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ProgressQuest blithely offers the users the transcendental visuals of a DOS disk defrag utility, combined with the clichéd narrative of fantasy RPGs. It’s most definitely freeware.

So why waste CPU cycles climbing the ranks of do-gooder distributed computing campaigns like Folding@Home, when instead, you could effortlessly build a swarthy Level 26 Demicanadian Fighter/Organist who casts a mean Level XI Cone of Annoyance spell?

Rob Swigart’s ‘Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval’, originally published as an ‘interactive novel’ back in ‘86, has been migrated to the web, complete with Commodore-era graphics.

I’m also fond of the (subsequent) hardback novelization. Not that the book or hyper-book are likely to be hailed as classics, but still: they imagine a networked world that, over time, seems increasingly familiar…

Word of the day is ‘quincunx’, the pattern of five on a six-sided die.

A quincunx can also refer to a crude probability-modeling device (animated here), a simple rolling ball that falls through a field of nails — distributing nice, Gaussian mounds o’ pellets on someone’s carpet.

…all of which leads us to pachinko and pinball, both championship sports in my book. A thousand jackpots in Caesar’s Palace couldn’t out-shout the everyday drone of a pachinko parlor, and the fine folks at FIFA still haven’t put on a game more thrilling than World Cup Soccer ‘94…

My tennis coach used to boast how, any woman he scored a date with, he took to Jack In The Box, specifically, the drive-thru window, via his Honda GoldWing.

He made it apparent — I was just 10 or 12 years old, then — that this exercise had been repeated times innumerable; the point was never to impress, nor to anger (nor to bed, I now imagine), but rather, to suss out that special lass capable of enjoying his company on a longer-term basis.

Computer afficionados seeking similarly high-risk/reward romance should consider an evening spent soldering His N’ Hers’ GameBoy lightshields, including a requisite trip to RadioShack for white LED #276-320 . (Both ours work dandily.)

For that unlikely second date, keep your eye on portablemonopoly.com — they’re promising retrofit-kits that’ll backlight existing GBA’s.

And as for the games… here’s a piece I recently wrote for WIRED magazine.

“I dreamt music” : Yamaha CS80’s and late ‘70’s analog / voltage-controlled synths, to be precise…

While Vangelis’ textured soundscape to Blade Runner has long been recognized as a groundbreaking electronic score, obtaining the actual music from the film has been nearly impossible. The morass of ‘legal and artistic’ issues holding back a definitive commercial CD spawned an entire phylum of bootlegs, which now have their own definitive history.

Meet Audrey: a conglomeration of the command line and the curvaceous, the ubercute and the Unix-y.

And while ‘Audrey Hacking’ may sound like ‘her’ full name, it’s actually the definitive guide to tinkering with 3com’s now-discontinued ‘ergo’ Net appliance — great fun for those intrigued by DNS spoofs and QNX shells.

With a fine browser, datebook, plus new mp3, caller ID, and picture frame hacks, you’ll soon see, Audrey is quite likable indeed. And now available for pennies on the dollar.

(Ours sits stately on the kitchen counter, for quite a number of reasons.)

Ruin-Japan.com. That’s ‘ruin’, the noun, not the verb — no kaiju here, though a few of the beautifully dilapidated buildings look to have received the ol’ Mothra remodel in the 60’s.

Some web ruins to match the Tokyo gothic: Syd Mead in HotWired; an expedition to Kowloon Walled City, and the story behind that ‘most Mos Eisley’ of Roppongi’s clubs, the venerable GasPanic.

The Fodor’s Guide Rule (“In the course of your adventure you will visit one desert city, one port town, one mining town, one casino city, one magic city (usually flying), one medieval castle kingdom, one martial arts-based community, one thieves’ slum, one lost city and one sci-fi utopia.”) is just one of the many observations from the Grand List of console role-playing cliches….

Ursula K. LeGuin, who I’ve always loved for her Earthsea series, also wrote a fine rendition of the Tao Te Cheng. I say ‘rendition’, as it’s more loosely interpreted than most translations, but she’s wielded her poetic license with wisdom and flair, methinks. To wit, some simple advice regarding greed:

to know enough’s enough
is enough to know.

“Down From the Top of Its Game” is a neat, in-depth analysis into the story of Infocom, Inc. Neat, at least, to those who know/care/remember what Infocom was…

So I’ve been playing another old-school text adventure — this time, one called ‘Christminster’ — which you can grab on this page, along with plenty of other Infocom-style games. Christminster is remarkably fun, with a depth and quality to its quasi-Oxford world that’s surprising to find in a freeware game.

Also, there is a nice cat in it.