User:Snarglefoop/Notable stuff

Everybody does it, it seems, after they've been around long enough and the brain rot has taken hold.

They write up the articles they've written up.

So I've written some stuff, I've drooled on a number of pages. And it's all really just a bunch of words

EXCEPT (YES REALLY) (THIS IS IMPORTANT)

for .....

GAMES I'VE WORKED ON
These are all legit puzzle games in the tradition of Adventure and Zork. They all can be solved (unless there are bugs whoopsie). (And they all should have little stickers at the end saying "I spent 500,000 hours solving this game and it wasn't worth it" but except for Rain of Dead Cats, they all don't, because I never got around to it, bad me. If anyone bugs me about it maybe I'll add some.)
What Difficulty Note-ish Stuff Rain of Dead Cats Easy It's got Communists, Capitalists, George W. Bush, bad puns, and a lot of dead cats. I didn't write this. Not completely. Somebody else wrote part of it and got bored and wandered off, so I finished it, adding some of the aforementioned capitalists and bad puns and stuff. It, alone of the games described here, can be edited by a normal person of sound mind. Furthermore, if you just "explore the game tree" by clicking all the links you'll eventually find your way to the ending. The Stench Medium difficulty -- you might solve it without going mad It's got an even worse smell than Rain of Dead Cats. It's got a balloon, it's got climbable trees, it's got a rather spiffy monster, and it's got a puzzle involving a dead elasmosaur which may make it harder than I think. I figured out how to add memory to a game on a Wiki, and wrote a script to help with writing the game. You have been warned. Captain Rant and the Celestial Pirates Insanely difficult It's got sea monsters, drunk Russians, a Klingon, and a dragon, to name just a few highlights. It's also got a cameo appearance by Oliver North. This marks the advent of the Dungeon Compiler Mark II, written in Perl, which was used to push Wiki technology to the limit. There is nothing reasonable about this game. Unfortunately, it is lacking in hints (which you will need). If anyone ever asked me for a hint on my talk page I'd ... well I'd something. Nobody ever has.  :-( NOTE: This includes a couple of random mazes, and P00psicle has discovered that with the latest MediaWiki upgrade random templates are not working right. However, a recent run through indicates the game still works and is still winnable, though there are a couple minor glitches in the formatting (one in the first room and one in the inventory list). The Sinkhole Wicked hard (but it's got built in hints) It's got insanity, hallucinations, hidden clues, random Zork references, an elephant, and wiener dogs ... just for starters. It's got hints available almost everywhere, and Heaven knows you'll need them. It entailed yet another complete rewrite of the dungeon compiler, this time in Python, because it was too complex for the first second version (written in Perl) to handle. There is nothing reasonable about this game. Beware the Road Goose Unknown Unfinished. It's got a goose in it but I ran out of energy before getting very far with it, and it's flat out impossible for anyone else to edit it (see previous comments about dungeon compilers) so if I don't finish it nobody will, sigh.

How Hard Can These Games Be?

They're "click-link" games, right? You start in a "room" in the "dungeon", and all you can do is click one of (a few) links to choose the next "room" to go to. Right? So, how hard can it be? Try all the possibilities, you're done, right?

Eh .... no.

In Zork, there are lots of "word choice" or "hidden idea" puzzles. Like, at some point you have to just type Give the egg to the thief, out of a clear sky. How you're supposed to guess that (short of hearing about it from someone else who played the game) is sure not clear to me. Obviously, that sort of "puzzle" is not possible in any of these games, because all the things you can do are right there in front of you, in the list of links you can click.

But again in the Zork series, in Zork Zero, there is a dead end: A road ends in a stone wall. To get past it, you must go to two other remote locations and pick up two halves of a "key" and you must then fit them together, and then bring the completed "key" to the stone wall. That is a "sequence puzzle" -- you need to do certain things in sequence in order to get through it. And that kind of thing sure exists in the games on this site.

So, for instance, just as a kind of hint .... in the Celestial Pirates, you need to find your way to Boston Harbor. That's not hard -- click enough links and you'll get there. But there's some exploring which you can do (or you can skip) along the way, and in the course of exploring, there's some stuff you may pick up. And it's stuff you'll need when you get to Boston Harbor. If you don't have it, well ... some things just won't be possible. The possibilities won't even appear on the menus.

You probably are starting to get the idea....

And in case you're wondering about how your inventory of stuff is tracked, and how the game "remembers" what you have and have not done ... Every "room" is actually cloned many times over, where the only difference between the clones is your inventory list and a set of flags which contain your game state. (And that is why these games can't be edited by hand.)