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Sierra AGI games had a limited vocabulary for their command parser, but they allowed some synonyms from their word list, including some common misspellings. They also tended to just carry the list of synonyms from one game to another, so there are references in there to other games. I decided to abuse that system to get through the game with some of the weirdest commands I could find.

It's been years since I've reviewed a point and click adventure game, but the official release of Inspector Waffles on several platforms, including on Steam and on GOG today warrants one. I've been following the game over the past 3 years or so and was extremely happy to have the opportunity to help out by beta testing as well as contributing some pixel art. So what is this game about?

Computers only have a finite amount of RAM. When it runs out, they will "swap out" parts of memory that is not crucial to disk, soit can be read back in when necessary. As disks are much slower than RAM, even with modern SSD drives, having more RAM is always preferable to swapping, but it's still a good idea to have swap space available for when it is required. If you don't, you might find the "oom killer" has killed an important process to make some memory available to others. You really don't want your database getting killed just because PHP requires some extra memory because it's resizing a large image.

This year, I participated in the $104 Adventure Game Challenge to create a graphical adventure game from scratch in 14 days. The theme of the jam was "A Delusion", meaning that the protagonist must be operating on a false belief, although the player must know that that belief is false. In my case, I opted to go for the story of a flat-earther teen who decides to build a rocket in his backyard to prove that the earth is flat. This is based loosely on the real life story of "Mad Mike" Hughes who perished in February this year.

After updating to the Windows 10 Version 1903, I noticed that my monitors started flickered every few seconds. I've seen it happen every 38 seconds, every 17 seconds or every 15 seconds, but always regular as clockwork and annoying as heck. Rolling back to Windows 10 Version 1809 eliminated the flickering, but that is obviously not a sustainable solution. So what causes this flickering? Is it a Windows 10 bug? Yes. And no.