A mate emailed me yesterday that Gary Gygax had passed away. Like many folk, I too played D&D in my teen years, and most of the group are still playing as we all approach our 40s. Even though I don’t sit down and play with the social group these days (and truth be said haven’t for at least 15 years), roleplaying games remain my thang. My love for interactive fiction, and particularly Infocom (and others), springs from the same well. I was playing God of War on the PS2 last night and that too, reflects the sort of environment or genre that was inspired by the work of Gygax. A mixture of fighting and problem solving, taking on the role of a character and exploring new worlds, or old worlds differently configured. One of the strengths of traditional D&D style gaming is that it’s very social: a group of people, usually gathered in one room, combining their imagination to create a unique storytelling experience. Computer games try to approach this and give as much “freedom” to the gamer as possible, but it falls very, very short of that face to face creativity, where simply tossing a beer mug in a pub can create an interesting story in and of itself.
6 March 2008
5 March 2008
more eee and zork
It’s just been announced that there’s a new eee due out with a bigger screen but similar footprint. It looks like it will be around 75g heavier weighing in at just under a kilo, compared with 920g of my current eee. Personally that’s going in the wrong direction; when I’m ready (and that won’t be for a year or two at least I reckon), I’ll be looking for a lighter eee, optimistically around the half kilo mark. Price point is likely to be around $6-700 but noone’s sure on the Oz model yet. At $500 it was pretty much an instant purchase, at $700 I need to pause and consider. $500 is a fair whack of moolah but at that price, the eee was a bargain and a purchase that I’ve had no regrets about, 3 months later. There’s also an XP version of mine due out next week and the RRP is $579, ie about $80 more just for XP instead of Linux.
I’ll stick with linux, which is proving quite easy to install new software on; if I see a program I like, it’s mostly a matter of
sudo apt-get install program
and that’s enough for it to check the repository, download, and install. I did add the debian repository to the default Xandros one a while back, which means most stuff I want is available. Realised last night I hadn’t installed any text adventures, having come across a mention of Zork in an eee forum. Found the Interactive Fiction Archive, tried to ftp in to get the files and discovered I didn’t have ftp installed. A few seconds later, thanks to apt-get, I was happily ftping game files and a linux interpreter (frotz, which I think I also installed via apt-get).
