Foolery

So the original Duke Nukem 3D was released just about exactly thirteen years ago, and FPS gamers past and present have been waiting thirteen years for the release of Duke Nukem Forever. The title's become synonymous with the term “vaporware” — in fact, you scarcely ever see one term without the other.

Pfft. Pikers. Johnny-come-latelies and mid-show seaters, all of you.

We puzzle-gamers have been waiting twenty-two years for The Fool and his Money, the sequel to the still-unsurpassed 1987 megapuzzler and metapuzzler The Fool's Errand. (Okay, eighteen if you mark from the 1991 release of the formally-unrelated-but-similarly-awesome 3 in Three instead. (And no, the CD-I games don't count.)) Quite literally legendary, the Errand's fiendish puzzles, intertwined story, and overarching metapuzzle essentially established the genre of the puzzle adventure, brought to later fame by the similarly-patterned Myst; much like the text adventure games of an only slightly earlier era, it holds up more than merely nostalgically well against the ravages of time.

(As an aside: The Fool's Errand was a HyperCard game, which all on its own brings back memories of half-baked games and halfheartedly-slapped-together applications. Interestingly, The Fool and his Money promises to be in Flash, which also brings thoughts of half-bakedness to mind.)

Of course, one might argue that the real difference between Duke and the Fool — never mind such petty trivialities as genre and time and timelessness — is that the Fool, well, isn't entirely future-tense anymore.