Chris Algoo

If you had 48 hours and a team, what kind of game would you make? Game Jam aims to find out. The teams are given some contraints around which they must build a game in the space of two days. NYU alumni that I am, I can go to the NYU branch of the Game Jam. This is the first Game Jam ever hosted, which is a bit lame, since I’d like to see some previous winners. But there aren’t any, so oh well. We’re going to be working in XNA, which is Microsoft’s genius game-development language. I call it genius, because it brings independent game development to the Xbox 360. Any developer can run his or her games right on his or her Halo machine! It’s created a huge, wide-open canvas for aspiring console gamedevs. I’m… not sure if anything has arisen from this, but it’s a great idea, certainly worthy of a hat-tipping. I hope the constraints are actually game-interesting, maybe something like “The player must control two entities”, and not something like “isometric camera”. 48 hours seems like a short time, and it is. John Romero had, like, a million years to make Daikatana, and it turned out… bad. We do not have a million years, but we can avoid making Daikatana, God willing. Wish us luck.

First off, I realize that today is not Tuesday, and I apologize. If anyone comes over, I’ll bake them a cake in apology (note – no cakes will be baked, unless I feel like eating one. German Chocolate, maybe.) So, this week has the unlikely combination of Snowboarding and Ham.

A two-hour drive brings me and several good friends to Camelback Mountain, where we eagerly disembark after a hearty Chinatown breakfast of steak and eggs. Then we wait on line for our lesson package, then another line for our boards, then another line to actually start the lesson. Total line time was about three hours, which was about as much as you’d spend in three hours at Otakon. The lesson starts, and I’m easily the worst out of our group of four. But I plow on, imagining a soundtrack of awesome 80’s music. I make a good deal of progress, although not enough to actually make it all the way down a very slight slope without falling. Oh well, it’s still fun, and I’ll be back.

Searching around Citysearch, I found a nifty Ham Bar. Run by Mario Batali, it serves cured Spanish meats… from Spain. I’m not much of a Ham or Wine conisseur, so all I can say is that I really liked the Ham and Wine. The ham was subtle, and the wine was… I don’t have the words to describe wine. I’ll say it’s good. The atmosphere was nice too, crowded but not aggressively so.

Time for growth, and new things, and all that good stuff. It’s amazing what effect changing one number can have on us, spurring us into change.

And New Year’s Resolutions. Don’t make a New Year’s Resolution, as there is a vindictive spirit that dwells in New Jersey whose sole reason to live is thwarting New Year’s Resolutions. If I may humbly make a suggestion, why not just make a Resolution?

Happy New Year! This year, be more awesome than you were last year.

Whether you’re celebrating Christmas, Chanukah or Cwanzaa, you know the real reason for this holiday – the birth of Santa. Christmas is simultaneously a time of giving and wishing – giving things that you hope people will like, and wishing that somebody won’t get you a toaster. Toast sucks.

For Christmas, I’d like to give Sonic Team a time machine so they can go back to when Sonic was fun, and I’d like Sebastian Bach to join Ayreon. That guy’s cool, aside from the drinking problem.

What do you wish for, and what would you like to give?

Tuesday works much better. In the intervening time between today and tomorrow (roughly 24 hours), you can answer this quiz. The article tomorrow will deal with each of the following in depth. So, please pick one or several…

Why do you game? (Game is a verb. It means “to play games”. Shakespeare isn’t the only one who can make stuff up.)

Challenge – I game to challenge myself. I enjoy achieving mastery over the game system or other players.

Social – I game to interact with / meet other people.

Experience – I enjoy games that take me on rides and create strong feelings.

Narrative – I game to watch a story unfold.

Roleplay – I game to play an internally-consistent, interesting character.

Growth – I enjoy watching my position (character, faction, country) grow in games.

Change – I enjoy creating change in the gameworld, or feeling as though I have.

Other – Please write what the Other is.

Tomorrow I’ll give an in-depth look into each of these styles. For the record, I see myself as a Narrative/Experience gamer with occasional bits of Roleplay (Fallout 3 really brought that out of me). If you’ve got some interesting “Others”, that would be awesome, as I’ll have more material for the post tomorrow.

I found a salsa event on the Internet – free lessons, free dancing and five dollar margaritas. I wanted to bring some friends of mine, but they couldn’t make it, which I later learned is a common thing with dance events. The club/lounge/whatever was on Bowery, near where my friends and I celebrated my friend’s Halloween birthday, so I wasn’t entirely lost.

I entered the dark club and was immediately greeted by a charmingly effusive event planner. I assume she sets up the meetings on that site, talks to the bar and coordinates the whole thing. I wanted to be an event planner for a while, it’s a nicely social bit of work (if stressful). I can only imagine that the bar allowed her to use the space for free if she could promise that a certain amount of drinks would be sold, and I’m pretty sure any threshold would be met. Drinks were in full force that night, from bright blue margaritas to dusky pink cosmopolitans. The crowd was surprisingly mixed in age, gender, race and whatever demographic spectra you can think of.

The night began with a free lesson, which is when I realized that tonight might be a problem. See, there are two kinds of Salsa, one and two. I had some training in two, but the dancing that day would be one. I was actually in a worse place than someone without lessons, since I had all of these habits and muscle memory things that would work against me. Eventually, I just danced the kind of salsa I knew. I met some pretty cool people at that club, one of which said that she was planning to bring several of her friends, who ended up not going. Oh well.

Nothing much to report here aside from this:

Apple Pie is Delicious.

But you already knew that.

Also, Thanksgiving is awesome because of the thinking it can encourage (break the word into its two component words and switch them). What’s awesome about your life?

One of my goals in life is to eat at every restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen, a strip of real estate north of Times Square packed with tasty food. I think I’ve eaten at six or so by now. Eatery was last Friday’s meal, an odd combination of homey American food and international fare. Rather, a Western conception of international fare, with standbys such as Spring rolls and Quesadillas and Roti, probably added in the Fusion cuisine rush that seems to afflict so many restaurants.

I requested a custom drink – it consisted of Vanilla Vodka, Bailey’s Irish Cream and Godiva Chocolate Liqueur. I saw it a while ago on Food Network, it was a cocktail serve in Boston meant to evoke the taste of a Boston Creme Pie. While it didn’t do that, it was delicious – even the waiter said so. If Eatery starts serving it, you can thank me for that.

The food was tasty and filling, although it could have used some more salt and pepper. My friends and I ordered a range of foods, so I got to try Chicken Paillard, Atlantic Salmon, French Fries and some other stuff. They were all well-executed if unoriginal, which I suppose describes Eatery rather well.

I’m about 11,000 words into my novel, a Loads and Loads of Characters story written in Third Person Present (which is fairly rebellious as far as writing goes). I don’t quite know what’s going on (I’m not going to plan. I have nothing against outliners, but it’s not for me), but it’s shaping up quite nicely. It seems that I produce about 500 words a day, which is fine – at this rate, I’ll write my desired 100,000 by, say, next June or so. I just got a new toy for writing on the go, an Alphasmart Dana, which is essentially a keyboard with nothing else attached except the tiniest of screens so you can see what you’re writing.

This Friday, I went with my coworkers to Smith’s Bar, a manly sports sort of place with rugby on the screen and large men with mustaches. We then went around to the various lounges of Hell’s Kitchen, but we were rather early, and the only ones there. Hell’s Kitchen lounges all have a certain cool atmosphere, a hip modernity that’s only helped by the copious neon lighting. That was fun, but I had to cut that short, because it was somebody’s birthday dinner.

Walking from 44th and 10th to 32nd and 4th took us to Todai, a Japanese buffet. The food wasn’t that great, but there’s no way I can pass up a quality pun like this post’s title. There was unlimited sushi of all shapes and sizes, hot food and a crepestation, which is not the title of Sony’s next console. There, you can fill a fresh crepe with chocolate, cream and a variety of fruit, the heat of the crepe melting everything together into two bites of ecstasy.

This Sunday was a Barcade LoveSac tag-team combo event. Barcade is a neat gaming-themed bar in Williamsburg, and Lovesac is a maker of bean bag chairs. They slapped the word “Gamer” onto one of their chairs, a decision which is hopefully driving some Gamer business their way. The day was for speedruns, which is when a player tries to finish a level as quickly as possible. There was Contra, Super Mario Bros, and some other, less awesome games (like Super Mario Kart). It took me a couple tries to even score in Contra, since getting a Game Over midway means you didn’t complete the level. After several deaths (I was able to beat the entirety of Contra as a boy, what happened?), I placed a respectable time of 1:40. The person running the event told me that the top time was 1:30, which was fine by me. By the way, beers with the word chocolate in their name don’t actually contain any chocolate. I know, I was surprised too.

Arthur brought up a great point today – websites (such as this) attract readership through consistency. If a reader can know that the site will update regularly, they’ll be more inclined to visit. If you build it, they will come (I will be very disappointed if that is not the title of an adult film), as the saying goes. With that in mind, I’d like to announce that I will update this blog every Monday at Noon, making for a nice bit of lunchtime reading.

Last Friday, my good buddy Dave was celebrating his 24th. Last Friday was also Halloween. The intersection of these two events proved problematic. Apparently, people enjoy celebrating Halloween in large numbers in bars and clubs, which is exactly the same sort of place that Dave wanted to hang out in. Our first stop, the Crocodile Lounge, a nice place with a roomy (as roomy as you can get around Union Square) back patio. The genius of the bar comes in these little red tickets that you are gifted with every time you purchase a beer. You can then exchange these tickets for a pizza, which you can then eat. The pizza isn’t that great, but come on, it came free with your beer (or your delicious Woodchuck’s Apple Cider Beer substance.) Pizza with beer is essentially a gimmick, much like arcade games with beer. If you know some interesting gimmick bars in NYC (or some interesting non-gimmick bars), please let me know, because I’d really like to check them out.

Eventually, the patio closed and the bar became too crowded for our liking. We took a large cab-van (van-cab?) to the intersection of Delancey and Essex, a place where our dreams would presumably come true. We walked into a club/bar, discovered it was crowded as **** (You all know what that word is, but let’s keep this family-friendly), and promptly left. This process repeated several times, until we landed in a cozy, quiet bar with wooden detailing and the word Whiskey in its name. We hung out, played pool, drank hot apple cider with rum, and chatted about whatever it is you chat about at 1 AM over alcoholic cider.

That was last Friday. This Friday, I did something that I hadn’t done in a while – played videogames with my friends, went out for a quiet dinner, and a quiet glass of bubble tea. There was none of the bustle and excitement of a usual night out, simply enjoying the company of one’s good friends in an environment where you can all hear each other. I read somewhere that a friend is someone who you can have a good time with in an empty room – I can’t find the original quote, so I guess it’s my quote now. The point is, quiet conversation with your friends is a good thing. Also, we designed a Sonic level with a pen and paper – they’re made of curving lines, making it possible for the least artistic of us to contribute. I likened level design to music composition, and I still think the simile holds – individual challenges (such as, say, hitting a spring to jump over a pit) function as phrases in music. A phrase in music is an string of notes, usually pretty short. Creating music involves creating such phrases, then weaving such phrases together in an interesting fashion. I found the experience quite invigorating – multiple sources of creativity always create something unique, with each creator bringing its own perspective to the creation.

I’m writing a novel! I struggled with my natural tendency to write in the present tense, wrangling my words into the “proper” past tense. No more of that, I’m going to write the way I write, which is in the present tense. Here’s a little unedited piece.

She placed her foot into the ropes, heard the satisfying creak as they adjusted to her weight. She pulled herself up the net with weathered hands, feeling the salt spray around her. After a short climb, she stood in the crow’s nest, a turret for her floating castle. It wasn’t high enough to make a difference, but the air somehow felt purer up here, and she loved the sight of the sea from this perch. The waves were no less majestic from this height, and Talara could see an enormous expanse, broken only by the horizon. She reached out to the sea, feeling mentally for a place where she can touch its pure energy, its essence. Finding some, she set to moving it, careful not to strain herself since she had not practiced in some time – it was becoming harder to find time alone. Holding carefully onto the wild energy, she lifts it slowly as a swell forms in the ocean.

Did you like that? I found it very unusual to write magic, but I quite like the way this turned out. That’s the end of this post – if you’ve got something to say, please post a comment – I love reading them.