Trilobite

I bought a computer game last week called Syberia and I’m really enjoying it. It’s a graphical adventure like Myst and Grim Fandango, which I also really enjoyed. (Although I don’t remember ever finishing Grim Fandango). The graphics in Syberia are really nice and the 3D characters walking around and climbing up ladders and stuff make me think of The Sims, but what I really love about the game is the story. The main character is a New York lawyer named Kate Walker and her mission is to buy out a family-owned toy factory in the French Alps, but she meets a few problems along the way…

I remember playing Zork, Enchanter, and all the other Infocom text adventures with Peter when they were the best selling computer games on the market. Syberia makes me feel a bit nostalgic about those times. We used to spend the whole night in Dad’s office playing games. We’d order $4.00 pizza and have it delivered to Scaife Hall, and when the sun came up Dad would come and drive us home.

These days the term “text adventure” has been replaced with “interactive fiction” and the genre is still booming. People are writing new games all the time and releasing them for free on the internet, and some of these games attract quite a following. I think I might try writing some interactive fiction for the IFComp this year. There’s a new version of the Inform programming language that was just released and it’s supposed to have some pretty interesting features. Yesterday I went out and bought a writing reference book called Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint. Maybe I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.