Games

Yes, I admit: I play games. Shouldn't exactly come as a surprise, given that I am the game operator of the wonderful multi-player game MUD2 at mud2.com. But I play other games as well. Sometimes it's computer games that keep me going, that help me endure spending as many hours in front of a computer screen every day as I do.

On this page, I collected a few of my all-time favorites; games that I don't wish to be without, including old games that I still load on my computer from time to time even after having played them countless times.

Please don't ask me for hints as I won't answer anyway. I firmly believe that much of the pleasure you derive from these games is through discovering the solutions on your own. Besides, if hints are what you must have, you can always visit one of the countless Web sites, Usenet newsgroups, CompuServe forums, where hints including complete walkthroughs are available.

	In the beginning, there were those text games. Not just any text games, but the wonderful adventures from INFOCOM. The three classic episodes of Zork are perhaps the best known among these, but INFOCOM also developed a few games whose unique flavor remains unmatched to this day: Trinity, for instance, or A Mind Forever Voyaging, and of course the incomparable Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
	INFOCOM is gone of course but their classic games remain. Activision is the name of the company that acquired the rights to INFOCOM's classic games and, to the delight of fans like myself, decided to reissue the games in a few collections. They also revived the Zork title with new multimedia games, the latest of which is Zork Grand Inquisitor. Unlike the previous multimedia Zork games which, however nice they were, had little to do with the Zork flavor, this one does an excellent job following the traditions of the original. Obscure puzzles, weird magic, legendary places like GUE Tech or the historic White House, even a brass lamp and an elven sword... highly recommended!
	Myst needs little or no introduction. The game is often quoted as the most successful title of all times. Although the game is somewhat light in the puzzles department (and consequently, a veteran game player may be able to finish it in a mere few days) its hauntingly beautiful landscape compels me to play it again and again. It's also one of the rare "gender-neutral" games, a game that appeals to male and female players alike (i.e., a game in which you can do something other than shoot monsters with ever more realistic special effects.) And now we have the sequel, Riven, a game that was worth waiting for.
	For a brief detour from the magical fantasy lands of most adventure games, consider The Last Express. This game deposits you on board the last Orient Express of 1914, literally hours before the outbreak of World War I. While I found some of the fight sequences an outright silly practicing of your Nintendo skills, I tremendously enjoyed the game's authentic atmosphere, from the fine details of the train itself to a beautiful performance of a piece by César Franck, from the bits and pieces of conversation in Russian and Serbian, French and Persian to some of the original train documents that I found as I was exploring. It was very much like the many trainrides I experienced when I was still living in Europe (although on far less luxurious trains). It also perfectly captured that eerie "quiet before the storm" feeling that preceded four years of Armageddon.
	Last but not least, there are the two Monty Python games. If you hated the TV series, you'll hate these games, too! Need I say more?

By the way, in case you're wondering, even though that platform is not officially supported, I was able to play all these games with no or little difficulty under Windows NT 4.0. Sometimes I had to play a bit with process priorities; at least in one case (Zork Grand Inquisitor) I found that setting the priority of the game's main process to a lower setting actually improved performance, presumably by allowing more time for background threads/processes responsible for screen updates or movie playback.