To be fair, I did say back in the comments of #415 that I needed to tell you guys the story of Sam Fram. Grandpa has been on my mind a lot lately as he’s been having some health issues, and I can’t help but think of these old jokes when I think of Grandpa. He can be quite the curmudgeon when he thinks about politics, but he has such a sense of joy inside of him, and it always, always shines through when he starts to tell his jokes. Yes, we’ve heard them all before, but it hardly matters. I remember one time when I was very young, we took a road trip with him to North Carolina to dig rubies (he is quite the rock hound), and the jokes flowed the entire time. We’d heard them all about 20 times by the time the trip was over, but it didn’t matter. Bad jokes, burgers “all tha wayahhh” and good times were had by all.
Of course the problem with telling an old joke is finding a new way of telling it to a new audience. What’s that saying about brevity and the soul of wit? Best not to think about it. Of course, in typical Slightly Off-Topic style, I’ve been given the choice of two references and went with the most obscure one. I realize that the Grue-infested Zork would have made for a slightly more accessible starting point for today’s strip, but while I played them and loved them, my text-based adventure heart will always belong to Scott Adams! I spent countless hours in the computer room at Taft Jr. High playing Scott Adams games on the Apple II. I loved them all… especially the classic Pirate Adventure! They say you never forget your first love, and nothing can make me smile like playing those old games. What’s that? Did I say ‘playing’? Well, of course. Didn’t you know you could download all the old Scott Adams Adventures? Of course you can! He has them available for free in a single package right on his official site! It turns out he wrote a new Pirate Adventure back in 2000 which is also for sale on his site. Looks like I’d better warm up the ol’ Paypal account!
Somehow, I knew a pun was coming…I just wasn’t sure how it was going to appear, but appear it did.
X D *facepalm* You just can’t help yourself, can you?
These things are in my head. They need to be released.
Wow, an awesome blast from the past. Thanks!
You are most welcome!
I thought there was some sort of hand yoga you were looking into so this didn’t happen again. Now you say they have to be released from your head. I have a suggestion that might fix both the hand and ensure release of such things from your head. It involves a hammer, your hand, and your head… ugh…
BTW, my first text adventure I had to type in all 40 or so lines of code and it was called “super bat snatch”… Ironic since I seem to have married her, it, whatever…
Actually, my hands been doing fine. The numb hands resulted in the crappy drawing of the monk, not the pun. I love doing bad puns. Though I don’t do them that often (it has been two weeks since the last one).
Oh I do remember the days of typing in code from Electronic Gaming magazine and saving it to cassette so that I could run those cool games on my C64. I also remember the inevitable code errors in the magazine which would requires hours, if not days, or pouring over the damn source code to find the errors.
Pirate Adventure, though, that was a thing of beauty!
…and hey, how about a little appreciation for finding the right font for an apple II and getting a reasonable approximation of the phosphor glow… believe it our not this thing took me about as long to make as doing a regular 4-panel strip!
“would requires hours, if not days, or pouring over” Not sure the code errors were in the magazine (hehe)…
And yes, I will indeed give you props for the font and phosphor effect. Looks like it could be a screen shot. I know a few of these old machines opted for no real cursor but my memory is telling me there should be a giant block of a cursor, maybe even blinking? Or was it the underline cursor? Either way, you seem to have captured only screens in mid blink. 🙂
Okay, technically, the prompt was a ‘]’ and the untyped character was a solid block which did not blink, but I prefer the ‘>’ so we’ll call it artistic license…