More exciting news! Codex Bash has been chosen for the Out Of Index 2017 Official Selection in Seoul, South Korea.
Out Of Index is an annual festival of experimental independent games, with a mission statement of exposing unusual and surprising works and making them visible and available to a wider audience. 98 games were submitted to the selection from a grand total of 22 countries, of which 12 made the final shortlist.
The exhibition will be this Saturday 29 July, and it marks the furthest Codex Bash has travelled from its birthplace in Bristol - narrowly beating Los Angeles by a mere 200 miles!
Earlier in the year I gathered together some friends to try to beat as much of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992, Sega Mega Drive) as we could using some of my hardware and software hacks. We didn't get very far, but it was a lot of fun!
Four players, one controller
First off we tried using the Mega Cooperator - a four button co-operative controller where each player controls one of the Mega Drive's buttons. The buttons change what they do every thirty seconds and the only way to find out what they do is to press them!
I love way the kit forces everyone to communicate with each other. You need to listen as well as speak, wait as well as act, and unlike Codex Bash - my codebreaking installation which I adapted the hardware from - you have to act in tandem.
Jumping between moving platforms, for example, requires a lot of attention to what the other player is doing. Are they running fast? Are they tapering their speed?
When the game breaks as you play
Then we tried to do the same with the self-glitching emulator I made. I set up a script in the emulator to glitch random bytes of level data every time Sonic collected a ring.
We skipped around levels this time to see what other effects could come up.
I love the way this setup forces you to play the game differently. You play to avoid rings rather than collect rings, and sometimes you have to abuse the way the game's physics work to launch yourself over level geometry that was never meant to be there.
