Greasepole Achievement List
Congratulations to Sci ’11 for their one-hour, 47-minute conquering of this year’s greasepole!
Can we all just take a moment to reflect on the academic year called “Sci ’11″? Man, I feel old all of a sudden.
Just for giggles, here’s the current list of achievements for Legend of the Greasepole. I wonder how the crowd around this year’s greasepole would have done.
Pole in Ten (Years!) - (100) - Stall the frosh for at least 10 minutes
Show Some Discipline - (10) – Proudly display the Discipline bar on your Engineering jacket.
Desperate Times, Desperate Measures - (10) – Wind up your arm fully, completely before you toss a road apple.
It’s The Jam, It’s All Good For You - (20) – Offer ‘za or a drink to the Engineering Society President.
You’re a Hoser - (20) – Cool down the frosh with water from the firehose.
Golden Soda - (50) – Offer a drink to hard-working Al ‘Pop Boy’ Burchell.
Like Homecoming, But With Lanolin - (50) – Quench the crowd’s thirst ’til they slam their leather jackets.
Dizzying Heights - (50) – Send a frosh flying all the way from tam to pit-water.
Iron Ring Ceremony – (100) – Unleash the power of the mighty Iron Ring.
Double Fisting - (150) – Wear two Iron Rings at the same time!
Exam Avoidance – (50) – Stall the frosh for five minutes without lobbing a physics ‘smart bomb’.
Fully Loaded Fun Fur - (70) – Stuff your pockets with 99 apples, 99 slices of ‘za, or 99 Clark mugs.
Secret Achievement - (??) – Keep stalling the frosh to discover this achievement!
Secret Achievement - (??) – Keep stalling the frosh to discover this achievement!
Secret Achievement - (??) – Keep stalling the frosh to discover this achievement!
Secret Achievement - (??) – Keep stalling the frosh to discover this achievement!
Legend of the Greasepole 2007 released for PC and XBox360
I’ve posted Windows and XBox360 versions of Legend of the Greasepole 2007 to the Queen’s EngSoc website!
The new version is built with XNA and includes the following new features:
- Controller support for either the mouse or the XBox360 Controller attached to the PC
- 3D sound
- Modestly enhanced graphics (although we realized it was ultimately a choice between a total revamp or maintaining the “retro” look, and we opted for the nostalgic solution)
- An installer that can detect and install all prerequisites, and integrate with Windows Vista’s Game Explorer
- A new version that runs on the XBox360! (!!)
- “Achievements” which can be unlocked by stalling the Frosh in creative ways.
The Windows version requires a graphics card capable of supporting Pixel Shader version 2.0. Almost any computer bought within the last couple of years should do. If your card doesn’t have this support, I’ve also left the Classic Version of Legend of the Greasepole available for download, with a new installer that runs more quickly and also can detect and install the needed prerequisite for Classic Edition (the DirectX runtime).
The XBox360 version is built with XNA and, as such, you currently require a subscription to the XNA Creators Club in order to play it. If you want to get it up and running on your XBox360, please let me know!
Introducing Legend of the Greasepole Achievements!
For the uninitiated, retail XBox360 games each are gifted with 1,000 “achievement points,” which the game’s designers can divvy up and dish out to players when they accomplish tasks within the game.
Legend of the Greasepole is peppered with “easter eggs” and innovative ways to stall the Frosh that the curious can discover by messing about. Previously, cleverness would get the crowd roaring and accelerate your earning an Iron Ring. Adding a more formal Achievement system seemed like an ideal way to further reward a player’s experimentation and creativity, which in fairness is really what The Pole Game (and the actual greasepole, for that matter) is meant to be about.
Our design goal was to create an fun experience rather than a brutally challenging one, including as many references to the memorable traditions of Queen’s Engineering and the Greasepole event as we could possibly cram in. Hopefully the Achievements will help you find some of them!
XNA doesn’t let you tap into the “official” achievement system, so I had to roll my own. With thanks to Craig Calvert and McKay Savage, we’ve come up with a first set of achievements and allocated 900 of the 1,000 points.
If you unlock all the current achievements, we definitely want to hear from you. (Four of them are secret, the rest are visible from within the game’s main menu.) If you have ideas for how we should allocate the remaining achievement points, we’d love to hear those too.
Please let me know how you get on with the game, and if you experience any technical difficulties, also please don’t hesitate to let me know, and I’ll do what I can to resolve them.
I have to tip my cap again to the dozens and dozens of Queen’s students who were involved in the game’s production from 1997 through 1999. It was an enormous amount of fun making this game, and a wash of memories of the very best kind porting it to XNA for re-release.
Greasepole 2007 is today…
… in fact it’s probably happening as I type, but I’m three-and-a-half hours down the 401 in Toronto. Sigh.
A huge thanks to the folks who have beta tested the re-release of the game. I had hoped to have it ready for today, but I’ve received some great feedback about a few things to tweak, and particularly in light of the new XBox control mechanism, I need to hold off a few days to find time to finish it up. Also, my partner-in-crime Craig Calvert, who was Legend’s Artistic Director, still hasn’t weighed in… I hope he’ll have a chance to look at the game soon.
A particularly huge thanks to McKay Savage, principal author of the LegendWeb, whose history of the Greasepole (and even poetry about the Greasepole!) was an integral part of the original CD release, and now can be found online. He’s really been enjoying the beta testing and wrote about it in his blog, which has the great name The Wind on My Face. I remember receiving the most amazingly thoughtful and detailed e-mails from McKay back in the day — and now he’s living in India. I think the blogging medium was made for folks like him.
Greasepole XNA: Looking for a few beta testers
By my reckoning, it’ll be next Saturday when Queen’s University frosh week will culminate this year for a new batch of fresh-faced Engineering students. Surrounded by upper-years dyed purple with gentian violet, they’ll struggle to form a pyramid and climb a lanolin-covered pole to liberate a Scottish tam that’s been nailed to its top, and officially be declared a Year.
Back in ’99 I was part of a team that wrote Legend of the Greasepole, a game inspired by this most bizarre (and awesome, and memorable) of the Queen’s Engineering rituals. Over 50 Queen’s students ended up involved, and in an era before ubiquitous digital recording equipment, we somehow managed to create a game that gave people a chance to re-live the unexplainable.
Anyway, if I may let a cat out of a bag, I am close to re-releasing the game in XNA. I’ve ported it from C++ to C# (a task that involved exploring Visual Studio’s underbelly rather intimately), and added a couple of new features along the way.
Why would I do such a thing? Fellow Sci ’99 Brendan Carroll (who happens to be part of the game’s voice talent) quipped on my Facebook stream “So when should we expect The Legend of the Greasepole to be released for the XBox 360?” And I got to thinking, dude, that sounds like an awesome idea. You know, if Clark Hall Pub is ever re-opened, maybe they could play it on the big screen like we did for the launch party back in ’98… but with wireless XBox controllers instead of a wired mouse!
So, since XNA is so accommodating, I figured I’d re-release the game fuelled by XNA for both the PC and the XBox 360. And you thought I was faffing about travelling the globe or something.
I’m looking for a few beta testers who are running different flavours of Windows to give the game a whirl, give some feedback, and make sure it works on your systems. I’m using some shader techniques that make me keen to test for compatibility as well as framerate. I have put together an installer that seems to reliably install all the prerequisites, and even integrate into Vista’s Game Explorer if possible, so the process should be easy for anyone who wants to give it a try.
If you’re keen, drop me a line… oh, and by the way…
(postscript for the uninitiated: the InstallShield installer for the old 1999 version of Legend doesn’t seem to be working very well on Vista. It spins its wheels for a very long time. Give it a few days and I’ll post a new installer for the old version as well.)