Bananadine, from Caltrops, has a thread going that depicts his attempts to bridge the gap between a Z-machine interpreter and the program Omegle. What is Omegle? It is a website that picks another user at random when you connect, and puts you in an awkward conversation. Here’s some of his output:

You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
You: Welcome to Adventure!
You: ADVENTURE
You: The Interactive Original
You: By Will Crowther (1973) and Don Woods (1977)
You: Reconstructed in three steps by:
You: Donald Ekman, David M. Baggett (1993) and Graham Nelson (1994)
You: [In memoriam Stephen Bishop (1820?-1857): GN]
You: Release 5 / Serial number 961209 / Inform v6.21(G0.33) Library 6/10
You: At End Of Road
You: You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
Stranger: The fuck
You: That’s not a verb I recognise.
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Unfortunately, there is almost literally…. literally NOTHING BUT THE ILLITERATE on Omegle. So this isn’t nearly as awesome as it could be.

Here’s the thread. Includes failed transcripts from games like LOCK & KEY and Sensory Jam.

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I had known about the beautiful program called Parchment for a few weeks now, but been unable to do anything about it. I assumed it would require throwing a web app on JC and … – I made poor assumptions. This is one of the, if not THE easiest way to play Interactive Fiction. I don’t even know what verbs I should be using here, because I did nothing but type in a link to get this going. “I arranged things so you can play two of my games using Parchment”? No. “I uploaded two of my games and … typed some stuff an-” – No!

“I did the barest minimum and now you can play two of my games over the Internet in a delightful font.” That’ll work.

Chicks Dig Jerks, using the Zcode web terp Parchment.
Revenger, using the same.

Many thanks to the Parchment team! I’m extremely delighted and extremely impressed.

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Ellison, Zarf and Rob at Infocom Headquarters

First off, these days, I’m kind of surprised when I meet people that I haven’t met before and find it especially enjoyable (I dunno, I’m fatalistic enough that I just get to a point where I figure I’ve met everyone I need to meet so far). I could list everyone I enjoyed talking to, but for fear of leaving anyone out, I’ll just give a special shout out to Mike Sousa, Worm, Chris Klimas, and Paul O’Brian since they are the most likely to read this.

I was very impressed with the quality of panels we had over the entire weekend. I was a little worried going into Robb’s panel that, being the one where people unfamiliar with the medium would go to, it would be the most watered-down talk of the weekend. Instead, it was quite the nice talk about various aspects of IF, and unsurprisingly, Robb delivered many of the funniest lines.

We had a panel the next day in the IF Suite about “IF Outreach”- promoting IF to new people. I was impressed with the caliber of the panelists. One guy was an AV Club writer for The Onion and another did stuff for jayisgames. It was great getting outside-the-community perspective from people who still appreciated the format.

The last talk on “adaptive difficulty” was good, too, but I’d like to chew on it some more before I really say much about it.

“Get Lamp” was good fun (and gave me my chance to finally thank Lebling personally for The Lurking Horror).

I think the weekend did a great job at showing new people that, yes, there is a community bundled with this gaming interest (which, sure, everyone knows but there’s just something about being crammed into a room full of people you’ve only known virtually). For us older people, many of whom are not as excited as we were when we found IF on the internet 10+ years ago, it was a great reminder that there are still new frontiers to be discovered in IF and that more progress and innovation are still ahead of us.

I know of at least three IF authors who haven’t written anything in years that have either already started coding something new or intend to, and I’m sure there are several more.

Near the end of the weekend, I was once again reminded that some of the recent IF games most mentioned aren’t similar in scope to the games I intend to write (I aim to continue writing games that are somewhat old-school, in at least limits-of-implementation and keeping-wordage-on-the-less-verbose-side aspects if not actual old-school puzzles), but the weekend was effective in making me rethink some scenes in the game I want to write (and I think it will be better for those changes).

Also, I have to admit, watching people code in Inform 7 is pretty even if I intend to stick with Hugo. Just the same, seeing that in person helps contribute to the whole “brave new world” feel.

All in all, the various game design talks were great, but just because I personally didn’t get into work-in-progress game mechanic discussions, I have found myself wanting another IF meet-up for authors where we concentrate on more on the applicable than the theoretical. Some other people feel the same way; we’ll see if it happens.

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Before I start: if anything I write below comes off as obnoxious or pretentious, it’s not intentional. Benjamin “Pinback” Parrish is under strict orders to punch me in the mouf if I get that way while talking about my experience at PAX East last weekend. He’s looking for an excuse; you have no idea how much he would love to fight me right now.

I was determined to go to PAX East once JScott said he was premiering GET LAMP at the con, so when Emily invited me to speak on the panel called Storytelling In The World of Interactive Fiction, it was a bonus to what was already going to be a great weekend. There was only one “problem,” scare quotes: I don’t talk about text games, verbally, with anyone.

It’s not because I don’t want to, it’s just because, well – the experiences I have as a player are solitary. My experiences as an author are also solitary, with the exception that one of three cats will attempt to carve their source code contributions into my arm using their claws. (Shit code, too, filled with semicolons.) I get my social fix from all this by going to a mud and reading a newsgroup instead of hanging out at an IF Suite. At one point during the weekend, Jeremy Freese asked me how I pronounce “Cryptozookeeper,” the name of the game I’m working on now. I really didn’t have an answer for him, because I’ve probably only referred to it five or six times in my real life. (Jeremy is a professor, so I’d be going with his recommendation anyway.) So I didn’t want to mess anything up due to simple inexperience about formulating my thoughts in the real world. I didn’t want to be asked a question and then have to write it down on paper, muttering “hold up…” while I crystalized my thoughts.

I also had no idea how any of these panels work. I asked over at Caltrops and got some good advice. From “N” over there:

[Y]ou probably want some talking points like:

o How to analyze storytelling and how somebody can even measure or determine efficacy.
o List of effective storytelling mechanics and some examples.
o List of ineffective storytelling mechanics and some examples (in other panelists’ work if you want the rest of the session to take care of itself).

I’m not recommending anyone head over there, but I’m very fond of all of them, and those are the kind of people I didn’t want to “let down,” I guess. It’s a jagged alliance at Caltrops anyway. Passing out on stage wasn’t going to help me. Slagging each other’s games would have made for an entertaining hour, but I don’t think it would have furthered the art form much.

I was the first person to make it to the Wyvern Theater at PAX, but that’s only because my friends helped me find it well before. Aaron Reed joined me a few minutes later with his laptop and I was slightly relieved – if nobody else showed up I’d commandeer his PC and the panel could be him giving me hints while I finished Blue Lacuna on the projector. I realize now it wouldn’t have done much for anyone attending, but I would have had a great time.

However, Rob, Zarf and Em arrived quickly thereafter and we were a go. Jason was also there filming, and he placed the lantern from his movie on the table next to me. I decided right then that if I froze up or something, my “out pitch” was going to be shoving the mic in the lamp’s face and letting it answer. That sounded a lot better in my anxious mind than it does typing it out, so I got lucky there. We all did.

I had two things mentally prepared for the panel, one of which I actually used. I wanted to note the intentional disconnect between player and player character in Pantomime, hoping to relate how I tried to start the character of Raif in an inevitable position to gain player sympathy, and then drive a wedge there, leveraging the fact that the exact opposite happens in three of my previous games. I got that in, but I was cognizant in the actual act of speaking that it that it was coming off as rehearsed. (The other bit I had planned beforehand was regarding stories in a non-traditional order: in No Time to Squeal, Mike Sousa and I centered a story around an unborn baby, and as someone who doesn’t have children and isn’t trusted with their care, I knew trying to write a game AS a baby wasn’t going to work. By me, I mean – Stephen Granade did a great job in the game Child’s Play where you’re just that. But one of the strengths of IF is that you can make a game with five different settings, because it’s the same “cost” to do a golf course, house, hospital as it is a Magnetic Scrolls-inspired-Wonderland. We were able to take advantage of the fact that all text costs the same… so go IF!) I never really prepare things beforehand because I hate how phony I sound when delivering it. When we got further into the panel and I was able to relax, I think I did a better job coming off as someone genuinely interested in IF.

My heart was racing during Emily’s opener, but by the end I felt completely at ease. I could have talked text games for another two hours. Three if we’re counting The Circuit’s Edge as a text game and, er, Inshallah. So my advice, if you ever find yourself on a panel for custom Doom 3 levels or something, is to surround yourself with a brilliant moderator and three other talented speakers. It takes the edge off; it would have been much more difficult if I were up there with Matt Barringer and Three Panks. I think the only part where I really diverged from my colleagues was when discussion turned to first-person shooters, Half-Life 2 specifically. I enjoy shooting people in the face, but I didn’t really care for HL2, so that was about the last game whose defense I was going to jump to. Although I would say that one of the most satisfying video game experiences of my life was in the level “We Don’t Go To Ravenholm,” the first time I threw one of those giant, circular, industrial razors at a zombie from half a mile away. (I didn’t want to say anything because it would take time away from IF, and there were other panels to discuss shooters, like every other video game panel in the whole of recorded human history.) But here’s the thing, even with that – Aaron had mentioned how he would have liked HL2 if the entire game had been hiding out from those fascists, and when I personally think back to HL2 for good thoughts, I remember throwing razors… and the part where you go up into the building at the beginning and look down at the troubles below. Offhand comments kind of inspired ideas for games I want to make one day, if that makes any sense.

One thing I noticed attending panels is that you can’t deadpan a joke initially – the audience, as a group, needs some sort of indication that you were kidding around. After that, everyone’s expectations have been set, and it’s all good. I attended the General Computer talk, and Kevin Osborn said something hilarious in a steady voice, and he didn’t get the laugh his comment deserved. I’m sure sociologists have researched group chortling dynamics to death, but still. (The General Computer talk was also notable as the guys there mentioned Racing the Beam to describe the method used to display four monsters-turned-ghosts via the Atari 2600. Racing the Beam was co-written by Nick Montfort, who was on the panel for GET LAMP. I wanted to text Nick that he just got his ass name-dropped!!!! by the GC guys, but I didn’t want them to see me texting on my phone because they would have had no idea it was texting through awesome, not boredom. But I loved how it was referenced, it was like, “fuck that 2600; read this one guy’s book describing it, we can’t get into that silicon monstrosity here.”)

We had some interesting questions at the end of the Interactive Fiction panel, although it’s my understanding that every one of these in the world gets multi-part, multiple questions. Alter Ego thought some of the questions went on for a while. Don Woods, Don FREAKING Woods got up to join the Q&A line and I was really pumped to hear what he had to say, though it was funny that HE was asking US something. The last question he asked me, 20 years ago, was if I was going to kill a dragon with what, psh, my bare hands, so it was great that there was a follow-up after all that time.

The final bit from the Q&A was from Jon Blask and it was there that I sort of completely and callously dropped a major spoiler for Pantomime. I had a half-second of mental hesitation before deciding to do it, but what the hell – hopefully it would be something crazy and unpredictable and leave everyone there with one last laugh.

I had an amazing time and if you were there, I hope you did too. If you got turned away, I feel terrible – if I could have done anything to help, I would have. I can’t wait to do all of this again sometime, although you’re gonna want to make sure you either finished Annoyotron or plan on skipping the Q&A, narmean.

I’ve got one other post in me about what it was like to be at the vendor table that I’m going to write up for the next issue of SPAG.
I tried for two minutes to attach a proper caption to that photo. It’s by Ben Collins-Sussman. Thanks, Ben!

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My favorite game developer is Steve Meretzky. I could go on at length about exactly why – I could totally spaz out in excruciating detail, like how the Malls n’ Muggers scene in Spellcasting 101 is one of the things I like best about video games… but I’ll simply say I want to make games like he does.

In 1998 I went to E3 with my pals Walrustitty and his girlfriend-turned-wife Cathy. It was in Atlanta, and I recall it behind hot, humid and miserable at day, but quite pleasant at night. The citizens seemed to have an almost palatable dread that their football team wouldn’t win it all before their rivals in New Orleans. I’m just kidding, nobody in Atlanta cares about the local teams. Douglas Adams was at E3 promoting Starship Titanic, an adventure game that he created with The Digital Village.

Douglas was sitting by himself before the official thing for Starship, and I had my “Masterpieces of Infocom” CD. I said hello and asked if he would sign it. He did and I thanked him and immediately left before I made a jackass out of myself. That was critical, I thought at the time.

I had always said that if I could ever add one autograph to that disc, it would be that of Douglas’s co-collaborator on the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game, Steve Meretzky. Well, on Friday, thanks to the generosity of GET LAMP director Jason Scott, I was able to meet Steve and tell him I love his games. I wanted to just put a picture of the CD on the Internet because otherwise it will just continue to be one of my favorite things at my house, and nobody can get here because of the hollyhocks and sunflowers.

You can click on it to get the larger photo. I know that HHGG isn’t actually on that disc (both Hitch-Hiker’s and Shogun were unable to be included, as they were based on previous novels) but I like it anyway. I probably even like it because of that. I don’t have many autographs or anything, but it makes me happy every time I look at that.

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Stephen King once said that he considers you talented at writing if you’re able to pay the electric bill with money somebody gave you for something you wrote. This is great, but I have an ever-increasing number of arcade games down here, meaning my electric bill creeps higher and higher each month.  I therefore become more and more untalented at writing in the eyes of Stephen King every time I add another one. This sucks, though I’m one impulse Pengo away from getting a three-picture deal as I transmorph into Dan Brown.

I can’t get any money from the writing of interactive fiction, but luckily that doesn’t stop me from pumping money into it. I just ordered 100 promotional CDs, to be handed out for free at the Interactive Fiction Suite at the end of the month at PAX East. If you don’t know what any of that means, here’s a link. I tried to add some new games to the 2005 version on the archive. I don’t want to imply that the only people likely to read this blog post are my fellow developers of Interactive Fiction, but if I didn’t add your game, it’s only because I got this project at the last minute and was only able to get a hold of people I already knew. Games 40-75 on the thing are just recompiled Annoyotrons. My favorite’s “grape,” and I think yours will be, too. In putting the disc together, I became extremely frustrated with both of the .ISO managers I used, but I complained into Google Buzz to ensure that nobody would ever, ever see it. Oh, except for Chinese nationalists (你好, amigos!).

I think we’ve got Mrs. Winchester’s other nightmare nicely defined here, but at any rate, that should prevent anyone just walking off with the entire spindle of discs because they were attracted to pure aesthetics of it.  I did clean up the ripped wallpaper under the Lacuna Bee, but – “Template Is On,” more like GAME IS ON, BABY one sec, I have to get the door, a guy is dropping off an environmental Boon-ga Boon-ga cabinet tonight.

Okay, I’m back. My kitchen is actually more of a patient-zero mess than the one on the disc there, so I have to go. See you at PAX East! Oh – right: the gentleman that dropped the game off was average in height, with a slender build and narrow shoulders.

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Alex Gray as Jarrett Duffy

I fixed a Linux bug in Necrotic Drift. You can get the latest version here. There’s no gameplay changes. Well, unless you were trying to play it in Linux (you might get farther now). Get v1.03 here: http://www.joltcountry.com/downloads/ndrift.zip

If you need the Hugo interpreter, I’d try here: http://www.generalcoffee.com/hugo/gethugo.html#linux

Or maybe Mike Snyder’s site here: http://www.sidneymerk.com/hugofree.shtml

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The hamper managed to tip over on all three cats, throwing them all into some kind of Parker Brother Presents Mouse Trap II: Kitty Jail, so I’m taking the ten minutes I have before the whining becomes unbearable at an evolutionary level to write up what I would have said on Twitter if I had more goddamn space.

But first a word – I like the 140 character limit. On Caltrops, we give people 80 characters in the message title of posts, and we frequently type our whole post in there. So Twitter gives me more space than what I am used to. Additionally, there is an appeal in brevity. If you’re at all like me and ruined your life at age 35, well, welcome to a world where texting a revolving stream of women is a valid method of communication you’d better be good at. I’m all for making a 700KB text game, but Sally ain’t reading that crap before deciding to call the third date off anyway.

Here’s a Twitter comment that could use some expanding in this, the Expanded Twitter Universe:

“So me, Galatea and Lex were the only people who didn’t go to #pax, and Lex already ‘did’ swine flu.(I’d risk it for early Scribblenauts,btw)”

Let’s break it down.

First thing you need to know is that PAX stands for the Penny Arcade … Expo, I think. Exhibit? I don’t really know, but it’s a convention and like the Montreal Expos, ultimately fated for disaster and ruin, as swine flu has been confirmed to be making the ways around.

I’m not going to go for the easy targets here – there’s a lot of ripe gamers. Senor Barborito called this unclean-ly valley shit years ago here, when it was called Lanwerx. Easy jokes that people are making, easily. Let’s go beyond that. My heart goes out to anyone who contracted hip SARS at PAX.

Emily Short wrote a tweet when PAX was actually going on that she felt like the only person who wasn’t attending. She also wrote a game with a richly-detailed non-player character named Galatea. (In retrospect, it seems like I am calling her Galatea. Not the case! I just thought it would be funnier to reference her creation instead. I can also see Galatea the statue being able to attend PAX before I get a chance to, actually/sadly.)

Lex is on Twitter as “Lettuphant.” He thought he was coming down with Swine Flu over Twitter a few weeks ago. Unfortunatley, I was really pressed for space, so I had to call him by his name, instead of his Twitter handle. (In fact, I had to go with his BBS name “Lex” instead of “Alex” because I was pressed for space.)

The last bit is about Scribblenauts. I can’t wait for Scribblenauts! Get this – somebody makes a game where you write in what objects you want your character to get… and they GET THEM. How great is that? You need a ladder in a game, you type in “ladder,” you get a ladder. You need a machine gun, you type in machine gun and – presto! I would literally give a finger for their database. I mean, not even kidding, that database is worth a small finger on my left, non-dominant hand. To me. (Erm, if I could use it to build a text game off it.) In fact, I’ll go ahead and say that if it contains what I think it does (properties of tens of thousands of everyday objects and animals) that it is the single most-valuable resource in video games today.

And apparently the game was at PAX, well before its release date.

I’d risk a little bit of flu to play it. It’s not like you’re guaranteed to get it. (Swine flu or a few minutes with Scribblenauts, actually.)  However, the thing is, I’ve been teasing my imagination with how it’s coming out next week and everything. I typed “Scribblenauts” into Google News a few hours ago at work and saw something about how it might be pushed to October. Oh no! It might just be the European release, which – honestly, the Europeans don’t deserve this indignity. I don’t have all the facts yet, but I can’t wait till this game comes out, even though there’s little chance it’s going to be as good as it is in my head, based on what I know of the concept.

At any rate, where I really wanted to go with this is how it would be great to make a language-independent, open source DB that was filled with all sorts of characteristics about everyday objects and creatures, for IF. I’ve started to finally implement things like “desk_class” and “table_class” in my own works-in-progress, but man, it’d be great to have access to more. Text game languages give us dozens of verbs “built in,” why not a complete living room set or office setup?

Someday!

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I’m replaying Circuit’s Edge, which was a graphical text adventure developed by Westwood, under the post-merger Infocom label. I once said it was the 59th best game ever made. While that list, um… is in desperate need of an update, I still feel it’s excellent, playing it in 2009 instead of 1989.

It’s great, yeah, but not perfect. In many cases, default dialogue is used for all characters on some plot-insensitive subjects.  The manual’s map is just wrong about the locations of certain shoppes. You can only save in Marid’s (the protagonist) apartment. There’s a police computer that will let you look up anyone if you know their full name – while it’s never mentioned in the game, I’ve read the three Budayeen books enough times to have the name of the Marid’s ex-girlfriend memorized (Yasmin Nablusi) and she’s not in there. I’m not saying it’s bad, but it could have been perfect.

(I’m going to hope the fact that the first thing I did when I gained access to a futuristic criminal database was look up an ex-girlfriend is just sort of glossed over here.)

But the game rocked my world during those years where your world can get rocked by things, and I’m thankful to know that it still holds up.

Circuit’s Edge was developed in part with the author of the source material, George Alec Effinger. George wrote three novels that featured Marid Audran, commonly referred to as the Budayeen series, for its setting. I’ve tried, over the years, to acquire everything George ever wrote. He’s my favorite author, and I suppose he always will be. But I have this “thing” about finishing games and reading everything a deceased author wrote, which is just – if you finish everything… then it’s over. There’s no new stuff. So long as I didn’t do the last couple of missions in Circuit’s Edge, the game would never really be over for me. But as I start to accept the fact that I’m going to have less and less time for gaming over the next thirty years,  well… okay, I just wanted to finish it.

Same with George’s books. I purchased a recent anthology titled A Thousand Deaths. It’s not a Budayeen-based work. Rather, it contains the stories involving one of George’s other protagonists, Sandor Courane.  Sandor – and this is not a spoiler, it’s on the dust jacket – passes away in a number of the stories George wrote that featured him. I’m just getting around to reading all the short stories within, but the feature is definitely the complete 1981 work The Wolves of Memory.  I don’t want to spoil anything, but George passed away at 56 after a long battle with stomach problems and while he wrote it well before having any idea of what his fate was, you can retro-fit some things as metaphor.

As an professional author, George didn’t have proper health insurance. He was great at what he did, but he wasn’t making the kind of money where money wasn’t a problem. After years of treatment at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, which he did not enjoy, he finally had an operation in “the early 1990s” at Tulane University Hospital. He wasn’t able to pay the bill, and the hospital went after the most valuable thing he had, his intellectual property.

I mean – okay, the hospital obviously needed to be paid, I have no problem with that. George shut it down, when it came to the Budayeen, after that. He got two chapters into the fourth Marid Audran novel (and honestly, having read them, they are the best work he ever did, his characters absolutely crackle with life, and whatever reservations I had with much of the third novel, The Exile Kiss, are blown away. The man was at the top of his game.) and that’s all he ever did. He wasn’t going to work on it if every penny was going to directly go to the hospital.

You can criticize his decision. You can criticize the heartlessness of the hospital. My hobby of making text games is, at some level, and attempt to make the kinds of things that people that loved George’s writing might enjoy, without mimicking him. It’s that way for me because I feel there was at least one amazing novel we never got because of circumstance. So that’s why I’m in favor of some kind of universal health care in this country. I couldn’t speak to the details, or how anyone’s going to pay for anything, but it seems silly that lives are saved and financially destroyed at the same time.

I believe that Fyodor Dostoyevsky said “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering the prisons.” (For real, it’s what I believe, I had the quote totally wrong in my mind and did some Googling, and came up with that. It’s totally not fact-checked.) And that’s fine, but I think you can say something similar regarding how it treats its artists.

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I wrote a scene in Fallacy of Dawn where the player is expected to give horrible games to a clerk that is a bit of a gaming elitist. The clerk can’t BELIEVE you came to the counter with a few gems from the bargain bin, and… okay, it isn’t the best puzzle in the world. 

My brother gave me Battlecruiser: 3000 AD for Christmas one year. This is because he is the greatest brother, ever. (He also played Delarion Yar, the main character in Fallacy of Dawn, and doing that even though it greatly annoyed him also makes him the greatest brother, ever.) The idea of a bunch of people going to work and finshing up with something that is truly miserable does sort of fascinate me in a perverse way.

There really is a sort of “classic” list of the worst video games in the world. I’ll try to list them below. They are the ones that always seem to show up on lists like “The 20 Worst Games of All-Time” and such. Annnnnd, because I am an enormous dork, I can’t help but read every “Worst Games Ever” article ever made. It’s a curse.

The list: Pac-Man, E.T. and Custer’s Revenge for the Atari 2600. Superman for the Nintendo 64. Battlecruiser 3000AD, Extreme Paintbrawl, Daikatana* and Outpost for the PC. Rise of the Robots for the Amiga. Finishing up is Sewer Shark and Night Trap for the Sega CD.

I mean, that is a fairly standard list. Season to taste, certainly. You can’t go wrong with those. A list generated by a group of game journalists would probably include those games (although PC Gamer was good enough to give the completely unfinished Outpost a 93%). Sprinkle with something acerbic regarding the Virtual Boy and you have yourself an article. Gamasutra could turn the above list into 33 pages and then remove the “print” option so they can level up their Adsense account. 

… And personally, hey, I never questioned those choices. I certainly did not feel that E.T. and Pac-Man were terrible games when I was growing up, but that’s not been a fight I felt passionate about. They didn’t seem any worse than many other 2600 games, and I did not spend a terrible amount of time in arcades when I was like seven, so the “real” Pac-Man was not burned into my memory. And in all honesty, they are usually included because what they represent, which was the temporary death of the domestic gaming industry.

(I began a thread on my BBS about the worst games ever, and I was trying to limit it to games I actually played and personally detested. Pac-Man, E.T. and so forth weren’t going to be on it. The thread sort of stalled because I promised myself that I’d go back and re-play every single game… and honestly, it’s just been a little difficult finding the time to play in irony the last couple of months.) 

But here is the reason I am writing all of this. Tonight, I was sent a Youtube video that shows the final scene to Night Trap. I am actually angry about this – I am smiling in anger.

At the very end of the video, you imprison some… well, I don’t know what they are specifically, a vampire or shadowbitch or something. (The last girl on the screen before Dana Plato is one such monster.) And then Dana tells you what a great guy you are for solving the game and saving all the girls you could. Right on. 

She turns to leave, walks down the hall and says, “Nah, you wouldn’t.”

At this point in the video, it appears that the same trap was triggered for her, the protagonist, as was triggered for the vampire a moment earlier. And I just assumed that the ending of the game was like that. But my friend said, no, you can actually press the “trap” button there. You have to press it for that to happen.

That’s when everything I thought I knew turned false.

What? What the — what? That is unbelievable! That totally gives the player a chance to – in NIGHT TRAP OF ALL GAMES, it — all right, I am going to try to compose myself here. It’s amazing and unexpected.

OK, first off, letting a trap be invoked right there messes with the player/player character relationship. That is supposed to be one of the big “things” you can experiment with in text adventures, and here is a wholly miserable and unloved FMV game pulling it off. And it’s our thing! Not Full Motion Video’s thing! It’s IF’s thing! Secondly, it allows for a meaningful moral choice right at the end of the game. Yes, it is a binary decision, and those can be as lame as they were in BioShock, but in Night Trap, it’s fast, it’s quick – you’re deciding what to do in a split second and the real-time nature of Night Trap actually works in its favor, to its credit. (Believe me, when I woke up today, I didn’t think I’d end it complimenting frigging Night Trap.) 

Lastly,  even in a game with universally terrible acting like Night Trap, Dana Plato is good enough to act distressed for three seconds. Admittedly, the laughable CGI effect that follows ruins the moment, but for a few seconds there is an actual bit of negative feedback as the PC screams and pleads for her own life.

And this is supposed to be one of the worst games of all-time.

I played Night Trap once, briefly, when it was new, and yeah – it sucks. Totally and completely. The writing is terrible, the acting embarrassing, and the gameplay kind of stale. I’m not trying to argue otherwise. But I can safely say that this “twist,” or this last-second player decision saves it from the rep it got over the years. I used to believe that there was no point in continuing to play a horrible game after a couple hours, but for the first time, Night Trap has me thinking, maybe, otherwise. It’s a total revelation. And in my opinion, it should be more famous for that.

*I purchased Daikatana last year, from a vendor on eBay. I had to know if it was as terrible as everyone says. It’s not great, but again, it’s nowhere near one of the “worst games of all-time.” And getting mad at John Romero is like getting mad at Manny Ramirez for something. You know what you’re in for, and Ion Storm the company was probably as bad an idea as Manny being allowed to manage the Washington Nationalsin 2014. But no, Daikatana wasn’t that unpleasant. If I get on Youtube tonight and find that the ending of Daikatana has you making a choice about the fate of Hiro Miyamoto, I am going to hang myself.

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