The Gaming Philosopher

Unfortunately, when I open my mailbox, I often have to wade through the spam. Popular right now are acai berry solutions to obesity, fake expensive watches, and, of course, large reproductive organs. In that latter category, I would like to nominate "Be like King Kong with an enormous dong" for trying to be original, and "You need a big tool to penetrate a woman's heart" for trying too hard. Anyway, I am reminded of my mailbox when I open Planet IF , otherwise a good website, and a website where this post will in fact show up. Planet IF now looks like this: Casebook Episode 0, a 250 MB free "demo" of the Casebook FMV/Hidden Object game series: http://areo.areograph.com/node/28 "Adventure Quest", a play based on 80s games such as King's Quest opens in June in Brooklyn, NY: http://is.gd/AdXK Strong Bad and Sam & Max seasons 50% off on Steam until May 18: http://store.steampowered.com/news/2501/ Get any one episode of any one Telltale ga...

I don't know whether it is a bug in Ubuntu or not, but the current version of Gnome Inform 7 will not run on Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty jackalope). There'll probably be a new version soon, but in the meantime, just type this in a command shell: cd /usr/lib sudo ln -s libossp-uuid.so.16 libossp-uuid.so.15 That will make a symbolic link to the new libossp-uuid library, which Gnome Inform can then call. Seems to work fine.

This is a review of the Spring Thing 2009 game Vague . So before going any further, here is some spoiler space for RSS feeds. Some spoiler space. Some spoiler space. Some spoiler space. It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum. Some spoiler space. Some spoiler space. And I'm all out of gum. Some spoiler space. Some spoiler space. This time, the game is Vague by Richard Otter. Which is a weird game, since it apparently consists of rooms taken from all Otter's other games. You have to find items with the name of a Richard Otter game on them, then give those items to people in the corresponding location. In the meantime, you must solve some other puzzles of the "give the cloak to the shivering beggar" variety. I only played one Richard Otter game before ( Unauthorised Termination ), but you don't need to be familiar with his work in order to play Vague : all locations contain clear hints about what game they are from. This is good, I suppose: forcing people to ...

This is a review of the Spring Thing 2009 game The Milk of Paradise . So before going any further, here is some spoiler space for RSS feeds. Some spoiler space. Some spoiler space. Some spoiler space. Some spoiler space. About Forged Alliance--I guess this is the first time I'm seriously playing a game online. Some spoiler space. It's a lot of fun, but you need a game where you can learn from your mistakes and get better. Like FA, with is incredible learning curve. Incredibly steep. Some spoiler space. Some spoiler space. That should be enough. The Milk of Paradise is too small and short, unituitive, and underimplemented. This is a shame, because the game is actualy trying to do something interesting: there is a narrator who is a character in the story and has a complicated relationship with the player character, and the game is about revealing this relationship and using it to make a point about... about what exactly? Adventure? Identity? Dreams? I don't know, because the...

This is a review of the Spring Thing 2009 game Realm of Obsidian . So before going any further, here is some spoiler space for RSS feeds. Some spoiler space. Some spoiler space. Some spoiler space. Some spoiler space. I have been playing way too much Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance lately. Some spoiler space. Some spoiler space. Right, here we go. First thing we notice is that this is a Windows executable, which is not good. Luckily, it ran almost perfectly in Wine, but unluckily, there was a bug (in Wine, obviously) which turned all text black. That may seem like a minor problem, until you realise that the background colour was also black. However, with some help of the author, I managed to turn the background white and I could play the game. Realm of Obsidian is a weird mix of the outdated and the newfangled. It is apparently made using a new IF authoring system that is not finished, but already works pretty well. (Although, for instance, "blue" was not recognised as ...

I finally finished Blue Lacuna . Which is, I think, the best piece of interactive fiction I have ever played. Some of the reviews I saw (like the--bizarre, from my current point of view--review in SPAG) made me think that it might disappoint in the end, but it didn't. Now I'll have to go back in and try to understand how it works; and those who expect me to write something more about it than the blog post will not be disappointed. (Deo volente, of course.) One question I want to ask right now, though, is this: both SPAG en Emily Short talk about a maze. What did I miss? I didn't encounter a maze in the entire game, and I apparently visited 131 out of 129 locations. (Maybe it only exists in puzzle mode?)

What is it? Inform 7 is a new but already widely used interactive fiction language, but also the IDE which has been developed in tandem with this language. (It is not the now version of Inform 6, which it hardly even resembles. The name is a bit confusing.) In terms of writing interactive fiction, Inform 7 is probably the most important application, so it is a top priority for IF on the Linux desktop. Availability for Linux When Inform 7 came out, there were a Windows and a Mac OS X version, but no Linux version. (I wrote Fate on Windows.) Today, however, there is a Linux version, thanks to P. F. Chimento; it is written to integrate well with Gnome, and is available as a .rpm for Fedora 10 and as a .deb for Ubuntu 8.10. These packages will presumably also install on other version of Fedora/Ubuntu and on other distributions that use either .rpm or .deb. You can also try to compile new packages from source, which is available from SourceForge. Finally, there is a command line version ...