video games

Photopia

Ever played a text-based adventure (interactive fiction) before? If so, this is a must-see. If not, now’s the time to start. I’ve just finished playing a short IF called Photopia, which won two prestigious (in IF circles) XYZZYnews awards back in 1998.

It’s not… great as an adventure game, but it’s amazing as a story. It’s… so amazingly clever and well thought-out. If you’re an experienced text-adventurer, you’ll be able to see it all in under an hour (and there is, of course, a SAVE and LOAD function). Wow. Just… just go play it. Go on.

Two good ways to get it:

Option 1: Download photo201.zip, packaged for Windows – download, extract to a folder, run the batch file (“play_the_game”, or something) – do this if you’re not experienced with setting up your IF enviroment.
Option 2: Get Photopia 2.01 (Glulx Edition) and a Glulx interpreter for your favourite operating system. You’ll work out the rest.

The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches

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Hide & Seek

Following the success of our last game of hide & seek in the Castle, Paul, Bryn, Claire and I went for another game last night. Ah; the simple joys of childish fun – legging it around a darkened ruin at night. Right up until silly screaming girls filled the area. Then we left.

In other news, I’ve been playing far too much The Ur-Quan Masters (a.k.a. Star Control 2). If you like retro space exploration and trading games, give it a go (it’s free). Fantastic soundtrack, too.

Parallel Parking For Dummies

Have a go at the parallel parking game – let’s so how good you lot are. I’ve managed to beat the rest of the folks at work with a stunning score of 87.72, parking in 5.7 seconds flat… not bad for the only non-driver!

Reb, Hell, And Unreal Tournament 2004

After I saw Faye’s weblog post about her own design for hell, I couldn’t help but leave an anonymous comment. If you’ve ever met Reb, my ex-girlfriend from a few years back, perhaps you’ll appreciate.

In other news, I spent far too much of the weekend playing the demo of Unreal Tournament 2004. I haven’t had so much fun with the demo of a computer game since about 1999 (I never have time for demos any more). Wow… it really is something stunning. They’ve really put a lot of work into making it accessible by anybody, too – the hardware specifications aren’t so horrible, and it’ll run on Windows, Linux, or MacOS X! Hell; it doesn’t even require a 3D card (although I wouldn’t like to try it without one!). It’s a doddle to get it running on a network (Bryn and I had a couple of LAN games – driving a tank right into an enemy base with one of you sat on the top with a minigun is sooo much fun), it’s fast and furious, and relies heavily on teamwork. It’s just fab. Have ordered a copy from Amazon.

Is There Anything More Romantic?

Claire and I stayed up late and played multiplayer Civilization 3: Conquests together. When the Carthaginians picked on her, I stuck up for her and razed one of their cities. We’re hoping that by working together, we might be able to get a spaceship to Alpha Centauri before 1900.

We played until it started to get light. Then we went to bed and rolled around, laughing. Then we had sex as the sun rose.

A long multiplayer games session followed by a shag. Is there anything more romantic?

Wargames As Public Acceptance

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

[more of this post was recovered on Friday 24 November 2017]

There’s a lot of defence for wargames, as Command & Conquer: Generals to see how far this can be taken. In Generals (set in the near future), the United States unite with a (reluctant) China in order to suppress terrorism in (you guessed it) the Middle East. All sides have weapons of mass destruction, but the wording is clear: while the American WMDs are called “Superweapons” the Chinese have “Nuclear Weapons” and the arab states have “Biochemical Terror Weapons”. And that’s not all – the American soldiers all say things like “Doing the right thing,” and “Defending our people,” in true American Hero voices. Meanwhile, the other sides are made to sound insidious and crafty. The Armerican tanks have names like “Crusader” (yeh; let’s make a reference to Jerusalem, shall we?) and “Patriot”, while the global …

Distractions Are Important For Concentration

…and so I recommend you take a break from whatever you’re doing and go play Crimson Room, an online flash puzzle game. Some infuriating bits, but if I can solve it, so can you.

Have fun.

Chicken-Heated Atomic Weapons, And Quake [TM] For Those Who Miss Text-Based Adventures

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[further fragments were recovered on 13 October 2018]

Two fantastic bits of funny news for you this April Fool’s morning:

1. A seven-ton atomic landmine, designed to prevent Soviet advance through West Germany, would have been kept warm while underground by being filled with live chickens (with enough food to keep them alive for a week). This (not an April Fool’s – really!) report brought to you by the BBC. Weird.

2. Do you remember a couple of years ago when somebody wrote ttyQuake, a front-end for iD‘s groundbreaking game, Quake, which replaced the graphics with live-generated ASCII-art [screenshot]? Well; somebody’s gone one step further: IF Quake. IF Quake is an Inform program that acts an an interface between your Z-Machine Interpreter and the Quake data files. What does this mean? It means that it’s a text-based-adventure version of Quake. So instead of wiggling your mouse and…

Dodge!

Go play this little DHTML game. Can you beat my ‘survival time’ of 24.593 seconds?

Busy Days

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[this post was partially recovered on 12 October 2018]

Yay! I won an eBay auction for a copy of Everyway. For £4! Yay! Winner! Now all I need are some friends, some paper, some pencils, and no dice.

In other good news, I solved a really nasty Project: Jukebox bug.

And finally: I’ve been spending way too long (when I should be revising) in Second Life. I’m currently working on trying to build the game world’s first Bluetooth-like short-range radio system, but while building prototypes I seem to have come up with a great espionage/surviellance device (i.e. a bug). It works really well. I’ve spent the afternoon listening in on people’s conversations. I intend to sell my bugging device for L$100 ($L = Linden Dollars, the currency of this virtual world), and then, when I’ve cornered the market, start selling a de-bugging device that can detect bug usage for L$500. I am one of those people, I have decided, whom; if I ran an anti-virus company, I would write viruses to ensure that people still needed my products.

I have one exam left. The …

Hand-Ins & Russian Spacecraft

[this post was damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has not been possible to recover it]

[this post was partially recovered on 12 October 2018]

Got my assignment finished in the end. Next stop: up to campus to deliver it.

I’ve got a fab Civ3: Conquests game on the go: I’m Premiere of the the Russians, and it’s 1856AD. I landed on the moon in 1812AD, and I’m now half-way to building an interstellar spacecraft. Damn I’m good at this game.

Unfortunatley, the Celts (with whom I share borders) have become jealous of my progress and have launched an invasion, which, while technologically inferior (mostly consisting of riflemen on horseback and on foot, and a handful of automatic weapons – compared to my M16s, TOW missiles, and jet aircraft) is a sizeable force and caught me very much off-guard, hitting me at a couple of weak points and capturing two cities, putting them in a good position to attack Moscow. I’ve begun conscription, drafting in citizens to military service to defend our country, and been pulling forward the military I have towards the front line… but this isn’t going to be pretty.

The AI in the game at the higher difficulty levels is really something. During my invasion of Spain in the 16th Century, the Spanish retreated deeper into their heartland, destroying key roads as they …

Back In Aber! Christmas Update! (Got A Spare Quarter Hour To Read This?)

[this post was lost during a server failure on Sunday 11 July 2004; it was finally (partially) recovered on 12 October 2018]

As most of my fellow Aberites know, I’ve actually been back in Aberystwyth for a few days, but have been typically drunk (celebrating getting back, then celebrating Kit’s engagement to Fiona, then celebrating New Year, then having a video night – and it’s the first Troma Night of the new year tonight: can my liver take it?).

When I’ve not been drunk, I’ve been playing Sim City 4: Rush Hour (good, but don’t buy it just for the U-Drive-It features, they’re not so good) and Civilization III: Conquests (very good; adds a lot of great new features to the game – slightly pissed-off that I bought Play The World and Conquests supercedes everything in it; ah well). The former I got with Christmas money, the latter a present from Claire (For Christmas, or my birthday? I’m not sure, but hey!)

Other notable Christmas gifts recieved include:

A zorbing/etc. experience thingy from my mum: …

Out Of Place

Something feels out of place. Probably just the time of year, the amount of work I have to do, etc. The only good thing about working as long hours at work as I have been is the anticipation of how healthy my next paycheque ought to be. Which it’ll need to be, because I’ll be penniless by then.

Gonna play some Super Mario World on the SNES emulator I downloaded and try not to get too stressed and start snapping at people again. Must de-stress!

Hugz, ye’all;

Yo-Ho-Ho And A Bottle Of Caern ‘O’ Moor

My mum and my sisters came down for the weekend. I’d not quite gotten around to recovering from my illness these past few days, so I was probably at least slightly grotty company, but nonetheless we all had a good time.

We visited Little Amsterdam, Aberystwyth’s first sex shop, shortly after they opened on Monday morning. They’ve got a huge selection of smoking goodies on display, and magic mushrooms for sale, but the sex toys won’t be arriving until Friday, I’m told. Aww. I play with myself a lot more often than I smoke. Ah well; I’ll return when they have some. At any rate, I got the chance to congratulate the store on making it to Aber after it’s months of legal efforts. Great work!

I’ve just bought a lifetime subscription to Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates!, perhaps the best MMORPG I’ve ever seen. It’s very, very impressive. If you haven’t seen it yet, give it a go.

When my family left, Paul, Claire and I lounged, drank a couple of bottles of red wine, and played You Don’t Know Jack, a hilarious quiz game, on our TV. Paul won by a mile, and only a few times did I manage to finish with a score above zero (although I did improve as I got more drunk). Claire puked.

I need to catch up on all the lecture notes I’ve missed this last week. And apologise to my personal tutor for not having been at the tutorial meeting. And get to the office tomorrow and catch up on some *real* work. And harrass the Student Loans Company into getting me money faster.