Trilobite

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately solving my Rubik’s Cube over and over again. I find it very relaxing, in the same sort of way that I imagine people who like knitting find knitting relaxing. My best time so far is 1:46, but I think I can get a lot faster than that. Here’s a video I made.

I went to see the new X-Men movie the other day and enjoyed it quite a bit. I didn’t know about it at the time, but apparently there is a 30-second scene after the end credits which hints pretty strongly that there will be a fourth movie. Thanks to the magic of the internet I managed to track down and download the extra scene [1.2MB AVI]. Background information is here. Don’t click on either of those links unless you’ve already seen the movie.

I finished playing Syberia II today and wish there was another game in that series. The graphics were much better than in the first game but the story had a few gaping holes in it. I still liked it very much though. One thing this game has made me start doing is double-clicking on everything. In the game, if you click somewhere on the screen Kate will stroll over to that spot and if you double click she’ll jog. Sometimes I even found myself triple-clicking when I was impatient. Yesterday at work I was showing a co-worker a bug that I had found in one of our products and I quadruple-clicked on a Windows button! Wow. I’m going to have to unlearn that habit fast! [I’m also going to have to change the font for this blog. I’m not sure what this WordPress default font is (Lucida Grande? Verdana?), but it puts the first two letters of the word “click” a bit too close together!]

I finished playing Syberia the other day and was very impressed by it. I decided that I really do want to try writing my own game for the interactive fiction competition this year and am starting to learn how to program in Inform 7. I7 a new version of a programming language for adventure games that was released less than a month ago. For this new version the syntax is in natural language and reads just like regular English. The language designer has written books and articles about the theory of interactive fiction as literature and about the computational linguistics of the natural language syntax. I find it very interesting, and think I’ll read some of them after I finish learning the language. Here’s a sample program somebody posted to rec.arts.int-fiction yesterday. I think it’s brilliant. Can you guess what it prints out?

The game I’ve started writing is called “Cranberry Lake Canoe Trip” and the goal of the game will be to find a geocache! I’m having lots of fun with it and have already got the map written so you can walk around the game. Right now I’m working on the room descriptions. I’m using the Rideau Trail Guidebook as a reference and am trying to describe all the trees and rocks and animals that I imagine would be in each location. Christine suggested I go to the library and check out some nature books and look at those too. I think I’ll see if they have any field guides that help you identify trees.

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.