CNET Is an Idiot.

[tablesaw]

It's one thing to use Wikipedia as a source without fact-checking, it's another thing to only minimally reword a Wikipedia article and pass it off as journalism, but it's a whole other thing to do both of these things without reading the original article correctly.

Wikipedia: Zork is set in a sprawling underground labyrinth which occupies a portion of the "Great Underground Empire". The player is a nameless adventurer whose goal is to find the treasures hidden in the caves and return alive with them. The dungeons are stocked with many novel creatures and objects, among them grues and zorkmids. The Zork universe and timeline has been extended by several of Infocom's other works of interactive fiction.

CNET: Set in an "underground empire" of dungeons and imaginative creatures such as grues and zorkmids, the Infocom trilogy of games is stocked with hidden cave treasures for players to find.

Yup. They just confused one of the most famous pieces of videogame currency (and videogame packaging) with an animal.

(Originally spotted by madbard

Also, the Nemesis Factor article has been posted on Game Set Watch. It includes a smackdown of Ken Jennings.

Comments

[spatch]

Oh, that is rich.

[akkanvader.livejournal.com]

what is a grue

[tablesaw]

The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

[mamagotcha.livejournal.com]

We love Nemisis Factor! We didn't do it as a group, though... each of us wanted the 'aha!' moments for ourselves. The bummer was that, with five different people at different levels swiping it back and forth, we managed to kill the batteries... yep. Resetting the whole thing. It was a tragic day in our household.

I ran out of steam around the 60s, but I hope (sometime after the toddler isn't so toddlish anymore) to pick it up again and finish it.