A long time ago, I made a rather odd observation in Super Smash Bros. Melee: Fox McCloud wags his tail to the tune of the Dr. Mario music, on the Mushroom Kingdom II level.

Fox McCloud is cute, Fox McCloud's tail is particularlcy cute - so having Fox McCloud wag the cute tail to the rhythm of the cute music is pretty cute!

Emergent gameplay at its finest.

So I made a rather silly, short video capture commemorating this. It's on gamevideos.com too, but needs QuickTime. The YouTube version may not be in sync. (Not sure if I keep it around either due to that fact. might need to make a better version.)

A few days ago was my Abuse Day. Held randomly every 6-9 months. If I try to play more Abuse than that, I get too... actioned.

Anyway, here's a silly idea that might just work. People are working on fan-made sequels to Metroid games. Abuse is a "what if Metroid games had a male protagonist" kind of game: More enemies, more stuff to shoot, less clever puzzles, darker atmosphere. (Okay, not that Metroid games are too feminine either.)

Anyway, what if, what if, there was a Metroid fangame... made... with... Abuse engine? ...that's a brilliant idea. Brilliant idea. I don't think I want to think of it more. Some good ideas might best be forgotten!

Here's one annoying thing I've noted: It's hard to start an interesting atypical MUD.

I've been thinking of starting a whole new kind of a multiplayer game. It might work as a web-based game, or ones with dedicated clients, but I think it would be best as something kind of like BattleTech: The Frontier Lands - a text-based MUD with an optional graphical frontend.

Anyway, starting writing something new is a daunting task. It seems to me that most MUD servers these days either assume too much about the underlying game, or require too much ripping apart to start from the clean table.

For me, an ideal starting point would be something that had

• Pre-made functionality for characters, rooms, inanimate objects and mobs (provided the game doesn't assume mobs behave in any way)
• No programming knowledge needed to create those
• A sane scripting language that allows expansion of everything

I've looked at LPMud derivants, which have kind of a sane scripting language, but most of the mudlibs are too intricate for this, and even if only marginal code use is needed, technically building areas needs writing code.

I also looked at MUCKs, which allow just about everything in this list in an elegant way, except that the MUF scripting language is just plain awful. (Multi User Forth? Has sounded quite unexciting to me for a long time!)

So what might I do? Write the whole MUD from scratch? Perhaps that would be the easy way - though that needs a lot of basic groundwork done, and that's just plain boring.

Recently, a Final Fantasy VII sequel (titled "Dirge of Cerberus") for PS2 was announced by Square Enix. So far, the only thing that has been confirmed is that the story will follow Vincent Valentine, which would be completely okay by me, except that I don't have a PS2. =) Anyway, I have somehow obtained a transcript of the game's intro. Here is a transcript of the intro movie:

Scene: A dark autumn day over a shack village, with heavy rain and thunderstorm. Dateline appears on the bottom: "North Corel. 18 months after Jenova's defeat and destruction of Sephiroth."

Barrett walks in one of the well-furnished shacks, where other characters from FF7 are already hanging around. "Yo, homes", he says, waving around cheerfully.

Cloud is sitting on the sofa, and looks up at Tifa, who apparently just arrived before Barrett, carrying some papers. "Hello Barrett. So, are there any news about these Cerberus things?" he asks.

Tifa shows Cloud one of the papers, apparently a map of some previously unknown island. "All I found among Sephiroth's belongings was a map showing the way to a place called the Isle of Cerberus, and this letter."

Barrett, impatient as usual, demands action. "Okay! Slap it down there!", motioning toward the table in the center of the room.

As Tifa opens the letter, something glowing rushes out of the envelope, and the whole letter mysteriously turns into a glowing magical thing that gets a life of its own and hovers above the table.

Barrett gets alarmed, barely managing to say, "Jump back!", as he does so, pointing his guns at the glowing ball.

The ball of light emits some of brilliant magical energy that swirls around for a while quietly. Then, without warning, a huge holographic projection fills the space above the table. Everyone is momentarily paralysed with fear as they recognize the creature as Jenova.

Then, the Jenova projection speaks, in calm, emotionless voice that chills every listener to the bone. "Sephiroth! Know that my face is most goth-like! While it's unlikely that this ludicruous gang that you spoke of manages to ruin our plans, you must send a clone of you to the Isle of Cerberus, to learn the secret of Acne Medication! Soon I and my horde of puppets will destroy the Planet!"

Then Jenova projection, along with the ball of energy that projected it, disappears, without sound or much other ceremony or flashiness. All of the friends look at the now-vacant space, completely stunned.

Then, Cloud dares to speak. "We must send Vincent to the Isle of Cerberus", he says, matter-of-factly.

Vincent looks at Cloud puzzledly, raising his eyebrows in non-human fashion. "Hm? Why me?", he says, his voice betraying his utter confusion.

But before Vincent even notices to react, Tifa and Cloud have already grabbed his hands, Barrett has grabbed his legs, and he's promptly heaved outside, where Cid quickly ties him to the back of a gold chocobo. As Cloud slaps the chocobo's behind, the bird panics and begins to run like wind out to the ocean, zig-zagging wildly.

Then, as the bird reaches outer sea, it mysteriously disappears out of view with a silly "Zot!" effect, as if affected by some sort of transdimensional teleportation spell.

And thus begin Vincent's journeys in the Isle of Cerberus...

...

(And here's an obscure hint for those who don't get the joke. =)

Aside of the delirious ramblings of Electronic Arts, it is fairly clear that Ultima series has always been about innovations in game engine, and depth of the game world and story. Regrettably, I'm not the perfect person to design Ultima games what comes to the game world and stories - I think the games are pretty damn good in that respect already. I can only hope that should EA make Ultima remakes, they'd just refer to the original games, and if they'd have to improve them, they'd just get the original creators on the job.

But I can think of various ways the game engines themselves could be improved. So, if EA, or fans, will ever will rerelease Ultima games with a single, improved game engine, here are some ideas for it. (Being Electronic Arts, however, they'll probably not only ignore the pleas from desperate fans, but also butcher the story in remakes. This is why I hope they'll not listen to me anyway. Maybe fan-Ultima-production people who aren't afraid of the Perpetual Limbo might be able to listen, however...)

What I personally long is a "multiparadigm" engine. This is just a cool-sounding buzzword that can easily be used to convince the evil EA managers. What I actually mean is this: U4 had turn-based combat, U7 has near-real-time combat, U4 had variable map scale, U7 had constant map scale - and the bad thing is, both ideas worked! Even dialogue had their sides: U1-3 told what to do, U4-6 had pseudo-tree that hid some things well until time was ripe, U7-9 had proper dialog trees. Why not let the user choose what map scale they're looking at, what kind of combat they prefer, heck, what kind of dialogue they prefer?

At times, in U7, I find overland travel boring and I just cheat and teleport to the target to save my nerves - but on some days, I find the travel through woods and whatnot fun. Turn-based combat is tactical and interesting, semi-automatic real-time combat is fun, effortless and allows me to focus on story and exploration - both have their sides. People who don't care about plot probably like to be just told what to do à la 1-3, while the plot fans will love modern, full-blown dialog trees - and some hard-core folks might even enjoy keyword guessing in U4 style.

Why not allow people to play the game the way they want the game to be played? Why does no RPG allow people to choose between both of the extremes? Make inter-location travel as detailed as you need. Make combat either tactical turn-based or dramatic real-time. Hell, let's just throw in a simplistic "Fight/Spell/Item/Flee" combat system as one of the options to lure in the Square fans - after all, it's just one of the choices, no one needs to use it...

Likewise the game could even lend itself to "multiple paradigms" in graphics and sound... everything from pixely stuff to full-blown 2D, maybe? Or, at least 2D stuff might be simulated properly with 3D. Music, of course, could be likewise done in appropriate way depending on preference.

I know what you are thinking - letting users to choose how they play the game makes the system easy to abuse and hard to balance. This can be made balanced, however. Yet, strict number-tumbling isn't what the games are about. In fact, it'd be good if the game had hackability - not necessarily changing the actual code, but it should be possible to mess around with the actual game state without the need for a hex editor or something like that. One of the good things about U7 is the fact that cheats, at least in Exult, can be used to make game more interesting as well as the obvious thing of making things easier. If the engine could somehow half-expose the underlying game logic, that would make things infinitely more easier. I don't ask for cheats - I ask that the game is actually hackable. U7 already pretty much is, it would just need to be more so.

More Ultima ideas possibly coming... or not. I don't know yet.

My sister and I invented two new cool games, based on Super Smash Bros. Melee. These game ideas are presented here, in the glorious tradition of the local Nintendo magazine of early 90s; in other words, these things are pretty silly and not many people necessarily find them cool, but for some reason, they got published anyway in a less than reputable publication. But silliness is a good thing.

Spot a Fox

Preparation: View all trophies, zoomed all the way in. Other player must move the view around. Rules: Whoever finds the Fox McCloud trophies first wins. This is easy if you've only beaten Classic and Adventure modes with Fox, slightly trickier if you've also beaten All-Star mode - the All-Star trophy is a bit harder to find among the trophies.

Guess Who?

Players take turns zooming into individual trophies. While the other player looks away, the other tries to find an interesting viewing angle to an individual trophy, and when that is found, the other player can look, and tries to guess which trophy it actually is. Special conditions: Zooming too far is not allowed (in other words, you aren't allowed to do misclipped views, like zooming inside someone's head or something).