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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
This would be great if some of the older infocom titlas (Hitchhikers etc) could be licensed - now where did I put that towel?
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.
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
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"
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.
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
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
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
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!"
[
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...
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
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
takc swokd
>I don't understand takc
take swokd
> I see no swokd.
lieht lamp
>I don't understand lieht.
George