Day 43 - come on, Tim!

It's the Wimbledon final today.  Normally I watch it, but when there's "home" involvement (and Andy Murray is always classed as British until he loses), I just can't bear to sit there and see another plucky failure.  As I write, the match is level, but every time I flick it over, Our Boy is either hitting the ball tamely into the net or seeing it fly past him.  So I'm a jinx, and I refuse to curse the lad further.  Instead, I've gone for a bit of computer tennis.


It's one of the oldest forms of video game, is tennis.  From its humble beginnings with Pong right up to the current motion-based efforts on modern consoles, we've always quite enjoyed whacking a ball over an electronic net.  It's much easier than actually going out and doing it for real, and risking getting wet or something.


Trouble is, it's a very difficult game to get right.  There's too much subtlety to the game that is hard to capture in video game form.  Some games get the hitting of the ball right, but not the running around the court.  Some games get the running around the court right, but not the hitting of the ball.  Some games are hateful bastards, like Mario Power Tennis.  Very few get everything right, but still they try.

Andy Murray never smiles, so he must be the one in black.

One of the games I bought on the Commodore 64 was Sensible Software's International 3D Tennis.  I always enjoyed Sensi's games, and when I read the review in ZZAP! 64 I was intrigued.  For one thing, it featured vector graphics, something that the C64 had struggled with in most cases.  The screenshots looked a bit odd, but the ZZAP! lads insisted it moved well and played better.  I trusted them, and I bought it.


I enjoyed it a fair bit at the time, but it never grabbed me as much as I'd hoped it would.  It was a very brave effort, and playing it again now I can appreciate it in a different light.  I probably wouldn't play it ahead of Virtua Tennis, but it certainly stands out from the crowd in many ways.  If I manage to get hold of any of the Sensible Software guys, and I'll certainly be making every effort to do so, then I'd love to ask a few questions about this game.

Day 9 - the pen is mightier than the sword.

Hey, what happened to Day 8?  Oh, that... I wrote something on Day 8, but forgot to put it in the title.  And without any further ado, it's onto Day 9!


I've managed to squeeze in a bit of actual writing for the book today.  I've been doing a lot of setting-up so far, and not a lot of actual playing or writing, so to let off steam I had a blast on Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior.


It's a game I remember fondly from the Eighties, as I used to have many a frenzied battle with a mate, hacking and slashing long into the evening.  It capitalised on the audience for Arnold Schwarzenegger's Conan the Barbarian film quite nicely, with webs of death being woven and heads flying all over the place, and even an interpretation of the film's theme music.

On second thoughts, let's see you do that with your pen.

I did enjoy playing it, but I won't go into too much detail... as with any game I play in this venture, most of my thoughts on it will end up in the book.  It was a pretty bold game for its time, though... most fighting games didn't even show injuries, let alone spurting blood and decapitation.  I'm a little surprised there wasn't more controversy, but maybe the papers hadn't yet caught on that video games were evil...


So, as a result of this, I've got down to some serious writing, and got another page under my belt. I've also done some writing of another kind... I've fired off a couple of e-mails to potential subjects.  It would be great to have their involvement, so I'll be interested to see how they respond.