Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Once again granted next-episode previews for Twilight Zone episodes, I was amused and intrigued to understand in advance that “The Man in the Bottle” would involve a genie offering the unusual generosity of “four wishes.” In between seeing that preview and getting to the episode itself, I did finish the old adventure game I’d mentioned some weeks ago which just might have sought to borrow some gravitas through its title “The CoCo Zone.” It helped to some considerable extent to use an online map-drawing program and discover a second such site along the way, given the adventure used a considerable number of hallways in between rooms illustrated with pre-drawn graphics. Before the end of the adventure I’d exhausted those illustrations and wound up with the slower “drawn on the fly” graphics familiar from Extended Color BASIC; I’d also resorted to glancing at the program source code offered for the typing in all those years ago to figure out how to solve some puzzles and expand the game’s world. The first disk image I’d worked with had also happened to crash right around when I got to the further illustrations; however, I was fortunate enough to have a correct version of the program (without the added note saying it had been typed in by someone) on another disk image preserving the available-for-an-extra-subscription “our programs without your typing them in” magazine service. The adventure did become a bit more fantastical towards the end.
( The episode itself )

For Easter’s extra-long weekend I headed home to see my family, which meant getting away from my Blu-Ray player and Twilight Zone Blu-Ray set alike. I did strike up a tenuous connection to the show that weekend, though. On going through the issue of the Color Computer magazine The Rainbow from exactly forty years back and seeing the winners of an adventure game competition, I managed to start an emulator, load a disk image of the programs from that month, and begin an adventure titled “The CoCo Zone.” After an “imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit” opening and a beeped-out version of what I understand to be the familiar Twilight Zone theme (but haven’t yet reached in my set), however, poking through the hallways of a completely empty prison might have made the title begin to seem an effort at borrowed gravitas. In any case I was interested in getting back to the show itself. The episode ahead was the last one left I’d first experienced via comics adaptations (although I’ve read an additional volume of short story adaptations of episodes still to come).
( The national pastime )

Keeping up with a sort of digest of “Color Computer news” (it was where I’d learned about the regional antique computer exposition I went to last year), I saw a pointer to a video promising a detailed look at a game ported to computers including the “CoCo 3,” Rescue on Fractalus. The game (an early work from Lucasfilm Games, later LucasArts) was a sort of science fiction flight simulator where you flew down valleys and over mountains generated via what was just becoming a buzzword, “fractals,” shooting alien gun turrets off the ridges and landing to rescue crashed pilots. While my recollections have my family only buying the game during the final closeout sales at Radio Shack on Color Computer software, by which the state of the art for people who’d bought more expensive computers had become Wing Commander, I’d played Rescue on Fractalus enough to take some interest in the video.
( Returning to the rescue )

On some level I’ve always been a bit distanced from most computer and video games. This stretches all the way from the low-resolution TRS-80 and four-colour Color Computer knockoffs of games for other platforms to the modern complaints that Apple never does enough to get developers putting games on its (conventional) computers. In these recent days of getting my hands on Apple Silicon myself, though, I did start thinking about certain claims about a program I’ve used for less demanding things (including running a particular Color Computer 3 emulator, if not so much to “play games” for it these days...)

Once I’d installed the Steam client at last in CrossOver, I turned to some games I hadn’t been able to play since (or hadn’t got around to playing until) “32-bit support” was taken out of the Macintosh operating system. The first one I took a chance on was Portal, which I had finished and replayed before, but may remain the latest “now that’s a real game running on real computers” game I’ve taken on. That it worked at all was something. There were occasional unfortunate moments where the program would freeze as a fragment of sound looped endlessly (the most unfortunate after managing at last a string of “place new portals with seconds to spare”), but I was able to get my computer to where I could “force quit” the game. In the end, too, I got to the closing credits of the game, still a little conscious of my computer’s cooling fan having to speed up to where I could hear it. I’m not sure how many more Steam games I might be able to get running the same way. At the same time, I’m aware of having faced “not playing a lot of computer games” through frittering my time away in different ways.

As the Love Live School Idol Festival All Stars mobile game wound down over a span of months, I did know a new rhythm game in the multimedia franchise had started over in Japan. Aware of how much time out of a day I could sink into these games to collect their “daily items,” I told myself I was very resolved not to try that new game when it became available over here the way its predecessors had.
( An unfortunate announcement, an unfortunate temptation )

Two months ago I was tapping in as usual to the Love Live School Idol Festival All Stars mobile game when, in the course of reading the news updates, I ran into an announcement the game would be shutting down. Having plugged away at the game since it became available in English, the news was a bit of a jolt. No more than a few moments later, though, I was at least telling myself the game really was a time sink for all that I liked it well enough to keep playing, and through an intervention of sorts I’d be getting that time back even if only to fritter away on an assortment of things now. I’d also been thinking that in the summer I’d be at a point at last where I wouldn’t be able to tap into the game every day and would just have to deal with missing out on the daily and weekly items for a while. Having the game shut down altogether before that at least settled things there for me.
( Shutdown preparations )

In experimenting with “getting recent text adventures running on ‘8-bit computers,’” I found the resolve to at least try something other than programming exercises. One game using “PunyInform” caught my eye just for offering its source code as well. However, when I tried out a fresh-made Color Computer 3 disk image in the XRoar emulator, which had added support for that advanced model not that long ago, I found myself facing something I might only have noticed during spot-checks of the hacked Infocom game interpreter before. The text displayed as yellow characters on a green background; it was pretty hard to read.
( An adventure in itself )

Nudged by a mere indirect reference, I turned back to a particular “first-person shooter” from the mid-1990s. Although I’d played Bungie’s Marathon for quite a while, I know it’s been some time too since I last really dove into its action. Replacing both the “Aleph One” open-source engine now used with the old game files and the all-in-one bundles of the original games also available, I noticed the date stamps on the old programs were from before I’d got my current computer, and it’s been around for a while itself. I suppose that disconnection had to do with starting to use wireless keyboards without numeric keypads, which had provided me Marathon’s movement keys. Intent on at least trying “the way everyone says they’re playing these sorts of games these days,” I tried out the default setup of the game bundle, which moved ahead, backed up, and sidestepped with keys on the left-hand side of the keyboard and turned left and right and looked up and down with your “pointing device.” My trackpad, though, did seem a bit too sensitive that way.
( somewhere in the heavens... they are waiting )

The news Microsoft was buying Activision for a fabulous sum did show up where I couldn’t miss it, but also had me supposing that not owning a video game console or even being able to play “PC games” (from this side of the millennium, anyway) detached me a bit from the moment. There’s a danger in looking too askew at “video game narratives,” though, or at least in making too big a deal of that. A few weeks later, there was an announcement Sony was buying Bungie, and with the games Bungie made on the far side of the millennium a few more thoughts drifted through my mind (although I’m at least aware Activision wound up owning Infocom.)
( A few Bungie games brought up )

Seeing a bit of attention paid to "old computers" from an unexpected but notable direction did get me thinking of the home computer games I'd actually played when I was young (instead of managing to get around to them years later), and which of them might be called "personal standouts." I thought of the Pole Position imitation I would load and then twiddle the TV's tint knob until the blue "artifact colour" of the backgrounds changed to "green grass" (although the Radio Shack Color Computer 2 could start up with its blue and red artifact colours switched, which made for a different experience again), of the "first-person perspective maze" our disk had gone bad for unfortunately early on so that long years later it became one of my most notable pushes towards getting emulator programs working, and of several illustrated adventures, some easier to play all the way through than others. After remembering those and other Color Computer games, though, all of a sudden I reminded myself that before it my family had started out with a TRS-80 Model I. Even with its low-resolution black-and-white graphics (converted to black-and-green with a thick piece of green plastic foam-taped to the converted RCA surplus TV that served as its official monitor), we had some games for it. Two of them that came to mind right away were the Berzerk imitation "Robot Attack" and a "swoop a spaceship over an enemy base and through a cavern" game from a "software every month" cassette magazine, both of which I'd got working on emulators in recent years. That double revival, though, had also got me thinking of a third game stuck in my mind but which I hadn't been able to find in these latter days...
( The third game, and some illustrated proof )