Copyright Nick Ferguson, 1998, 1999

Nick F’s Yaroze Diary
(learning to program video games from scratch)

Author’s Note:
Although I am writing about learning C, this diary is not here to offer anyone specific tutorials or exercises; please remember that I am still a novice programmer myself! What I am trying to do here is communicate my experience of learning C with the intention of programming Sony’s Net Yaroze. If this diary happens to inspire or encourage any wanna-be programmers or dedicated game-heads to follow in my footsteps (and I hope it does), then it’s done something useful. And if you know infinitely more about programming than me? Well, this might prove a fun read in any case (and if not, at least the C gods out there can scoff at my feeble ineptitude)…

Contents:

Prologue: A long time ago in a bedroom far, far away…
Winter 1997: To be, or not to be? Not to be.
23 February, 1998: I never did worry about the little things.
24 & 25 February, 1998: How I learned to stop worrying and love DJGPP
1 March, 1998: Are you ready? Then, let’s begin now…*bing!*
12 March, 1998: Sometimes they come back!
17 March, 1998: Black and Sexy.
20 March, 1998: Holida-ay! Celebra-ate!
Easter 1998: Hong Kong
7 May, 1998: Is Saturn Near Uranus..?
16 June, 1998: 5/10. Must do better.
5 July, 1998: The more I “see”, the less I know.
7 August, 1998: GDUK and other stories.
4 September, 1998: Game Over. Continue?
17 November, 1998: ECTS 1998 – Part One
19 January, 1999: Tonight’s Double Bill: “Son of ECTS” & “GDUK-Zilla!”
14 March, 1999: Edinburgh Yaroze Meet (& NOT the Final Curtain)!

Prologue: A long time ago in a bedroom far, far away…

	It’s not completely new to me, this programming lark. When I was little we had a 48K Sinclair Spectrum, a small black box with funky rubber keys and a disconcerting habit of buzzing loudly when the power was on. Like the definitive 8-bit home computer it was, the Spectrum didn’t have a monitor - you plugged it into your television and tuned into it like a long-lost TV channel. Despite my tender years, I could write really simple stuff in BASIC for the Speccy - one early program I fondly remember went something like:

10 PRINT “ Nick rules the world! ”;
20 GOTO 10

	If you ran that, the screen would fill with: 

Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world!  Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! (etc…)

	Cool trick, huh? The zenith of my BASIC skills was a semi-interactive text adventure based on my then favourite movie ‘Aliens’. Rather like those equally 80’s ‘Choose Your Own Adventure Books’, each screen of text ended with two choices. If you chose wisely, you survived and made it a little further through the game. If you chose the blatantly wrong option (i.e. ‘Do you peer a little closer at the burning acid dripping from above?’), you died each time in a suitably painful, hideous and blood-curdling fashion. Even worse, you had to listen to my appalling ‘end-of-game’ music (with accompanying morbid black screen).

I guess, looking back, I always wanted to program a proper game…

To be, or not to be? Not to be.

Winter 1997

	James Rutherford (AKA Mr Frosty) is this guy in my Psychology class. He’s doing a joint honours with Artificial Intelligence (V. Cool - like, HAL and all that!). I know he’s into games because we’ve had informal e-mail and RL conversations about the usual gamehead things - PlayStation vs N64 and nostalgic burbles about the ‘good old days’ (reaching consensus, despite the fact he is blatantly an Amiga-cadet, whereas I hail from the made-in-Japan 8 and 16-bit console school of gaming). Anyway, apart from the fact he’s a nice guy, he also has a Net Yaroze - wow! I know what that is (i.e. I read EDGE) - it’s a programmable PlayStation. It costs £550 and you need a PC and must know C fairly well to make use of it. You can run NTSC and PAL games without chipping, and you can swap demos and discuss Yaroze stuff with people all over the world. It sounds awesome. Jimbo’s fairly enthusiastic, but it’s pretty obvious he hasn’t gotten all that far with it. “Yeah, I’ve mostly done little demos - graphics demos - not a real game as such, no. I’m working on something, though.”
	Bugger! If this obvious Amiga-hacking, demo-coding, Quatermass-experimenting, AMOS ninja-type person is struggling to come up with “Super Quake & Conquer II” what chance do I have? Zilch. Zero. Niente.

	So, it’s almost time to wave goodbye to 1997. Why don’t I have a Net Yaroze yet? Well, although the idea appeals to me, let me list the reasons in great, boring detail:

1) I don’t know how to program in C
2) 	I can’t afford the thing, anyway. I blew my 21st birthday money on a (damn cool!) hi-fi separates system.
3) 	I’m in my third year of doing a Psychology Masters degree at Edinburgh University and I’ve got too much to do - work is building up, lectures are getting longer, essays trickier
4) 	I’ve also noticed that at 21 years of age I can no longer sit on my arse all day long and maintain my buff physique (better make some serious use of that gym membership)
5) 	 I’ve got a flat that needs major DIY…
6) 	and a girlfriend who thinks video games are the devil incarnate

Oh well, maybe next lifetime! I resign myself to the fact I will forever march on the consumer’s side of the videogaming walk of life. I take comfort in the knowledge that someone, someday, will produce a game better than Rare’s ‘Goldeneye’ (God, I love that cart). It just won’t be me, that’s all.

I never did worry about the little things.

February 23, 1998

	Every time I bump into James, I seem to end up saying “Oh, I must pop round to see your Yaroze in action sometime!” but never actually do anything about it. Not in keeping with my technophile nature perhaps, but then I’m never going to get a Yaroze of my own, am I? Still, the idea of playtesting the latest build of James’ potential EDGE competition winner - Snowball Fight - certainly appeals to me. Maybe if it wins, I can put “Lead playtester of Snowball Fight” on my CV and send it off to Pete Molyneux?
	Finally, on Monday, 23 February 1998, I get my act together and scoot along to James’ flat with my equally games-besotted flatmate Ross Anderson. After some pleasant chit-chat, we pile into Jimbo’s room. Hey, it might be a bit of a tip, but that doesn’t detract from the sight of the black PlayStation sitting tidily, patiently next to the PC monitor on his desk. There’s no other way to describe it - it looks fucking cool. It’s a PlayStation. It’s black. It plays any legit game. It lets you write your own games. I knew all this before, but actually seeing it for real brings home how wild this whole Net Yaroze thing is - it’s suddenly real (much like the first time you saw Terminator 2, even though you’d read about how awesome the liquid metal special effects were).
	One thing that struck me, something you won’t know unless you’ve fooled with a Yaroze yourself, is that the texture of the machine and pads themselves is different from that of a normal grey or white PlayStation. They have a smooth-yet-sandpapered feel to them, a rough texture that is really pleasant. I guess it’s so you can still grip the pad even as rivets of gaming-induced sweat run down your arm. For example, as you make one last-ditch attempt to crack your Wipeout records (yeah man, hard-core gamers play the original Wipeout and not the sequel, because it is a lot harder and thus your mates are doubly astounded by the traditional “their immense crapness vs. your godlike proficiency” divide. A similar logic applies to the 16 and 64-bit versions of Mario Kart).
	Jimbo boots up his PC, a fairly impressive P166 MMX against which my lowly P133 would struggle valiantly to keep up with (before failing miserably, subsequently claiming to have suffered a sprained IRQ port, or something). He has a bizarre Windows 95 desktop arrangement IMHO, but then he is an Amiga cadet and probably gets a bit homesick, so we must make allowances. First of all he loads up his Yaroze homepage, recently feted by SCEE for its reviews of demos and games. Nice! I didn’t know Yaroze owners got homepage space - this is a definite plus. I quickly flick through the reviews and make a mental note - you must need an NTSC compatible TV to run Yaroze demos; almost all of them seem to use the US and Japanese television system. Reading James’ reviews, the content of the games seem to vary considerably, including the traditional (Cosmo Fight - “a competent 3 level horizontally-scrolling shoot ‘em-up”), the adventurous (Little Wing - “places you at the centre of a paper aeroplane competition”), the crude (Gas Girl - “harness the power of trapped wind to eliminate the bad guys”) and the bizarre (My Flower - “a ‘grow ‘em-up’ - you play a milkmaid-style character”).
	“So, what do you want to see first?” asks James.
	“I dunno. Start with a goodie. What’s the best game you’ve seen?”
Using an indecipherable string of commands in a DOS window, James loads up the Japanese Yaroze epic Hover Racing. The Yaroze’s standard loading screen is nicely done - a brick wall backdrops the loading screen as data scurries through the serial cable (all Yaroze game data is stored on your PC or Mac’s hard disc and transferred into the PlayStation’s RAM when you need it). Alas, it’s only playable in black and white (Mr Frosty doesn’t have a fully NTSC compatible monitor) but it still looks good.
Hover Racing is a blatant attempt to do SNES classic F-Zero in true polygonal 3D. Technically, it is superb; the 3D is on a par with the earliest commercial PlayStation games, the sound is suitably funky and it even supports the memory card for saving high-scores! James swiftly points out that this game represents the pinnacle of Yaroze coding so far. I am not surprised. It is difficult for me to contain my excitement at the thought of a group of like-minded Japanese individuals coming up with such an accomplished game. It isn’t perfect (the control of the ships is a bit too clever-clever if you ask me), but it’s an astonishing testament to what a dedicated programming team can get out of the machine!
	Ross and I take breathless turns racing a single Hover Racing track. The computer continually thrashes us. I’d love to blame this on cheating AI but the truth is, we suck. Hey, I thought that Japanese gamers liked easy games! Of course, I’m thinking of Japan’s “Average Video Game Playing Kid” - not the hard-core gurus who crafted this beauty. People like myself, who prefer to master a game over time, relishing the challenge of a long, rewarding and well-structured learning curve. The snack food gamers of the world don’t care so much; they don’t want to write the games, they want to play them! Master the basics, see the pretty graphics, beat the final boss and move on to the next big thing - that’s their motto. These Hover Racing guys and me, we have a common bond. I like that. It’s an otaku thing.
	So what’s next up? Snowball Fight - James’ competition project! As it loads, I’m thinking, “What’s this going to be like? Are we talking slightly cheesy or genre-bending? He’s been pretty vocal about the exceptional nature of the other Yaroze demo, does he think Snowball Fight  sucks donkeys in comparison?” Time will tell. It loads. First impression? It’s cute - the penguins move in a very cartoony way (and their resemblance to Pingu doesn’t hurt, either). The control is excellent - Ross and I are partaking in a two-player battle, and the friction of the icy landscape is spot on. Hey - this game is fun! Snowball Fight is probably the one key thing that got me seriously considering buying the Net Yaroze, so I feel obliged to explain how it plays in great detail!
	Imagine an icy island in the middle of the Antarctic (as we all know, penguins do not frequent the North Pole). On this island are stuck two penguins in the middle of a mild snowstorm. As the snow falls, it gradually builds up into piles - there are four or five piles of snow randomly dotted about the screen. All this is viewed from an two-dimensional three-quarters perspective. Your penguin comes armed with a directional crosshair - you can rotate this using the L and R buttons on the PS pad, indicating the direction in which you can pelt snowballs at the opposition (a hacked down Robotron device enabling you to run one way whilst firing the other). The penguins themselves have eight directions of movement and are controlled using the traditional gamepad.
	Your penguin begins unarmed, so to gather your first snowball you have to dash to the nearest snow pile and start bashing the ‘X’ button. As you gather and pack the ice into one mean mother of a snowball, watch the bars at the top of the screen. The most obvious element is a Street Fighter II style energy meter, but at the end of each character’s bar is a tiny snowball which grows and grows as you pump the ‘X’ button until it reaches maximum size! As you might suspect, the size of your snowball is directly related to the energy lost in the event of a direct hit. Where this system gets clever is that as you scoop up snow, your snow pile disappears. This means you can only make a couple of snowballs from each pile! Furthermore, you then have to move away from a depleted pile to allow the falling snow to build up again; this keeps the gameplay fluid and frantic, as well as introducing a tactical element! Oh, did I mention that the energy bars and snowball indicators are transparent? He likes his transparencies, does our James.
	Snowball Fight v0.1 (which is pretty much what I played) is great fun. The basic controls and gameplay are on a par with the better multiplayer NES games (a major compliment in my book), except with better graphics and no sound (soon to be rectified - James’ Snowball Fight MIDI anthem oozes pure Nintendo charm). It suddenly strikes me that this lone Yaroze coder has come up with an incredibly imaginative game engine - one that feels like it has been tweaked and tinkered with by Shigeru Miyamoto, the 10th Dan of gameplay, as if in passing. It’s impressive. Most impressive! It doesn’t really matter to me that the game is clearly unfinished (i.e. missing animation frames, reducing the other penguin’s energy bar to zero means nothing - the game engine just rolls on - so victory is purely symbolic), it’s just bloody good fun. And surely that is what the Net Yaroze is all about? 
	The evening proceeded as you might suspect. I could go on (and on) about all the demos I saw, but I won’t. Suffice to say I was hooked by the time I saw Snowball Fight (“You had me at ‘Hello’.”), although James’ less developed projects appear to have at least as much potential. I played EDGE’s recommended hot titles, Fatal Fantasy - a brief (but-oh-so-crafted) spoof of Final Fantasy VII - and the 3D RPG Terra Incognita (with hilarious Japlish translation). I briefly tinkered with James’ Shadebob demo, which created awesome light patterns in response to movement of the analogue pad. I played through the entirety of George Bain’s Star Fighters in a couple of minutes. I played numerous multiplayer games with Ross, getting drubbed most of the time. It was about then that I looked at some Yaroze source code for a number of programs…
Oh shit! I was so blown away by the arctic coolness of Net Yaroze I had completely forgotten that I couldn’t actually program. Never mind my financial status (solution - student loan) or my temperamental girlfriend, I lacked even ‘basic programming qualifications’, as it probably reads in the advertisement for “Hi-Score Engine Writer” at iD Software. But then I thought, like a character in a tacky management training video, “Hey, work the problem!” Suddenly, everything turned around. Fitness? I can get fit and still code in my spare time, and hey, my flat can stand a little more negligence. Besides, I have a light lecture schedule next term, no exams, and that peachy university summer holiday to follow. I guess you can give yourself plenty of spare time when you really want it! What follows is an approximation of my subsequent thoughts (imagine dramatic, crescendoing Hollywood music) -
“Aaaah, sod it - I never used to be able to use DOS either, but I’ll just have to learn. How hard can it be? Isn’t C meant to be fairly easy to pick up, anyway? I’ll go out, buy “Learn C in 21 Days” and become a guru before you know it. And even if it takes months, and then a few more months on top of that to get used to the Yaroze, I don’t care. I’m going to DO IT. I can do it, and I will do it! As long as I live, I’ll never go hungry again…!”
Thus feeling suitably self-empowered, I arrived home sometime past midnight clutching a loaned copy of “A Guide to C”, blabbering enthusiastically to my bemused flatmates about the merits of amateur programming. That night I slept fitfully, dreaming of sliding penguins.

How I learned to stop worrying and love DJGPP

February 24, 1998

	The morning after my Yaroze ‘awakening’ (as we like to call it in therapy), I rose from my bed to the early morning sounds of birds chirping and with a new-found sense of determination. Like when you see a great movie, the buzz of the previous night was still with me. I started to flick through “A Guide to C”, and although it began in a fairly straightforward manner, after a few pages it began to throw sentences at me that took three or four readings to understand. Uh-oh. James had said this was a fairly useful book (it’s what he used to learn C), but it was causing me trouble before the end of the first chapter. It was encouraging that I vaguely understood the more rudimentary concepts it outlined, but after skipping ahead to sections on “Arrays, Strings and Pointers” and “Binary Trees” I realised that I would never learn C from this book without a great deal of help. “A Guide to C” seems to have been written to accompany university courses, rather than to teach complete home-alone novices (like myself) C. Surely there was something a tad beginner-friendlier? In a state of concern and brooding despair, I trotted down to the local bookstore and browsed the ‘Computer Programming’ section (in the company of numerous bearded gentlemen). After half an hour or so (despite the vast number of titles), I reckon the books available could be neatly divided into three categories:

1) 	References for people who already know how to program C, but need a book to help them pick up on mistakes, etc. These books are for professional C freaks, and should be avoided like the plague by beginners. They have titles like “The C Programming Language” or “The Complete C Reference”.

2) 	Books for people doing C at university, or on similar courses. I reckon “A Guide to C” falls into this category. If you can program in another language already, and are quite computer-literate and mathematically-minded, a book like this might suit you - although I suspect you’d still struggle with some of the trickier elements. These tomes have titles like “C by Dissection”, “The Basics of C” or “The Student’s C Handbook”.

3) 	Books for regular people (like me) who want to learn C from a book, probably from scratch. These books have vaguely encouraging titles, like “Learn C in 21 Days”, “C from Scratch” or “C for Dummies”. If life were a Douglas Adams novel, they would have “Don’t Panic” emblazoned on the front in warm, friendly letters.

	I have no ego. I plumped for “C for Dummies: Volume One” because it starts you right at the beginning. It assumes you have zero programming ability, and takes about 20 pages to cover what most of the other books do in 5, spelling out exactly what you’re doing and why you’re learning it. At the time of writing, I’m actually about two-thirds of the way through (a week after buying it) and I have to say, I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn C. It was a bit simplistic to start with (even for me!) but by the time you get to the vaguely tricky stuff you’ll be glad you had such a thorough grounding in the basics! The only downer is that “C for Dummies” comes in two volumes - and although when put together they cover a fair bit more than the other books, the total cost of the two volumes is still over £40. Still, if you’re serious about learning C (and you suspect you might benefit from the softly-softly approach) this isn’t a huge amount of money (especially as the “Dummies” books also function as references when you’re finished with them). Oh yeah, the “C for Dummies” books are also written in a chatty, slightly jokey style which might put some people off (i.e. if you prefer dry, dull, turgid textbooks).
	A few words of warning about all of these books. First of all, as you might have suspected, they are bloody expensive i.e. “C for Dummies: Volume One” costs £18.99 in the UK (and then Volume Two is £23.99 - grrrr)! That said, most of the other books are about £25-30. Another important point is that all of them assume you have a ‘reasonable working knowledge’ of computers (specifically, PC’s). I can only assume that anyone contemplating taking up Yaroze coding has a ‘reasonable working knowledge’ of how their computer works. Although programming in C has turned out to be less tricky (so far!) than I thought it might be, I don’t want to make it sound like a piece of piss. If you don’t really know how to use DOS, or are new to computing in general, you should really get good at the basics before diving in at the deep end (i.e. learning programming). That said, I can’t imagine too many people reading this who wouldn’t call themselves reasonably competent computer users. The final (and possibly most important) point is that all these books assume you have access to (and know how to use) a C compiler. Don’t panic: I’ll explain what that means later on (and if you use Windows 95, I’ll explain how to get hold of the excellent freeware compiler I use - DJGPP).
	I didn’t actually buy the ‘Dummies’ book that day. I reckoned that I needed a while to mull over the options. In a games-o-centric frame of mind, I picked up a copy of “Joystick Nation” (JC Herz’s paean to the halcyon gaming days of the eighties) to keep me going, which was an entertaining (if not exactly mind-shattering) read. There were a few niggling remarks which suggested JC might be slightly more clued-up if she played less of those eighties games of her youth and got stuck into some modern classics like Mario 64 and Resident Evil, but her heart is definitely in the right place. I guess that’s the evil of print - it dates so quickly.

February 25, 1998

	Today was designated “Get my C compiler up and running so I can go out and buy a C book” day. If you got all freaked out when I mentioned ‘C compiler’ a few paragraphs back, don’t worry! At this moment I suppose I should quickly explain my limited understanding of what a C compiler is. Basically, you type in your C program which looks something like this (except normally much longer!):

	#include <stdio.h>

	void main()
	{
	printf(“Whoah, dude! This is, like, such a cliché…\n”);
	}

Next step is to save it as some file with a ‘.c’ extension, like “cheese.c”. You then use a program called a C compiler to turn your dainty C code into an actual executable file! The feeling of satisfaction after creating your first EXE file is indescribable (or maybe I’m just too embarrassed to describe it). I can’t remark on the numerous C compilers out there, but if you plan on learning C on a Windows 95 PC, you should get hold of DJGPP, which is a port of the GNU GCC C compiler made available as freeware by the Free Software Foundation. Bless ‘em! DJGPP actually runs in a DOS box, but it does require to be in a Windows environment so if you’re a real dinosaur and just use DOS, you’re on your own! The DJGPP homepage is at:

http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/

There are loads of files available to download, and different people may need different ones. To save you the hassle I had, I can tell you that all you need to get in order to compile C programs and learn C on a Windows 95 PC are the following:
(explanations courtesy of the DJGPP FAQ)

readme.1st 
(This explains how to install DJGPP and get started with using it)

faq210b.zip 
(The latest edition of a FAQ list.  Use it whenever you have problems installing and using DJGPP)

bnu27b.zip 
(The GNU Binutils, including `as', the GNU assembler; `ld', the GNU linker; and their docs)

djdev201.zip 
(C header files and libraries, library reference, minimal development environment, DJGPP-specific utilities and their documentation)

gcc2721b.zip 
(The GNU C Compiler binaries and docs - including the docs for the C++ compiler)

txi390b.zip 
(Info, a stand-alone program to read GNU hypertext documentation, and an environment to produce such files.  Without `info', you cannot read the C library reference and the docs included with the ported GNU software packages)

	Install all this in an aptly named directory, working in a DOS box, and you have a bare-bones C learning setup. Of course, if you already have a Net Yaroze, then you will have received Sony’s C/C++ compiler (which is another port of the GNU software)! If you are currently Yaroze-less (which you probably should be if you don’t know any C), then the DJGPP solution is a good way to dip your toes into the murky waters of amateur C programming.
	My experience of downloading DJGPP was fairly traumatic. Being the donkey I am, I downloaded the UNIX port of GCC from the Free Software Foundation’s homepage before I realised that I actually needed to get DJGPP. Doh! Anyway, after spanning the files over several floppies, I arrived home to discover that one of the files was corrupted. So, I downloaded it again from home, at great personal expense. I have to say, I was in such despair at my bad luck and DJGPP ineptitude that I almost gave up, but getting the C compiler installed and working has actually been harder to work out than most of the C programming stuff I’ve done so far!
	Late that night I typed in my first C program (from the opening chapter of James’ “A Guide to C”), compiled it and was greatly chuffed to end up with an EXE file that displayed “Hello, world” on the screen. One giant leap for a man, one small step for mankind. At this point I should explain my “learn to program C” strategy, which went something like this:

1)	Get C compiler up and running
2)	Get “C for Dummies: Volume One”
3)	Work through “C for Dummies” to ensure I have what it takes to program C and that I’m not about to waste a huge amount of money.
4)	Order Net Yaroze. Perfect my C skills waiting for it to arrive by working through “C for Dummies: Volume Two”.
5)	Unfuzzy the differences between Yaroze and PC programming, get to work creating the world’s best-ever game, take over DMA Design (and, eventually, the world).

I vowed to pick up “C for Dummies: Volume One” the next day, and spend the weekend going through it, hopefully finding out whether I could hack it or not. I was quietly confident, but only time would tell…

Are you ready? Then, let’s begin now…*bing!*

1 March, 1998

	Thursday was a busy day for me at uni, so I didn’t get back home with a copy of “C for Dummies: Volume One” (hence referred to as Dummies) until early that evening. To be honest, I didn’t do very much apart from read the introduction and flick through the first few chapters. The next day was a bit of a lost cause as well; I had to work during the day, so it wasn’t until Friday night that I got to go through Dummies properly. It might appear extremely sad that I spent a Friday night indoors, learning how perform miraculous feats in C (such as bringing my name up on a DOS screen), but I shamefully admit I really enjoyed it. My flatmates were away for the weekend and my girlfriend was acting in a play, so the flat was quiet and my evening proceeded interruption-free. I went through the book slowly and methodically, coding from about 8 till midnight, taking a break every now and again. To be quite honest, there wasn’t anything that caused me real trouble. I was just reading each chapter, working through the lessons, entering any example programs that were given and making sure I understood how they worked. Easy.
	When you look at a C program for the first time, it appears to be a mixture of gibberish and almost-proper English. This tends to be both encouraging and frustrating, but it’s also one of the reasons C is quite easy to learn - it has roots in everyday language and logical thought. C is a ‘mid-level’ programming language, hovering in-between BASIC (easy to learn, but clumsy and inefficient) and assembler (fiendishly hard but very efficient) in the grand scheme of programming languages. The exciting thing about learning C is that as you learn more, the gibberish element in other people’s code gradually disappears. For instance, your early C programs will all follow a fairly standardised outline. Within that general outline there is room for a great deal of flexibility, but as soon as you begin to get the idea behind the rules of how C programs are written, you will be able to look at fairly complex C source code written for the Yaroze with a greater understanding of what’s going on. I happened to have downloaded the source code for a simple 3D object viewer on the Yaroze a few days before, and after briefly looking at it that day I decided that I really didn’t have a clue what was going on. After Friday night, however, I was able to understand that it was a large program built up of numerous smaller programs. I also began to understand that a lot of the commands that were being used in the PlayStation programs were not going to be taught to me in Dummies, but were specifically for use on the Yaroze. Now, I’m not a C prodigy or anything - most of the source code was still incomprehensible to me - but these glimmers of insight were both encouraging and exciting. I was already gaining a sense of structure as well as developing a knack for spotting Yaroze programming techniques that I had touched on in my own lessons.
	The other thing that happened on Friday was that my application form for the Yaroze arrived through the mail. I eagerly tore the flimsy packaging apart to glimpse the coolness inside. Really, there wasn’t all that much to get excited about, but Sony’s glossy fold-out Yaroze leaflet just oozes class, and the dinky logo on the letterhead was pretty smart, too! A letter was enclosed (“Dear Mr Ferguson” - wow, that’s me!) which just mentioned how the web site worked and reminded you that you can get Codewarrior for Yaroze if you want it etc. Much cooler IMHO was the opportunity to buy professional quality software at worryingly low prices - 3D Studio 4 is available for £375 and Animator Pro 1.3 is only £175 to Yaroze owners; that makes a combined saving of £1,135!!! There was also some glossy fluff on those software packages, and a photocopied article from the December 1997 EDGE which covered the burgeoning UK Yaroze scene. The application form itself is in triplicate, and I was horrified (aye, horrified!) to discover I had to pay £12.50 for postage and packing on top of the cost of the Yaroze system itself! For those interested, you can pay for Yaroze using Visa, Mastercard, Delta (but not Switch), Eurocheque, a postal order or bank draft.
	After my fairly early night on the Friday, I was up early on Saturday. I coded through the day, taking the afternoon off, and for some of the evening, too. Alas, I had some ‘proper’ work to do as well (damn this university lark!), and a party that night. Hey, who said programmers had to be geeks..? Still, by the end of the day I had covered the first couple of chapters in Dummies - stuff like variables, strings and basic maths. In fact, I was so encouraged by my progress that I decided to go for it and just send off my Yaroze application form that afternoon (with £362.49 cheque attached), although I winced when I put the letter in the post-box at the thought of what it was going to do to my bank balance. At least I was getting the £350 special offer!
Sunday was another early start, and I ploughed through Dummies for most of the day, like a man obsessed (which, in retrospect, I probably was). It was a fairly purposeful weekend, I suppose, and by the time I got to sleep on Friday night I was wallowing in the murky depths of C, creating my own functions, simple loops and exploring the joys of if-else conditions. Sounds great, huh? Looking at my precious piece of genuine Yaroze source code I was delighted to see that I understood even MORE of it than before! I rounded off the perfect day by looking up a few of the Yaroze fan sites on the web. Unfortunately, many of then seem to be updated sporadically (at best) and a few hadn’t been touched since summer 1997. Ah well, I suppose the restricted members’ websites are where the real action is anyway!

Sometimes they come back!

March 12, 1998

	So, a week has gone by since I last wrote something. It’s been quite a busy week for me, really. My copy of Dummies is a little more dog-eared than when I last wrote but quite honestly, after last weekend’s C coding blitz I never got stuck into it like that again. I suppose university projects, meetings and my buddy’s 21st birthday party all kind of got in the way. I did manage to get a few good hours worth done over the week - and I would have done a lot more over the weekend, except I was in London (!) for my pal GY’s 21st. Excuses, excuses, huh? Anyway, today was notable because it was the second time I saw a Yaroze in action.
	This evening, James dropped by my place on his way home and we trotted up to his place again. After stopping for (the now customary) fish ‘n’ chips, I was treated to a much more advanced version of Snowball Fight. Improved animation, different maps and slightly tweaked control and aiming mechanisms were evident, as well as the presence of (gasp!) music. Very nice. I would also like to state on the official record that I was the first person in the world to beat ‘Mr Frosty’ at his own game (quite literally) - heh! Still, my score was something reduced to something suitably feeble by the end of the evening’s SBF session.
	Most of the rest of the time wasn’t spend on the Yaroze, but leafing through James’ emulator and MIDI game music files. I had about 200MB worth of emulation stuff on my hard drive last summer, but a horrific FAT error meant that I lost it all. It was with a faintly teary eye that I once again played Star Wars on MAME, and listened to the Castlevania IV music. I heartily recommend that anyone interested in games programming who wasn’t really into (or ‘around during’ - a scary thought) the 80’s arcade and 8-bit scene gets hold of brilliant emulators like Nesticle (NES), Genecyst (Mega Drive/Genesis), Z80 (Sinclair Spectrum) or MAME (arcade emulator). These games might be old, but many of them still play brilliantly, and to be honest the games you’ll be coding (at least to start with) will have a lot more in common with Lunar Jetman than Tekken 3! I also firmly believe historical perspective is important if you want to succeed at something - it’s a lot like movie directors: guys like Tarantino, Scorsese and Spielberg live and breathe film. Likewise, if you’re serious about games, you have to understand where they’re coming from. I can’t stand people who complain about crappy graphics in old games - they’re often the same ignoramuses who can’t stand watching black and white movies, or think amazing special effects equate to a good film. So, is ‘Flubber’ a better movie than ‘Casablanca’, then? Likewise, is ‘Incredible Hulk’ on PlayStation a better game than ‘Commando’? Oh, how I love my over-the-top examples…
I’m not one of those bores who thinks games were oh-so-much-better 10 years ago, in case you’re beginning to think that. I have a sneaking suspicion most of us would rather play Virtua Fighter 3 than Way of the Exploding Fist any day! International Karate + may be crying out for a 90’s remake, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to get a second-hand Amiga and throw away my N64! Like films, mediocre games will often date badly, but the classics of the past deserve to be remembered in their pure and original format, rather than recycled into flashy but vacuous 3D versions of their former selves. I applaud Namco for their museum series, even if some of the more recent titles are distinctly ropey! OK, rant over.
	It gets late, so I leave. I arrive home. I sleep. Next week is looking pretty busy. Hopefully, my Yaroze will arrive before the weekend, and I can get it out my system a bit before my end of term exams! I’m not entirely confident in my ability to shelve the Yaroze till after what is, after all, a mere “class” exam. Again, time will tell…

Black and Sexy.

17 March, 1998

	My Net Yaroze arrived today! Typically, it came just after I sent my second annoying, nagging “Where is it, then?”-type letter to the NY team in London (sorry, Kerry!) I spent most of the morning waiting for a knock on the door, but I gave up hope at about 11 and nipped over the road to get some stuff from Tesco. Anyway, on my way back I noticed an Amtrak van parked just 50 yards up the road from me, outside the local Domino’s Pizza (handy area I live in, eh?) Well, at this moment things got very silly. You know how sometimes everything happens to you all at once, and you get this spastic brain-lock because you can’t process all the information immediately? Well, first I bumped into a classmate from Psychology and we got talking right outside my front door, just chatting about the upcoming exam and our group project. Anyway, after a few minutes, this bloke in a navy blue jumper (looking amazingly like an Amtrak delivery person might, I actually think) walks out the front door of my building. We psychologists scoot out of his way, and he goes off in a Domino’s-esque direction. Amazingly, I fail to put two and two together until I notice out the corner of my eye that he is fiddling with keys to get into the Amtrak van. Leaving my bewildered psych buddy behind, I excuse myself and bomb upstairs to the flat. I open the front door to find a “Sorry - We Called…” notice on the floor. Aaaargh! Cognitive senses now racing, I drop the shopping, leg it downstairs and up the street to the Amtrak van, slowly pulling away. At this point I am vaguely aware of somebody calling my name. Anyway, I run up to the van and hammer away on the window, probably giving the driver a heart attack and looking (not a little) like a bit of a prat.
	You can guess how it turned out, right? It’s a package from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe - cool in itself, but what’s inside is sooo much sweeter. Turning to carry my Yaroze booty back to the flat, I bump into my bemused flatmate Ross who I ran past at speed, not just ignoring him but completely failing to register his existence at all (despite his shouting my name)! Well, I might have a Psychology class exam in two days but I figure there’s no harm in setting up the machine and trying to run a few demos before lunch. Ha-ha, how wrong one can be!
	The Yaroze kit comes in two boxes, one containing the Net Yaroze itself (and packaged much like a regular PlayStation), the second contains all the software and documentation, kept in a natty storage case. Nice one, Sony! The PC CD is a fairly dull silver job, but the Yaroze boot disc is a luminous snot-green which I can’t decide if I like or not. But what sort of sad gimp actually cares about the colour of their CDs? With my flatmates drooling enviously (or at least, I like to think so) in the background, I go about unplugging my 14” Trinitron and setting it up next to the Yaroze, speakers and, erm, PC monitor already on my desk. Hmmm, crowded. Anyway, all goes well until I try to connect the Yaroze to my PC’s serial port. Erp! My mouse is guzzling the required port, and so I have to trot all the way down to Tandy to get myself an adaptor for the larger serial port still free on my PC.
	Upon my return, it is not exactly plain sailing. Despite following Sony’s start-up documentation to the letter, I cannot get SIOCONS (the interface between the Yaroze and PC) to recognise the serial port it is plugged into as a valid COM port. Thus begins a 3 hour nightmare of configuration, modification and generally ballsy attitude towards the wellbeing of my system registry. At certain points I can get the damn thing to work:

1) 	No mouse plugged in, and the Yaroze taking its rightful place at COM 2
2) 	No modem installed. COM port nightmares ahoy!
3) 	Bizzarely, multiple COM ports start springing up all over the place. None of these work, actually, but it’s all bit bizarre so I thought I’d mention it.

Finally, I solve it. And it had nothing to do with the way Windows was set up, my 3DFX card guzzling up IRQ space or my dodgy, cheapo network card either. Nope, the problem was staring me in the face (or lurking cowardishly in my BIOS) all along, where it read:
SERIAL PORT 2: DISABLED
Sadly, clicking on ENABLED solved all my problems faster than it takes for Bill Gates’ PC to boot. I had been tearing my hair out over nothing, more or less - another big “Doh!” on the slippery slopes of Yaroze coding. A few desperate pleas to James “Mr Frosty” R, whom I suspected (correctly) would be checking his university e-mail at some point in the afternoon, resulted in Jimbo turning up on my doorstep only minutes after I finally got SIOCONS to work in harmony with the rest of my overworked P133. Typical. For your entertainment, here’s the desperate e-mail I sent him begging for assistance:

Hiya (again),

Hey it arrived! Yay. A bit of a bugger to set up, and it isn't really
working right. I have run games on it (Snowball Fight - woo hoo!) but I
can ONLY get the fucker to accept a signal thru the serial port that my
mouse is normally connected to. I bought an adapor for the 9-pin
to -many pins serial thing so I could use the other serial port, but it
doesn't register. To get it to work I either have to shut down to DOS
and swap the mouse for the Yaroze cable, or boot into Windows with the
Yaroze cable in and no mouse. Grrrr! Fuuuck! Nyaaaa! I'm trying
everything, but if you get this (ie are at the PCs) could you pop round
to see if you could help? Just quickly!

Is this like what happened to you? Please email a reply too - I'll meet
you in the ATL4 labs if you want and I'll check my email every half hour
till 6pm. I'm that desperate. Oh, and I'll try calling too. Hmmm.

Ta,

Nick

PS It may not be working 100%, but it is beautiful. Mmmm.
------------------------------------ 
ICQ #: 9464742
"Spandex - it's a privilege, NOT a right!"

Hmmm. Pathetic, really, isn’t it? Not as pathetic as the sight my girlfriend had later on when she popped round that evening, with James and myself facing my laden desk, pelting snowballs at each other’s cutesy penguins in a distinctly enjoyable fashion (Snowball Fight: download it NOW from Mr Frosty on the SCEE server). Heaven!
	I feel dutibound to mention that I have also been progressing slowly through C for Dummies I over the last week, and finished it yesterday. Just to give you an idea of the concepts I now understand, I covered chapters on variables, math, loops, custom functions, calling and sending to and from functions, keyboard input, and the basics of strings and arrays as well as a fair bit of other stuff. Nothing to do with pointers yet, which everyone seems to acknowledge as the hardest part of C to get to grips with. Great! Volume II seems to spend about 50% of its time dealing with that, so hopefully I should be OK. Anyway, not bad for less than 3 weeks work! And I can genuinely say that I understand 100% of what I’ve done so far, which is more than I can with most textbooks (I did say ‘understand’, now, not ‘remember’).

Holida-ay! Celebra-ate!

20 March, 1998

	Apologies to Madonna. And if you don’t get that, well, never mind. Here’s my hot tip for the day - 

Don’t order your Net Yaroze if you suspect it might arrive close to an important exam.

Thankfully, mine wasn’t too important but I can tell you I’m not looking forward to receiving the results! And where was the damned ‘Honey Bee Cognition’ question anyway? But, I digress…
	After the exam from hell yesterday (you know, when you leave an exam and you actually feel quite elated - just because it’s over - and the full realisation of how miserably you performed only hits you when you wake up the next morning), I had a lovely evening out with my girlfriend and saw her off at the station this morning. I also think I have so far neglected to mention that I am flying out to stay with my parents in Hong Kong for the next fortnight tomorrow. Exciting as that may sound, I predict a fortnight of C “coding” (if I can give myself that much credit yet), PlayStation and (gulp) N64 gaming, and not-inconsiderable consumer spending. On my return I think I’ll be staying with Kate (the aforementioned GF) for a week and then, to top off my busiest holiday ever, attending a CRAC (!) management course at my university in Edinburgh. Fun, fun, fun!
Aside from packing, changing money and some very last-minute exam revision, I did find time over the last few days to explore the official Net Yaroze members-only site, homepages and newsgroups, play some demos, and gain a general impression of just what the “scene” is like. In these early days, I really only looked at SCEE (Sony Europe) members and sites, although the omni-present Mr Frosty pointed me in the direction of some excellent US sites. Sadly, I am still far from the position of needing many of the programming tools made available by Sony - and some immensely talented members - so I focused (as is the story of my life) on the games and the people.
Well, the SCEE site interface is OK, but I think the SCEA site has a much better layout. Sorry guys, but as a newbie I have to say that the info up on the SCEE pages is fairly outdated and quite confusing. Perhaps an explanation of some of the more bizarre compression formats (LHA? More like WTF…) and a little reorganisation of the files system (with more detailed explanations) may be in order? Official site aside, I have to congratulate many of the people whose homepages I visited - excellent work! I only visited those sites that had been updated in the last month or so, and I gather that other pages have been “dead” for some time. Well, I think that my advice (as the owner of 2 homepages, and a writer for many others) would be to keep your page simple so that updating isn’t too daunting a task! My SAQnet homepage (formerly on Geocities) was maintained for over 2 years using only my basic knowledge of HTML and Notepad for Windows, so don’t think you need all those fancy Frontpage-style programs!
	The homepages really conveyed the feelings I have as a new Net Yaroze member - one of excitement and a real sense of community. The newsgroups were also a very welcome surprise; no flame wars, no system advocacy - just sensible, civilised debate. In fact, it’s a testament to the maturity of the Yaroze newsgroups (thank God they’re private!) that reasonable, albeit forceful, posts are not interpreted as flames. I hate having to fluff egos in the regular groups so as not to start a flame war… The obvious wealth of technical expertise available from both members and staff in the technical groups is invaluable, especially for a beginner like me! Plus, the freetalk groups are a great platform for ideas, thoughts, plus the odd grumble or two (yeah, where IS the multi-tap support, Sony? Snowball Fight demands it!)
	I downloaded a few demos, too. Mostly those I had heard about from magazines like EDGE and talking to Mr Frosty. Graeme Evans’ Pune was a notably playable and amusing bugger, and some of the older Yaroze demos I had a look at were most impressive for first efforts. James came round this afternoon packing a number of discs worth of SCEI and SCEA material - some of which I’d played at his place (Hover Racing, Terra Incognita, Gasgar) but never seen in colour. We made a demo tape of Snowball Fight, too - my TV/VCR-in-1 coming in handy for a change, although the picture quality wasn’t up to much even coming from an RGB source!
	I made the last-minute decision to pack my Yaroze at about 2 in the morning, and stayed up till about 4am looking at stuff on the web and uploading my own Yaroze homepage. With the combined weight of C for Dummies I (just finished) and II, a Net Yaroze, an N64 and numerous videos, CDs and clothes my suitcase was disturbingly heavy for a two-week trip. Ah well, I can’t say when I’ll be writing again (term starts 21 April) but look for a lengthy and entertaining update soon after I get back to university!

Hong Kong

Easter 1998

	Hong Kong. Land of John Woo (and Wong Kar-Wai), Jackie Chan, mobile phones, rampant copyright theft, soft-core neon nights, cash-rich consumers and ill-mannered crowds. It’s a truly unique place, a city which, until recently, also happened to be its own country (come on, do you think Britain ever really owned HK?). I’ve been zipping back and forth for five years now, and although I get tired of the mad pace after a couple of weeks, I always miss it when I get back to the UK. “What has all this wistful crap got to do with the Net Yaroze?”, you may be asking yourself. Good point. Well, Hong Kong is a veritable Mecca for gamers - the many software shops import just about every title you could ever want, and it’s common for games to be out in Hong Kong the day of their official release in the US or Japan, if not earlier. The average cost of a PlayStation title varies wildly, but let’s say that old releases can be picked up for less than $200 (about £15) whereas the brand new games hover at the $420 mark (£35).
Hong Kong is perhaps better known for its pirate games; known as ‘HKs’ or ‘silvers’, these retail for about £3 each if you buy a large number at a time. Allegedly. I’ll just dwell on the morals of software piracy for a moment, although I guess it’s up to each individual if they think it’s worth buying pirate games or not. As someone who quite fancies a career in the software industry, I have to say I now think it’s just plain wrong to steal someone else’s hard work. Plus - and I have to admit I speak from experience - you cannot fully appreciate games when you pick them up for next to nothing. Sure, you can buy 15 HKs for the cost of a legit game, but when do you think you’re going to find the time to play them all properly? Also, imagine getting to disk 3 of Final Fantasy VII and then finding out that you bought a dud copy. Annoying, no? Pirate disks are often well dodgy, and they do your PS’s laser lens no good, believe me. What is truly fascinating about piracy in Hong Kong is the open environment in which the pirates operate - they’re usually located right next to the legitimate shops (which still manage a brisk trade, it has to be said). Since 1997, it has certainly become less blatant - several notorious pirate CD hangouts have even been closed down - but you’d never think there was anything illegal about the rest of the places if it wasn’t for the ridiculously low prices and obviously photocopied CD covers... It’s not just PlayStation software, either. Brand new movies are for sale on copied Video CDs (Titanic and Jackie Brown when I was out), and pirate PC software is even more common. I guess ELSPA wouldn’t know where to start!
I picked up the following games while I was out in Hong Kong - all, I hasten to add, legitimate Japanese versions:

•	Biohazard\Resident Evil II - £25 (I couldn’t believe it!)
•	1080 Degree Snowboarding (N64) - £40 (and damn hard to find)
•	Tekken 3 (with Dual Shock Pad) - £50
•	Bust A Move: Dance and Rhythm Action (PS) - £35

Wow! Gaming sure can be an expensive habit, though I suppose I get more for my money than most! I’m extremely happy with all my purchases - Biohazard II certainly makes the top of my list (please, indulge my zombie obsession by reading the George A. Romero article I wrote for Edinburgh’s student paper and my old Resident Evil review...) and BTW, I couldn’t give a damn if the text is in Japanese! As for the brilliance of the rest, well, I don’t know about Tekken 3 - it’s a stupendous beat-em up, but I think the whole “I-slap-you, you-slap-me” genre is looking very tired. Bust A Move is obviously “inspired” by Parappa, but takes the premise a great deal further with gorgeous 3D visuals, an awesome soundtrack, great characterisation and a gameplay-saving two player mode. Ignore the (slightly harsh) 7/10 review in April’s EDGE - pick it up on import if you fancy a genuinely amusing and entertaining change from the usual PS fare (Graeme Evans’ “It’s Love” kitty-petting weirdfest is perhaps the closest experience on the Yaroze). For those who care - and you should - 1080 Snowboarding is a beautiful snowboarding game with oh-so-nearly flawless playability, and knocks the socks off of any of the PlayStation snowboarding games. Yes, a pity about the brain-dead opposition AI, but the control, graphics and sound are fantastic.
	Enough of the games! This is meant to be my Yaroze Diary, not the game reviews section of my homepage or N64 Gazetta (plug, plug). When I wasn’t playing my spunky new games, I did crack on with C for Dummies II and spent a lot of time cruising the Yaroze websites, particularly the SCEE ones (with a mind to picking up all the EDGE competition entries). The results of the EDGE competition were up the first few days I was back, and I’ll confess, I had mixed feelings about them. This isn’t small-minded Snowball Fight bias, I assure you! I just didn’t feel the winning games were the ones that I had found really exciting - Chris Chadwick’s “Blitter Boy” was beautiful and technically superb, but really at too early a stage of development to merit first place IMHO (as ever). No offence, Chris! I was also surprised Robert Swan’s “Revolution” wasn’t in there somewhere, along with James Shaughnessy’s “Gravitation” (PAL/NTSC switching! 2 player ‘Thrust’-style battles! Dodgy ‘gate bug’ - now fixed!). But then, who am I to argue with ex-EDGE ed. Jason Brookes?
	Aside from picking up the odd demo or ten (I’m not reviewing them all - you can go to Mr Frosty on SCEE for that!), I also got hold of Ira Rainey’s sprite tutorial, Pete Passmore’s 3D tutorials, and Robert Swan’s explanation of exactly what an “ordering table” is. Excellent! All I can say to these people is “Thank you” (they’re probably now wondering why I never mailed them to say so at the time - erp!), these references are about 1000 times more useful than the official Sony stuff (again!?) and are making it much easier for me to get the hang of writing stuff for Yaroze.
	My C programming also progressed in leaps and bounds this holiday. I managed to make it to the end of the massive chapter on pointers; I now understand pretty much how they work, and why people get into trouble with them! Other topics I covered included advanced stuff on arrays and strings, as well as some of the more advanced maths functions like ‘cos’, ‘sine’, ‘log’ and all that GCSE maths stuff. The only things I have left do now in C for Dummies are the chapters on structures, memory allocation and writing big programs. There are also some “missing” chapters on the web that I might look at, as well as a section on PC disk accessing which isn’t really Yaroze-related but might come in handy. Hey, you never know!
	Looking at Yaroze source code (namely, the “bouncing balls” demo you get on the PC CD and Mr Frosty’s well-commented ‘Funky Spirals’ code) these days is both encouraging and profoundly depressing. It’s encouraging because I now understand so much more of it than I possibly could a month ago. OK, so that isn’t hard because I knew absolutely ZERO a month ago, but it gives me a real sense of progress. What is depressing is looking at all the PlayStation-specific commands - all the sound and graphics functions, controller handling and sprite instructions look horribly complex. Even the simplest programs, such as Ira Rainey’s sprite tutorials, are vaguely intimidating. But then, I knew what I was getting into, didn’t I? And don’t think I’m giving up, all you veteran hardcore Yaroze coders! I’ll be entering a polished (if likely simplistic and sonically-challenged!) game for the GDUK ’98 competition, or I’m a big hairy gooseberry with no mates! It’s a case of “so near, and yet so far” if there ever was one.
	Ah, yes. The Games Design UK 98 competition. I suppose it’s testament to the reputation I have amongst friends and family that I received no less than three e-mails and one fax alerting me to the subject while I was out in Hong Kong. My aunt faxed me a newspaper article with a big cheesy picture of David Jones from DMA Design, and the encouraging claim that the British software industry would be worth £15 billion by 2000. Hmmm. Really? Anyway, I checked out the GDUK 98 website and was most chuffed that my nation was pioneering such a brilliant competition - GDUK is primarily sponsored by Scottish Enterprise, Dundee-based (just like my flatmates) DMA Design and Glasgow bods Red Lemon, among others. Scoland, eh? FREEEEDOM!!!  *ahem*
	Wetting my trousers with excitement at the so-remote-it’s-not-even-worth-thinking-about prospect of scooping 5 grand for writing a game, or getting £1000 for trying hard (or something), I made a deal with my parents that my termly allowance from them will be extended into the summer so I won’t have to work and can instead get to grips - seriously, now - with writing for the Yaroze. The situation is also helped by the fact that my workload this term is ridiculously light - no summer exams, and only 1 lecture a week. I do have a lengthy dissertation to write, but as I plan on doing something along the lines of “Difference in levels of aggression between children and adults when playing video games” I think that will turn out to be quite fun, and give me better leverage when we have family arguments over the damaging potential of “those TV games” (as most adults in my family tend to call them). Another plus side of this “not working” lark is that I don’t have to pickle my brain working at UCI Cinemas or for the British Survey of Fertiliser Practice (great people, lousy jobs) this year. The minus side is that it doesn’t look like I’ll be going away on holiday in September, and I won’t have the usual stacks of cash (hah!) to spend on the girlfriend/games “habit”/Edinburgh Festival this year. The sacrifices I make, eh? One funny thing is that people are saying “Shouldn’t you be getting work experience this summer?” so I tell them, “Well, actually, this is what I want to do - design and (maybe) write video games...”? Most people are surprised, used to me saying that I want to be a film director (should have done a film course, then), or write novels and screenplays (ditto), or work for the BBC (hmmm), or write for EDGE, Empire, or some similar tome (hey, still might!). Maybe I could produce the first decent games-related program not aimed at kiddies - the “Top Gear” of video games? Arf! Sounds good to me.
	The only other notable thing I did was to write my first C program for the PC (run it in a DOS box under Win95). No great shakes - basically it’s just a modified version of a program in C for Dummies but “I’ve done a lot of special modifications myself”. Download lottery.zip from my FTP directory if you want a random number generator for the British National Lottery. Oh, and I’m just kidding about 50% of any wins (erm, is that statement legally binding?). I still say it’s a mugs game, though...

	So, two weeks in Hong Kong passed by in a flash, really.

Highlights:
•	The Oscars ceremony on cable. Still an avid movie buff, I love it. I love it all, damn you!
•	Mum watching a particularly gory session on RE2, then declaring “That’s disgusting!” I tell you, it would have made a great ad for the game!
•	Playing 1080 Snowboarding - Nintendo begin making up for Yoshi’s Story.
•	Wankily discussing game design philosophy with Graeme Evans via e-mail.
•	Hong Kong Rugby 7’s: it might be the beginning of the end for the 7’s, but it was still fun!

Lowlights:
•	Joan Rivers’ Oscar Pre-Show. Plastic and insincere, anybody?
•	My parents claiming that even a sound-muted Tekken 3 was giving them a headache and always making me turn it off “so they could read”. Liars!
•	Being reduced to using a 486 SX/66 with a 420MB HD to browse the web.
•	Teaching my Mum to use the aforementioned PC. “So, the CD isn’t the hard disk? But CD’s are hard...” Aaargh!
•	Failing to find a decently priced Namco GunCon anywhere. Again.

	I arrived back in the UK and promptly spent 5 days with my girlfriend in Darlington. Hey, it was more fun than it sounds - I saw “Sphere” (disappointing) and, er, did a very large jigsaw. Oh, and I got taken out to eat a lot, too! Then I had this university management course when I got back to Edinburgh which was absolutely brilliant. Then it was back to work after being told I had to get my overdue Psychology project (from last term) in within a week, or else! Erp! The epic Yaroze Diary saga WILL continue...after I deal with the whole evil project thing!

Is Saturn near Uranus..?

7 May, 1998

	Hmmmm. Yes. Apologies well in advance for the puerile chapter heading of this diary entry...designed to draw attention, cause controversy, and highlight my unoriginal and  immature sense of humour/humor (delete as applicable). There IS a vaguely justifiable reason for this ‘Saturn’ malarkey, which I’ll get into later. Anyway, sorry for the gap in updates but I’ve just had a busy couple of weeks after my slightly “happy-go-lucky” attitude to university work last term caught up with me. Thankfully, I’m now out of the danger zone and can afford to spend my time doing the things I love. Like writing this diary for you lot!
	Instead of waffling on about general gaming issues, then slipping in some vague references to what I’ve been doing with my Yaroze, I’ve decided to reverse the order this week. I suppose the first Yaroze-related event of Spring 1998 was the Grand Edinburgh Yarozers Conference, with myself, James Rutherford and Graeme Evans all partaking in a highly intellectual debate (hmmm) before the evening descended into a fiercely competitive - for me, anyway - multi-player Micro Machines session (James’ multi-tap boomerang coming in quite handy for a change). The standard of gamesmanship was pretty mixed throughout the evening, but the self-styled Mr Frosty’s ice-cool driving (and early string of victories) cushioned him from my desperately aggressive ramming tactics in the closing races. As consolation, I got James and Graeme to sign the issue of EDGE they were quoted in (and you thought I was sad before, right?) so I can sell it for megabucks when they become game-design gurus. Ahem. Hey, it was all James’ idea..!
	Some of you may know that a select group of Yarozers (i.e. EDGE competition winners and runners-up) were invited down to SCEE HQ in London for ‘a tour of the facilities’ as Lando Calrissian might have said (if he really existed). No, of course *I* wasn’t one of them, but (diary regular) James Rutherford was, and he made the extremely wise decision to tape the whole event (controversially, even his encounter with Lewis Evans in the men’s room). So far I’ve had a listen to the opening talk given by Juan “SCEE top brass” Montes which was very enlightening - it reminded me that games software really is a serious business, not just some hobby you get paid for. I gather most of the other talks were also really interesting (so geeze a loan of yer tapes, Jimbo)! Oh yeah, the lucky EDGE compo gits also got a ‘free’ lunch at Planet Hollywood. So, that’s where the membership funds go, huh (*joke* - to avoid being put on SCEE blacklist)? Those SCEE visitors among you will be insanely jealous to discover that I too have one of Mr Frosty’s “Snowball Fight” promo T-shirts, putting Sony’s recent PS clothing label to shame (although I quite fancy getting my girlfriend one of those “PlayStation Widow” T-shirts - ahhh, the irony). Still, not as nifty as Frosty’s freebie “Polygon-count-reduction Man” effort! *snigger*
	As far as my programming ‘progress’ was concerned, by the time I got round to dusting off C for Dummies II a whole month happened to have passed since I last typed “void main()” or used the ‘{‘ key of my PC. Erp! To jog my memory, I went through the whole chapter on pointers again, and I understood it soooo much better. Hey, I guess revision DOES make a difference! As I write, I’m now getting into structures and stuff, with the distinctly non-Yaroze related chapter on disk access ahead. Only a week to go and I’ll have finished the book, I reckon. Then I’ll have to start ploughing through all the tutorials I’ve downloaded - it’ll be “Hello World” all over again -erp! Be afraid. Be very afraid.
	The final bit of Yaroze-y news is that I decided to splash out on a Hauppauge TV card for my PC, thus returning my temperamental Sony Trinitron to the N64 and ‘proper’ PlayStation in the corner of my room. What do I reckon? Well, I ended up paying £115 for the TV/Teletext card (model 406) and I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got. It DOES play back in full-colour (PAL or NTSC), it DOES have a sharp S-Video picture and it DOES look pretty good, even on a puny 14-inch monitor. The only downer is that the picture is slightly bordered (particularly in NTSC mode) on all 4 sides, and on my increasingly creaky P133 (or is it my dutiful but malnourished 2MB video card?) the full screen picture gets a bit motion-blurry - I reckon this is due to a slow frame rate or interlace problems (which a nifty processor/video card upgrade should solve). Still, it’s not that noticeable when you’re actually playing a game, like Wipeout 2097 or Psychon (yes, I helpfully gave you examples of games there). FYI, my first TV card actually fizzed out after a few days (the screen was perpetually ultra-bright) so I changed it and the replacement has been fine (so far). Technology, eh? I also plan on digitising some of my more accomplished camcorder movies for your enjoyment at some point. Watch out for AVI-formatted classics like “The Great Milk Robbery”, “Pool Shark” and “Enemy UFO”. You’ll wonder how I never got a job in special effects with that last one.
	Far more exciting (and increasingly detrimental to my Yaroze programming schedule) has been my recent purchase of a cheapo second-hand Sega Saturn with Virtua Fighter 2! I also managed to pick up Virtua Cop (with gun), an extra pad, Christmas Nights and a memory pack on the cheap. Excellent! I’m well chuffed, but I know some people don’t exactly hold Sega’s machine in high regard - and they tend to be PlayStation owners. Allow me to explain the wisdom of buying a Saturn in it’s twilight years by saying, prophet-like:

1) 	It ISN’T crap, actually. It’s not as good at 3D as the PS, but then it’s much better at 2D. Not that that’s a great argument (more of a random point, I suppose).
2) 	It’s become exceedingly cheap, and you can get a lot of the classic Saturn games for not much over a tenner i.e. Sega Rally, Nights, VF2, Virtual On, Virtua Cop(s) etc...
3) 	The Saturn’s light gun games are much more fun IMHO than the PlayStation’s. And I love gun games.
4) 	Pretty soon, all the good stuff is going to dry up off the 2nd hand market and all that’ll be left will be the likes of Bug Too and Chaos Control. Yeuch - buy now!!!
5) 	There’s a gameplay element in Sega’s successful titles that I’ve not really got my finger on, so the Saturn is actually a tool for research as well as another “toy”. Or so I tell myself...
6) 	Sega’s PAL conversions are ace. Full-screen, full-speed ahoy!

	I’m well aware that the last game due to come out (in PAL territories) is Shining Force III this June, so it’s essentially a “dead” format in Europe. Oh well - I hope my fellow UK Saturn owners are foolish enough to sell off their old games at ludicrously low prices this summer! In the meantime, Burning Rangers, House of the Dead and Panzer Dragoon Saga look extremely promising! Mmmm, zombies!
	The next diary entry will hopefully chronicle (yes, I said ‘chronicle’ - it will be *that* epic!) my first attempts to get the Yaroze to do something. Anything. I have a few ideas for very basic graphics demos and “fun things” that will work as a precursor to actually writing my first game: they might even keep you guys entertained (at least for a few seconds). Alas, I heard from Graeme that my genius “Etch-A-Sketch emulator” idea has already been done. Grrr - that makes me feel for those New Zealand guys who claim their play inspired ‘The Full Monty’! Anyone got any nominations for other cheesy 80’s kids toys that I can “convert” to the PS? ‘Simple Simon’ comes to mind (but that always got dead boring, didn’t it)?
	It’s my li’l brother Chris’ 20th birthday today. In misty-eyed celebration, I salute three great 2-player games that we used to play all the time (and I mean ALL the time)...

1) 	Super Mario Bros (NES)
2) 	Super Mario Kart (SNES)
3) 	Street Fighter II (SNES)

We were talking on the phone a few weeks ago, about the way some people lose interest in games as they get older. He still likes video games, but I think they no longer grab him the way they did even 5 years ago. I mean, Chris doesn’t exactly leap on my PlayStation when he visits, demanding to play Resident Evil 2 or Gran Turismo. Hell, we no longer even fight over who gets to play next! Multi-player games are pretty much all that go on when he’s up - Goldeneye gets bags of play time, as does Mario Kart 64. I’ve asked him to write about his thoughts on this matter for my Game Design section, which IS in the works but is proceeding a bit slower than I had planned (hey, blame the Saturn and my impending literary dissertation deadline). As for me, I sometimes worry that I’m too into games to appreciate what “regular” gamers (i.e. those who don’t own 8 gaming platforms) want... Maybe hardcore gamers like myself really are freaks with social ‘issues’? Hey, if anyone has any thoughts along these lines, please mail me and I’ll quote you in the forthcoming Game Design article!

(BTW, didn’t the UK do well in Eurovision? I can’t work out whether to be proud or ashamed...)

5/10. Must do better.

16 June, 1998

	Excuses for the late diary entry: university work, parents back in UK, World Cup, anniversary with girlfriend, finally got a GunCon, Panzer Dragoon Saga.

	After a good three months of droning on (and on) about stuff that has very little to do with Yaroze programming, I suddenly realised that these diary entries were getting a bit random. So, finally finishing C for Dummies: Volume 2 (whoopee!), I decided to sit and pore over the numerous pages of Yaroze source code I had printed out and relate the C I knew to what was going on in other Yarozers’ code. I can tell you that this was the most depressing experience I’ve had since getting the machine, and for a little while (about a day or two) I suddenly felt like the biggest dope in the world. How could I possibly expect to write for this machine, with my cheesy programming ability (self-rated as 2/10, according to my profile on Dennis Brinkhuis’ page) and lack of any mathematical background past GCSE? As I stared at the squiggles and strangely-familiar-but-still-unfathomable C, I was confronted by numerous functions, loops and weirdness (bitshifts? What the..?) that - hey! - they never told me about in ‘C for Dummies’. Which, by the way, was seeming an awfully ironic title for that book.
	Never give in! Over the next few days (and after about 10 readings of Ira Rainey’s and Scott Campbell’s most basic sprite tutorials) it gradually began to make sense. I have to admit, the turning point came when I was sitting typing this stuff into the computer myself - blatant word-for-word imitation, but I did get a vague sense of where the program was at, and I realised that if I could just hold onto that, then as I gradually looked up the functions, read other code etc etc I could work out what was going on and get it all straight in my head. After 3 hours or so on a Saturday night, I ended up with a picture of the Final Fantasy VIII logo displayed on my Yaroze screen - and even better I was about 50% certain of how it got there.
	The other thing I did was write something that displayed, in text, which button was being pressed on pad 1. Like, “CIRCLE” or “PAD UP” - nothing fancy. I even made a loop so you could hold “SELECT” and “START” together to quit. Well, it made me happy. Pad input - don’t ya just love it?
	Every bit of advice I’ve heard from people, directly or indirectly, has stated that you should aim to get a sprite onscreen, then get it moving about, then add another sprite, then add some animation, rotation scaling, a background, collision detection, scrolling and gradually build up into something basic that might even be passable as a game! Whew! I guess that’s my goal - so I decided to try and get a program written that displayed 2 sprites on the screen, and then build it up from there.
	Believe it or not, I had a bit of trouble working out how I should go about putting up 2 sprites. Do you need 2 GsSprite things? 2 GsImage structures? How do you go about getting them initialised, etc? Basic questions, I know, but still a bit daunting when there isn’t too much in plain English to help you. The sprite tutorials were very helpful, but they didn’t seem to say anything about 2 sprites. Oh. Well, I just muddled about and eventually got it sort-of working (AFAIK, you DO need 2 GsSprite structures - and 2 GsImage things is playing it safe). Except something was wrong - the colours were totally messed-up. It was ugly. Now, earlier in my programming endeavours I had discovered that my TIMs (graphics files) were being overwritten by the actual program code when that loaded up (doh) but this wasn’t the case here. Hmmm.
	I tried a lot of things - shifting TIMs around in memory using TIMtool and swearing at the computer being two of them - but it wasn’t until a chance (honest, guv!) visit from fellow Edinburgh Yarozer James “Mr Frosty” Rutherford that the problem was solved. Amusingly enough, the mistake was one of such blind stupidity that it took even the creator of  (we’re not worthy, we’re not worthy) a good half hour to suss it: my TIMs were fine, but my CLUTs were still lurking in the video memory display area. Dur! Duh-duh-duh-durrrr! I knew what a Colour Look-Up Table was, but I had rather forgotten about sorting it out in memory before running the program. Ahem. Another foolish newbie error, but we all have to learn, right?
	This problem solved, I was left with my beautiful 8-bit creations, resplendent in their naked, brazen glory. The job was done for the day, but my next task was to add a bit of movement. Wahey! With what I’d sussed from reading the pad, this shouldn’t have proven too tricky. And it didn’t! Using the dire and pathetically inadequate default Sony “pad.h” header, I soon had the 2 sprites zooming over the screen (albeit with no regard for the screen’s boundaries, or each other). I also added a bit of code to show (gasp) the X and Y co-ordinates of the two sprites. After another quick (ahem) glance at the tutorials, I added scaling and rotation to the sprites, just for a laugh. With my “goal for the day” (good idea, that) completed, I felt it would be a doddle to add some collision detection next. Wrong!!!
	Is it just me, or is there no collision detection function in the Yaroze libraries? Does this mean (shudder!) that I’m going to have to write.. my... own? Apparently. Cue bit of graph paper, 2 cut-out shapes and a lot of thinking hard about an equation for when two rectangles (‘bounding-box method’ ahoy!) overlap. This hurts my (largely arts-and-literature filled) head a lot. I resort to cheating, and plummet into the source code for Snowball Fight (not available to the public, but I have a copy ‘for my own enjoyment’ from the benevolent and generous Mr Frosty) to look at how it was done there. I am aghast to discover that I was on the right track, and only my inability to wrap my head around the concept failed me. Another “Doh!” on the long and dangerous road to gaming greatness...
	Now, out of respect for Mr Frosty’s entrusted SBF source - and not wanting to incur the wrath of a buddy and mentor - I do not perform a straight cut-and-paste. Oh no! I have “adapted” this basic idea into my code, and I’m fairly pleased with the result. Send off the co-ordinates to a collision function, and if the movement just performed results in a collision, then undo it. Pretty basic stuff, all handled in the pad reading routine. Phew! Actually, the first thing I did was to create a variable which was “1” if the sprites were overlapping in some way and “0” if there was no collision, just to check the function worked OK. Then I wrote a quick fix to stop the sprites going off-screen (learning a bit about that PAL display ‘bug’ - 240 vs 256 lines - in the process) before putting motion checks on the sprites. It worked. Time for bed.
	Finally, I decided to add a  background and change the sprites to something a bit cooler. With the vague idea of a crappy arena-based shooter occurring to me (remember ‘Battle City’ on the NES?) I figure some funky ships are in order. Numerous experiments in Photoshop later, and I come up with what I was aiming for - simple sleek, sexy and distinctly retro in appearance, but with a modern feel as well. Yes, look at the picture below and you’ll see exactly what I’m being so pretentious about!!!

(YOU’LL HAVE TO VISIT THE WEBSITE TO SEE THIS PUPPY!)

Well, not bad for 30 minutes work. I spend a bit longer coming up with some “cool” background for these epic battles to take place on, and eventually I have a screen-sized 16-bit sprite ready to stick in the background, with 2 dinky spaceships roaming about on it, rotating and scaling and sliding away...
	What went wrong? I dealt with the background as Ira Rainey suggested (and it works fine), but now my sprites are mutated (much as they were when the CLUTs were stuck in the display area). Grrr! I subsequently try everything I can think of to get the damn code to work, including (for no really obvious reason):

•	Changing the player sprites to 4, 8 and 16-bit.
•	Ditto for the background. Doesn’t look pretty at 4-bit, I can assure you.
•	Moving TIMs and CLUTs about in memory. Many, many times. Oh, that gets old quick, dunnit?
•	Read through my (no sir, not buggy at all!) code. I can’t see anything, but that doesn’t prove anything does it?
•	Praying.

The gods MUST be crazy. Eventually, the combination of 8-bit background and sprites, pretty TIM arrangements in memory etc works. To this day, I’m not sure why this is so, and I reckon I should make a bit more of an effort to understand how the PlayStation’s memory works, and how to go about loading things into it. Oo-er, missus.

	(Starts off in husky movie-trailer guy voice) That’s where my story ends. Two weeks ago. Since then, nothing. Not a sign. I’ve been a bit busy with “other commitments”, although I’d better get my arse in gear sharpish if I want to get some code in for the Game Design UK competition. Hmmm. I have reneged on my summer pledges to NOT WORK and CODE. Rather, my old job wanted me back for MORE MONEY and as I am a sell-out slut when it comes to cash, I accepted. The only reason I have a shred of cred remaining is that I refused to work a full day, so I get away with 5 hours a day - which is all I can stand, processing the results of the British Survey of Fertiliser Practice (yes, really), anyway... At least this means I can now afford to get Banjo-Kazooie, Zelda, F-Zero, Metal Gear Solid, Parasite Eve, Colour Gameboy etc when they come out.
	A few quick things that I feel the need to share. First of all, I went to an Iain Banks book signing at Waterstone’s in Edinburgh on Saturday and was first-in-line (sad man that I am) to get my old-and-battered copy of ‘Consider Phlebus’ signed by the great man himself! Cool, huh? Also, I went home a few weekends ago (not to Hong Kong - my parents are back in the UK for a month) and whipped my brother at Street Fighter II on the SNES. Heh heh heh. You see, usually he could DESTROY me with Guile (his character), even when I used Ryu (my best character). Maybe my improved coding skills have somehow made me a better gamer, too..? Or perhaps not. I also got a hold of my aunt’s shiny (and awesome) Fuji digital camera (it gets 5/5 in this month’s T3 magazine) and got some very cheesy pictures of myself. These were taken in the bathroom and have been digitally altered to remove any semblance of “taken in a bog”-ness (the removal of a loo-roll holder by my arm, and a row of toothbrushes up behind my head). Vanity, eh? It’s a terrible thing.

The more I “see”, the less I know.

5 July, 1998

	Phew! I know I always kick off these diary entries with some lame excuse about work (I mean, I’m at university for God’s sake - who am I trying to fool?) but the last fortnight has been exceptionally frantic. No sooner had I handed in my last piece of work for the term (whoopee!) than I started work at the British Survey of Fertiliser Practice (oh). At least I managed to blag a 5-hour day, thus enabling me to start at 8 in the morning (not too bad as I can walk there in 5 min) and finish at 1 in the afternoon - no wasteful lunch breaks, y’see? Not only that, but I finally got down to some serious coding this week: like a man possessed, I have been cleaning up my old (sloppy) code, and rewritten most of my experimental “learning” project, AMATEUR WARS, from scratch. Currently, it’s still a few days from being finished but after spending a good many hours getting the lasers working properly and fiddling with the controls I can honestly say...
	Well, what CAN I say? I have to confess - it plays like a dog. It isn’t really that much fun at all in my opinion (or, I suspect, in anyone else’s). Yes, the code does what I tell it to (more or less) and the ships aren’t entirely crappy looking, but that doesn’t make it any good. The background is slightly dodgy, but that isn’t the problem either. It just has absolutely NO imagination, no art, and no soul. It is purely a technology demo, and not a particularly impressive one at that. As a showcase of my programming skills so far, it makes for a profoundly depressing experience. It might have looked good on paper, but there are several crucial elements missing; for example, I haven’t bothered with a scaling system for moving the sprites, and they currently glide entirely free of inertia (in an astonishingly-limiting 4 directions of movement). The lasers (as yet) fail to obey the laws of physics, and although it took me an AGE to figure out how to get them to do what they currently do (i.e. fire in a most dull and unoriginal manner) I am stunned at how bland the final effect is. No excuses - I have to look myself in the mirror and say “My first game is crap.”
	So, what have I learned since I last wrote in this diary? Well, I’ve got the hang of pointers and structures, and I think I understand a lot of stuff better than I did before. I felt I had improved so much over the last week that I tore apart ol’ AMATEUR WARS a few days ago and rewrote it to be less confusing to a) me and b) those newbies who might find it useful (is that possible?) I even worked out the laser-firing functions on paper (you should have seen how badly messed up they were at one point) before trying to integrate them. Yes, I was that organised. But, all this programming stuff is incidental - what I’ve come to realise is that whenever we download someone’s game or demo, or have a peek at their public source, we are usually viewing the FINISHED PRODUCT(tm). It works. It is clean. It goes well. Yet, the process of writing games (indeed, writing anything - but games are pretty complicated as far as I can tell) is full of mistakes, pitfalls and unforseen bugs that leap out and mess up everything. Grrrr! We don’t usually get to see the evolution of other people’s programs - we see the spit-and-polished show version.
	Now, I’m not some naive games junkie who picked up a magazine, read about Net Yaroze and thought “Kewl, I can do that!”. I knew learning C, learning how to apply it to the Yaroze, and then writing my own games would be a slog. But, at the same time, I can remember seeing James Rutherford’s early, unreleased demos (see diary entries passim) and thinking “Wow. If I could even do THAT I’d be happy”. Well, I’m not at James’ level back then yet (tho’ I’m certainly getting closer and closer every week) but I think I won’t be happy even when I AM there - I think I’ll be looking at the guys who are still way ahead of me (and that’s most of you) and thinking “I want to be able to do THAT”. And hey - even if I get there, I’ll end up looking at ‘proper’ commercial games, wistfully dreaming “I WISH I could do that...”
	So where does it end? When will I be happy with what I can do and give up wanting to be the best? Or should I always aim to be the best? Or should I stop treating this programming lark like the scoreboard in ‘Top Gun’? Right now, my main driving force is that I know I can get better - a lot better, in fact. It’s actually really great noticing how much better I’ve got in the last week, but what happens over the long term? Will I keep improving or will I ‘plateau’? Will I create a storming 2D GDUK entry only to embark on my next creation and discover I was born with the “unable to understand 3D maths” gene? I think that I get too hung up with the technical side of things - the problem is, the more that I see other people’s code and understand bits of it and the things they do, the more I realise that I don’t know diddly-squat in the big picture of grown-up games development. That’s quite a depressing thought, and the main reason I sit here typing out dubious code (and swearing loudly at 2 in the morning when it quite rightly goes belly-up on me). But there’s only so long you can keep putting “yet” at the end of sentences. Sentences like “I’m not good enough to work for Rare... yet”.
	I’m not actually that bothered by this damp patch - I knew I’d get this feeling at some point, and I’ll probably get it again. This is going to be a short, bitter diary entry because, right now, that is how I feel. I think at times this diary is a bit happy-clappy, and it needs a bit of ‘edge’ - a bit of 1970’s urban realism, a gritty docu-drama life-on-the-street feel, if you will. Right now I feel a bit defeated, and I don’t really have much fight in me, but on the whole this Yaroze lark is great fun, and I’ve not had a regret since I got my machine; it’s just hard bloody work!
Enough of this moaning on - I need to get AMATEUR WARS finished (as much as I want it to be, anyway) and get a move on with my GDUK entry. And I think I’d better hurry along with that...it looks like I’m going to have to make some time for getting that ‘playability’ element just right. Roll on the next diary entry!

GDUK and other stories.

7 August, 1998

	I think that these diary entries are going to be less frequent than the early days. Why? Because I spend so much time coding and doing graphics at the moment that I don’t really have time to write *exactly* what I’m doing any more. Don’t worry - the diary WILL NOT DIE! In fact, it’s just going to get more interesting...

	A month has passed since I last wrote, and I have learnt so much since then. The release of Amateur Wars has benefited me far more than (I think) it could have anyone else. Special thanks must go to SCEE Yaroze members James “Gravitation” Shaughnessy (who rewrote the code, improving it to utilise structures, bit-shifts and a more sophisticated control method) and James Rutherford (who dutifully went through and pointed out all that was wrong about it - that boy is sooo far ahead of me, it’s just not fair). It’s true what they say, y’know - you DO learn a lot faster from doing something yourself, and then listening to all the helpful criticism and tips that you get as feedback! Looking back at my Amateur Wars source is painful in many ways, although it’s only 3 weeks old! I guess that’s testament to how much more I know about setting up the basics of a 2D game. Don’t fret, fellow beginner Yarozers - pending permission from my aforementioned tutors, I’ll put their handy comments on my code in a special “Amateur Wars Plus” download (sometime this weekend, hopefully).
	Armed with my new-found knowledge, I’ve been busy planning my Game Design UK entry (thinking WTF? Visit ), which has been under the development moniker “Chemical Warfare” for the past few months. This is not going to be the final title, as what I really had originally was an idea for a great game mechanic that, to be honest, I’m probably not going to be able to get done in time for GDUK or until I get a wee bit better (no, I’m not telling). So, I’ve stepped back a bit from the original design (currently a design-only GDUK entry - expect to see it running for GDUK ’99, or perhaps the 2nd Anniversary Yaroze competition) and come up with a simpler idea (scribbled on a few bits of A4) which I suppose I can discuss briefly to keep your appetites whetted...
	The World War I picture and poem on my ‘Projects’ page gives it away a bit, really. My GDUK entry is (drum roll)... a World War I trench warfare game! No, I’m not some ‘Commando’ comics nut (“Scratch one for Jerry!”, “Die, Englander, die!”, etc), but I feel that the First World War is a pretty rich (and relatively unexplored) picking ground for a simple “2 player versus” game.  It’s in dubious taste, perhaps, but I find the idea of controlling a battalion of troops trying to gain territory over a network of trenches (think Worms-meets-Cannon Fodder-meets-Bomberman) quite intriguing - the only major problem is my still-elementary coding ability. At the moment, I have a potentially dinky generic soldier sprite and a semi-decent background, but I feel that I need to work out the play mechanics before I get down to my main coding blitz on Monday (I even got the week off work!). The basic idea seems to work in my head, but when I focus on the nitty-gritty, things go a bit fuzzy. One thing I learnt from Amateur Wars, piece of piss tho’ it was, is that you can’t just come up with something and expect everyone else to go “Wow!” (for any reason other than politeness, anyway). In that case, I was chuffed to bits just because I finally had a game running in a loop, with ships reacting to pad input - and you could shoot! I was especially chuffed with the lasers because they really were 100% my own ideas, and I got them to work (using the limited C understanding I have) starting with almost no idea how to do it.
With “Chemical Warfare” I want to write something that people will find fun for more than a few minutes (or, indeed, just fun), which doesn’t look or sound totally awful and functions as a more-or-less complete game (menu screen, options, end sequence, credits etc). Alas, I don’t think that I’ll get all that done for the end of August - but I’ll be giving it my best shot! My initial take (“WWI meets ‘South Park’”) was in exceptionally bad taste; there’s still going to be a few traces of the Grand Theft Auto-esque  ‘look how naughty I am’ element, but hopefully the gruesome/funny death animations and mass carnage will add to the game play experience. God knows I’d love to be basking in glory at Stirling Castle for the GDUK awards ceremony November 5th! Hmmm, where’s Satan when you need to make a deal?
	Aside from loooong periods of time spent writing dubious code and animating sprites pixel-by-pixel in MS Paint, I have also been pondering a career in the “Games Industry” recently. Yeah, this is partially inspired by the current thread in the ‘freetalk’ SCEE member newsgroup, but it’s also something I’ve thought about a lot before - and I suspect many of my fellow Yaroze owners have, too. Thing is, until about a year or so ago I was pretty clueless about what I really wanted to do after university - working for the BBC, going to film school, writing for a proper newspaper/magazine or getting into some media/arts permutation all seemed like the way to go. Although I’ve always dreamt of being a games designer (cheesy, but true), I never really considered it as a serious option until I got my Yaroze. And BTW I *know* that there are no serious job openings for a ‘game designer’ as such, so I’ve always planned on getting involved starting with testing, level design or any “bottom of the ladder” job. I doubt I’ll be good enough at programming for any half-decent company by the time I finish next summer (won’t stop me working for a crappy company, tho’)! What the hell - hopefully I’ll have one or two completed games or substantial demos which I shouldn’t be too ashamed of. With regard to level design, I might also get into designing maps for 3D PC games like Quake or Unreal - but with all this Yarozery, my final year at uni and all the other stuff I like doing (movies, web stuff, keeping the girlfriend happy), I’d have to not sleep for a year to get it all done (didn’t Margaret Thatcher manage on 3 hours a night?)
The other option that appeals is journalism (again) - I enjoy writing (just as well, eh?), have always been quite good at it which probably explains why I ended up as Associate Editor of N64 Gazetta (unfortunately, I’m struggling with my Gazetta commitments since I got the Yaroze). I’d love to be a staff journo on a decent games magazine like EDGE or one of the other more reputable publications. God knows, I might take o job with a rag like PlayStation Power if only to get my foot in the door but the truth is I absolutely HATE what those magazines do. I also find that ‘lads’ magazines like FHM, Loaded and Maxim get my back up a bit - do they really need to cram so many shots of cleavage, erect nipples and bum-clefts into the mag? It shows something about the purpose/relevance/quality of the writing (and the people that buy it) when every issue of these titles has the latest pair of tits on it, and an interview with some wannabe Page 3 girl is meant to be interesting... Anyway, my feeling is that mags like <whatever> Power and Total <insert system name here> are just the same sort of light masturbation fodder, but with respect to games rather than sex. “Oooh, look at the light-sourcing!”, “Oooh, look at the size of hers!” - it’s all the same crowd-round-in-the-schoolyard, hide-it-from-teacher British schoolboy mentality. I can stomach CVG because behind their “Gee whiz!” veneer I think it’s written by people who seriously know their shit. Similarly, even though T3 feels compelled to have some lovely young lady holding/caressing its cover item each month, there is at least genuine soul in their writing. Alas, the illiterate “me-too’s” of the British games journalism scene seem to have cut-and-pasted their articles from press releases and newsgroup posts. Maybe any country that lets a class act like the old SNES-covering “Super Play” die out doesn’t deserve quality games journalism. Mmmm, maybe this last paragraph should be stuck in Mr Frosty’s rants section..? And at least I don’t live in the US, where the number of decent games magazines can be counted on one hand...
I’m getting quite excited about ECTS in September. As long as Sony pull through with the tickets, I’ll definitely be there. Half of me is just dead keen on seeing the games on show (Metal Gear Solid, Perfect Dark, Zelda, F-Zero X etc) and getting to see or meet Shigeru Miyamoto would make my month - autograph/photo opportunity ahoy! Maybe I’ll get him to sign my SNES..? The other reason I’m quite keen is to meet some of you lot - as most of you know I see James Rutherford a fair bit during university as he’s a fellow Edinburgh Psychology student (see diary entries passim), and I’ve also now met the rest of the vaguely-local Yaroze crew (Graeme Evans, Scott Campbell and Peter Dollochan). At ECTS, DEnnis is someone I just *have* to meet, anyone else is a bonus (only kidding, guys)! The Middlesex Net Yaroze short course seemed like a real success - I won’t be able to make it to any of the rest of them, but I wish I could. Ah well... It’s not that I don’t have any friends or anything (!) but I guess I do have a very long-standing reputation as “Mr. Video Games” amongst my peers and it would be nice to meet (as I imagine it, anyway) all the other “Mr. Video Games” people in the UK! James R. is a Mr. Video Games, but there must be more of us out there!

Oh, what *am* I going on about...? Tune in next, er, um, fortnight (no promises)!

Game Over. Continue?

4 September, 1998

	Wow, have I been busy since the last diary entry! I suppose most of the people reading this will have played Mud ‘n Blood, and are therefore wondering why I have any right to feel so pleased with myself. Heh. Go jump off a cliff!

	Thank God I have something other than ‘Amateur Wars’ to post on this website! If nothing else, the previous four weeks of mental, social and physical isolation are worthwhile for that alone. If anyone thinks I’m being melodramatic, well, you’re probably right - but I have been one busy puppy recently. It all started when my girlfriend went off to Pakistan for a 2 month (was it something I said?) backpacking trip. Hmmm, travelling around what I imagine as one of the least tourism-friendly countries on the planet (well, out of those *not* currently concerned with wiping out their ethnic minorities) doesn’t sound like much fun to me - particularly with the US of A gamely deciding to piss off most countries ending with “-istan” by dropping a few Tomahawks on that chemical weapons/mothercare factory (depending on who you believe) . But these are my personal worries!
	Anyway, if “her indoors” (how ironic - given our respective activities over the last month) hadn’t decided to go off and discover herself, I wouldn’t have got this game done so how can I complain? Answer: I can’t. In fact, I took to my new-found role as “computer programmer” with a zeal I found rather alarming. I had a week off work over the beginning of August, during which I worked pretty much all through the day (and night) on my game, pausing only for -yes! - take-out pizza and Diet Coke (actually, I always drink a lot of ‘DC’, as we affectionately refer to it in the flat). More scary - I chose not to shave for nigh-on two weeks, thereby letting my (potentially-not-inconsiderable) facial hair take hold of me in a new and scary fashion. It was when the checkout girls at Tesco’s started crying when I joined the queues I suspected I might need to shave (read: chainsaw) it off! Thank goodness I did, or I might have been raided by the police in that recent kiddy-porn crackdown (“Look at yourself you filthy pervert! Now, what have you done with those JPGs?”) etc
	So, semi-bearded and laden with phenylaninine (an “essential amino acid”, according to the Diet Coke hotline), I was in the perfect position to get on with some serious coding/learning experience. The first week was largely taken up with drawing and animating the soldier sprite - in fact, getting the little bastard to run, fire and move decently on a black background was the first step. I figured that if the control of the character wasn’t right, then nobody would give two hoots about playing the game. And after the “technology demo” that was Amateur Wars, I was mainly concerned with writing something people would actually, actively, want to load up and play! So, many, many hours were spent getting that little dude drawn in Microsoft Paint and tweaking the animation so the four-frame motions didn’t look too cack. Since I discovered there is no such thing as a “collision detection” library for the Yaroze (ah such naivete), I wasn’t too surprised to discover there is no “animation library” either. To be honest, I found animating my sprite pretty easy - those of you who’ve read my clumsy source will no doubt have realised that all the motions are tied to a “animation timer” variable in the player function. Oooh, how original. I guess that’s how everyone does it? I also got a bit of help from “Mr Frosty” re: getting diagonals working, and he introduced me to “The Joy of Enum”, which I keep by my bedside just in case.
	Progress slowed as the game got bigger - I found that some of my clever time-saving ideas actually messed things up later on, and as I kept adding things bugs kept appearing. The closest I got to actually ever planning any code was a morning at work when the “network was down” (turned out some Neanderthal engineer had yanked out the wrong wires downstairs) and I was thus severed from “processing” the precious data for the British Survey of Fertiliser Practice (of which I am/was “Data Manager” - I finished today. Woo-hoo!) Anyway, I had a morning free which I geekily spent planning which pointers were going to go where and how the explosion structures were going to work. Lo and behold, I managed to get the explosions working in about 2 hours! Hmmm, maybe this “planning” lark is a good idea.
	Despite all my “Chemical Warfare” hype-mongering, I wasn’t ever *that* sure what the game was going to be, other than a 2-player battle fest where you get to twat each other. Incidentally, mentions of the game’s similarities to Snowball Fight bother me not one whit, but I was never intending to try and copy it. As “World War One meets South Park” slowly morphed into “World War One meets South Park meets Goldeneye” - except about 50% of my original vision - I was more concerned with getting stuff like the “sniper mode” and the power-ups working correctly than ploughing forward into uncharted boundaries of gameplay. Maybe next time, eh? The multiple death animations were done purely for my own amusement, but proved so popular with my flatmates that I decided to put 6 in rather than the original 3. This is why the winner animations are so crap (did you notice the guy who looks almost as if he’s doing a John Travolta in SNF? That’s because originally, he was).
Unfortunately, I did a rather silly thing at the end of July - I went and spent about £50 on Edinburgh International Film Festival tickets. This meant I was seeing a film a night for two weeks at the end of August! I am glad I did it, because staring at a computer screen all day was driving me nuts (much better to stare at a cinema screen, eh?) and I also got to see some class movies (“Last Days of Disco”, “My Name is Joe”) and got to a talk with Tim Roth and Ray Winstone, and one with Terry Gilliam which was just... cooooool! Sorry, but these things excite me. All this top-class cinema-going action meant that my GDUK entry suffered a wee bit - it was only a couple of hours each evening, plus walking time, but you know how it is - you want a solid, 3-4 hours chunk of time to just WORK and then you can forget about it. Does anyone actually code seriously in chunks of time less than a couple of hours? I just can’t do it. Yet.
The actual story of me writing the game isn’t that interesting in itself really. I know it isn’t the world’s most amazing game, but I’m proud of the stuff I got in it considering the time it took me to do, and the film festival and catching mild flu in the week before the deadline meant I probably lost about 30 hours worth of time that would have been used to add more sounds, add the oft-mentioned, mythical “chemicals” and perhaps even dabble with scrolling and using BGmap-type stuff. Still, the very fact I actually sat on my ass and wrote something whilst the Edinburgh Festival (which I love) was going on has kind of reassured me that, yes, I obviously really want to try and do this - or something like it, preferably involving less maths and more money - for a living. Kewl.
I really got my act together the weekend before the Monday deadline - the game was still just booting into the action straight-off, and there was absolutely no provision in the code for the existence of a title screen, options (which never materialised, sadly) or even the addition of sounds. Most of Friday was spent panicking and putting together some sort of feeble information package for SCEE and the GDUK people to send thru the mail - the vast majority of which is the drivel in Mud N Blood’s readme file. It was tricky writing instructions for a game that wasn’t yet finished -  a load of options has an asterisk next to them, meaning “May not be available in final version”. Yes, I can see it now: “I removed the chemical attacks, not due to lack of coding ability as many have speculated, but because their free-flowing, awesome three-dimensional beauty just showed up the rest of the game”. On a dubiously-related note: I read that Turok 2 is one of the first games to use proper polygonal fire (rather than cunning use of bitmaps) for a flamethrower-type weapon - is it just me or is that not sooo cool? Oh, so it’s just me then...
	The sound (all of it) was chucked in on Monday. You can tell, can’t you? Yes, that’s my deep, booming voice you can hear - as James Rutherford so kindly pointed out it’s my telephone voice (“What are your hands doing now..?” etc). I stretched my illness out as long as I could and got Monday off too, and I am eternally grateful to the anonymous boyo who wrote the “Sound Programming for Dummies” tutorial as using that I was able to get pretty much everything I wanted to done! You could have mentioned the different pitches, though! Took me a while to work out why my voice sounded like Mickey Mouse and for a while I was thinking “Hey, maybe I really do sound like that..?” (not really)
	In celebration, James R. and myself had a curry - I’m sure many of our fellow GDUK cadets rewarded themselves in some other way (a top-shelf video, perhaps, or a call to 0898 P-A-R-T-Y-T-I-M-E that night)? It’s going to be at least, ooooh, a couple of weeks before I get Yaroze-ing again. In the meantime I’m looking forward (very very very much) to ECTS this weekend, and I have a fortnight in Hong Kong after that. Unfortunately this means I won’t be about to update my page (or the Member Demos Hub) for about three weeks, but I suspect most people working on something cranked it out for GDUK anyway!
	A brief word on the quality of the GDUK entries I have seen so far: wow! You guys have now raised the benchmark for the average Net Yaroze game, particularly Charles Chapman with his freakish “Total Soccer” and Rob Swan’s hilarious “Adventure Game”. To single out these two seems a bit mean, but that soccer game is sheer class and Adventure should win “Best NY game” for the “You are tenacious. But I am very scary” bit alone... Even my old fave Snowball Fight returned, a notch smarter, with *much* improved graphics and the (frankly, sinister) hidden ‘Ninja Mode’. And how much better can Jim Shaughnessy’s Gravitiation get? I look forward to a booming Grav race demo ‘scene’, now that Jim has removed his freakish scores from the lap times chart! I shall be working hard on my P.B.’s in Hong Kong (when I’m not playing my spanking new Colour Gameboy, that is).
	I’m not sure what I’m going to do upon my return from “the Orient” (hah!) - whether I’ll tidy up Mud ‘n Blood and add the stuff I wanted to (sensible option) or start another project (appealing option). There’s the Yaroze World compo to enter, and I suspect there might be another Yaroze anniversary competition - tho’ perhaps without EDGE this time? Yeah, just being paranoid...

To those of you going to ECTS - I look forward to (hopefully) meeting you. To everyone else, I hope you enjoy the rest of the summer as it draws to a close and you can comfort yourselves as the nights draw in by looking forward to some of the great games that are finally beginning to do more than loom enticingly (can you “loom enticingly”?) on the horizon. Apparently, when quizzed about the footage of the new Star Wars movie he had just seen, Spielberg just uttered “Oh. My. God.” I think you guys will see a similar reaction come over me when I finally get to play the N64’s Zelda: The Ocarina of Time! Finally, if any of you guys find yourself looking for a book to read, can I recommend Alex Garland’s “The Beach”? It’s been around for a few years now, but if you haven’t read it... well, I don’t want to ruin the surprises. Just trust me! 

ECTS 1998 – Part One

17 November, 1998

A BIG “Thank you” to my mate GY without whose hospitality these diary events could never have happened. Thanks, man! 2 months since the last entry. Oh dear…

	Londinium. The Big Smoke. The South. England. I have to say, I enjoy travelling down to London - a lot! Perhaps it has something to do with the special occasions that I’m usually travelling for – a buddy’s 21st birthday, a brief visit before the jaunt to Hong Kong or, as was the case in September, the European Computer Trade Show. Mmmm. I have to say, I was planning on attending ECTS before the momentum to get passes from SCEE built up on the Yaroze newsgroups; I registered online for a press pass at the start of the summer as the Associate Editor of the hibernating/extinct N64 website N64 Gazetta. You might feel this was a rather dubious qualification, but I felt I thoroughly deserved a pass – after 2 years of writing lengthy reviews for the PlayStation and N64 (both on and off-line), it’s about time I got to attend a trade show!
	So, the day my pass arrived was a distinct cause for celebration. Despite the annoying fact that “N64 Gazetta” had somehow changed to “M64 Gazetta” (could prove handy in Sony quarters), the tell-tale word “PRESS” was there for all and sundry to see. Yessss! Visions of exclusive back-stage access (oo-er) and freebies galore were hard to shake off as I sat coding Mud ‘n Blood. When I finally got on the train from Edinburgh to London, I felt like a fully-fledged games journo. I couldn’t believe that I was going to get to play Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Metal Gear Solid, Turok 2, Body Harvest, Silicon Valley, Outcast, Abe’s Exoduss, Soul Reaver, Spyro, Alien Resurrection and Messiah (let alone all the others) months before their release dates. For someone who’s had to live with the inevitable fact his home country is a backwater for import enthusiasts (a US Goldeneye cost me 70 bloody quid) the chance to see all these titles without jetting off to the US or South-East Asia was, to say the least, tremendously exciting.
	Diary regulars and Net Yaroze members will be familiar with James Rutherford (AKA Mr Frosty), a fellow Edinburgh Uni student (indeed, occasional classmate) and fellow Yarozer. Well, my accommodation in London was being provided by my good friend Gwon Yau Wong (henceforth known as GY), who had kindly agreed to put myself and James up for the duration of the show. As GY lives a few hundred meters from Victoria Station, we were in an ideal position to get the best out of our stay! I met James on the platform at King’s Cross in London the evening before ECTS started – he had flown in that morning and spent the day with Yarozer Rob Ryan visiting London’s retro games shops, primarily the Computer Exchange. We got to GY’s without any trouble, and it was decided that we should all go out for a pizza! As anyone who knows me well will attest, there is nothing that makes me happier than going out for a big juicy pizza with my mates. Actually, sod the mates part – a big juicy pizza’s all I need!
	The big surprise was walking into GY’s local Pizza Hut and bumping into Yaroze members Scott (AKA escotia) and Dave from Glasgow (“Together, they form the entity known as 2cc”, said in an Orson Welles voice-over). Co-incidence or what? After a vaguely embarrassing and prolonged double-take I went over and said “Hi”, then we moved onto a bigger table to guzzle our dinner. Poor GY was subjected to assorted Yaroze gossip for the rest of the meal, but it was good to hear how the guys were getting on. They were staying at the Holiday Inn Something-Or-Other up the road and were looking forward to a night on the town. Being geeks with an N64, two PlayStations and every relevant gaming peripheral known to man back at GY’s flat, we declined to join the mad wee-gee party animals in favour of an evening of Goldeneye, Banjo-Kazooie and Japanese game Bust-A-Move (known as Bust-A-Groove in the West). Wahey! It was quite late when we got to bed, and we had to get up vaguely early the next morning for the first day of ECTS. My first industry trade show – I don’t mind admitting I was really excited!
	The next three days were spent at ECTS, more or less. Rather than list what I did on each day, I’ll relate some of my impressions, memories and experiences of the show in no particular order (other than how I remember them). Well, I can start by mentioning how excited I was on the first day – nightmare scenarios of being rejected at the door (“You’re not really Press, you hairy Scots gimp. Go home.”) gradually faded as James, GY and myself boarded the tube for Olympia and realised that everyone else on the platform was headed for the show. How could we tell? Well, some people already had their passes in hand, but it was the disproportionate number of bearded, heavy metal t-shirt wearers that gave it away! Wow – I guess the psychologists who described a “kernel of truth” in every stereotype were right in this case. There were some guys from Blue Moon Studios (one of Lionhead’s “Satellites”) as we entered the show floor who epitomised the stereotype I hold of games programmers – long hair, slight weirdo/goth look and pale, malnourished bodies. This was great!
	Entering the show for the first time was bewildering. Even with a map, we had difficulty working out what was where, and which way up everything was. There was just so much to see – should we visit the Nintendo zone, the Sony ‘small-country’ or the numerous publishers’ stands? Our first half hour was spent (somewhat anti-climatically) wandering confused around the ‘peripherals’ section – largely devoted to PC steering-wheels for some reason. But, again, rather than relate what we did and when, I’ll try to provide a summary of my strongest impressions for each major stand (and some of the minor ones) over the 3 days. First up, Nintendo!
	Nintendo. I think that most Brits can’t understand quite how deep my devotion to Nintendo goes. Even though they’ve disappointed many with the N64, understand that I’ve been playing Nintendo games on Nintendo systems since the heady days of the Game & Watch. I was staying up late on school nights with the original Famicom in the mid-to-late eighties (remember I was brought up in the East where it was h-u-g-e!) when I think most people in the UK were more into Spectrums and C64s (or Amigas, if you were rich). In some ways, I think that’s why programming never really started to appeal until Net Yaroze, the programmable console – to me, there’s an important distinction between what we do and PC-style programming. Anyway, if you want me to justify Nintendo’s heritage, just take the NES, SNES, Gameboy and the N64 with their finest games and you’ll have the undisputed championship family of console gaming (look at how the Zelda or Mario series has evolved if you want a case study in game development over several technical generations). Sure, Sony have exceeded everyone’s wildest expectations with their first platform, but it remains to be seen whether they can repeat the impact created so far. Don’t get me wrong – it is my opinion that the PlayStation saved the games market from another horrible crash – but sometimes there’s an air of “emperor’s new clothes” around Sony and what they’ve achieved in the video games industry. Any company just had to learn from the failure of the previous CD and 32-bit consoles (3DO, Cdi, Jaguar, CD-32 etc) – it’s the way they’ve marketed the thing that has proved revolutionary; if games are growing up, we have Sony to thank for beginning to drag them out of the murky depths of adolescence (and thus to a wider, older audience).
	The Nintendo stand was dominated by a number of key then-future releases: F-Zero X, the Gameboy Color and, of course, Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I made a  beeline for Zelda – after nearly 3 years of waiting for this title I was damned if I wasn’t going to finally play it! To my surprise, there weren’t huge queues – only a few people were milling around the Zelda section. I guess the seasoned journo’s who saw it at E3 had bigger fish to fry, and so I was straight on. First impressions? Well, as I discovered over ECTS, a loud, noisy trade show is no place to play a game. Aside from being unable to hear much of the sound (if it was even turned up), there was a constant awareness that someone else wanted to play (I’m just too nice) and I just felt unable to relax and enjoy the games with so much else to see. Not that worries like that stopped rude adolescents from hogging various machines for hours (I thought this was a trade show)! What first struck me about Zelda was that Link’s control system took a bit of getting used to (no jump button!) and the graphics weren’t quite as fantastic as I’d been led to believe, but then I was playing the dowdy first section of the game – all dull browns, greens and trudging through mud. Bleugh! Despite the nagging of the Nintendo “helpers”, I was able to gather a feel for how the game plays in the total hour or so that I played Zelda during the show (and that’s a good 30 minutes more than I played any other game). Also, the video footage showing later sections of the game was amazing, so I still believe it’s possibly worthy of the hype it has been getting!
	The Gameboy Color was my other ECTS must-see, and I have to say I was exceedingly impressed. The stories are true – there is NO screen blur, and the non-backlit colour LCD system works very well. The high point for me was the limited demo version of the original Super Mario scroller game from the NES which looked identical to the original (except, I noticed, the extra lives weren’t in place yet)! If Nintendo are developing this as a proper release title (the mock-up box just said “Mario”) then I can’t see how the CGB can fail. The new version of Tetris ran very well, although seeing as the GBC can “colour” old GB games I can’t see much need for owners of the old version of Tetris to upgrade, except for the horrid new music or the solo Vs. mode (pretend to play someone else – what fun)! I was disappointed to learn that the infrared link-up wasn’t actually for playing games, but “exchanging gamepak data” and a link cable IS required. Doh! The colour version of Link’s Awakening was also running (in Japanese) and looks great – the news that it contains an extra dungeon (designed to take advantage of the colour system) is another excellent bonus! I would have played Conker’s Pocket Quest, but it kept crashing. Heh heh heh. All I can say is I will definitely be getting a Gameboy Color this Christmas, and to those of you who think it’s a dinosaur of a system, well, take my word for it that you’d be glad of it if you had to sit on a coach, train or flight for 6 or more hours on a regular basis!
	The rest of the Nintendo stand was admittedly less exciting – F-Zero X was a game I planned on getting in about a week’s time (when I flew out to Hong Kong for the rest of September) so I wasn’t overly-anxious to play it extensively – just enough to make sure it was a valid purchase (it was)! There were also N64s running Glover (ho-hum), Iggy’s Wrecking Balls (oo-er), Mission Impossible and even old stalwarts like Goldeneye and Mario 64! Turok 2 was also on display, but I’ll mention that in my summary of the Acclaim stand. Lucasarts’ Shadows of the Empire follow-up ‘Rogue Squadron’, was available in partially finished form, but I wasn’t impressed after only ten minutes of play. Call me picky, but the clipping was pretty poor and it seemed jerky. Being a Star Wars nut, I really hope they sort it out for the Winter release! The only other notable display was behind “the world’s most annoying booth curtain” (eminently suitable quote from EDGE magazine) seemingly made from velcro, where Rare were showing a video of three upcoming N64 releases – Conker’s Quest, Jet Force Gemini and (wait for it..) Perfect Dark.
After watching the video about 4 times, I can say that Conker, errr, looks very cute and I sincerely hope Rare do something special with it. I think that sometimes they go over the top with the whole cute thing; what puts me off is that if the game is so obviously aimed at 6 year olds, is the gameplay going to be easy or simplistic? I know that Diddy Kong Racing was ‘cute’ but actually a pretty tough game, but belive me – Conker is 1000 times cuter. Even the SFX sounded like they were coated in sugar - sounds of kids laughing and cute “boing!” noises should be noted as crimes against humanity. Top graphics, although it looks even more like a Mario rip-off than Banjo-Kazooie! It was a different story for the next game - Jet Force Gemini had some great character design and an awesome array of weaponry, blended into another inventive, and beautiful, 3D environment. The music and sound were sharp too, and although you might think the screenshots merit another Rare “cute alert”, believe me, the gallons of (green) alien blood and serious carnage shown in the clip indicate that initial impressions of this game are misleading. Dammit, another N64 game I might have to buy!
Finally, Perfect Dark. Quite possibly the most eagerly-awaited game on the face of the planet – certainly in my case – I think that early indicators are looking good. Despite quite obviously still using a lot of the original Goldeneye code (i.e. weapon names and effects, enemy movement and death animations), at this early stage it is possible to see where Rare are headed. Imagine the towering skyscrapers and opulent corporate environment of Robocop mixed with the futuristic menace and alien architecture of Total Recall and you have an idea of the way the level designs seem to be panning out. Of course, there were only a few stages shown, including the already famous ‘hoverbike’ section and the level where you have to rescue a ‘gray’ lying incapacitated on a floating stretcher. The graphics were already smooth, sharp and showed off a number of effects, from reflections to what seemed to be real-time light-sourcing, as well as the ubiquitous lens flare. What struck me more than anything - probably because I hadn’t read about it anywhere - was the excellent music. A futuristic, pulsing track of the electronica variety played throughout the clip which I hope is actual game music and not something mixed up for the promo reel. I also have to mention that the way the N64 logo morphs into a stylised “Perfect Dark” version of itself (in the opening sequence) is possibly the coolest thing I have seen on console for a long time. I cannot WAIT for this game!
	That other gaming behemoth, Sony, was nestled in a surprisingly tiny corner of the show, hidden under a pile of flyers… Oh, OK, I’m being silly. Sony seemed to have taken over a whole hall of the Olympia, creating a vaguely THX-1128 / Logan’s Run sterile environment in which punters could play games (under hypnosis from swirly lights and ambient tunes) that had been available on import for ages. Slightly harsh judgement, but I found precious little in the Sony section to get me excited about PlayStation (only Metal Gear Solid at the Konami stand did that for me). Machines were running Spyro the cute, marketable Dragon and Tekken 3 in abundance, but the most interesting games of the show for me (Abe’s Exodus, Soul Reaver, the Quake 2 conversion) were only allocated one poxy screen each. Bah!
It was in the Sony section that the Net Yaroze stand was located, manned largely by Sarah Bennett (you’re not really large, Sarah. Ho ho!) and cheer-meister George Bain, although a host of familiar Sony names made appearances while I hung about. The demo machines were playing a selection of the GDUK entries (not mine I noticed, but I guess Sony were looking to sell the machine so I forgive them) and a web link enabled show visitors to register for a Yaroze there and then. Bless James Rutherford for trying to register a NY to Sony Europe HQ themselves – it could have been a telling investigation into SCEE bureaucracy! I myself logged their PC onto the N64 Gazetta web site and left it there in a gesture of “ironic defiance” (read: puerile wit). The “special announcement” we’d all been told about was another price drop (to £230 - less than the PS cost when it first came out, which is amazing to me). Apparently, the drop will encourage more users and create a more vibrant community! Hopefully, that won’t translate as an increase in posts asking “How do I use scanf() on Yaroze?”, or whether there are any Quake conversion tools for PS. Hey, we all like to help but I think that for most 13 year old kids the Yaroze is a bit much, don’t you? I spoke to Sarah Bennett about it, and she said that instructions on the price drops come straight from Sony Japan, so it really isn’t their fault, you guys (if she’s telling the truth, that is. I mean, you’d think if Sony Japan were giving instructions for price cuts, they’d implement them over the Atlantic as well). Maybe they’ll waive the membership fee this year too, huh?
	I met a lot of the people who are probably reading this diary at the show, with the informal one o’clock meetings at the NY stand proving quite popular, despite the fact that nobody knew what to do once they got there and saw everyone else standing about. There was a merciful lack of greasy long hair and Motorhead t-shirts among us lot, although that might be an old-skool thing and the modern equivalent is yet to be defined. It was interesting to see everyone and chat with the likes of Charles “Total Soccer guru” Chapman as well as NY members who either have jobs in the industry, are trying to get jobs in the industry, or are still at school (does that cover everyone?). I think we all saw DEnnis with his multimedia presentation, but did you guys also see him trying to photo almost every girl on the show floor? Heh heh. Special mention must also go to Jim Shaughnessy who made it to London for the Monday and Tuesday, whupped James R. and myself in several of the Formula 1 racing competitions, whupped me again at Gravitation and got his picture taken with numerous EIDOS babes. Cheers, Jim, for generally being a fun, friendly bloke (bet I could slaughter him at Goldeneye, though…)

NEXT ENTRY: Acclaim, Konami, Interplay, famous people, freebies, how I wound up in the women’s toilets plus my overall impressions of the show. You lucky people. Anyone going to tell me this has nothing to do with Yaroze?

Tonight’s Double Bill: “Son of ECTS” & “GDUK-Zilla!”

This diary entry is dedicated to Sarah Bennett at SCEE, for thinking of myself and Mr Frosty when those spare tickets for GDUK came up!

19 January, 1999

A funny thing happened – I woke up and two months had gone by without me noticing. Errrr, so where have I been and what have I been doing? Good question - I am determined not to become one of those people who fizzles enthusiastically and then mysteriously vanishes from the Net Yaroze scene BUT it is increasingly hard to maintain this page and do all the other things I want to do. I mean, which is more important – keeping up with the diary, or continuing the “personal development” (to be pronounced in sickly Californian drawl) that it is meant to describe? Glancing back over the past few entries, there has been precious little about my Net Yaroze progress, and there’s a reason for that: I haven’t made any. Not a jot since ECTS – Mud ‘n Blood was the last thing I wrote – how bad is that?
So, what to do? Suggestions from the audience please… I’m not going away, but – well, let me list the things going on in my life in horrendously mundane detail:

1)	University work. I’ve been at Edinburgh Uni for 3-and-a-half years and there’s no way I’m not graduating this summer with a 2.1 or a 1st, thanks very much. I might not want to be a Psychologist when I grow up, but I am interested in my degree and want to do my family some justice for paying me to doss about for 4 years. I need to get stuck into some serious coursework from now on – I probably know less about my subject than any other Masters student in the history of mankind.
2)	Social life. There can be no escaping the fact that things got a bit anorak-y last summer. Not that I particularly care, but I don’t think focusing every bit of spare time on my Net Yaroze (or, indeed, computers) is a very healthy idea. Go out and have a pint, lad, for chrissake!
3)	Job hunting. Let it begin in earnest! I’m finished composing letters for a few games companies, and I’m thinking seriously about where I’m prepared to move to and what sort of positions I’ll go for (read: anywhere and anything). I’ve already made the decision NOT to go for the traditional “milk round” jobs (consulting, accountancy, middle management) that many of my peers are falling over each other to get, even if the starting salaries are mucho grande than what I can expect as a newbie in the games industry. At least I’ll be happy (he naively thought).
4)	Writing. Yup, aside from this diary I have a few other commitments – not least my new post as resident console expert at Loonygames (www.loonygames.com), writing the fortnightly “Pad Happy” column. I also want to redesign my personal webpage, making something a bit sharper, more stylish and professional – something for prospective employers to visit. You must realise that my ultimate dream for this diary is to chart my eventual employment by a real company, at which point I’ll vanish from the NY scene like so many other Yarozers who have found industry jobs? Just kidding, I’d like to keep this up for as long as I think it’s worth it - only a vicious NDA will stop me!
5)	Other games-related stuff. Despite going on about starting it (I haven’t), I’m still crap at 3D stuff and anything mathematically more complex than very simple equations. Hmmm. I also want to get into some serious level-editing for Half-Life and Unreal – basically, get skilled at Worldcraft, make some good levels, and take them round to prove I have a clue. Similarly, I have a few cheapo books on 3D art and modelling I want to get into. Oh, and I still want to play a few games, too – thank God the Christmas blitz of titles is over, though (yeah, I know you don’t have to buy them the day they come out).
6)	Girlfriend. I want to keep her around, especially considering the lack of females in my chosen profession. ‘nuff said, I think.

There is far too much above for me to fit into the next 6 months, after which time I’ll no longer be a student (and will hopefully be spending a month or so visiting the US of A, my spiritual homeland). So what’s going to give? We’ll just have to wait and see. Anyway, I believe I promised a few things in the last diary entry, so here’s a bit more of the sort of thing you were probably expecting when you innocently clicked on this link, not expecting my little crisis of faith…

	ECTS? I remember that! Well, let’s just continue by saying the Konami stand was one of my favourites – boasting Metal Gear Solid (*hem* - bought and finished it now, of course, but at the time it was very exciting!) plus the strangely engrossing Silent Hill – a game that impressed me so much I’m probably going to make it the one game I’m allowing myself to buy between now and the summer. There were two short demos you could play at the show, and I sat and played them both. Silent Hill – spooky, atmospheric, psychological horror (Twin Peaks meets The Fog). I’m hooked, boys. Castlevania 64 was another game I had a long shot of – very nice to see all the familiar stuff in 3D, but I wasn’t convinced of the control system, nor the quality of the graphics and animation. Why is it nobody can match Nintendo, Rare or Acclaim when it comes to programming the N64? Grrr….
	Interplay had a few goodies – namely Shiny’s Messiah and Earthworm Jim 3D. Messiah looked amazing, and I had the knee-trembling opportunity to “chat” briefly with Dave Perry about it. The conversation went something like this…

The (very tall) Dave Perry notices some street urchin with unconvincing “PRESS” pass watching him play Messiah…
Dave: Hi there.
Me: Uuuh, hi. Is this Messiah? (Duh – why not say “I’m an amoeba”?)
Dave: Yeah, this is Messiah, a game we’re releasing in 1999 for the PC.
Me: It’s, uh, cool - the way you can take over people and set them on fire.
Dave: Well, this spontaneous combustion is just a feature we have for the show – the fire effect is started by a button-press, in the real game you’d have to make the guy run into a fire. But you will be able to throw people over ledges and break their legs ‘n stuff.
Me: Cool. (No!!!! Ferguson, say something intelligent!) What else?
Dave: (Lengthy explanation of “scaling” polygon tessellation technology everyone now knows about)
Me: So, what machine is this running on?
Dave: Uh, a P2 450.
Me: Is there a machine here demonstrating the game’s performance on a slower machine?
Dave: No, but that would have been a good idea (yay!). Well, excuse me, I gotta go…

So, once again, sorry Dave Perry for ruining your day. Heh. The other embarrassing incident was when I got a call on my mobile and walked off the show floor into some quiet area to answer it. So engrossed was I in my conversation that it took a good few seconds before I realised I was standing in the middle of the ladies “restroom”. Erp! Thankfully, this is ECTS we’re talking about so it wasn’t too busy, but still a bit of a faux pas. Damn those phones!
The Acclaim stand was one of my favourites – and not just because the big video screen gave me something to watch while queuing for the Metal Gear show. Turok 2 was a very impressive-looking game (the N64 memory pack-enhanced version, especially) and the 15 or so minutes I spent playing the opening level convinced me that, yes, this game was going on my Xmas shopping list, along with the RAM pack. And then there were those Acclaim dancers – if anyone tries to tell you that the games industry ISN’T sad, let me assure you that judging from the desperate gazes of assorted geeks, it very much IS. And this from a guy who queued to get his photo taken with “the real Lara Croft”.
	The freebies at ECTS weren’t too bad. A bumper crop from Sony – including a demo CD, a PRESS PACK (woo-hoo!), a tacky Tekken 3 bag and a Net Yaroze pen. Most of the other giveaways were pretty dull, but I was particularly chuffed with my Metal Gear Solid dog-tag and my EDGE t-shirt. Lots of PC demo discs, but the only one I bothered to install was Grand Prix Legends and it ran so slowly that it was immediately deleted. Had a bit of trouble getting the Sony Press CD to run in my PlayStation until I realised it was probably a PC disc. Aaaaanyway…

	I was in Hong Kong for a fortnight after that and managed to get hold of the Japanese version of Metal Gear Solid (not all that good an idea, but worth it for the Premium Pack freebies) and F-Zero X for Nintendo 64. My flatmate Ross was out and spent a fortune on stuff (a DVD player, a PlayStation, assorted games, PC hardware and a Philips Nino handheld PC – very nice). I bought a couple of DVDs for the flat’s new DVD player and I have to say – DVD rocks! Yes, I know I’m a movie buff with a distinct technological bent so you’d expect me to like it, but these li’l things are sooo much better than VHS you wouldn’t believe it (and the extra stuff you can get on some of the better discs is brilliant). I now have “The Thing” in widescreen with a John Carpenter/Kurt Russell commentary – I can die a happy man. I returned to university in October a very relaxed person – and waited with not-particularly-bated breath for news of GDUK. Turned out I wasn’t nominated (duh) – but good things lay in store anyway.

	On the morning of the Game Design UK awards, I was rudely awoken by a fairly excited-sounding James Rutherford telling me we MIGHT be getting to go to the GDUK awards, as a couple of people scheduled to travel with the Sony party had pulled out at the last minute. I guess we were picked because we were 1) fairly local (to Stirling, that is) 2) students (and thus well able to skip lectures for the opportunity to dine with the cream of Scottish game design talent) 3) GDUK entrants and 4) keen gits. Well, one confirmatory phone call later that afternoon and we were on the train to Stirling faster than you could say, er, Bannockburn. A night of feasting, quaffing and industry hob-nobbing lay ahead!
	We arrived at the Holiday Inn Express at about 5 o’clock, giving us a few minutes to chat with some of the nominees, including Net Yaroze heroes Chris Chadwick, Nick Slaven and Rob Swan. The other nominees were a mixed bunch – some quiet, reticent chappies, some a bit outspoken; Mark Gallear, with a design nomination for “Roman Gladiators”, was a bit loud and abrasive (so we were glad he didn’t win in the end), and French lass Florence Richer, who had created some multimedia demo (she described it to me but I think that just made my understanding worse) was an interesting character. After I’d finished my beer, I hopped into my DJ and boarded the bus to the awards dinner and ceremony!
	The reception was in a big hall at Stirling Castle – there was a video screen displaying what I think were sequences from Red Lemon’s upcoming “Aeronauts” title and a web-browsing set-up (with just the Scottish Games Alliance site on it). I ended up chatting to Andrew Dobson, one of the nominees for “Best Music” – turns out he was more into film music, but thought writing something for a game would be fun. Nice one! Amid the throng of people I spotted Dominik Diamond - and memories of watching Gamesmaster after school (or uni, for that matter) couldn’t help but get my spine a-tingling! Let’s get a decent games-related program on the telly again, shall we?
A few glasses of mulled wine later, I was sat on the Sony table between James Rutherford and some journalist from PC Zone. This journo proceeded to get visibly pissed over the course of the evening, prove incapable of operating his minidisc recorder and generally coming over as a bit of a tit: I hope if I ever end up being a reporter, I’ll have a bit more self-discipline than that. I had a chat with Pete Passmore, who told me that his first degree was in Psychology! He’s an interesting guy, I wish I’d spoken to him a bit more. Also at the table were Sarah Bennett (down, DEnnis!) and Yules Grovier from SCEE but they were a bit too far away for me to talk to them much. Nick Slaven was on our table, but the kilt-wearing Rob Swan and Chris Chadwick had been dispersed – along with the other nominees - to the numerous “company” tables (DMA, Eidos, Red Lemon, Vis, etc).
The food was yummy and the ambience suitably “Scottish” – in a fire-lit, macabre kind of way, but that was fun. There was a presentation stage set up at the end of the hall, and after a few introductory speeches (one by EIDOS bod and those 80’s Fighting Fantasy books guru Ian Livingstone) the awards commenced. Well, it’s old news now but congratulations to Chris Chadwick for becoming 6 grand richer in the space of ten minutes, and commiseration’s to Rob and Nick. Still, I guess the publicity (and resultant job offers) mean nobody really lost (especially Mr Chadwick - buy us a pint, Chris)!
After the awards I chatted to a couple of the non-Yaroze entrants: Kenny McAlpine (who won Best Audio) and the Winner of Best Game Design (whose name I forget) - I remember we shared a common bond: he also LOVED Rare and the old Ultimate Speccy games! I see they have since signed up to work for Inner Workings - I have to remember to win a category if there’s a GDUK next year! I also chatted, briefly, with Dave Jones of DMA (James R. was hogging him) and Jim Woods, DMA’s development manager. I found out a wee bit about the new Edinburgh Studio, and I wasn’t so far gone as to make an arse of myself, which was nice (James, on the other hand, actually asked if he could “steal” Dave Jones’ name-place from the table – har har)! Finally, for those who maintain Scots are stingy, I’d like to add that two Scots were the only winners to buy me a drink (me-ow!).
We were bussed back to the Holiday Inn and I sat up in the lobby for a looong time with guys from assorted Scottish games companies (inc. a be-kilted Chris Van der Kuyl from Vis). Can’t remember too much about this, but I did talk to Chris Wright from Inner Workings about how just how fantastic Gameboy Zelda was, and received a few interview tips on “how to be a good game designer”. I eventually fell into bed at about 5 or so in the morning, and woke up to the sound of everyone jumping on the bus back to the airport. Later, guys! One bog-standard travel-lodge breakfast later, and my GDUK odyssey was pretty much over. Just before we left, James and I had the chance to bitch up the arse from PC Zone to Scottish Enterprise’s GDUK organiser Liz Ibbotson - that was most satisfying.
My advice for any future GDUK attendees? Well, most likely you’ll be there for a real reason (unlike me), so just enjoy the ride and remember to TALK to people, especially important people who are in charge of big companies. I really only talked to the DMA guys, and had a Dave Perry-esque exchange with Kirk Ewing from Vis. When will I learn? Overall, it was just fantastic to be in a room with so many “names”, to meet some like-minded bods and to feel  (however unwarranted) that I had somehow “earned” my position in all this. I love the games industry more than ever now – every few months I seem to get a bit closer to it – and if GDUK did one thing for me, it reassured me that this is what I want to do.

NEXT: Christmas in Hong Kong. PC upgrades. More musings on life, death and Yaroze. Slowly catching up with myself, see?

Edinburgh Yaroze Meet (& NOT the Final Curtain)!

Too much to do. I hate university. Well, that’s not entirely true, but now that I’ve absolutely decided that what I want to do is write / design video games, this whole psychology lark just seems to be getting in the way, big time. Still, I owe it to myself to get a decent mark (here’s hoping for a 2:1) and I really have to get my arse in gear to make sure I do.
14 March, 1999

	This will be the last diary entry until I graduate in mid-July. Now, in case anyone’s thinking “Aaaah, Nick F – who was one of the keenest gits a year ago – has finally given up the ghost”, I can only reply: WRONG!!! In the next few months (after I get my dissertation finished – due in 2 weeks and not even started yet) I’m going to be starting a strict timetable of revision and Yarozery. Not strictly Yarozery, either – I’m hoping to dip my fingers into the wonderful world of DirectX (esp.Direct3D) and OpenGL programming at some stage. I’m also going to be looking through some “Teach Yourself” books, dealing with all the wonderful math I missed out on while I was learning to quote great chunks of Shakespeare at A-Level (how very useful that has proven)… “Elementary Linear Algebra” here I come!
	What has caused this much-needed kick in the arse? I don’t really know. The Yaroze Meet in Edinburgh (more on that later) certainly had an effect, as has knuckling down to writing application letters to games firms. I’m also thinking about what to do after uni – I could go home (shudder!) and spend a good few months getting my programming skills up to scratch, working on design stuff and keeping up my writing skills (i.e. Loonygames) just in case a “Staff Writer” ad appears in EDGE. Heh heh.
The other option lies in further further education – more specifically, the PGDip/MSc degree in “Software Engineering (Games and Virtual Environments)” at Abertay University. You know, the course that Dave Jones was involved in setting up. I’ve already been in touch with some of the staff there, met a student on it, and I think that it might be a good idea. Who knows, maybe there’s only so much I can teach myself? The news that almost everyone from the last class got a job in the industry was pretty encouraging - but do I want/can I physically afford to spend another year to a year-and-a-half at university? I’ll be popping up sometime in April to have a look about, at any rate. We shall see!
	In the meantime I have an MA in Psychology to get, which should at least prove I have a brain. This will require some serious revision to get a decent grade, as I really know F-A about my subject compared to many people in my class (they have the advantage of actually caring a lot about the subject). Why couldn’t we have had more coursework (instead of 5 three-hour exams determining 70% of the mark)!?!? Part of me feels that no subject can be that interesting when you have to cover it in such detail. Except games programming, obviously! At least I have a month travelling in the US after my exams finish in early June to take my mind off things (and hopefully catch Star Wars before you lot).

	I seem to remember saying I would talk about my trip to Hong Kong in the last diary entry. Well, it was unusually perfect weather for my last ever holiday there, and I was in such a great mood I spent a ton of cash. I bought bits ‘n bobs to upgrade my PC to a respectable P2 350 with 64MB RAM and a Riva TNT graphics card. I can run Half-Life respectably at 1024x768, so I need never go outside again! I also procured the Ridge Racer Type 4 box set (including JogCon and t-shirt), a GOLD copy of US Zelda 64 (at great personal expense), US Turok 2 (with the 4MB N64 memory expansion), and my brother got me N64 Rogue Squadron for Christmas. I also picked up a Color Gameboy with Tetris DX and a US copy of GB Zelda – which is absolutely the best thing I got out there. Color Gameboy rules!
	I saw plenty of Dreamcasts, and although I was impressed it felt nothing like the first time I saw the PS or N64 running (or MPEGs of the new ‘Emotion Engine’ – cheese - in action). I’ll probably get a Dreamcast when it comes out (if I can afford it) but now I’m really looking forward to the PS2 after the recent announcements (I was wandering about in a good mood for days after hearing about it)! Dreamcast Sonic Adventure looked good (if a tad glitchy) and VF3 was pretty much arcade-identical as far as I could tell. So far, my impression of Dreamcast is of a hi-res N64, but I did leave Hong Kong before Sega Rally 2 came out - since everyone says that’s the most impressive DC game, I suppose the jury’s still out. I was pleased to see that Sony completely blew my expectations for PS2 out the water – I was sure that it would be much more impressive than Dreamcast, but they really have taken things to “the next level”. It’s definitely a good time to want to work in the games business, I feel.
I’ll miss Hong Kong, but I’m sure I’ll return some day. Let’s face it, if I was going to buy a PlayStation 2 on the launch day I’d probably save myself some serious cash flying direct to Hong Kong and buying one on a shopping weekend, rather than buying an import one here (what do you mean, “Wait”?)! I recently discovered that buying US games (and DVDs) direct over the net is practically as cheap as getting them from Hong Kong, anyway.
	The Edinburgh Yaroze Meet a fortnight ago was pretty successful, I thought. George Bain and Robert Shand came down a day early, and I met them Friday afternoon at the train station. We spent the afternoon chatting and drinking (after a v. brief tour of Edinburgh’s town centre). Trivia facts: Bob Shand had a work placement QA testing at Bullfrog, and George Bain was a renowned SEGA fan before working for arch-rivals Sony! After a night of intense conversation and yummy Mexican food, I handed the guys over to Mr Frosty who “entertained” them by taking them along to a night of improvised comedy at the university theatre.
	The next day, everyone else turned up at Waverly Station for the official meet and we started well by trotting off to Burger King (George Bain managing to overcome his fear of British beef for a moment). Then we walked along to H.P. Mather’s pub in the Edinburgh West End (which is emphatically NOT an old man’s pub. At all. In any sense). After one scary drink with the locals, we ventured on to Sega Park (a semi-dingy arcade with about 20 games machines and 100 fruit machines). I wasted a pound on a 45-second long shot on Sega’s Star Wars Arcade, but my bitter humiliation was tempered when I won a 4-player race of Sega Rally 2. “I am the master!”, etc. We didn’t spend too long in the arcade; it always surprises me when people who profess to enjoy writing and playing games don’t seem into arcade games (which are the most fun way of playing games with a large group of people). Maybe that’s something I’ve picked up from Hong Kong, which is a bit like Japan with respect to “arcade culture”? Or maybe arcades are just too bloody expensive! 8 player Daytona – I say “YES”!
	After that we trotted up through Edinburgh’s Grassmarket (famous pub area) and into the Cowgate (less famous pub area). A lot of places were packed out because of the rugby international, but student “favourite” The Living Room was suitably empty. Good! A few hours worth of hardened Yaroze boozing and wenching (hmmm) ensued. James Rutherford - who couldn’t make it till later - was meant to call us on George’s mobile, but it turned out he couldn’t get through (due to the pub being under a good few tons worth of stone). At this point, we also lost Graeme Evans who had (gasp!) “other arrangements”. The hurt…
The situation improved when we trotted up to my place for some much-needed food (handily, I live just next to a Domino’s Pizza). I finally got in touch with James to say where we were, and surprised my flatmates by barging into my humble abode with 12 or so Yaroze members in tow. Whilst waiting for the pizza I forced everybody in my room (13 people! Flat record, everyone) to watch the Ridge Racer Type 4 intro (and me being shit at playing it), then “challenged” people to Goldeneye. I must apologise for coming across as a bit of an arrogant arse at that point – sorry, but the prospect of thrashing victims at multi-player Goldeneye makes me like that.
	After the 6 extra-larges were devoured (and my limited-edition Mario Kart N64 pad took a bath in the Meat Feast), we decided to head off to the Tron Ceilidh Bar to “crash” a meeting of DMA people (Alisdair Huston – Yaroze Meet member and lecturer at Abertay – used to work for DMA). What actually happened? Drinking! Tomfoolery! Misidentification of Dave Jones (it was one of the Body Harvest guys, everyone) and my alleged sighting of DMA’s PR guy, Brian Baglow! Needless to say, we weren’t invited to the party later that night (huh - last time I shell out for a DMA game).
	It was about this time that people started to filter away. The last trains back to Dundee and Glasgow left at about 10:30, and the momentum of the evening was slowing a bit. George, Bob and myself had some chips and a final drink before the night drew to a close. And with that it was ‘Game Over’.
I’d like to thank everyone who made the effort to come through, and I hope that we can do it again sometime. I’m thinking that the best time for the next meet would be during the Edinburgh Festival (i.e. August), when Edinburgh is undoubtedly the coolest place to be in the entire universe.

A salute to the Edinburgh Yaroze Meet v2.0 heroes!

•	George Bain - SCEE Technology Group & Yaroze member
•	Scott Campbell – Yaroze member
•	Pete Dollochan –Yaroze member
•	James Duffield - Yaroze member
•	Michael Enoch –Visual Sciences (F1 ’98) programmer & Yaroze member
•	Graeme Evans - Yaroze member
•	Alisdair Huston – Ex-DMA and lecturer on Abertay’s “games” course
•	Dave MacDonald – Yaroze member
•	James Rutherford – Yaroze member
•	Robert Shand – Yaroze member and undergrad at Abertay
•	Steve Zamoida – Yaroze member and post-grad at Abertay

Robert and James R. now have photos that they took online – check them out!

	Since then I’ve been pretty busy with university work. I did find the time to buy myself a cheapo second-hand Mega Drive and a bunch of games – including some of my favourites (Desert Strike, Strider and Another World). If I find Earthworm Jim 1 & 2, Flashback, Terminator and Aladdin, I think I can die happy (for the next few months, anyway). I also found Dixons selling PlayStation Abe’s Exoddus half-price for twenty quid, which was a great deal. I’m hopefully getting the Nintendo fighting game Super Smash Brothers and PlayStation Resident Evil-beater Silent Hill over the Easter “holiday”, and a review copy of X-Wing: Alliance from Loonygames. That should be enough to keep me entertained until I finish this year, in between coding and revision of course! I have this nasty habit of playing games in my free time instead of working on Yaroze stuff – I think it probably has to do with the amount of money I’ve spent on games in the last few months.
	I was pleasantly surprised to find out I had been mentioned in a games magazine. I was sent a scan from the Australian rag ‘Hyper’ which mentioned Mr Frosty and myself, and carried a picture from Mud N Blood! The picture was copied from my public page (it was pretty obvious that the guy who wrote the piece had no access to the official sites), but I was still chuffed to see my name and game in print (it would’ve been nice if they’d contacted me about it). One for the “press cuttings” file, I think! You can check out the article by clicking here.

	Although I say I’m not going to be about much till after I finish university, I am still going to be looking at the newsgroups and updating other areas of my homepage (including the Member Demos Hub – keep ‘em coming guys)! Also, if anything exciting happens on the jobs front, I’ll put a special message up (and maybe even a euphoric diary entry). I’ve spent today sorting out my PC’s Yaroze directory - getting rid of any useless files, old programs, and any member demos that don’t come with source. I’ve also uninstalled all those pesky games (i.e. Half-Life) that suck up my free time.
My Net Yaroze is finally moving back from a “fun toy” into an “educational tool”. I’m quite excited about the prospect of finishing university and being able to devote a lot more time to programming games. Hopefully, I’ll have a few decent 3D demos for you in my next big update. See you in the summer, everyone!

Nick F will return – smarter, stronger and much more relaxed – in July 1999