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Old Text Adventure Games...


DavidMil

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Zork was the gold standard of course.

 

I spent a lot of time playing all the Scott Adams adventures too.

 

Also, I remember Wizard and the Princess, Blade of Blackpool, Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, Mission Asteroid. Ah, good times.

 

For a couple of years I remember thinking in two word verb+noun phrases. Kind of freaky when I think back about it now.

 

MOVE RUG

OPEN TRAP

GO DOWN

...get eaten by a grue.

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There are some decent text adventures from ANALOG computing and the public domain from back in the day, too...

 

I remember Crash Dive and Spare Tire being fun.

 

You may very well be right adam242. I remember that we took Analog magazine and one year we got the magazines with the diskettes.

I'll look through my rather large pile of diskettes and see if I can pull any of those disks out. Come to think of it I think, I believe that I got

some of those from Atarimax too.

 

Thank you and thanks to everyone for all the feed back!

David Milsop

Kingwood, Texas

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Zork was the gold standard of course.

 

I spent a lot of time playing all the Scott Adams adventures too.

 

Also, I remember Wizard and the Princess, Blade of Blackpool, Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, Mission Asteroid. Ah, good times.

 

For a couple of years I remember thinking in two word verb+noun phrases. Kind of freaky when I think back about it now.

 

MOVE RUG

OPEN TRAP

GO DOWN

...get eaten by a grue.

Those were the days when I learned the Magic Phrase of gaming.... SAVE OFTEN!!!

 

David

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I have a game called Starship Titanic that I thought was a Scott Adams game, but as I look at the title I see that is was

written by Douglas Adams. Is this the same person?

 

The sadly late Douglas Adams is NOT the same person as Scott Adams of Adventure International fame. He is famous for his Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio plays and books and wrote a Hitchhiker game for Infocom as well as Bureaucracy. According to a Douglas Adams biography Starship Titanic was the first product of The Digital Village, an early multimedia/games/publishing company attempting to re-create something like the HHGTTG online. Starship Titanic didn't do well as it was probably the wrong product for the time and The Digital Village ceased to exist. I recently bought in on GOG but have yet to play it. If you liked it, give HHGTTG and Bureaucracy (and all of his books) a try, although both are very hard and probably not suitable for your great granddaughter.

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My old favourite was "Lords of Karma" a 48k game that came out on tape - that you should find easily these days. It took about 5 minutes? to initialize itself at the very start, when it would say "working...". It's one of the few games in which you can die, and then restart again on a mountain top.

While not exactly capturing the flavour of - do good deeds and you'll do well in the game - it's a little bit different to others of the standard text adventure game - although it is one.

I did manage to map it out - and it's not as hard as say the Scott Adams text adventure games.

 

Harvey

I love that game! I loved it so much, in fact, that I asked Nir Dary to burn me a copy on cart years ago.

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Wishbringer is a fantasy adventure thats easier than Zork and the Enchanter series and might appeal a bit more to kids. It is a bit younger than Zork and AFAIK has an improved parser and some hint features. I think you need to download the Wishbringer map as well but that's easily found using google.

 

(One of my kids gave it a try but didn't finish it.)

Playing experience much enhanced by the glow-in-the-dark feelie stone that came with the game. I used that thing as a nightlight until the glow finally faded out.

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I don't think I ever laughed so loudly, playing a videogame by myself, as when I thought I had figured out the Babelfish puzzle, only to have yet ANOTHER problem show up.

 

 

I was going to guess you were referring to MUD2, but if you didn't have the Internet, then I guess it must've been some other game.

 

I loved how in Hitchhikers, if you typed something stupid, you might find it becomes part of the story later in the game :)

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I have a game called Starship Titanic that I thought was a Scott Adams game, but as I look at the title I see that is was

written by Douglas Adams. Is this the same person? It's a good game with a very Scott Adams like theme and a rather

droll sense of humor. I tested it and it plays well on my computer with XP but nothing after that.

 

David

 

Douglas Adams was a British author/humorist who later got into writing games. He also wrote a few Doctor Who episodes, and even appeared in at least one Monty Python Flying Circus sketch. So he's kinda like a 70s/80s geek icon :)

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Here's a few I remember. I've include some that are text adventures with pictures. But back then the pictures were often crudely drawn and generic, and didn't really add much to the game.

 

The Quest (Penguin) - graphics/text adventure

 

Dark Crystal (Sierra) - graphics/text adventure based on the movie.

 

The Sands of Egypt (Datasoft) - had some animation too IIRC

 

Mindwheel (Broderbund) - In the early days of the text adventure genre, most developer had parsers that recognized only ACTION/NOUN commands "GO NORTH" "EAT APPLE", etc. While Infocom's understood full sentences. In the mid-80s, there was an effort by other text adventure developers to outdo the Infocom parser. Mindwheel was one of the first of these

 

The Pawn (Firebird) - This first came to the Atari ST and made a splash because instead of crudely drawn graphics, it had some gorgeous bitmaps for graphics, as well as a full text parser. It was later ported to the Atari 8bit, and it still had good graphics for that system. It also had a full-sentence parser.

 

Guild of Thieves (Firebird) - Like The Pawn, full sentence parser and graphics.

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Your Grand daughter can play ZORK I online: https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/5zyoqrsugeopel3ffhz_vq/zork

 

A rubber mat saying 'Welcome to Zork!' lies by the door.

>take mat

 

Taken.

 

>eat mat

I don't think that the welcome mat would agree with you.

 

 

Edit: Zork 2 and 3 are available here.

http://www.play.vg/games/153-Zork0Trilogy.html

Edited by hitchcock4
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The podcast is called Eaten By A Grue: you can hear in your podcast app or at http://monsterfeet.com/grue/

Now I have that song stuck in my head again...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

 

This video really, really makes me want to waste my cash on a green monochrome Apple ][ monitor >_<

 

I've include some that are text adventures with pictures. But back then the pictures were often crudely drawn and generic, and didn't really add much to the game.

I feel like it's fair to count those types of games. Games like The Hobbit or Amazon were certainly different from games like Deja Vu or King's Quest, where you couldn't really play the game without the images.

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Man, I'd kill for one of those. And being that it's just a composite display, I could play all my retro consoles on the green screen. XD

A lot of eBay auctions for them show that they're working (in the photos) by hooking them up to a DVD player =) It's kind of surreal to see black and white...in green.

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