vivdunstan

Answering an anonymous poll on the intfiction forum. The answers in this question don't range far enough back 😜 I first played - and became interested in - interactive fiction back in December 1980, 45 years ago this month. Colossal Cave Adventure on an Apple II borrowed over Christmas.

Onto the first in the fourth series of Benny Big Finish audios. And this one sees the return of Doctor Who monsters the Rutans. Who work surprisingly well on audio. Less good is that the audio feels very slow and overlong, especially in the first half.

Benny has been called in to advise on an archaeological site in the middle of the Sontaran/Rutan war. So the stakes are high. But it's just _so_ leisurely. On plus Benny is paired with a wry space commander, who sparks well with her. I'd like to have heard more of that pairing. Though his acting is somewhat dodgy in places. Also surprisingly reminiscent voice-wise of Miles Richardson who plays Benny's employer Irving Braxiatel.

The last third of the audio is very zippy, with the addition of another spin-off Doctor Who character Bev Tarrant, who will play a more prominent role in the Benny audios to come. This section is fun. But it feels like 20 minutes of goodness at the end after nearly 50 minutes of oh so slow.

There is a contentious element in the audio that will annoy some, but I was ok with: ( big spoiler ). But yes, it could easily annoy some folks.

Benny continues to delight. She's a remarkably effective character for a spin-off scifi series of her own. And she is always superbly acted by Lisa Bowerman.

First trial for my new Beats earbud headphones too. Worked very well! Very pleased with them.

I'm reading Aaron A. Reed's 50 Years of Text Games book. This was based on a series of blogs, each looking at an important game for each of 50 years. But the published book expands on that content considerably. I have a hardback copy and an ebook.

I'm currently early on in the book, in the 1970s, and was just amused by some of the snippets of info from a general chapter about computer text games in that period, not just the main ones featured in the book. Here are some snapshots:

• 1973 Lemonade Stand - 50 years old this year! This was one of the first computer games I played, in 1980 on an Apple II dad borrowed to bring home over the Christmas period.
• 1977 Atom20 - a post apocalyptic (!) clone of The Oregon Trail. That must have been fun to play ...
• 1977 Trek80 - a Star Trek game "with the twist that you could place an AM radio near your computer to get sound effects". Cor.
• 1978 Empyrean Challenge - a play by mail game with 150 players and "turn results could be hundreds of pages long". I played a lot of play by mail games in the 1980s and 1990s, and even getting a turn through the letterbox that was 5 pages long could be exciting. But hundreds?! Wow.

Aaron's book is very good, somewhat US-centric in places, but still has good coverage of places and types of text games. It is currently not in print, but there is an ebook version currently available, and there will be a print on demand coming soon. And the original blogs about 50 key text games are still freely online to read.