William Willing

An item in Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities reminded me of a puzzle I once amused myself with during a boring physics class. I wanted to create a puzzle for the school paper where you have a 4×4 grid filled with letters and you have to use the knight’s move to visit all squares in the right order so you get a sixteen-letter word.

After I picked the word, I tried to fill all squares, but soon I suspected that what I wanted wasn’t possible; I couldn’t find a way to reach all sixteen squares using a knight’s move (one square horizontal or vertical and one diagonal) without passing any square twice. Now I had a new puzzle: prove that this is impossible.

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It’s good to see that Double Fine’s upcoming game Brütal Legend is getting a lot of attention these days. The Double Fine people deserve it after way too little people played the awesome game Psychonauts. That game is easily one of my favourite computer games of all time. (The only reason it’s not on my list of favourite games is that I hadn’t played it yet when I put that list together.) Yahtzee likes it too, by the way.

So I hope Brütal Legend will be a huge success. There’s no doubt in my mind that it will be great, because when was the last time that Tim Schafer made a game that wasn’t totally awesome? Never, that’s when. A few days ago, he responded to questions of fans via Twitter. You can read the entire Q&A if you have some time to kill, but here are some of my favourite quotes.

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Of all the reasons to buy an Xbox, I never thought Monkey Island would be one of them! Sure, you may not like the new graphics, but just the fact that they are doing this is great news. Let’s hope it doesn’t stop here.

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