Here’s another PASCAL game I programmed back in high school — Defender. (I was later told there was already a game called that. Whatever — I’m sure this one’s better.)

DEFSV102.EXE
Screenshots:

And yeah, this is just the shareware version. If you play through it and and are eager to get your hands on the full commercial version, well … don’t hold your breath.

I don’t know how many people still play Doom 2, but here’s the best Doom deathmatch map ever made.

kprisn36.wad

Yeah, I probably should have posted this back in 1996, but better late than never, right?

So what makes it so great? Well, for one thing this has got to be one of the most thoroughly playtested levels in the history of video games. This map is basically what my friends and I did instead of high school. We played this map constantly as I was building it, and over months and months the level evolved to foster ever more elaborate wheels-within-wheels of strategy. Over a decade later friends of mine who’ve already spent hundreds of hours playing this map are still playing it.

So it’s a prison, right, and there are all sorts of buttons you can push that will open and close certain doors and seal off certain areas and activate certain traps. The basic layout is a ring, and if you’re in a stronger position you can create a block in the ring and then circle around the other way. Alternatively, if you’re in the weaker position you can shut a door and buy yourself some time as your opponent has to circle the ring. If you find yourself trapped in one of the cells, you can either hide and lie in wait for your opponent, or if you’ve got a rocket launcher you may decide a strategic suicide is your best option. The level discourages camping, as if you do your opponent will begin locking you away from all the best weapons. And to really excel you’ve got to learn all the ways into and out of the secret passage/torture chamber.

To play it you’ll need a copy of Doom 2 installed. Then copy the kprisn36.wad file into your Doom directory and type: doom2 -file kprisn36.wad

And make sure you’re using “old deathmatch” rules, otherwise all the strategy just goes right out the window.

ETA: Big thanks to AXDOOMER for posting video of this map in action.

Hey, no way! Wow, there’s lot of great stuff on this old CD. For example, I found a copy of my old game “Caerion,” which I programmed in PASCAL back in high school. I thought it lost forever. I even got it running on my MacBook using a free DOS emulator called Boxer:

I had big plans for this game (hence the overly-optimistic designation of map “6”), but not long after this version was created I ran up against a memory limit in my PASCAL compiler, and I decided to move on to other programming languages. So the game’s only got two maps. This makes the Gauntlet-style single player/co-op mode (“Quest”) a bit pointless (and the monsters move way too fast in my emulator), but the Doom-style multiplayer deathmatch mode (“Duel”) is still pretty fun, and my friends and I actually spent a fair amount of time playing it. And it’s available now as FREE download! If nothing else you should witness the devastating power of the “Firedeath” spell; I’m still pretty proud of that one.

CAERION.EXE

HOW TO PLAY: Press S to summon the blue player. Use W, A, D, and X to move. Some doors can only be opened with the appropriate key. Pick up melee weapons and spells. Press Z to switch between melee weapons. If two players bump into each other, both take damage depending on the other’s melee weapon. Press Q and E to rotate the white arrow that aims the direction of your spells. Press S to cast a spell. Press C to switch between spells. Players can’t cast spells if an opponent is standing in an adjacent square. If you die, press S to respawn. The controls for the other players are the same, except using the G, L, and 5 keys in place of S. (If your keyboard doesn’t have a Tic-Tac-Toe style number pad, the gray player is going to be basically unplayable.)

Okay, we’ve got a July 7th release date for the Monkey Island 2 special edition. Here’s a new video showing off some of the game’s features:

ETA: Listen to my December 2010 interview with Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert.

Here’s a new promotional video for the Monkey Island 2: Special Edition being released this summer.

ETA: Listen to my December 2010 interview with Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert.

Yay! I just saw that Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, the greatest video game of all time, is getting the special edition treatment and will be re-released this summer. Check it out.

ETA: Listen to my December 2010 interview with Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert.

I just came across this really neat illustration of Queen Moire of Rebma, a character from Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber. This piece was painted years ago by artist Stephen Hickman and was intended to be the cover art for a sadly never-released supplement for the Amber role-playing game. I love the way the artist painted the billowing hair and the play of refracted light. See a larger version at the RPGsite forums.

This summer LucasArts is releasing a remake of Ron Gilbert’s The Secret of Monkey Island, the greatest video game of all time (along with its sequel Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge).

Monkey Island was inspired by the Tim Powers novel On Stranger Tides, and the subsequent Pirates of the Caribbean films were so obviously influenced by Monkey Island that Ron Gilbert joked on his blog about being mystified that his royalty check from Disney hadn’t yet arrived. The game also features a brilliant insult swordfighting mini-game with insults written by Orson Scott Card.

Recently a younger relative of mine asked me if I play video games. I told him I used to play a lot, but don’t any more, because they stopped making the kind of games that were my favorite, adventure games, and after a while I just got bored with the other kinds of games I used to like, shooters and rpgs, because really how many hundreds of hours can you spend killing monsters before it just gets old? This young man didn’t even know what an adventure game was. I tried to explain that in adventure games you would have a character and you would explore and pick up items and talk to people and solve puzzles. His friend said, “Like Zelda?” And I said, “Yeah, sort of. Except in Zelda you spend 95% of your time killing things and 5% of your time solving puzzles and talking to people. In an adventure game you would spend 0% of your time killing things and 100% of your time solving puzzles and talking to people.”

I keep hoping that adventure games will make a comeback someday. If you’ve never played Monkey Island before and you own a PC or XBox, definitely keep an eye out for this new version.

Last fall I discovered a terrific video game video podcast called The 1-Up Show that’s put out by a group of video game magazine reviewers. The show has great production values, and alternates between game footage, comedy skits, and hardcore gamers hanging out and talking about games. These guys definitely know their stuff, they swear a lot, and overall it’s a lot like just hanging out with a bunch of friends, and in my opinion is a lot more successful than other video game video podcasts I’ve seen that try to parrot the formal conventions of a television news broadcast. The show even features a theme song I like more than most Top 40 (“Hey, I don’t wanna go to work today / Just wanna stay home and play / all my videogames”). The 1-Up Show stopped updating in December, and I figured they were just taking the holidays off, but I recently learned that the whole staff was laid off and the show is no more. Damn. Some of the cast members are trying to keep the show going as an indie production under the name Co-Op, and it’s even got good theme music too (“The thing I like about you most is / You run away with me / So pack your bags and your shotgun too / We might run into zom-bies”). If you have any interest in video games at all, check it out. They could probably use the eyeballs right now more than ever.

I was 90% sure I was going to buy this book after just seeing the title: The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons, and Growing Up Strange. I mean, come on — memoir, Dungeons & Dragons, a nod to Richard Dawkins. Right up my alley. But I read the first two chapters in the bookstore just to make sure, then bought the book and read it straight through.

I would give 5 stars to the first 3/4 of this book. It’s a quick, fun read, and it’s a real rollercoaster between laugh-out-loud hilarity and cringe-inducing embarrassment. The author tells of how he spent his teenage years totally obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons. He spoke about nothing but D&D, hung out only with other players, spent all his money on books and accessories, and selected his clothes based on how much they looked like something a D&D character might wear. His focus on D&D was so over-the-top that it annoyed even other obsessive players, who ostracized him. (The book’s dedication, to the author’s wife, reads: “To Tabitha. Avoid this.”) One particularly vivid anecdote relates how one of the “bad girls” who hung out down at the local bus stop invited the author into a phone booth so that he could feel her boobs, but he blew his chance by first trying to impress her with his D&D knowledge. The author’s D&D friends were all male, mostly all megalomaniacal, and the atmosphere of the games was often one of ugly competition and verbal evisceration. Much of the book is a painfully acute exploration of the adolescent male psyche. (For example, in this exchange with his mother: “‘What’s wrong with you?’ she said. ‘Other kids ask for a bike. Why are you drawn to the macabre?’ My mum was very capable of unknowingly flattering me. For several weeks after she said this I couldn’t pass a mirror without looking into it, raising a raffish brow and saying ‘drawn to the macabre’ as if it was some caption for my image in the glass.”)

The book also sometimes conveys the excitement of playing D&D. “I had a dream when I was twelve that … I’d find friends who respected intelligence and wanted to learn things; I’d be in an environment where people told each other facts and read books and were proud of it.” And: “D&D is, I believe, something virtually unique and unprecedented in human history. It’s a story you can listen to at the same time as telling it … It’s like the best story you’ve ever read combined with the charge a good storyteller feels as he plays his audience … I have finished games feeling physically drained and actually wanted to continue to have my characters buy food at a shop or smoke a pipe in a tavern just to calm down before breaking with the game world entirely.”

My only real reservation about the first 3/4 of the book is that the author’s obsession with D&D minutiae is sometimes excessive, and I can easily imagine this boring — if not outright baffling — readers who aren’t familiar with the rules. (“When you’re in an underground or indoor setting one inch represented by the figure is to scale ten feet. When you’re in a wilderness setting one inch is ten yards … According to a very strict interpretation of the law, Billy’s fighter suddenly became capable of thirty yards a turn whereas the Ancient One — still underground — was only moving at sixty feet a turn until it got to the door.”)

Unfortunately, the last 1/4 of the book is dreadful, and is best avoided. For one thing it’s not funny, which is a real letdown after the earlier sections. For another, the author comes across as kind of a dick. Of course, the author’s behavior throughout the book has been insufferable, but this is forgivable and even somewhat endearing in a naive teenager. It’s not at all endearing coming from a forty-year-old man. The author expresses surprising bitterness about D&D, and makes bizarre claims, such as that D&D was so much fun that it forever ruined him for day jobs, since jobs just seem dull and unfulfilling compared to the magical world of D&D. (As if people who didn’t play D&D never find their jobs dull or unfulfilling.) He expresses withering disdain for any losers who still play D&D, and takes pride in having escaped back into reality. (Among the rewards that “reality” has to offer he lists “my wife” — okay so far — “the dog” — sure, why not? — and “TV” — TV? Um, hello?)

By the book’s end the author feels he’s grown up because he’s discarded D&D, but it’s pretty obvious that D&D was never his problem. He was his problem. (The fault is not in our TSRs, but in ourselves.) Throughout the book the author demonstrates some pretty constant and grievous character flaws — among them a tendency to desire women’s company merely for the status that he feels it affords him, and also a pattern of desperately seeking the approval of jerks who despise him while at the same time he alienates his true friends. Toward the end of the book he mentions that after he stopped playing D&D he started dating, but he never talks about any of the women with any kind of specificity or affection — certainly nothing approaching the kind of sensitivity and concern with which he illuminates his friendship with his best D&D buddy. Maybe he’s just choosing his topics, but overall this contributes to the impression that the author regards women as some sort of trophy that reformed nerds can win. In fact, at the same time that he lauds “reality,” he makes reality sound rather dreary, and only writes about it — drugs, jobs, women — in the most perfunctory way. You’d think that “reality” might have furnished him with some interesting anecdotes that would really illustrate just how empty all his time spent playing D&D was, but actually it comes across as the other way around. Which leads us to character flaw #2. The whole final section of the book seems like a repeat of his same old pattern — desperately seeking the approval of people who despise him anyway (in this case “normal” people), and who don’t really notice or care what he does, while at the same time he disses his one true friend — D&D, in my analogy here, the one thing in his life that he seems capable of writing about with real passion.

There’s one particular incident toward the end of the book that’s not just off-base but is actually disturbing. In college, the author is participating in a live action role-playing session, and somehow the group has roped in some young teenagers to play monsters. The author accidentally pokes a makeshift sword into the eye of one of the kids, which injures the kid badly. As the kid writhes in pain, an attractive girl whom the author knows walks by and asks him what he’s doing dressed up like that. Suddenly the author feels embarrassed to be hanging out with all these dweebs, so he goes off with the girl instead, leaving the other role-players to cart the injured kid off to the hospital. And this is presented as an example of the author’s growing maturity and of choosing reality over fantasy. Huh? Am I crazy? To me it seems more like borderline sociopathic behavior. Wouldn’t the “mature” thing be to say to the girl something like: “Oh hi. I’m doing some live action role-playing. I guess it looks a little silly if you’ve never seen it before, but I enjoy it, and, you know, you can’t let other people’s opinions determine how you live your life. But listen, this kid here is hurt pretty bad, and it’s my fault. I’m going to go with him over to the hospital and make sure he’s all right. I’ll see you around, okay?”

So, I’m conflicted. I really loved the first 3/4 of the book but was deeply disappointed by the final 1/4. I’d recommend it for old D&D fans, but definitely put it down around the time the author starts going on and on about heavy metal music.

Holy crap, what a find! While browsing through the Art section of the bookstore last night I came across (and instantly acquired) I Am 8-Bit: Art Inspired by Classic Videogames of the ’80s by Jon M. Gibson (and featuring a foreword by Chuck Klosterman).

This book combines some of my greatest loves (pop surrealist art, ’80s pop culture, and videogames), so I probably would’ve bought it even if most of the art was only so-so, but actually the artwork is spectacular, and I like just about everything in here. Sorry art critics, but my favorite art tends to be quirky, representational, and narrative, and this stuff fits the bill perfectly. In Amanda Visell‘s Level 1016, Frogger hopelessly contemplates an endless landscape of criss-crossing traffic-heavy highways. Ryan Bubnis‘s Mourning the Loss of the Princess depicts Link with vacant eyes, rotten teeth, and threadbare clothing. The artist explains, “I was never skilled enough to beat Gannon and save Princess Zelda … So I thought it would be funny and interesting to revisit Link years after his defeat and see how he was coping.” In Martin Cendreda‘s Luigi Bros., Lugi stares dejectedly at an arcade machine and laments, “How come it’s never called ‘Luigi Bros’ …” In Greg “Craola” Simkin‘s Pac-Man in Hospice, a decrepit Pac-Man sits in a rocking chair and is fed an IV drip of pac pellets while characters from other videogames of the era cavort about him. And finally, in Jason Sho Green‘s Putting the Super in Mario, Mario faces a bed upon which the princess is splayed, naked and seductive, and an uncertain Mario checks the cheat sheet he’s written on his palm, which reads “up up down down left right B A start.”

I just saw that Erick Wujcik died last week, of pancreatic cancer at the age of 57. Wujcik created the Amber diceless roleplaying game, which is based on my favorite series, Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber. The published material for the game consists of two manuals, Amber and Shadow Knight, and a related fanzine called Amberzine. The game itself is revolutionary — a diceless pen & paper RPG that emphasizes acting and improvisation over maps and stats — but even if you have no interest in gaming the books are well worth reading just for their close textual analysis of Zelazny’s saga as well as for the thoughtful meditations on the art of storytelling. The books also contain portraits of all the major characters in the Amber universe, which greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the series and also made it a heck of a lot easier to keep everyone straight. I’ve probably spent hundreds of hours poring over those gamebooks. They’re always floating around my living space, and I often thumb through them just to scan the illustrations or to peruse the little excerpts from Zelazny’s work. I never met Wujcik, but I did write him some fan letters — I think the only fan letters I ever wrote — and he was nice enough to write me back with personal, full-page responses, and he even included some of the artwork from the then-unreleased (and agonizingly long-delayed) Shadow Knight. There were supposed to be other Amber DRPG supplements — I remember talk about books dealing in more detail with the Courts of Chaos and/or Rebma and/or the environs of Amber. After so many years I wasn’t exactly holding my breath, but I did sort of hope someday to see Wujcik write more about Amber, and it’s sad to think now that that’ll never be, especially coming as it does just weeks after the death of Robert Asprin, who held a similarly exalted place in my youthful pantheon. At least with writers the work is always there, and you can open a book and hear the author’s voice. If you ever come across Wujcik’s Amber gamebooks — especially if you’re a fan of Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber — read them. They look like this:
 

It seems like everyone on the blogosphere is taking the death of Gary Gygax as an opportunity to write encomiums to Dungeons & Dragons, and I’m certainly not going to buck the trend. Dungeons & Dragons is freaking awesome.

I first got interested in the game one year at summer camp. D&D was the pastime of a bunch of the cool older campers, and I finally worked up the nerve to ask if I could join them. They let me sit in on a session, which is when I discovered — as has generally been my experience since — that most D&D sessions consist of sitting around chatting and flipping through the ruleboks and trying and failing to get organized enough to actually play the game. Still, I was hooked.

There were at the time a dizzying array of supplements, and it was not immediately obvious to me which book to buy first. Many, many supplements were advertised as containing “everything you need” to play in such and such a world or run such and such an adventure, when in fact — when you got home and started trying to make sense of the rules — you realized that this book definitely did not contain “everything you need.” Note to aspiring RPG developers: If you create a game that has over 50 rulebooks, it might not be a bad idea to put a note on the back cover of each one stating: “Are you new to this game? Buy the Player’s Handbook first.”

In high school, my friends and I tried to start a regular gaming group. We managed to get together a few times, but since we lived spread out over the length and breadth of Westchester county, and since none of us could drive, it was basically impossible for everyone to reliably meet up. One solution would have been to play at school after class. Some of my friends tried to start an official Dungeons & Dragons club. They browbeat a reluctant teacher into signing on as advisor. I remember one day at school some of my friends came and found me and said, “You have to come with us. The principal wants to see us about the D&D club.” I think my friends knew that the principal was going to shoot us down, and my friends wanted me along to lend my modest gravitas to the proceedings, since I was a varsity athlete, a fairly decent student, and vice president of half the clubs on campus, so the principal actually knew and liked me.

So we all trooped into the principal’s office. At that time there had been a decade-long smear campaign against Dungeons & Dragons by a bunch of religious nutball parents, and misconceptions about the game were rampant — like that if your character died in the game you were supposed to kill yourself, or that the rulebooks contained actual, working black magic rituals. (I wish.) The principal said to us, “So what is Dungeons & Dragons anyway? Isn’t this that thing that makes kids violent and suicidal?” To which I replied, “No, that’s called high school.” Okay, not really, but that would’ve been sweet if I had. We explained that Dungeons & Dragons is just a fun boardgame, like a really complicated version of Monopoly, with a bit of acting and storytelling thrown in. We said, “Look, here are the rulebooks. You can read them and see.” The principal thought for a bit, then said, “No.” We said, “Why?” and she just shook her head and said, “No. Just … No.” I think I might’ve said something trite and irrelevant like, “That’s not fair.” She said she had other business to attend to, and we trudged out of her office.

Of course, I know now that what we should’ve done is start up a “Monopoly” club or something, and then just used the time to play Dungeons & Dragons. This would qualify as one of the very, very few things I actually learned at high school. (I wonder, do religious fuckwit parents still hurl hysterical imprecations against Dungeons & Dragons, or have they all moved on to Harry Potter?)

Anyway, in the end I realized that writing role-playing scenarios is as much work as writing fiction (I always wrote my own scenarios, since I didn’t think any of the store-bought ones were good enough), and I decided that I’d rather spend my time writing fiction, so I drifted away from role-playing games. I probably only actually played Dungeons & Dragons maybe a dozen times, but I spent countless hours perusing and ruminating on the rulebooks, and it was time well spent. I think I probably got as much useful writing advice from role-playing game books as from fiction writing manuals. When you’re trying to create a story and your audience is a bunch of teenage boys with short attention spans who might at any moment lose interest and go off to play video games, you think a lot about how you’re going to hold your audience’s attention, which is something that most fiction writing books (and most fiction writers generally) don’t pay enough attention to.