Humour: Jesus makes poor showing at frag fest

By Michael Coyne

San Jose, CA - Jesus Christ, a surprise late entry to the Doom 3 competition at California Extreme this year, disappointed many fans and players.

"I don't know," said fellow fragger, Darren Nowakowski. "When he first showed up in that white robe with the long flowing hair, I thought he was going to turn out to be one of these FPS freaks. You know, they do the calm and meek act and then they kick your butt royally. But I pasted him all over the arena, like thirty times or something. And he was all, 'I forgive you.' Yeah, thanks dude, I was really cut up about wasting you. Everyone was getting in on the act. If you didn't bag at least one Jesus, you were nowhere."

"He sucks," noted Jamie Schweigert, another player in the tournament, who scored twenty "Jesuses" himself. "When I heard he was the son of some god or something, I figured he would be all, like, 'i @m yOrE g0d, i 0wN yoo', but he kept coming out with crap like 'I am the way, the truth and the life' or 'Feed my sheep.' So I go, 'Okay, pal, eat this.'"

Kurt Chapell was another player who scored well against the son of God. "He said something to me about how he was the Lamb of God. Well, it was a slaughter all right. Lamb guts everywhere. I figured he'd be all mad after being killed so many times, but he comes up after the match and forgives me, which I thought was cool."

Even the amateurs were getting in on the J-frags. Nelson Riesgo, a young player of 10, scored several hits. "I ran down this hallway and he was right there in front of me, and he was busy saying 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me', so I went right through him. Still didn't see the Father, whoever he is, but when he shows up, his ass is grass."

Any hard feelings on either side seemed to have been cleared up when the group headed out to eat, said Fred Coronel. "It was great. We went out to dinner, Jesus had just one of us order a meal, and then there was enough for everybody. Oh, and he told the server we were just going to drink water, and we were all, 'Oh man, that sucks', but when I picked up my Dasani, it was some awesome wine instead."

Jesus declined to comment on the results of the tournament, but sources reported spotting a white-robed and bearded figure at Best Buy later that day, buying a new laptop and a copy of Doom 3. When asked if he would return next year, Jesus intimated that he only "gets back here every couple of thousand years" but that a second coming shouldn't be ruled out.

An update, at long last

Well, it's an update, but I haven't got a great deal to say.

I've added zplet, so you can now play Risorgimento Represso online if you like.

IF Comp04 is now taking place, but I haven't even had time to download the games, let alone play or review any of them. With two children under two in the house, it makes for a complete lack of time for IF.

I have a pending Risorg version 4 to release that adds true, context-sensitive hints, fixes a minor bug, and adds a Glulx game file, but I haven't gotten around to checking it into my CVS and releasing it.

I also have autodoor.h, which is a combination of the auto-opening, auto-unlocking door code I used in Risorg, along with Ross Raszewski's doors module... so it makes for auto-opening doors that are easy to use. I can't even remember if I worked out all the issues in Glulx with it or not. Because of the "look-through" feature, there were some string-handling hoops to jump through to get both Glulx and ZMachine to print things like "Looking through the open door, you see the kitchen."

I am hoping to get some of the Comp04 games played and maybe even reviewed. I think I'll have to end up throwing them on the laptop so that I can play them at leisure outside of the computer room. There's always the PocketPC I could use too, but that's more aggravation than it's worth, as far as I'm concerned.

Risorg2 is progressing at a snail's pace. I've written the opening scene. It's far too long, but there's a certain amount of information I want to get conveyed across. I'll have to explore ways of revealing that information after the fact. Of course, seeing this one won't be intended for competition release, it might not be such a big deal.

I've also put some work into figuring out what's going to happen for roughly the first half of the game, and a few of the puzzles, as well. I don't anticipate it being finished any time soon.

IF Comp03 reviews

My somewhat incomplete set of reviews for IFComp03 entries can be found here.

IF Comp03 comes to an end...

It's all over, and RR finished in 2nd, behind Slouching Towards Bedlam. If you're still interested in the game, check out my main IF page or hit Baf's Guide.

I was a little surprised to finish so highly, but it was certainly nice. The prize will come in handy as well, as a couple of days before the competition intent to enter deadline, my employer announced that they were closing their office in Winnipeg... and this was exactly on week after my wife and I had signed up to get a new house built. So the financial situation is a little dicey, as what savings we had are tied up making payments toward getting the house finished.

Anyway, maybe coming in 2nd place is the break in the storm, and things will start looking up for us soon. : )

IF Comp03 begins...

It's out! The competition is on! Check out this link if you're interested in downloading and playing the games.

RR first pass completed...

Well, I managed to get the first pass of the game completed, along with hints and the "amusing things to do" section. It's been sent off to the beta-testers as of July 3/03. A few of them are in the US, so I'm sure they won't be looking at it for a while to come. That's all right though. I wanted to make sure I got the thing off early, so there isn't a lot of pressure to test quickly in order to make it in for the competition.

I also spent some time reviewing all the Inform library patches that I hadn't ever looked at before, and ended up applying the ones that were likely to affect my game (such as looking into containers in the darkness).

Then on a whim, I started looking at the rest of the Inform compiler issues as well, and lo and behold, I found a description of my abbreviation problem, the one preventing me from using the latest abbreviations that -u was providing. So I grabbed the compiler source and patched everything I felt was important enough, and built it for the Linux box.

So this meant I would be able to use my new abbreviations. So I ran the compiler with -u, got a new set of abbreviations, and used them. Oddly, they generate a larger .z8 file than my original abbreviations... so I went back to the old ones.

One change that did make a big difference was the bug that prevented short jumps from being used if the jump was more than 31 bytes... in fact, in the Z-machine, short jumps can be up to 63 bytes. Making this change to the compiler shaved 1.5K off my code size. Okay, not that I needed that 1.5K, but if we ignored every possible 1.5K savings...

Risorgimento Represso: An IF work-in-progress

At the moment, the only IF I'm actively working on is my Comp03 entry, Risorgimento Represso.

I think it's too long of a game, really, for the competition, but I'm interested in releasing it under maximum exposure conditions. It's not too long if the players don't go wandering around talking exhaustively to the few NPCs. There aren't really that many puzzles.

How's it going with the game? Well, all right, I suppose. I'm having some trouble making the ending work (literarily speaking, not programming-wise) the way I want it. It just doesn't seem to ring true, and I'm not sure if it's too easy, too short, or what. Well, we'll see. I'm hoping to move it out to beta-test before the end of June (optimism mode now disengaging).

Apart from that, I had a fully-developed plot, puzzles and all, for an entry for the SwashComp, but I haven't had any time to work on it, so I've decided not to bother. I may work on it at another time, but because my Comp03 is a fantasy piece, it has a similar technological level to what's in the SwashComp game, so I think I'd rather move on to something radically different next.

I have a few more ideas from some of my short stories percolating in my head, but I'm not certain how well they'd translate to IF.

I have one other idea that I'm still developing, and I'm not sure whether I'll go anywhere with it. With the initial kicking around in the brain, it feels like it would be very interesting, but a bit of a struggle to write.