A Twisty Maze

[tikat]

HappyMonkey and Slartibartfast hit on Interactive Fiction games (Zork and such) in another thread.

I played these voraciously when I was a kid, and even put together a few barely playable games with sad little parsers in Apple BASIC and Pascal.

Now commercial text-only adventure games are pretty much gone, but with dedicated IF languages like Inform and TADS out there, it is easy for anyone to write one, and many people do.

Did the rest of you play Infocom and similar games, and have you written any?

[perth]

I just finished the Hamlet one I posted elsewhere, in the site of the day thread, i think. It was my first serious attempt at one, and I actually really enjoyed it.

My first experience with one was an Incredible Hulk game. It started with Weakling Dr. Bruce Banner being tied to a chair. Being a 10 year old with no attention span, my attempts went something like this...

"Get mad"
"Get angry"
"Break ropes"
"Break chair"

when none of those worked...

"Fuck a duck"

The game replied something about naughty language, at which point I unloaded the game, put the Gauntlet tape(!) in and started having real fun.

I saw the Zork games are available online for free, so I might check them out.

[Happy Monkey]

I still remember clearly the sense of wonder when I made it across the lake in Zork, and discovered I hadn't seen half of what was there in the game. Amazing game design.

And yet, I don't have the patience anymore to struggle with them. I've got a CD of a ton of old Infocom games, which I haven't gotten to for a while.

[wolf]

I played the original colossal caves advenure obsessively in college. finished it. Hung out with people who altered it, who instead of adding a room to the maze as was the usual hack, added a spray can which yielded different results if you were in the cave or outside the cave (outside it just hissed, as there were no walls to paint). Inside the cave it yielded one of three sentences ... "Beware of the Leopard" "Who is Tom Baker" "Don't say Gazonga" (with a subroutine that caused one of those nasty little dwarves with the sharp knives to come after you if you SAID Gazonga)

I played a little bit of Zork, didn't have a computer when it was in it's heydey. I do have the infocom total zork collection, but haven't really played much of it.

[tikat]

I played through several of their games. Most of my computer game time was split between Infocom, Origin and the Phantasie series (by the folks who brought us Roadwar 2000).

My favorite of the Infocom games was probably the Enchanter series.

The only big game that I've extended was Nethack. I added random vending machines to the dungeon to balance out my usual situation of plenty of gold and no food.

[vsp]

WinFrotz is a Windows port of a Z-Machine emulator, which can play both the original Infocom and new homebrewed text adventures. Some of the non-Infocom adventures (like the Scott Adams series) are also out there, or you can dig up the original ROM images and an Apple II or Commodore 64 emulator to go with them.

The only text-based game I've contributed directly to is Zangband, a spinoff of Angband, which is a spinoff of Moria, which is a spinoff of Rogue. Hack -> NetHack is the other major fork among roguelike adventure games.

Or there's a little something I created many years ago... viewing source is cheating.

[Slartibartfast]

My brother created a Xanth game with about 100 rooms. It had a magic side where science didn't work but magic did work, and a mundane side where things were the other way around. there were two light sources, a flashlight with batteries that only worked on the mundane side, and a magic glowing gem or something on the other side.

This awesome little game fell prey to a magnet or something that fried the disk it was on.

He also wrote a spiral mapped game set in dante's inferno. i don't remember much about it except that there was a bureaucratic demon who would not let you pass without a 1040 form in triplicate that you found elsewhere in a closet.

When I was first learning programming one thing I eventually found out was that the room coordinances in text games were typically held in an array variable. The arrays could be two dimensional like 5X5 or three dimensional like 5X5X5, I became a bit obsessed with creating a FOUR dimensional game. Wanting the game to be a perfect cube (well, hypercube), I settled on 3X3X3X3 which is still a huge 81 rooms. The directions were going to be the traditional N S E W U D and then Z and A standing for Zonk and Anti-Zonk, the two other directions perpendicular to the three traditional axis of movement. I spent a lot of time trying to envision wandering through this game grid. I eventually did create an empty world that I could walk around on the computer. I never did flesh it out with room details or items or anything. The game remains my favorite game I never made.

edit - fixed a stupid typo that changed the meaning of a sentence

[Slartibartfast]

There is an online community that still writes and plays text games- which they call interactive fiction. they can be found at

http://www.xyzzynews.com/


and as I mentioned elsewhere,

For those who are interested in playing Colossal Caves, and many Infocom games online,

http://infocom.elsewhere.org/

[Slartibartfast]

Has anyone heard of 'Madness and the Minotaur' for the Tandy Color Computer? It was the most infuriating text adventure I have ever seen. It almost made sense, which was what was so addictive about it. But everything was so randomized that you had a snowball's chance in hades to actually figure things out.