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Both Tea And No Tea - Updated Hitchhiker's Game 314
Ford Prefect writes "To coincide with the new radio series of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the BBC will be reviving the old Infocom Hitchhiker's text adventure game, to appear on Radio 4's website. It's not just a straight port, either - apparently 'the new version of the game will be illustrated by Rod Lord, who won a BAFTA for his graphics for the original Hitchhiker TV series.' Hoopy!"
THAT game (Score:5, Funny)
There's nothing to see. You're lying on your back.
# Get up
I don't understand.
# Get out of bed
You get out of bed.
# Look around
You see nothing. The lights are off.
Your house is demolished by a bulldozer. You have died. Would you like to play again? (y/n)
I really hate that game. Feel free to frustrate yourself here. [douglasadams.com]
Re:THAT game (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:THAT game (Score:4, Funny)
Then there's the problem with puzzles that require grabbing non-evident things (the dust from under the bed) at the beginning of the game and needing them near the end -- with no way to go back and get them of course, because the house and Earth has been destroyed.
After typing all that, I realize it's the perfect Hitchhiker's Guide game.
ob quotation (Score:5, Funny)
Re:THAT game (Score:4, Informative)
Try turning on the light.
Re:THAT game (Score:3, Funny)
When I was in highschool during the late 80s (God I'm old) I wrote a text adventure (in basic - shudder) for my computer class. At the time, Oliver North was on trial, so I decided to base it on the iran-contra affair.
Basically you could wander around a house and do some basic things. I added a random timeout, so after a few turns it came up with:
Three men with machine guns burst into the room!
You are dead!
Never double-cross the Iranians
I got an A.
Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish (Score:4, Funny)
The Babel fish is small, yellow, leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the NON-existence of God.
The argument goes like this:
`I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book, "Well, That about Wraps It Up for God."
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish (Score:2)
Those interludes with its English accent voice overs helped the show, to me, become something more than just a funny Doctor Who series.
Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish (Score:2)
Further, God is not dependent on faith. "You have faith in me, Thomas, because you have seen me. Blessed are those who have not seen, but believe."
Adams' is a spurious argument, without true logical basis. It is funny as hell, though.
Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish (Score:3, Informative)
We're talking about arguing with creationists, not biologists. Creationists do indeed claim that human beings were created from mud, not monkeys (well, dust anyway, but in honor of DNA, mud alliterates better). And agreed- to any *thinking* Christian, God is not dependent on faith- but most creation fundamentalists only memorize the 30 or so verses that their Health & Wealth preacher preaches on and i
Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish (Score:2)
BTW- my signature is a spoof on another signature seen recently - "Vote Kerry/Edwards, this time we'll make Socialism work! No, Really!" Same straw man, different sacred cow. Kerry is no more going to get socialism to work in this country any more than Bush could get trickle-down to work; let's just hope that a single HMO can do a more efficient job than 20,000 HMOs duplicating each othe
Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish (Score:3, Informative)
1-
Sure I've heard it's proof, but I've also seen proof that your evidence is highly incorrect.
Creationists (most) place the age of the earth at 6000- 8000 years old. This derived from calculating dates from the bible. (Chinese history goes back to 6000 bc so 8000 might be possible. Except most geological techniques and research into the age of earth place it at 4.6 billion years old. evidence here: age of earth [wikipedia.org]
6000-8000 years doesn't give the mechanism for evolution (m
Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish (Score:5, Funny)
We're small and leechlike, some of us are yellowish, we may be the oddest thing in the Universe, but there's no way you're slipping something like "mind-bogglingly useful" past me. Nuh-uh.
Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish (Score:3, Funny)
I disagree. http://www.nportman.com/ [nportman.com]
Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish (Score:3, Interesting)
Another generation of frustration (Score:5, Interesting)
If they're really going to redo the game, I hope they rework some of the more obtuse puzzles to make them a little less frustrating to the general populace.
Re:Another generation of frustration (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Another generation of frustration (Score:5, Informative)
> Seriously, this was probably the most annoying Infocom game ever published
Oh, I don't know about that. I still don't follow the logic behind the 2-piles-of-cubes puzzle in Spellbreaker. And have you tried "Suspect"? Man!
Well, Ok, you're right about the first 1/3 of HHGTTG. If you haven't gotten everything you need off Earth before it blows up, then you're in trouble (although if you failed to feed the dog, there is a second chance for you later in the game!). And if you don't get the Babel fish before you're hauled off to the poetry slam, then too bad for you.
But once you make it to the Heart of Gold, you're pretty much free to explore without time constraints. Yes, you can "die" in many of the scenarios you'll teleport to with the Improbability Drive, but all that does is send you back to the H.O.G. Then you just try it again.
Best Puzzle: "You can't see anything, smell anything, taste anything, or feel anything..." (etc.) Brilliant. :-)
Worst Puzzle: "put junk mail on satchel". Ok, maybe the three previous steps for getting the fish were somewhat logical, but the "confuse-the-upper-half-of-the-room-robot" step was ridiculous!
Re:Another generation of frustration (Score:5, Insightful)
I was able to deduce the babel fish puzzle back when the game first came out. Once one remembers the last item the Rube Goldberg-style sequence stops at, it's not hard to figure out what part of your limited inventory to use next.
But "enjoy poetry" was one thing I never figured out until I found a guide to the game.
Re:Another generation of frustration (Score:2)
Re:Another generation of frustration (Score:3, Interesting)
How do you get by not feeding the dog? As I remember, you end up in someone's brain, with synapses all around. Could you get out of that?
If early in the game you had typed "turn on ligt", the game responded "I don't know what a ligt is.
Re:Another generation of frustration (Score:2, Informative)
I think you get a second chance by having Ford feed the dog. Eventually you (as Arthur Dent) wind up in your own mazelike brain. By removing your common sense, you'll be able to take tea and no tea at the same time (since it won't be able to say you can't do that).
Re:Another generation of frustration (Score:5, Interesting)
If they're really going to redo the game, I hope they rework some of the more obtuse puzzles to make them a little less frustrating to the general populace.
They could easily have destroyed the game, but somehow it didn't. When the babel-fish twanged off into the wrong place for the umpteen billionth time, or you didn't know how to get the Vogon captain to recite the second verse of his magnum opus, it was your fault. It truly showed what it was like to be Arthur Dent, with what appeared to be the entire universe ganging up against him for some utterly arbitrary reason...
I originally discovered an illicit copy of the game many years ago on a bunch of old floppy disks being thrown out of a cupboard at my father's workplace. I never knew of its official Douglas Adams roots until years later, but from playing it I knew it was something special. I managed to get a lot of the way through - the version I had found didn't have any hints, which I suppose was quite impressive. More recently, a friend lent me another, um, copy which did have hints, and I finally got round to finishing it.
Annoying ending, but an excellent, if mind-breakingly difficult, game.
Re:Another generation of frustration (Score:2)
I remember the babelfish puzzle.
The FIENDISH bit was that you could solve it logically without any trial or error . Each time the babelfish "twanged off" you could fix it (Oh, I'll put the towel there. Oh, I'll put the backpack there). But if you went through it step-by-step, the vending machine ran out of babelfish JUST EXACTLY when you'd solved the puzzle. So you had to restart. Devilishly frustrating, I though at the time. But your insight regarding Arthur Dent vs the Universe is spot on, mate.
Re:Another generation of frustration (Score:5, Funny)
The devil is holding a contract in one hand, and he says "Still haven't gotten the bable fish, eh?"
Re:Another generation of frustration (Score:4, Interesting)
So I eventually broke down and looked at a hint book. When I found out what the solution was, I got really mad. The game had stymied me due to what was a simple one-word error in one of the descritptions.
The really annoying thing I found about the game, though, came later on. On the Heart of Gold, there are a number of different tools with random sounding names. Any attempt to ask the game what the tools look like gave you no information whatsoever, instead just telling you that you don't know what they do. Therefore there is no way to tell what to do with them, and no way to form any visual picture as to what these objects actually are. But one of them was necessary to "remove the common sense portion of my brain", and there was no way at all to clue you in as to (1) that such a task was even possible, and (2) that one of the unknown random tools laying around is related to this task in some way.
That game was the funniest text adventure ever made, but it was also the least playable one ever made. It sucked as a game. It was great as a good read if you use the hint book.
Re:Another generation of frustration (Score:4, Informative)
Odd. I just finish playing it-- and "take common sense" worked fine.
Re:Another generation of frustration (Score:2)
At this point, brave men have been known to break down and cry.
Dear God, though, the Babel Fish puzzle. The bloody Babel Fish puzzle... But that was fair enough because it was immensely funny, or at least immensely funny in hindsight. Opening the case that contained the atomic vector plotter, that was annoying, because you didn't have long and the interface was a bugger to figure out even if you had persuaded the Vog
Re:Another generation of frustration (Score:2)
Re:Another generation of frustration (Score:2)
Well, if you had to just pay attention to details, it would be a lot easier. The real problem/difficulty comes from the fact that the game makes no sense. The whole point of the humor is that the solutions make no sense. Your about to be killed by a monster? Well, put your towel on your head. I mean, in hindsight, you can see why it's funny, but if you thought of that
Great News! (Score:5, Funny)
Rod Lord's graphics are fun (Score:4, Interesting)
Though I hope the colors look better this time around
PS: I run it as a slideshow screensaver
Remember (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Remember (Score:4, Informative)
Don't feed the dog a sandwich.
That really blew my stack, about thirty hours later
Re:Remember (Score:4, Informative)
Don't feed the dog a sandwich.
That really blew my stack, about thirty hours later
That one wasn't actually fatal, as getting eaten by the dog merely thru you back into the DARK prematurely. From the dark, there were 5 possible exits, and if you waited for the one where you became Ford Prefect, you could feed the dog a sandwich in that scenario, and then go do the warship scenario and this time you wouldn't be eaten by the dog.
There were actually only a few unrecoverables, and all of them were very early in the game.
-Get crushed in the house.
-Don't follow Ford's directions and get blown up with Earth.
-Forget to get the junk mail and you could not get the Babel Fish, or try too many times on the Babel Fish Dispenser and it ran out. And then you got killed because you couldn't understand what was being said by the Vogon later.
But once you find the "dark" after being ejected from the Vogon's ship, you're essentially in the clear. Everything else is doable from that point onward, as long as you have your gown and your towel. Dying means that you go back into the "dark", and you can replay any of the failed scenarios by merely waiting until the right moment before exiting the dark.
Game tip: (Score:5, Informative)
Take the mail from your (Mailbox? Front step?) It will come in very helpful when you need to get a fish in your ear.
Mods: if you don't get this, just ignore it, OK? It's on topic, I swear.
"Offtopic" (Score:5, Funny)
The influence of Adams on Internet culture (Score:5, Interesting)
42 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:42 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:42 (Score:3)
Unfortunately far too often. I love that whole ultimate Question business, but whenever someone brightly quips, "42!" I just want to throttle them.
the Google answer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The influence of Adams on Internet culture (Score:2)
Re:The influence of Adams on Internet culture (Score:2)
Re:The influence of Adams on Internet culture (Score:2)
Yes, but if the Tolkien estate got $.01 for every (insert random fantasy cliche here), it could buy Hasbro for breakfast.
Been A While (Score:4, Insightful)
Certainly has taken a while for the sequel, I don't even wear a digital watch anymore! :-)
Re:Been A While (Score:3, Insightful)
Suprisingly, that's actually worth an insightful mod.
On reading that I looked at my watch, thought about three watches I own, tried to think about the 20 odd watches my fiances has (one for each pair of shoes, of course), and I think there isn't a full digital watch among them.
Possible exception is an "analogue" watch that I have with a digital module that displays the date or one of two other timezones, depending wher e I'm travelling.
wicked.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:wicked.. (Score:2, Funny)
Kind of like Slashdot?
Re:wicked.. (Score:5, Funny)
#Click on Star Trek
"Ain't it cool news has reported that John Waters has said at an interview in Entertainment Weekly that he is 'very interested' in making a Star Trek movie." I wouldn't mind at all, says michael.
There are no posts.
#post "frist psot"
You fail it.
While posting that utterly brilliant article, a grue has broken into your parents' basement. He is currently chewing on your leg. An ambulance is headed for your house, but it gets stuck in traffic.
Would you like to restart? (y/n)
You think the GAME was frustrating? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:You think the GAME was frustrating? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You think the GAME was frustrating? (Score:2)
Beyond user-friendly... (Score:5, Funny)
"the first game to move beyond being 'user friendly'"... "It's actually 'user insulting' and because it lies to you as well it's also 'user mendacious,'" he said.
Best. Software project. Ever.
What I would have given to work on such a program. I bet they had programmers offering to work for free. Heck, I would have paid them...
"Please, just one printf, one insult, that's all I ask!"
Re:Beyond user-friendly... (Score:2)
Y'know, I think you may have just stumbled on the next revolution in software development...
Re:Beyond user-friendly... (Score:5, Funny)
Wait. You mean Windows is based on the HHTTG text-adventure game?
(Ah, just mod me -1 karma whore...)
This game is EVIL!!! (Score:4, Funny)
"Get flask"
"You can't get ye flask!"
And you're stuck there wondering why on earth you can't get ye flask...
Re:This game is EVIL!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Best Infocom Game Quote (Score:5, Funny)
While playing Zork I, in the caves, I said:
# get leaflet
Picked up leaflet
# get tube of glue
Picked up tube of glue
# glue leaflet to wall
And you must put spinach in your gas tank, too.
Not a nice thing to do to a sleepy 17 year old at 3:30 in the morning.
Anyone? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Anyone? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Written Ford Prefect falls "To with the series of new radiosenders of Douglas fir Adams' together; ; At leaders of Hitchhiker's at the galaxy the BBC reviving the old play of the l'aventure of the Hitchhiker's-Textes d'Infocom for deapparaître in the net location 4's of the radio. It's not only straight lines a port, everyone, which one - the new version of 't
What do you think, Ford? (Score:2)
Or more to the point, it would be good if it could be downloaded rather than being purely online. I replay old text adventures on my laptop sometimes whilst on the train - this would be a nice addition.
And I'm a UK taxpayer, so I've definitely paid for the game already.
Cheers,
Ian
(Bonus points to anyone who remembers what I'm talking about with the "just stroll off with it" quote. And I'm talking the original radio, not the books).
Re:What do you think, Ford? (Score:2)
(I found the original BBC radio series on Soulseek - it has provided me with many a happy hour of driving and eliminated much frustration at Chicago traffic - yes, I'm stop and going 15 MPH, but I'm stop and going to the tune of Ford Prefect!)
Re:What do you think, Ford? (Score:2)
Re:What do you think, Ford? (Score:2)
Douglas Adams was wrong about Vogon poetry (Score:2, Funny)
Freddle your gruntbuggly!
Hot and plurdled gabbleblotchits waiting for you
Refinance your foonting turlingdromes
Earn that crinkly bindlewurdle you've always dreamed of...
I got karma to burn... (Score:5, Funny)
Where do I put all my stuff??? (Score:4, Informative)
You know that thing your aunt gave you that you don't know what it is? Put your stuff in it. All your stuff. It'll fit! (well, except the really big stuff). Then throw it away. It'll show up in your hands, your pocket, or at your feet a few moves later.
Voila! No more accursed "Your load is too heavy" message.
Man, what I wouldn't give for something like that!
Re:Where do I put all my stuff??? (Score:4, Funny)
I thought it should have just ended the game right there, saying something along the lines of, "Okay, fine. You win. You've done something sillier than anything else we had planned. Happy?"
Play the old version here. (Score:4, Interesting)
I signed the applet myself. If you accept write permission, then you can save the state of the game to your hard drive and restore from it.
Text adventures... (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally I loved the things, but hated the frustration of being locked into typing EXACTLY what the command processor/ parser wanted.
I would hazard a guess that if a larger publisher backed the development of a professional quality text adventure, that on a percentage ROI basis, it would be very worthwhile from a business standpoint.
Especially if it was marketed and promoted in a way that Myst was years ago. I mean Myst got a lot of non-gamers to play a "game" (actually Myst was basically a powerpoint presentation with cheesy 3D graphics, not actually a game).
Compare the development cost and time frame of a quality text adventure with something like DoomIII. The potential market is thousands of times bigger because you could run the game on pretty much anything with a screen and input device cable of text entry and the processing power to handle a REALLY robust parser and command interpreter. There's no need for 4-6 years of R&D. Success is driven by creativity, etc. rather than eye-candy.
Sure it's not for everyone, but if you eliminate the frustration normally associated with parsers, have a quality product, market it properly, it could be a very good business opportunity.
That is if game publishers weren't complete lemmings.
Re:Text adventures... (Score:2)
Damn, that one issue drove me CRAZY! Fortunately I had planetfall and zork to switch off to when i got frustrated. Ahhh.... apple
Natural Language Processing (Score:2)
Minor problem with that is that NLP hasn't advanced that much in 30 years.
I mean, you can do some advanced stuff nowadays like including whole dictionaries full of words so in the thing that no longer will "get" be needed and "pick up" or "acquire" or "grab the damn" will all be processed as the same thing, and you can even include heuristics so that the c
Re:Text adventures... (Score:3, Interesting)
The real question is... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The real question is... (Score:2)
Thanks to a "problem of scale" I could never find out if the copy my library had really had the fleet or not...
Then again, I aways thought that the genuine fluff was much more interesting [egotron.com]...
Most Evil Game Ever, and here's why. (Score:2, Informative)
Also, all that other impossible stuff.
Link to obligatory H2G2 IF game solution (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Link to obligatory H2G2 IF game solution (Score:2)
Ah...words to live by.
H2G2 like the internet - not (Score:5, Interesting)
I've just come back from holidays where I re-read the full 5-part H2G2 trilogy that, despite being extremely familiar with, I enjoyed hugely.
Douglas should go down in the annals of literature because reading his stuff is as much about enjoying his words as it is about enjoying the story. You could read it 100 times and still smirk at his amazing sense of humour and wordplay.
Like a good wine, it's not just about getting merry.
To (mis)quote an excellent and early example:
"The jump through hyperspace is like being drunk."
"What's so bad about being drunk?"
"Ask a glass of water."
Absolute bloody genius, the like of which I don't think we've ever seen before or will ever see again.
I had the pleasure of hearing and meeting Douglas back in 1998 when I was studying at Oxford and he did an evolution lecture with Richard Dawkins (there was an evening!). He was a really, really lovely guy with loads of time for the geeks around him. Mention your love of the Mac to him and he was yours for the night!
I still miss him loads.
Share & Enjoy (Score:5, Funny)
However, no-one quite knows why it does this, as it invariably spits out a boring graphical clickfest that is almost, but not entirely, unlike a text adventure.
Downloadable doesn't have the best part (Score:4, Funny)
My favorite story about that game.. (Score:3, Interesting)
That game is hilarious, and evil. Modern game design simply doesn't delight in killing you nearly as much, or stranding you with no outs without restarting the game from scratch.
Personally, what I would like is a complete rip of all the text from the game.
-Z
Where to find new games (Score:2, Interesting)
Infocom? (Score:2)
Fellow train passengers must have been rather bemused watching my increasing frustration with the original game...
What? How? (Score:2, Funny)
"the new version of the game will be illustrated..."
How do you Illustrate a Text Adventure game???
ASCII art??
Old games don't have so much an afterlife... (Score:3, Funny)
How Fitting (Score:3, Interesting)
Writing these things was my first real job (Score:3, Interesting)
I did a whole game for Magnetic Scrolls called REACH FOR THE MOON, which unfortunately never got published as far as I know.
They were a very fun company to work for. I think I did the whole thing on a Sinclair Spectrum which they shipped out to me. It paid surprisingly well, too.
Opening picture for C64 version (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone here remember this picture? Anyone has a copy that can be run on an emulator? I drew this picture and I'd love to see it again...
Douglas Adams' Other Interactive Fiction (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Whales and petunias ... (Score:4, Informative)
The Petunias was a soul that kept comming back to after Aruthor Dent kept killed it time and time again.
Re:Whales and petunias ... (Score:3, Informative)
To be played by Douglas Adams himself in the upcoming radio series
It's not that bad! (Score:5, Funny)
Just wear your Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses until the article goes away.
Re:nerd ID card (Score:5, Funny)
As the article submitter, please accept my sincerest apologies. If there are any other topic that you, or anyone else, would not like aired, please let me know and I will not post articles relating to them in the future.
Best regards,
Ford Prefect
Re:BAFTA? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:/. Icon (Score:5, Informative)
I'd go for a 'Don't Panic' icon.