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Text Adventures On Cell Phones
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."
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
Man, get a sense of humor already, kids.. jeezus. :)
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
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 and that has a tappable keyboard and automatic word expansion.
Extra points to those that can identify the game
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
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.
.z5 and .z8 games to my MessagePad last night before I went to bed....
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.
Weird that this article was posted; I was just downloading a fresh mess of
--
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?
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
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. 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.)
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
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
Man, somone should have thought of this before .
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...
"Information wants to be paid"
There are for the record some good text based video games, for example, hack, that drug dealer games and muds like tsunami.thebigwave.net
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
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.
Do something about world hunger. Click here
People desparatly shouting into their phones "I need an exit..."
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.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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.
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? :-)
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
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?!?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Hm... Text adventure... mobile phone... When are we going to be able to MUD on our cell phones? =)
-- Dr. Eldarion --
douglasadams.com has the original game playable in a little Java applet but if you look at the applet parameters, you'll find the original game in its original form right here. You can play that on any Infocom interpreter you like.
:-) 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.
PS if you've never played it, it's very funny, but f**king impossible
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
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!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Darn near all of them work on the Palm Pilot, just look for the
http://okcomput er.antiflux.org/~superfly/star-wars-asciimation.h
Star Wars ASCII, now if only I could get the Matrix in ASCII format, screw DVD
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Yes, I found it here. It was linked to in the original thread.
For more information, click here.
Hey, thank Google for this one:
http://www.msu.edu/user/reicher6/zyll.htm 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!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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... but that's another story.)
Chris of chrisworth.com
- Read fiction at www.espressostories.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!
-JimThetaMy stupid web site
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?
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...
There is no such thing as good luck. There is only misfortune and its occasional absence.
For those of you who think spelling things with up to four presses of a digit, see www.tegic.com. They use dictionary and probability data to shorten,
into,
I thought it was clever, and the website has a scenario demonstration.
Still not quite the way I would play Spellbreaker, though. "Frotz me!"
[
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
-.Shaun.-
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
Kevin Fox
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...
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
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.
Do something about world hunger. Click here
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?
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
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.
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
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...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
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....
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.