Zork

Z is for…

I remember going up to a computer store on Dundurn street in Hamilton, possibly the strip mall at the corner of Dundurn and Main, to buy a computer game for the family IBM-XT clone, and coming back with ZORK I on a 5 and a quarter inch floppy.

It wasn’t the first text adventure game that I’d ever played – there had been similar games for Commodore 64 computers at school, and even a few for the TRS-80 that we had before the new PC, but Zork really captured my imagination – the Troll waiting near the dungeon stairs with his grim axe, waiting to do you battle, the suave thief running circles around you and swiping your best loot, the annoying echo room that wouldn’t let you pick up a treasure that was sitting right in front of you, the maze with the body of a dead adventurer and his gear lying in the middle of it, the coal mine full of deadly hazards at every turn, the mystifying Frobozz dam and the magical rainbow bridge over the Aragain falls… (and figuring out what Aragain spelled when you turned it back to front.)

I didn’t have the self discipline to solve the game without spoilers, unfortunately. That version came with its own invisiclues system built into a HELP command, so I started peeking at the clues for anything that had me a little bit stumped, and even peeked ahead for ideas about a few things that I hadn’t gotten to yet, so that I wouldn’t kill myself by doing the wrong thing… again.

But I did get to the end, and played around with a few of the fun ‘did you ever’ ideas, and then gradually lost interest.

Much later, I ran into Zork games again, this time downloading them off an internet site, along with the plethora of Inform interpreters that you can now get to play them on all kinds of machines that the original designers never imagines – from Windows, Mac, and Unix to palm-pilots, alphasmarts, pocket PCs, and iPhones. I don’t know first-hand if anybody has ported the frotz interpreter (or any of the others) to blackberry and Droid, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

And that’s what led me to try writing text adventure games myself. I’m really proud of completing my ‘Star Hunter’ game, though it didn’t place too well in Ifcomp, because I didn’t really think of it from a player’s point of view. And I want to get back to text game design sometime this year, if I can squeeze it in.

Toronto

T is for…

Well, I’ve already dedicated H to my true hometown of Hamilton, but Toronto is sort of a half-adopted hometown, a place that’s also very dear to my heart. I didn’t really pay it that much attention for the first eighteen years plus of my life, except for a place to occasionally go to ride up the CN tower or see a baseball game or get government records, and really I suppose I was really ignorant of the benefits of living so close to such an amazing city. But then, I was young.

I moved to Toronto, to the suburban wilds of North York at least, for university, in the fall of 1995, and spent four years at York University, commuting back home to crash at my parent’s place every other weekend or so. (For some reason I still have dreams about finding my way across the big city on the TTC and looking for a new room to rent in Toronto.) I spent the first year, including the summer, in residence, and then spent the regular school term in rental places found on the housing board and summers back in Hamilton.

After seven months spent trying to find a job with only a bachelor’s degree and no work experience, during the consolidation days of the Y2K scare, I ended up going back to school in Toronto, taking the applied IT course at the Herzing institute in the Eaton center, and commuting into the city and back every day from Hamilton on GO transit – which would have been much more stressful, except that regular classes only lasted for four hours a day when I wasn’t doing teaching assistance or tutoring or grading for the school, so a lot of the time I could head back to Hamilton early. It was really a worthwhile experience, rounding out my university education with some more marketable skills, and also giving me a few useful connections, including the referral that led me to the job that I’m in now, (indirectly.)

Roswell

R is for…

Long-time readers of this blog will have probably heard me mention the television show ‘Roswell’, especially in connection with the fanfic and fanart I’ve created based on the show. It’s a bit of an interesting story how I got so involved in Roswell fandom. It’s not really one of the best shows that have been on television, but I think that possibly its flaws are just big enough to give fans room to slip through and play on their own.

I tuned into the show in the fall of 1999, after it had been on the air for a few months – mostly because I wanted to see what Julie Benz was up to since leaving Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ironically, the first episode I saw was the end of Julie’s recurring arc on the show – she returned for one more episode later in the season, and I caught most of her other episodes in reruns, but that was all for Julie.

But I started following the show – the teenage leads had some charisma working for them, the writing was witty and engaging, (Jason Katims knows his stuff, and so does most of the writing team he put together,) and most of the plot holes that crept up were easy to gloss over.

Around this same time I was participating in a crazy crossover RPG on egroups, and later yahoo groups – Roswell wasn’t part of the canon for the RPG, just Buffy, Angel, Charmed, and the movie ‘Sleepy Hollow.’ It was a lot of fun, and the moderator of the game was also a big fan of Roswell. She ended up pointing me to a few fan sites, and gave me my first taste of Roswell shipper controversy.

To explain this part fairly briefly, over most of the first season of the show, there were roughly parallel romantic arcs between three couples in the show’s teenage cast – Max Evans with Liz Parker, Michael Guerin with Maria DeLuca, Isabel Evans with Alex Whitman. Each of these pairs was one alien character, (Max, Michael, Isabel) and one human, (Liz, Maria, Alex.) There was also another teenage regular human, Kyle Valenti, Liz’s ex-boyfriend, but he was more of a foil for Max than anything else at this point.