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Games Entertainment

Text Adventures On Cell Phones 147

Posted by Hemos from the you-have-been-killed-by-a-grue dept.
Sargent1 writes: "According to this article, a company called Bedouin wants to get people playing text adventures on cell phones and PDAs. Bedouin's going to get the games from this open-source-like community of authors that has been making the games and tools for free. The company is offering them royalties if they put their games under contract, and the authors aren't sure they want their games sold like that, since they're used to giving them away."
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Text Adventures on Cell Phones More

Text Adventures on Cell Phones

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  • Absurdity... (Score:3)

    by tokengeekgrrl ( 105602 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @07:14AM (#1008244)
    I doubt that the majority of cellphone users, which I believe are not necessarily text adventure kind of people but I may be wrong, would have the patience for the lack of GUI.

    Nevermind the fact that the current reduce-every-application-and-game-to-handheld -devices craze is totally silly. Then again, I'm one of the last people on the planet who does not have a cellphone - I've come close but the need has not arisen to such a degree as to compel me to buy one.

    I cheered mightily when I attended a theater performance this past weekend where the house rules detailed no cellphones and proceeded to act out what would happen to someone whose cellphone went off during the performance with a butcher block table and a HUGE mallet. It was beautiful.

    - tokengeekgrrl
    "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions

  • Anyone consider how much this would cost consumers if they became addicted to gaming on their PDA's or cell phones?

    It's bad enough to see some 16 year old chatting on his cell in his brand spanking new Toyota Landcruiser -- but to have them playing Trade Wars 2002 at $0.25 per minute...

    --
  • Do text-based games fly in Japan, the latest proving ground for all-things-cellular?

    I've *read* that docomo offers games over their i-mode service. And Bandai and NTT Docomo are working to develop more phone-based video games (http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/20/bandai. cell.phone.idg/ ).

    Success of such games in Japan might suggest whether Bedouin is on to a good thing or not.
  • Man, get a sense of humor already, kids.. jeezus. :)


    Bowie J. Poag
  • It's bad enough when people talk and drive at the same time. The last thing I need is some jackass not paying attention to the road because he's worried he might be eaten by a Grue.
  • can you imagine trying the following on a cel phone (teensy screen, awkward at best text input):

    The Thing Your Aunt Gave You Which You Don't Know What It Is contains:
    Satchel Fluff
    Pocket Fluff
    Cushion Fluff
    Jacket Fluff
    An Atomic Vector Plotter
    A Hyperwave Pincer

    >get fluff from thing
    Which fluff do you mean? Satchel Fluff, Pocket Fluff, Cushion Fluff, or Jacket Fluff?

    >get satchel fluff from thing
    Satchel Fluff: taken.

    as if it's not hard enough to do in YAZI on my Newton MessagePad [scrawlsoft.com] and that has a tappable keyboard and automatic word expansion.

    Extra points to those that can identify the game :)

  • Interesting comments.

    Let me add a little bit to what I was saying before. I think that in the long run you are correct.

    Currently, cell phones have penetrated a much larger market space than PDA's have. Also, simple games are mainstream games for the masses. If my cell phone let me play a sports game, I would play it when I was on the toilet, in the bus, etc.. The point being, everyone has them, and they are readily available. People who own cell phones and PDA's tend to leave their PDAs behind before they leave their cell phones behind (I'm sure there are exceptions, I'm only looking at trends).

    This is what makes the cell phone an attractive target for these kinds of games. Clearly, the games need to be made for the interfaces that currently exist.

    Ok. However, I believe through some recently good conversations with people in the cell business (guys that worked on BlueTooth, and other fun stuff) that cell phones are going to become pure access devices. They are always connected to a global network and when combined with BlueTooth allow all of your other devices to connect as well. For those who don't know BlueTooth is a technology that allows devices to talk to eachother when in close proximity. You can use BlueTooth to have your PDA talk to your cell phone. This means that later, your cell phone will likely just sit in your pocket (maybe as a belt buckle?). Your PDA will talk to it through BlueTooth and be your access device. You could also pull out your laptop and use it on the network for when you needed that kind of hardware.

    So, I believe that Cell Phones make a great simple game platform that someone will likely exploit in the short term. However in the long term I think they will be relegated to the task of being your network jack, and other devices will be used to provide the interfaces.

    Just some more thoughts,

    Jeff
  • If you've got a Palm Pilot, check out PocketRogue at http://home8.highway.ne.jp/~tota/html/palmware/

    Great for trips with the wife to the mall...

  • The nice folks at ScrawlSoft had a Z-Machine interpreter, YAZI, four years ago. One of the few third-party Newton widgets worth the sharware fee; it has lots of little buttons and shortcuts for the most popular words, command history, quick cut'n'paste from the output window... makes it almost as easy to play as if you had a keyboard.

    And, of course, the shock value of telling your fellow geeks that you were playing "Suspended" on your MessagePad 130 back in 1997 was well worth the price of admission.

    I keep pestering them to open the source up, since the project stalled at 2.0b4 when the platform died and still has a couple cosmetic bugs, but they seem to have stopped caring, sigh...

    In any case, YAZI can be found at the ftp.gmd.de site mentioned elsewhere, as well as at ScrawlSoft's YAZI Beta Page [scrawlsoft.com].

    Weird that this article was posted; I was just downloading a fresh mess of .z5 and .z8 games to my MessagePad last night before I went to bed....
    --
  • The difference, near as I can tell, is that these games will be playable *online* from Bedouin's servers, and will be available on cell phones and the like. In other words, you won't have to download the games to play them.

    You can still download them to play them on your Palm or whatever. In fact, the article says Bedouin is planning on publicizing this fact on their web page, probably in the hopes of getting more people hooked on the games.
  • No but I have seen people read books and newspapers while driveing, give a person a way to kill themself and others and they will use it.
  • I'd hate to play a text adventure game even on my Palm (which has decent text entry) let alone on a cell-phone.

    However, I'll tell you what I would pay money for: If I could call up and a sexy, young, female voice would read a text adventure to me: "You draw your weapon and repeatedly thrust it deep into....oh 'Conan' you really know how to play this game."
    --
    Compaq dropping MAILWorks?
  • Actually, interactive fiction is a *great* way to improve your graffiti skills. Beats the hell out of that Giraffe nonsense...
  • Hmm... I wonder how long the Big-Bang generation would take on my Qualcomm 1960?
    Let's see, it used to take 25 minutes on my old 386dx33...
  • You've slashdotted Geocities! BASTARD!
  • The Interactive Fiction archive [ftp.gmd.de] at ftp.gmd.de/if-archive has a wide variety of interpreters for the Infocom z-machine standard, including some for the Palm already. You can play any Infocom story files you have around, or grab some new games from the IF Archive's extensive library. Most every game released by the IF community ends up here eventually. There's also a yearly Interactive Fiction competition [textfire.com] open to all; it's a good way to get to know the new luminaries of the genre.

  • *Zork*. 'Nuff said...

  • a) There is hardly a single text adventure with real-time constraints, and the vast majority of modern ones (which is what Bedouin is looking at) don't have combat either.

    b) They've been selling little cellphone keyboards for easier sending of text messages over here (Norway) for several months.

  • The old Infocom games ran on a virtual machine called the ZMachine. A lot of work (ie. reverse engineering) has been done on this over the last 10 years or so and a plethora of original works are released every year that use this system.

    The best interpreter IMO for the ZMachine, is Frotz [geocities.com]. It is available for many platforms and source code is available so porting to a mobile phone is always a possibility.

    Moreover, a complete programming language explicitely designed for producing ZMachine games is also available. Inform [demon.co.uk] This too is available for many systems along with source code.

    Finally, an excellent repository for text adventures can be found at ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive [ftp.gmd.de]

    Have fun :-)
  • Maybe like one of those interactive voice response systems:

    Hello. Thank you for calling the Zork Hotline.
    Calls are being charged at $3.99 Per Minute.
    You are standing to the west of a house.

    To Open Mailbox, Please press 1.
    To Go North, Please press 2.
    To Go South, Please press 3.
    To Go NorthEast, Please press 4
     ...
  • >On an unrelated topic.. why hasn't anyone made a
    >portable real-time chat, like IRC or
    >ICQ/AIM, either through a cell phone or
    >other dedicated device yet? or have they? I'd
    >assume the technology is there for it already? I
    >think that would be insanely popular...
    >hell, I'd buy it. It's be good for deaf folks too.

    Thats what SMS is for, of course, its not compatible with the hoards of ICQ users out there.. only compatible with the even larger mobile phone community...

    of course, there's still the cost.. 12p (about 18 cents) per message on my phone, but if it was a little cheaper, I could easily see SMS becoming (already is?) like real time text chat.....
    all we need now is SMS to multiple users, without the monopolising bastards wanting 500 times the money to send SMSes to the 490 lamers and bots on the irc channels :)
  • See Daytron Superstore [netsales.net] for the same product, apparently 10% cheaper. (15.21 vs. 16.95 USD)

    No, I'm not affilated, just saw it linked in an earlier post. And I don't know why one host should have so many "Superstores" selling the same product.
  • Earth (games.eesite.com/earth) and utopia (games.eesite.com/utopia) are like planetarion, but without all the annoying properties and a much better social structure.

    I started on planetarion, but because the rules ENCOURAGE powerful players to trash small players it's just no fun. Utopia is far better balanced.

  • Fantastic.... (Score:3)

    by JSurguy ( 85240 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @07:00AM (#1008267)
    This would be great if some of the older infocom titlas (Hitchhikers etc) could be licensed - now where did I put that towel?
  • For those of you who are suffering with Win9x, I prepared a nice graphical front end for ten post-Infocom text adventures. You can get it at ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/starters/ AB10.exe [ftp.gmd.de]. Granted, you need none of this flashy stuff if you're playing a real text-mode client under Linux, but it's handy for giving to your less technically ept friends.

    The games were written by people more talented than I, but the whole thing is free as in beer. (It would be free as in speech, except that I long since lost track of the source.)
  • The company is offering them royalties if they put their games under contract, and the authors aren't sure they want their games sold like that, since they're used to giving them away.

    A few years ago, the interactive fiction community started doing annual competitions. This, combined with the availability of a language called INFORM, has helped to generate a variety of game s of exceedingly high quality. (There are, of course, some real stinkers.) I've seen a few comments to the effect that "Infocom is all anyone needs". The people who believe that haven't examined the current crop. The only thing Infocom (or Magnetic Scrolls, or Scott Adams :-) has on some of the current games is nostalgia.

    These games have been available for free for years from here [ifarchive.org]. This company wants to make these games available through their service, and pay the authors royalties. What should the authors watch out for? What should they keep in mind? Does /. have any real input for them?

    If you're interested in this sort of thing:

    That should get you started. There's a LOT of good stuff out there.

  • WAP MUDs (Score:4)

    by hattig ( 47930 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @07:02AM (#1008270) Journal
    How about WAP Multi-User-Dungeons then? That would be fun. You wouldn't have a chance, there would be no room for the description, and when you encountered an enemy (BERT), it would be:

    55444555#555122337778 (KILL BERT in mobile phone keypad characters :-) )

    Okay, so in normal use you would map directions to the keys, and the * and the # could bring up the more advanced options, but still...

    Next: NetHack for Nokia 7100. Then Quake.

  • Last weekn I started playing the great MUDs again. I love it! Do you remember when these games where the only things you could find? Check pout a good one over at Rom.org
  • Man, I'd kill to play Leather Goddesses of Phobos on my Nokia! Where do I sign?
  • Too bad circles don't look too great in ASCII. The giant Death Egg didn't look so scary as I remembered it...

  • Hmmm (Score:1)

    by / ( 33804 )
    My car may have driven off the road and into a tree and two pedestrians, but dammit I got that wumpus!
  • Their deal is a trick; read the article. The article states they're offering authors a cut of the 'NET revenue' instead of the gross. In english, this means, essentially zero money. Just about every movie in hollywood uses accounting tricks to end up having zero net revenue, so that newbies will sign deals for a % of net and get nothing, and the Spielbergs of the world can get a % of gross. If this company is offering a % of the net, they're clearly planning the same thing. They get software rights; the authors get nothing.
  • You are in a maze of twisty little passages all alike. There is a sign on the wall.
    >read sign

    "Pepsi. The choice of a new generation."
    >n

    You are in a maze of twisty little passages all alike. There is a sign on the wall. Your sword has begun glowing.
    >read sign

    "Nike. Just do it."
    >n

    Your have entered the lair of a troll who, besides smelling really bad, has impeccable fashion sense. He is wearing Bugle Boy jeans and an Old Navy performance fleece shirt.
    >quit

  • Ha ha ha.

    -- Sunlighter

  • Man, somone should have thought of this before [geocities.com].
  • I have just come back from Japan, and talking to some colleges from NTT DoCoMo they said that 60% of the traffic on I-Mode (the Jap equivalent of WAP) was games. Everyone in Europe and the US is talking about m-Commerce at the big thing on WAP and games don't even figure on the development plans. I think this could be the killer app for WAP even if it is only half as big as it is in Japan.

  • Why I Hate Mobiles (Score:4)

    by JimPooley ( 150814 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @07:25AM (#1008280) Homepage
    Oh my god!
    Now I'm a big fan of text adventures. I even used to write them back in the 80's - with a sophisticated natural language parser and non-player characters that could do just about anything the player could.
    But playing one on a tiny screen when you have to hit a button up to three times for each character? No thanks!
    Still. Could be worse. Imagine if they had speech recogition to get around the typing problem? Instead of all the idiots bellowing "Hello! Hello! I'M ON THE TRAIN!!!!!" and so on, there would be people shouting :-
    "Go North!"
    "Go East!"
    "Open Door"
    "Open Door With Red Key!"
    "Kill Troll!"
    "Kill Troll With Sword!"
    and so on....
    ***SHUDDER*** I'd invest in earplugs...

  • Spooky - Found this earlier today Hitchhikers guide in Java [xcalibur.co.uk]
  • Yes, but if you have to carry the keyboard with your cellphone, you lose the advantage of having 1 small object to carry. Then you might as well have a PDA or Laptop with a wireless WAP modem.

  • My Motorola PageWiter 2000 already has multi-player games written for it. It just uses the packet-based 2-way paging network.

    So far the only one I've actually played against someone else is Battleship, but it's pretty cool.

    But then again, it's a pager with a multitasking microkernel os (FlexOS), QWERTY keyboard, GUI, and scripting language to write your own programs in called FlexScript... basic-like but cool.

    My point is, it's kind of cool to be able to pull out the pager and play games while waiting for the bus or plane, or even in boring meetings. People just think I'm checking my email... of course, sometimes I forget to turn the sound off and then I get caught!!!

  • I play text adventures on my Palm all the time. Sometimes I use the stylus, but I usually use the keyboard I bought (GoType). The interface on the interpreter is kind of clumsy, and so's the font, but otherwise I'm good.
  • Did anybody ever port Leather Goddes to either Linux or Windows. If so anybody know where to get it.

    Most of Infocom's games, including LGOP, were in their .z5 format, playable on a wide range of machines. If you have the game files (you can probably find the Infocom masterpieces collection, 33 games on one CD) all you need is an interpreter.

    Download the Zork 1-3 .z5 files (they might possibly be renamed to .dat) at http://www.concentric.net/~Twist/WinFrotz/download .shtml [concentric.net] . These are freely redistributable.

    Download interpreters for your platform at ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive /interpreters-infocom-zcode/ [ftp.gmd.de]

    See where you can buy the games at http://underworld.fortunecity.com/trac k/946/ [fortunecity.com]

  • Actually, somebody did something very much like that... It's called FooM, and adapted the first level of DooM.

    To get it, look in ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/ for foom, and look in ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/programming/tads/ and get an interpreter for your favorite platform.

    Run foom with the interpreter chosen.

    (Addresses from memory; you may have to look around.)
    -----------

  • .... when people start playing The Incredible Erotic Adventures of Stiffy Makane [geocities.com] while they're driving! Get off the roads now!
  • Take a gander at this Wired article I read a few months back... http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.09/nokia.html . In Finland Role-Playing on Nokias is a Killer App and according to a news story I saw up here in the Great White North (sorry, no link) cellphones with text messaging sold to teanagers would outsell some summer blockbusters dollar for dollar (once converted)

  • I agree that it won't be popular beyond a novelty, but not because of interface problems... The target audience here seems to be old gaming enthusiasts (read: Computer geeks), the same audience which has already dug up a Z-Machine emulator and beaten them all!

  • Offtopic?

    Please read the article. Then read my post. There is a connection, even besides the fact that I quoted from it word for word with 'music' in place of 'text adventure'. The article is about text adventures on cell phones. But the real question the article poses is at the end, "What happens when a company brings commercial opportunities into what has been a mostly-commercial-free zone?" Text adventures were once a profitable thing for companies to create. Music is currently a profitable thing for companies to create. So I raise a subtle question (if you didn't get the implication from the previous post): Does this pattern of moving from commercial entity to no-longer-profitable freeware-only entity happen inevitably, or is it more selective, and can it be changed by companies and/or laws? Yes, my question plays with some broad-based ideas, but it relates very much to the spirit of the article.

  • That's Death Star, you silly Sonic veteran, Death Star.


  • There are for the record some good text based video games, for example, hack, that drug dealer games and muds like tsunami.thebigwave.net [thebigwave.net]

  • I use SMS messages all the time (Mostly cause I hate talking on the phone) and while it is slower than a keyboard, you can get a decent speed going once you've the hang of it. I can see this taking off like mad.. esp. if you add a human element to it.

    Something like L.O.R.D. would be highly addictive on a mobile. Plus, text adventures suit themselves much better to a mobile phone than arcade games or FPS's... you don't move your arms and tilt your head to the game like a spaz typing something in like you do with a game controller.

    On an unrelated topic.. why hasn't anyone made a portable real-time chat, like IRC or ICQ/AIM, either through a cell phone or other dedicated device yet? or have they? I'd assume the technology is there for it already? I think that would be insanely popular... hell, I'd buy it. It's be good for deaf folks too.
  • Unless the game is interactive (a MUD or what have you) there's no need to dial/charge anyhow. The simplest text adventures, which are presumably the ones that the phone companies are talking about, are like Adventure or Zork, like the Hitchiker's Guide and suchlike. They involve you and the script, no other live players. Worm, memory, tetris, &c. are currently available on phones. You don't need to dial into anything. You're not charged per play or per minute. They come included, and you can play them if you're bored. These are the games that are primed for further free distribution. And phones enabled for text adventures would then be enabled to dial-up or what have you to pay-per-play games or muds or whatever you'd like them to be enabled for. That could be a possible profit issue for the companies involved... but that's not the issue here. This idea doesn't necessarily have to cost the user more money. It could simply add more appeal to the phone. I'd rather play Zork on my phone than Worm, personally.
  • Canyon A ice cognitive.

    Voice recognition has a ways to go... and if you aren't gonna do it on the cellphone end, then the quality degredation introduced by the transmission will make it even harder. Plus text-to-speach could use some work before you could really play games via talking on a cell phone.

    Plus my little brother would constantly be yelling "Kill self with sword!" in the background.

    (Man, I wish I still had Via Voice so I could have created some REAL voice-to-speach messup and not invented my own... oh well.)

  • Sounds Familier... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12, 2000 @07:35AM (#1008296)
    People desparatly shouting into their phones "I need an exit..."

  • Nethack (Score:3)

    by fishbowl ( 7759 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @07:38AM (#1008297)
    I'd probably become so addicted to nethack,
    if I could play it on a pda, that I'd never
    do anything else.

    If you've looked at nethack and dismissed it for
    being too shallow or for the interface being too
    simple, look closer... I know there are roguelike
    games for the palm, etc., but nothing as intense
    as nethack, or even close.

  • Hnnn...RL MU*ing, this could be interesting.

    Standing in front of Micro$oft Headquarters:

    You see the fortress of doom in front of you, a massive ogre is guarding the door.

    Shoot Ogre

    I leave the rest to your imagination.

  • Actually, he means this [mr.net].
  • Out of 169 articles, there are 6 instances
    of the word 'Bedouin'. Which is what the
    article was about.

    Good work!
  • I wish... Unfortunatly, I could never get it to run anywhere else other than my PCjr.

    I just remember the sound it played when you picked up something.. it startled me.

    Pan
  • Havn't you got the graphics sent to your phone yet. All the sex and blowjob ones?
  • Yup. I wrote Colossal Cave for WAP several months ago. There are still some problems with it that I need to get back to, but it's usable (I think!) (And no, it doesn't have voicemail.)

    Try http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/servlets/wapcave/

    Funny... no-one seemed interested at the time. Now a company's doing it it's news...

    Jon

  • Funny.... The rules do man that powerful players can crush others with impunity... but those that newbie bash tend to be vilified and hounded by others....

    There ae a lot of planets out there - make too many enemies and you're in real trouble.

  • mmmmmm. (Score:1)

    by AjR ( 148833 )
    Your address book contains a number of twisty turny phone numbers, all alike.....
  • There has allways, and still is Pay to use Text-based MUDS.
  • Strange. A couple of weeks ago I wrote down some thoughts on how to build a MUD to WAP gateway.

    It's in PDF and it's full of bad English, but I'll fix both of those issues "real soon".

    http://www.dallaway.com/mud/index.html
  • And even better: All nokia phones since the 3210 has this feature built in.

  • I don't think that either you or the moderator who moderated you up bother to read the story this article links to!

    WARNING! Spoilers ahead for those who actaully bother to read a story before commenting on or bitching about it!!!

    In the article, they said they're working on a system that will let you enter commands with just a couple of taps, instead of having to type everything. There, feel better now? :-)

  • Anyone have a URL for HHGG (either the binaries or an online version)? I was only about 5 years old when it came out and didn't read the books until a little more recently ;)

  • HRM (Score:4)

    by jbarnett ( 127033 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @07:42AM (#1008311) Homepage

    1-800-your-mud

    "Hi Welcome to your mud, please please # then your ID and pin number then pound again to login"

    #************#

    Logged in as "SOLVAS the Great"

    You are standing in front of a tower:

    `w`

    You head west, here you are in front of a small lake:
    'LAKI the queen of the NORMILZA empire' is stand here

    `say so how are you, a/s/l?`

    LAKI: 18 Female, sitting on a bus

    `say really I am also on a bus which bus`

    This would never happen though, because there isn't and would never be beatiful 18 year old females playing muds...

    Second, isn't like a cell phone charge $1.49 or something PER MINUTE?!?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Nethack is one of the Triumvirate; the three greatest games ever. Other two are Ultima 5 and Wasteland.
  • douglasadams.com [douglasadams.com] has the original game playable in a little Java applet [douglasadams.com] but if you look at the applet parameters, you'll find the original game in its original form right here [douglasadams.com]. You can play that on any Infocom interpreter you like.

    PS if you've never played it, it's very funny, but f**king impossible :-) Took about a year and a half when I was playing in my school lunchbreaks. Maybe being 12 didn't help with getting some of the humour, mind.

  • Zyll! (Score:2)

    by Pope ( 17780 )
    I played Zyll on my IBM PCjr, and it had a semblance of "real time" built-in. When you did an action, such as picking a lock, it would put up ellipses (OK, just a string of periods) to show passage of time. Like "dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, you failed to pick the lock."
    Combat was also "real time": if the ghost of the king attacked you, and you just sat there doing nothing, it would hit you a few times and you would die!
    It was pretty cool, and I used to play it listening to Jethro Tull. *Very* good for getting in the mood to play games about skulking about in castle dungeons.
    Hey, does anyone out there have a copy to, uh, lend me? :)

    Pope

    Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!

  • MORE RESOURCES (Score:4)

    by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @08:33AM (#1008319) Journal
    • The Unofficial Infocom Home page [csd.uwo.ca] - along with information, walkthroughs, and even the Invisiclues for most every infocom games, you can also download Zorks 0 - 4 completely legally
    • If you dig your way through that page, you'll eventually find the "where to get Infocom games" page... most every link is dead and you'll get disappointed real fast, but there is ONE EXCEPTION, and its the JACKPOT: Joey Jim's Superstore Infocom Classics Masterpieces Collection Online Download [netsales.net] for $17 (american). It's the every-game-except-HHGTTG-and-Shogun, and you can find HHGTTG online as mentioned elsewhere. It has the manuals and the maps. Since you can't seem to get the physical version anywhere anymore, this place is the only place I know to get the goods.

      Darn near all of them work on the Palm Pilot, just look for the .dat files and convert them with the include z2pdb converter.

  • star wars ascii (Score:3)

    by jbarnett ( 127033 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @08:34AM (#1008321) Homepage

    http://okcomput er.antiflux.org/~superfly/star-wars-asciimation.ht ml [antiflux.org]

    Star Wars ASCII, now if only I could get the Matrix in ASCII format, screw DVD

  • Yes, I found it here [antiflux.org]. It was linked to in the original thread.
  • FYI, z2pdb is in the PilotFrotz package, not the package you can buy.
  • Hey, thank Google for this one:
    http://www.msu.edu/user/reicher6/zyll.htm [msu.edu] has links to get the program! Time to fire up Virtual PC and see if it works.

    Pope

    Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
  • Recently I spoke to Activision's lawyer (Activision own Infocom, who made the classic 80s text adventures) George Rose, and he said that they've recently started a deal with Nokia to offer these classic games on phones.

    (The reason I was talking to this guy was that I was inadvertently offering these games as warez on a page of mine [chrisworth.com]... but that's another story.)

    Chris of chrisworth.com [chrisworth.com]

  • Oh gee, that's f***ing great. Now in addition to following some yuppie going 55 in the fast lane talking to his broker, I gotta follow some 23 year-old dorkus playing Nethack.

    Hey, Buttwipe! Stop fighting the ice griffin and watch the road!

    -JimTheta

  • Isn't it a little ridiculous to assume that cell phones will remain text based. The natural progression will be to a GUI. Why not start developing for that now?

  • In some sort of vague attempt to prolong the death of intellectual property for a while, please note that the Infocom HHGG game is still copyright. I know that, by way of us being the copyright owners. Xcalibur.co.uk is not licensed to run the game. For the functionally identical but kosher version, see http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava. html

    Richard

  • They're catering this to *today's* cellphone crowd?

    >north
    You walk into the bathroom. Do your nails? (y/n)
    >n
    Yuk! You really look fat without your nails done. Do your nails? (y/n)
    >y
    You feel much better. You notice some makeup on the counter. Put on makeup? (y/n)
    >n
    You think you're going to school without putting makeup on? What will your friends think?! Put on makeup? (y/n)
    >y
    You feel much better.
    >go outside
    You're in the driveway.
    >drive car
    Which care do you want to take?
    >drive Jeep
    Yuk! Why not take daddy's nice BMW?

    Ecetera, ecetera...

  • Ok, shouldn't have hit enter on subject field. Let's try this again.

    I for one would love to have Nethack, ADOM, Omega or such in my cell phone. I don't carry a laptop with me but a phone goes where ever I do.

    Just imagine, three hours in a train/bus/whatnot, with nothing to do, you could simply grab your phone and have a good game session. Travelling would never be that boring again.

    The next logical step would be the development of multi-player capability in these. And we all know how well MUDs and on-line gaming communities appeal...

  • Spelling on a phone... (Score:4)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @08:47AM (#1008345) Homepage Journal

    For those of you who think spelling things with up to four presses of a digit, see www.tegic.com [tegic.com]. They use dictionary and probability data to shorten,

    • 22
    • B 666O 777R 444I 66N 4G

    into,

    • 2
    • B 6O 7R 4I 6N 4G

    I thought it was clever, and the website has a scenario demonstration.

    Still not quite the way I would play Spellbreaker, though. "Frotz me!"

  • I can see this catching fire here in the states. You figure that people (kids included) use Instant messaging services all day on the internet, for business or whatever. Kids in finland also do the same thing but with thier cell phones. I can't see America translating Instant Messaging into a part of thier communication culture but I do see a mutation of this sort of interaction taking place. After all America is known for importing certain facets of culture and taking them to other worlds (GHB :) but I can see This sort of interaction becoming somewhat popular in the pop-sense of popular anyway. Toss in the popularitiy and addictiveness of everquest and the addictiveness of MUDS (hey why not play these from a cell phones) and hey you've got a market there!
    But what about the old WORMS game. I saw that on a Nokia phone the other day. Does anyone get royalties for that game?

    The Face -= o_O

  • That'd be a trip, a huge multi-user dungeon, mapped to the space in the real world, so you 'meet' those who are playing around you physically, and can talk to them. Heck, who needs a meatworld at all? Oh yeah, you have to have someplace for your charging cradle...

    Kevin Fox

  • You don't need to write out those commands! (Score:3)

    by slothbait ( 2922 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @08:18AM (#1008360)
    In Frotz for palm, you can just tap an instance in the word on the screen to cut and paste it to the prompt. It's quite convenient. Also, if you tap on the middle, right of the screen, it pops up a list of commands for you to choose from. There's very seldom need to actually draw out words with Graffiti.

    When I discovered this feature of PalmFrotz, the thing went from being Cool to being Amazing. No Palm should be without one!

    --Lenny, a Zork geek from way back...

  • I haven't seen this with the game boy, yet...
  • If the cell phone distributers are planning on including the games as part of the package (and my cell phone currently has several complimentary games that were included sans extra charge) then they will still be freely distributed, just through more media. (Unless, of course, the phones et al are costing a lot more simply because they have these games on them, which would be awfully silly.) If the games are simply being included (as they often are now) then I say take the royalties and run, grinning and laughing maniacally that someone has offered to pay you to further freely distribute your already freely-distributed game. Else, I'd think twice.

    Ah, Adventure on my cell phone... or I could connect to my favorite mud on the train to work...
    I might never have to look a human being in the face again. :)
  • This for sure heralds the end of civilization as we all play Adventure and Zork, not to mention interactive MUDs for hours, nay, days, weeks on end. I wonder if the MUD style games will have voice capability?

  • Ideal Game For Phones - Planetarion (Score:4)

    by szyzyg ( 7313 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @07:08AM (#1008374)
    Planetarion is basically an online, realtime strategy game...

    When I say realtime, I mean that it takes ohous for things to happen - 8 hous to fly acoss the galaxy to attack someone.

    This game is teh kind of thing that suit's wap technology - in fact having a mobile phone client would enhance the game somewhat.... Imagine getting an automatic phone alert when an attack fleet is on the way....

    Imagine leaving an impotant meeting because your planet means more to you than business!

    (www.planetarion.com BTW)
  • You can get a Z-code (infocom's platform-independent bytecode) interpreter for your palm pilot at: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/2367/do
    wnload.htm

    It is free, works well on all the infocom games I've tried so far (Zork III, Planetfall, Infidel, Leather Goddesses of Phobos). Great way to pass time waiting for the dentist, car, etc...

    Activision sells an Infocom compilation CD (everything but Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and Shogun) for about $20-$25. You can play HHGG on the web (or at least used to), and dig up the Z-code file in your cache. Many other entertaining games are available from the interactive fiction archives.
  • You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

    Somewhere nearby is Colossal Cave, where others have found fortunes in treasure and gold, though it is rumored that some who enter are never seen again. Magic is said to work in the cave.

    I will be your eyes and hands. Direct me with commands of 1 or 2 words.

    You have one incoming call. Type PLOVER to teleport to your message center. Type LPT1 to redirect the call to the Well Building for voicemail...

  • My graffiti needs to improve (Score:5)

    by georgeha ( 43752 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @07:10AM (#1008377) Homepage
    takc swokd

    >I don't understand takc

    take swokd

    > I see no swokd.

    lieht lamp

    >I don't understand lieht.

    George
  • Wow. Now there's someone from the marketing department at Nokia/Qualcomm/Motorola doing some serious brainstorming.

    "Dammit Jim, we gotta do something to drive airtime costs up."

    "Look, these rubes doing know nothing. Nothing! If we hook them on old Zork games, they won't know what hit 'em."

    "Jim, you're brilliant."

    "I know. They just don't give out MBA's to anyone, nowadays."

    But really now. One of the great hurdles for WAP handheld devices is resolution. Here the consumer market has been getting accustomed to large format monitors for cheap, and now we want to have them going back to squinting at 3" diagonal output. It's okay for quick {pager, email} messages, but come on. Text RPG's? Egads! My eyes just hurt thinking about it.

    Then again, maybe Gate's is considering cornering the eyeglass market....

  • I don't know about cellphones being the ultimate platform for.. well.. anything other than communications. The current trend for cellulars seems to be smaller and less noticable. With those fractal antennas that were in an article [slashdot.org] here a while back i wouldn't be surprsed at cellular headsets that clip behind your ear within a year or so.

    The real multi-player game platform is still computers. For simple games like cards or gambling, a PDA can do the job much more easily than a cell' and with the advent of built-in wireless internet connections it's no less convenient than the phone. For more complex games, which are what make the big bucks anyway- $10/month is all well and good, but $60 plus $10-20 a month is even better-desktop computers are a long way from being replaced, since the interface for palmtops is still so clunky and laptop batteries are so inefficient. Not to mention how much cheaper bandwidth is at home.
    Dreamweaver

  • "I for one would love to have Nethack, ADOM, Omega or such in my cell phone. I don't carry a laptop with me but
    a phone goes where ever I do."

    I *do* carry a laptop around, just to play nethack. (Seriously).

  • Coming soon to a newsserver near you...
  • I don't think it will be popular, because cell-phones have lousy key-pads, instead of keyboards. How are you supposed to type: "Cast Freeze" in less than 5 seconds when a Troll is bashing you? Or imagine how long it would take to type: "Look at old Tome on 2nd Shelf". I just remember playing Zork II and Zork III, and how much typing you have to do. I can't imagine typing on cell-phone.
  • Making money is all about supply and demand, and I for one think Bedouin have it right that their will be a resurgence in demand for text adventures. Hitchhikers guide, leather goddesses of phobos and just a few of the games that many of us remember with fondly. If games like that can be brought to a new audience on cell phones and pda's then great, and if the original authors (and the authors of new titles) can make some coin-of-the-realm from it then that's even better.

    Simply shouting that text adventures don't sell anymore doesn't really cut it as an argument, what sells is what sells. For to long gaming has been totally dominated by flash graphics, the old craft of weaving a story can still be just as enjoyable.

    It may be of interest that I was recently contracted to code a customized client for a text mud (for the pc/dreamcast). In the intervening time I have spent a bit of time online with one of the mud's servers and found the mud culture to be alive and well (If not somewhat smaller than 10 years ago). The text renaissance is coming and I for one am already making some money out of it.

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