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The other day I was browsing YouTube and came across someone playing Metal Blob Solid. It was fun to watch them exploring the game and working things out. 'Why would you want any weapon other than the machine gun?' the player wanted to know at one point. They later discovered that only the pistol can be fired underwater, and all the other weapons do have their own benefits.

However, one thing that I did see immediately was the old 'No Medal Key found - Online functions disabled' message that shows up at the start of the game. I decided it was high time I did something about that.

I dug into the old Parallel Realities website code, and in a few hours I had managed to get the medal functionality restored. It now runs on this site, rather than PR, as PR is just a domain name pointing at Blogger. I made some minor changes: the sign-up process now just requires you to enter a player name, and you will be given a key to use; no more need for you to enter an email address, click a link, blah, blah blah. Just pick a name, copy the key into the medalKey file, and start the game. You (and others) can track your progress via the medals page.

You can find the new medal stuff at the dedicated Medals page in the games section. One caveat of this change is that Metal Blob Solid points at www.parallelrealities.co.uk for Medal functions, which means that a new version of the game will need to be produced (it's literally just a one line change in the make file). A shame it's not in a config file, as that would've made updating much easier. Still, it's a very simple update.

For those who wish to update it themselves, simply open the make file, and change MEDAL_SERVER_HOST to www.stephenjsweeney.com. Now, rebuild the game (make clean, make, make install), then create a file on the Medals page, pop it in the medalKey file, and run the game. It should now report that it is connected to the medals server.