So last night the PuTTY team went out for a CuRRY, to celebrate some grateful users having sent us enough small donations to do so. Very nice. Mmmm.

Then the four of us went back to my place and played my excessively silly distant descendant of the Tron lightcycles game, which I'd originally written at secondary school and recently ported to my PS2. I was half expecting this to be a complete flop and for everyone (including me) to suddenly realise that it was a lot less funny when you aren't 14, but actually it turned out reasonably playable (although there were a few glitches I'll need to fix :-).

For those who haven't heard the story already, I made a trivial error when implementing the lightcycles game at school: I arranged for each player to be allowed to drive through their own trail as many times as they liked, and it was only the opponent's which was lethal. This accidental change of rules made the game totally tedious: each player just fenced off an area of the screen and then played Etch-a-Sketch in their own section until they both got bored. But for some reason lost in the mists of time, I didn't immediately realise my error and correct it; instead I decided that the way to break this deadlock was to give both players weapons, so that they could shoot at each other across the barrier between their areas.

Six different weapons (including the legendary FLIB KRONT weapon), three special functions and a bundle of extra game modes later, Son Of Tron was an outstandingly silly game, and barely recognisable as being related to the original. At school we used to play serious league matches on free afternoons; in these my friend Jeremy and I typically shared the glory, since we could both beat everyone else pretty much all the time. Irritatingly, even though I usually beat him in our climactic grand final with everyone watching, he usually came out top in the leagues, due to having beaten everyone else by greater margins than I did...

On the PS2 it seems to run pretty much the same way it did on the Beeb (though perhaps slightly faster :-) and apart from the tactical differences introduced by allowing more than one weapon in the same bout, it seems to be much the same game. And last night's blastfest seemed to be enjoyed by all, so I think my first foray into home-grown PS2 gaming has to be declared a Success. Woo!

(Oh, and I reckon I was still playing it better than anyone else. So perhaps I've now found a game I can win at. Double woo :-)