181–190 of 241 posts
I found a swear in the Hitchhiker's source code: https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/ma...
I can't find a definition for that, but it's used in several places. Is a ZIL primitive??!
https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/d7...
"Zork I is a 1980 interactive fiction game" Surely, these were called Adventure Games at the time. I never recall them being called that.
The box art calls it Interactive Fiction: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ac/Zork_I_box_ar... EDIT: Some more info on the origins; apparently it was first used by an early creator of such games (Robert Lafore), and then picked up by Infocom: https://www.filfre.net/2011/09/robert-lafores-interactive-fi...
I remember them as being called text adventures but as your link says they officially shifted to IF at some point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The name Infocom comes from their desire to make business software. To a large extent they considered games that they had written in the past to be a way to raise money so they could afford to make the business software that would make them rich. Games were always a distraction in their eye - a profitable one, but not their purpose. As far as I know they never got anywhere with business software...
I realize. Still doesn't mean I can't lament them for not realizing they were already successful and could continue to be. Just imagine if BioWare had kept trying to make medical software despite the success of their RPGs, just because their name said they should.
(Either way, I think it'd have struggled to survive the emergence of story-driven games with good graphics. There's plenty of comparatively well-written and user-friendly modern IF which only reaches niche audiences despite it being freely available and publicised across the internet )
)>
-- https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/blob/master/gverbs... The SPRAYED? global wasn't used in Zork I, but showed up in Zork II as the Frobozz Magic Grue Repellent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
One person's "problem" is another person's joie de vivre. I loved the original Zork and all the Infocom games back in the day.
I admit, though, that I don't know if I'd have the patience to play them today. E.g., they required making maps with pencil and paper and taking notes, etc. These days, I just want to kick back on the sofa and shoot aliens with space magic guns.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Firstly, if you judge the "value" of a game based on how long it takes to complete then having overly-complex/fiddly/obscure puzzles is a great way to artificially inflate the perceived "value" of your game via the reported play time in reviews and among players.
Secondly, in the golden age of software piracy, including puzzles that most players wouldn't be able to solve without help creates a way to extract money from otherwise non-paying players via purchases of hint guides or calls to premium-rate hint lines. A kind of precursor to "pay-to-win" microtransactions in modern "free-to-play" games.
Of course, over time both of those influences waned. With the rise of the Internet you could get a walkthrough for any game very easily, killing the market for hint guides/hint lines, and people came to understand that there's more to the value of a game than how long it takes to play (though some "hard-core gamer" types still don't understand this).
I read an interview a while ago with the founder of Wadjet Eye Games (a modern-day retro-aesthetic adventure game studio), Dave Gilbert (no relation to Ron Gilbert of Lucas Arts fame). He said that designing adventure game puzzles these days is very challenging because he is aware that if they are made too hard players will stop playing and just go look up a guide or watch a recorded playthrough, however if they are too easy the player will breeze through the game. Essentially he has to find the right balance of puzzle difficulty to maintain good pacing in his games.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Also consider that, Invisiclues books notwithstanding, there was no straightforward way to get help if you really got stuck somewhere as this was pre-Internet for most people and certainly pre-Web.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I realize. Still doesn't mean I can't lament them for not realizing they were already successful and could continue to be. Just imagine if BioWare had kept trying to make medical software despite the success of their RPGs, just because their name said they should.
The Infocom brand and creative team outlived their failed business software division, but couldn't survive the tension of being acquired by a games company that wanted to churn out more content. It's possible the company regarding the games division as a side project to raise seed money rather than a cash cow actually indirectly helped the creative side... (Either way, I think it'd have struggled to survive the emerg…
It's impossible to say how well Infocom might have done as graphics continued to take focus. The diaspora of Infocom's creative talent worked on many well-beloved graphic adventure games (Moriarty's LOOM and influence on other LucasArts games, Meretsky's The Space Bar and influence as a consultant to a variety of game companies in roughly the same time span, as two examples quickest to mind).
They still probably wouldn't have survived the "adventure game" crash that eventually broke Sierra and LucasArts, but it's interesting to wonder what sort of a contender they might have been had they not been forced to sell to Activision (or had they stumbled into selling to a publisher that was a better fit creatively).
Anyway, its interesting to armchair quarterback with decades of hindsight. The business software was a technical marvel of a sort and potentially had it been much better timed and budgeted it could have eaten Lotus and Excel's lunch. Maybe there's an alternate universe where we are all using an Infocom office suite and Infocom operating system on hardware Z-Machines, which is a fun idea to think about.