Do you remember playing Tetris so much that you’d see the pieces falling when you closed your eyes? Sleep was no escape — I just kept fitting them together in my dreams. That’s when I knew it was time to take a Tetris break for a few days.

I haven’t had the same experience with any other game since then. Until last night. I bought a new Sony PSP the other day (yes, I am occasionally susceptible to hype) and have been playing Lumines ever since.

Lumines (darned if I know how to pronounce it) is a puzzle game in the falling-block tradition of Tetris, but its mechanics are different enough to provide a completely different experience. Every block is a 4×4 square made up of some arrangement of two different colors. Your goal is to arrange the falling blocks into 4×4 squares of the same color, which will then disappear. There are more subtleties that enhance the gameplay, but that’s basically about all there is to it. Pretty simple, but somehow it works, and it works very well. Especially when you add up the exceptional production quality of this game. The music is so tightly integrated with the gameplay it feels like I’m composing it while listening to it at the same time. And it looks stunning on the PSP’s sharp LCD screen.

It works well enough that now I have to take a little Lumines break so that I don’t see these stinking blocks falling every time I close my eyes. I left my PSP at home this morning so I wouldn’t be tempted to play it on the train on my way to work. That’s the only reason you’re getting this entry. Argh, my eyes! Somebody make it stop!

Here’s a screenshot from the Ubisoft website:

I love interactive fiction, or “IF” for the acronymically inclined. Or “text adventure” games if you’re less familiar with the Infocom of the 1980s. IF as a genre, fundamentally unchanged for more than twenty years, evolved in a world of gaming where graphics were non-existent and words were the sole medium of expression. The game described locations, objects, and actions in text, and the player controlled the story’s protagonist by typing commands in English (or any other natural language in which the story was written). As a player, you had to rely on your imagination to fill in the gaps.

In the time since, technology has allowed designers to create games that realize their visual ideals. And many of these games have captivating stories and excellent puzzles, just like good IF games. And there are entirely different styles of games whose pure entertainment value is graphics-based, like a first-person shooter or even a simple puzzle game like Tetris. And that’s great! But it’s also different, and IF still has something to offer today.

I like to think of the relationship between IF and popular modern games as analogous to the relationship between books and movies. It’s not much of a stretch. It’s words versus pictures. Both words and pictures have their place, both can be entertaining, educational, and otherwise enriching. But I personally prefer words.

If you’re a fan of words like me and you’ve never played interactive fiction, or perhaps if you played Infocom’s Zork back in the 80s and remember it fondly, you might be surprised to learn that the medium is far from extinct. An active hobbyist community continues to produce new titles, and as a result IF has grown tremendously, both technically (in terms of language parser sophistication, availability of IF writing/development tools, etc.) and as an art form. Now there are countless modern IF titles currently available for free, representing an amazing array of genres and story-telling styles. Erstwhile players of old-style text adventure games might, for instance, notice the trend toward emphasis on a game’s plot and story-telling as opposed to disjointed puzzle solving. That’s a severe generalization, as classic puzzle games are also certainly still developed — I just want to emphasize that the diversity of titles now available surpasses anything imagined in IF’s “heyday” of twenty plus years ago.

Playing them allows me to simultaneously experience three of my favorite things: reading, puzzle solving, and playing games (or four if I happen to play IF while eating peanut butter!). If you also enjoy the art of the crafted sentence, do yourself a favor and read this Beginner’s Guide to Interactive Fiction. It may or may not be your cup of tea, but it has to be nice to know that people are telling stories in interesting new ways.

In February of this year I moved for my job, as do many in the software field, to the San Francisco Bay area. Coming from Rochester, NY, a medium-sized city, and having visited San Francisco on many previous occasions, there were a lot of changes I knew to expect. Public transportation, for one. I love not driving to work. If you do drive at all, even if it’s not to commute, the sheer volume of people mean that your life must be planned around traffic patterns. Rent, of course, is too depressing to talk about. And then there’s the weather–no rain and a little cooler in the summer, with no winter to speak of. It’s a mix of good and bad, but nothing particularly shocking.

// begin whine

For the past several months, though, I’ve been feeling the need to rant about the grocery stores here. It’s one of those things that nobody thinks about much when moving, but, assuming you eat, has a big effect on your day-to-day life. Sure, the prices are a little higher and it’s still a little weird seeing wine and liquor on the shelves, but that’s nothing unexpected. There are a few things, though, that really get on my nerves. Maybe I have unreasonable expectations. Maybe I’m just a big whiner. It’s likely I’ve been ruined by Wegman’s for the rest of my life. Oh well, you can decide for yourself.

First, the price of produce is crazy. Bananas are always more than 70 cents per pound. We couldn’t get tomatoes for less than four dollars a pound yesterday. A box of Clementine oranges is eight bucks. We’re talking double the price in New York. And this is where they grow the stuff!

Then there’s the feeling I get when I realize that half the dairy expires in two days, and maybe another quarter of it is already past its “sell by” date. It’s the feeling that I have to try to avoid a bait-and-switch more suited to a sleazy used car dealership than a grocery store. It seems like I never had to be so careful in the past. Wasn’t this supposed to be the land of ultra-regulation?

But that’s not nearly as bad as the shock you’ll get when you try to get in line. At the wrong time on a weekend, I’ve stood in lines fifteen carts long, stretching into the aisles. People still shopping have to turn around and go all the way back to get to the next aisle because there’s no room at the front near the registers.

Seriously, what is it with these grocery stores? Am I just in a particularly lousy area? The store I usually go to has ten registers, a few of which are usually not open, even during the busy times, plus four self-service checkout stands. The stores I’d grown accustomed to had, in about the same amount of space, about twice the number of registers. And we’re talking a much lower population density. How does that work?

Anyway, that’s enough moaning for now. I feel much better! I would be interested, though, in hearing about anyone else’s experiences to see if perhaps I’m just shopping in the wrong area or store.

As anyone in my family knows, I’m a particularly terrible communicator. People will often go weeks without hearing a word from me. Also, when I develop a new interest, I tend to obsess about it for a short time only to drop it just as quickly when the next shiny object catches my eye.

For example, a couple years ago I was obsessed with making my own mustard. There are fancy shops that sell little gift packages of “gourmet” mustard, and I figured I could do just as well! It’s a process that involves grinding up mustard seeds and mixing them with vinegar and other interesting ingredients. I think. I really can’t remember, but I still have a mostly-unused box of Ball canning jars and boxes of mustard seeds in my cupboard.

Understanding this about myself, it is with low expectations that I jump on the blog bandwagon. I’ve decommissioned the placeholder I’ve had at frankpape.com for years (never got around to finishing that “personal site” redesign), and replaced it with this. Now, perhaps for the next several days or even weeks, I’ll come here to post about what’s going on or something that I find interesting.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll prove myself wrong and I can laugh about it here a year from now. Or maybe you’re looking at this in October of 2005 with one or two entries above it. If that’s the case, I probably haven’t died or disappeared. I just saw something shiny.