I love playing older games, especially interactive fiction. They require thought, timing and a bit of skill. Unfortunately, newer games require an awful lot on how fast you can press buttons. That can be entertaining, but not always what I’d want from a game.

I’ve been looking at the IF wiki and considering digging out my old ‘The Infocom Collections: The Sci-Fi Collection’ CD and playing Stationfall again (even though I’ll have to use DOSBox to play it). I’m not entirely certain if I ever finished it, though I do remember it getting fairly difficult. I know I never completed the prequel, Planetfall. I think the only IF game I’ve actually completed has been Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Interactive fiction is cool… you just can’t do that sort of thing with a graphical game.

Is an internet kaleidoscope a toy? A game? I’m not entirely certain what it is, beyond absolutely mesmerizing. I keep staring at it, unable to do much more than that. And it’s such a silly thing, too! But fascinating. I’m going to have to close the window if I ever hope to do anything productive…

People make robots that do the strangest things. Now I’ve found one that uses LEGO parts and solves Rubic’s Cubes. It’s an interesting application of LEGOs and software to solve a rather silly problem.

I’m not sure if I would have the patience to build something like this from scratch, especially since I don’t have any Rubic’s Cubes that I  desperately need solving. But I commend someone for doing what they think is fun, so that’s cool.

I file this under ‘programming’ and ‘toys and games’ since when you’re programming games, you often have to find sounds to go with your program. Logical, yes?

FindSounds is a great site for searching for various sounds in different formats. There is no guarantee that the audio files will be copyright free or GPL-able, but at least it’s a good start!

I know I’ve used this site before to search for sounds to use as sounds on my personal computer.

No matter how old you are, it’s always fun (in my opinion) to make ‘toys’. However, if you’re the type that needs an ‘excuse’ to play around with stuff, then you should simply skip the Science Toys site. It has a variety of ‘experiments’/toys from various areas of science.

There is even something about playing with electronic fish - something like an electric eel, only not quite as dangerous.

I have an urge to try making the ‘3 penny radio‘… but I’d need a few parts first. Hm.

You’ve worked hard all week, now it’s time to kick back, relax and enjoy some time to yourself. Go check out eScavengers, which seems to be an online treasure hunt.

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet been able to join an ‘Adventure’ as they call it, so I can’t say how easy or difficult it is. They do claim it’s fairly easy (I just did the sample training, and it seemed pretty easy if you’re a fast reader) and the prizes you can win are very nice. Even if you don’t win the big prize, they do give you ‘doubloons’ for simply playing which you can use to buy other things from the site.

You do have to collect a great deal of doubloons to get even the small prizes, and I’m not sure how many doubloons they hand out for playing, so I don’t know how outrageous the doubloon costs are.

For April Fools Day, ThinkGeek introduced the 8-bit tie. Supposedly, if you purchased you would get ‘retro’ geek points instead of the numerical number normally displayed (thus making it easy to tell the jokes from the non-jokes).

I thought the tie was pretty cool, and so did others apparently. I don’t know how many people emailed ThinkGeek, telling them that they wanted the tie, but it must have been dozens; at least judging by the message now displayed on the tie page:

Hey! You! Quit emailing us to make this for REAL already We promise, we’ll make it. In fact we are already working on it. You’ve just forced our hand! Click the ‘email me when available’ link above to get notified! Thanks! I guess the joke is on us this year :p

I want the tie, but I’m also waiting for them to make the Piranhaz - R/C Battle Fish a reality.

It’s hard to find a game with a unique theme. Monsters? *yawn* Space? *yawn*

But have you ever heard of one where you toss wads of paper? No? Neither had I, until today. It looks easy at first, but it’s fiendishly difficult. Each time you toss a wad of paper into the basket, the wind direction changes. So each toss is different, making the game more challenging.

I’ve only managed to get one piece of paper in so far, darn. How many can you get into the basket?

But this thing is cool anyway. It’s a sort of a drawing program, only it draws with… well, you have to see it.

I don’t think you could really do anything useful with this little applet, but it is fun to play with anyway. I saw a different one awhile back that had more colors, but I cannot find the link now. Oh well.