thingoid

Well it looks like I was right: old adventure games never die - they just get a facelift and come back as freeware.

A mob calling themselves Infamous Adventures has just released a remake of the classic Kings Quest III graphical adventure game with the following new features:

• All 16 color backgrounds remade into stunning VGA graphics
• Enhanced Close up cut-scenes and dialogue pictures help immerse you into what is known as the first plot driven chapter of the King’s Quest series.
• Original music by professional music composer(s)
• Re-experience the adventure with a stunning new interface (no more typing) And if you never played well, you’ll probably enjoy it anyway.

Personally I don’t see that “no more typing” is necessarily an improvement, but I’m sure they’ve come up with a good interface that will still allow for a rich player experience. The screen images are certainly pretty lavish:

Infamous Adventures claims to be

a game development group focused on bringing adventure games back into the mainstream by updating classic adventure games as well as creating new masterworks of our own.

Their site also points to a group called Anonymous Game Developers Interactive, a “team of dedicated members … devoted to bringing adventure games back into style”, who have a couple of older projects I hadn’t heard about previously: remakes of Kings Quest I and Kings Quest II.

Cool.

If you’ve never played the Kings Quest games before, here’s you chance to have a bash at some genuine gaming history, as the AGD Interactive folks explain:

King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown, a revolutionary game designed by Roberta Williams and released in 1984, epitomizes the adventure gaming experience. This game was the first of its kind that allowed the player to interact in an entirely original 2.5D world, and can be credited as the game that started graphic adventure gaming on the PC altogether. King’s Quest was not only groundbreaking, but also history in the making, and was followed by seven more games bearing the King’s Quest title.

So download ‘em and have a go – they’re tons of fun.

Hmm, I think I can see another wasted weekend (or three) coming up…

Inform 7 was released on 30 April 2006, ten years to the day since the last major upgrade of the Interactive Fiction authoring system. And it’s an exciting leap forward (more…)

These days a commercial computer or video game requires a battalion of programmers, graphic artists, animators, writers, actors, and miscellaneous other contributors - probably about as many people as a modest movie production. But thanks to tools like Inform and TADS Interactive Fiction is still within the scope of a single author, hence the enduring attraction of IF for “after-hours” programmers. A programmer with a creative bent or a writer willing to learn to program can turn out a decent Interactive Fiction story while holding down a “real” job or full time study (more…)

There’s very little required to start playing with Interactive Fiction: install an interpreter and download some game files then you’re ready to roll (more…)

Sometime back in the early 1980s I booted the family computer (a TRS-80 Model I, if memory serves) and loaded a new program we had just acquired. In flickering green letters a strip of text appeared across the top of the screen:

I’m in a forest
Obvious exits: NORTH SOUTH EAST WEST
Visible items: Trees

Then below that:

A voice BOOOOMS out: Welcome to Adventure International’s Mini-Adventure Sampler! This is a small but complete Adventure. You must find the 3 hidden Treasures and store them away! Say: score to see how well you’re doing! Remember you can always say HELP
WHAT SHALL I DO?

This was a free sample of “Adventureland”, the first in a series of about a dozen text adventure games by Scott Adams and his company Adventure International (more…)

Oh wow!

I haven’t had a look at anything Interactive Fiction for ages but things have kept moving along. Inform, one of the big two authoring systems, has just gone to version 7 with a stack of features. And is that a spiffy new IDE I see there?

I notice this version has been a real team effort with recognisable names like Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin being added to Graham Nelson’s in the credits.

OK, downloaded and ready to play - it looks like I’ve got a few more wasted weekends ahead!

Learning to program your computer? Wondering why should I learn to program a computer? Trying to teach computer programming? For some time I’ve been trying to find the words to explain things like:

• Why is programming such a rewarding occupation and/or hobby?
• Why does a little bit of programming knowledge help you get more out of your machine?
  And,
• Does knowing how to program change the way you think?

While I ponder this further, here are some thoughts from others along the same lines - maybe you will find some inspiration in their words. (more…)

We can’t go on like this. Using prompt() and alert() for all input and output (as we did in the previous articles is unwieldy and just plain dumb when there are many ways of skinning this particular cat. So this month we’ll make a diversion into some I/O options that are available to JavaScript. (more…)

Making a hash of JavaScript arrays

In the previous article we looked at creating, manipulating and extracting values from JavaScript arrays. Arrays allow us to store lists of related data using a numbered index.

But in JavaScript, the index of an array need not be a number, it can also be a word (more…)

In the previous article I sang the praises of JavaScript as an advanced programming language, then proceeded to demonstrate some rather unsophisticated methods of input/output. In hindsight my examples didn’t support my argument too well. In this article I will rectify things by having a good hard look at JavaScript arrays. (more…)

Introduction

For quite some time I have not had a high opinion of JavaScript. This is probably because in the late 90s I spent far too much time trying to get so-called Dynamic HTML to work reliably on the version 4 flavours of Netscape and Internet Explorer. And also because JavaScript is far too often used in stupid and annoying ways on the Web, to name a few: pop-up windows, window resizing, dialog boxes, cursor trails, and JavaScript-only links and forms.

However I have recently discovered that, as with many other programming languages, the power of JavaScript can be harnessed for good as well as evil. JavaScript is a surprisingly powerful programming language and is well worth a detailed look. (more…)

Part Two: Things 6 -8

In part two we continue to look at what programming languages have in common. (more…)

Five languages were used to demonstrate the eight things programming languages do - Java, Perl, Python, REBOL, and Scheme. (more…)