Ad Verbum
If you enjoy witty wordplay, devious dilemmas, annoying adherence to alliteration and throwing your computer and/or palmpilot across the room, then you'll love Nick Montfort's Ad Verbum, a wicked little text adventure that reads like what might have resulted had Infocom ditched Douglas Adams and hired John Sladek. Set in the condemned mansion of the Wizard of Wordplay, the game features several rooms that can be escaped only with words that meet specific criteria, a robotic dog who plays the dozens ("Yo mamma goes down more often than Windows 98"), and a cameo by Robert Pinsky.
The game is relatively short; it took me about an evening and a third. There is plenty of help available, though if you have a thesaurus you won't need most of the hints. [Spoilery anecdote; highlight to view.] It is somewhat embarrassing to realize that I am the sort of person who, when faced with a pig in a toga and told that I need to speak in a language he'll understand, will immediately type "Porcus, salve!"
The game's author, I discovered, contributes to Grand Text Auto, a group blog dedicated to Interactive Fiction and surrounding issues. (If you build it, I suppose, they will blog.) On that site I learned that Sony and Philips Electronics will release the first book made with digital paper. At only $375 (in Japan at least) it won't take too many iterations of Moore's law for this to trickle down to the impulse buy level (depending, of course, on one's impulsiveness). Sony seems to be planning on selling it as an e-book, but if they'd just make the screen touch-sensitive and throw in a stylus and some Optical Character Recognition programming, they'd have the ultimate crossword puzzle machine.
The game is relatively short; it took me about an evening and a third. There is plenty of help available, though if you have a thesaurus you won't need most of the hints. [Spoilery anecdote; highlight to view.] It is somewhat embarrassing to realize that I am the sort of person who, when faced with a pig in a toga and told that I need to speak in a language he'll understand, will immediately type "Porcus, salve!"
The game's author, I discovered, contributes to Grand Text Auto, a group blog dedicated to Interactive Fiction and surrounding issues. (If you build it, I suppose, they will blog.) On that site I learned that Sony and Philips Electronics will release the first book made with digital paper. At only $375 (in Japan at least) it won't take too many iterations of Moore's law for this to trickle down to the impulse buy level (depending, of course, on one's impulsiveness). Sony seems to be planning on selling it as an e-book, but if they'd just make the screen touch-sensitive and throw in a stylus and some Optical Character Recognition programming, they'd have the ultimate crossword puzzle machine.