Jolt Country

Announcing the very first Burning Down the House player competition!

The first player to successfully empty the toilet of water will receive a special BDTH prize pack!

Email the puzzle solution to pinback@earthlink.net, and if you're the first (correct) submission, YOU WIN!!

Good luck everyone! Happy flushing!

Oh, and you can't use the source code to get the answer.

Yeah, I was gonna mention that subtle flaw.

There have been NO WINNING SUBMISSIONS thusfar in the BDTH competition.

You still have a chance to take home the coveted BDTH Prize Pack! Come on! Empty that toilet!

I'm afraid I got curious and looked through the sourcecode without even trying the puzzle, so I'm out.

But nice coding on the bath.

Can NOBODY empty the toilet?! Have I ascended to Zarfian realms of tantalizing, infuriating puzzle design!?!

Or, more likely, does just nobody give a fuck?

Oh, sure, when you got to run down an empty hallway, that was D4 B0M, but now that I threw Inky, Blinky and Clyde at you, you just wilt up and die like my love of life!

I confess I have been lax.

I'll pump it up sooner rather than later, though. I am now fully recovered from being up until 3:00am at night posting congratulatory messages to Der Clashal over there on PWC2.

Well, my motherboard died last night, taking a hard drive down with it. The hard drive I had BDTH on it. Oh, and all the games that I have in development, natch.

(Luckily I backup all my in-progress games at work, so any development I do is not lost when my annual dead mobo & drive thing happens.)

I could rant and rave about how much life sucks due to that fact, but all I really ended up losing was my Baldur's Gate II save (AGAIN... fuck, I will never, ever finish that game) and some MP3s. Here's my daily CompSci PROTIP: never work on a PC when carpet is around, and never do so in May in Colorado until after 11:30pm, when temperatures go from the 150C that they are during the day to something slightly cooler.

Touched my motherboard once when I was, like, 14 or something. So much static flew down my arm that I was thrown back about a foot. I couldn't feel my arm for two days.
The motherboard was glowing orange.

Alas, I've tried to empty the toilet of water but I didn't even notice any water object in that aforementioned toilet... This requires more lateral thinking than I first imagined!
Oh, well, I'll get back to that task once I'm done exploring the house.

Well, let's just say that the toilet bowl has some water in it. Just because:

> get water from bowl
You don't see that.

...is no reason to think there isn't water in the bowl. I mean, flush the damn thing and it's quite clear about the fact that there's water in there.

Sorry, did you expect me to code for every single little thing you'd possibly think of?

(Note: The only reason anyone would ever type "get water from bowl" is if someone told them that they had to empty the toilet bowl, which nobody ever would do unless they released a half-finished game that had no other goal to shoot for.)

Did you get my mail, Ben, that said I was going to begin adding parts to BDTH any day now? I just mention that because I have, in fact, started. That is all.

Wow, excellent!

But more importantly... HAVE YOU EMPTIED THE TO1LET YET!!!!???

That'd be a "negative."

I have the source code in one window and the game in another and I can't flush the goddamn toilet.

By the way, someone made an "Annoyotron III."

http://www.wurb.com/if/game/1823

Why do I get the feeling that a murderous rampage is on the horizon for you? Because I get that feeling.

"You look terrible." --bitch
"Yeah, well... you shoulda seen me yesterday." -- mike mcd

Son.

Of.

A.




Fuck.

And here's something else for you -- I'm reading through your source code this week in an attempt to add some stuff for you and... THIS IS REALLY GOOD. Jesus, man. This would be your best game ever. Let me put that another way: this would be a game that anyone would be proud to write. True, the hatred you have for everyone who plays it could be decreased by may a smidgen, but there's lots and lots of good stuff here.

Who is giving you advice like, "stop writing your quality game"? Punch that mofo in the gob and piss on their prone, battered body, because they ain't helping you at all.

Thanks, man.

I wish I cared more. I don't mean that flippantly either. I desperately wish I cared more. I wish I could learn to dedicate myself to it. To anything.

Oh, the horror. The horror. Skimming along the edges of life, enjoying the scenery but never venturing in.

Aw, crap, I'm posting drunk again, aren't I? I wish I would stop doing that. The mornings after are so embarassing.

I have a story for you. Gather round.

It seems that a substance has been recently banned in the NFL. Ephedra it is called, I believe. Funnily enough, it happens to be in the Ripped Fuel tablets I've been consuming, so that I can run around a softball infield without becoming short of breath. It's banned because it'll kill you, essentially. I'd need to do a bit of research to be sure, but the active ingredient there is like a giant amphetamine.

Your ass is probably in the know regarding the fact that softball games occur in the evening: 7:00pm for ours. I took one of these... "Ripped Fuel" pills at 5:00pm. Now, don't get me wrong, After a month you should be taking six a day. But not wanting my heart to leap out of my chest, grab my bag of "Dungoneer" dice, and start whipping them at me for having nerdish pursuits, I only take one and no more than five a week.

But still. An amphetamine is an amphetamine. I'll be up until 5:00am in the morning due to the 12 hour kick they give me.

Is it worth it? I went 4-5 with at least two RBIs and two runs scored. We won in the bottom of the 7th inning (the last one) 24-23. I went from batting .250 to .462. Oh yes, it was worth it. Oh yes indeed.

But back to my point: for Christ's sake, you fucking SHOULD care. I mean, I understand that you don't. And let's be honest -- AF209 is a nice little snapshot. The first Annoyotron is the classic case of what games should not be. But by the time Aggravatron: A2 rolled around, your hatred had consumed you in a way that I don't think was necessarily beneficial. You hated us all. I mean, Clash mostly, but all of us as well. (Not just the people who post here, but more, the people who don't. But us too.)

But!!!! "Burning Down the House".... ah, BDTH. There are a number of programmers out there, both for IF and for real games who could not come up with some of the quality lines in that thing if given ten years and a copy of "Bartlet's Familiar Quality Lines." Your hatred is now much more productive. You've mastered the Zork 1-like flicking off of the player along with putting the pieces together of a nice puzzle as well.

I'll get your additional stuff plopped into this game and we'll get it in tip-top shape. Much like how Mike Sousa was able to light a fire under me and get me productive last year, well, so shall I with BDTH. And it will be magnificent.

And then, after the game gets an accolade or two -- then you can begin your systematic termination of all that have unwittingly sequeled you. And it shall be most heinous.


Also: Baf's guide has you listed as "anonymous" for all your games, so I'm guessing that nobody knew there was a real guy out there who is responsible for the "Annoyotron" lineage.

Also, add these fuckers to this list:

Review by R. Serena Wakefield (12 Jul 2000)
*
Billed as "The Most Annoying Game of All Time," but it doesn't even come close. The joke is obvious by the second move of the game, but takes around 350 more moves to play out and isn't that funny. There isn't even a real punchline. Not so much annoying as pointless.

---

Review by Carl Muckenhoupt (14 Mar 2001)
*
Same basic idea as Annoyotron, shorter hallway, slightly different punchline.

---

I'm making a list. I'm checking it twice. Maybe I can't care about IF in a good, productive, creative way, but you can be damn sure I can care about it in an angry, violent, vengeful way.

both for IF and for real games

FUCK YOU, PUSSYLESS PUSSY![/color][/size]