131–140 of 241 posts
I don't see it here, but Bureaucracy[1] was also really great. The whole premise of the game was that you are trying to change your address with your bank after a move. It's never that easy... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)
Hitchhikers Guide was one of the first PC games I ever got. I had no idea it was a “text adventure.” Nor did I understand it was based on a book. My dad got it for me used from The Computer Club in downtown Lake Oswego, Oregon. I picked it out largely due to the green guy on the front of the box. I remember being delighted by all the weird stuff it came with, including a small packet of fuzz, and other artifacts from…
It is an extremely difficult game. In theory, I know the answer to all the puzzles, however, there are so many ways to lose without realizing it that I've never managed to string together a single play session in which I do it correctly. Though I've also long since stopped trying. :) For instance, there are subareas where you must collect various tools. Many of these are themselves rather fragile affairs, easy to rui…
Is that some kind of angle bracket lisp? Can anyone shed more light of zil files?
It's exactly a Lisp derivative/fork. Zork was originally written in MDL [0], a Lisp derivative in use on MIT's mainframes (that in turn went on to inspire parts of Scheme). When the Zork team left college to form Infocom, they built ZIL to port Zork to home computers, based on their experience of MDL, and their needs for their Z-Machine virtual machine. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language)
don't know. But Lisp Machine Lisp and then Common Lisp.
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but dial-up modem bulletin boards were definitely a thing, in those days. Or Compuserv, if so inclined. I wrote a BBS in Applesoft basic (and assembly, to trap some of the control characters and escape commands) and hosted it on my Apple ][. comms at 110/300 baud (full duplex!) or even 1200 baud where text comes faster than you can read, if you had the extra $400 for an AppleCat modem! walkthroughs were very popular…
And magazines - some times later than Infocom we got Dungeon Master (on an ST although we were Amiga guys) as soon as possible, played it through, wrote a walkthrough with all the maps drawn to be the first to the magazine but got slightly beaten by another guy.
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I think the best of the Sierra games was the original Kings Quest, as all the puzzles were based on various fairy tales. Also, some display glitches helped such as items that you could move would be drawn on the screen last. The worst section of a Sierra game was in Leisure Suit Larry, where the official way of getting money is to save the game state every time you win at the casino. If you lose a round, then restore…
The original King's Quest had a puzzle which required writing down the alphabet forwards and backwards to encode Rumplestitskin as the secret word needed to get the magic beans. (You could "win" the game without the beans but you'd miss out on a really cool portion of the game and your score was far from the max.) The in-game puzzle hint was far from helpful. I played the game for a year before getting a hint book. R…
KQ6 and 7 were setup so it was impossible to get stuck, but 5 was not. KQ3 had that annoying path you had to transverse and time limits until you killed the evil wizard. I think you could get stuck in that one too, but I don't remember KQ1-4 as well.
You can still try it out, I think, if you say "Ok, Google, let me talk to Dungeon RPG"
Reminds me of that time I hacked together Zork for the Google Home. You can still try it out, I think, if you say "Ok, Google, let me talk to Dungeon RPG" https://github.com/mitchellgordon95/DungeonForGoogleHome
Smart assistants, ironically, feel like the perfect medium for "text" adventure games to have a resurgence.
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It is an extremely difficult game. In theory, I know the answer to all the puzzles, however, there are so many ways to lose without realizing it that I've never managed to string together a single play session in which I do it correctly. Though I've also long since stopped trying. :) For instance, there are subareas where you must collect various tools. Many of these are themselves rather fragile affairs, easy to rui…
This is really the problem with the entire early genre of adventure games. The later Sierra titles were terrible about this. You pretty much needed the hint book to beat many of them. Even after they dropped text for point-n-click, the puzzles were still hard and not really intuitive. The later LucasArts games were better at this (I bit The Dig without any hints; think I needed one or two for Full Throttle). The mode…
I finished the game after that.
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It was kind of the point. His other Infocom game was called Bureacrary, so you can see the theme developing... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)
An infamous scene in Bureaucracy was when you had to order some food in a diner, and you'd spend 10 minutes on that (How do you want the burger, rare, medium, or well done? With fries or onion rings? Small, medium, or large? Coke or Fanta? Regular or light? etc. etc., really drawn out), and then the waiter comes back and explains that the computer crashed and you had to go through the whole tedious process again... C…
You're on a barge in a river, and in the distance is something that "looks like a giant naked lady, breasts pointing to the sky".
So you sail down the river towards it, and it gets bigger and bigger over the next ten pages.
And then the river turns, and it fades away, but is still there. So you keep sailing.
"Getting bigger. You must be getting closer now". You keep sailing.
"Sunlight is gleaming on the statue, and it feels so close you could touch it". You keep sailing.
"You turn around another bend in a river, and there's... nothing there. You look around. Nothing. It was all a mirage. And the barge can't go any further."
So you sail all the way back...
[0]https://retrotinker.blogspot.com/2018/02/z-intepreter-source...
[1]http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Programming/Source/...