151–160 of 241 posts
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And developer sense of humor about code quality remains the same... https://github.com/historicalsource/zork/blob/70d16c9c817bc1...
That word "issue" used in the context of a printed magazine... seems like you don't hear it used much anymore.
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Slowly? the iPhone is many thousands of times more capable than any of the target systems these software were built for -- typical was a 1 megahertz 8-bit CPU with 32 kilobytes of RAM. Even the most inefficient ZIL interpreter will spend most of its time in a stall loop.
I think “play slowly” in this case means “take it out during odd moments of the day such as waiting in a line or riding a bus and poke at the puzzles instead of catching up on Twitter”. I am pretty sure that even a first-generation ZIL interpreter spent the bulk of its cycles flashing the cursor and waiting for the player to type something.
I love interactive fiction (as these types of games are now denoted) then and now. In principle. There are possibilities with the text-only canvas that are not even conceivable in other media. But really, does anyone have time for these games anymore? Playing these Infocom games is a multi-month project, with a significant amount of note-taking, manual mapping, and patience (read: replay) required. To call the "parse…
Do you have statistics on how much time people spend playing Candy Crush or other modern games? I think a lot of people have spent 70 hours watching Game of Thrones. But if length is really a problem, making shorter versions wouldn't be hard.
There is no casual playing of HHGTTG or Zork or Hadean Lands.
This is the correct link, not the one on the HN post: https://github.com/historicalsource?tab=repositories As a zipfile because someone is bound to get that repo taken down. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S1CgtZNEKS8VITqTAWAkeyO0LBf...
Regarding where these files came from: > The source code was contributed anonymously and represents a snapshot of the Infocom development system at time of shutdown - there is no remaining way to compare it against any official version as of this writing, and so it should be considered canonical, but not necessarily the exact source code arrangement for production. (From the "witness" readme, and presumably other rep…
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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…
Fair enough. I was active in BBSs but didn’t remember walkthroughs. But then I knew a number of the authors and just asked them if I was really stuck :-)
So yeah, walkthroughs were popular. Another favorite was Easter Eggs (hidden features). I remember one particular firestorm on my BBS -- an author claimed there was an Easter Egg in the Atari Battlezone stand-up 3D vector graphics arcade game. (For those who aren't familiar, you drive a tank and shoot at other tanks, looking through a periscope and driving with differential sticks). The promise was, if one drove far enough toward the volcano/mountain in the background and fired the gun or spun around a certain number of times, you could reach a city where an urban battle would commence.
Really exciting stuff, right? Of course we now know it was all nonsense, but boy did that ignite a conversation. At the time it was just crazy enough to be plausible and we were just gullible enough to believe it, leading to many wasted quarters (some of them my own) trying to reach that fabled tank battle city.
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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 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…
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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 was able to solve almost everything in Zork except the bell, book, & candle puzzle. I only discovered the answer a couple of years later when they revealed the solution in the Zork books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork_books I finished the game after that.