WELCOME TO WURB

Welcome to the World Wide Wurb What is wurb? Wurb is Carl Muckenhoupt's domain. There's no overarching theme to wurb; it's just a place to hold the odds and ends that I've wound up hosting for one

reason or another.

THE STACK - WURB

Demoniak is a 1991 text adventure that I mainly think of as Suspended taken to an extreme: it has a cast of about 50 characters, acting autonomously in the world, and with only a few exceptions, you can switch control to any of them at any time, including the antagonists. There’s a core team of five heroes with special powers, although only one of them thinks of herself as a superhero. THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: COMBAT UI I haven’t made a lot of progress in Pool of Radiance; I’m really only beginning the urban renewal of the city of Phlan (going through the slums, rousting out the squatters and slaughtering them with cold steel).I’ve honestly been avoiding it. Not because of any moral qualms — if there’s one thing D&D has taught us, it’s that there’s nothing bad about charging into someone’s THE STACK » TEMPEST 2000: CONTROLS Tempest, on the other hand, has genuinely rotary motion on screen. Any mouse-based control scheme is going to wind up either (a) moving the player in the opposite direction from the mouse motion some of the time, or (b) being more complicated than the simple two-direction spinning of the original. Now, Tempest 2000 has the additional

handicap

THE STACK » THE LONGING: FACE Maybe waking him up isn’t such a good idea after all. Taking a step back, it’s pretty clearly talking about the end of the game. When the 400 days are over, and the player is done playing, your longing for the ending is over, and the countdown at the top of the screen will end. Your longing for the ending satisfied, you no longer need

the

THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: RESTORATION It turns out that most of them are scrolls of Restoration. And a good thing, too, because I’m going to be moving on the graveyard pretty soon. And here’s the partial second-order retraction: the Restoration spell isn’t described in the Pool of Radiance documentation at all, presumably because your characters can’t learn

to cast it unaided.

THE STACK » TLC: BRANCHES AND ENDINGS In the end, Kathryn, knowing that her time in the house is over, tries to force Allison to a breakthrough by “killing” a doll that Allison had come to identify with Jody. Michael tries to stop her, there’s a struggle, and then comes the single greatest forking of paths in the game. Maybe he accidentally pushes her down the stairs,

maybe

THE STACK » CHRONO TRIGGER: ZABIE DOOR I keep seeing it mentioned that an experienced player can reach the ending of Chrono Trigger while skipping most of the content. I think of Myst as the extreme of this sort of thing: there, you can basically just skip straight to the ending if you know the combination to Atrus’s hidey-hole. Unless Chrono Trigger has some really non-obvious actions in the opening areas, it doesn’t look like THE STACK » IFCOMP 2016: DETECTIVELAND Spoilers follow the break. This is a private-eye pastiche, and a goofy one at that, a tongue-in-cheek period piece with occasional vintage pulp illustrations, all based on stereotype and broad slapstick. THE STACK » PUZZLE QUEST: CHOICES Puzzle Quest: Choices. Posted May 7, 2008 Comments (1) It turns out that level 50 is indeed the highest attainable. I have attained it, and I am now spending my time doing the last remaining batches of side-quests, forging new items, and researching spells. I’m a little reluctant to pursue the main quest line, because it seems to be

funneling

WELCOME TO WURB

Welcome to the World Wide Wurb What is wurb? Wurb is Carl Muckenhoupt's domain. There's no overarching theme to wurb; it's just a place to hold the odds and ends that I've wound up hosting for one

reason or another.

THE STACK - WURB

Demoniak is a 1991 text adventure that I mainly think of as Suspended taken to an extreme: it has a cast of about 50 characters, acting autonomously in the world, and with only a few exceptions, you can switch control to any of them at any time, including the antagonists. There’s a core team of five heroes with special powers, although only one of them thinks of herself as a superhero. THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: COMBAT UI I haven’t made a lot of progress in Pool of Radiance; I’m really only beginning the urban renewal of the city of Phlan (going through the slums, rousting out the squatters and slaughtering them with cold steel).I’ve honestly been avoiding it. Not because of any moral qualms — if there’s one thing D&D has taught us, it’s that there’s nothing bad about charging into someone’s THE STACK » TEMPEST 2000: CONTROLS Tempest, on the other hand, has genuinely rotary motion on screen. Any mouse-based control scheme is going to wind up either (a) moving the player in the opposite direction from the mouse motion some of the time, or (b) being more complicated than the simple two-direction spinning of the original. Now, Tempest 2000 has the additional

handicap

THE STACK » THE LONGING: FACE Maybe waking him up isn’t such a good idea after all. Taking a step back, it’s pretty clearly talking about the end of the game. When the 400 days are over, and the player is done playing, your longing for the ending is over, and the countdown at the top of the screen will end. Your longing for the ending satisfied, you no longer need

the

THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: RESTORATION It turns out that most of them are scrolls of Restoration. And a good thing, too, because I’m going to be moving on the graveyard pretty soon. And here’s the partial second-order retraction: the Restoration spell isn’t described in the Pool of Radiance documentation at all, presumably because your characters can’t learn

to cast it unaided.

THE STACK » TLC: BRANCHES AND ENDINGS In the end, Kathryn, knowing that her time in the house is over, tries to force Allison to a breakthrough by “killing” a doll that Allison had come to identify with Jody. Michael tries to stop her, there’s a struggle, and then comes the single greatest forking of paths in the game. Maybe he accidentally pushes her down the stairs,

maybe

THE STACK » CHRONO TRIGGER: ZABIE DOOR I keep seeing it mentioned that an experienced player can reach the ending of Chrono Trigger while skipping most of the content. I think of Myst as the extreme of this sort of thing: there, you can basically just skip straight to the ending if you know the combination to Atrus’s hidey-hole. Unless Chrono Trigger has some really non-obvious actions in the opening areas, it doesn’t look like THE STACK » IFCOMP 2016: DETECTIVELAND Spoilers follow the break. This is a private-eye pastiche, and a goofy one at that, a tongue-in-cheek period piece with occasional vintage pulp illustrations, all based on stereotype and broad slapstick. THE STACK » PUZZLE QUEST: CHOICES Puzzle Quest: Choices. Posted May 7, 2008 Comments (1) It turns out that level 50 is indeed the highest attainable. I have attained it, and I am now spending my time doing the last remaining batches of side-quests, forging new items, and researching spells. I’m a little reluctant to pursue the main quest line, because it seems to be

funneling

THE STACK » IFCOMP 2020: THE IMPOSSIBLE BOTTLE IFComp 2020: The Impossible Bottle. Posted November 15, 2020 Comments (0) A six-year-old girl helps her father with little chores around the house: cleaning up her toys, setting the table, that sort of thing. A dollhouse in her room bears a suspicious resemblance to the house itself, so you test it and confirm: the dollhouse is the house, or at THE STACK » IFCOMP 2019: SKYBREAK! IFComp 2019: Skybreak! It’s easy to get the impression that all of Interactive Fiction is based on just two models, the explorable environments typically seen in parser-based text adventures and the branching stories typically seen in hypertext. So it’s good to get occasional reminders that there are other alternatives. THE STACK » BABA IS YOU The most important predicate for these rules is YOU. Every level has a YOU statement, usually (but not always) BABA IS YOU — Baba is a sort of white oval-shaped quadruped. Apparently there’s some controversy over whether Baba is a sheep or a rabbit, but as far as I’m concerned, Baba is simply a Baba. (In the original game jam version THE STACK » EVERYDAY SHOOTER: END BOSS They’re generally the last thing in a level, and the way to finish level is to defeat the boss. But in Everyday Shooter, every level ends when its song is over. That’s so basic to the mechanics of the game that bosses aren’t allowed be an exception. The level 4 boss

explodes into a

THE STACK » FINAL FANTASY V: THE DEATH OF GALUF Final Fantasy V: The Death of Galuf. By now, all four of the original Dawn Warriors are dead. With the exception of Dorgan, who was already dead before the story began 1. Unless he’s actually alive, which wouldn’t surprise me at all. , they all heroically sacrificed themselves to help me escape X-Death’s clutches, symbolically

stepping

THE STACK » DINO CRISIS: CHARACTERS Dino Crisis: Characters. My last post described the mission leader, a man only referred to as “Gail”. It’s not clear if this is a first name or a last name, so it either fits in the tradition of tough guys with feminine names, like Firefly ‘s Jayne Cobb or Vyvyan from The Young Ones, or the tradition of Japanese game designers not THE STACK » CAT GIRL WITHOUT SALAD Cat Girl Without Salad is clearly descended from that, despite being a shoot-em-up instead of a platformer. It takes the “kooky girl” aspect and turns it up a few notches. There’s so much kooky banter in the game that it can’t be limited to the cutscenes, and instead plays out nonstop while you’re playing the game, providing an extra THE STACK » THRONE OF DARKNESS: WORDS 1. Answers: The “shinjyu” in the game, an enchanted string of beads, is probably 真珠, which means “pearl”. There’s also an item-enhancement component called a “pearl”, but I think that’s just a result of the developers not paying much attention to translations when they were choosing names. “Ka-ho” in the game is

a gem

THE STACK » DINO CRISIS: ENDINGS The third ending is the best of both options: the whole team escapes alive 1. Except for Cooper, who I had completely forgotten about when I wrote up the mission roster in a previous post, because he got eaten by the tyrannosaur before the opening cutscene was over. with Kirk in

custody.

THE STACK » DINO CRISIS: HEALTH AND AMMO tempestdash on 27 Jul 2010 . Similarly, in RE I only ever mixed herbs when I started to run out of inventory space. While taking three green herbs (which heal a little) and turning them into a green powder-of-some-sort (heals to full) is a good payoff, it was kind of annoying to only be hurt a little and have an inventory full of Heal

To Full items.

WELCOME TO WURB

Welcome to the World Wide Wurb What is wurb? Wurb is Carl Muckenhoupt's domain. There's no overarching theme to wurb; it's just a place to hold the odds and ends that I've wound up hosting for one

reason or another.

THE STACK - WURB

Demoniak is a 1991 text adventure that I mainly think of as Suspended taken to an extreme: it has a cast of about 50 characters, acting autonomously in the world, and with only a few exceptions, you can switch control to any of them at any time, including the antagonists. There’s a core team of five heroes with special powers, although only one of them thinks of herself as a superhero. THE STACK » BABA IS YOU The most important predicate for these rules is YOU. Every level has a YOU statement, usually (but not always) BABA IS YOU — Baba is a sort of white oval-shaped quadruped. Apparently there’s some controversy over whether Baba is a sheep or a rabbit, but as far as I’m concerned, Baba is simply a Baba. (In the original game jam version THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: COMBAT UI I haven’t made a lot of progress in Pool of Radiance; I’m really only beginning the urban renewal of the city of Phlan (going through the slums, rousting out the squatters and slaughtering them with cold steel).I’ve honestly been avoiding it. Not because of any moral qualms — if there’s one thing D&D has taught us, it’s that there’s nothing bad about charging into someone’s THE STACK » TEMPEST 2000: CONTROLS Tempest, on the other hand, has genuinely rotary motion on screen. Any mouse-based control scheme is going to wind up either (a) moving the player in the opposite direction from the mouse motion some of the time, or (b) being more complicated than the simple two-direction spinning of the original. Now, Tempest 2000 has the additional

handicap

THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: RESTORATION It turns out that most of them are scrolls of Restoration. And a good thing, too, because I’m going to be moving on the graveyard pretty soon. And here’s the partial second-order retraction: the Restoration spell isn’t described in the Pool of Radiance documentation at all, presumably because your characters can’t learn

to cast it unaided.

THE STACK » TLC: BRANCHES AND ENDINGS In the end, Kathryn, knowing that her time in the house is over, tries to force Allison to a breakthrough by “killing” a doll that Allison had come to identify with Jody. Michael tries to stop her, there’s a struggle, and then comes the single greatest forking of paths in the game. Maybe he accidentally pushes her down the stairs,

maybe

THE STACK » CHRONO TRIGGER: ZABIE DOOR I keep seeing it mentioned that an experienced player can reach the ending of Chrono Trigger while skipping most of the content. I think of Myst as the extreme of this sort of thing: there, you can basically just skip straight to the ending if you know the combination to Atrus’s hidey-hole. Unless Chrono Trigger has some really non-obvious actions in the opening areas, it doesn’t look like THE STACK » DINO CRISIS: CHARACTERS Dino Crisis: Characters. My last post described the mission leader, a man only referred to as “Gail”. It’s not clear if this is a first name or a last name, so it either fits in the tradition of tough guys with feminine names, like Firefly ‘s Jayne Cobb or Vyvyan from The Young Ones, or the tradition of Japanese game designers not THE STACK » TENDER LOVING CARE: TECH STUFF Tender Loving Care: Tech stuff. Tender Loving Care is one of an all-but-dead breed, the Interactive Movie. A lot of people seem to have been convinced at one point that this was the future of digital media. The whole phenomenon was inextricably bound up with the introduction of the CD-ROM, with its impressively large storage

capacity compared

WELCOME TO WURB

Welcome to the World Wide Wurb What is wurb? Wurb is Carl Muckenhoupt's domain. There's no overarching theme to wurb; it's just a place to hold the odds and ends that I've wound up hosting for one

reason or another.

THE STACK - WURB

Demoniak is a 1991 text adventure that I mainly think of as Suspended taken to an extreme: it has a cast of about 50 characters, acting autonomously in the world, and with only a few exceptions, you can switch control to any of them at any time, including the antagonists. There’s a core team of five heroes with special powers, although only one of them thinks of herself as a superhero. THE STACK » BABA IS YOU The most important predicate for these rules is YOU. Every level has a YOU statement, usually (but not always) BABA IS YOU — Baba is a sort of white oval-shaped quadruped. Apparently there’s some controversy over whether Baba is a sheep or a rabbit, but as far as I’m concerned, Baba is simply a Baba. (In the original game jam version THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: COMBAT UI I haven’t made a lot of progress in Pool of Radiance; I’m really only beginning the urban renewal of the city of Phlan (going through the slums, rousting out the squatters and slaughtering them with cold steel).I’ve honestly been avoiding it. Not because of any moral qualms — if there’s one thing D&D has taught us, it’s that there’s nothing bad about charging into someone’s THE STACK » TEMPEST 2000: CONTROLS Tempest, on the other hand, has genuinely rotary motion on screen. Any mouse-based control scheme is going to wind up either (a) moving the player in the opposite direction from the mouse motion some of the time, or (b) being more complicated than the simple two-direction spinning of the original. Now, Tempest 2000 has the additional

handicap

THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: RESTORATION It turns out that most of them are scrolls of Restoration. And a good thing, too, because I’m going to be moving on the graveyard pretty soon. And here’s the partial second-order retraction: the Restoration spell isn’t described in the Pool of Radiance documentation at all, presumably because your characters can’t learn

to cast it unaided.

THE STACK » TLC: BRANCHES AND ENDINGS In the end, Kathryn, knowing that her time in the house is over, tries to force Allison to a breakthrough by “killing” a doll that Allison had come to identify with Jody. Michael tries to stop her, there’s a struggle, and then comes the single greatest forking of paths in the game. Maybe he accidentally pushes her down the stairs,

maybe

THE STACK » CHRONO TRIGGER: ZABIE DOOR I keep seeing it mentioned that an experienced player can reach the ending of Chrono Trigger while skipping most of the content. I think of Myst as the extreme of this sort of thing: there, you can basically just skip straight to the ending if you know the combination to Atrus’s hidey-hole. Unless Chrono Trigger has some really non-obvious actions in the opening areas, it doesn’t look like THE STACK » DINO CRISIS: CHARACTERS Dino Crisis: Characters. My last post described the mission leader, a man only referred to as “Gail”. It’s not clear if this is a first name or a last name, so it either fits in the tradition of tough guys with feminine names, like Firefly ‘s Jayne Cobb or Vyvyan from The Young Ones, or the tradition of Japanese game designers not THE STACK » TENDER LOVING CARE: TECH STUFF Tender Loving Care: Tech stuff. Tender Loving Care is one of an all-but-dead breed, the Interactive Movie. A lot of people seem to have been convinced at one point that this was the future of digital media. The whole phenomenon was inextricably bound up with the introduction of the CD-ROM, with its impressively large storage

capacity compared

THE STACK » ABOUT

The stack is the set of games I have not yet completed. Although I call it a stack, it has been some years since it was physically possible to stack them all. In my youth, when my game-buying habits were formed, I had more time than money. Today, I have more money than time. As a result, for the last decade or so, I have bought games

faster

THE STACK » WINDOSILL Windosill is the sort of game where you have to poke at things to see how they react. It’s drawn comparisons to Cyan’s early works, such as The Manhole and Cosmic Osmo, because of its surrealist busy-box vibe.Those games, though intended for children, always had a slight tinge of menace to them, which I don’t think was intentional; it was just a side-effect of the gameworld’s utter THE STACK » STEALTH The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was released in 2004, which seems to be something of a turning-point year for graphics in games: this is the first game I’ve played in my chronological run-down that doesn’t look old-fashioned. At least, not to my eyes, which are probably kind of old-fashioned themselves. We’re almost up to the point in time where I more or less lost THE STACK » BLOODNET Bloodnet, from 1993, is one of the games that’s spent the most time on my Stack.Before there even was a Stack, really, there was always just a game or two that I hadn’t finished yet, and then Bloodnet, that one game that I had bought a few years back and never got very far in but intended to get back to at some point.. It’s one of the few point-and-click adventure games from Microprose THE STACK » THE TALOS PRINCIPLE Talos is a Portal-like — a first-person puzzle game, with precise solutions, marked by epiphanies about what the mechanics make possible. And in theme, it’s a meditation on mortality and entropy, and on finding meaning through obedience or defiance. It’s a bit self-serious at times, but then, it also throws in the occasional

jarring Sam

THE STACK » IFCOMP 2019: SKYBREAK! IFComp 2019: Skybreak! It’s easy to get the impression that all of Interactive Fiction is based on just two models, the explorable environments typically seen in parser-based text adventures and the branching stories typically seen in hypertext. So it’s good to get occasional reminders that there are other alternatives. THE STACK » DINO CRISIS: CHARACTERS Dino Crisis: Characters. My last post described the mission leader, a man only referred to as “Gail”. It’s not clear if this is a first name or a last name, so it either fits in the tradition of tough guys with feminine names, like Firefly ‘s Jayne Cobb or Vyvyan from The Young Ones, or the tradition of Japanese game designers not THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: OTHER UI It’s tolerable mainly because all it takes is a press of the default do-thing button, which you already have your thumb on at the time. In Pool of Radiance, you’re expected to press “T” for Take, then choose Money or Item, and then choose the individual moneys or items one by one from a further menu. For money, you get a menu of all the THE STACK » TENDER LOVING CARE: TECH STUFF Tender Loving Care is one of an all-but-dead breed, the Interactive Movie. A lot of people seem to have been convinced at one point that this was the future of digital media. The whole phenomenon was inextricably bound up with the introduction of the CD-ROM, with its impressively large storage capacity compared to floppy disks, making it suddenly practical to include heaps of choppy THE STACK » GAMES INTERACTIVE: THE REST OF LOGIC Paint By Numbers must have been good training for Battleships, either in solving technique, or in attaining the right mindset, or simply in

finding patience.

WELCOME TO WURB

Welcome to the World Wide Wurb What is wurb? Wurb is Carl Muckenhoupt's domain. There's no overarching theme to wurb; it's just a place to hold the odds and ends that I've wound up hosting for one

reason or another.

THE STACK - WURB

Demoniak is a 1991 text adventure that I mainly think of as Suspended taken to an extreme: it has a cast of about 50 characters, acting autonomously in the world, and with only a few exceptions, you can switch control to any of them at any time, including the antagonists. There’s a core team of five heroes with special powers, although only one of them thinks of herself as a superhero. THE STACK » BABA IS YOU The most important predicate for these rules is YOU. Every level has a YOU statement, usually (but not always) BABA IS YOU — Baba is a sort of white oval-shaped quadruped. Apparently there’s some controversy over whether Baba is a sheep or a rabbit, but as far as I’m concerned, Baba is simply a Baba. (In the original game jam version THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: COMBAT UI I haven’t made a lot of progress in Pool of Radiance; I’m really only beginning the urban renewal of the city of Phlan (going through the slums, rousting out the squatters and slaughtering them with cold steel).I’ve honestly been avoiding it. Not because of any moral qualms — if there’s one thing D&D has taught us, it’s that there’s nothing bad about charging into someone’s THE STACK » TEMPEST 2000: CONTROLS Tempest, on the other hand, has genuinely rotary motion on screen. Any mouse-based control scheme is going to wind up either (a) moving the player in the opposite direction from the mouse motion some of the time, or (b) being more complicated than the simple two-direction spinning of the original. Now, Tempest 2000 has the additional

handicap

THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: RESTORATION It turns out that most of them are scrolls of Restoration. And a good thing, too, because I’m going to be moving on the graveyard pretty soon. And here’s the partial second-order retraction: the Restoration spell isn’t described in the Pool of Radiance documentation at all, presumably because your characters can’t learn

to cast it unaided.

THE STACK » TLC: BRANCHES AND ENDINGS In the end, Kathryn, knowing that her time in the house is over, tries to force Allison to a breakthrough by “killing” a doll that Allison had come to identify with Jody. Michael tries to stop her, there’s a struggle, and then comes the single greatest forking of paths in the game. Maybe he accidentally pushes her down the stairs,

maybe

THE STACK » CHRONO TRIGGER: ZABIE DOOR I keep seeing it mentioned that an experienced player can reach the ending of Chrono Trigger while skipping most of the content. I think of Myst as the extreme of this sort of thing: there, you can basically just skip straight to the ending if you know the combination to Atrus’s hidey-hole. Unless Chrono Trigger has some really non-obvious actions in the opening areas, it doesn’t look like THE STACK » DINO CRISIS: CHARACTERS Dino Crisis: Characters. My last post described the mission leader, a man only referred to as “Gail”. It’s not clear if this is a first name or a last name, so it either fits in the tradition of tough guys with feminine names, like Firefly ‘s Jayne Cobb or Vyvyan from The Young Ones, or the tradition of Japanese game designers not THE STACK » TENDER LOVING CARE: TECH STUFF Tender Loving Care: Tech stuff. Tender Loving Care is one of an all-but-dead breed, the Interactive Movie. A lot of people seem to have been convinced at one point that this was the future of digital media. The whole phenomenon was inextricably bound up with the introduction of the CD-ROM, with its impressively large storage

capacity compared

WELCOME TO WURB

Welcome to the World Wide Wurb What is wurb? Wurb is Carl Muckenhoupt's domain. There's no overarching theme to wurb; it's just a place to hold the odds and ends that I've wound up hosting for one

reason or another.

THE STACK - WURB

Demoniak is a 1991 text adventure that I mainly think of as Suspended taken to an extreme: it has a cast of about 50 characters, acting autonomously in the world, and with only a few exceptions, you can switch control to any of them at any time, including the antagonists. There’s a core team of five heroes with special powers, although only one of them thinks of herself as a superhero. THE STACK » BABA IS YOU The most important predicate for these rules is YOU. Every level has a YOU statement, usually (but not always) BABA IS YOU — Baba is a sort of white oval-shaped quadruped. Apparently there’s some controversy over whether Baba is a sheep or a rabbit, but as far as I’m concerned, Baba is simply a Baba. (In the original game jam version THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: COMBAT UI I haven’t made a lot of progress in Pool of Radiance; I’m really only beginning the urban renewal of the city of Phlan (going through the slums, rousting out the squatters and slaughtering them with cold steel).I’ve honestly been avoiding it. Not because of any moral qualms — if there’s one thing D&D has taught us, it’s that there’s nothing bad about charging into someone’s THE STACK » TEMPEST 2000: CONTROLS Tempest, on the other hand, has genuinely rotary motion on screen. Any mouse-based control scheme is going to wind up either (a) moving the player in the opposite direction from the mouse motion some of the time, or (b) being more complicated than the simple two-direction spinning of the original. Now, Tempest 2000 has the additional

handicap

THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: RESTORATION It turns out that most of them are scrolls of Restoration. And a good thing, too, because I’m going to be moving on the graveyard pretty soon. And here’s the partial second-order retraction: the Restoration spell isn’t described in the Pool of Radiance documentation at all, presumably because your characters can’t learn

to cast it unaided.

THE STACK » TLC: BRANCHES AND ENDINGS In the end, Kathryn, knowing that her time in the house is over, tries to force Allison to a breakthrough by “killing” a doll that Allison had come to identify with Jody. Michael tries to stop her, there’s a struggle, and then comes the single greatest forking of paths in the game. Maybe he accidentally pushes her down the stairs,

maybe

THE STACK » CHRONO TRIGGER: ZABIE DOOR I keep seeing it mentioned that an experienced player can reach the ending of Chrono Trigger while skipping most of the content. I think of Myst as the extreme of this sort of thing: there, you can basically just skip straight to the ending if you know the combination to Atrus’s hidey-hole. Unless Chrono Trigger has some really non-obvious actions in the opening areas, it doesn’t look like THE STACK » DINO CRISIS: CHARACTERS Dino Crisis: Characters. My last post described the mission leader, a man only referred to as “Gail”. It’s not clear if this is a first name or a last name, so it either fits in the tradition of tough guys with feminine names, like Firefly ‘s Jayne Cobb or Vyvyan from The Young Ones, or the tradition of Japanese game designers not THE STACK » TENDER LOVING CARE: TECH STUFF Tender Loving Care: Tech stuff. Tender Loving Care is one of an all-but-dead breed, the Interactive Movie. A lot of people seem to have been convinced at one point that this was the future of digital media. The whole phenomenon was inextricably bound up with the introduction of the CD-ROM, with its impressively large storage

capacity compared

THE STACK » ABOUT

The stack is the set of games I have not yet completed. Although I call it a stack, it has been some years since it was physically possible to stack them all. In my youth, when my game-buying habits were formed, I had more time than money. Today, I have more money than time. As a result, for the last decade or so, I have bought games

faster

THE STACK » POSTCURIOUS In the waning days of the year 2020, I finally accomplished something I’d been putting off for a couple of years: finishing The Tale of Ord, the blockbuster puzzle-story package from PostCurious, makers of the upcoming Emerald Flame.. This is a genre that has its roots in the venerable Dennis Wheatley crime dossiers and the Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective board game, but its current THE STACK » WINDOSILL Windosill is the sort of game where you have to poke at things to see how they react. It’s drawn comparisons to Cyan’s early works, such as The Manhole and Cosmic Osmo, because of its surrealist busy-box vibe.Those games, though intended for children, always had a slight tinge of menace to them, which I don’t think was intentional; it was just a side-effect of the gameworld’s utter THE STACK » STEALTH The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was released in 2004, which seems to be something of a turning-point year for graphics in games: this is the first game I’ve played in my chronological run-down that doesn’t look old-fashioned. At least, not to my eyes, which are probably kind of old-fashioned themselves. We’re almost up to the point in time where I more or less lost THE STACK » BLOODNET Bloodnet, from 1993, is one of the games that’s spent the most time on my Stack.Before there even was a Stack, really, there was always just a game or two that I hadn’t finished yet, and then Bloodnet, that one game that I had bought a few years back and never got very far in but intended to get back to at some point.. It’s one of the few point-and-click adventure games from Microprose THE STACK » IFCOMP 2019: SKYBREAK! IFComp 2019: Skybreak! It’s easy to get the impression that all of Interactive Fiction is based on just two models, the explorable environments typically seen in parser-based text adventures and the branching stories typically seen in hypertext. So it’s good to get occasional reminders that there are other alternatives. THE STACK » THE TALOS PRINCIPLE Talos is a Portal-like — a first-person puzzle game, with precise solutions, marked by epiphanies about what the mechanics make possible. And in theme, it’s a meditation on mortality and entropy, and on finding meaning through obedience or defiance. It’s a bit self-serious at times, but then, it also throws in the occasional

jarring Sam

THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: OTHER UI It’s tolerable mainly because all it takes is a press of the default do-thing button, which you already have your thumb on at the time. In Pool of Radiance, you’re expected to press “T” for Take, then choose Money or Item, and then choose the individual moneys or items one by one from a further menu. For money, you get a menu of all the THE STACK » DINO CRISIS: CHARACTERS Dino Crisis: Characters. My last post described the mission leader, a man only referred to as “Gail”. It’s not clear if this is a first name or a last name, so it either fits in the tradition of tough guys with feminine names, like Firefly ‘s Jayne Cobb or Vyvyan from The Young Ones, or the tradition of Japanese game designers not THE STACK » TENDER LOVING CARE: TECH STUFF Tender Loving Care is one of an all-but-dead breed, the Interactive Movie. A lot of people seem to have been convinced at one point that this was the future of digital media. The whole phenomenon was inextricably bound up with the introduction of the CD-ROM, with its impressively large storage capacity compared to floppy disks, making it suddenly practical to include heaps of choppy

WELCOME TO WURB

Welcome to the World Wide Wurb What is wurb? Wurb is Carl Muckenhoupt's domain. There's no overarching theme to wurb; it's just a place to hold the odds and ends that I've wound up hosting for one

reason or another.

THE STACK - WURBTHE STACK MENUTHE STACK CLEVELAND TNTHE STACK NEW HAVEN CTSTACK THE STATES FREE DOWNLOADSTACK THE STATES FREE ONLINESTACK THE STATES PLAY NOW Demoniak is a 1991 text adventure that I mainly think of as Suspended taken to an extreme: it has a cast of about 50 characters, acting autonomously in the world, and with only a few exceptions, you can switch control to any of them at any time, including the antagonists. There’s a core team of five heroes with special powers, although only one of them thinks of herself as a superhero. THE STACK » TLC: BRANCHES AND ENDINGS In the end, Kathryn, knowing that her time in the house is over, tries to force Allison to a breakthrough by “killing” a doll that Allison had come to identify with Jody. Michael tries to stop her, there’s a struggle, and then comes the single greatest forking of paths in the game. Maybe he accidentally pushes her down the stairs,

maybe

THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: RESTORATION It turns out that most of them are scrolls of Restoration. And a good thing, too, because I’m going to be moving on the graveyard pretty soon. And here’s the partial second-order retraction: the Restoration spell isn’t described in the Pool of Radiance documentation at all, presumably because your characters can’t learn

to cast it unaided.

THE STACK » CHRONO TRIGGER: ZABIE DOOR I keep seeing it mentioned that an experienced player can reach the ending of Chrono Trigger while skipping most of the content. I think of Myst as the extreme of this sort of thing: there, you can basically just skip straight to the ending if you know the combination to Atrus’s hidey-hole. Unless Chrono Trigger has some really non-obvious actions in the opening areas, it doesn’t look like THE STACK » DINO CRISIS: CHARACTERS Dino Crisis: Characters. My last post described the mission leader, a man only referred to as “Gail”. It’s not clear if this is a first name or a last name, so it either fits in the tradition of tough guys with feminine names, like Firefly ‘s Jayne Cobb or Vyvyan from The Young Ones, or the tradition of Japanese game designers not THE STACK » IFCOMP 2016: DETECTIVELAND Spoilers follow the break. This is a private-eye pastiche, and a goofy one at that, a tongue-in-cheek period piece with occasional vintage pulp illustrations, all based on stereotype and broad slapstick. THE STACK » TENDER LOVING CARE: TECH STUFF Tender Loving Care: Tech stuff. Tender Loving Care is one of an all-but-dead breed, the Interactive Movie. A lot of people seem to have been convinced at one point that this was the future of digital media. The whole phenomenon was inextricably bound up with the introduction of the CD-ROM, with its impressively large storage

capacity compared

THE STACK » PUZZLE QUEST: CHOICES Puzzle Quest: Choices. Posted May 7, 2008 Comments (1) It turns out that level 50 is indeed the highest attainable. I have attained it, and I am now spending my time doing the last remaining batches of side-quests, forging new items, and researching spells. I’m a little reluctant to pursue the main quest line, because it seems to be

funneling

THE STACK » PRINCE OF PERSIA: ANIMATED MOTION Playing Prince of Persia (2008) again just after sampling Angry Birds makes for an interesting contrast. I said that I was prejudiced against thinking of stuff that you play on a phone as “real games”, but in a way, Angry Birds feels like more of a game than PoP08.Even though your actions in it are limited to operating a slingshot and tapping the screen to activate special abilities, it

WELCOME TO WURB

Welcome to the World Wide Wurb What is wurb? Wurb is Carl Muckenhoupt's domain. There's no overarching theme to wurb; it's just a place to hold the odds and ends that I've wound up hosting for one

reason or another.

THE STACK - WURBTHE STACK MENUTHE STACK CLEVELAND TNTHE STACK NEW HAVEN CTSTACK THE STATES FREE DOWNLOADSTACK THE STATES FREE ONLINESTACK THE STATES PLAY NOW Demoniak is a 1991 text adventure that I mainly think of as Suspended taken to an extreme: it has a cast of about 50 characters, acting autonomously in the world, and with only a few exceptions, you can switch control to any of them at any time, including the antagonists. There’s a core team of five heroes with special powers, although only one of them thinks of herself as a superhero. THE STACK » TLC: BRANCHES AND ENDINGS In the end, Kathryn, knowing that her time in the house is over, tries to force Allison to a breakthrough by “killing” a doll that Allison had come to identify with Jody. Michael tries to stop her, there’s a struggle, and then comes the single greatest forking of paths in the game. Maybe he accidentally pushes her down the stairs,

maybe

THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: RESTORATION It turns out that most of them are scrolls of Restoration. And a good thing, too, because I’m going to be moving on the graveyard pretty soon. And here’s the partial second-order retraction: the Restoration spell isn’t described in the Pool of Radiance documentation at all, presumably because your characters can’t learn

to cast it unaided.

THE STACK » CHRONO TRIGGER: ZABIE DOOR I keep seeing it mentioned that an experienced player can reach the ending of Chrono Trigger while skipping most of the content. I think of Myst as the extreme of this sort of thing: there, you can basically just skip straight to the ending if you know the combination to Atrus’s hidey-hole. Unless Chrono Trigger has some really non-obvious actions in the opening areas, it doesn’t look like THE STACK » DINO CRISIS: CHARACTERS Dino Crisis: Characters. My last post described the mission leader, a man only referred to as “Gail”. It’s not clear if this is a first name or a last name, so it either fits in the tradition of tough guys with feminine names, like Firefly ‘s Jayne Cobb or Vyvyan from The Young Ones, or the tradition of Japanese game designers not THE STACK » IFCOMP 2016: DETECTIVELAND Spoilers follow the break. This is a private-eye pastiche, and a goofy one at that, a tongue-in-cheek period piece with occasional vintage pulp illustrations, all based on stereotype and broad slapstick. THE STACK » TENDER LOVING CARE: TECH STUFF Tender Loving Care: Tech stuff. Tender Loving Care is one of an all-but-dead breed, the Interactive Movie. A lot of people seem to have been convinced at one point that this was the future of digital media. The whole phenomenon was inextricably bound up with the introduction of the CD-ROM, with its impressively large storage

capacity compared

THE STACK » PUZZLE QUEST: CHOICES Puzzle Quest: Choices. Posted May 7, 2008 Comments (1) It turns out that level 50 is indeed the highest attainable. I have attained it, and I am now spending my time doing the last remaining batches of side-quests, forging new items, and researching spells. I’m a little reluctant to pursue the main quest line, because it seems to be

funneling

THE STACK » PRINCE OF PERSIA: ANIMATED MOTION Playing Prince of Persia (2008) again just after sampling Angry Birds makes for an interesting contrast. I said that I was prejudiced against thinking of stuff that you play on a phone as “real games”, but in a way, Angry Birds feels like more of a game than PoP08.Even though your actions in it are limited to operating a slingshot and tapping the screen to activate special abilities, it

THE STACK » ABOUT

The stack is the set of games I have not yet completed. Although I call it a stack, it has been some years since it was physically possible to stack them all. In my youth, when my game-buying habits were formed, I had more time than money. Today, I have more money than time. As a result, for the last decade or so, I have bought games

faster

THE STACK » POSTCURIOUS In the waning days of the year 2020, I finally accomplished something I’d been putting off for a couple of years: finishing The Tale of Ord, the blockbuster puzzle-story package from PostCurious, makers of the upcoming Emerald Flame.. This is a genre that has its roots in the venerable Dennis Wheatley crime dossiers and the Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective board game, but its current THE STACK » POOL OF RADIANCE: COMBAT UI I haven’t made a lot of progress in Pool of Radiance; I’m really only beginning the urban renewal of the city of Phlan (going through the slums, rousting out the squatters and slaughtering them with cold steel).I’ve honestly been avoiding it. Not because of any moral qualms — if there’s one thing D&D has taught us, it’s that there’s nothing bad about charging into someone’s THE STACK » THE LONGING: FACE Maybe waking him up isn’t such a good idea after all. Taking a step back, it’s pretty clearly talking about the end of the game. When the 400 days are over, and the player is done playing, your longing for the ending is over, and the countdown at the top of the screen will end. Your longing for the ending satisfied, you no longer need

the

THE STACK » DINO CRISIS: ENDINGS The third ending is the best of both options: the whole team escapes alive 1. Except for Cooper, who I had completely forgotten about when I wrote up the mission roster in a previous post, because he got eaten by the tyrannosaur before the opening cutscene was over. with Kirk in

custody.

THE STACK » PUZZLE QUEST: CHOICES Puzzle Quest: Choices. Posted May 7, 2008 Comments (1) It turns out that level 50 is indeed the highest attainable. I have attained it, and I am now spending my time doing the last remaining batches of side-quests, forging new items, and researching spells. I’m a little reluctant to pursue the main quest line, because it seems to be

funneling

THE STACK » DARK FALL 2: LIGHTS OUT Dark Fall 2: Lights Out (or Lights Out: Dark Fall 2; the game itself isn’t entirely consistent about this) isn’t a direct sequel to the first game.It shifts the setting from Dorset to Cornwall, and from the approximate present day to 1912. This time around, the primary setting is an ominous lighthouse, where three men disappeared without a trace one day, leaving nothing but “a door ajar THE STACK » PRINCE OF PERSIA (2008): BOSSES AND COMBAT Prince of Persia (2008) is organized around groups of four. There are four colors of power-plate, and four distinct sets of zones, each of which is made of an entrance zone, a terminus, and a circle of four zones between them. And there are four bosses, each ruling over one of the four zone groups. The bosses are a bit like ringwraiths. THE STACK » FROSTBORN WRATH: FIELD TOKENS I’ve mentioned “field tokens” a few times, so let me explain what I mean. In every Gemcraft game except Labyrinth, battlefields are shown on the map as a sort of frame-like icon, usually in the same bulging triangle shape as a grade 1 gem.Gemcraft Chapter 0: Gem of Eternity, the second game, additionally used this frame to keep track of which play modes you had completed the field in THE STACK » PRINCE OF PERSIA: ANIMATED MOTION Playing Prince of Persia (2008) again just after sampling Angry Birds makes for an interesting contrast. I said that I was prejudiced against thinking of stuff that you play on a phone as “real games”, but in a way, Angry Birds feels like more of a game than PoP08.Even though your actions in it are limited to operating a slingshot and tapping the screen to activate special abilities, it WELCOME TO THE WORLD WIDE WURB

WHAT IS WURB?

Wurb is Carl Muckenhoupt's domain. There's no overarching theme to wurb; it's just a place to hold the odds and ends that I've wound up hosting for one reason or another.

WHY "WURB"?

Because baf.com was taken.

WHAT'S HERE?

* Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive * The Interactive Fiction Wiki

* The Stack

* Daupo.com

* A couple of games of Nomic * A rather nice raytraced portrait of Christopher H. Gernon . This was created in 1991 using DKBTrace, the progenitor of the popular POVRay. I really wish I still had the source code for this image; it holds considerable sentimental value for me.