Loyalists Preserve Past Through Text-Only Games 399
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.'"
Love text adventures (Score:3, Interesting)
WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN, "TEXTMODE QUAKE"? (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
Interactive Fiction Competition going on right now (Score:2, Interesting)
Feature creep (Score:2, Interesting)
BOFH's 10 year old dungeon game on VMS (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/23/bofh_hitt
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RageTech
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 titles.
Re:Games reached a dead end (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, basically I never want a response like "I don't understand what you mean", and want to be able to have proper conversations with in game characters, etc. Yes, I know it's hard, but not impossible and we no longer have the limitations of hardware that we used to have.
can't stop now (Score:2, Interesting)
On the plus side, he does seem a little interested in the text adventures on Games Knoppix.
Re:hmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Gemstone IV (Score:2, Interesting)
Gemstone is BY FAR the best MUD out there but I love them all anyway. I am glad the genre is staying alive. Even if I do pay $50 a month for text
Legend of Kyrandia (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:can't stop now (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd advise that you play his favorite games while he's not around to see which it is. Next time he says "I can't save here!" you can be like "LIES! I saved there yesterday!"
Don't overwrite his profile though... that's just evil.
What about Icebreaker? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nethack (Score:3, Interesting)
SLASH'EM is generally regarded as significantly easier than Nethack once you learn how to play them both.
It's a lot harder when you're starting out (especially coming from a Nethack background, and learning that things like drain resistance are just as integral a part of a safe ascension kit as magic resistanc, reflection, etc), but once you've ascended a few times in each then slash'em has a lot more "outs".
Back to Basics? (Score:3, Interesting)
Back? Some of us never left. [sindome.org]
Tips on text adventures (Score:3, Interesting)
Modern text adventures no longer do that. There were a couple of playability problems that have been largely addressed by modern games. Remember that this is a genre that has seen a huge amount of input from many people fixing irritations (much like the OSS community) and has had two decades to polish out imperfections:
* Parsing -- Well, this will never be perfect as long as we lack human-class AI. However, modern parsing is *much* more reasonable than the original games, where you could play "hunt the verb". There are still a few bad games, however, any decent modern TADS-based game is going to be pretty playable -- might take you a little bit to get used to things, but you aren't going to throw your keyboard across the wall because you couldn't figure out what particular command the game wanted you to use. ADRIFT games are another story, and mostly suck badly at this.
* Missed an action somewhere in the game, now cannot win. Game designers have realized that this is frusterating. Modern text-based adventures don't do this. Basically, if you screwed up and you're going to lose, you lose right away.
* Illogical puzzles. Game designers have realized that most people don't want to spend time trying to SMELL OCTOPUS to have a bucket magically fall out of the air. These are pretty much gone. There are some things, though, that it helps to be familiar with the genre to play. For example, people new to RPGs probably don't immediately come up with the idea of talking to everyone in a town to solve a problem (after all, it's not what one would do in real life). People new to FPSes probably don't immediately think that smashing open every crate in the game (especially in random alleyways and houses) is a good way to get medical kits and ammunition. People new to text-based adventures may not think of trying to LOOK UNDER BED or realize that TADS-based games generally consider EXAMINE CLOSET and SEARCH CLOSET to be two different commands (EXAMINE being equivalent to LOOK AT and SEARCH meaning to try to find anything unusual). Most TADS games come with basic starter help like this that comes up if you type HELP.
If you're looking for a good (IMHO) game, I'd suggest downloading a TADS runtime (frob seems to be the latest-and-greatest implementation for Linux, though regrettably it doesn't use emacs keystrokes) and try Babel [ifarchive.org]. That was the first text adventure game that I ever beat without help or hints.
I'd also like to point out the (even smaller than the standard IF community) AIF [emsai.net] community, which produces adult games.