The Almost Always Productive Day of Zeux

Well, I took the comment of two posts ago as a starting point for my last, so I suppose I should take the comment of the last post as a starting point for this one: "daniel - when are you going to write something that i can understand??!! thank you for becoming my own personal greek philosopher and i crown you danocrates the great. you rock. but really write something i can get. love you stud. " My aunt, who in the forum of Blogspot has assumed the moniker of "k-po," wrote this comment. I hope that whatever on earth I provide in this next post will fulfill that request.

I have now turned off the music that was playing in my headphones after a long and tiresome writer's block. Music it seems can be as much a distractor as it can be a focus tool. For those of you who doubt its power as a focus tool, note that while reading much of what I have read of Simon Blackburn's Think for my philosophy class, I was listening to the Linkin Park album Meteora--and it seems it helped a bit. Do you italicize album titles or just put quotation marks around them? I wonder.

I know that this may not appease the commentator but it will probably be a bit less strenuous for everyone involved (I myself the writer and you readers) to note the continuation of a great tradition in the Megazeux community over at DigitalMZX. Well, it's a Megazeux community tradition in general, but that's the main site. Megazeux, or MZX for short, is an obscure game-creation system from the mid-1990s which has passed into open-source development, meaning it is no longer shareware and is developed freely by anyone willing to expand on the code of the system and put up whatever code they add to it for others to expand on.

Anyway, this tradition is a contest in which Megazeuxers try to make a game on a previosuly unannounced topic in the span of 24 Hours, without A) dying or B) falling asleep. This great test of wills, wits and wacky game ideas is known as the Day of Zeux. I myself have been a participant, and I daresay that it has produced some of my decent finished games. I missed it this time, because it was the same day as the rodeo, but there are two games I have played so far worth noting. One involves a secret agent who, over the course of each level, becomes increasingly obese and hard to maneuver. Another involves the catchphrase "eat or be eaten" and a character who moves by the pixel, which is good fun because in MZX games movement is most often done by the tile.

Those not involved with the MZX community should probably figure out if they even understand how to work MZX before downloading the entries; this time around, there's something special you have to do, because they're not on DigitalMZX right away. But even if you're not into the idea of getting into something like MZX, I hope that this little dash of obscure internet subculture has brightened your day.