A young writer crosses paths with the designer of Zork, sparking a surprisingly experimental game where you experience reality from six unique perspectives.
This is easily my favorite newsletter of the year. I'm 28, Choose Your Own Adventure is the only one of these I ever played! Now you've got me doing a deep-dive on Infocom at the digital antiquarian lol.
This is one of the few Infocom games I've never replayed. It was so much work at the time (I bought it for the Atari 800 back when the original face mask package was still being sold) to solve it. I took copious notes, now lost, and kept replaying it to optimize the game. I'm not sure if I hit the optimal solution or not, but I spend dozens of hours on it in the early 80s. But it's not a game that one remembers well decades later, because the story, plot, the room descriptions and images, are all kind of secondary points to the main part of figuring out the timing and events and what can mitigate them. I remember enough of Infidel, Deadline, the Zorks and the Enchanter/etc triology that I can replay them nearly 40 years later without hints. To reply Suspended would require recreating all my work, or using a walkthrough, which kills the point.
Here's a "decompiled" to "pseudo-Inform" version that's a bit easier to read than the ZIL: http://plover.net/~agarvin/suspended.inf.txt (I did most of the work on this before we had the ZIL sources so I had to figure out variable function slowly by context, and give them names of my own choosing).
This is easily my favorite newsletter of the year. I'm 28, Choose Your Own Adventure is the only one of these I ever played! Now you've got me doing a deep-dive on Infocom at the digital antiquarian lol.
This is one of the few Infocom games I've never replayed. It was so much work at the time (I bought it for the Atari 800 back when the original face mask package was still being sold) to solve it. I took copious notes, now lost, and kept replaying it to optimize the game. I'm not sure if I hit the optimal solution or not, but I spend dozens of hours on it in the early 80s. But it's not a game that one remembers well decades later, because the story, plot, the room descriptions and images, are all kind of secondary points to the main part of figuring out the timing and events and what can mitigate them. I remember enough of Infidel, Deadline, the Zorks and the Enchanter/etc triology that I can replay them nearly 40 years later without hints. To reply Suspended would require recreating all my work, or using a walkthrough, which kills the point.
Here's a "decompiled" to "pseudo-Inform" version that's a bit easier to read than the ZIL: http://plover.net/~agarvin/suspended.inf.txt (I did most of the work on this before we had the ZIL sources so I had to figure out variable function slowly by context, and give them names of my own choosing).
These time capsules are pure gold. I remember that box on the shelf: I was always too intimidated by it to pick that one up!