A second page approaches! Command?

The second page of non-Issue Six is online now. This is probably the best-written part of the entire venture, honestly. By this point I’d warmed up to the task but hadn’t quite burned out. So if you find this interminably dull and irredeemably obtuse, hang on to your hats. It gets worse.

Particularly egregious are the illustrations, which are badly-crafted Photoshop composites of the images I had intended to draw by hand and which are inexplicable meshings of half-considered jokes loosely derived from the text.

Am I doing a good job of selling you on this yet? Great.

I’m pretty sure I’ve concocted a good make-up plan for people who were shorted their promised issues six through eight (and zero), but I need to think on it for a few days before committing myself. Because there’s no sense in making this all worse.

To make up for the lameness of these links, here is a valid if perhaps ill-advised attempt to prove that Toejam & Earl is a roguelike. And here is a gigantic chunk of Japanese countryside marching several hundred feet toward the sea. Thank you, Internet, for being brilliant where I fail.

8 thoughts on “A second page approaches! Command?”

  1. I was weened on Adventure. I like any game where they have to put a hole in the antagonist’s stomach so you would know when you had been eaten.

  2. I hate to be that guy, but your chronology is a bit off–Hunt the Wumpus was first, from around 1972. Colossal Cave and ADVENT are essentially the same game (sometimes the different names are used to refer to different versions of it, but I’m not sure how standard that usage is). Will Crowther made the first version in 1975, which was a largely faithful reproduction of Bedquilt Cave with some fantasy elements. Don Woods expanded it into the canonical ADVENT in 1976.
    .
    Again, I feel like a jerk doing this, but you have to remember that I once researched this stuff at your behest. I’m definitely enjoying the article, though!

  3. That’s OK. The slapdash, unresearched nature of this stupid thing is exactly why I didn’t want to take people’s money for it.

  4. With regards to note 15, my favorite lesson on poerty terminology was the one included in the Holy Tango of Literature. You can find it on this page http://www.yarnivore.com/francis/Holy_Tango.htm by scrolling down to the section titled “Notes on Prosody”, though I would forgive anyone who decided to give up a few hours to reading the whole thing – it’s quite good.

  5. Given Chrono Trigger‘s time travel and its implicit “here’s something you’ve already seen, but now it’s slightly different!” aesthetic, I think one could make the argument for the game as a villanelle.

  6. Parish, we love it as it is, you don’t need to convince us not to read it. To put it in Crowesian, you had us at “The second page of non-Issue Six is online now.”

  8. Technically Garriott switched Ultima 4 from “beat the bad guy” to “spiritual quest for enlightenment” because he was sick of being called the Satanic Corruptor of America’s Youth. No joke.

    Whatever the reason, it’s a pretty sweet game.

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