Simon the Sorcerer and other reminiscences

I woke up with this tune in my head this morning. It's the theme from Simon the Sorcerer, by Adventuresoft, as remastered by James Woodcock for the ScummVM project.

Simon was originally released in 1993. I'd played a demo on a magazine coverdisc and completely fell in love with it. At the time I was 12, and lived in a surrealist-humoured world of hobbits and elves and goblins* so to see a very similar world in a computer game was wonderful.

[Midly context-establishing but mainly just wistful digression: the same year saw the release of Return to Zork, with its full-motion video (but only if you had an MPEG decoder card.. I find it amusing to consider the same hardware is now inside pretty much any mid-range mobile phone..). Another big adventure release was Myst, although I didn't play it at the time. Simcity 2000 also appeared, which I remember thinking was brilliant purely because it had aliens in it, and of course 1993 also saw the release of Doom.]

And back to Simon. The graphics were (and still are) a delight, they're very low-res by today's standards but you can still see the care and detail that went into the "real world" versions. I wonder if the originals still exist somewhere.. Similarly the music really captures the spirit of the game, kinda cute, often atmospheric, very rarely annoying (I never did like the village shop tune, but then the two-headed shop owner was annoying too so I guess it fits).

Simon was one of a lot of games at the time that came in floppy or CD "talkie" versions, which had recorded dialogue instead of text. Adventuresoft had enough money to get Chris Barrie to do Simon's voice on the talkie version, and the end result is quite good. The quality of the supporting voice talent varies wildly, but overall it works. (As a side rant, the proliferation of CD-ROM meant bad scripts and worse voice acting exploded in the mid-nineties as the games industry became obsessed with "interactive movies". This is still happening - Free Radical claim to have hired RSC actors to do the voice acting for Haze, but the dialogue was still widely panned)

The game's plot is fairly simple: Simon is summoned to a fantasy world - via a spellbook in the attic - to rescue the wizard Calypso from the evil sorcerer Sordid. The details of the plot are then basically made up of parodies of famous fantasy references strung together with occasionally elaborate (but always sensible) puzzles. I suppose the thing that really sticks out though, and the reason I still love the game today, is that a lot of the characters are very well developed. Simon is a master of sarcasm and one-liners, and who could forget the entirely adorable Swampling. As demonstrated in that video, a fair amount of breaking-the-fourth-wall happens, which I'm generally a fan of (Robert Rankin, probably my favourite author, does the literary equivalent throughout his books).

Ahhh, I think the urge to reminisce is leaving me now. Still there's no harm in listening to the remastered music for the rest of the afternoon though..


Maybe I'll talk about Grim Fandango next time :)



*I still have the schoolwork to prove it - including the entirely perplexed comments by my teachers :)

"Chris Russell"

When I first started gaying it up round Newcastle every second person I bumped into was called Chris, and googling "Chris Russell" suggests the whole name is quite common too.

Recently I joined Facebook.. and it occurred to me today: how many Chris Russells can I find?

A general name search finds over 500, unsurprisingly, so I restricted the search to the Manchester group.

There are only 18 Chris Russells in Manchester, according to Facebook.

But now I was interested - with such a small group it would be quite fun to see what we did or didn't have in common. I suppose I was a little inspired by the scene from American Splendor (which is a great film anyway, you should watch it!).


So I restricted my search further: show me the gays!

Zero.

According to Facebook, I'm the only gay Chris Russell in Manchester. I always *knew* I was special!


So how else are these Chris Russells different from me? And how are they similar?

Well lets start with the basics: of the 18, 6 are girls. 9 of the profiles are private.
3 Chris Russells declined to specify their exact age. The rest are older than me - their ages range from 29 to 49.
Religion came as a surprise - 7 Chris Russells avoid the question by not answering or saying something very vague. 1 Chris Russell is Christian, which I can't help but think of as letting the side down. I am the only obvious atheist in the group.
When it comes to politics the Chris Russells are similarly coy - 6 don't specify a bias, 1 describes his political inclination as "moderate", 2 are "liberal".

Now obviously this has been a thoroughly scientific study so far, but I decided to depart slightly from my rigorous methods for the final "similarity metric" - of the profiles I could access, if Chris Russell listed an interest that I actively agreed with, I incremented their "score". Likewise, if something struck me as dreadful I decremented the score.

The otherwise perfectly valid statistics are somewhat wrecked by the fact 5 of the Chris Russells have completely empty interest sections. Anyway..

Name: Chris Russell
+ points: classic rock, blue planet, family guy, spaced, red dwarf, monty python, back to the future, indiana jones trilogy, lord of the rings, bill bryson
- points: the f word, tom clancy
Similarity score: 8

Name: Chris Russell
+ points: nintendo ds, scissor sisters, pavarotti
- points: house, corrie, scent of a woman, pretty woman, barbara taylor-bradford, catherine cookson
Similarity score: -3

Name: Chris Russell
+ points: steve vai, simpsons, my name is earl, the matrix, forrest gump, labyrinth
- points: lost, da vinci code
Similarity score: 4

So clearly this demonstrates I'd get on with Chris Russell, but that I should avoid Chris Russell at all costs.

I wonder if I can get a grant to pursue this..