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''Obsidian'' is a 1996 computer game created by Rocket Science Games for Mac OS and Windows platforms. Based on a game design outline by VP of Development/Creative Director, Bill Davis, and written by Howard Cushnir and Adam Wolff, the genre of the game was a first-person 3-D graphical adventure game, with a large puzzle element. The puzzles were designed by Scott Kim, Howard Cushnir and Adam Wolff. The soundtrack was developed by Thomas Dolby. The game spanned five CDs, and featured pre-rendered environments, audio, and full-motion video (both live action and CGI). The strategy guide included numerous small essays throughout the book, providing background on such subjects as nanotechnology, Jungian psychology, and the nature of artificial intelligence. One of its notable puzzles was a minigame which used a "twenty questions" algorithm (similar to what would eventually be used in 20Q). The game came preprogrammed with a set of guesses, but after losing it would ask the player for criteria that would have led it to a correct guess—and then recorded that information into a text file. Because of this, the game was able to (theoretically) "learn" how to become so good as to beat the player every time. == Storyline == The year is 2066. The player controls scientist Lilah Kerlins. Lilah and her partner, Max, have just launched the Ceres satellite into orbit around the Earth. The satellite is designed to release nanobots into Earth's atmosphere in order to counteract depletion of the ozone layer and air pollution. Because the satellite has been endowed with a powerful artificial intelligence, it is thought that all further control may safely be ceded to the satellite itself. Thus, Lilah and Max go on vacation in the woods of a mountain (one of the first areas to be positively affected by Ceres). While checking Lilah's e-mail on her PDA at the campsite, the player hears Max scream in the distance. Running to check on him, she discovers a large black outcropping on the side of the mountain, the Obsidian for which the game is named. The glassy structure opens, and Lilah falls inside, leading to the beginning of the game itself. Ceres' artificial intelligence has become sentient. In an attempt to figure out who she (the A.I. refers to itself as female) is, Ceres has used her nanobots to create a world. She seems to be discovering all the faults and downsides of humanity, and asking herself whether or not the Earth wouldn't be better off without people on it. Unlike other Artificially Intelligent supercomputers, Ceres was not made conscious by learning about humans directly through a central device, but instead through the growing complexity of her nanobots, creating a ''distributed intelligence'', akin to that of a beehive or anthill. In order to communicate with Lilah and her partner, the nanobots constructed a female android known as "The Conductor", with a white porcelain, human head with silver eyes and a bizarre electrical halo cap on top. Every time this android speaks, her (or its) mouth does not move, but instead the sides of her face flash light blue with every syllable. During the complexity, Ceres, for unknown reasons, thought of her two creators as mother and father, begging for approval, yet able to change the world completely on her own. Max, suspicious of this, was imprisoned within his own invention: The Programmable Molecular Assembler, despite the fact that the PMA was the very thing that created her. Why the guide addresses Ceres as "The Conductor" is unknown, though the meaning could be understood in one of the game's endings. The game is extremely linear until the end, although two realms involve areas that can be accessed in a number of different combinations. At that point, the player has the option of either talking Ceres out of destroying humanity, or ceding that she is correct. Depending on the choice made, the game plays one of two endings. One ending shows Ceres destroyed and Lilah returning to the original world with Max. The other ending shows Lilah return to a world which has been "rebooted" by Ceres, who in its misguided urge to cleanse the planet has erased the source of the pollution, mankind, leaving Earth in a bleak, primordial state, which Ceres considers decontaminated. The final shot of the second ending, in which Lilah stands on a cliff overlooking a wasteland, is identical to a painting seen earlier in the game. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Obsidian (video game)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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