Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

A throwaway remark about King's Quest led to a general conversation about text adventures and, eventually, the amusing sight of a Millennial struggling to get to grips with the impossibly basic interface of Dunnet.

The take and drop commands took a while to figure out, as did navigation — largely because Dunnet does not repeat descriptions of locations unless you deliberately look around. Attempting to use one object with another also resulted in a certain amount of confusion, when the message "You must supply an indirect object." was initially assumed to be a Lisp error.

Eventually they got as far as reading the paper but gave up when asked to ftp to a remote location. Entering the die command, they discovered they'd got 0 points out of a possible 90...

A deeply miserable morning, with strong winds and driving rain. Prompted by a chance comment someone had made last week, I downloaded a Spectrum emulator and fired up a copy of Elite. After a few hours of careful trading and the prompt purchase of a docking computer, I'd made enough to upgrade to a military laser & an energy unit and ground my way up to competent with a right on commander.

I was pleased to find that Elite — in small doses at least! — is still as much fun as ever and I don't seem to have lost my knack for it. When I get back to Exeter, I think I'm going see if I can make anything of the Archimedes version in emulation and take another look at Oolite — both look like they're well worth exploring.

I've finally finished Dragon Age II, my most recent of time-sink obsessions. Over all, I liked it. I thought it was easy on the eyes, I liked the gameplay and I enjoyed the plot and the characters — especially the voice acting and the banter between the NPCs — and I was amused by the cheerful bisexuality of the NPCs who, if you're nice to them, happily flirt with your character regardless of gender — it all so sweetly done it's hard to see why people were upset when the game came out, but upset they were.

I had slight problems with the relatively limited range of settings — I'd have preferred something like Neverwinter Nights where the location changes with every section — and I wasn't entirely convinced by the way the Arishok switches gears from slightly passive existentialist to furious destroyer, but the story and the way the game forces the player to make ethical choices more than makes up for these minor misgivings.

Feeling at a bit of a loss, I decided to take the plunge and buy Portal 2. And wow. It's every bit as good as people have said. The puzzles are interesting, the humour is wonderfully snarky, and I particularly like the way that some of the early levels are decayed, ruined versions of the same levels in the original Portal.

On the advice of a couple of friends, I decided to give Portal a whirl. And my God, but I adore it.

The puzzles are right up my street, with their twisted logic that requires lateral thinking to solve — I particularly love the idea of being able to pick up speed by looping through a series of portals. But what I really adore is the quirky humour. I love the snarky health and safety warnings from GLaDOS and the deliciously cute chatter from the sentry drones.

It is, apparently, the 25th anniversary of Elite, the gaming staple of my younger days. I've just had a quick bash using a Spectrum emulator and I was pleased to discover that my touch hadn't deserted me: I manged the fiendishly difficult task of docking with a space station of my first attempt.

Excelsior!

I very much regret installing Jedi Knight on the computer. My nephew has been nagging my non-stop to play it with — or, more precisely, for — him ever since and I'm already seriously bored with it.

Following a suggestion from silvershooter, I've added locks and keys to my adventure game:

( More adventure text... )

Hopefully, the work that underlies this — a clean up of some of the data structures, a move to XML input files, etc. — should generalise, making it relatively painless to add in other actions. Which means that, with any luck, version 0.3 should allow for those twin staples of bureaucratic life: coffee drinking and Guardian reading.

According to Stephen, the main reason to buy a PS3 is so that you can install Linux on it, run a Spectrum emulator and play Manic Miner in hi-def splendour. Very much a case of plus ça change.