Games

Aug 17, 2008 — I have a long history with Infocom games (“text adventures” was what I called them as a kid, and “interactive fiction” is the new name). People still write these games, did you know that? There’s a big archive and an annual competition. I haven’t played any of the non-Infocom variety, though I think I ought to try one. I have copies of all the data files for all the original Infocom games from the 80s, and for years there has been an open-source program to load these files and let you play the games. It’s called Frotz. I’ve had a version of Frotz on all my computers for the last 12 years, including my various Palm PDAs. The only Infocom game I’ve ever finished in my life (making it one of like 5 games of any variety that I have ever finished) was “Enchanter”, which I played on the Palm. The latest incarnation of Frotz is for the iPhone, and so of course I downloaded it right away.

Dec 30, 2007 — Over this holiday break, I played through all the tutorials in one of my newer DS games Panzer Tactics. It’s a very engrossing turn-based war game, very much along the lines of Advance Wars. Panzer Tactics clicked much more with me, though, and I grasped how to deploy my units intuitively pretty quickly. I think I can take this experience back to Advance Wars as well, and have more fun with it, too. But first, I’m ready to start the real campaigns in Panzer Tactics. Then maybe I’ll go back to Korsun Pocket, which is more complicated.

Dec 4, 2006 — I’ve bought my first computer wargame, called Korsun Pocket, from Matrix Games. I wanted to share a short section from the manual, because it gets me pretty excited to play and so I thought it would be a good illustration to share:

Dec 1, 2006 — My interest in the World Wars, and my recent reading of The Guns of August (Tuchman), led me somehow to look into the wargaming universe. I learned that there is of course a sizable community of computer wargamers and developers, and I took a look around the landscape and selected a few to zero in on. Some of these are on my Christmas shelf, and some I pirated so I could read the manual and get a feel for how it goes. It turns out the more detailed ones are more appealing so far, such as the one pictured above, The Operational Art of War III.

Apr 14, 2003 — I actually had time to play some Gameboy games today! I have quite a backlog, which will surprise no one who knows me, and it felt good to give it some attention.

Apr 16, 2002 — Hall of Fame Game M.U.L.E. To Be Ported To PC [Slashdot] M.U.L.E. was one of my favorite games. It’s like the modern real-time strategy games we have now, except that it was fun. I’ll definitely be checking this out.