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Ask HN: Great text based games to play?

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Re: Ask HN: Great text based games to play?

#71

Post by markus_zhang »

pjc50 wrote: post #35
kianryan wrote: post #25

Infocom adventure games are some of the grand-daddy's of text adventures. Zork is by far the most well known, but also pretty infamous are Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Leather Godesses' of Phobos and A Mind Forever Voyaging. As a warm-up, I'd recommend Moonmist. It's a mystery game listed as a "Beginner" game, and is great for introducing elements of the Infocom system. The feelies are available to view here: ht…

> feelies This is a term we're going to have to explain to the younger generation: when games were shipped in boxes, those contained at minimum a disc and a printed manual, but some companies came up with gimmick items you could put in the box and "feel", to enhance your immersion in the game. I still have my Ultima 6 "moonstone" and cloth map somewhere.

It's sad that game publishers don't do it anymore since I don't know when. Everything goes online nowadays. Boring.

Re: Ask HN: Great text based games to play?

#72

Post by markus_zhang »

ghaff wrote: post #37
pjc50 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> feelies This is a term we're going to have to explain to the younger generation: when games were shipped in boxes, those contained at minimum a disc and a printed manual, but some companies came up with gimmick items you could put in the box and "feel", to enhance your immersion in the game. I still have my Ultima 6 "moonstone" and cloth map somewhere.

They also sometimes included essentially proto-copy protection, e.g. you need this decoder wheel to solve some puzzle--which of course worked a lot better pre-Web. A lot of the original packaging could be rather unique generally but eventually they ended up standardizing for retail shelving.

I still love the wheel and manuals of SSI Gold Box games. Apparently there wasn't enough space for all those texts so the games guide you to read say Page 31 for a certain long dialog.

I actually think it gives a lot of immersion than modern day AAA games.

Re: Ask HN: Great text based games to play?

#73

Post by dfabulich »

I help run the Interactive Fiction Database. https://ifdb.org/

I think that our list of games ranked by review scores is certainly the finest repository of extraordinary text-based games in the world. https://ifdb.org/search?browse

Every game on that list is fantastic. For your reading convenience, the top ten are: Counterfeit Monkey, Anchorhead, Superluminal Vagrant Twin, 80 Days, Hadean Lands, Lost Pig, The Wizard Sniffer, Violet, and The Impossible Bottle.

You can click the "Play Online" button on almost any game in IFDB to play it right there in your browser, without downloading anything.

IFDB also includes all of the 20th century classics, including Infocom games, but IMO the modern games have long-since outclassed them.

If you're curious, here's our list of top-ranked Infocom games. https://ifdb.org/search?searchfor=tag:infocom The top-ranked Infocom games are science-fiction games, topped by Trinity, Infocom's surreal "Alice in Wonderland" time-travel game, followed by Planetfall and A Mind Forever Voyaging.

Re: Ask HN: Great text based games to play?

#74

Post by stormcode »

mindcrime wrote: post #21

Broadly speaking there are two big "threads" to follow here. You have your MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon)[1] & MOOs (MUD, Object Oriented)[2] which are played over the network, and are more or less the text based equivalent to MMORPGs. Then you have your IF (Interactive Fiction)[3] / text adventure game that installs and runs locally like the old Infocom games. There is, of course, some overlap here. You can find lists an…

https://www.mudverse.com/

Re: Ask HN: Great text based games to play?

#75

Post by stormcode »

ctoth wrote: post #10

The Grapevine network[0] is a fun little community of different MUDs where you can connect and hang out with other people who enjoy text-based worlds. If you're looking for something to play on your own, winners of the IF competition[1] are often excellent. [0]: https://grapevine.haus [1]: https://ifcomp.org/comp/2022

Grapevine is awesome. Good call-out.

Re: Ask HN: Great text based games to play?

#76

Post by stormcode »

Sebguer wrote: post #13
PenguinCoder wrote: post #4

Look for MUDs and MOOs[1] I've liked and played in the past a lot of these text based role playing games, especially when I was on a shittier dial up connection or remote satellite connections. I liked Aardwolf and Realms of Despair the most. I've played the IRE games like Achaea and Aetolia way too much. While those two definitely have a great lore and many active players, I have always loathed IREs pay to win "cred…

Very sadly, TMS was shifted to an archive-only format a short while ago. End of an era. It looks like Mud Connect is dead, too. Not sure there are any aggregators still standing? :/

https://www.mudverse.com/ is actively maintained.

Re: Ask HN: Great text based games to play?

#78

Post by pmayrgundter »

Here's one I made with ChatG, with DallE images too. But otherwise a choose your own adventure/Zork clone.

Two stories:

  - your spaceship has crash landed

  - Breaking Rad: what of Walt & Jesse cooked acid instead of meth (a friend's idea)
Needs you to have an OpenAI key.

They're super fun

https://pablo-mayrgundter.github.io/artificial-adventure/

Re: Ask HN: Great text based games to play?

#79

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

markus_zhang wrote: post #71
pjc50 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> feelies This is a term we're going to have to explain to the younger generation: when games were shipped in boxes, those contained at minimum a disc and a printed manual, but some companies came up with gimmick items you could put in the box and "feel", to enhance your immersion in the game. I still have my Ultima 6 "moonstone" and cloth map somewhere.

It's sad that game publishers don't do it anymore since I don't know when. Everything goes online nowadays. Boring.

Actually, there are a LOT of 'collector's edition' versions of physical games from publishers like Limited Run, Super Rare, and iam8bit. Check out this Cuphead package, for example:

https://www.iam8bit.com/collections/collectors-editions/prod...

Now, for many of us, they are prohibitively expensive, but they are available.

Re: Ask HN: Great text based games to play?

#80

Post by jah »

sp332 wrote: post #2

Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short. https://github.com/i7/counterfeit-monkey/releases Maps and cheat sheets are in the "Counterfeit Monkey.materials" folder. If you don't want to install a parser on your computer, you can play it online by putting the link to the .gblorb file into https://iplayif.com/ I.e. https://iplayif.com/?story=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fi7%2Fc... Modern games are generally going to be more appro…

Savoir-Faire (https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=p0cizeb3kiwzlm2p) is another incredible game of hers.
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