"I got just what you need," he said and sat me down at his desk, turned on his computer, and fired up Doom II. My friend from across the hall knocked and asked how I was doing. I had a paper due, and my dad had started calling regularly, pretending to be suicidal. I was in college, having a particularly stressful day. But Doom II will always own a special place in my heart because of how I was introduced to it. Yeah, I know, Half-life is a better franchise. But I've found that devising a plot and filling it with rational, diegetic puzzles is no simple task.
#Ultima iii the floor attacks you for free
There are some amazing tools available for free with which you can make games quickly and easily. I never created a finished game, but the experience taught me a lot about programming. Playing Zork led me to writing and programing a game myself. Not only did it help me solve some difficult games and call upon the cryptology skills I learned from "The Gold Bug," it also had a section on creating text adventures on your own. I had to break the code-I am not making this up-then translate each hint one at a time. The book gave hints to Zork and other Infocom games in code. The Internet was still a gleam in some engineer's eye, so the only hints I had came from a peculiar book I bought about adventure games. Some days were successful simply because I discovered one more room or earned ten more points. I took the game to Joe's house, and we beat our collective brains against the devilish, though mostly logical, puzzles. I spent hours playing Zork and hours away from my CoCo thinking about Zork. When the troll swings his massive axe at your head, the beast conjured by your imagination is much scarier than any vector rendering created by a committee of artists could ever be. There's no graphics? What kind of game is that? Well, my jaded little dumpling, it's a fantastic game. Now as you try to explain text-based adventure games, the blank stares of those who grew up using a mouse will leave you disheartened. We quickly saved, turned off the game, and went to bed. But to our sleep-deprived brains, it was meant just for us. You should be in bed." It was a throwaway joke that could have surfaced at any time. Then we spoke to a character in a village, who said, "It's too late to be playing Ultima. I had thrown off the shackles of adult control. This was also my first time ever staying up that late. Only when the sun came up did we realize how long we'd been playing. We took turns playing, handing over the controller whenever we managed to kill off the whole party, which was often. The character selection, upping the stats, choosing the right equipment, learning spells, talking with NPCs. Ultima: Exodus was the first RPG I'd ever seen, and I was in love with the whole experience. Joe, Craig, and I were at Joe's house for the weekend, playing Nintendo. Video Games I Have Loved and That Have Loved Me Back by Michael Channing Ultima: Exodus for the NES