and, the... [liner note: I was about to say "piece de resistance" but then realized I couldn't pronounce it] a truly inspired touch, I think you will agree - a pink pom-pom tail on the back.

[Whoops, whistles, cries of "Rabbit!", assorted bizarre noises]

You're enjoying this image a lot more than I thought... but all -

[Inaudible shout from audience]

What? Oh, never mind. Just... who's doing this act? Uhh... all credit to this student girl - she is keeping her eyes locked on mine and somehow ignoring the fact that I'm dressed in this romper-suit like a giant mutant baby. And I'm... I'm doing the same - I'm just hoping she hasn't noticed, somehow, and I'm saying... "yes! Oh, yes, the people here are nice. Oh, there's nobody weird living here at all." When over her shoulder, I spy her mother...

[Curious reaction]

... who has been wandering around the gardens and she is now headed up my front path. And she sees me and she freezes! And she looks me up and down taking in the entire picture... before eventually, with a presence of mind that I have admired to this day, she simply says... "...Happy Easter?!"

That beautiful student girl did not move in next to me... and as a community this is your fault. Thank you, furries, for everything - thank you, Furfright, and congratulations on ten years. Thank you!

Aaagh, Furfright is this weekend! On Thursday afternoon, I will be leaving the office in the middle of the day and driving to Connecticut, where I will meet several people I have exchanged millions of words with for the first time in an environment amongst a population of upright badgers and weasels. And I'm experiencing... massive excitement, an unusual feeling for me - this is what Christmas used to feel like.

It's always a strange feeling being around someone you know so well but is unfamiliar to you physically, and it's a feeling that our generation is the first one to experience to this extent... I've only had that a couple of times before, but this will happen to me multiple times over the few days in the hotel. And I'll be the cause of it to those people as well! I like to feel I've gathered at least some measure of... respect from these friends - what are they going to do when they find out I'm actually a massive yuppie?

I'm also making things unnecessarily stressful for myself by performing at the Masquerade - I'll be doing a standup bit on how I got corrupted into the furry fandom. Attending the Masquerade last year made me believe I could do it (and watching the acts there made me believe I could do it to an acceptable standard) - I was already composing things in my head during the drive back, and so I was determined not to let the personality I have for the rest of the year discourage me from doing something that I felt I'd love to when caught up in the moment. I've been practicing it (in between editing videos) over the last month, and it evolves slightly every time I tell it... the most difficult part was keeping it down, as I was always ending up at about ten minutes and had to cut it down quite severely to fit it into a space where I might reasonably be able to perform it in six.

It's been a long time since I actually practiced something to be performed in front of an audience, without the notes-backed safety of phone presentations, and at the moment it's been performed mostly to a brick wall and once to Whitney and a family of stuffed rabbits. But I'm hoping that taking part in the improvisation events in the evenings, and riding on the wave of otherworldly euphoria from the event, will get me ready. Also, the anti-anxiety drugs will help.

I've submitted Crystal Towers 2 to Greenlight, a Steam project that allows developers to submit games to be voted on in the hope that they eventually get released there. If you've got an account, I'd really appreciate a vote up, or spreading the word!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfil.....s/?id=92975382

I've been doing some things other than music for the last while, but I had been meaning to upload some of my music to Youtube for some time in the hope of grabbing some attention - only being hesitant because, well, it's Youtube.

Nevertheless, tonight I put together a karaoke-style video for Navigator with scrolling lyrics and everything - you can see it here!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxJ8Wm_F288

I might do the rest of the songs as well if people want to see more...

I just want to acknowledge that I'm still alive, as I haven't been able to be around much recently - I had some minor but painful surgery a couple of weeks ago and recovery has taken more mental energy than I had thought. But I'm up and working again, and am walking with a cane for the time being, which people rather distressingly tend to say suits me.

I have been crawling forward with the last song for Signal from the Sky, though - this is the longest one on the album, based on a dream that I had in 2010 (and scraps of it have been around since then), and it's called The Secrets of an Island - a name that I Googled and realized that I had half-remembered from the worst album cover in the world, but nevertheless it stuck. The structure of the song has been... fluid at best, and it's only recently that I really managed to pin down the template for it - my notes on the sections' completeness currently look like this...

[X] Acoustic
[X] Vocal intro
[X] Lead into main
[X] Verses 1 - Island
[X] Pre-Chorus 1
[X] Library Chorus 1
[X] Verses 2 - The book and the page
[X] Pre-Chorus 2
[X] Fantasy Chorus 1
[X] Instrumental bridge
[X] Fire
[X] Library Chorus 2
[ ] Air
[/] Fast lead-up
[X] Fantasy Chorus 2 (soft)
[X] Acoustic + Solo 3
[/] Earth
[ ] Future
[X] Water
[/] Escape
[X] Conclusion
[X] Out

As for when it'll all be released... something that I hadn't anticipated about pre-orders is that I now feel sort of bad holding people's money in escrow, so I hope it'll be soon! Hopefully before the end of this month. It all depends on when these last sections come to me...

Because I'll be around on the Saturday - I still don't really know what I'll be doing most of the day. I'll be going around with a couple of people I know from work, so I'm still undecided as to how to introduce myself as a rabbit in front of them.

I did. I'd just been watching the obsession that had swept the site for the last year and a half until now, but curiosity (and  kjorteo) eventually got the better of me.

I recorded my thoughts as it went on - I think you need to see the images to really get the full impression. Therefore: http://davidn.livejournal.com/498797.html

Unreality was an unusually well-organized album for me - I posted a planned tracklist oh dear God three years ago and then managed to stick largely with it as I actually wrote the songs around them. The unnamed song became Angel Eye and was moved later on, Risk and Reward had its focus changed slightly and became The Machinist, and the unwieldy title of The Last of My Angels was changed to Carry the Rings.

Even given that that was a surprising case, I've felt that it's taken me far too long to actually pin down a new collection of songs this time around - I've had the general theme for the album decided for a while, but I've been adding and subtracting things as ideas came to my mind and were superseded by other ideas. After making a couple of decisions today, though, I think I might finally have the tracklist of Signal from the Sky - nine songs and two introductions, to be released at some point within the next few months...

1. By the Stars (Intro)
2. Navigator [6:43]
3. Dream of Albion [5:57]
4. Enter the Labyrinth (???)
5. Red Versus Blue [4:02]
6. Signal from the Sky [7:23]
7. The Swarm [5:13]
8. Elements Part One [2:08]
9. Elements [8:27]
10. No Way Home [4:32]
11. The Secrets of an Island (???)

Anything with a time next to it is finished - and most of these are in my gallery. With rough guesses as to the eventual length of the two unfinished songs, it looks like this one is shaping up to be about 70 minutes long - and unlike Unreality, will fit on a CD :)

Because of my going back and forth so much on this one, I have an unusually long abandoned list - the songs that were started but remain half-finished are Sign of the Star, Savior's Return, Song of Life, and Even the Sun (which I sort of feel bad about as it was started before Unreality was even finished, and I had to admit to myself tonight that it just didn't fit with the rest of the album!) Perhaps you'll see these titles coming up again in the future...

Album cover artwork is already underway, from an underappreciated and very talented artist that I met through this site, Modplug and a shared love of Albion. I'll post about it as it takes shape!

Still not a furry-related game, though... I should work to correct that. This one's a platform/puzzle game where you can switch gravity in four directions, to guide a perpetually running stickman through sheets of increasingly dangerous graph paper.

In an Iron Maiden tribute that will go unnoticed by the majority of its audience, it's called Running Free - you can play a Flash demo and find a link to it on the App Store here!

http://www.runningfreegame.com

There's a video on Youtube that you might have already seen, showing what Quake (and there's another one for Doom) would be like if made today. While it's a caricature, it made me think about how first-person shooters - once a genre about flying around nonsensical architecture at the speed of light - have been supplanted with realistic war games, the pace of which have all but vanished.

Then I found where it had all gone - I've really got into Quake Live over the last week. It's a real sign of progress that I'm no longer all that surprised that it's possible to squeeze a free remake of Quake 3 into a browser, even when I realize that the game is now more than ten years old. The game looked noticeably slicker than the more moderately-paced Unreal Tournament from the same era, but its gameplay was simple, no-frills fun, with the focus just on dropping you into an arena with some other players and some weapons scattered around and having you fight it out in any way takes your fancy - explosives, lasers, the ID Software staple shotgun, and the quad damage which enhances all of these with the side effect of lighting you up like a Christmas tree with a sign on it saying "INSERT ROCKETS HERE". And on a good day you don't even notice any network latency at all - it's strange now to think back to when a ping of 400 was really good when madly rollerskating around the original game.

It's not without its problems, though, the most blatant of which is the skill matching system. Strangely there is no overall visible ladder, but they've made an attempt at sorting players into four tiers per game type - in theory, the games presented to you contain players of about the same skill, and you go up a tier when you're too good for the one you're currently in. However, in practice the system feels a bit... top-heavy, and the fourth tier contains players who range from "pretty good" (me) to "turbo nutter bastard nitrous" (the rest). Having been trained in the art of Quake 3 by the ancient masters (or at least one Linux geek in university), what usually happens is that I fight it out for the top of the lower section of the scoreboard while two or three mutant killer cyborgs from the future compete for actual first place.

Even when they're beating you to a pulp, some of the population are surprisingly polite, but there are also a fair number of people who remind me why I stopped playing the original Quake, spending less time playing than hurling whatever grunted insults they can manage to dribble out of their proto-human mouths or whining about people cheating by having moderately good aim. I was accused of being a bot yesterday (which, honestly, has been pretty much my dream ever since playing the original one in 1996). That's the risk you take when you're playing with unknown people over the Internet - so if anybody else I know wants to try this out, my account is DavidN. I'd be glad to meet up with you and/or blast you into oblivion on The Longest Yard.

I haven't posted a whole lot here over the last while, but I've still been going! I've been experimenting with the marriage of Modplug and Tracktion again, hoping to produce the title track of Signal from the Sky by me, with guest guitars also by me. This is actually starting to sound like it's approaching half-decent...

http://albion.bandcamp.com/track/si.....m-the-sky-solo

Even though I thought my songwriting had been so slow recently, I'm coming to realize that I actually have about six pieces that are anything from halfway to nearly completed and needing some connecting up. So I might actually be able to release this lot this year - a two-year gap between releases isn't bad, is it?

This was written for a non-furry audience on my Livejournal at http://davidn.livejournal.com/475930.html , but it would seem wrong not to post it here as well!

---

Well, I really am one of them now. This weekend, the people I know at work thought that I was on holiday with Whitney, and my parents thought I was at some sort of independent game conference. I'm going to have to prepare two separate cover stories before I talk to any of them again, because where I actually spent my weekend was at a convention for people who dress up as woodland creatures and go out for tea and biscuits.

Furfright is a (slightly) Halloween-themed furry convention, held in a hotel in Connecticut. I had said for a while that I should go to at least one of these things in my life, and as it's a smallish convention (1,500 people and/or bipedal animal-things) that's only a hundred-mile drive for me, it sounded like a good start. Far from the red strobe-lit writhing nightmarescape of the underworld that you might have seen on television, it's more like a convention for general geekery with slightly more ears and tails being worn than you would normally expect and only a couple of events specifically enabled by the wearing of huge animal suits. There was a cake-tasting event, for example, with a sheet of instructions that began in slightly worrying fashion:

1. Enter Cake-Con
2. Allow musical notes to insert themselves into your ears
3. Insert cake into all other holes

Though I met a lot of people who I'd vaguely known the names of over the Internet for a long time, some of the best moments of the weekend weren't actually furry-related. Once we had our extended group together, our first dinner as real-life almost normal people was at a hibachi restaurant, which is a term for teppanyaki cooking here for some reason, and that I think I can only describe as Japanese cookery mixed with an episode of Banzai. Food is prepared on a griddle at your table with the ninjutsu-trained chef doing all sorts of physically impossible things with the utensils and eggs - at this one, they were also fond of launching bits of vegetable into the air and seeing who could catch them in their mouth. The chef would then shout "SAKE!!!", pick up a squeeze bottle and fire it five feet across the room at whoever had caught it, keeping time by whacking his spatula against the table until his target's mouth capacity overflowed and it fountained out across them and everyone else in the vicinity.

The other thing that I most loved doing at the convention was an improvisation games event, styled after such things as Whose Line Is It Anyway and I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue (as in Britain we are unable to make any programmes with titles less than five words long). At that point I was going around with  susi and  scani, and I don't think I would have had the confidence to get up and take part without them. I hadn't done anything in front of people like that since being in the church youth group many, many years ago, and it made me remember how much I enjoyed it. At first I was afraid of people absolutely dying up there (especially if it were me), but even though a couple of people were identifiably amazing at it, everyone involved managed to work with the surreal flow of the games, and drew real laughs from the audience - I'd forgotten how wonderful that felt. Unlike here, where as much as I appreciate you all, it's like writing on a brick wall somewhere and hoping that someone will eventually come along and read it.

There were two other things about the event that I didn't notice at the time but can be counted as barely short of miraculous:

1. Only one Portal reference was made throughout the entire one and a half hours
2. It was actually good

And that made me think about something else I discovered - as great as the people I know are, the convention actually made me slowly realize I hate the Internet and wonder why I spend quite so much of my time on it, full as it is of people who actually use words like "omnoms" in daily conversation. As I might have touched on before, for a subculture which I see as so creative, a lot of what it holds up as good is based so much on imitation rather than creativity. I was looking through a folder of artwork at a dealer's table, when a rather sweaty individual poked his head over my shoulder, pointed down at one rather shocking picture and shouted "Starfox - do a barrel roll!" as if it were the funniest thing ever. It is, however, fortunate that people can't yet talk entirely in cat pictures in real life.

Other firsts for the weekend were that I found myself having to go to a Wal-Mart, which is like a slightly more obnoxious Asda but I don't feel irreversibly tainted by having gone there, and we were in a Wendy's for one dinner. (People gave me a large explanation of what it was like before we set off, though I had to interrupt saying that despite my outward appearances, I had actually been in a McDonald's at least once in my life and knew the concept of fast food.) And it was edible enough - on our way back to the car we went outside and nearly fell over the manager, who was sitting crumpled on the pavement having a cigarette. Surely the mark of a classy place.

Even though I said above that most of the events aren't actually centred around them, there's something that I haven't even really mentioned so far - the unusual (non-zero) number of people walking around the place dressed up as six-foot anthropomorphous or mythological creatures of their own design. And that made it really special. I know you're sitting there, with your left elbow on the desk and your hand planted somewhere on your forehead by now, thinking "What could possibly be appealing about these absurd creatures? I'm sure Dante had visions much like this in his Inferno." I used to think the same way, that they had this uncanny look and that they were frightening parodies of things that were much more attractive in make-believe. Then I got to know a few people who built them, and I could see the amount of effort and love that went into them, but I thought that would be the limit of their appeal for me.

But when you're in amongst them and interacting with them, it's different - the back of your brain keeps trying to tell you that there are just humans in there doing slightly stupid things in strategically cut carpets, but with the reactions they get whenever they come into a room, you really do want to believe for a moment that these six foot anthropomorphs just exist alongside normal humans. With a good performer inside, the most mundane of things become wonderful - watching them drink (much-needed) water through long straws that reach through their artificial muzzles, standing around talking to each other, or just going around shaking people's hands and ruffling their hair. I wandered outside at one point and bumped into a purple dog playing the saxophone, and - unlike the incident above - it really did seem like the funniest thing ever.

Susi has two character suits - a brown gryphon called Angel in particular got a lot of attention in the convention space, perhaps for being one of the few bird-inspired creatures there, and I felt very honoured to be his sort of wardrobe assistant (wrangler?) for when he needed extra hands (because when in those things, you can't really see). Normally, in any genre of dance without specific instructions provided, the dance floor is made up of people vaguely moving their limbs about rhythmically and hoping they don't look stupid. While wearing a gryphon-suit... somehow the same thing becomes adorable, as you can see in this video from the party during the last night. (For the impatient, the highlight is at 3:00.)



And, what can I say... it's really nice when they hug you.

Furfright starts tomorrow, and it's going to be my first furry convention ever - I'm equal parts excited and frankly terrified.

If you see a British person looking confused, possibly with a rabbit on his shoulder and with a badge remarkably similar to my icon over there, then it's me.

At this point in my life, this is probably the greatest thing to have ever happened. Getting furry fanart of a game I've written was a life goal that I never knew I had until I saw it :)

Thanks to  technicolorpie for the artwork, and especially to  doscoon for commissioning and surprising me with it!

(Also, buy my game - it's better than Duke Nukem Forever)

I know... I can't quite believe it either. After starting it in 2007 and then dragging it through every version of Multimedia Fusion 2 that's ever existed since then, Crystal Towers 2 - my far-too-long Mario 64ish, Metroid-Zelda-sort-of-Sonic-inspired platform game is finally ready to be booted out into the world.

Here's some evidence, in the form of the introduction...



You can get it at crystaltowers2.com! The free edition has... quite a while of gameplay in it, letting you get up to the second boss, and the full one ($5 through Fastspring) has close to 300 challenges across 33 levels and 14 bosses.

I'd like to give some special thanks to some of the furrier testers I had for the game:

 crassadon
 kjorteo
 rakarr
 ravenworks
 susi

It's been quite an experience... but perhaps I can go back to a normal life now. Maybe upload some music!

With the last bit of music in place and a final-barring-adjustments version sent off to testers, I've finished Crystal Towers 2, the game that I've been working on for the last four years. I still have to get up the courage to declare it absolutely final and then organize a release - it'll be $5 through Fastspring or so - and then maybe I'll get the chance to do something else with my life.

I've just put the soundtrack up on Bandcamp - there's about an hours' worth of music in it, about half of which I haven't released anywhere else. Although, just how many excerpts and reworkings of songs of mine can you find in it? :)

http://albion.bandcamp.com/album/crystal-towers-2

Yes - thanks in no small part to the people who have been testing this over the last couple of months, though the process is slow, I might eventually get this game finished and released.



The only major things missing now are the ending and some graphics work on the final boss. I hope to see if Steam are interested.

You can get the now-woefully-out-of-date demo from this submission!

I was just looking through my music fragments folder, and discovered an experimental start to Find You that I'd completely forgotten about, under the name "frg-king.it"... I think I must have started it on my laptop, before transferring it over into the song template that I used for the rest of the songs on that album.

http://www.clickteam.info/davidn/mu.....rg-findyou.mp3

Points of interest - the very start, which sounds a lot harder and more... to the point than anything that the full song ever had there (although I'm not sure I ever intended that introduction to ever actually be used). It then goes to (half) the instrumental of the main melody, then the pre-chorus and chorus, which are recognizable but higher-pitched, and the finer details of the voice instrument got shifted around as I came up with the actual lyrics. Then it changes to a guitar part that never made it into the main song - it's strange to hear what might have been.

Well, it's been a pile-up over the last couple of days, hasn't it? Fortunately I seem to have sensible friends, as there has been barely a reaction post, and those that did exist were nice and reasonable.

Quite by coincidence, later the day after that change was made, I found a clip of Dara O Briain doing an impression of angry Internet people - in this case, it was because they'd written in to say that he'd got the triple point of water wrong by 0.01°C. I loved his furious typing so much that I had to turn it into a GIF, and it does a decent job of representing everything that's been going on in the forums over the last 48 hours.

http://www.clickteam.info/davidn/im.....s/daratype.gif

At the end of last week, I was meant to take a flight with my wife to California, but I suffered an anxiety attack on boarding and, after some discussion with the cabin crew, chose to leave the aeroplane. So I'm the only person in the world who has attempted to go on holiday, found that too stressful and gone back to work instead. Yesterday I attended my most tragic birthday celebration ever, over Skype with the in-laws that I was meant to be visiting.

I had just been getting used to my unexpected solitude for the week when my parents contacted me to inform me that the cat drank antifreeze and died.

So it's not going that well.

I went back and forth on Sonic 4 more times than you would reasonably expect given its short playing time. It's being billed as "Episode 1" of a game of as yet unknown length, and in this first instalment you have to guide the smug little blue bastard over sixteen levels spread across four different types in his everlasting quest to free the animals from Jamie Hyneman and his moustache.

Games have now reached the age where nostalgia service is possible in them - from the start, when the chorus of "SE-GAAAA" booms out followed by the Megadrive-styled music accompanying the scrolling sea and wings logo on the title screen, this is taking great care to play in to memories of how amazing it was to see four-way scrolling levels speeding by on the Megadrive. Start it up and you're given a classic flying-text transition into Green Emerald Splash Hill, populated with all the oddly rotating flowers, inexplicably chequered mountains and metallic enemies that you remember.

Then you start moving, and it all goes a bit wonky. The sense of momentum is... completely different from what you would expect, being able to stop much more quickly than before even in mid-air. Arguably this is to make the controls tighter, which you rather need on some of the more difficult platforming sections, but it really feels hopelessly off when you first start it up. It's easy to overlook just how complex the Sonic physics are compared to more standard platform games, but the morbidly insane fangame community for it has produced movement more true to the original with MMF2 (and with no technical support either, seeing as 99% of them pirate it). You get sort of used to it after a while, but it still feels slightly like a more standard platform game that happens to have Sonic models in it - especially as they now seem to enjoy putting you in more self-contained almost puzzlish rooms that can take a long time to get through (the average level time is about five minutes now, as opposed to 1 or 2).

You can't rely on your spin attack to get you through, either - instead of being in it whenever you're in the air, springs will cancel your spin, along with several other obstacles, so you really have to watch what you're doing. In a sort of attempt to make up for it, you're given a homing attack that makes an attempt to zoom to the nearest enemy on-screen if you press Jump again when you're in the air, but apart from the obvious chains of enemies that are used as a new way of getting around the levels, it isn't often completely reliable.

I was mostly undecided on how innovative the game was being - the balance that it has between taking things wholesale from the earlier games to please the fans, and introducing new elements. At first I thought that they were ripping off earlier levels' styles too much - the zones are roughly analogous to Green Hill, Labyrinth, Casino Night and Metropolis, and at first I thought that they had over-got the message from their recent failures to make anything enjoyable and were sticking a bit too closely to what had come before. Then, after a while, I realized that they were following a pattern of staying in "classic mode" for the first level of each zone, and then adding new ideas for the last two - every level is now more or less based around one specific type of obstacle, which feels ironically Mario-like sometimes.

As for other things, the music starts off well like I mentioned above, with a sort-of emulation of the Megadrive's style on the title screen. The in-game stuff never quite reaches the same simple catchiness of the first few games, though, and once I had noticed the uncanny resemblance of one of the phrases of the casino levels' music to The Internet Is For Porn from Avenue Q, I could never un-notice it. I dreaded the water levels (all acts now have names, and one in Lost Labyrinth is something along the lines of "Escape from the Water Temple"), but they've actually come up with something even more stressful than those in the form of crushing wall sections, which require twitch reactions to avoid getting stuck and can go on for what seems like ages. The special stages are Sonic 1's, with the twist that you now control the rotation of the maze instead of trying to bounce around inside it - control problems therefore rear their tentacles again here because you feel that pressing a direction should send you the opposite way from where you actually ping off to when you do so, but I was able to successfully get around them by the method of holding the controller upside-down for the duration of the levels.

Eventually, the question of whether this level of innovation was good or not was answered for me in the form of the game bosses. It's obvious where the inspiration for them all came from, but they at least tried to add new phases to them in the main game - however, once you've finished all of those, you go to the obligatory space level, and are given a last challenge in the form of just having to defeat every single sodding one of them in a row again. Then you eventually get to the end of the space station - are you going to be given something new as a grand finale? No, it's just the horribly annoying boss from Sonic 2 again, with the number of hits he takes ramped up to about fifty.

I suppose that if this had more new ideas in it, it would feel more like a welcome attempt at a nostalgia-laden sequel. Instead it feels slightly like a fan port - a game that we've all played before, except done slightly less well.