Woohoo! I did the scene rewrites for Heavy Rains this afternoon and took care of half the to-do list in one swoop. Now it just needs a bit of a general spit n' polish before the first readers get their hands on it! I also did a little more research for the other stories, but no startling new insights resulted from that.

On a whim, this morning I started playing an old Sierra PC game called Goldrush. When I say old, I mean 1980s old. I'm a big fan of Sierra's adventure games, which they don't make anymore, but never got around to playing this one. I thought I'd give it a go today and I was pleasantly surprised.

The graphics and sound (PC speaker anyone?) are terrible by today's standards and the interface is one of those old text-based parsers, but I still found it to be a charming and educational little game. It even comes with a nice historical manual about the California goldrush, and a map of the US and surrounds showing different routes travellers took to get to California.

Unfortunately a lot of these old Sierra AGI (Adventure Game Interpreter) games have trouble running on modern machines, so I used a nifty little interpreter utility called NAGI to take care of the speed, sound and graphics problems I normally have when running these games on my laptop.

Now if only I can figure out how to get my intrepid explorer down the steep incline without the oxen bolting and smashing him and the wagon to bits...