{"id":93,"date":"2007-03-23T23:56:25","date_gmt":"2007-03-24T04:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/93"},"modified":"2016-06-05T17:42:43","modified_gmt":"2016-06-06T00:42:43","slug":"time-zone-more-whinging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/93","title":{"rendered":"Time Zone: More Whinging"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Several hours into <em>Time Zone<\/em>, I&#8217;m just starting to get past the initial exploration phase and start finding solutions to problems.  In most adventures, the exploration phase includes a certain amount of experimental poking at objects and scenery.  That hasn&#8217;t really been the case here, as there aren&#8217;t very many objects around, and those few have limited pokability.  Exploration has been a matter of exploring the map, with its neat grid of hundreds of filler rooms, each of which pauses to stroke in its graphics whenever you enter.  I should turn off my emulator&#8217;s governor.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/03\/time_zone-surprise-1.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/03\/time_zone-surprise-1-300x206.png\" alt=\"time_zone-surprise\" width=\"300\" height=\"206\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-3324\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/03\/time_zone-surprise-1-300x206.png 300w, https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/03\/time_zone-surprise-1.png 560w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>Then there&#8217;s the instant-death areas.  Since this game is both (a) old-school and (b) written by Roberta Williams, there are plenty of them.  It&#8217;s easy to forget, in the post-<em>Monkey Island<\/em> age, about the ubiquity of death in the old days.  The way that games would kill you for walking in the wrong direction, off a cliff or into a river, where newer games would stop you with a warning.  And no &#8220;undo&#8221; feature.  When you die, you have to start over, which means swapping back to disk 1, even if you&#8217;ll want to immediately restore a game on a different disk.  Of course, since I&#8217;m running the game under emulation, there are no actual floppy disks involved.  Swapping disks is a matter of selecting a disk image from a file-selection dialog.  Still, this is a minor nuisance, and not something I want to do very often.  Perhaps I should look for a better emulator, one that has its own snapshot quicksave\/quickload interface, so I don&#8217;t have to rely on the in-game save\/load system.<\/p>\n<p>I really have to close this post, though &mdash; I&#8217;m running out of time until my self-imposed deadline, because I&#8217;ve been spending so much time playing the thing.  I&#8217;ll try to have something more to say about the content next time, after I&#8217;ve seen some more of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Several hours into Time Zone, I&#8217;m just starting to get past the initial exploration phase and start finding solutions to problems. In most adventures, the exploration phase includes a certain amount of experimental poking at objects and scenery. That hasn&#8217;t really been the case here, as there aren&#8217;t very many objects around, and those few [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[89,90],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","tag-roberta-williams","tag-time-zone"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3325,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions\/3325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}