The last few days have been filled with Work, Planescape:Torment, kittens and SGI boxes.

Planescape:Torment still stands up as an incredible game, despite its age. Even though the interface could be marginally better, it's well worth replaying.

On the other hand, I finally got round to playing Grim Fandango for the first time, and remain less than impressed. The control system is annoying and the exits unobvious. 3D adventures are definitely possible (see The Longest Adventure), but this one appears sub par, even if the characters are generally quite engaging.

I've managed to get Irix on one of the SGI O2s. Plugging in the wireless camera (composite output) I had lying around worked instantly - and much better than with the ISA WinTV card in the 486... looks like the card is knackered - so I should remove it and save 10W of power(!). More playing with the hardware over the next few days. This also illustrates a few points I shall include in my Guide To Buying Old Crap :

1) Old kit isn't necessarily less power hungry than newer kit.
2) Remember to read the documentation thoroughly. The second O2 box now has OpenBSD on it. This is fine, but the only supported interface is the serial port (and network). There's no xserver at the moment... Fortunately, there are releases of Debian and Gentoo for MIPS IP32 chips that support O2 devices. Even if a machine has an official release, it doesn't mean the release is feature complete.
3) Keeping old devices around is always valuable. The CDROM in the second O2 is broken (a cog fell out..), but was swapped straight out for an existing Toshiba SCSI CDROM I had.
3a) The bit that fails, will always be the part that requires lots of removal of screws etc, especially when *everything else* features completely tool free maintenance..
4) Make sure you have way more CDRs than required instead of running out after about 6 coasters due to trying to burn a non ISO9660 CD (The SGI machines use CDs with an SGI disklabel rather than ISO9660. This can be burnt with CDrecord, but unless the parameters are known, fails badly on Alcohol 120%, standard Vista burning, etc...)
5) A well integrated interface works well. Boot up times are slow, but so far the interface seems to nip along at an acceptable speed.

( kitten stuff )

Although first a response to softfruit viz my Am I going out with anyone meme - geroff, she's mine! You can have Kylie instead :).

Anyway, I spent part of my lazing holiday time creating a Portable Adventure Machine. I have an obsolete Tapwave Zodiac from a while back - now, what can you do with a portable PalmOS running, 200MHz ARM machine, with 128MB RAM, two 2 SD card slots, a 2D accelerated 480x320 screen and a stereo sound system with on-board MP3 decoding? Might it be able to run SCUMMVM particularly well? I think it could..

Could it also run a PalmOS Inform Z Machine, and stick all the Inform IF competition entries on it? Ooh yes.

Might I shoehorn other official tapwave games at some point or similar? Just perhaps. It'll fill the time on trains when bored of reading. It currently has Beneath a Steel Sky (oh so much fun), Loom, Zak Mackraken, Flight of the Amazon Queen (BASS and Amazon Queen are freely available!) and Legend of Kyrandia stuck on it.

I really need to get a backup application though, so I can easily restore the main memory from SD card when it runs out of power..

I also succumbed to mousey goodness in the form of a cordless Logitech Click Plus. Other than the 14 hour charge time and some initial pointer jumpiness (hopefully low power or surface issues rather than interference) it's gorgeous - so smooth in use (first optical mouse at home). I can finally retire my ancient cordless mouseman (non optical).

After popping The Longest Journey into the CD drive and playing a little, I'm reminded of some of the rules for writing a decent adventure game, and thus I present my personal list of Top 10 Mistakes in Adventures

1. Sudden deaths

( ..oh dear, you appear to be dead )

2. Substandard parsers and overly finicky clicky combos

( I don't understand "open the red door" )

3. Pixel hunting and hidden descriptions

( ..surely the eye of newt cannot be difficult to find? )

4. Overly finicky interaction

( ..Cannot "use" cake on mouth )

5. Mazes

( You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike )

6. Objects and people withholding information

( ..just one more thing )

7. Illogical puzzles

( What do you mean, you didn't know to put the fish on the bicycle? )

8. Timed Puzzles

( ..there's a difference between urgency and annoyance )

9. Substandard Endings

( ..suddenly he woke up and found it was all a dream )

10. Uneven difficulty

( You fought the other monsters, why not this 30ft one whilst you're half dead? )

I got the urge for a little interactive fiction last night (that's text adventures, all [1]). When embarking on such a project, it's important to use the right tool for the job. A PC is such a generalised machine, it's often more fun to use something else.

To play action games, a console is often the better tool.
To play poker, break out a pack of cards and invite round some friends.

For a text adventure, what is required is a green screen terminal in a darkened room connecting to a shell account on a large mainframe. For total realism mail on the shell account should include four increasingly irritated e-mails from your pHD project supervisor asking for a completion date, and one from the sysadmin asking why you are in the top ten CPU users and what 'Advent550 by Crowther and Woods' is.

There's nothing so spooky as typing commands whilst your face is illuminated by a green CRT, hiking through twisty passages wondering when you may be eaten by a Grue.

For the modern day user this is perhaps overkill, in which case you should head to the Interactive Fiction archive or Baf's guide to the IF archive, download one of the many clients, several of the free adventures (handily reviewed in SPAG) and promptly lose several weeks of your life.

Wanting to preserve the ambience, I digged out my nearest equivalent - an Amstrad PCW8512 (released in 1985). A PCW8512 is an 8 bit Z80 based green screen wordprocessor with 512Kb RAM that also ran CP/M+ (v3.1). I got it mostly working after some tribulations (more later) and was soon having fun adventures :).

[1] Actually, it's not quite 'text adventures' because some of them feature graphics. A strong text based narrative is still the defining feature regardless of graphics though