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Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 10:50:44 +0100
From: Peter Killworth <P.Killworth@soc.soton.ac.uk>
Organization: Natural Environment Research Council
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Richard Fairweather wrote:
>
> ...
> The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. For an example
> of the universality of that epithet, simply look to the Phoenix games of the mid
> 1980's - relatively barren of description and resolutely unaccomodating to the
> user's mistakes - and compare them with today's more player-friendly, verbose
> puzzle-fests, exemplified by the likes of Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina and
> Augmented Fourth....
>
> ...This last quibble can be explained by the fact that
> most of the Phoenix games were designed by mathematicians at Cambridge
> University, and were initially only played by academics there; although that may
> come as scant consolation to today's IF players who get stuck at that point...
>

So let's see now... today's games wouldn't require a knowledge of
mathematics,
would they? Ballerina only needs you to understand base 7 arithmetic;
and
Mulldoon is a snip with only base 6.

As one of the writers in the Cambridge era (my post-Cambridge stuff is
in the Countdown to Doom, Return to Doom, and Last Days of Doom
[CtDoom.z5,
RtDoom.z5, LDoDoom.z5 in the expected place, all converted the hard way
to Inform!]), I really don't see what has changed in puzzle difficulty
really...
Peter K.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Peter D. Killworth, James Rennell Division for Ocean Circulation
and Climate, Southampton Oceanography Centre, Empress Dock, Southampton
SO14 3ZH, England.
Tel: +44 (0)23-80596202
Fax: +44 (0)23-80596204
Email: P.Killworth@soc.soton.ac.uk
Web: http://www.soc.soton.ac.uk/JRD/PROC/people/pki/pki.html
Ocean Modelling Newsletter: http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/omodol/
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