Educational and Editorial Games

Lately I’ve played a few rounds of Electrocity, a simulation game by a New Zealand power company in which the player gets to manage the power supply for a young city. It’s designed to be played by school kids, so the interface is deliberately a bit simpler than for most sim games, but otherwise it basically works in a familiar way: you have various resources, and you can build things (mines, gas wells, airports, hydro-electric plants) and clean them up. At the end of the game, you’re scored on how well you did at building a large population, a clean environment, and a steady power supply.

On Stephen Bond on Player Freedom

Stephen Bond recently (very recently, I think) posted an essay on player freedom, essentially arguing that IF shouldn’t be about offering the player moral choice, and that not forcing the player to make a specific choice is a kind of artistic abdication, giving up the opportunity (or the responsibility) to Say Something.

Now I’m about to disagree with him, at some length.

Recommendation

Over the weekend I played and quite enjoyed Adventurer’s Consumer Guide by Oyvind Thorsby. I will probably publish a longer review later, but for now I want to mention it because it doesn’t seem to be getting much notice on the newsgroups, which is a pity. It’s a game of the light-hearted, puzzle-centric type: the puzzles are good, the game is very soundly tested, and there are lots of nifty easter eggs.

More Glulx goodies

Another item of interest only to I7 users doing multimedia stuff:

Minor and belated update

I have made some updates to the I7 syntax document to reflect changes in the latest build of Inform, including changed names of action rules, and some new syntax for defining variables that apply only during the duration of a rulebook/activity/action.

What Makes You Tick.

Last night, on a recommendation from Jay Is Games, I tried What Makes You Tick, a graphical adventure game built with LASSIE and meant to emulate things like the Monkey Island games.

Graphics Windows for Glulx

I’ve just uploaded to Inform’s extension page a couple of new extensions: “Simple Graphics Window”, which allows the author to create a single graphical window, and “Location Images”, a much smaller item which uses this ability to illustrate rooms automatically as the player moves through them (assuming the author has assigned an image to each room).