Jacaranda Jim

Jacaranda Jim was the first IF I ever played. It was, to put it mildly, not a brilliant game; the tone is wacky-morose-snark in that Douglas Adams style that's unbearable when done by anybody other than Douglas Adams. It was clearly aware of this. The world doesn't make a vast amount of sense now, and it made even less sense to an eight-year-old. It kills you a lot. It traps you permanently in certain rooms. It has a sidekick character, Alan the Gribbley, who is both revolting and useless. When I wrote off for the map and my one hint, the former turned out to be larger by several orders of magnitude than the area I had actually managed to explore.

There were, however, a number of puzzles that I managed to solve. They didn't really resemble anything that might be considered a plot, but I gained a good deal of satisfaction from them anyway. And I played and played and played it, despite everything, because I understood that this was a medium vastly more appealing than anything else available at the time, if only the content wasn't so horrendous. So I owe it a fairly substantial debt, despite all.

Moreover, it introduced me to a number of words, including 'bootleg' (there is an evil Software Pirate) and 'plinth'.

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