A while back I gave this game a spin during a Steam free weekend and ended up setting it aside I guess because I couldn’t quite grok the stealth mechanics. On this second go around I’ve realized that it’s all about using your magic skills for just about every encounter. In fact, by the end of the game the player is well-nigh invincible will his arsenal of teleportation, mind control and time dilation. I’m too old to be wasting my time mastering a video game, so I welcome it when games feel like they get a little easier as I go along.
There’s enough of a thread of plot to keep it engaging to end. It’s all a pretty basic damsel in distress narrative with the usual litany of video game story-telling cliches. At least it is set in an interesting steam-punk world. Or more appropriately, whale oil punk.
I managed to finish the game only having to kill two characters, so I got the “good” ending. Hurray! I suppose.
The harrowing true life account of three airmen who are adrift in a rubber raft for thirty-four days following an emergency landing in the Pacific Ocean. It’s written a blunt, mid-century pulp style very much befitting a Reader’s Digest book of the month from back in the 1940s (which it was). Short and to the point. Spoiler alert: includes details of their bowel movements on the twelfth day. For a much better and detailed lost at sea tale I would highly recommend Steve Callahan’s Adrift.
This massive book has been sitting on my shelf taunting me for twenty-plus years. Ages ago it was recommended to me (by my art professor, Richard Long) as essential reading in the canon of conservative thought. It was only after having read some lesser (in page length) works about the Russian prison system—mainly, The Darkness at Noon and To Build a Castle—and having watched the excellent satirical T.V. series Comrade Detective, that I have mustered the energy to tackle this. Going into this endeavor I didn’t realize this copy was only two volumes of the seven books of The Gulag Archipelago and, quite frankly, I don’t think I will continue on to the rest. Doubtless this is an important work if history and literature. It is very thorough in its descriptions of the Gulag system… to a fault. Maybe, two dozen nearly identical depictions of an overcrowded cell are more than enough for one book? It is at its best when the narrative focuses on Solzhenitsyn’s personal accounts. However, there are multiple sections dedicated to a history of the various show trials from 1917 up to the 40s. The point being to show that the Gulags weren’t just Stalin’s doing. They had been a part of the Soviet experiment from the get go. Point taken. Lenin and Trotsky were both schmucks too. I think we are all well-aware of the horrors of communism by now (aren’t we?), and this account is just too much for me, as a mostly casual reader, to undertake. Still, worthwhile if you need further convincing that socialism is a dumb idea.
Games journalists (I can’t believe that’s really a thing) seem to love this game, I thought it was tiresome. Every game a new world is generated that you’re supposed to jump around looking for treasure, secrets and rare upgrades. If you die, that’s it. Permadeath. A game for shut-ins and the insane. So, why didn’t I like it? My problem is that I don’t find you basic platform-game mechanics all that interesting and, without a narrative hook, I lose interest fast. Believe me, I tried to like this one but no thanks. Sayonara, uninstalled-ed!
The ridiculous plot of this pulp trash novel is as follows: disgraced big city reporter winds up in small town; proves his investigative reporting skills in the local paper; is hired by rich media baron to do press for his corrupt political campaign… as a means of preventing him from covering the campaign or something (?); reporter actually planned this all along as a ruse to destroy ol’ richy-richy; um, S & M, lesbianism and the usual pulp sleaze; a stabbing and then all is well. Super realistic.
Eye of the Beholder is a real-time RPG dungeon crawl that borrows heavily from the mechanics of Dungeon Master. It’s a completely mouse-driven experience in which the objects in the environment can all be used, picked up or thrown with a click. Combat is also real-time and is generally just a mad scramble backwards as you click your various party members’ weapon hands and hope for “good rolls”.
While the fights are frantic and fun, the real meat of the game-play is exploration, mapping, and puzzle solving. I went through a dozen sheets of graph paper drawing out each floor knowing full-well I could just grab the maps from the Web (the GOG.com version even includes a complete hint book). As tedious as it might sound to modern gamers, the act of plotting out the layout is oddly satisfying. I wish it could be done in-game ála Etrian Odyssey, but, if it’s any consolation, I now have 11 floors worth of half-erased, taped together graph paper maps that are suitable for framing. Perfect for any lair!
In the end, I suppose there was a plot to follow too. Probably something about an evil wizard. dwarves and elves. None of that matters. You just need to keep going deeper and deeper. Eventually you’ll find the big boss monster and hope you have enough experience to hack it to death.
I generally like the various Ben Shapiro “Destroys” videos I come across on the webs. He is an excellent debater and can take down just about anyone who crosses him. However, this book is not really worth the read. He has nothing original to add to the crowded field of conservative political screeds. The book is just a litany of left-wing hypocrisy and “they do it too, but much worse” finger pointing. I get it. Partisans disagree vehemently on issues. Welcome to reality, Ben. Now make YOUR case.
This is a pretty good overview of the roots of (mostly) right-wing Internet subcultures and trolls with a little fair-and-balanced lip service given to SJWs too. I guess the main thesis here is that the Pepe crowd is the direct decedent of 60s left-wing transgressive counter-culture. The most extreme and abusive side of 4chan culture is on display and, as a reader, I was adequately repulsed by it. However, I feel there is a fun, creative side of the trolling culture wars that gets a little lost in her narrative.
Now that my memory issues are seemingly under control, let’s take a look at my modifications to the parser. Normally, in these types of graphical adventures the player enters two words in the form of VERB OBJECT. My interface limits the number of verb choices and allows the player to enter a verb with a single keystroke.
In Applesoft you can prompt for user input in two ways. First there is INPUT A$ which will display a question mark on the screen and await user input followed by a RETURN. That user response then fills the variable A$. Similarly there is GET A$ which also displays a question mark but GET will only accept a single keypress as user input. My main problem with both of these is an aesthetic one: that darn question mark.
The solution is to write your own input routine leveraging machine code routines via PEEKs and POKEs. To do this, first I simulate a cursor by placing a flashing underscore character at the bottom of the screen.
A lot is going on in this line. The VTAB and HTAB commands position the screen cursor at line 24 and character 1. CALL -868 is a special machine code call that clears that single line of text. Now that we have an empty line we type a colon and then a flashing underscore. The result looks like this:
This looks like a user input prompt, but at this point it does nothing. The magic happens at the subroutine which is GOSUB’d at the end of that line.
55 KEY = PEEK (49152) : IF KEY < 128 THEN 55
56 IF KEY > 224 AND KEY < 251 THEN KEY = KEY - 32 : REM UPPERCASE
57 POKE 49168,0 : BUZZ = PEEK (49200) : RETURN
In line 55 we are creating a variable KEY and assigning to it the contents of memory location 49,152 to it ($C000 for you hex-heads). Turns out location 49,152 will read the keyboard and return the ASCII value of the currently pressed key. If that value is a character then we break out of the loop and go to line 56.
Line 56 insures that, if the ASCII value of the key denotes a lowercase key, it is converted to uppercase by shifting the ASCII value. POKE 49168,0 clears the keyboard buffer so that the PEEK in 55 will work next time around and not just register the same value. Finally, that BUZZ = PEEK (49200) bit triggers a speaker click so that the player’s keystroke has and audible sound.
When we return to the main game loop we now have a variable KEY which contains an ASCII value of the key pressed. I can then branch the program based on this value. I can also test if it’s a RETURN keypress and then toggle text display. Later in my program I can concatenate keypresses into a single string value by returning to that subroutine again and again until a return press is detected. That’s how I collect the OBJECT half of the VERB OBJECT pair.
Apocalyptic dystopia from a libertarian perspective. Biases confirmed! In this story it’s not war, plague or environmental catastrophe that brings the end times, it’s the devaluation of the U.S. dollar. This is a far more likely scenario than we’d like to think and the author does a great job in showing how it would gradually affect a regular family. In the early parts it feels like a tale of what happens to all the normal people in the world of Atlas Shrugged.
