MindsBase

There aren’t too many things I enjoy as much as a good story, but this week I met some creatures that compete nicely with even the best fiction. Don’t believe me?

C’mon. Could you have come up with this guy in your wildest imagination? I mean, if you hadn’t seen anything like it before.

Even though we see lots of amazing stuff on TV and in movies, there’s really no substitute for real live experiences. This week, our local library brought the Reptile Man over to show us his pets.

Well, not exactly pets – he runs what he calls a Serpentarium, which houses, as you might guess, snakes, lizards, turtles, an alligator or two, and the like. Something I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to see. But the way he talks so expertly, so lovingly, of these creatures, well, you can’t help but fall in love with them too.

Especially when, after the show, you get to pet the 4 foot alligator, the 10 foot banana-yellow snake (that takes 7 kids to hold) or the knobby tortoise that wanders boldy through throngs of children, searching for dandelions to munch.

I did notice that he didn’t let us pet the rattlesnake or the king cobra, but that was fine by me.

One lizard (a skink, I think) can go without eating for A YEAR. He stores fat in his tail. Tell me you aren’t impressed!

Who doesn’t love mazes? Raise your hand?

That’s right. Everyone loves a maze (and universals are always true! Unicursals??) But my favorite maze of all time is a little game that we played on my family’s Tandy computer. That poor Tandy — a KEYBOARD only computer (no mouse, no joystick, no controller of any kind) — had to be unplugged from the TV in order to plug in and play the Atari console. As a result, the more popular Atari got the lions share of the play time.

It’s hard to compete with Pitfall.

But there was one game I would bother changing over for. If I was in a dangerous sort of mood.

Dungeons of Daggorath.

Great name, huh? I re-purposed it (with changed spelling) for a MindsBase prog, actually. Dungeons of Daggorath was one of the first first-person, three-dimensional games. What? you say. Read that again. Since so many modern consoles games are just that (think Halo.)

DoD, as you can see from the screenshot above, had a simple line-drawn design. You simply typed in commands to move around the dungeon, looking for dark creatures to destroy. Three wonderful things about this game:

1. You had one life. Just one. And many creatures would kill you with just ONE hit… so what moves you made mattered. A lot.

2. You had to type on this spongy, sticky keyboard (was it sticky by design or was that my orange juice spills?) and boy, you were bummed if you messed up (see #1.)

3. You had this little heart in the middle of the screen and it made this little thump thump sound which sped up if you walked faster and when you were attacking a creature. If you fainted or died, it raced out of control — thththththththththththhhhhhhddddd!

And one more great thing. It was played in real time. Yes. You had a pine torch to start with, which lasted fifteen minutes. If you didn’t have a replacement torch by then, it dimmed, then darkened — and you were toast. No annoying clocks on the screen… just real consequences for not moving along, buster. Now all those poor people in Rivenshire village will be destroyed by the Evil Wizard.

But the greatest thing about it? They made a PC port of it, which you can download (free)! Enjoy! Oh, and here’s the manual.

There are things I miss.

I miss Ultima III, the one that came on 5 1/4″ floppies. The one where you were just a tiny figure moving about the landscape, talking in the towns and fighting in the woods. I loved saying “join me” to people and delighted when they said they would join my motley crew. I liked it better than Ultima IV because you could travel all night without the darkness swallowing you. I never knew what was lurking in that darkness.

Way back, I remember being frightened of the dark greenish pages and pale green pants with nobody inside them. My imagination created a horror movie-worthy villain out of those pants. I was most alarmed when they began to cry. It only made them more horrible when they shook like that.

I even miss Hunt the Wumpus, a text-only game played on the Wang computer that sat on our dryer in the laundry room. I imagined the Wumpus — big, hairy, many-legged, dripping with yuck, lurking in the semi-darkness of one of the rooms as I played Russian roulette with the doors.

What I’m saying is, I miss imagination, even in its darkest form. But also in its most wondrous! Now, everything is visual, three-dimensional, surround-sound, neon-sign. We’ve lost the subtle shades of emotion that imagination creates.

So, I decided to make my own world for my imagination to play in. It is made up of nothing but the twenty-six western letters and ten numbers. Eventually there may be a few line drawings and a glossy cover illustration, but it’s mainly just a world in my mind.

I used to have more vivid dreams. Perhaps I’m just too tired now to have many of them. Or too grown-up. I actually miss the terror that jerked me from the dream where I’m running from “bad guys” down my dark neighborhood streets. I’m running in slow-motion, of course, screaming at my legs to MOVE, C’MON MOVE!

So I knew that it would be endlessly fun to have my imaginary playground to be a dream. A shared dream.