Computer Games – Spinor Info

Everybody wants to save the world, they just disagree on how

Computer Games, Television No Responses »

Apr 172024

I just finished watching the first (but hopefully not the only) season of the new Amazon Prime series, Fallout.

There have been three modern game franchises that I became quite fond of over the years, all of the post-apocalyptic genre: S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Metro, and Fallout. Metro has incredible storytelling: For instance, meeting the last surviving theater critic or the shadow artist at the half-flooded Bolshoi station of the Moscow Metro are moments I’ll never forget. And the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series has its own incredible moments, foremost among them when I finished the main storyline of the third installment, Call of Pripyat, by accident in the middle of the night, in-game time, and found myself alone, in the dead silence, near the center of a deserted, pitch dark Pripyat, with my comrades gone. The relief I felt when I retreated to the Laundromat and found that it was now full of lively stalkers like myself, eating, listening to music, sleeping… A reaffirmation of life in that dead city.

And then Fallout… Fallout is in a league of its own. I admit I only played the 3D open world installments of the franchise, starting with Fallout 3. A game that begins with The Ink Spots singing how they don’t want to put the world on fire… with the burned-out, post-nuclear ruins of the DC Mall serving as background scenery. A game in which, after “growing up” inside an underground Vault, you experience true daylight for the very first time, with eyes that never saw anything other than artificial lighting.

So it is this Fallout universe that was turned into a television series on Amazon Prime, and what a series it is. It captures the vibe of the game franchise perfectly, but it also stands on its own as a darn good television series.

The first five minutes of the first episode already contain an instant classic: The line uttered by a little girl as she, horrified, is looking at the growing mushroom cloud enveloping Los Angeles, trying to measure it by holding out her thumb, as taught by her dad. “Is it your thumb or mine?” she asks innocently.

But the real motto of the series is a statement made by one of the main protagonists, Maximus, in episode five. “Everybody wants to save the world,” Maximus observes, “they just disagree on how.”

Doesn’t that perfectly capture our present-day world of 2024, too, as we are slowly, but inevitably, stumbling towards a new “chaotic era” (to borrow an expression from another recent television adaptation, the 3 Body Problem)? I can only hope that we don’t all end up like Shady Sands, the one-time capital city of the New California Republic, pictured above. Because, as all Fallout players know, war… war never changes.

MUD1 in your browser

MUD, Personal No Responses »

Aug 072023

The game’s Web site may be dated (hey, it’s a nearly 20 year old template… yes, we’ve been around that long, a lot longer in fact) but it now has a new feature: it is again possible to play MUD1/British Legends from the browser.

The feature is experimental and may still need to be disabled if it glitches but here’s to hoping that it doesn’t.

Bioshock — the Twitter edition

Computer Games, Internet, Politics No Responses »

Apr 112023

So I am playing this iconic computer game, Bioshock, and its sequel Bioshock 2. The games are set in a magnificent underwater city that is in an advanced state of decay and societal collapse: a consequence of unconstrained, unregulated capitalism, Ayn Rand style. In the game’s universe, the city was created by a self-made billionaire in the wake of WW2 and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A way for the talented, the willing to escape from a world in which their wealth, the fruits of their labor were taken in the name of government, in the name of a deity, or in the name of the people. The founder’s name, not coincidentally, is a near anagram, a play on Ayn Rand’s name: Andrew Ryan.

As I watch the Twitter saga unfold, increasingly Andrew Ryan’s tragic (for that’s what it is, even if it is self-inflicted) fate reminds me of Elon Musk and his ever wilder shenanigans. And Twitter is beginning to feel like a digital equivalent of Ryan’s once striving city of Rapture: many of its corridors are now flooded, increasingly abandoned except for the remaining gene-altered freak show who still call Rapture home.

As of today, there’s a new alternative in addition to the decentralized world of Mastodon: Substack Notes. Will it be able to pick up the tab as Musk’s Twitter self-destructs? We shall see. Ironically, I would not even know about Substack Notes were it not for Musk’s tirade against it on, well, Twitter…

Computer games and reality

Computer Games, Politics No Responses »

Apr 072023

Computer games are often seen as a means to escape reality. But every so often, they come uncomfortably close to modeling reality.

Take Bioshock. In this game, the player explores in a glorious underwater metropolis… A metropolis founded by a billionaire who follows a version of Ayn Rand’s positivist philosophy. Fiction? As I walk around in that underwater city, now on the brink as its society collapsed due to extreme poverty, drug use, reckless medical experiments and worse, and as I listen to the rants of its founder, Andrew Ryan (a name that is an obvious play on Ayn Rand’s) I cannot escape the eerie sensation that I am listening to an alter ego of Elon Musk. While Ryan offers his “plasmids” for gene manipulation as he rants about the “parasites” (basically, anyone who needs any help from someone else), there’s Musk playing around the virtual metropolis of Twitter, now his personal playground, peddling his dogecoin (even swapping out Twitter’s logo for that stupid dog symbol) and labeling NPR as “state-affiliated media”.

And then there’s this classic text game, now nearly forty years old, from the legendary Infocom: A Mind Forever Voyaging. What an incredible experience it was to play that game, playing as an AI (!) protagonist, exploring simulations of a city ever further into the future, trying to find the causes of societal collapse. I read words like, “There is a factory on the eastern corner, and on the northern corner a boarded-up soup kitchen. To the west is a vacant lot, and south of here are some dilapidated apartments. The smell of stale urine wafts from a stairway leading down to a gloomy Tube station,” and suddenly I am reminded of very real images of present-day streets of San Francisco full of homeless tents, or the ever rising number of beggars at major intersections or downtown streets even here in shiny Ottawa. Please, folks, AMFV was supposed to be fiction, a cautionary tale, not a manual.

Homeless in San Francisco (2021)

Of course the Elon Musks of the world have a point: having grown up in a country with a communist regime, I know it only too well. But those who warn about the rising income and wealth gap, the vanishing of affordable housing must also be heard. Their concerns are real and pressing.

Perhaps, like Captain Kirk in the famous Star Trek episode, The Enemy Within, our societies also need both: a little bit of statist communism and a little bit of corporatist fascism to stay healthy, open, welcoming and, ultimately, stable and democratic?

Stray

Cats, Computer Games No Responses »

Jul 282022

So I’ve been playing this cyberpunk cat game (how could I possibly resist? The protagonist is a cat. I am quite fond of cats. And the game is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, my favorite genre, so to speak.)

But first…

* * * Spoiler alert! * * *

As I said, I was playing Stray. Beautiful game. The visuals are stunning, the story is engaging (reminds me of the quality of writing that went into the classic Infocom text adventure games in the early 1980s) and the cat is an orange tabby that looks and behaves just like our Freddy. What more can I ask for?

But then I realized that the story of Stray is incredibly sad. Even the ending can at best be described as bittersweet.

Because… because for starters, in Stray there are no humans. Only robots, which look very obviously robots, with display screens as faces showing cute emoticons.

The reason why there are only robots has to do with humans, and something unspeakably evil that these humans must have done in the distant past. The result: A walled city (“safest walled city on Earth!”) devoid of human inhabitants, infested with evolved trash-eating bacteria that now eat cats and robots both, and inhabited by kind, naive, incredibly gentle, almost innocent robots, former Companions, cleaning and maintenance staff who have become somewhat self-aware, mimicking the behavior of their former masters.

A few of these robots dream of the Outside, which is where the cat protagonist comes from, after falling off a broken pipe. His drone buddy, who turns out to carry the consciousness of a human (quite possibly the very last human), helps him navigate the dangers and eventually open up the city. He does so at the cost of his own life.

When the game ends, the cat is free, again walking under a blue sky chasing a butterfly. And this cat may very well be the last representative of our once great civilization. Because the robots do not form a functioning society. They go through the motions, sure, even running, rather pointlessly, barbershops and bars with robots for customers. They are so innocent, they are almost completely free of malice (apart from a few security robots and their drones) and they are incredibly polite: “What will it be today, little sir?” asks the robot bartender of the aforementioned bar, “Our world must seem gigantic from your little eyes. Wish I could be as tiny as you, so I could explore new hidden places.”

Yet their society is non-functional. They don’t make things, they just make use of the leftover remnants of a collapsed civilization.

The world of Stray, then, is more depressing than the various Wastelands of the Fallout game franchise. At least in the Wastelands, humans survive. Sure, the societies that emerge are often evil (the Enclave, the Institute) yet they present a path towards a better future. But the world of Stray, as far as humans are concerned, is irreversibly dead (unless a sequel introduces us to surviving enclaves of humans, but I sure hope that won’t happen, as it would ruin a great, if depressing, story.)

Hence my sense of melancholy when I was ultimately successful opening up the city, at the cost of losing my last NPC companion, the drone B-12. While it was hidden behind its impenetrable walls, the city of Stray preserved at least an echo, an image of the civilization that created it. Now that the city is open, what is going to happen as the robots disperse? What remains (other than lovely colonies of feral cats) after the last robot’s power supply runs out or the robot suffers some irreparable damage?

Not much, I think. The little eyes of Stray, the cat, may very well end up as the final witness to that echo of our existence.

Drawing circles in the 8-bit world

Computer Games, Programming No Responses »

Apr 272022

Someone reminded me that 40 years ago, when we developed games for the Commodore-64, there were no GPUs. That 8-bit CPUs did not even have a machine instruction for multiplication. And they were dreadfully slow.

Therefore, it was essential to use fast and efficient algorithms for graphics primitives.

One such primitive is Bresenham’s algorithm although back then, I didn’t know it had a name beyond being called a forward differences algorithm. It’s a wonderful, powerful example of an algorithm that produces a circle relying only on integer addition and bitwise shifts; never mind floating point, it doesn’t even need multiplication!

Here’s a C-language implementation for an R=20 circle (implemented in this case as a character map just for demonstration purposes):

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

#define R 20

void main(void)
{
    int x, y, d, dA, dB;
    int i;
    char B[2*R+1][2*R+2];

    memset(B, ' ', sizeof(B));
    for (i = 0; i < 2*R+1; i++) B[i][2*R+1] = 0;

    x = 0;
    y = R;
    d = 5 - (R<<2);
    dA = 12;
    dB = 20 - (R<<3);
    while (x<=y)
    {
        B[R+x][R+y] = B[R+x][R-y] = B[R-x][R+y] = B[R-x][R-y] =
        B[R+y][R+x] = B[R+y][R-x] = B[R-y][R+x] = B[R-y][R-x] = 'X';
        if (d<0)
        {
            d += dA;
            dB += 8;
        }
        else
        {
            y--;
            d += dB;
            dB += 16;
        }
        x++;
        dA += 8;
    }

    for (i = 0; i < 2*R+1; i++) printf("%s\n", B[i]);
}

And the output it produces:

                XXXXXXXXX                
             XXX         XXX             
           XX               XX           
         XX                   XX         
        X                       X        
       X                         X       
      X                           X      
     X                             X     
    X                               X    
   X                                 X   
   X                                 X   
  X                                   X  
  X                                   X  
 X                                     X 
 X                                     X 
 X                                     X 
X                                       X
X                                       X
X                                       X
X                                       X
X                                       X
X                                       X
X                                       X
X                                       X
X                                       X
 X                                     X 
 X                                     X 
 X                                     X 
  X                                   X  
  X                                   X  
   X                                 X   
   X                                 X   
    X                               X    
     X                             X     
      X                           X      
       X                         X       
        X                       X        
         XX                   XX         
           XX               XX           
             XXX         XXX             
                XXXXXXXXX

Don’t tell me it’s not beautiful. And even in machine language, it’s just a few dozen instructions.

Commit a virtual “crime”, do some real time…

Computer Games, Politics No Responses »

Feb 262022

This piece of news caught my attention a couple of weeks ago, before Tsar, pardon me, benevolent humble president Putin launched the opening salvo of what may yet prove to be WWIII and the end of civilization. Still, I think it offers insight into just how sick (and, by implication, how bloody dangerous) his regime really is.

We all agree that planning to blow up a major institution, even if it is a much disliked spy agency, is not a good idea. But this is what the evil extremist, hardliner Nikita Uvarov was trying to do when he was getting ready to blow up the headquarters of Russia’s FSB, its federal security service.

Oh wait… did I mention that Mr. Uvarov was 14 at the time, and the FSB building he was planning to demolish was, in fact, a virtual version that he himself and his buddies constructed in the online computer game Minecraft?

It didn’t deter Mother Russia’s fearless prosecutors, intent on restoring law and order and maintaining the security of the Russian state. A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Uvarov was sentenced, by a military court no less, to serve five years in a penal colony.

Podcast interview (in Hungarian)

Calculators, Computer Games, Hungary, MUD, Personal, Physics, Programming, Space No Responses »

Dec 222020

I was recently interviewed by a Hungarian podcaster, mostly about my participation in the early days of game development in Hungary, but also about my more recent work, including my scientific contributions.

I just listened to the interview and thankfully, I didn’t say anything colossally stupid.

Another friend gone

Computer Games, Mathematics, Personal 4 Responses »

Jul 162020

I met Gabor David back in 1982 when I became a member of the team we informally named F451 (inspired by Ray Bradbury of course.) Gabor was a close friend of Ferenc Szatmari. Together, they played an instrumental role in establishing a business relationship between the Hungarian firm Novotrade and its British partner, Andromeda, developing game programs for the Commodore 64.

In the months and years that followed, we spent a lot of time working together. I was proud to enjoy Gabor’s friendship. He was very knowledgeable, and also very committed to our success. We had some stressful times, to be sure, but also a lot of fun, frantic days (and many nights!) spent working together.

I remember Gabor’s deep, loud voice, with a slight speech impediment, a mild case of rhotacism. His face, too, I can recall with almost movie like quality.

He loved coffee more than I thought possible. He once dropped by at my place, not long after I managed to destroy my coffee maker, a stovetop espresso that I accidentally left on the stove for a good half hour. Gabor entered with the words, “Kids, do you have any coffee?” I tried to explain to him that the devil’s brew in that carafe was a bitter, undrinkable (and likely unhealthy) blend of burnt coffee and burnt rubber, but to no avail: he gulped it down like it was nectar.

After I left Hungary in 1986, we remained in sporadic contact. In fact, Gabor helped me with a small loan during my initial few weeks on Austria; for this, I was very grateful.

When I first visited Hungary as a newly minted Canadian citizen, after the collapse of communism there, Gabor was one of the few close friends that I sought out. I was hugely impressed. Gabor was now heading a company called Banknet, an international joint venture bringing business grade satellite-based Internet service to the country.

When our friend Ferenc was diagnosed with lung cancer, Gabor was distraught. He tried to help Feri with financing an unconventional treatment not covered by insurance. I pitched in, too. It was not enough to save Feri’s life: he passed away shortly thereafter, a loss I still feel more than two decades later.

My last conversation with Gabor was distressing. I don’t really remember the details, but I did learn that he suffered a stroke, and that he was worried that he would be placed under some form of guardianship. Soon thereafter, I lost touch; his phone number, as I recall, was disconnected and Gabor vanished.

Every so often, I looked for him on the Internet, on social media, but to no avail. His name is not uncommon, and moreover, as his last name also doubles as a first name for many, searches bring up far too many false positives. But last night, it occurred to me to search for his name and his original profession: “Dávid Gábor” “matematikus” (mathematician).

Jackpot, if it can be called that. One of the first hits that came up was a page from Hungary’s John von Neumann Computer Society, their information technology history forum, to be specific: a short biography of Gabor, together with his picture.

And from this page I learned that Gabor passed away almost six years ago, on November 10, 2014, at the age of 72.

Well… at least I now know. It has been a privilege knowing you, Gabor, and being able to count you among my friends. I learned a lot from you, and I cherish all those times that we spent working together.

Post-apocalyptia

Computer Games No Responses »

Sep 262017

Lately, I’ve been spending my free time playing post-apocalyptic computer games. Most recently, Fallout New Vegas, from which this screen shot of a full moon rising is taken.

I’ve now played a couple of Fallout games, the two Metro games and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game trilogy. Sure there are some common traits but these games are nonetheless quite different. Yet they all have their poetic moments.

The Metro games left the deepest impression on me, to be sure. The characters in these games were perhaps the most realistic, their despair as they clung to life in the tunnels of the Moscow metro under a dead city, almost tangible. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was something else… for starters, these were games set not in a dead world, only a dead zone in a world that was otherwise alive and well, presumably. And then, Fallout 3 and Fallout NV. When I began playing Fallout 3, I thought that the game lacked soul. Soon, I realized how wrong I was. While the message of the Metro games was that often, it was more satisfying to be merciful (indeed, you can pretty much play through both games without ever killing a human), the message of Fallout is that often there are no good options, only a choice between bad and worse. Killing bad guys or monsters is easy. Killing good guys because they must die for the greater good… Not the choice I’d care to make in real life.

Moleman

Computer Games, Hungary, Personal No Responses »

Jun 212017

I just finished watching a 2016 Hungarian documentary film about the early days of the computer game industry in Hungary.

I was also interviewed via Skype for this film, albeit not much of my conversation with the filmmaker remained in the final cut. But that’s okay… it is, in a sense, fitting, because after the first few “heroic” years, I was no longer taking part in games development, whereas others continued and produced some amazing software.

Anyhow, I enjoyed this film. I met familiar faces (though I admit I would not have recognized all of them on the street after 30-odd years) but I also found out details about those days that I just didn’t know. I don’t necessarily agree with everything that was said in the film, but by and large, I think it paints an interesting, reasonably complete, accurate and balanced picture of what computer game development was like, what it meant to us in the early 1980s behind the Iron Curtain.

For what it’s worth, I bought my downloadable copy. (No DRM.) I think films like these deserve our support.

Games as art

Computer Games No Responses »

May 162017

In my copious amounts of free time (yeah, right) I’ve been playing with the second installment in the Metro 2033 game franchise, Metro Last Light. Like its predecessor, it is set in (or mostly, under) post-apocalyptic Moscow, in what remains of the tunnels of the Moscow Metro, with stations acting as city states, and the protagonist fighting mutants, aliens and human enemies alike.

My only complaint about these games is that the gameplay is very linear: you just advance the story, your actions do not alter it in any meaningful way, apart from contributing to the choice of ending that is shown after the final battle.

But the atmosphere of the game is brilliant. Brilliantly dark, that is. And the game is beautifully crafted.

Here is one example: midway through the game, you find yourself in a station named Venice, so called because it is half-flooded. (Or was it the station under the Bolshoi Theatre? Not sure.) As you wonder around, you encounter… a shadow play artist, entertaining a small group of children, showing shadows, some of which are quite recognizable as the monsters of the game.

This character plays no role in the story. You do not interact with it. It does not advance the game in any which way. It’s just… there. Because… well, what would a post-apocalyptic subway station be like without a shadow play artist?

It was when I encountered this scene that I became fully hooked by the atmosphere of the Metro games. This is no more just entertainment… this is a form of art.

No Man’s Sky

Computer Games, Personal No Responses »

Oct 302016

And the most maligned game of the year award for 2016 goes to… undoubtedly, No Man’s Sky. This game was much hyped by its creator in the months leading up to its release, hugely disappointing its fans when the released version lacked many of the features that they anticipated.

I was not part of this lot, though. I have not even heard of No Man’s Sky until I was asked to review it by a customer.

I spent a bit of time playing with it. I actually found the game quite enjoyable, albeit a bit monotonous after a while. Game play, in the end, boils down to landing on a planet, collecting resources, upgrading your ship, suit, or weapon, and moving on. There is a very thin storyline about some perpetual conflict between the three alien races that you meet, the mysterious “sentinels”, and the even more mysterious Atlas that ultimately reveals that the galaxy which you explore is just a simulation (d’oh!) but I found it uncompelling. Still, I found the game strangely attractive. Perhaps because it is the ultimate sandbox environment: You are not confined to a building, a cave, a city, a country, or even to a whole planet: you have an entire universe to explore!

Still, I’d love to have seen more races, signs of civilization, alien cities covering entire continents… or for that matter, just continents and more variety in the landscape within a planet, differences between mountains and plains, polar and equatorial regions and the like.

In short, I have to agree with those reviewers that No Man’s Sky feels a little unfinished; it would make an excellent indie game, but it is a bit of a letdown when it is released at a premium price under a major label (SONY).

Like all other games, No Man’s Sky has its glitches. I certainly ran into a few of them. The most annoying is when the game slows down unexpectedly, for which the only remedy is to restart the game and reload the last save. Fortunately, the remaining glitches were much easier to overcome. Like, when I managed to land my spaceship on top of a freaking plant.

I also managed to land once on top of a tower, with my spaceship precariously balanced on one end, making it quite a challenge to get back on board.

Or how about my starship, which I swear I previously left on the ground, ending up high, way high up in the sky? Thankfully, by this time I knew how to call my spaceship back.

I once managed to fall out of the world. It is a bit disconcerting, but easy to solve by reloading my last save.

And once I happened upon a building that was mostly floating in the air. As it turns out, building floors are transparent from below. I was hoping to be able to enter areas that were previously inaccessible to me (I have not yet obtained the appropriate Atlas pass), but alas, the transparency did not go that far.

Speaking of spaceships, here is the cutest-looking ship that I managed to acquire during my travels:

Unfortunately I had to trade it away when a spaceship with a bigger cargo capacity became available. Maybe one day I’ll find another one like this, with more cargo space.

In the end, it seems to me that No Man’s Sky will not appeal to everyone, but to those who like it, it can be quite enjoyable with decent replay value. I still fire it up from time to time.

Visiting Pripyat

Computer Games, History, Technology No Responses »

Aug 062016

I have never been to the ghost city of Pripyat, evacuated in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

However, in recent days, I spent some of my free time fighting mutants, mercenaries, bandits and fanatics in and around a virtual version of Pripyat, in the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Call of Pripyat.

This game is the third installment in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, made by Ukrainian game developer GSC Game World.

And it is a damn good game (available without crippling DRM, courtesy of GOG.com; which is the only reason I purchased the game, as I do not buy DRM-protected crippleware.) The other two games are pretty darn good, too.

The games combine an iconic science fiction novella by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky with the realities of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (officially the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation.)

The novella, Roadside Picnic, is inspired by a vision of some careless visitors near a forest, who, after a brief stop, leave behind everything from trash to discarded spark plugs, perhaps a pocket knife or a forgotten transistor radio, or maybe even a pool of used motor oil. What do these strange, sometimes dangerous artifacts and anomalies mean to the forest’s animals? Now imagine a visit to the Earth by some equally careless members of an extraterrestrial supercivilization, with us playing the role of the forest’s fauna. What would we make of the often deadly, totally incomprehensible anomalies and artifacts? As such, the Visitation Zones become places of interest to all, including “stalkers”, freelancers who defy government restrictions and risk life and limb as they enter the Zone illegally to retrieve precious artifacts and substances from the Zone.

The novella was written 15 years before the Chernobyl disaster and its setting is a fictitious town in Canada. Nonetheless, the parallels between the novella’s fiction and Chernobyl’s reality are eerily striking: abandoned buildings, abandoned military equipment, locations with a dangerous buildup of radiation, not to mention what remained a still operating nuclear power plant for many years at the very center of the Exclusion Zone.

This, then, is the setting of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of games: The Zone, its abandoned industrial facilities, farms, vehicles and equipment, the town of Pripyat, even the nuclear plant itself, complete with its sarcophagus. In the fictitious storyline of the games, the 1986 disaster was followed by another man-made disaster some 20 years later, as the Zone, now largely uninhabited, was used as a place to conduct secret, often unsanctioned research.

Near the end of the third game, the player is presented with a choice of being part of an evacuation (which ends the game) or staying in Pripyat. I opted to stay. (OK, I had a saved game, so of course I could explore both scenarios.) After the helicopters left, I still had to dispatch a few enemies… but after that, there I was, standing in the middle of a square in Pripyat in the dead of night, with no friends, not even enemies, just silence occasionally broken by the howl of mutants in the distance. My safe house was gone, all I had was the equipment I carried… and I was alone.

I was honestly surprised by the intensity of this feeling of loneliness coming from a computer game.

Anyhow, I survived, morning came, and I was able to explore parts of Pripyat that I did not visit during the more intense game playing earlier. And thus, I happened upon a famous Pripyat landmark, the town’s never used Ferris wheel:

The Ferris wheel, along with the rest of Pripyat’s brand new amusement park, was set to open on May 1, 1986; unfortunately, the power plant disaster on April 26 scuttled those plans.

Sadly, I was unable to explore the Ferris wheel up close; it is located outside the region of Pripyat that is accessible to the player. But the area that can be explored is huge and terrifyingly gloomy, looking a little bit like pictures from North Korea:

As to the abandoned Soviet-era facilities, here is a splendid example:

Hey, when I took that screen shot, the Sun was almost shining!

The Sun was not shining, though, when I visited the Chernobyl nuclear plant in one of the earlier installments of the game:

But what a place it was. Mostly quiet deadly, even with the best equipment my game persona could muster.

Oh well, it was fun to play these games. Time to get back to work, though.

The Longest Journey ends

Computer Games, Personal, Politics No Responses »

Jun 232016

Ever since I first laid my hands on INFOCOM’s legendary titles like Zork, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’ve been a sucker for high quality computer adventure games.

Over the years, the genre evolved from text-based games to point-and-click graphical adventures, often set in freely explorable worlds. Myst remains a perfect example.

And then came The Longest Journey, one of the most epic adventure games ever created. Sure, its graphics and user interface are somewhat primitive by present-day standards, but the game was exciting, interesting, and—not unlike the best science fiction stories out there—it also served as a cautionary tale.

Then came its sequel, Dreamfall; a strangely flawed game with a moving storyline but stupid quirks like ill-designed action sequences that were more frustrating than enjoyable. Still, it was a great game because its story was great. But it was also unfinished.

Finally, after a successful crowdfunding campaign, came Dreamfall Chapters. Among other things its title reflects the fact that the game was released in five installments, or Books. The latest, Book Five: Redux, came out just a few days ago.

I now played this game to the end, and I remain deeply moved by its ending.

Yet I am also creeped out by the extent to which elements of the game—elements first released almost two years ago!—resemble present-day politics. Most notably, a political election campaign fought between a xenophobic populist whose party promises a new dawn, and a female center-left politician whose campaign turns out to be rather more corrupt than many thought. Sounds familiar? I emphasize, this part of the story was written in 2014 or before. Life imitating art? A mere coincidence? Or prophetic vision?

Cautionary tales are the best that the science fiction genre can offer. Dreamfall Chapters certainly did not disappoint.

Computer games from the past

Computer Games, MUD, Personal No Responses »

May 182016

A question on Quora made me reminisce about old computer games that make me feel somewhat nostalgic.

I’ve been involved with computer games both as a player and in a professional capacity for a very long time.

Long before I laid my hands on a personal computer, I was an avid player of Trek on a PDP/11. This was a game written for text terminals, simulating the mission of the Starship Enterprise through Klingon-infested space:

Another game of similar vintage, which I used to play on a peer-to-peer QNX network, is Hack:

Then there was the Commodore-64. Here are two Commodore-64 games that I remember fondly. Impossible Mission:

And Jumpman:

After the Commodore-64 came the Amiga. One of the first games I played on the Amiga 500 was the absolutely surrealist Mind Walker:

Very weird game. Memorable, algorithm-generated music. Ahead of its time.

Moving on to the PC (actually, I first played these on the Atari ST), there are the classic INFOCOM games. (Yes, I am taking the liberty of classifying pure text adventure games as “video games”.) Best known perhaps is Zork:

But there was also the unforgettable apocalyptic story of Trinity:

The equally unforgettable A Mind Forever Voyaging in which you get to play a disembodied artificial intelligence:

And the hilarious Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with its fiendishly impossible puzzles:

Still on the text game front, back in 1991 I began playing what was for me the first multiplayer online game, British Legends, aka. MUD (Multi-User Dungeon):

Meanwhile, on my PC, I was busy playing Duke Nukem, its platform versions first, eventually moving on to Duke Nukem 3D (which exists to this day in a community supported 32-bit high-resolution version, complete with NSFW imagery):

And then came Myst, the “killer app” for CD-ROMs:

Last but not least, a game that gave me tremendous amounts of joy, Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny (with none other than Patrick Stewart lending his voice acting skills to the CD version):

I remember all these games very fondly. And they are all still eminently playable, and very enjoyable, to this day.

Spying on trolls and warriors

MUD, Politics No Responses »

Dec 092013

Here is something new: America’s ever watchful National Security Agency is not content with spying in all the real lands of the world. Their interests also extend to imaginary realms, like the virtual world of Second Life and World of Warcraft.

Ostensibly, their concern is that terrorists around the world might be using online games for secret communication. The idea is not, in fact, new; for what it’s worth, a similar idea exists as a plot device in Margaret Atwood’s superb, dystopian Oryx and Crake trilogy.

So I guess I should count it as a blessing that other aspects of Atwood’s nightmarish future have not become reality yet. Instead of corporatist anarchy, all we have is a benevolent superstate ever more keen on enforcing Pax Americana. And who knows… our freedoms and privacy may be somewhat curtailed in this New World Order, but if the Roman example is any guide, it may be a small price to pay for centuries of stable prosperity.

Anyhow, for what it’s worth, as far as I know there is no spying going on in MUD1/British Legends and MUD2. I can actually vouch for MUD1 personally; I, after all, wrote the code for the current implementation.

Comprehension

Internet, MUD, Society No Responses »

Jan 172013

Many years ago, I created a form where players can sign up to play MUD2. To keep things relatively uncomplicated, I just created two fields for the player’s name: one labeled “Last Name” and the other, “First Name and Initials”. To me it was self-evident that if I encountered a form like this, I’d enter “Toth” and “Viktor T.”, respectively, into these fields.

But soon I found out that I was wrong. I got one signup after another like “Doe”, “John JD”. Or “Doe”, “John, JAD” if the delinquient’s middle name happened to start with an A.

What’s wrong with my form, I asked? Perhaps it’s my English? I quickly Googled “First name and initials” and found a great many hits. It was clear from the context that none of them asked for all your initials, only the initials of any additional given names that you might have, just like I did. Yet registrations in the form of Doe, John JD kept on coming. Do these people write “John JD” on passport and other official forms, too, when they are requested to enter their “Middle name and initials”?

Just to be absolutely clear, though, I added an asterisk to the field and a note: “*In case there’s a misunderstanding, this means any EXTRA initials you might have. If you’re called John A. Doe, put John A. in this field, not John JAD. And if you’re John Doe, well, that means that you have no initials to put here next to your first name!”

It didn’t help. To this date, I continue getting registrations in the form of Doe, John JD.

Nowadays, this is more amusing than annoying. I needed to know the name and country of residence of players when we charged for MUD2, for tax purposes (among other things, I was obliged to collect the Goods and Services Tax from Canadian players.) But now that the game is free, it really doesn’t matter anymore what your name is. So long as you supply a valid e-mail address, I have a means to contact you if I must (which means almost never. And no, I don’t collect and sell e-mail addresses.) But perhaps it does illustrate why I always found programming so much easier than dealing with people.

Good-bye, Nurse Chapel

MUD, Television No Responses »

Dec 192008

Sad news today: at the age of 76, Majel Roddenberry, aka. Nurse Christine Chapel from Star Trek and Lwaxana Troi from Star Trek: TNG, has passed away today. My she rest in peace.

Her husband, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, passed away over 17 years ago, on October 24, 1991. That date is memorable to me for another reason: it was on the morning of that day that I became a wizard of Richard Bartle’s classic multiplayer computer game, MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), aka British Legends, a game that I have ported to modern 32-bit platforms nearly a decade later and that I have been hosting ever since.