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Aug. 21st, 2008 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerLast weekend, I took a trip to a personal computer museum that I'd heard about. It was an entertaining outing, and I got to see machines that I've used myself and machines I'd only heard about (at times side by side). I noticed that the museum's original IBM PC was running Infocom's interactive fiction adventure game The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which did start a few associations in my mind. That game, no doubt memorable to many through its connection to a "regular" book, was the one Infocom game I actually got to play while the company was still a going concern I sometimes read about in magazines... although I didn't finish it at the time, being hopelessly stuck on one problem. Or rather, perhaps, that one problem wasn't covered in the hint column of the computer magazine my family subscribed to...
Perhaps as if to make up for that, I did get around to reading the four Hitchhiker's Guide books. When Douglas Adams got around to writing a fifth one, I read it as well, and yet it seemed more bleak, final, and depressing than the others... there's even the dark possibility that it for once wrought on me a fate I find annoying in others, one of letting "later works" hold hostage my feelings about their predecessors... Still, when I found the book reprinting the original radio scripts, I enjoyed them for being different from the novels. The movie, though, just perhaps was affected for me by others who might have been trying to use it just in advance against Revenge of the Sith... (although it was certainly entertaining to see the RotS teaser before the Hitchhiker's Guide movie.)
Getting back to the game itself, I eventually managed to learn that one of my friends in high school had an old hint booklet for the game and borrowed it. The booklet, unfortunately, used a special "magic ink" to hide its clues, which had faded over time until the booklet seemed more like a cruel tease than anything... but at last I figured out that the solution involved realising that one small piece of description at one point was in fact an object that could be obtained, even though I had imagined that my character at that point didn't have the money to "buy" things. I finished the game at last, and yet in that moment of triumph felt a little sad that I wouldn't have the chance to see any of the other Infocom games mentioned in the small catalog tucked into the elaborate package... and not that long afterwards, I did manage to get the budget collections reissuing Infocom's "lost treasures."
Having seen the game running in the present, I went to an online Radio Shack Color Computer emulator that includes it in its software library (for some reason the rights surrounding the game seem specially tangled) and played the beginning of it in all caps on a screen 32 characters wide with the computer pausing to process every input, just as I'd first experienced it... then, I got around to using one of my more modern "interactive fiction interpreters." Looking back on it now, I'm amused by some of its dry moments, although I did happen to notice how a certain number of characters don't have entertaining descriptions before they completely vanished off-screen while I worked though the puzzles by myself. That did somehow make the game feel a little "thinner" than what I now think "interactive fiction" to be... still struggling with puzzles, I never seem to play as much of it as I think I "should" be.
Perhaps as if to make up for that, I did get around to reading the four Hitchhiker's Guide books. When Douglas Adams got around to writing a fifth one, I read it as well, and yet it seemed more bleak, final, and depressing than the others... there's even the dark possibility that it for once wrought on me a fate I find annoying in others, one of letting "later works" hold hostage my feelings about their predecessors... Still, when I found the book reprinting the original radio scripts, I enjoyed them for being different from the novels. The movie, though, just perhaps was affected for me by others who might have been trying to use it just in advance against Revenge of the Sith... (although it was certainly entertaining to see the RotS teaser before the Hitchhiker's Guide movie.)
Getting back to the game itself, I eventually managed to learn that one of my friends in high school had an old hint booklet for the game and borrowed it. The booklet, unfortunately, used a special "magic ink" to hide its clues, which had faded over time until the booklet seemed more like a cruel tease than anything... but at last I figured out that the solution involved realising that one small piece of description at one point was in fact an object that could be obtained, even though I had imagined that my character at that point didn't have the money to "buy" things. I finished the game at last, and yet in that moment of triumph felt a little sad that I wouldn't have the chance to see any of the other Infocom games mentioned in the small catalog tucked into the elaborate package... and not that long afterwards, I did manage to get the budget collections reissuing Infocom's "lost treasures."
Having seen the game running in the present, I went to an online Radio Shack Color Computer emulator that includes it in its software library (for some reason the rights surrounding the game seem specially tangled) and played the beginning of it in all caps on a screen 32 characters wide with the computer pausing to process every input, just as I'd first experienced it... then, I got around to using one of my more modern "interactive fiction interpreters." Looking back on it now, I'm amused by some of its dry moments, although I did happen to notice how a certain number of characters don't have entertaining descriptions before they completely vanished off-screen while I worked though the puzzles by myself. That did somehow make the game feel a little "thinner" than what I now think "interactive fiction" to be... still struggling with puzzles, I never seem to play as much of it as I think I "should" be.