Metalhead. Rocket surgeon.
Outstanding. You had teachers that cared. Out of that list, A Modest Proposal was recommended to me by a history teacher, and Gulliver’s Travels was probably assigned reading at some point. I sought out the others on my own in my late teens.
I got into reviewing a few classics.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species.
Origin is a fascinating read. People give Galileo and Newton credit for founding true science and its methods, but Darwin earned credit too. He forced us all to understand that we are just animals, despite whatever the holy books say. That was a rough fight, and Darwin won. In so doing, he helped lay down the blueprint for how to do science.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1228
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince.
This is one of the most maligned pieces of literature ever written. It as coldly logical and sensible as could be imagined. Niccolò had some things to say, and whether or not you agree with his conclusions about how we should act, he is demonstrably correct about how we do act. This is a slim volume, written in direct language, doesn’t take too long to absorb.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57037
Johnathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
One of the most famous essays ever written. Savage satire that skewers the causes of the famines in Ireland in the 1700s. This is the same guy that wrote Gulliver’s Travels, which probably also has more teeth than one might expect upon re-reading it as an adult. Only a few pages long, A Modest Proposal is a master class in effective writing.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm
Dante Alighieri, The Inferno
Officially known as The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, this is a trilogy about someone losing his way and going to hell. And back. The Inferno is the first book, and unsurprisingly, the Hell bit is the only part really worth reading. To be honest, even just The Inferno is hard slog. It’s supposed to be a poem, or at least be in verse of some sort. It was published in 1321. That’s a lot of language gap, they simply talked a lot different. Anyway this work is where an awful lot of our conceptions of heaven and hell came from. It’s worth the time, if you can stand the very, very old text.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41537
I think I figured it out.
Look where the legs are. The chair started out facing parallel with the floorboards.
And then the AI turned it to slightly face the fire.
The AI doesn’t understand continuity and what components are connected, so it all came apart.
Kinda like if you took a square construction of loose wooden blocks and squished it to a parallelogram.
Well in this game, there was the chair (see my other comment) that no human would sit in.
There are other tells that process that doesn’t understand the continuity of solid objects created the game, not a person.
.
There were two other questionable bits where I don’t remember the original game, but it seems the AI flubbed. The 4 button dam controls were wonky: stop, start, bust the pipe, and what? And the cyclops room has a door you never get to open, no info about it.
All together, these seem like things no human would get wrong. Like, maybe a human would make a shitty chair, but they would almost certainly ensure that all the pieces fit together before they published the game.
My favorites are the Round Room that is square and the chair beside fireplace in in the house.
Like wtf is this cubist nightmare?
One thing I do NOT miss is navigating the twisty passages. The maze has been compressed to one room.
Hit L to turn out your light.
If you are holding the ivory torch, it just switches between the lamp and the torch, but if you only have the lamp, the light goes out.
And then the grue shows up.
I saved this for last. After I finished the game, I left the light off.
The grue shows up like three times and finally just eats you.
Upon further reflection, I think dying to the Grue was my favorite part of this game.
I played Zork a lot back in the day. You know, before the dawn of time.
This adaptation has one thing going for it. It plays a LOT faster than the original text game.
So far, I’ve not been told I’m likely to be eaten by a Grue. (This happens when you turn out the light.)
Finished it. About 2 hours of playtime.
The whole game is absolute shit. I cannot recommend it. But I did have fun.
Where’s the beans?
Ketchup sucks. And they spell it funny.
(Image stolen.)
Child. What do you think zDOOM is? Get a clue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5D
Original DOOM and DOOM II game engines were 2.5 D.
You could not look up and down or jump.
That is not to say that there was no z-axis in the maps themselves, but the game engine handled it in a simplified, flattened way.
Its been a really, really long time since Quake z-axis code was backported to create zDOOM.
You are a great example of people not realizing this.
ZDOOM is the DOOM we’ve all been playing for a really long time now.
Few even remember that the original release of DOOM was not full 3D. It was 2.5 dimensions. You couldn’t look up and down or jump. In fact, that’s where rocket-jumping came from, as it was the only way to go vertical.
ZDOOM was a backport of the z-axis code from Quake back into the DOOM engine. It enabled full 3D and dramatically enhanced the game. Carmack open-sourced DOOM code first, and then a couple years later Quake was open-sourced. The community did the rest.
I’m an old DOOMer. I’m gonna download this UZDOOM and give it a whirl.
Awesome. That spoke to you across 3 centuries.
It’s an amazing piece that absolutely sucker punches you.