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Games

January 19, 2006

Text adventures

The first computer game I ever played was Zork on the Commodore 64. Its a good, old fashioned text adventure. Go north. Take the key. Throw the sack at the troll (from memory, the troll catches the sack, eats it and hits you in the head with its axe). Its command parser was excellent - a good deal smarter than the one in Rot muds.

(As a side note, if you ever wondered what the hell a Grue was in Rot's Newbie school, they're from Zork).

Poking around in my Linux system, I've discovered that GNU emacs (no flames) comes bundled with a few things on the sly. Games. They're tucked away in /usr/share/emacs/21.3/lisp/play (The 21.3 numbers vary across machines). Any system with GNU Emacs has these tucked away - BSD Unix, Linux, Mac OS X.

meathe@quincy:/usr/share/emacs/21.3/lisp/play> ls
5x5.elc         doctor.elc     hanoi.elc     snake.elc
animate.elc     dunnet.elc     landmark.elc  solitaire.elc
blackbox.elc    fortune.elc    life.elc      spook.elc
bruce.el        gamegrid.elc   meese.elc     studly.elc
cookie1.elc     gametree.elc   morse.elc     tetris.elc
decipher.elc    gomoku.elc     mpuz.elc      yow.elc
dissociate.elc  handwrite.elc  pong.elc      zone.elc
meathe@quincy:/usr/share/emacs/21.3/lisp/play> cd ~
meathe@quincy:~> emacs -batch -l dunnet
Dead end
You are at a dead end of a dirt road.  The road goes to the east.
In the distance you can see that it will eventually fork off.  The
trees here are very tall royal palms, and they are spaced equidistant
from each other.
There is a shovel here.
>take the shovel
Taken.
>

This could keep me busy for a while.

I've been asked. If you're also wondering why the computer is named Quincy, it's running OpenSuSE Linux where the logo is a chameleon. Quincy is the iguana in the Foxtrot comic. I know this is a stretch.


>east
You fall down the cliff and land on your head.
You are dead.
You have scored 50 out of a possible 90 points.

Theres always next time.


The bear is very annoyed that you would be so presumptuous as to try and walk right by it. He tells you so by tearing your head off.
You are dead.
You have scored 0 out of a possible 90 points.

Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at January 19, 2006 10:51 AM

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