Throat Infection, Castle of the Winds
Some virus or bacteria really did a number on my throat this week. The first symptoms appeared on Thursday, and by Friday, I could barely talk. I've spent most of my time between then and now half-asleep in bed, spitting lung-gunk into a wastebasket, and mindlessly letting a backlog of YouTube videos wash over me. I don't think I've ever before had a throat infection that has caused such hoarseness in my voice, to the point that I struggle to communicate verbally beyond grunting "yes" and "no."
When I got sore from lying in bed, I sat at my PC and played Castle of the Winds for a few hours. It's a dungeon crawler from 1993 that was programmed as a Windows 3.x GUI application; it has the kinds of buttons, scroll bars, icons and other doohickeys that one would expect from a word processor or a CAD package of the time, and the game world is presented as a basic tilemap with EGA colours. In gameplay terms, it plays much like Rogue and its descendants, but without permadeath. I'm currently on the second of two shareware episodes.
I set up my character to be a fighter with high strength and dexterity, but since I put no points into constitution, he has a low maximum HP, and consequently runs a moderate risk of dying when fighting even mildly difficult monsters. He has since become a magician, after randomly finding an enchanted flail that increases intelligence when equipped.
I first found this game on a shareware CD collection as a child. I was not predisposed to reading instruction manuals at the time, so I didn't get very far. I think it was my first experience with cursed equipment in a video game.