Transport Tycoon Deluxe is awesome. I still play it occasionally.
But make sure you get the unofficial patch. It fixes bugs, extends limits that were mostly in place for memory / resource reasons, and adds some gameplay improvements (all of which can be turned on or off).
We have one of these. The only problem with it is exactly the issue this article is addressing --- when the remote consists only of a 5cm by 12cm LCD (or so), there is no tactile feedback. It is almost impossible to use by touch. (I am getting better, but I still hit the wrong button often)
Parenthetically, photostat copies of the manuscript rules were made, and when the commercial game was published, fans not willing or financially unable to expend the princely sum of $10 for the product did likewise, copying the material on school (mainly college/university) machines. We were well aware of this, and many gamers who had spent their hard-earned money to buy the game were more irate than we were. In all, though, the "pirate" material was more helpful that not. Many new fans were made by DMs who were using such copies to run their games.
Master of Magic is a game that deserves an update.
I agree totally. What I'd like to see from an updated MOM is, first, modern OS support. Also, borders to make it clear where AI players consider their territory to be (I can never manage to keep the AIs happy with me), and perhaps other better diplomacy options. Oh, and a good system for having cities build automatically. (I think Civ3's governor system works well)
There is a MOM remake project over at Age of Magic, but the project seems to be stalled.
I used to know the full solution to Citadel, many years ago... We (my dad and I) had a map drawn on fanfold paper too:-)
There was also a Citadel 2. I only discovered this recently (well, a couple of years ago) when I was looking at emulators.
Did you find the easter egg? You could jump into the title screen... you needed to drop a trampoline on the beach at the far east of the game (where this ball of fire floats towards you over the ocean to kill you). Then you use the trampoline to jump up off the screen. [you have to jump into the room to the left a couple of times to reset the fireball]
And some things are obvious. Should you have separate buttons for opening a door, opening a chest, and pressing a lever, or should you have one "do stuff" button? In this case, the answer is "No" of course.
I recall one of my early games, on about dungeon level 4, I was walking around when suddenly about a dozen hezrou trooped into the room and made mincemeat of me.
(I didn't even know what a hezrou was at that stage...)
As soon as I was back in the BBS, the sysop broke in to chat and ask me where all those demons came from:-)
Now these poets were all avant-garde, and Trurl's machine wrote only in the traditional manner; Trurl, no connoisseur of poetry, had relied heavily on the classics in setting up its program. The machine's guests jeered and left in triumph. The machine was self-programming, however, and in addition had a special ambition-amplifying mechanism with glory-seeking circuits, and very soon a great change took place. Its poems became difficult, ambigious, so intricate and charged with meaning that they were totally incomprehensible....
PS.
fortune -m Cyberiad to see more output from Trurl's Electronic Bard.
I don't know how things work here exactly, but a couple of times I have been forced to run red lights because the lights simply weren't changing for me...
I use Moz.. A web page can still occasionally slip a popup through its blocker.
But, since I also have Tabbrowser extensions, I can set it so that any new window opens in a tab instead. Guarantees that, no matter what, I will only have one browser window open (unless I open another myself).
Fast food restaurants are in business to do one thing, and that's sell food.
So, in other words, it is in their best interests to get you to eat more.
For example, the companies did some research and discovered that people wouldn't, say, buy two packets of fries, because it makes them look like a glutton. So they make larger packets that cost more and then encourage people to go for them instead.
They also discover that parents would often buy a single meal and share the food with their kids. So they introduce things like the Happy Meal, to get parents to buy their kids a separate meal, thus increasing the ammount of food they buy.
I agree with you that people need to take responsibility for what they eat... But the fast food companies aren't exactly blameless saints here. They are in the business of selling food, and the more food they sell, the more money they make. So they will use all the advertising tricks in the book to encourage people to buy more...
I maintain nonetheless that yin-yang dualism can be overcome.
With sufficient enlightenment we can give substance to any
distinction: mind without body, north without south, pleasure
without pain. Remember, enlightenment is a function of willpower,
not of physical strength.
-- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang,
"Essays on Mind and Matter"
Um. If you can't tell the difference between Notepad and vim, well, I worry about you...:-/
...
Ok, ok, I confess. I'm a vi fan. With every day that passes, I find it harder and harder to understand how anyone could cope without basic movement commands such as/, ?, f, F,;, b, w, 0 or $, not to mention the various editing commands available. Most of the time I can move the cursor to where I want it faster than I could with the mouse, and as my hands stay on the keyboard, there is no downtime. And I'm not even a vi master:-)
But that's not the point. Computers are fast, these days. There's plenty of other lightweight editors around that provide more (useful) functionality than notepad does.
It's like I meet someone and they proudly claim to have sold their car and be commuting by bicycle. And this is great! But then I see their bike, and it's some old 1-speed... They might say to me "But I never go fast, and I don't mind having to get off and push when the hills get too steep". But for the small investment of learning to change gears (pretty simple), they could do so much more with your bike, and they would after a little while.
Anyway, last post from me (unless someone else says something I want to reply to:-) ).
(ps: Syntax highlighting doesn't matter, but I would hate to do any programming in an editor that didn't support auto-indentation)
My point is that telnet is not the most efficient program. TinyFugue runs in an xterm with no pretty buttons. For the price of 'apt-get install tf' and about two minutes of setup (adding my MUD as the default world), I get something that works identically to telnet, except that it has two lines separated off for text entry, meaning I can see what I'm typing when the MUD scrolls quickly. This is purely better, with no disadvantages.
As to notepad, I find it frustrating for even basic editing. My fingers are too trained to vi and emacs. I might say that a Real Man should take the time to learn vi --- it's not very difficult. (and you can play nethack in roguelike mode to help yourself learn the movement keys:-) )
BTW, your example sounds like what the Wellington library system did recently. Their computer catelogue used to be a menu-based text system. It was fast and if you learnt the keys, you could navigate very quickly. But recently, they changed to GUI based around Internet Explorer. The advantage is that you can use the system over the internet. The disadvantage is the same as in your case... (I guess it was inevitable, though --- internet access to the catelogue is useful, the old system would not work over the web, and consistency of interface is a valuable goal)
E_elven wrote: Only if you're too much of a pansy for telnet.
I've never understood this "Real men use crappy tools" philosophy. It is perfectly possible to MUD with telnet --- I recommend turning "scroll to bottom on TTY output" OFF in your xterm --- but anyone with two brain cells to rub together should be able to realise that MUD clients are better. Even if you just use TinyFugue out of the box, you still get basically the same interface as with telnet, but with a couple of lines separated off for text entry and better scrollback support.
(I get these same emotions whenever I see someone proudly claiming that they make their web pages in notepad... I want to go up to them and beat them with a stick until they realise that notepad is complete crap. Just because Microsoft doesn't give you a good text editor doesn't mean you can't go and find one yourself! Use gvim or emacs or ultraedit or just about _anything_ else...
PS:T would, I fear, be significantly more complex. Particularly, I'm thinking of interface issues, such as the use of pie menus, and rules issues, such as the different spells available, or the NO's class switching and particular stat system.
Hmm... I've already done three plays of PS:T. Maybe it's time for a fourth...
I don't know what the laws are like where you live, but here in New Zealand, under those circumstances, you would be entitled to a full refund, and the shop doesn't have any choice in the matter.
Why? Because you bought a product, with a reasonable expectation that it would work, and it didn't.
(the relevant bit of the act is probably here, since you said your computer fit the minimum requirements)
Slashdot Mirror
Funniest thing about that search --- underneath the GWB link is a Jimmy Carter link. Both are accompanied by a Google directory link.
Jimmy Carter is under
George W. Bush is under
Transport Tycoon Deluxe is awesome. I still play it occasionally.
But make sure you get the unofficial patch. It fixes bugs, extends limits that were mostly in place for memory / resource reasons, and adds some gameplay improvements (all of which can be turned on or off).
Perl was first released in 1987. Y'know, I could've sworn the internet already existed back then...
(especially since Perl was released in a post to alt.sources)
We have one of these. The only problem with it is exactly the issue this article is addressing --- when the remote consists only of a 5cm by 12cm LCD (or so), there is no tactile feedback. It is almost impossible to use by touch. (I am getting better, but I still hit the wrong button often)
Interesting quote...
[talking about the very early releases]
I agree totally. What I'd like to see from an updated MOM is, first, modern OS support. Also, borders to make it clear where AI players consider their territory to be (I can never manage to keep the AIs happy with me), and perhaps other better diplomacy options. Oh, and a good system for having cities build automatically. (I think Civ3's governor system works well)
There is a MOM remake project over at Age of Magic, but the project seems to be stalled.
I used to know the full solution to Citadel, many years ago... We (my dad and I) had a map drawn on fanfold paper too :-)
There was also a Citadel 2. I only discovered this recently (well, a couple of years ago) when I was looking at emulators.
Did you find the easter egg? You could jump into the title screen... you needed to drop a trampoline on the beach at the far east of the game (where this ball of fire floats towards you over the ocean to kill you). Then you use the trampoline to jump up off the screen. [you have to jump into the room to the left a couple of times to reset the fireball]
(oh, I used to play Repton too :-/ )
You think?
I'd've said that the answer is "yes" ...
I do, actually ...
I first played it as a door game on a dialup BBS.
I recall one of my early games, on about dungeon level 4, I was walking around when suddenly about a dozen hezrou trooped into the room and made mincemeat of me.
(I didn't even know what a hezrou was at that stage ...)
As soon as I was back in the BBS, the sysop broke in to chat and ask me where all those demons came from :-)
(I guess, in hindsight, it was a bones level..)
Does the system cope with cyclists?
I don't know how things work here exactly, but a couple of times I have been forced to run red lights because the lights simply weren't changing for me...
I use Moz.. A web page can still occasionally slip a popup through its blocker.
But, since I also have Tabbrowser extensions, I can set it so that any new window opens in a tab instead. Guarantees that, no matter what, I will only have one browser window open (unless I open another myself).
So, in other words, it is in their best interests to get you to eat more.
For example, the companies did some research and discovered that people wouldn't, say, buy two packets of fries, because it makes them look like a glutton. So they make larger packets that cost more and then encourage people to go for them instead.
They also discover that parents would often buy a single meal and share the food with their kids. So they introduce things like the Happy Meal, to get parents to buy their kids a separate meal, thus increasing the ammount of food they buy.
I agree with you that people need to take responsibility for what they eat ... But the fast food companies aren't exactly blameless saints here. They are in the business of selling food, and the more food they sell, the more money they make. So they will use all the advertising tricks in the book to encourage people to buy more...
Here is Snopes on the origin of the name "Donkey Kong".
Dark Forces was pretty cool...
I maintain nonetheless that yin-yang dualism can be overcome.
With sufficient enlightenment we can give substance to any
distinction: mind without body, north without south, pleasure
without pain. Remember, enlightenment is a function of willpower,
not of physical strength.
-- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang,
"Essays on Mind and Matter"
They're in the official comic book...
(which is almost completely impossible to understand if you don't already know what's going on)
Every FPS has crates. Just like every mammal has breasts. You can't have one without the other.
The only question is, how long is the Start-to-Crate?
Next time you're in emacs, try M-x dunnet ...
Um. If you can't tell the difference between Notepad and vim, well, I worry about you... :-/
...
Ok, ok, I confess. I'm a vi fan. With every day that passes, I find it harder and harder to understand how anyone could cope without basic movement commands such as /, ?, f, F, ;, b, w, 0 or $, not to mention the various editing commands available. Most of the time I can move the cursor to where I want it faster than I could with the mouse, and as my hands stay on the keyboard, there is no downtime. And I'm not even a vi master :-)
But that's not the point. Computers are fast, these days. There's plenty of other lightweight editors around that provide more (useful) functionality than notepad does.
It's like I meet someone and they proudly claim to have sold their car and be commuting by bicycle. And this is great! But then I see their bike, and it's some old 1-speed... They might say to me "But I never go fast, and I don't mind having to get off and push when the hills get too steep". But for the small investment of learning to change gears (pretty simple), they could do so much more with your bike, and they would after a little while.
Anyway, last post from me (unless someone else says something I want to reply to :-) ).
(ps: Syntax highlighting doesn't matter, but I would hate to do any programming in an editor that didn't support auto-indentation)
My point is that telnet is not the most efficient program. TinyFugue runs in an xterm with no pretty buttons. For the price of 'apt-get install tf' and about two minutes of setup (adding my MUD as the default world), I get something that works identically to telnet, except that it has two lines separated off for text entry, meaning I can see what I'm typing when the MUD scrolls quickly. This is purely better, with no disadvantages.
As to notepad, I find it frustrating for even basic editing. My fingers are too trained to vi and emacs. I might say that a Real Man should take the time to learn vi --- it's not very difficult. (and you can play nethack in roguelike mode to help yourself learn the movement keys :-) )
BTW, your example sounds like what the Wellington library system did recently. Their computer catelogue used to be a menu-based text system. It was fast and if you learnt the keys, you could navigate very quickly. But recently, they changed to GUI based around Internet Explorer. The advantage is that you can use the system over the internet. The disadvantage is the same as in your case... (I guess it was inevitable, though --- internet access to the catelogue is useful, the old system would not work over the web, and consistency of interface is a valuable goal)
E_elven wrote: Only if you're too much of a pansy for telnet.
I've never understood this "Real men use crappy tools" philosophy. It is perfectly possible to MUD with telnet --- I recommend turning "scroll to bottom on TTY output" OFF in your xterm --- but anyone with two brain cells to rub together should be able to realise that MUD clients are better. Even if you just use TinyFugue out of the box, you still get basically the same interface as with telnet, but with a couple of lines separated off for text entry and better scrollback support.
(I get these same emotions whenever I see someone proudly claiming that they make their web pages in notepad... I want to go up to them and beat them with a stick until they realise that notepad is complete crap. Just because Microsoft doesn't give you a good text editor doesn't mean you can't go and find one yourself! Use gvim or emacs or ultraedit or just about _anything_ else...
Ahem.
Sorry.</rant>
)Hear, hear. PS:T rulez.
PS:T would, I fear, be significantly more complex. Particularly, I'm thinking of interface issues, such as the use of pie menus, and rules issues, such as the different spells available, or the NO's class switching and particular stat system.
Hmm... I've already done three plays of PS:T. Maybe it's time for a fourth...
I don't know what the laws are like where you live, but here in New Zealand, under those circumstances, you would be entitled to a full refund, and the shop doesn't have any choice in the matter.
Why? Because you bought a product, with a reasonable expectation that it would work, and it didn't.
(the relevant bit of the act is probably here, since you said your computer fit the minimum requirements)
The ultimate Deux Ex walkthrough.