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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?

#91

Post by jfzoid »

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…

Planetfall Enchanter Trilogy Starcross (took place inside a space station -- map was wrap-around) Suspended was harder but definitely very good

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

#92

Post by ReaLNero »

jacquesm wrote: post #85

Don't click. https://kittensgame.com I take absolutely no responsibility for the consequences of clicking this link. Remember: Praise the sun, and Zebras hate you for no reason.

Tip: if you are like me and can't help but play games that are elaborate loading screens that sap your productivity, try using cheats. It gets rid of the pull to play fast once you jump through all the content.

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

#94

Post by PebblesRox »

raldi wrote: post #20

Spider and Web, https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/tangle/ Without giving anything away: It does something brilliant that wouldn't be possible in any other storytelling medium.

Seconded! And put on the album "Eye in the Sky" by The Alan Parsons Project while you play. I happened to listen to that while playing the game and thematically it's very appropriate.

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

#95

Post by xwowsersx »

dfabulich wrote: post #73

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 W…

Counterfeit Monkey is great writing:

  To review, we're Alexandra now. I was Alex, before the synthesis. You were...
 
  >I don't know
  ...oh boy. Okay. Okay. I need you on form here. This is going to be hard if you don't remember being Andra. Not panicking. As far as I can tell, the operation was a success. We're meant to be one person now, unrecognizable to anyone who knew us before.
hehe

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

#96

Post by Lenis »

If you want to try a multiplayer text game I'd recommend Akanbar.

I would say it has the best qualities of many text games and MUDs with less of the weaknesses of its rivals.

You don't need an emulator, you can play from the website, however it's usually advised to download a client to connect from (Mudlet, Cmud, Mushclient, TinTin) so that you can make use of triggers (copy and paste a line from the game into the client so that if that line comes up again your character will react automatically with a 'triggered' response) and aliases (shorten commands, make 'sh' sip health instead of typing it out everytime).

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

#97

Post by poisonarena »

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 actually am from the box/manual generation and never heard it called 'feelies'.. I remember to register some games i would have to look up charts or keys in the manual, or on page numbers

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

#98

Post by 082349872349872 »

pjc50 wrote: post #29

tThe general term is "interactive fiction", and the ancestor is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure : you can play it in a browser at https://rickadams.org/adventure/advent/ , and when you've tried it the source is small enough to just read through. More recently the scene converged on the programming language "inform" https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ - so Inform games are portable. They'r…

more Colossal Cave nostalgia: https://meheller.medium.com/adventure-3e663876d257

note that Willie Crowther was on the IMP team and probably wrote code related to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34165014

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

#99

Post by Lenis »

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…

I would never recommend an Iron Realms game to someone for a couple of reasons.

One being the pay to win aspects where players who pay real money to buy items get major advantages.

Another being the amount of grinding required to level up.

I'd recommend Akanbar instead. It has no pay to win features. Balance based real time combat loosely based on the old Avalon game (Achaea did not invent balance based mud combat, it came from the now dead game 'Avalon') and you don't have to learn a coding language just to become competitive and partake effectively in the pvp if that's a part of the game you have interest in.

It sits in a sweet spot between complexity and simplicity and has a fun concept, well made guilds and a dedicated playerbase and admin.

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

#100

Post by michaelsbradley »

awb wrote: post #36

My first computer game in the mid 80s was a text adventure game called “Hunt the Wumpus”, voted one of the top 100 games of all time. Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus Emulator: https://archive.org/details/Hunt_the_Wumpus_1977_Creative_Co...

That brought back some good memories! My dad and I enjoyed playing the TI 99/4 variant quite a bit, though that version is more of a graphical game than a text adventure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkWJMU16GrU
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