I once spent a pleasurable few days hacking (or rather trying to hack) Colossal Cave's "magic mode". The DEC-10 machine at the college I worked at back then had very little security; I could <Ctrl-C> a program and then examine the machine code at leisure. I got quite a few steps into the rather lengthy process of establishing myself as a "wizard", but didn't finish before I ended up doing something else - taking another job somewhere else, I think it was, but I don't remember for sure.
And yes, experimenting with various strategies in a complicated game is often more fun than just playing it. Once I discovered the application of statistics to "games theory", I began to think it'd be fun to work on that. But that was before I became a coder, which still keeps me interested. Out of curiosity, did the game know what to do with "eat bird"? I guess if they were doing their job, the writers needed to match every verb with every object and invent a result, just to satisfy people like you. --- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 /* When the omniscient God asks you a question, it is not because He is seeking information. -from "The Final Quest" by Rick Joyner */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Seymour J Metz Sent: Monday, July 3, 2023 17:53 I always found writing games to be more interesting than playing them, and will run experiments rather than concentrating on winning. An example was when I wondered what Adventure would do with absud actions such as "eat bird" or "throw troll". ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
