reject only your ignorance and you may survive

One of the neat costumes I saw at Dragoncon was this one: which I asked if I could take so that I could use a flash a get a good shot:



She's dressed as the title character from the Electronic Arts game American McGhee's Alice:


The game is a very dark adventure in the world of Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland. (The wikipedia article on the game probably has spoilers.)

You pick up various "toys" in the game that are your weapons. There are multiple copies of each weapon in the game, some of them hard to get to. I didn't realize when I was playing the first time through (when the game was still fairly new) that getting a weapon multiple times makes it more powerful. More than half way through the game, I ended up stuck in a boss fight. Looking through some on-line strategy guides, I found out my mistake. I didn't have the heart at the time to start the game over, but now a few years later, I think I'll take this chance to give it another try. For those who know the game, I'm playing on "medium" difficulty.

The Cheshire Cat goes along in the game and has advice and tips for you. Here's my favorite bit; it's when you get the Vorpal Blade at the beginning, which is your base weapon.

of COURSE it's an AND-gate

I thought about a game I've not thought about in ages yesterday, called Robot Odyssey. It was a game I had for my Tandy 1000 EX made by the Learning Company. It was a very involved puzzle game where the central theme was circuit logic. You had three (later four) robots (moving boxes) that you wired to do certain things in the game, like retrive objects or push buttons to open doors. I played the game through a couple of times in junior high and high school, and so learning a bunch of basic circuit logic stuff. To the point that when I got to electronics class my junior year at Gustavus, I already knew the basic symbols of circuit logic and the basics of how to use them.

Some links for Robot Odyssey, past and present:

• Wikipedia article
• a page on AOL that includes solutions and web maps
• Thomas Foote's page about creating a Java port of the game

I played this game...well, an apallingly long time ago, during my formative years. It was a lot of fun, and I learned stuff, but I don't think I can underestimate its effect on my personality. It, along with Starflight, were very important in training me to be able to take on long tasks and persevere to the end.

I recently started to get enough furniture in the basement that I can start to set up some of my vintage computers. When I've set up the Tandy, I will see about getting some screen shots of Robot Odyssey.