It's got Pong on it

The more astute visitors to my site (assuming of course that there are visitors, i've never been entirely sure that the counter hits aren't just a figment of a deranged imagination and then worried about whose) will have noticed that my likkle corner of the web has gone through a bit of a revamp! Yes, T.M.R's Workstation has been through a sort of spring clean (do websites have springs?) and in the process has gained new downloads in the Backward Engineering section as well as a new covert art render for the just-released Blok Copy which i'm rather pleased with. In fact, the release of Blok Copy has seen both the Workstation and the main Cosine site being upgraded, although the design of the latter remains the same and just the way it handles things has been updated so that it now handles a couple of browsers that it previously caused to stutter.

So what's this Blok Copy thingy i;ve mentioned a couple of times then? Well, it's a new game from Cosine for, surprisingly to us as well as others it would seem, the Commodore PET - or more specifically, it works on 40 column PETs with 8K of RAM or more. The code (which features some nice touches like PET model detection and vertical blank sync, something of a first for the PET as far as i'm aware) was knocked together by yours truly, the screen layouts by Bizzmo and me and i've managed to wedge what i'll call music in there too, although i'll struggle a bit to stop laughing as i do so. PETs don't have sound out of the box (well, the majority of them don't, some of the later models have a "bell") but there is, so i've read at least, a relatively popular hardware hack that connects to the parallel port and i slapped a crap step time music driver together and got it playing a version of SLL's "End Theme" and some sound effects. All told i'm rather proud of it for a first attempt on a machine with no user-defined graphics and it seems to have gone down well with the playtesters so i have me fingers crossed...

Watching Torchwood

One thing i always find slightly annoying with drama that's aimed at an adult audience is when the writers feel the need to be nasty to the regular characters; it's almost the norm with Spooks for example, at least once a season there's a death or a similar yanking of the heart strings, be it Harry and Ruth finally getting together before she's forced to run away and hide, Colin being killed, Zaf disappearing or a myriad of other situations and that show isn't alone. We have, it seems, to watch these characters really suffer for it to be considered real i suspect.

Torchwood makes its characters suffer as well and we suffer along with them, the multi-story thread that was Owen's death being the most recent example and the effect was increased by the Torchwood Declassified after the episode where he was shot, lots of commentary from Burn Gorman about how he'd like to go out in a similar fashion as the hero and RTD saying about how hard it was to take the step of killing a major character... what a sneaky trick that was! Instead of him dying we end up with Owen the zombie, slowly going out of his mind, being relieved of duty and, as we found him at the start of tonight's episode, perched on the edge of a building... but as usual for Torchwood, all isn't as it seems and he was there purely to save the woman who was planning to end it all. i bloody cheered when i realised that Owen was going to come out of the other side of the ordeal and would be staying with the team, i really did.

Torchwood is part of the Doctor Who universe in that respect, it will be nasty to it's characters but, at the end of the day, it's rarely terminal and we love it all the more for that...