h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's basically a text-adventure "programming language" which is more or less literally written in English. To create the "west of house" room from Zork 1, you literally type:

West Of House is a room. "You are standing in an open field west of a small white house with a boarded-up front door." A small mailbox is here. "There is a small mailbox here." It is an openable container. It is closed. The mailbox is fixed in place.

Or at least, that's how I made it work in a little mini-game where I just played around a bit to see what I could do. At first, I had trouble getting things to work, since you need to be blisteringly precise and in the right structure (i.e. "The fish is carried by the player" works, but "The player carries the fish" does not); however, chalk that up to simple inexperience and unfamiliarity.

I might make one or both of the text adventures in my previous journal entries with it. Assuming I can keep my attention span on it long enough ...

I like the basics of Inform 7, but it doesn't let me solve some of the more basic problems I was hoping it'd let me work around.

Like, in the long-planned CLI text adventure, "CLI: System Failure!", I had this complicated door locking mechanism that seemed so simple in my head, but didn't translate as seemlessly to the game environment as I'd hoped. I thought that Inform 7 would make it easier, but it seems that its dependence upon Inform 6 makes the task just as difficult as before (though I will admit, the ease at typing out the code is making it easier to process why something isn't working. Progress has been made, but I think that in the end the puzzle will have to be left for a later date when I have a better grasp of Inform.)

Looks cool. Now, does it come with a free-time generator?

Nope!

Not that I've actually picked it up in ages. I've had ... er, a bunch of other stuff I've had to deal with, which includes 1. school and 2. getting ready to move down the street (which is a fantastic tale in its own right).

I'm sure. Moving is always fascinating, in one sense of the word or another.

Really? Which word?

Fascinating.