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Loyalists Preserve Past Through Text-Only Games
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Tue Nov 15, 2005 10:24 AM
from the graphics-are-just-bloat dept.
from the graphics-are-just-bloat dept.
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "'You are at the edge of a clearing with an impressive view of the mountains. A trail splits off toward some standing stones to the southwest, while the main road emerges from the forest to the east and continues westward down the hill, via a series of switchbacks.' So begins 'A New Life' (downloadable from here), part of a group of game hobbyists going back to text-only basics. They try to keep the genre alive by posting their titles online for free and meeting in chat rooms dedicated to the craft, the Wall Street Journal Online reports. 'Console games are demanding,' says Mike Snyder, a 33-year-old computer programmer in Wichita, Kan. 'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more.'"
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d'oh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:d'oh (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:d'oh (Score:3, Funny)
I hope not.
Re:d'oh (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:d'oh (Score:5, Funny)
> WHAT IS A GRUE?
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Re:d'oh (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:d'oh (Score:4, Funny)
I have to quit smoking herb....
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Re:d'oh (Score:5, Informative)
The poster is not asking what a grue is. They are imitating the text parser in the game.
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Re:d'oh (Score:4, Funny)
Specify unknown object by cursor? [ynq] (q) n
Specify what? (type the word) Grue
I don't have any information on those things.
And a good thing this is.. Can you imagine grues in Nethack?
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Re:d'oh (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:d'oh (Score:5, Funny)
It was much worse in my case, I took a bathroom break and came back to find that my SANDWICH was eaten by a grue.
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What fun (Score:5, Funny)
> get up
You can't get up, it's dark.
> turn on light
You turn on the lamp.
> get up
You can't get up. You've got a headache from that hangover.
> look in pockets
While you look in pockets, your house is demolished by a bulldozer.
Try Again?[y/n]
#$@@#$! That's the third time in a row! !@#%!#@ text games!
Re:What fun (Score:5, Interesting)
Well at least I knew the game wanted me to put the salt on the slug. There are worse examples.
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Re:What fun (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What fun (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't a property of text games per se, but of 1980s adventures in general. It was once LucasArts hit on the idea of eliminating all possible deaths and all the no-win situations that modern adventures really got going: Loom, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle... That liberated the player to walk up to dangerous pirates and insult them to their faces and know that however embarrassing the consequences, it would never be fatal to the game.
Most of the modern text games I've seen follow this ethos; they make it hard, if not always impossible, to lose - or at least, to lose without knowing it...
Parent
You are in a twisty maze of comments (Score:4, Funny)
Re:You are in a twisty maze of comments (Score:4, Funny)
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Love text adventures (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Love text adventures (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Love text adventures (Score:5, Interesting)
Assume this was version in English for people who want to speak French.
To start with, the game engine could describe things to you in English, but be set in France. Any signs or non-player characters you come across would be French. Where you have to speak to characters you'd have to do it in French, with there being clues around if you don't know what to say. At an advanced stage of the game, the language that the game itself uses for descriptions etc. could switch to French.
As the parent poster says, you would be unable to progress without understanding.
Parent
Re:Love text adventures (Score:5, Funny)
Please tell me that when you first met a native English-speaker, you did not greet them with 'Hello sailor'...
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Re:Love text adventures (Score:5, Funny)
You must be a lot of fun around the office.
"Hey, which way is it to the bathroom in this building?"
"Get up; go left; y; y; door; light; use stall."
"Uh... thanks."
Parent
Text mode Quake, anyone? (Score:5, Funny)
Copyright (c) 1991-2001. All rights reserved.
West of steaming pit of hell
You are standing in an open room west of a steaming pit of hell leading down.
There is a gun here.
>
(recycled: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/31
--
RageTech
WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN, "TEXTMODE QUAKE"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Text mode Quake, anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Way back when, a friend of mine made a "DOOM area" for our MUD, Powerstruggle. It was exactly like what you describe, with +- 260 rooms with descriptions like that. I think it was based on Doom episode 3, level 5 or so.
It was seperate from the rest of the mud - hitpoints worked differently, and you couldn't take items from outside into it. Doom weapons had commands like "fire west" that would fire up to three rooms in that direction; there were minimap commands, that showed a 5x5 area around you; monsters would be asleep at first, until they were woken up (say by nearby shots), and then they'd have pretty nice AI. And there was deathmatch, for a number of players. Rather good, for 1995 or so.
That said, real PK muds like Genocide (still exists, telnet geno.org 2222) or Tron (down, as far as I know) were much, much better. Doom deathmatch was weak compared to good 40 player Geno team wars, with some of the best players doing 200 commands per minute... and every room had beautifully detailed descriptions (you could go exploring while you were dead and waiting for the next war).
Parent
Re:Text mode Quake, anyone? (Score:3, Funny)
> nw
Nethack (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nethack (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Nethack (Score:5, Interesting)
For a pure text game, try a MUD; I would say the Two Towers [t2tmud.org] is the best one in existence.
Of course, note that around 99% of development time in a game goes into graphics and sound. If you take these two away, you suddenly get something with two times of magnitude more depth. And if a game has been developed for more than ten years (like NetHack or T2T), you get extreme results, a lot better than the typical sell&forget new-fangled stuff.
Just compare NetHack and Diablo. Or, T2T and MMORPGs. If you're literate, the extra playability is worth a lot more than the graphical bells&whistles.
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Like the Amish (Score:5, Funny)
Can't Belive nobodys mentioned... (Score:5, Insightful)
No games graphics will ever beat text only's games:
WHY - Becuase its not limited by your PC, by its programming, and by Your Graphics Card, only your MIND.
You get a general mental version of the world your in, and you can assume its more detailed then wandering the plains in EQ2, unless your imaginaionally inept.
Re:Can't Belive nobodys mentioned... (Score:3, Insightful)
Damn right. I've played so many RPGs over the years and some of them have been absolutely magnificent, but nothing was ever so perfectly rendered as the environment around Flood Control Dam #3...
* sniffle * ... oh, the nostalgia...
Re:Can't Belive nobodys mentioned... (Score:4, Insightful)
So for most people then, graphics games will beat text-only games? :-)
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turn based (Score:3, Interesting)
same goes with all turn based games. like adom, chess, nethack and others. There is one problem about turns however - they are not MMORPG-able by definition. Some tweaks to the turn system must be made, so that other players wouldn't have to wait for other players. I'm dreaming about MMORPG version of adom, just like I'm dreaming about Diablo-like graphical version of adom. Sad is - that they will probably never happen...
If you want to.. (Score:4, Informative)
Gemstone 3 (Score:5, Informative)
The great thing about text MUDs was how easily (and quickly) GMs could add content. There was no 3d modeling, no conceptual drawings, downloadable patches, etc, so a festival or merchant could be whipped up in a matter of hours to days (depending on the extent)
Another nice thing about the "special events"? It was a REAL PERSON you interacted with. The merchant would alter your items, enchant them, etc.
Sharvan has since moved onto World of Warcraft... but I still have a soft spot for GS III (now Gemstone IV), as it introduced me to the world of online gaming. There are a lot of things that were in GS that I wish WoW had as well, but it's an entirely different environment so it's pretty much impossible. Totally different experiences.
I actually attribute my ability to type >120wpm to Gemstone. When you spend so much time in the game, and typing is the only way to interact, you learn to get around the keyboard quite well. Who ever said gaming was pointless?!
Not new (Score:5, Informative)
And, for the more graphically inclined, check out these:
Old Skool (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting that this made it to the Wall Street Journal. (nostalgia) My first video game was Zork I running on an Osborne I, and I still remember figuring out to give Marvin "tea" and "no tea" in Hitchhiker's.... (/nostalgia)
I do think this is an unfair statement (FTA): "The plots of the games are often as minimalist as the graphics: To win, players must solve a series of puzzles, like finding the key to a castle door."
How is that less complex than any of today's graphics-intensive games? If anything, text adventures are more complex, because you have to read and use your imagination instead of simply killing villians and "walking" over their corpses to collect power-ups or keys or whatever. It's still "find the key to the door," just more literary than visual.
Slashdot as a text game ... (Score:5, Funny)
> Surf to
Page Loads - no recent stories
> Reload 7,512 times
A new story pops up
> Click on the story
Nothing to see here - move along
> Reload 389 times
You see the new story
> Write pithy First Post comment - hit Submit
Comment accepted - 8/8
> Reload page
Your comment is gibberish because you didn't preview it
> Reload page again
Comment moderated to -1 as Troll
> Change race to Elf
Change not accepted - you are now permanently cursed as a Troll.
Games reached a dead end (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to write text adventure games on the BBC micro. Only 32Kb memory as I remember, and you had to get the whole game and all data into that. Even with those limitations, the engines were getting pretty interesting. A lot of time was spent thinking how to compress the info down.
I remember thinking back then, I wonder how amazing the games will be when we have much more memory, like 128Kb or even 256Kb! Couldn't even conceive of 1Mb of memory.
I returned to it a few years ago because I'd heard there were still people developing them, but the engines really haven't advanced at all. It's a shame, with the capacities that computers have these days we really should be able to develop truely interactive fiction, but I don't think it's ever going to happen. A pity.
Re:Games reached a dead end (Score:3, Interesting)
There have been some innovative games since then, but they're few and far between. What advancements would you like to see in the genre, though? I feel a lot of the things people think of as possible advancements would actually be detrimental to the game nature of the
Re:Games reached a dead end (Score:4, Informative)
There have been advances in the engines--look at Glulx--but the problem is that there haven't been the kinds of advances in AI needed to really open up the game world.
Parent
You are trapped in a cave... (Score:3, Interesting)
> Improvise a light using the minerals from the cave walls, putting it in a piece of my shirt so the combustion can be controlled. I'll use some flints to light it up. The sweat in the shirt can provide enough moisture
Sorry, Macgyverisms not supported in this game.
> WTF?
Welcome to the World of Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
>_
Long live Infocom! (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_nola
Yes, they do put some basic graphics up, but the whole text game is still there!
Interesting in text adventures? (Score:5, Insightful)
Text adventures are great. To dismiss them as obsolete because we have graphics now is as foolish as dismissing novels because we have movies. I'm a big fan of graphic adventures (and just about any other type of game), but I still appreciate text adventures. There is a level of interactivity in modern text adventures that graphic games haven't yet achieved. The extremely low development costs mean that lots of interesting and quirky stuff gets made.
The WSJ article oversimplifies a few important things. The IF competition is supposed to be limited to games that take two hours. The idea is to get more people writing games under the idea that a two hour game is much easier to make than a twenty hour game. But people still regularly release longer games. Anchorhead, mentioned above, too me about 30 hours.
It's also not fair to say that "just" 174 people voted. Judging is time consuming; you're expected to play to the conclusion (or for two hours, whichever comes first) at least 5 games. And while there is lots of good stuff, there is a lot of junk. So being a proper judge takes a healthy chunk of time and a willingness to suffer some bad games. It's far easier to just wait until the competition ends, then download the top rated ones. While text adventures are a niche market, I expect we're talking thousands of people who play the competition games. It's just that only a small subset vote.
Re:hmmm... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Must have been written in Java then.
Parent
Re:Infocom (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.lacegem.com/ [lacegem.com]
One CD with every Infocom game that Activision could legaly put on one disc. Activision lost the rights for games like HHGTG and Shogun. Yes, they are in the UK, and yes, they ship to the USA. I ordered this from them a few years ago. I have no affiliation with the company other than being a satisfied customer.
Words are just keys. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
"You stand before a mountain."
The mountain you see in your mind's eye will be unique and different from every other mountain experienced by anybody else who reads those words. Where is the limitation there? Compare that to a photograph, or a painting which boxes the person into a narrow, pre-defined experience.
Words are simple tools, yes, but they are designed to spark the deep wells of the imagination.
Only a writer frustrated by the fact that the particular mountain in his head cannot ever be perfectly transcribed to another person would complain. Better to be open to the reality that there are endless perspectives and then use those perspectives to cooperatively cobble together a universe in which to tell one's stories.
"You stand before a mountain."
-FL
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