Escape from planet earth torrent

Go to the "Customize" screen, and change the settings to your liking. Once here, though, don't create the world. Instead, press the ' In this screen, you will see a copybox which you can select to copy the worl Yahoo Web Search Yahoo Settings. Sign In. Search query. All Videos Images News. Local Shopping. Past week. Anytime Past day Past week Past month. About 49 search results. Author: Mel Burke. Author: Joanna Gillan. People also ask.

What is New 52 Earth? In the alternate New 52 Earth known as Earth, an idyllic Silver Age version of the s prevails, where John Fitzgerald Kennedy was not assassinated in , and an analogue Justice League exists, with a Martian Manhunter as one of its members, although troubled by US anti-communism and xenophobia in this Cold War historical context.

Parental guidance. Escape From Planet Earth. Once you select Rent you'll have 14 days to start watching the movie and 48 hours to finish it. Can't play on this device. Check system requirements. Available on HoloLens. Mobile device. Xbox The runners who came first and last both win.

This is my proof, the pledge of what I tell you. My husband passed the news to me from Troy. In this fascinating passage, then, we learn of what may have been the first near-instantaneous long-distance communications network ever conceived, dating back more than years. The signal began with a burning pyre atop Mount Ida near Troy itself, then flashed onward like a torch being passed between the members of a relay team: to the highlands of the island of Lemnos, to Mount Athos on a northeastern peninsula of the Greek mainland, to the northern tip of the island of Euboea, to finally reach the mainland city of Aulas, whence the Greek fleet had sailed for Troy so long before.

From there, the signal fires spread across Greece. Historians and geographers are skeptical whether such a signal system might truly have been practicable, even given the mountainous landscape of the region with its many rarefied peaks. But even if it never existed in reality, Aeschylus — or some other, anonymous earlier Greek who created the legend before him — deserves a great deal of credit for imagining that such a thing might exist.

Others after Aeschylus refined the idea further, into something that would function over shorter distances in places without mountain peaks in useful proximity to one another, something that might be used to send a message at least slightly more complicated than word of a war won. During the Second Punic War of the late second century BC, both Rome and its enemy Carthage are believed to have built networks of signal towers for purposes of battlefield communication.

Very simple messages — signals to attack or withdraw, etc. But all such systems were sharply limited in the types of information they could transmit and the distances over which they could send it. On any broader, more flexible scale, the speed of communication was still the same as that of messengers on horseback, or of sailors in ships at the mercy of the wind and waves. The people of the past, for their part, had equally little conception of any alternative speed of communication; for them, the weeks that were required to, say, get a message from the Americas to Europe were as natural as a transatlantic telephone call is to us.

He became obsessed with the idea of a fast long-range communications network that could transmit messages as arbitrary as the content of any given written letter. He first thought of using electricity, a phenomenon which scientists and inventors were just starting to consider how to turn to practical purposes. But it was still a dangerous, untamed beast at this juncture, and Chappe quickly — and probably wisely — set it aside.

Next he turned to sound. He and his four brothers discovered that a cast-iron pot could be heard up to a quarter of a mile away if hit hard enough with a steel mallet. Thus by beating out patterns they could pass messages across reasonably long distances, a quarter-mile at a time. So, Chappe went back to the drawing board again — went back, in fact, to the ancient solution of optical signalling.

After much experimentation, he arrived at a system based on semaphores mounted atop towers. Each semaphore consisted of three separate, jointed pieces which could be positioned in multiple ways, enough so that there were fully 98 possible distinct configurations of the apparatus as a whole.

The other 92 stood for numbers. Chappe provided a code dictionary consisting of words, divided into 92 pages of 92 words each. The transmission of each word was a two-step procedure: first a number pointing to the page, then another pointing to the word on that page. Chappe envisioned a vast network of towers, separated from one another by 10 to 20 miles 15 to 30 kilometers depending on the terrain, the whole extending across the country of France or even eventually across the whole continent of Europe.

The system was labor-intensive, requiring as it did a pair of attendants in every tower. It was also slow — at best, it was good for about one word per minute — and at the mercy of the hours of daylight and to some extent the weather.

But when the conditions were right it worked. Appropriately given how the germ of the concept stemmed from Aeschylus, Chappe turned to Greek for a name for his invention. Living in revolutionary times tends to bring challenges along with benefits: Chappe and his brothers had to run for their lives during at least one of their tests, when a mob decided they must be Royalist sympathizers passing secret messages of sedition.

On the other hand, the new leaders of France were as eager as any have ever been to throw out the old ways of doing things and to embrace modernity in all its aspects. Some of the innovations they enacted, such as the metric system of measurement, have remained with us to this day; others, such as a new calendar that used ten-day weeks Revolutionary France had a positive mania for decimals , would prove less enduring.

And so, while other branches of the same Committee were carrying out the Reign of Terror with the assistance of Madame la Guillotine, Chappe was building a chain of signal towers stretching from Lille to Paris; the terminus in the capital stood on the dome of the Louvre Palace, newly re-purposed as a public art museum.

By the time Napoleon seized power from the corrupt and dysfunctional remnants of the Revolution in , most of France had been bound together in a web of towers and semaphores. But Chappe found himself increasingly sidelined by the French bureaucracy, even as he apparently suffered from a debilitating bladder disease. On January 25, , at the age of 42, he either cut his own throat while standing beneath a telegraph tower on the Rue de Saint Germain in Paris, or deliberately threw himself into a well, or stumbled accidentally into one.

Reports of the death of Claude Chappe, like many of those pertaining to his life, are confused and contradictory, a byproduct of the chaotic times in which he lived. This statue of Claude Chappe used to stand in central Paris on the site where some say he committed suicide, just next to one of his preserved telegraph towers.

His optical telegraph would live on for another half-century after him, growing to fully towers, concentrated in France but stretching as far as Amsterdam, Brussels, Mainz, Milan, Turin, and Venice.

According to folk history, it was used for the last time in , to bring news of the victory of France and its allies in the siege of Sevastopol — a fitting bookend for a system which had announced its arrival with word of another military victory more than 60 years before.

This semaphore tower stands in the commune of Saverne in the northeastern part of the country. This photograph of Samuel Morse was taken in , in the midst of his struggle to interest the world in his electric telegraph. An artist of real talent with a not unimpressive track record — he had once been commissioned to paint President James Monroe — he had previously been in the habit of prioritizing his muse over his earnings.

But now he was determined to change that: he went to the capital in the hope of becoming one of a small circle of painters who earned a steady living by making flattering official portraits of prominent men. On February 10, , Morse sent a letter back home to his wife in New Haven, Connecticut, with some exciting news: he had won a lucrative contract to paint the Marquis de Lafayette, a famous hero of both the American and French Revolutions. But his wife never got to read the letter: she had died on February 7.

The day after Morse had posted his missive, word of her death finally reached him. He immediately left for home, but by the time he arrived she had already been buried. The episode was a painful lesson in the shortcomings of current communications methods in the United States, a country which had not embraced even the optical telegraph.

In addition to his more well-known accomplishments as an inventor, Samuel Morse was a painter of no small talent and not inconsiderable importance. He painted his rather magnificent Grand Gallery of the Louvre on his trip to Europe of to Seven years later, Morse found himself aboard a packet ship called the Sully, returning to his homeland from France after an extended sojourn in Europe during which he had combined the profitable business of making miniature copies of European masterpieces with the more artistically satisfying one of trying to create new masterpieces of his own.

One of his fellow passengers enjoyed dabbling with electricity, and showed him a battery and some other toys he had brought onboard. Morse was not, as is sometimes claimed, a complete neophyte to the wonders of electricity at this point; a man of astonishingly diverse interests and aptitudes, he had attended a series of lectures on the subject a few years earlier, and had even befriended the instructor. Nevertheless, he clearly had a eureka moment aboard the Sully.

His surprise and excitement at the thought were in some ways a measure of his ignorance: the idea of an electric telegraph that would not be subject to all of the multitudinous drawbacks of optical systems was practically old hat by now in engineering and invention circles.

Still, no one had ever quite managed to get one to work well enough to be useful. This may strike us as odd today; as Tom Standage has noted in his book The Victorian Internet, any clever child of today can construct a working one-way electric telegraph in the course of an afternoon.

All you need is a length of wire, a breaker switch, an electric lamp of some sort, and a battery. But for electrical experimenters at the turn of the nineteenth century, the devil was in the details. One serious problem was that of detecting the presence or absence of electric current at all, many decades before reasonably reliable incandescent light bulbs became available.

By , it had been discovered that immersing the end of a live wire into water would generate telltale bubbles; we now understand that these are the result of a process known as electrolysis, in which an electric current breaks water molecules down into their component hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Experiments were conducted which attempted to apply this phenomenon to telegraphy, but it was difficult, to say the least, to read a coherent message from bubbles floating in a pot of water.

Electricity, in other words, generates its own magnetic field. By winding together a coil of wire, one can make an electromagnet, which affects a compass or anything else containing ferromagnetic materials just like an ordinary magnet, with one important difference: this magnet functions only when electric current is flowing through the coil. The implications for telegraphy were enormous: an electromagnet should finally make it possible to instantly and precisely detect the presence or absence of current in a wire.

In , a Briton named Peter Barlow, one of the eminent mathematical and scientific luminaries of his day, conducted a series of experiments to determine the scale of the problem. His conclusions gave little room for optimism. An American named Joseph Henry, a teacher of teenage boys at The Albany Academy in New York who was possessed at the time of neither a university degree nor an international reputation, conducted experiments of his own, and found that Barlow had been mistaken in one of his key conclusions: he found that the strength of a current was inversely proportional to its distance from the battery, full stop — i.

In the course of further experimenting, Henry discovered that higher voltages lost proportionally even less of their strength over distance than weaker ones. Fortunately, the state of the art in batteries was steadily improving. He published his findings in , while a blissfully unaware Samuel Morse was painting pictures in Europe. But the world of science and invention did take notice; suddenly a workable electric telegraph seemed like a practical possibility once again.

Meanwhile Morse spent the years after his eureka moment aboard the Sully as busily and diversely as ever: teaching art at New York University, teaching private pupils how to paint, painting more pictures of his own, serving on the American Academy of Fine Arts, writing feverish anti-Catholic screeds, even running for mayor of New York City under the auspices of the anti-immigration Native American Democratic Association.

Like too many men of his era, Morse was a thoroughgoing racist and bigot in addition to his more positive qualities. In light of all this activity, it would be a stretch to say he was consistently consumed with the possibility of an electric telegraph, but he clearly did tinker with the project intermittently, and may very well have followed the latest advancements in the field of electrical transmission closely as part of his interest.

But while people like Joseph Henry were asking whether and how an electrical signal might be sent over a long distance in the abstract, Morse was asking how an electric telegraph might actually function as a tool. How could you get messages into it, and how could you get them out of it? He designed his electric telegraph to work essentially like a long-distance printing press.

As he did so, the teeth on the metal type caused a breaker connected to the telegraph wire to close and open, producing a pattern of electrical pulses. We see here two pieces representing the number two, and one representing each of three, four, and five.

At the other end of the wire was an electromagnet, to which was mounted a pencil on the end of a spring-loaded arm made from a ferromagnetic metal. The nib of the pencil rested on a band of paper, which could be set in motion by means of a clockwork mechanism driven by a counterweight. When a message came down the wire, the electrical pulses caused the electromagnet to switch on and off, pulling the pencil up and down as the paper scrolled beneath it.

It was all quite fiddly and complicated, but by — i. Range was his biggest problem; not having access to the cutting-edge batteries that were available to Joseph Henry, Morse found that his first versions of his telegraph could only transmit a message 40 feet 12 meters. With his invention looking more and more promising, Morse befriended a younger man named Alfred Vail, the scion of a wealthy family with many industrial and political connections.

Vail became an important collaborator in ironing out the design of the telegraph, while his family signed on as backers, giving Morse access to much more advanced batteries among other benefits. This was not least because Morse was forced to set up his sending and receiving stations right next to one another in the same room, then to try to explain that the unruly tangle of wire lying piled up between them meant that they could just as well have been ten miles apart.

As it was, his telegraph looked like little more than a pointless parlor trick to busy men who believed they had more important things to worry about. So, Morse decided to try his luck in Europe. Upon arriving there, he learned to his discomfiture that various Europeans were already working on the same project he was.

In particular, a pair of Britons named William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, building upon the ideas and experiments of a Russian nobleman named Pavel Lvovitch Schilling, had made considerable progress on a system which transmitted signals over a set of ten wires to a set of five needles, causing them to tilt in different directions and thereby to signify different letters of the alphabet.

Yet few of the Europeans Morse met showed much interest in yet another electric-telegraph project, much less one from the other side of the Atlantic. He grew almost frantic with worry that one of the European projects would pan out before he could get his own telegraph into service.

Against all rhyme and reason, he began claiming that Cooke and Wheatstone had stolen from him the very idea for an electric telegraph; it had, he said, probably reached them through one of the other passengers who had sailed on the Sully back in This was of course absurd on the face of it; the idea of an electric telegraph in the broad strokes had been batted about for decades by that point.

Yet he heatedly insisted that he alone was the father of the electric telegraph in every sense. The argument quickly got personal. Morse returned to the United States in early a very angry man.

He now enlisted the nativist American press in his cause. But even Morse had to recognize eventually that such pettiness availed him little.

There came a point, not that long after his return to American shores, when he seemed ready to give up on his telegraph and all the bickering that had come to surround it in favor of a new passion.

While visiting Paris, he had seen some of the first photographs taken by Louis Daguerre, had even visited the artist and inventor personally in his studio. Morse also plunged back into reactionary politics with a passion; he ran again, still unsuccessfully, for mayor of New York on an anti-immigration, anti-Catholic, pro-slavery platform. Over in Britain, Cooke and Wheatstone had been making somewhat more headway. They had found that the men behind the new railroads that were then being built showed some interest in their telegraph as a means of keeping tabs on the progress of trains and avoiding that ultimate disaster of a collision.

Several more were installed over the next few years on other densely trafficked stretches. One story has it that, when three of the five indicator needles on the complex system conked out on one of the lines, the operators in the stations improvised a code for passing all the information they needed to using only the remaining two needles. The lesson thus imparted would only slowly dawn on our would-be electric-telegraph entrepreneurs on both sides of the Atlantic: that both of their systems were actually more complicated than they needed to be, that a simpler system would be cheaper and more reliable while still doing everything it needed to.

But first, the insult: flush with their relative success, Cooke and Wheatstone wrote to Morse in early to ask whether, in light of all his experience with electric telegraphy in general, he might be interested in peddling their system to the railroads in his country — in becoming, in other words, a mere salesman for their telegraph. It may have been intended as an honest conciliatory overture, a straightforward attempt to bury the hatchet.

He wrote a deferential letter to Joseph Henry, whose experiments had by now won him a position on the faculty of Princeton University and the reputation of the leading authority in the country on long-distance applications of electricity.

Morse knew that, if he could get Henry to throw his weight behind his telegraph, it might make all the difference. Not only did Henry reply in the negative, but he invited Morse up to Princeton to talk in person. This was, needless to say, exactly what Morse had been hoping for. Thus Henry was in attendance when Morse exhibited his telegraph in New York City in the summer of , garnering for it the first serious publicity it had received in a couple of years.

Morse continued beavering away at it, adding an important new feature: a sending and receiving station at each end of the same wire, to turn his telegraph into an effortless two-way communications medium. The British system, by contrast, required no fewer than twenty separate wires to accomplish the same thing. In December of , the growing buzz won Morse another hearing in Washington, D.

Knowing that this was almost certainly his last chance to secure government funding, he lobbied for and got access to two separate audience halls. He installed one station in each, and he and Alfred Vail then mediated a real-time conversation between two separate groups of politicians and bureaucrats who could neither see nor hear one another. This added bit of showmanship seemed to do the trick; at last some of those assembled seemed to grasp the potential of what they were seeing.

On February 23, , it passed the House by a vote of 89 to 83, with 70 abstainers. On March 3, the Senate passed it unanimously as a final piece of business in the literal last minute of the current term, and President John Tyler signed it.

More than a decade after the idea had come to him aboard the Sully, Morse finally had his chance to prove to the world how useful his telegraph could be. He had no small task before him: no one in the country had had ever attempted to run a permanent electrical cable over a distance of 40 miles before.

They agreed, in return for free use of the telegraph, thus further cementing a connection between railroads and telegraphs that would persist for many years. The project was beset with difficulties from the start. A plan to lay the cable underground, encased within custom-manufactured lead pipe, went horribly awry when the latter proved to be defective.

The team had to pull it all up again, whereupon Morse decided to string the cable along on poles instead, where it would be more exposed to the elements and to vandals but also much more accessible to repair crews; thus was born the ubiquitous telegraph — later telephone — pole. This experience may have taught Morse something of the virtues of robust simplicity.

At any rate, it was during the construction of the Washington-to-Baltimore line that he finally abandoned his complicated electrical printing press in favor of a sending apparatus that was about as simplistic as it could be. The receiving station, on the other hand, remained largely unchanged: a pencil or pen made marks on a paper tape turning beneath it. The Morse key. To facilitate communication using such a crude tool, Morse and Vail created the first draft of the system that would be known forevermore as Morse code.

After being further refined and simplified by the German Friedrich Clemens Gerke in , Morse code became the first widely used binary communications standard, the ancestor of later computer protocols like ASCII. In lieu of the zeroes and ones of the computer age, it encoded every letter and digit as a series of dots and dashes, which the operator at the sending end produced on the roll of paper at the other end of the line by pressing and releasing the Morse key quickly in the case of a dot or pressing and holding it for a somewhat longer time in the case of a dash.

The system demanded training and practice, not to mention significant manual dexterity, and was far from entirely foolproof even with a seasoned operator on each end of the line. Nonetheless, plenty of people would get very, very good at it, would learn practically to think in Morse code and to transcribe any text into dots and dashes almost as fast as you or I might type it on a computer keyboard.

And they would learn to turn a received sequence back into characters on the page with equal facility. The electromagnet attached to the stylus on the receiving end gave out a distinct whine when it was engaged; thanks to this, operators would soon learn to translate messages by ear alone in real time.

The sublime ballet of a telegraph line being operated well would become a pleasure to watch, in that way it is always wonderful to watch competent people who take pride in their skilled work going about it. On May 24, , the Washington-to-Baltimore telegraph line was officially opened for business.

Before an audience of journalists, politicians, and other luminaries, Morse himself tapped out the first message in, of all places, the chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States. At the other end of the line in Baltimore, Alfred Vail decoded it before an audience of his own.

Morse by Kenneth Silverman. As usual for my victory posts, the rest of them are needed for context. Via Every Game Going. So the most helpful hint Voltgloss gave was his giving the item list for entering the final section of the game drinking the potion and entering the ice palace which included the ring. I was forewarned — again, I had the item list — so I had the key already. A brief aside on the restarts: I think it is safe to say there was strong assumption at the time the final run at the game would be more a choreographed set of moves, rather than a coherent single-run story.

The difference is that Outer Wilds has lots of modern conveniences and things to explore and unlock, and Zodiac is on an Atom with miniscule memory space. Minimalism can feel like elegant poetry sometimes and not just awkward. The gold let me bribe Sagittarius, who then let me take his bow. I had typed HELP earlier and got. But it suggested to me, especially in the mindset of this game, that there was, in fact, someone who could help elsewhere.

Typing HELP while falling into the pit led to a giant hand scooping me up and dropping me into the next room, with a polar bear. The polar bear was easy to fell with the bow, and then it was on to the final zodiac room, Capricorn. I quickly realized — especially holding onto, still, the box filled with earth — that this meant the four classical elements.

A crystal ball from the ice palace could count for air, and the torch I still clung to counted for fire, but what about water? Where could I get water? This is the kind of brilliant part. You may want to read back over my previous posts before I go on and try to work it out. Way back, way way back, near the start, where I melted ice to get at a ring! This had the only water in the game. Fortunately, Voltgloss had also posted a walkthrough, so I poked inside to find out….

With all four elements in hand, I was able to finally stride past the final obstacle into victory. One of the contemporary reviews of this gives it higher marks than Death Satellite, in the sense that nothing is wasted. I can see the perspective here. Certainly at first appearances this struck me as unremarkable, and here I am on my third post and combined roughly at words.

I intentionally wanted an easy game because the game I have earmarked for the place after is in addition to being hotly anticipated by my readers legendary for being both difficult and very, very, very, very, very, long. Due to a hint in the advertising copy?! I was able to trudge up to seeing 11 out of 12 Zodiac rooms. Having read my prior post is essentially for understanding this one. The Ice giant attacks you. You survive. A giant dragon confronts your path.

The knife will kill it. Can you find it? Can you find the magic potion, will you ever reach the House of Immortality — the only safe place, or is it?

Maybe they had too many questions about the dragon? As this was a marginally improbable solve, I wandered by the right thing to do without knowing I was close. That combined with the fact the dragon eventually wakes up causing you to have to start over — no save game feature is what made me stuck. Knowing it had to be the dagger led me to think about the syntax a little more.

The axe which I had retrieved from a maze last time I then used to swiftly dispatch an ice giant. Notice the earth is not given as an item.

The magic ring I had got from melting ice here finally came in handy; I was able to RUB RING right before entering the walrus room, which turned me invisible long enough to get by. The dragon, no need for a ring, you just stab it; the walrus, be afraid. Bilbo clearly had his priorities wrong. The map has the obstacles — and the zodiac rooms — laid out in a quite linear way structurally, even though the directions twist and turn.

Remember, room exits are generally not described! Then I used the key that I got back at the Gemini twins to acquire a spellbook to go with a wand. I waved the wand and it opened another secret door, to a room with a potion. What makes this really hard to test is not only the lack of a save feature but the potion-transport moment of the game: it goes one-way. Testing any new theory requires restarting from the beginning and entering all the commands of the game so far.

I can relate to spending Christmas morning searching the trash, but I personally do it for those last few delectable drops of whiskey rather than the orphans. Christmas is my favorite holiday, and this is a great Christmas game. I just wish I could play with my fairy buddies or mine with a dwarf in this one just like Winter Wonderland. This game captures the true spirit of Christmas: ceaseless, selfless laboring on behalf of the less fortunate. I mean you are also trying to bang a chick, but the level of self-sacrifice exhibited here is truly astounding.

Author Info: OldGrover is one of those guys who briefly danced into our lives for a time, stole our hearts, and then vanished. The Christmas Party seems to be his only text adventure. Never forget OldGrover, kids.

It takes a brave man indeed to stand up to Big Muppet. Christmas can be a lot of work. Lots and lots of uncomfortably sober suffering. For my mom, Christmas meant hours upon hours of cooking and soothing irate relatives eternally on the warpath. My dad seemed to grow progressively more resigned as December proceeded until he gained the strength for a sudden flurry of intensely focused holiday activity. Acquire the tree, trim the tree, affix the tree to the stand, test the lights, replace the bulbs, place the lights.

Then he could relax and pretend like none of the festivities around him were actually happening. Christmas Dad was a bit like a Predator with a saw and electrical outlet for attachments in place of the speargun and disc.

He would emerge once more briefly to leave the denuded Christmas tree out for junk pickup. I always felt like this was a rather upsetting way to end the holiday season, but I still use the decompaction and landfill swimming skills I picked up back then today. I guess it was a tough love kind of thing. It can be quite a bit of work after all. What I like best about The Christmas Party is the distinctly unsentimental approach it takes to the holidays.

Bear in mind this is a game that was entered into a holiday-themed minicomp Text the Halls, Not going the sentimental route in this context carries a certain amount of risk. OldGrover had to change the name when he sensed it was attracting the wrong sort of audience. Your concerns are distinctly more practical and mundane than that. There even might be some DIY repair work to do and future fire hazards to create.

You could argue that while your character is not directly spreading holiday cheer as a conscripted handyman he is still doing all this work for the orphans. He has to care on some level, right? These women felt shocked, upset, and betrayed, and I understood why. I do see it as a violation of friendship to suddenly make a move on someone who has given no indication that they think of you as anything but a friend.

But I can understand things from the other side too. In that situation, do you always stifle your feelings for the sake of the friendship? Sometimes friends are the only ones that are there for you while lovers abandon and betray you. Plus, if you start leveling up self-control you can eventually start having attractive married friends and perhaps even be allowed to be in the same room as your stepsisters again.

Baby steps to glory! Obviously, The Christmas Party guy feels differently about the situation than I do. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt because maybe Melody did give out signals that she was interested. Melody wants the joint spruced up and looking Christmasy, but the player has to figure out just how to handle that task. You have to use your prior knowledge of Christmas customs and what orphans crave to put together this party.

I also have discovered a new environmentally friendly way to make popcorn thanks to my man Grover. The parser definitely makes the game much less playable than it could be. The whole trio of parser horror is here: lazy oversights, missing descriptions, and unreasonable pickiness.

I had to beat it partly just to spite the guy and for the sake of ball pride. I suppose a Christmas game that is fundamentally about home improvement and trying to bang your friend is probably never going to win anything, but I think The Christmas Party would be recommendable if only the parser was more responsive.

The game subverts our expectations for Christmas games in an interesting way, and it actually manages to vividly capture a seldom seen slice of the holidays by focusing on one of their least heartwarming aspects: the labor.

A lot of sweat goes into every cup of Christmas cheer. As fades into , I want to wish everyone a happy new year and remind each and every one of you to drive safe and bang your friends responsibly if at all! Courtesy of the Infocom Fact Sheet and this forum post.

Rooms: Vocabulary: Takeable Objects: 45 60 Size: Regular readers should know this well. I am tempted to say, with little evidence of any kind, that Planetfall is a nostalgic title in a genre that grows less and less nostalgic for the s as the years pile up. What do I mean by this? So far as I know, there is no ready demographic information to prove this, but I believe that, over the years, more and more fans of interactive fiction are not old enough to have played Infocom games in their original context.

What does it mean for a game to be nostalgic? It can be a cowardly way to tell someone that they cannot think objectively. And yet, some gaming moments truly are nostalgic. This distinction is important.

For the purposes of this discussion, gaming nostalgia is the recollection of a moment, or scene. I consider them singular, unrepeatable pockets of time. They may be milestone events in which our expectations of gaming as a medium are expanded. Nostalgia owes no proof to anyone. It is not the subject of debate, because it exists outside the realm of logic. It is a moment of pure subjectivity. Even now, 27 years later, I watch it and my eyes mist over—I do not exaggerate—this is the subjective truth of nostalgia.

I will not say which one, because this is a spoiler-free introduction, but I believe it affords an opportunity for a similarly singular moment for readers. And, of course, they are right to feel nostalgic, because, as the sole owners of their emotional lives, their vote is the only one that counts. No matter how many years pass, Planetfall will be the first interactive text to grant such a moment.

For some, it will always be, in its own sense, that one game. It is almost certainly most famous for its supporting character, a robot named Floyd. He is undoubtedly a nostalgic figure who raised expectations of non-player characters in video games, both in terms of emotional attachment as well as narrative import. I challenge readers to name a more affecting character in a video game that preceded Planetfall seriously! I may as well quote myself I am kamineko :.

The secret is Floyd; what a difference a robot makes! His implementation is incredibly shallow—you can ask him about anything and you can only get him to do a few things, and yet it really does feel as though he is your friend. He is the Eliza of computer game sidekicks. There is more to Planetfall than Floyd, of course, and not all of it is fun. Moreover, there are items scattered throughout the game that have no utility. There is probably a conversation to be had about the value of realism in Infocom games, perhaps science fiction games with talking robots in particular.

This work has been performed by people of goodwill. The question has to be asked, though—are the hassles of Planetfall artistically intended? If so, it is my opinion that they should remain as-is.

This seems an interactive fiction-specific endeavor. I am not aware, for instance, of John Donne scholars getting together to make his poems more enjoyable. For this discussion, I think intent is the key, and I consider Planetfall a special case.

In my final essay of this series, I will argue that inconvenience, needling, and busywork are, in fact, core to the experience of Planetfall, even if nobody likes it. The second essay, as always, will deal with the text itself. Apologies to everyone who has tried to get in touch! The issue is fixed now. As always, comments and tweets GolmacB are sound alternatives. I am also reachable at [email protected]. That session is now available on YouTube. Aaron A.

Reed has published the last posts in his 50 Years of Text Games series, covering A. Dungeon and Scents and Semiosis, looking at two very different types of generative storytelling.

The interview was conducted by Sara Uslenghi, but I restructured it into an ergodic experience drawing a little inspiration from Meanwhile for how to present a short choice-based piece in a visual, large-page format.

Liza Daly has released a new version of Windrift, her tool for writing hypertextual interactive fiction, along with some sample pieces that show off what it can currently do. I hope that you're all safe from the ravages of Covid. I hope to make amends in For the time being, I'm grateful for the efforts of my co-editors. Thank you, one and all - and thank you to all of you users out there who help keep the site busy.

Case in point: Our registered game count has just crossed the 9, mark ! Impressive indeed! I gave the historical background for this one already in my last post on Death Satellite. Keep in mind that game was first advertised in Your Computer in June, and this game was first advertised in September. While several months is not absurd for writing a era adventure game, the fast turnaround does mean this one might be more a cash-grab than the last.

The start, as shown above, made me think it was an Arctic Adventure lost-in-the-wild type situation, but in addition to ice-related antics the theme falls into having a sequence of rooms with ones in between named after the Zodiac.

This leads nearly to abstraction-as-environment, with places like. In a way, this is simply embracing the purity of the crossword in the crossword-vs-narrative battle. Adventure game entirely as challenge. And wurf, it is unfortunate it has challenge, because there is no walkthrough, hint sheet, etc.

One thing that helped a bit to start was being able to find a chink in the parser. When the game says. If either verb or noun is recognized, the game says. The right way to test verbs is to simply type them with no object at all. One of the most difficult is how to get past the bull in the House of Taurus — a problem which I wrestled with for a long time, along with a friend who has the same program.

I should have looked at the text here more carefully, this had a hint! The reviewer wrestled with the problem a long time, ha. Solving a puzzle by default, essentially. The idea behind it is simple. Gold Machine is a collection of formal in internet terms, anyway essays with academic influences. My solution is Gold Microphone, a podcast featuring informal discussions about these great games.

Callie is an English PhD candidate who is interested in ecology and the visual arts. Like me, she loves cats. To avoid too much retread with the blog, we will tackle the games in semi-random order. Unlike me, Callie is not very experienced with interactive fiction or s technology, which I believe is all for the best. Like me, Callie has experience teaching composition and creative writing at the college level.

If it is missing from your platform of choice, let me know. The first episode is about Wishbringer. As an extra, we unbox a sealed grey box of the game on camera here. We welcome feedback and comments. There are lots of ways to get ahold of Gold Machine: Twitter GomacB , comments below, or even email [email protected]. We may respond to you on the air! During the pandemic, however, gyms closed down, and I had to figure out what to do.

Instead of watching videos on my phone or tablet, I can just roll my bike in front of my computer monitor and watch whatever I want there.

This was a great replacement for my usual routine with the elliptical, but early this year I realized I could actually play video games while on the bike, too.