Quirkaglitch

Every now and then, there comes a program that somehow prevents reviews from being written in a hurry. Xavier Belanche has finally released his first personal game: Quirkaglitch. The story line is a weak as ever - some nonsense about the story of an unfinished game that was developed by himself when he was thirteen.

In late January 1986, coinciding with the birthday of my best friend I fell ill and eventually had to be admitted into the hospital. Fortunately I completely recovered. After two weeks in the hospital I returned home and went back to school. Everything was as I had left it. I was even surprised to find several drawings I had done while becoming ill in my desk drawer. I got back to normal, but I left the game unfinished. I'll never understand why I quit. Maybe I established an absurd relationship between the disease and the development of the game.

The aim is for the player to recover the original shape of his unfinished game through a ruined and glitched rooms of ancient 80's Speccy games. Weak it may be, still 'it's the game itself wot matters'.

I wondered if by chance I could locate the game on one of those old cassettes, would it correspond to what I imagined in my memory? If I found it I would be able to look at the source code I wrote in BASIC language and I could try to finish the game that I had given up on after my illness.

The game is full of glitches, flawed and plenty of crazy bugs, an incomplete work, fragmented, only making sense to the player who assumes a role close to the archaeologist. The controls are simple; you can move left (“Q", “E", “T", “U", “O") or right (“W", “R", “Y", “I", “P") and you can jump (“Z", “X", “C", “V", “B", “N", “M") effortlessly into the air. And that's all there is to it - except, of course, that this is where all your problems begin!

Several glitches appeared on the screen; the characters were distorted and sometimes unrecognizable and blinking like a fluorescent light that is going out. Then I discovered that the decay of time not only damaged my game but every game I remembered playing when I was a child.

Another clever little trick you discover, even before getting to indulge in the delights of the game, is the way the author has chosen to 'anti-pirate' his program. Using a vintage colour chart (well, googling a bit and easyly you'll find it), you have to set in a code of four colours which you access from the chart via coordinates displayed on-screen. Obviously it's not fool-proof, but it should slow 'em down a bit.

Enter the right code and you're whisked from the title page to your first glimpse of 64-room map. That's you standing staring at a nothing but ten exits. The moral of the game is that virtually everything that is moving will kill you except some static objects. You've guessed it… the objects are the ones you have to pick up and combine them each other; there are a few of them in all and the majority are very difficult to find indeed.

One step out of The Padlock System Parable and you're thrust into the thick of the creator's memories - and what a place that must be! You can forget all about malevolent burded minecraft mobs and greedy yoga selfish puzzles, here the unlucky glitched creatures coming from the past…, and … need I go on?

Walking along that landscape of ruins made by glitches of ancient Speccy games I discovered the entrance to a passage that led me to a game that had been created by someone I knew. Matthew Smith disappeared after he decided to leave his game unfinished. Due the glitches it was difficult to the read the title of the game, but I recognized it as Matthew Smith's game by this inscription: “We must perform a Quirkaglitch". At that moment I knew I had arrived to the Domus Aurea of my childhood.

If you enjoyed The Ruins of Machi Itcza, then Quirkaglitch is going to seem like the proverbial manna from heaven. Xavier Belanche seems to have incorporated the best of his weirdness mind, let none of his apparent invisible fame spoil his wonderful sense of humour, and firmly set the blueprint for what I'm sure will be a very unsuccessful range of games. In the meantime, it's good to see a program that'll rattle the software houses a bit and get them thinking along less traditional lines for their future releases.

Soundtrack attribution

• Drones » cellstrcrs.wav by Corsica_S
• frellinnk.wav by Corsica_S
• SclolexDronePack1 » Falling.wav by Sclolex
• ZX Spectrum reading a tape by are16ocean
• tapes » s piano to tape.flac by arseniiv
• dark ambient » ambient sounds 13.mp3 by burning-mir
• dark ambient » creepy sadness by burning-mir
• dark ambient » mysterious synth drone loop by burning-mir
• experimental 8 bit audio research 2 by burning-mir
• music loop » electronic music loop 001 by frankfum

Thanks to Lyud and Rotter :)