Both Tea And No Tea - Updated Hitchhiker's Game

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!"

Comments

THAT game

[AKAImBatman]

# Look around

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.

Re:THAT game

[Nos.]

#inventory pocket lint #drop pocket lint You might need that later

Re:THAT game

[LiquidShaneo]

That was one thing that really frustrated me about the game was that you had to play out things in a certain sequence and in a certain time frame otherwise you'd die or something nasty would happen to you. I found myself saving the game often and reloading it until I got it right. It got old pretty quick. :/ Nothing like the Zork games I played... Shane

Re:THAT game

[neurojab]

>You see nothing. The lights are off. ...

Try turning on the light.

Re:THAT game

[superstick58]

Please please don't post that link! I am supposed to be working!!

So much for productivity today.

Re:THAT game

[Luigi30]

You have to put on the gown and take the analgesic before you can get out of bed.

Re:THAT game

[Anonymous Coed]

No, you can get out of bed first thing. Try it. You can't leave the room until you've taken the analgesic.

Re:THAT game

[xlsior]

"open eyes"

Re:THAT game

[einTier]

There were also lots of unintiutive puzzles, and lots of things that made sense only if you had read the book. Don't forget that the game doesn't exactly follow the book, so reading it will confuse the game for you just as much as if you hadn't read it at all -- just in a different way.

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.

Re:THAT game

[robertjw]

Ahhh... that brings back memories.

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.

Re:THAT game

[Rolo Tomasi]

Interestingly, you have pocket lint at the start of Larry 1 as well ...

Re:THAT game

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that feeling. When I first played the game
in year 1987, I only missed the door by few feets.
Newer got further. And now - still not managed to get out of the house.

At least I have my own dos-version of The Game.

Re:THAT game

[drinkypoo]

They turned off the game due to the (predictable) heavy influx of traffic. I'm pretty damn frustrated now...

Re:THAT game

[AKAImBatman]

Whoops! Sorry! I found a mirror here, but you might want to download the page and applet to your hard drive so that it doesn't happen again.

Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[romper]

No, not this fish.

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

[GoofyBoy]

That was the best part of of the TV show.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

What's even funnier is that a friend of mine tried to use this as argument against the existence of God until I reminded him that the Babelfish isn't fucking real.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Replace "Babelfish" with "human" the next time you're arguing with a creationist though, and watch their head explode.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Mattcelt]

So humans could not have possibly evolved? I know quite a few biologists who would argue that point.

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

[Marxist Hacker 42]

So humans could not have possibly evolved? I know quite a few biologists who would argue that point.

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 ignore the rest of the Bible anyway, so you're pretty safe on not running into that quote from Acts that is so close to all the communism stuff in Acts 4 & 5.

And agreed- it's a completely spurious argument, but so is creationism to begin with.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Anonymous Coward]

Even "most creation fundamentalists", while mis-educated and incorrect, are far more thoughtful than you give them credit for. While Adams was very funny in the passage in question, he is merely knocking over a straw man.

Sort of like what you are doing with your signature.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Of course- that's the point, creationism is a straw man that needs to be knocked over. Just a brilliant setup is all.

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 other's effort with slightly different forms.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Matthias Wiesmann]

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.

Maybe this explains the poor quality of the other fish, it is not that machine translation does not work, but a valiant effort to prevent wars caused by better understanding.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Throtex]

I don't think you understood what 'straw men' means in the context of an argument. (mind you, I'm anti-creationism, just pointing out what he meant...)

The argument of creationism isn't the straw man. When you're engaged in an argument with someone, and you create an entirely fictitious position for them, and attack that instead of the real argument, you'll be accused of knocking down straw men.

- Person A has position X.
- Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
- Person B attacks position Y.
- Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.

This is a fallacious argument.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The thing is- when it comes to creationism and this particular argument, you have a third level:

Person A is an evolutionist- and thus has position X.
Person B is a creationist- his position Y is a corruption of position X to a large extent (you can get Position X from the Bible if you try REALLY hard).
Person A retorts with Position Z which is a straw man that exaggerates the flaws in Position Y.
Person A utterly destroys Postion Z, therefore showing the flaws in Position Y and proving Position X.

But agreed, it's a fallacious argument- because neither Position Y or Postion Z is actually Position X. I find that in real life, however, I rarely if ever get accused of knocking down straw men- because I choose my battles with people who don't know what a straw man IS.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Tackhead]

> Replace "Babelfish" with "human" the next time you're arguing with a creationist though, and watch their head explode.

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

[jdavidb]

Wouldn't work, though, because there's a hole in the argument:

`I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'

That's not a description of Biblical faith. "Blind faith" is not the same as the "faith" described by the Christian religion. There is no religious tenet against proving God.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Marxist Hacker 42]

To a creationist- we're so mind boggingly usefull that the entire Earth was created for OUR benefit alone. So from the point of view of the creationist- this is still true.

But yes, completely agreed- why should we, who have done so much damage to the planet, be usefull to anyone?

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Shadow Wrought]

I choose my battles with people who don't know what a straw man IS

I believe Sun-Tzu said something similar to this in his Art of War. To loosely paraphrase, one way to ensure victory is to make sure you only fight those who are weaker.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[xgamer04]

Maybe you missed the memo, but creationism and evolutionism are not necessarily mutually exclusive. There do exist Christians/Jews/Muslims/etc who believe a mix of both.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Absolutely- The Art Of War is a must study for any debator.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Marxist Hacker 42]

There is if you believe in Sola Fide- By Faith Alone, which is obviously the form of Christianity that DNA is attacking in this passage.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Absolutely- and I'm one of them. DNA however was obviously attacking a very narrowly defined breed of believers in this- Original Protestants, the kind who still believe in Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, Sola Gratia. For these people there will never be a marriage between the idea that people came from Apes and their 6000-year-old world described in the literal scriptures. And they ain't so sure about Jews or Muslims who never accepted Christ as God either. Think Rev. Phelps of Kansas City style Christians. See explaination of how the straw man works above.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Anonymous Coward]

Those interludes with its English accent voice overs helped the show, to me, become something more than just a funny Doctor Who series.

Yeah, you don't normally expect an English accent from BBC productions.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[jdavidb]

No, no; you are equating "faith" with "blind faith." "By faith alone" does not mean "by blind faith alone." Sola fide means salvation is by (not necessarily blind) faith alone. It does not mean "do not try to prove the existence of God.

Check out the Wikipedia article on the subject. Nothing in there against trying to prove God.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[king-manic]

Creationists and an open mind are mutually exclusive so even though your argument is true, no creationists will change. they believe in their narrow view of religion and science and base their faith on it. In my opinion it is the poorest form of faith. Faith that denies truth in favor of ignorance. The Catholic church beleives in evolution but the fundementalists don't.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[king-manic]

The thing is- when it comes to creationism and this particular argument, you have a third level:

Person A is an evolutionist- and thus has position X.
Person B is a creationist- his position Y is a corruption of position X to a large extent (you can get Position X from the Bible if you try REALLY hard).
Person A retorts with Position Z which is a straw man that exaggerates the flaws in Position Y.
Person A utterly destroys Postion Z, therefore showing the flaws in Position Y and proving Position X.

But agreed, it's a fallacious argument- because neither Position Y or Postion Z is actually Position X. I find that in real life, however, I rarely if ever get accused of knocking down straw men- because I choose my battles with people who don't know what a straw man IS.

I find all my arguements with creationists are not liek this. It goes more liek this:

Person A is in favor of evolution (evolutionists isn't a proper label)
person b is in favor of creationism
person a points to supporting evidence X
person b points out supporting evidence w + y + z is not true.
person a says W Y X is not X.
person b never addresses X points to W+Y+z.

indeed a straw man argument. Sure some glory seekers have placed fossils. But phylogenetic tree support most fossil evidence. many many many many other supporting evidence exsists for evolution.

Creationism is heavily dependant on assumptiosn and the bible.

Moutain of support vs assumptiosn and bible....

example of support: phylo genetic trees. fossils. mechanism in action (the creationist alteration of macro vs micro ecolution still depends on a lot of assumptions). Physics(carbon dating). Astronomy. Geology. ect...

So many fields all supporting evolution. So many diverse fields. Creationism just doesn't make sense. The only factions that beleievs it are the fundementalists.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Marxist Hacker 42]

No, I'm equating *blind faith* with *faith alone*, that is, faith without any other supporting evidence or works. And the Wikipedia article is wrong- the phrase "by Faith Alone" does exist in the new Testament, in the Epistle of James, prefaced by a Not and followed by "but by every good work", that is, faith with evidence of that faith is what saves. Blind faith- faith without works, is faith without evidence.

Faith for the fundamentalist is always a blind faith- he believes because that is the way it is, not because he has seen any evidence for it. If the Atheists are correct and subjective evidence isn't evidence simply because it is subjective and not objective- then all faith becomes blind faith, because we have no proof for any of it.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[jdavidb]

You've still got some definitions confused. You have conflated "evidence that a person possesses faith" with "evidence that God exists."

You are very right about the fact that the phrase "faith alone" DOES occur in the Bible, and the Wikipedia article is wrong.

But "faith alone" is STILL not talking about "blind faith." When Protestants refer to "faith alone," they are referring to their doctrine that you can only be saved through faith/belief, and that there is absolutely NOTHING you can or must do in order to obtain salvation. It has nothing to do with whether the supporting evidence is present or not, or examined or not.

Relevant Bible quotes are: Romans 3:28, Romans 9:32, Galatians 2:16, and Ephesians 2:8-9. The context is not talking about whether faith falls apart when a person tries to investigate God's existence, as in the Douglas Adams quote that started this discussion.

Most Protestants wrongly use these passages to teach "there is nothing you must do to be saved; simply believe." As you have demonstrated, the Bible contradicts this, in the book of James, chapter 2. But it doesn't go on to say what you said it did. ;) "Faith alone," in addition to not being a Bible doctrine, does not mean "blind faith." It means, in the usage of Protestants (who as I have said are are not teaching the way the Bible does) "all you have to do to be saved is believe (have faith)." They use it to mean "faith without action," not "faith without logical proof."

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[memco]

You got any references to back any of that evidence up. Sure I've heard it's proof, but I've also seen proof that your evidence is highly incorrect. The argument swings both ways. Creationism makes more logical sense than does evolution, but you do have to believe that there is a God for it to be proven. Either way, they're both theories at best.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[xgamer04]

That's interesting, I'm an "original protestant" (lutheran) and yet I believe in evolution, so...heh.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[xgamer04]

Thanks for clearing that up. Now I can be sure that all creationists I know are closed-minded, backwards heathens that are incapable of change.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[darkmeridian]

No humans can be "Mind-Bogginglingly useful?"

I disagree. http://www.nportman.com/

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[king-manic]

Let us break down your evidence:

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

6000-8000 years doesn't give the mechanism for evolution (mutation) to work. however 4.6 billion give it ample time.

Creationism hold that while the mechanism for evolution (mutation/selection) can be observed now and they cannot deny any evidence that it happens and is observable, they claim simply that our current diversity is not the result of that and they label it micro evolution. They deny evolution happens by reclassing their argument to ignore all current proof. (i.e. if I have a population of people, and I kill everyone with 10 fingers and 10 toes at their 14 birthday, eventually only people with more or less toes and fingers will be around). This is perhaps their weakest argument. To say that X happens. and there is evidence X happens in the past. Then to say the past only extended to yesterday, and thus there is no time for x to happen and thus all evidence of X happening is fake, is a pretty dumb argument.

there's more but I'll move on to your next statement

2-Creationism makes more logical sense than does evolution

No, for the above reason, creationism takes more assumptions, and more unsupported assumptions. This logically, there is more support for evolution and thus evolution is our current theory.

3-but you do have to believe that there is a God for it to be proven

You must assume a god (or aliens or what ever) to have creationism. But evolution happens now, and stands on its own.

4-Either way, they're both theories at best.

Poor American education system victim. A scientific theory isn't just a "theory". A scientific theory is the current working model of a certain observed phenomenon. It is the current model because it is well supported. There may be competing theories and they will remain competing until one or the other is disproved. The community may favor one or the other.

A theory had passed the scrutiny of those reviewing it. And it has some substantial proof behind it. Theories that are accepted are rarely proven wholly wrong but are instead amended. Newton's theory of gravity(the equations) is not wrong, but only right in the local parameter set. that is at very large scales and very small scale it's off. but Einstein's general relativity solved a few of these problems while Hawking et al is trying to iron out the remaining anomalous behaviors at certain levels.

Creationism is not a scientific theory. it has not been peer reviewed its evidence is whole theological/rationalization. At best, creationist is a poorly supported idea from a certain group of individuals. At worst evolution is our best current working model of how life came into it's current diversity. Ammendments will be made as evidence comes to light.

PS. I am a devout Christian. My faith does not conflict with evolution.some may use evolution against faith but they two integrate nicly. Science is a outward growth of theological studies. It is studing gods work.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[king-manic]

Thanks for clearing that up. Now I can be sure that all creationists I know are closed-minded, backwards heathens that are incapable of change.


Generally, this is true.

Humor aside. the sects that beleive this are rarly the educated set of society. And they generally would rather accept "the devil put it there to trick us" then "we might have to rethink some of our theories in light of this evidence". Are these generalizatiosn too much?

I am a christian. I have no issues what so ever with evolution. Those exsist. But creationism has no degrees. what degrees are there? they deny that mutation as any part to play in diversity.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[singleantler]

Peter Jones was the voice and unfortunately he died recently. One of his friends will be the new voice of the guide and is a pretty close match. He also voiced the guide in the radio series, which is worth tracking down if you like his voice. As with each version of HHG the radio series is rather different from the books and TV show.

When all of our computers can talk like Peter Jones, the world will be a better place.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[hesiod]

> I'm an "original protestant"

Wow, how many hundreds of years old are you?

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Really? So you believe exactly what Martin Luther did? Evolution wasn't around in 1520, Darwin wasn't born yet. There are quite a few Calvinists and Congergationalists out there who still believe this way- but no modern Lutheran church touches such fundamentalism, nor should they.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Can't be any more than 600- before that all Christians were Catholics!

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[memco]

A theory is a theory well accepted or otherwise. It has not been proven, and therefore remains subject to skepticism. Regardless of it's acceptance, it still remains to be proven. That applies for both arguments.

Creation may not be a scientific theory, true, but there is a theory that creationists have about the origins of life, based on a scientific model. In fact, you'll find that most Christians who have anything to do with science (see here and here) tend to believe in the big bang, and that the universe is in fact billions of years of old.

As for your argument about evolution not happening today, and considering the Christian doctrine, we could say they have a right to say it ended; after all according to Christianity creation happened over seven days (days not necessarily being a 24 hour period, but rather an undefined length of finite time), it would have stopped at that point on a grand scale (creating new species, but now mutation within the species). However, this may not be the case as you have pointed out that we have proof of evolution today.

I should apologize for using evolution generically, I should say that the argument should be Creation vs. non-creation theories. I applaud your argument; quite the rebuttal to anyone who attacks evolution.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[CaptainAvatar]

Yeah, right, tell that to the orthodox Christians, among others ...

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[xgamer04]

Maybe I should be clearer. I consider myself part of a modern Lutheran sect...so, uh... i need to stop posting when i'm really tired.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The Orthodox Christians call themselves Catholic- not Roman Catholic obviously, but then again, going back as far as the Apostles the Roman Pontiff was neither the only Pontiff or the only one ruling over the same territory as St. Peter (The Patriarch of Antioch comes to mind for that one). The Roman Pontiff was merely the First Among Equals until he made the mistake of changing the Creed. And those following the other patriarchs are no less CATHOLIC.

Re:Obligatory Quote - The Babel Fish

[Anonymous Coward]

Creationism is heavily dependant on assumptiosn and the bible.

Dude, ALL arguments rely on assumptions! If you can't agree on the assumptions in question, you can't have a productive debate, because there is absolutely no common ground to work from.

Think about any debate topic you might have. Economics - you have to agree what "economics" are and what constitutues the parameters of the debate. If you're arguing that apples are red and I'm arguing that apples have seeds, there's an obvious disconnect there, so we can't have a productive debate. Most debates have this sort of disconnect, only in much more subtle ways.

You have to agree on assumptions for a debate to be successful.

Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Cafe at the End of the Universe: the perfect place to meet our welcomed Tea overlords.

Another generation of frustration

[jandrese]

Alright, now a whole new generation can get frustrated and give up on this game before making it a tenth of the way through. Seriously, this was probably the most annoying Infocom game ever published, and I doubt I would have ever made it through without a guide I found on the net years later. There were so many ways to kill yourself in this game that you basically had to write out a script of actions that you must follow precisely in order to survive. Later on in the game it does branch out, but it is very easy to overlook a tiny detail and totally screw yourself over later in the game. The whole thing was an exercise in frustration for most players, especially ones who hadn't read the books or heard the radio broadcasts for several years.

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

[ackthpt]

If you think that game was frustrating, you should have tried his Bureacracy game. It took me a while to figure out what a gaol was, but it's certainly another pleaseantly nutty diversion.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[g_adams27]

> 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

[Ford Prefect]

(NB: Yes, I'm the article submitter. Go me!)

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

[tuffy]

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!

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

[mahdi13]

But "enjoy poetry" was one thing I never figured out until I found a guide to the game.

That's right out of the book! Arthur tells the Vogon that it's "Actully quite nice" which pisses the commander off and orders them to be tossed out the airlock

Re:Another generation of frustration

[tuffy]

That's right out of the book! Arthur tells the Vogon that it's "Actully quite nice" which pisses the commander off and orders them to be tossed out the airlock.

That's the beauty of Infocom games. The solution is blindingly obvious in retrospect, but "enjoying poetry" (or using "enjoy" as a verb at all) never crossed my mind.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[ceswiedler]

Absoutely great game. I figured out the "see nothing, taste nothing..." one on my own, most of the others I had to get some help on. The babel fish, the intelligent door (most of the puzzles actually) were too much for me (or anyway I was too impatient) as a 8-year old kid.

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." Then later, it describes that two alien races are sitting down to a truce after a million years of war. Through a freak wormhole, the words "turn on ligt" are heard, which happens to be the worst insult ever to one of the alien races. They fight each other for another million years, but eventually they realize that it was an Earthling who said it, and they amass a fleet to destroy Earth.

No, it's not the Vogons, it's a race of microscopic (to our eyes) aliens. They appear, and are eaten by a dog outside a pub five minutes before the Vogons actually do destroy Earth.

Unless you feed the dog your ham sandwich.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[Gudlyf]

I too played this game, but I loved it. I knew nothing about the books until I picked up this game, so of course I read them later. In doing so, it was pretty obvious that the game creators kept as closely to the book(s) as possible, which really is what I'd expect fans of the books to expect. There's more than a good chance that allowing the player to alter the course of what really happens in the story would piss off fans. Then again, having umpteen ways for your charater to die is a serious detraction from this story, isn't it? ;-)

Re:Another generation of frustration

[dillon_rinker]

Heh.

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

[tuffy]

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?

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

[meringuoid]

One of the hints for the Babel Fish puzzle, around the fifteenth one down, simply said:

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 Vogon captain to continue his poetry...

I actually got the second verse on my first go - I'd discovered the 'enjoy' verb in the pub, enjoyed the music and the beer, and then out of a spirit of sheer masochism I enjoyed the Vogon poetry ;-) Then the next time around I enjoyed everything... the mud was particularly enjoyable, as was Mr Prosser, and indeed the house both before and after demolition.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[nine-times]

Later on in the game it does branch out, but it is very easy to overlook a tiny detail and totally screw yourself over later in the game.

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 solution on your own, there's something wrong with you.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[Mondoz]

I remember a comic in one of the old Infocom newsletters showing a guy at his PC, with the devil standing next to him.
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

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Ah yes, the Ravenous Bug-Blatter Beast of Traal. A mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very, very ravenous.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I was the opposite. For some reason, I didn't grab the mail on the porch, I just read it and left it there (I don't know what was I thinking - the first rule of infocom games is to pick up everything that isn't nailed down). So when I got to that part I figured out that I needed to put more than one thing on the satchel, but it wouldn't let me. I thought of using the peanuts, but didn't live long enough if I didn't eat them. It wasn't till I was watching my dad play the game from the beginning that I snapped about the letters.

I did get the poetry on my own. If I remember right, I kept typing silly stuff like "clap", or "thank vogon", and the game told me that if I liked the poetry I should just shut up and enjoy it, or something like that.

Good times. IMHO, HHGG is still the best problem solving game I have ever played.

-jackson

Re:Another generation of frustration

[tompaulco]

I guess there's something wrong with me. That was the first thing that popped into my head when I met up with the beast.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[MalaclypseTheYounger]

Try 'enjoy mud' outside of your house when Prosser tries to knock your house down.

Hilarious.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[nomadic]

Seriously, this was probably the most annoying Infocom game ever published, and I doubt I would have ever made it through without a guide I found on the net years later.

I got further in HHGTTG than I did in Plundered Hearts. Well, Plundered Hearts wasn't that difficult, I just could never stay focused on the puzzles, I spent all my time trying to get the heroine naked.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[slartibart]

Oh please, it wasn't that hard. In 1984 I was 10 years old, and I made it onto the Heart of Gold and past the rocket attack before I had to get the invisi-clues book.

I never did solve the game, though. For some reason, the Bugblatter Beast always got me. I know I was supposed to carve my name on the memorial to make the beast think he'd already eaten me, and wrap the towel around my head so he'd think he couldn't see me. But i still couldn't escape - I couldn't go anywhere with the towel on my head. I couldn't carve my name with it on, either. I suspected something was wrong with my (legal) copy of the game, since the invisiclues didn't offer any more help.

Once the game was ported to Palm I tried my hand at it, but didn't have the patience to figure it all out again.

But I was impressed with myself how quickly I made it to the rocket sequence not having played it in over 15 years. But then I couldn't remember how to get the improbability drive working.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[Brandybuck]

You had Arthur Dent *enjoy* Mr. Prosser? You sicko!

Re:Another generation of frustration

[gamgee5273]

I was 12 when I got the game and made it through in three months or so (no, I wasn't allowed a lot of computer time and there were other games I was playing, too). I really didn't find it that hard. The toughest puzzle for me was getting the Babel Fish in Arthur's ear. After I finished that everything else was a breeze.

The Infocom game I never finished was Bureaucracy! Now that was tough...

Re:Another generation of frustration

[MyHair]

Ah, you missed out. The boxed version came with a pair of Joojanta 2000 Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, a microscopic alien invasion fleet, pocket lint and a "Don't Panic!" button. (Black cardboard sunglasses, a small plastic bag w/cardboard label and a cotton ball, respectively.) There were some other things, but I forget...seems like maybe $200k Altarian dollars or something.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[Iffy Bonzoolie]

Read all the infocom newsletters at http://infodoc.plover.net/nzt/!

or http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfoco mXNZT+TSL.html

They even include the fan comics they published...

-If

Re:Another generation of frustration

[joak]

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!

I didn't have trouble with that one . . . the game's response was something like "The flying robot catches the Babel fish, which is the only flying junk it can find."

Hmm. Need more airborne junk. As always, you go through your inventory and look for something you haven't used yet. Hey, something called "junk mail"! Seemed pretty obvious to me.

The problem with games based on riddles is how subjective they are: what's obvious to some is obscure to others. And it only takes one that you can't just get to stop the game.

The cruelest trick in an infocom game was Starcross, IMHO, where it let you "solve" a puzzle by using a charge from your gun. Only near the end of your game, the missing charge will dead-end the game.

And I never made any headway in Suspect.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[DunbarTheInept]

In the copy of the game I played way back when (Commodore 64), the text description of the events surrounding the Babelfish machine made it impossible to logically figure out how to solve the puzzle. The problem was that the panel out of which the floor cleaning robot emerged was described incorrectly as being "by" the floor, which makes you think it's on the wall, when it is actually "IN" the floor, like a trapdoor. This small difference made it impossible to put the satchel where it belonged. I understood that blocking the panel was a good idea, but the thing is, I kept trying to block the panel by putting things "in front of", or "next to" the panel when I was supposed to be putting them "on top of" the panel - all of this was because the description put the panel in the wall instead of in the floor. And the nature of the error messages coming back never help inform you as to the nature of the misunderstanding - that the problem was with the prepositional phrase, not the rest of the command.

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

[takshaka]

My "Don't Panic!" button is still pinned to my guitar strap. Alas, it is the only bit of swag I kept.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[DunbarTheInept]

it's not hard to figure out what part of your limited inventory to use next.

It is when the game's text is lying to you about the picture of what's in the room. (Mine didn't tell me that the floor panel was a trapdoor in the floor that opened upward. It said it was NEAR the floor, which would mean it was in the wall. So I was trying to put things NEXT TO or IN FRONT OF it, instead of putting them on top of it, and that is where the puzzle stumped me until I read a hint book.

I actually did figure out "enjoy poetry" all on my own (it helped that the game came with a list of some known verbs in the instruction manual, and that "enjoy" was one of them (use it on random objects, the text is really funny).)

Re:Another generation of frustration

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, if you bother to consult the Guide, solutions like that are blindingly obvious even if you haven't read the books. If you never consult the Guide, there's something wrong with you.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[shawn99452]

If early in the game you had typed "turn on ligt", the game responded "I don't know what a ligt is." Then later, it describes that two alien races are sitting down to a truce after a million years of war. Through a freak wormhole, the words "turn on ligt" are heard, which happens to be the worst insult ever to one of the alien races. They fight each other for another million years, but eventually they realize that it was an Earthling who said it, and they amass a fleet to destroy Earth.

Actually, anything you type at any early point in the game can be used in that event. It could be something valid, like 'enjoy ford prefect' or something invalid. It's either random what phrase it chooses or it remembers a certain turn number or something. But after playing through multiple times, I noticed that the phrase changes each time you play it, and it's always something you entered earlier in the game.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[Slurm-V]

You can just take the particle - no need to use the a tool.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[babbage]

Seriously, this was probably the most annoying Infocom game ever published

Oh, I don't know about that. I think Douglas Adams's other Infocom game deserves at least an honorable mention. Just consider the name he gave it: Bureaucracy...

The very first thing the game has you do is fill out a form with your name, address, previous address, etc. The insertion point jumps randomly from field to field, so you have to pay very close attention not to just start randomly typing, but actually read closely to see where the input is now. Not that it matters though, because even then the game will toss out what you typed and use random data in the dialogue that follows.

>look
Front Room

This is the living room of your new house, a pretty nice room, actually. At least, it will
be when all your stuff has arrived as the removals company said they would have done
yesterday and now say they will do while you're on vacation. At the moment, however, it's
a bit dull. Plain white, no carpets, no curtains, no furniture. A room to go bughouse in,
really. Another room is visible to the west, and a closed front door leads outside.

>score
[Your blood pressure is 124/82, in 2 moves. Your status is Stable. Your score is 0 out of
a possible 21, making you a Victim.]

>walk west
Back Room

You're in the back room of your new house, another nice room, at present suitable for
lining with latex padding and bouncing off the walls, but likely to be pretty impressive
and upwardly mobile once the removals men have sorted out their little problem. The exit
leads east to the living room.

You see a combination telephone/answering machine and a table here. On the table you see
a hacksaw, an address book, a small case, your Boysenberry computer, a letter and your
passport.

The doorbell is ringing.

>answer door
Front Room
You open the front door.

"Hi," says the annoyingly bright young man in the doorway. "Chowmail Overnite. Are you Mr
Devers, of 42 Main St?" He holds up a large burlap bag. "Here's your order of Llamex(R)
brand High-Fibre Llama Treats!"

>slam door
You slam the front door in the delivery man's face. You can hear him muttering a
traditional llama-food delivery man's curse upon you, your family and your llamas as he
walks away.

>score
[Your blood pressure is 122/81, in 6 moves. Your status is Stable. Your score is 0 out of
a possible 21, making you a Victim.]

>

Etc -- it just goes on and on like this -- the whole point of it all is to be frustrating. At least the Hitchhiker's game had, well, the whole Hitchhiker's thing; Bureaucracy is just a long, endless chain of pain....

Re:Another generation of frustration

[Anonymous Coward]

yer nuts. it's one of the greatest games ever. you just have to think like Douglas Adams.
as to 'least playable', i'd hardly say that about a game that keeps one trying again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again ......
you get the picture. irresistably playable, is what i'd call it. if your just about beating the game, or winning, or whatnot, you're doing it for the wrong reason.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[Mondoz]

Excellent links!

Looks like the comic was from this one:
http://infodoc.plover.net/nzt/NZT7.3.pdf

Haven't seen those newsletters in 16 years... Wow.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[atcurtis]

Don't forget the demolition orders for Arthur's house.... and the Vogon demolition orders for Earth (printed on a silver coated card)

And the box also says that it includes "no tea".

Re:Another generation of frustration

[Jeremy Erwin]

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.

Odd. I just finish playing it-- and "take common sense" worked fine.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[Rysc]

The Infocom game I never finished was Bureaucracy! Now that was tough... /me screams!

Please to be NOT mentioning that game again. /me goes looking for a strong drink.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[DunbarTheInept]

if your just about beating the game, or winning, or whatnot, you're doing it for the wrong reason.

No, I want to read the story, and the funny responses. But when you're stuck in the same damn place and can't get past it, the responses aren't funny anymore.

My goal was not to *beat* the game, but to finish *reading* the game, and to do one you have to do the other, duh.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[noahproblem]

THe first time that happened to me it was after I typed in a certain R-rated phrase out of frustration (hint: the current governor of California used it in one of his movies when asked about a dead cat....). I LMAO when that came up a few turns later - in that case, that phrase probably would have set off even the most peaceful of aliens....

Re:Another generation of frustration

[bobbozzo]

Those newsletters are what made me want to become a computer (game) programmer. Their programmers claimed to be making 6-figure incomes, which was really a fortune in the early 80's.

Sadly, today, most game programmers start under $50k.

Of course, Infocom's programmers were also the game designers and copy writers so they had to be quite talented and literary.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[bobbozzo]

I agree with you... I bought the game when I was a teenager and never got through it. A few months ago I found an emulated version that works in Windows, and started playing again. Even WITH online hints/walkthroughs, I still managed to get stuck in the game because I screwed up on some of the "dark place" missions... I got killed by the Bugblatter beast so I was unable to pickup the object there, ... Supposedly if you keep messing with the II drive, you can get back there, but the beast seems to kill you immediately now. Unfortunately I saved the game AFTER I got killed the first time so now I'm totally screwed, and I've given up on finishing. Maybe I'll try again when this new one goes online.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[Macgrrl]

It was a cheese sandwich - not ham.

The last few times I played, the game ended for me because a certain number of moves after you remove your common sense, your brain explodes - because you had materialised inside it...

Re:Another generation of frustration

[bugg]

HGTTG is an excellent text game...

but have you ever played Bureaucracy? That surely wins the title for "funniest text adventure ever made," and hands down.

http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/bureaucracy/b ureaucracy.html

Re:Another generation of frustration

[sgtron]

Putting the towel on your head is only half the puzzle, you have to add your name to the list of recently eaten victims to get the beast to leave you alone.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[SirBruce]

My problem with the Bablefish puzzle was the crucial "move satchel" step, which you had to do AFTER you put the satchel in place (but, supposedly, not in exactly the RIGHT place). There was no feedback or difference in the fish's trajectory that even hinted at such a maneuver, and as far as I can recall nothing else in the game reqired such an action, either. The puzzle was needlessly complex. Bruce

Re:Another generation of frustration

[Dabido]

Alright, now a whole new generation can get frustrated and give up on this game before making it a tenth of the way through.

The new generation will go to a cheat site, get all the info on what they need to do to get through it. Then finish it before we can work out the Bistromathics of how it's done.

Only way to stop them is to play a Snooglehoort at them, in the hope they will run away, or get the Circling Poets of Arium to throw stones at them.

Mainichi onaji koto no kuri kaeshi.

Re:Another generation of frustration

[God! Awful 2]

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.

Congratulations to anyone who figured out "kick dog" on their own.

-a

Re:Another generation of frustration

[tmasssey]

I had this problem with Adventure Land for the Commodore VIC 20 by Scott Adams. (Playable here.

I could get through 12 of the 13 items. But to get one of the items I had to feed a bear with the Royal Honey (which was also a treasure). I figured the bees would make more, but they never did. The trick was to not feed the bear, but to yell at it.

How the heck are you going to think of that?!?

Re:Another generation of frustration

[DunbarTheInept]

We might have played different versions. Mine required the tool (now, the command DID work without explicitly mentioning the tool if you happened to have it on you at the time. It would be like so:

] take common sense
(with the whatsahoozit thingymajob)
Taken.

]

But if whatsahoozit thingymajob was not in your inventory at the time, it did not work and would ask "with what"?

Re:Another generation of frustration

[RexxFiend]

If I remember correctly tho, although this might be at the end, the only way you could know what the correct tool was going to be (and it changed each time you went in!) was to see in advance what it was going to be. As luck would have it, if you had all 4 bits of fluff, you could use them to create some sort of seed which, if planted somewhere (never did figure that bit out, damn!) would grow into a machine which would let you see into the future so you would know what tool to take in (you could only take one!).
There were a pile of clues about this in the game - consult guide on fluff got you started I think, it would tell you about the 4 bits of special fluff which gave you the clue about collecting fluff (which you had, of course, not been doing so you had to start again, dammit!).

Ah, those were the days - didn't know about sex in those days so I had to get my frustration fix from somewhere else.

Great News!

[CommanderData]

Now I can finally prove my intelligence to that *$&#@& door on the Heart of Gold so it will open for me!

Re:Great News!

[LiENUS]

get tea
get no tea

This is great news

[JakeSpencer]

Back in the early ninties, I bought a Commodore 64 with a box full of games and accessories. This was the one game I played the most. I was never very good at it, but I enjoyed it a lot. It was my introduction to text-based adventures and also HHGTTG. I will definately be playing this.

Rod Lord's graphics are fun

[Gopal.V]

Especially the one with Dolphins on one side and Soldiers (with Guns) on the other ... from blue to dark red .. saying intelligence more <===> less . Also the meringue Margathean planet, the cone headed babel fish and all the other stuff ...

Though I hope the colors look better this time around :)

PS: I run it as a slideshow screensaver

Re:Rod Lord's graphics are fun

[bobbozzo]

Where are they? I looked at his site but only saw some low-res, z-rotated images.

Remember

[BlightThePower]

Pick up the junkmail. I remember this because it was one of the most frustrating moments of my young life when I finally realised where it was needed. Of course I get more frustrated than that on the drive to work every morning alone, but I still remember it.

Re:Remember

[peatbakke]

You think that's frustrating?

Don't feed the dog a sandwich.

That really blew my stack, about thirty hours later ...

Re:Remember

[Anonymous Coward]

What happens when you do/don't feed the dog?

Re:Remember

[Otto]

You think that's frustrating?

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.

Re:Remember

[fireboy1919]

Or even worse:
-Don't get the tools from earth every environment you go to.

You don't find out about that problem 'till the very end of the game.

Re:Remember

[DieterWeber]

But it CAN be fatal, if you run out of inventory space and the dog won't ACCEPT the sandwich!

As Arthur, try buying the sandwich, then when leaving the bar, try to give it to the dog. If it refuses, it'll continue to do so. No biggie, right?

Well, once you get to the Vogon ship (and you don't yet understand that you can keep stuff in the 'thing that you're aunt gave you and you don't know what it is', you may just have to drop some stuff to pick up some essentials in the ship. Like drop a cheese sandwich. Doesn't seem important; the dog wouldn't eat it, and you certainly don't want to. So you drop it, move on, and make it to the HOG.

Okay, fine, you kept getting eaten by a hungry dog when in the War Room. So let's just buy a cheese sandwich at the bar as Ford. Unfortunately, there is no cheese sandwich available at the bar. Apparently, Arthur got the last one. Okay, maybe I can make it back to the Vogon ship to get the sandwich I dropped earlier. Too bad as soon as you arrive you get sent back (blasted to bits by the guards).

Maybe I can ask Arthur for it? What about this? What about that? Must have played through every single possible scenario trying to get (back) a damn cheese sandwich.

Best I can tell, your only option is to restart. Oh well! :-)

Game tip:

[El_Smack]

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.

Re:Game tip:

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh for Christ's sake!!
I played that game on my C-64 when I was a kid. I hadn't even thought about it for probably the past decade. I never did get past the point of getting the fish into my ear, and I never realized why. Thanks.
Of course you realize now that I'm going to try it out, and subsequently burn the next 3 weeks getting stuck at another point.
Jackass.

Re:Game tip:

[techno-vampire]

Put the mail on Ford's briefcase before trying to get the fish.

Why dows /. exist?

[drmancini]

42

The influence of Adams on Internet culture

[Nakito]

I always liked the fact that AltaVista named their translation service "Babelfish." It would be interesting to catalog other examples of how Adams has left his mark on the Internet.

Re:The influence of Adams on Internet culture

[Trurl's Machine]

He is probably the #1 author of signature quotes, at least he used to be in the early days of Internet. My God, if he had $1 for every "So long and thanks for all the fish" mail signature (and similar ones), the Adams Estate could now purchase the Tolkien Estate for breakfast.

Re:The influence of Adams on Internet culture

[dillon_rinker]

Yes, but if the Tolkien estate got $.01 for every , it could buy Hasbro for breakfast.

Re:The influence of Adams on Internet culture

[dillon_rinker]

DOH! Shoulda previewed. Slashdot didn't like my angle brackets; let's try parentheses.

Yes, but if the Tolkien estate got $.01 for every (insert random fantasy cliche here), it could buy Hasbro for breakfast.

Re:The influence of Adams on Internet culture

[loqi]

You buy Hasbro for breakfast?

Whales and petunias ...

[Dark$ide]

As the whale said "Oh no, not again!". The petunias didn't comment.

Re:Whales and petunias ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, wrong. It was the petunias that said "Oh no, not again". It has often been theorized that if we understood that comment we'd no a lot more about the universe than we do now.

Re:Whales and petunias ...

[LWATCDR]

Actually it was the the bowl of petunias that said "No not again".
The Petunias was a soul that kept comming back to after Aruthor Dent kept killed it time and time again.

Re:Whales and petunias ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone failed to spot the irony.

Re:Whales and petunias ...

[Alranor]

Ah yes, Agrajag

To be played by Douglas Adams himself in the upcoming radio series :)

Been A While

[ackthpt]

It's been a while, but I don't remember Agrajag being in the HHGG game I played on a C64. I do remember being aboard the Heart of Gold, something to do with the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast, entering my own head, but I don't recall Agrajag being in there. Sounds like it's been expanded a bit.

Certainly has taken a while for the sequel, I don't even wear a digital watch anymore! :-)

Re:Been A While

[Anonymous Coward]

Agrajag won't be there. That bit of TFA was referring to the new Radio Series.

I don't have very high hopes for this. I really doubt that BBC is writing a new Infocom interpreter capable of rendering justice (pun intended) to Rob Lord's graphics in-game.

Expect some kind of lame "unlocking" system, where you can hyperlink to the webpage with the right graphic, once the game gives you a password or something. (For those who've played the original, it'll probably be through the "footnote" command or something similar.)

Hell, for all of the detail in the article, I'm expecting nothing more than still captures of the Guide animations from the original BBC TV series.

Re:Been A While

[Mateito]

I don't even wear a digital watch anymore!

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.

Re:Been A While

[nyphot]

Agrajag will be voiced by Douglas Adams in the new radio series, not in the text adventure game. A text adventure with voiceovers? The horror.

But, incidentally, Agrajag DOES show up briefly in the game, though perhaps not recognizable as such. You/Arthur kill/s one of his incarnations while on the Heart of Gold, though it IS a highly improbable event.

Re:Been A While

[jallison]

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.

Wandering off topic here, but as someone else said, it is THHGTTG we're discussing here, so off topic is on topic. Sort of like tea and no tea.

Analog watches are more popular because people are more interested in relative time than absolute time. In other words, we don't really care what time it is, we care how long it is before something happens. How long til lunch? How long til the movie starts? Etc. And your brain grasps these intervals much more intuitively when they are presented with hands going around in a circle. With a digital watch you actually have to do math to figure out how long you have. With an analog it's not "twenty minutes," it's 120 degrees of the circle, which you quickly have a strong feel for.

Re:Been A While

[CaptainAvatar]

Pity I've already posted, you deserve to be modded up! +1, Insightful and DNAish.

wicked..

[radarsat1]

i wish text adventure games would come back. this is going to be great! command-line gaming at its best. hey, i've heard rumours that production levels across the nation dipped visibly when Adventure first came out, is that true?

Re:wicked..

[StalinsNotDead]

production levels across the nation dipped visibly when Adventure first came out

Kind of like Slashdot?

Re:wicked..

[Anonymous Coward]

Text adventures (or Interactive Fiction) are here. http://ifarchive.org/, http://ifcomp.org/ and rec.arts.int-fiction & rec.games.int-fiction. Some people have gone the annoying, so-called "puzzleless" route, but there are still good games out there that aren't puzzleless.

Re:wicked..

[UserGoogol]

As you refresh, you see that there is a new article loaded. "New Star Trek Movie by John Waters." No posts have yet been posted.s

#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)

Re:wicked..

[MilenCent]

You could always play... Thy Dungeonman!

Re:wicked..

[Anonymous Coward]

i wish text adventure games would come back.

They're still around. We just call them "interactive fiction" now.

You think the GAME was frustrating?

[xmuskrat]

You should have bought the hintbook for it. In order to get an obscure clue, you had to highlight it with a special marker. Unfortuantely, there were far more clues then ink in the marker. There was a rumor you could develop the answers with lemonade, and I guess that wasn't a bad idea to try (since if you wanted the answers you had to buy a new hintbook anyway for a new marker...)

Re:You think the GAME was frustrating?

[justforaday]

I went throught the exact same thing with those damn Invisiclues books...The worst was when you stopped playing a game for a month, only to pick it up again later to find that the hintbook you spent 15 bucks on was now no good...I supposed it's still better than paying $2.99/minute for some telephone hintline though...

Re:You think the GAME was frustrating?

[WesternActor]

This simply isn't accurate. At one point or another, I owned just about all the Infocom hint booklets, including the one for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and never once had a problem with running out of ink in the markers. (And that includes the extra-large books that included hints for multiple games.) And Infocom sold replacement markers for all their hint books, and even included a message to this effect in the books themselves.

Re:You think the GAME was frustrating?

[Zilfondel2]

Boy, I bet SOMEBODY feels stupid now.

Cheers.

Re:You think the GAME was frustrating?

[xmuskrat]

I know I don't feel stupid. Just the fact that he had a different experience with a product then both me and justforaday did, doesn't make either of experiences inaccurate. My markers did run out, his didn't. It could have been different batches, different years, lots of things. The hint books actually did have text in a little back section that said if your markers ran out you could develop them using a household mixture. That actually was true. But hey, this was all at least 15 years ago. So I don't sweat it.

Re:You think the GAME was frustrating?

[Anonymous Coward]

there were far more clues then ink in the marker.

Than. The word you are looking for is than.

Re:You think the GAME was frustrating?

[neurojab]

FYI... The DOS version of "hitchhik" has the invisiclues and a reader for them built-in to the game. All you do is type "HINT" at the prompt.

Also FYI.. The DOS version runs great under DOSEMU. :)

Re:You think the GAME was frustrating?

[Anonymous Coward]

Very cool! Where can I download it?

I'd love just to read the old invisiclues. They were as funny as the game. (when *my* marker worked...)

Re:You think the GAME was frustrating?

[Anonymous Coward]

The inventor to those InvisiClues made quite a bit of money from those things. One has to wonder if they weren't meant to expire on purpose?

Re:You think the GAME was frustrating?

[JimBobJoe]

..I supposed it's still better than paying $2.99/minute for some telephone hintline though...

Haha. That reminds me of when I would get regularly stumped in Sierra's first Police Quest. At the time there was a 900 number you could call into to get answers, but Canada had no such thing--so there was a reagular phone line for Canadians. Since there was also no caller ID, I just called the regular line over and over again claiming I was from Canada.

I feel bad for the poor guy who had to deal with me...I think I had a $70 phone bill on an MCI card.

Re:You think the GAME was frustrating?

[Trejkaz]

I also remember copying the data file from the DOS version, which then worked fine on any Infocom emulator, without DOSEMU. :-)

Re:You think the GAME was frustrating?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now would that be the PC-DOS version, or the MS-DOS version? [yes, they sold two different versions of most games. something to do with minor incompatibilities in the interpreter.] Anyways, I think you're thinking of one of the later greatest hits compilation versions, because I can guarantee the version I had didn't have any built-in hints...

Re:You think the GAME was frustrating?

[neurojab]

>Anyways, I think you're thinking of one of the later greatest hits compilation versions, because I can guarantee the version I had didn't have any built-in hints...

Nope. It was the 5&1/4 floppy version sold by itself. Release 31. Copyright 1984. It's possible it may not have been the FIRST version sold, but it definately was not part of a compilation.

Beyond user-friendly...

[DeadVulcan]

"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...

[justforaday]

I bet they had programmers offering to work for free. Heck, I would have paid them...

Y'know, I think you may have just stumbled on the next revolution in software development...

Re:Beyond user-friendly...

[blair1q]

> because it lies to you as well it's also 'user mendacious,

Wait. You mean Windows is based on the HHTTG text-adventure game?

(Ah, just mod me -1 karma whore...)

Re:Beyond user-friendly...

[HedonismBot]

You mean Windows is based on the HHTTG text-adventure game?

Uhm...I don't think so, judging by Douglas Adams' thoughts on Windows 95. ;-)

Excerpt: As part of this billion-dollar festival of smoke and mirrors, Bill Gates has apparently paid the Rolling Stones 8 million pounds for the right to use Start Me Up, the song which is better known for its catchy refrain "You make a grown man cry".

Tee Hee.

This game is EVIL!!!

[kjones692]

I never managed to get past the bit where Ford comes and talks to you, then leaves to go to the pub... but, then again, this game is pretty much representative of all text-based adventure games.

"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!!!

[Deep Fried Geekboy]

The secret is not to take the towel.

Re:This game is EVIL!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

DON'T TAKE THE TOWEL!!

Re:This game is EVIL!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can go North, South, or Dennis :-p

Re:This game is EVIL!!!

[xmuskrat]

I made it back on my C64 all the way to the heart of gold, but I'm not sure if I got bored of it by then, if I had gone mad, or if I just gave up out of sheer frustration.

Best Infocom Game Quote

[dcigary]

..for ME, anyhow...

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.

Re:Best Infocom Game Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite is a bug in Zork II (in only happens in some of the 50+ (!!) versions of the game that have been released), after the obnoxious wizard levitates you:

# look
Caverns (levitating)
You see nothing of interest.
# north
You can't walk north; you're hovering helplessly in mid-air.
# drop self
You don't have the you!
# look
Caverns (levitating)
There is a you lying here.

This transcript is, of course, from memory and not totally accurate.

It's not that bad!

[ackthpt]

I'll hand in my nerd ID card if you so deem it necessary, but I for one amd damn tired of anything related to HHGTTG.

Just wear your Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses until the article goes away.

Re:It's not that bad!

[Knight2K]

For some reason, when ever I see Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, I keep mentally transmuting it into Perl Sensitive Sunglasses. Which, considering some of the Perl I've seen, would be pretty useful.

Not trolling here, just sharing my mental state. I love you Perl guys, really. And your poetry. It's full of delightful visual imagery and appealing metaphors underlying this and highlighting the other and developing the theme.... oh never mind. Where's the nearest airlock?

ob quotation

[betelgeuse-4]

It is very dark... You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.

Re:ob quotation

[Lurkingrue]

It is very dark... You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.

You wish.

Re:ob quotation

[stickb0y]

You call that an obligatory quote? "Pitch black", not just "very dark"! Kids these days.

Anyone?

[Guano_Jim]

Anyone have a babelfish translation of the article?

Re:Anyone?

[StalinsNotDead]

Didn't the babel fish need the brain waves of the speaker? If so, would it work on written material?

Re:Anyone?

[Gaewyn L Knight]

Umm... stick it in your ear! :} Sorry couldn't resist.

Re:Anyone?

[irokitt]

I didn't feel like copying-pasting the entire article, but here's the Slashdot intro, with a few fun steps in between, and then back to Engrish:

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 'the of the play is illustrated obviously by Rod gentleman, the BAFTA for their graphics for the tev4. Originalseries.' won; ; of more hitchhiker; Hoopy!" ;

What do you think, Ford?

[mccalli]

"What, just stroll off with it?"

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're looking for is called a Z Machine interpreter. (Z machine being the text adventure mechanism that drove those Infocom games)

If you look around enough, you whould be able to find one (as well as the *.z files for HHGG)

Failing that, Activision released a 'best of infocom' years back that you can likely find on ebay.

Re:What do you think, Ford?

[Kiryat Malachi]

The admiral's ship, of course.

(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?

[Natchswing]

Sure, just download the game and Z interpreter.

Re:What do you think, Ford?

[Bapu]

That would be what Ford said to Zaphod before they stole the flagship belonging the Haggunenon Admiral. This was a bad idea, since the Admiral later evolved into a Ravenous Bug-Blatter Beast of Traal.
I knew there was a reason I kept all this stuff.

Re:What do you think, Ford?

[Natchswing]

Oh yeah, you can also download the game directly from the Douglas Adams site.

Re:What do you think, Ford?

[mihalis]

Oh yeah, you can also download the game directly from the Douglas Adams site.

that link doesn't work

Re:What do you think, Ford?

[Natchswing]

Did earlier, I checked it before I submitted. Maybe it's just swamped now.

Douglas Adams was wrong about Vogon poetry

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to Vogon spam, it's quite pleasant.

Freddle your gruntbuggly!

Hot and plurdled gabbleblotchits waiting for you

Refinance your foonting turlingdromes

Earn that crinkly bindlewurdle you've always dreamed of...

Re:Douglas Adams was wrong about Vogon poetry

[mihalis]

groop I implore thee!

Re:Douglas Adams was wrong about Vogon poetry

[Yer Mom]

Increase the size of your gobberwarts...

I got karma to burn...

[Metallic Matty]

Forty-second post.

Re:I got karma to burn...

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, sadly enough, it IS 42nd post. I just put it on oldest first ignore threads flat and he was 42nd.

BAFTA?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty cool, not every day you win an animal from Star Wars.

Re:BAFTA?

[darth_MALL]

perhaps 'tis the Bantha you seek?

Re:BAFTA?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the Bush American Free Trade Agreement is an acceptable term. It's only for the US, you can't trade without heavy taxes, and they dictate all terms of the deal.

NOOOOO!

[Anonymous Coward]

All text.

No graffiti.

Where do I put all my stuff???

[g_adams27]

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???

[Thedalek]

Actually, I think in one version you could put your bathrobe in "the thing your aunt gave you and you don't know what it is," and then put TTYAGYAYDKWII in the pocket of your bathrobe. It even listed in your inventory that both were inside each other.

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.

[fireboy1919]

Actually, I've got a lot of my old inform (the name of the interpreter) favorites up on my site (all of these are freeware now afaik).

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.

Re:Play the old version here.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are standing outside your house. There is a mailbox here.
#open mailbox
Opening the mailbox reveals a leaflet.
#read leaflet
It is actually a cease and desist letter from Activision (1), concerning your Infocom story file redistribution site and their rights to the intellectual properties therein.
# footnote 1
Activision acquired Infocom and all rights to its games. They've made a few special deals, e.g. I think Zork I is free as well as a "special edition" of Zork which was commissioned as an advert for the failed Zork:Grand Inquisitor. It is most certainly a copyright violation to hand out the story files.

Re:Play the old version here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah. Actually looking at your site, I notice that you are only distributing HHGTTG and Zork I.

And, btw, it's "Graham Nelson", not "Graham Norton". I also don't believe that he was in the original MIT gang that developed Zork. He basically re-invented the field by developing a new object-oriented story file compiler called "inform".

Re:Play the old version here.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Meteor, the Stone and a Long Glass of Sherbet: A game by one of the masters of the genre, Graham Norton.

That games is by Graham Nelson. Graham Norton is the name of a camp comedian.

Re:Play the old version here.

[fireboy1919]

Thanks for the corrections.

Yeah, I'm only distributing those two. Those two were the only ones I found in freeware locations.

42

[kavau]

Not really internet related, but I think Douglas Adams' greatest achievement is that he provided us with a simple answer to the question about life, the universe, and everything. Whenever you engage in a metaphysical discussion about the meaning of life, his answer will invariably come up at some point.

Re:42

[Rude Turnip]

Technically, the answer is "forty two," much in the same way every culture has a drink called "gin and tonic," (ie gin and tonic, jinintoxix, etc).

Re:42

[titusjan]

There is even a Ford model named after it.

Re:42

[bobbozzo]

groan!

Re:42

[Feanturi]

Whenever you engage in a metaphysical discussion about the meaning of life, his answer will invariably come up at some point.

Unfortunately far too often. I love that whole ultimate Question business, but whenever someone brightly quips, "42!" I just want to throttle them.

Re:42

[CaptainAvatar]

Tell me about it! I mean, it's funny enough the first ten thousand times you hear it, but after that it gets a tad tedious ... of course, I perpetrated this myself often enough as a teenager, so perhaps it's karma.

there is a cheat code for this game

[circletimessquare]

the cheat code is "42"

Text adventures...

[monkeyfarm]

It would seem that in 30 years of Natural Language processing advancements and so forth, that it would be possible to revive text adventure type games.

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...

[Sebastopol]

You mean like "lay down in front of bulldozer" instead of "lie down in front of bulldozer"... or vice versa?

Damn, that one issue drove me CRAZY! Fortunately I had planetfall and zork to switch off to when i got frustrated. Ahhh.... apple //e pirating ruled!

Re:Text adventures...

[david.given]

It would seem that in 30 years of Natural Language processing advancements and so forth, that it would be possible to revive text adventure type games.

NLP never really came into it, but these days they are better. Much better. Partly it's better parsers, but mostly it's having more memory so you can have bigger dictionaries of words.

The standard sort of thing you can do with parsers these days looks like this:

> n
The door to the north is locked.
> unlock door
What with?
> key
Do you mean the gold key or the silver key?
> gold
You unlock the door. The key crumbles into dust.

There is a vending machine in front of you. A small pile of coins stands in front of it.
> examine coins
There are five red ones and six green ones.
> get all the red coins
Taken.
> put three red coins and one green coin into the vending machine
(Taking the green coin first)
You receive a dead babel fish.
> drop all but one of the red coins
Dropped.
>

Re:Text adventures...

[StaticEngine]

Check out Inform: http://www.inform-fiction.org/index.html

Also, this year's Interactive Fiction Competition: http://www.ifcomp.org

and the newsgroups rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction. Text Adventures are still alive, thank you.

Re:Text adventures...

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's not really any more advanced than what Infocom were doing back in the early 80s! HHTG already processes lines like "drop everything except the towel and the gown" correctly.

Re:Text adventures...

[ivoras]

There's no need for 4-6 years of R&D. Success is driven by creativity, etc. rather than eye-candy.

I don't really know how long it took to write even one of the HH books, but from what I've read, most of the good books (of any genre) take at least a year to write. Combine that with the fact that there's acrually a lot more to write for a game than for a book (multiple options/endings/commands/dialogues), and I gather a good *and elaborate* text game would take at least 2 years to make, maybe more.

Re:Text adventures...

[Deep Fried Geekboy]

Good lord, I hope they've got further than that. The Magnetic Scrolls parser could do that in 1986. I know coz I worked for them briefly. I subsequently wrote a much better parser in Prolog, which is absolutely the best language for prototyping parsers because the Backus-Naur notation transcribes almost directly into a Prolog implementation, which is extremely neat.

In fact parsing is probably the easiest bit of writing a text adventure. If you can specify the kinds of sentences you'd like to be able to understand and write that into a grammar, you can write a parser for it. Much more difficult is writing the representational system that actually drives the thing.

Re:Text adventures...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I gather a good *and elaborate* text game would take at least 2 years to make, maybe more"

Maybe, but it wouldn't require 2 years of work by dozens of designers, programmers, graphic artists and sound artists, as is currently the case for graphics games.

But I doubt many games would require 2 years. Interactive Fiction games probably would be closer to a short story or a novella than a full-length novel.

Infocom, in the early days, was putting out games pretty quickly, and they were *good* games, if limited by 8-bit computer hardware capabilities.

Re:Text adventures...

[jackbird]

...for a single author. Games are developed by teams these days, and an art director/editor working with several writers could fill in the game world faster.

Re:Text adventures...

[bobbozzo]

Around 10 years ago, Activision bought rights to the Infocom games. They made a few sequels to the Infocom games with graphics, and IIRC, a better command interface.

Some pictures here.

I don't know if they were any good, but they didn't sell well.

The real question is...

[Kenja]

The real question is, will it come with a small bag of space ships?

Re:The real question is...

[DLWormwood]

will it come with a small bag of space ships?

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...

Re:The real question is...

[bomb_number_20]

I can't tell if you're making a reference to the original infocom game or the storyline itself.

For the benefit of those who haven't played it, the original game came with a small collection of stuff in the box, one of which was a small sealed plastic bag with a label that said 'Microscopic Space Fleet'. I can't recall what the other items were. Actually, IIRC, one of the other items was a 'Don't Panic' button.

Infocom always included a small treasure trove of interesting stuff in their games. Some of which was useful in actually solving it.

Re:The real question is...

[sfbanutt]

Peril sensitive sunglasses (cut out of black construction paper). I still have them, the microscopic space fleet and the original box. I just don't have the original disk anymore...

Re:The real question is...

[kent_eh]

For the benefit of those who haven't played it, the original game came with a small collection of stuff in the box... I can't recall what the other items were.

-Microscopic space fleet
-Peril Sensitive Sunglasses
-"Don't Panic" button (Mine is still on the cork board beside my computer)
-fluff
-no tea (just like real intergalactic hitchikers don't carry)

IIRC

Re:The real question is...

[tuffy]

Don't forget the twin demolition orders, one in english and one in vogon.

Infocom always had the best goodies.

Re:The real question is...

[bomb_number_20]

HA!

Thanks- you've completely made my day.

the Google answer

[loqi]

All your search engines are belong to Douglas.

Graphical Adventure

[Arthur Yossarian]

I would like to see an updated point-and-click version of the text adventure game, in the style of the Monkey Island games. I think they did this for Starship Titanic, and it would be great to see them make one in time for the HHGTG movie. (Oh, and a tip for the text game: relieve the headache by taking the analgesic found in the pocket of the dressing gown.)

Most Evil Game Ever, and here's why.

[loqi]

The goddamned button on the thumb! Once you get ahold of that thing, you have one turn to press the right button. If you so much as look at the device, you're Vogon toast. Granted you only have to do this once before you know it, but any game that more or less says, "hehe, not this time" is pretty malicious.

Also, all that other impossible stuff.

Link to obligatory H2G2 IF game solution

[Dthoma]

Full game walkthrough here.

Re:Link to obligatory H2G2 IF game solution

[Gudlyf]

DRINK BEER. DRINK BEER. DRINK BEER.

Drink the beer three times. One too many and you'll get drunk and die.

Ah...words to live by.

H2G2 like the internet - not

[TintinX]

I think I actually love DNA.
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

[fahrvergnugen]

Ah yes, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation text adventure revival machine. When the page is accessed, the machine automatically analyzes the thought patterns and intelligence quotient of the player, in order to figure out exactly which precise combination of interesting prose and obtuse logic puzzles will provide the most mentally stimulating and pleasing gaming experience for the individual.

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.

Natural Language Processing

[Otto]

It would seem that in 30 years of Natural Language processing advancements and so forth, that it would be possible to revive text adventure type games.

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 command doesn't always have to be (verb) (noun) (optional specifier) or something like that, but in essence the computer still doesn't really understand English and so there's always going to be some kind of default response of "Huh?" or "I don't know what you're talking about." or something along those lines.

Downloadable doesn't have the best part

[red floyd]

The old Infocom boxed game came with a pair of Joo-Jaglan Peril Sensitive Sunglasses!

Re:Downloadable doesn't have the best part

[ferdmack]

actually it contained, among other things,

Joo Janta 200 Super Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses;
one red button to wear, labeled "Don't Panic";
navel lint a.k.a. some loose cotton;
and something else i think, but i can't remember...

ah! now i remember. a small ziplock bag, empty, that was reported to hold a small fleet of something or other...

Re:Downloadable doesn't have the best part

[Bambi Dee]

and something else i think, but i can't remember

No tea, and demolition orders?

My favorite story about that game..

[Zaphod-AVA]

It's fun to tell people how I was stuck for 6 months on one part. I didn't know that while I was Ford, I was supposed to get Arthur drunk and give him my satchel fluff.

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

[Athrawn17]

See this link here: http://www.ifcomp.org/ Also there is this about the IM bots which serve up INFOCOM games. Those can be found here: http://wired.com/news/games/0,2101,62791,00.html

Infocom?

[gidds]

But will I be able to play the new game on my existing Infocom interpreter???

Fellow train passengers must have been rather bemused watching my increasing frustration with the original game...

Re:Infocom?

[tuffy]

But will I be able to play the new game on my existing Infocom interpreter???

If they're smart, they'll just take the original game and translate it from its original Z-Code level 3 to the graphics-enabled level 6 (used by Zork Zero). That'll allow the game to use graphics and still run on common, multi-platform intepreters.

But if they're not smart, they'll translate it from the original Z-Code to Something Else, and it'll be a huge screw up.

MOD PARENT UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on guys! This post IS funny and IS on topic. Try reading the Hitch Hikers books and you'll see why.

Re:nerd ID card

[Ford Prefect]

I'll hand in my nerd ID card if you so deem it necessary, but I for one amd damn tired of anything related to HHGTTG.

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 ;-)

Direct quote

[Country_hacker]

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

Cheers!

What? How?

[filpaul]

"reviving the old text adventure game..."
"the new version of the game will be illustrated..."

How do you Illustrate a Text Adventure game???
ASCII art??

Re:What? How?

[dykofone]

Quite simple, instead of:

#look around
Bedroom
The bedroom is a mess
It is a small bedroom with a faded carpet and old wallpaper. There is a washbasin, a chair with a tatty dressing gown slung over it, and a window with the curtains drawn. Near the exit leading south is a phone.

You'll have:

#look around
Bedroom
The bedroom is a mess
It is a small bedroom with a faded carpet and old wallpaper. There is a washbasin, a chair with a tatty dressing gown slung over it, and a window with the curtains drawn. Near the exit leading south is a phone. It has been wonderfully illustrated by Rod Lord, who won a BAFTA for his graphics in the original TV series. You admire his quirky style and attention to detail

A bulldozer crashes through the wall and you die as the house collapses.

Re:What? How?

[nomadic]

Actually a lot of text adventure games had illustrations. Magnetic Scrolls games (Guild of Thieves, Fish!, etc) at the time had the best graphics in the game industry.

Re:What? How?

[Hub_City]

Given that the illustrator in question did all the "guide" illustrations for the TV series (which very much look like a proper answer to the question "how would one illustrate a text adventure?") I'm actually really looking forward to this.

He has a knack for using "informative" line illustrations in very funny ways, such as the diagrammatic display of a Vogon's intestine leaping up through his neck and throttling his brain.

Old games don't have so much an afterlife...

[payndz]

...more a sort of apres-vis!

heh, I have HHG game signed by the author...

[feloneous cat]

sadly, I never managed to get into the Heart of Gold without getting shot...

(And the fish was retrieved only through cheats )

The memories

[Zebbers]

I never got far on the game, but boy did I try. Had it on Tandy 1000. Kept the boxes and stuff and even picked up the boxes, etc for an apple II version...thinking they may one day be collectible. Atleast theyd make a nice decoration.

Re:nerd ID card

[Golias]

You might not be the only one.

I absolutely worshipped his writing... when I was 14.

Looking back, he managed to write two-and-a-half oustanding books in his five-novel trilogy. The rest of his stuff was better than a lot of what's out there, but were kind of like the Sherlock Holmes stories Doyle wrote after "killing" Holmes off, only to find that popular demand compelled him to cash in... er... give in and write some new material.

In the end, Adams wound up being the sort of niche celebrity who actually thought the world gave a crap about his opinions on religion, politics, technology, and Dire Straits guitar solos. All I ever wanted out of him was some light chuckles about bureaucracy and Isaac Asimov novels, and when he was in his prime, that was what he delivered, with a style of prose which was often imitated, but never really duplicated.

But the brilliant punch of describing massive spaceships that hang in the air "exactly the same way that bricks don't," has been diluted slightly by a thousand posers (I'm looking in your direction, Mr. Pratchett) who were less adept at playing with the language yet still insisted on doing do.

The jokes have worn even thinner still from being quoted by college-aged nerds more often than the Knights Who Say Ni.

HHGTTG was the "Tom Swift" series of a whole generation, and we will see "the next Beatles" long before we ever see an author worthy of being called "the next Douglas Adams."

But yeah... I'm fucking sick of it too. I hope this new movie suffers a pre-natal death and is forgotten about.

Ah Douglas Adams

[bludstone]

He and Linus are the two alpha geeks. Or maybe one is alpha, and one is omega? The beginning and the end?

Regardless, you must bow before his mighty brains. For he will stimulate your mind not unlike the triple breasted whore of eroticon six will stimulate your groin.

I have, in the past 2 years, given away 3 copies of the complete hitchhikers guide. None of them entirely on purpose, mind you. I just find myself shocked that a friend hasnt read them, loan it to the friend, then opt to let them keep it and buy a new copy for myself.

The new fake-leatherbound version is really nice.

One of the best games

[eamonman]

I don't know what people are talking about, this being the worst game and such. When I played it way back when, I was the fluff planting, towel wrapping, dark enjoying master. I don't recall finishing it though, but I recall reachign the point where Magrathea's Missles attacked.

The parser was fun to play with ("Maximum verbosity," is still a funny line I think), even though it was constricting (but then, most text adventures were.) And the story was, like the book, so way out there that it was just a lot of fun to play.

Re:One of the best games

[grikdog]

Yep. Actually you can still find a file called hhgg.z5 out there in the cybervoid, which is an Inform formatted version of the original Infocom game. Runs under emulation, you need something like MacZip or whatever your platform needs. Curiously, it runs on my Panther iBook in Mac OS 9 Classic Mode in ZIP emulation about 10 times faster than it ran on my Kaypro 10. Even stranger, it's possible to find the ORIGINAL INFOCOM INVISICLUES which tells you how to get the babelfish. (You DO read your mail, right?)

Other Game! (= Bureaucracy)

[Anonymous Coward]

Douglas Adams did another game for Infocom, called Bureaucracy. Similar fiendish twisted puzzles. Not as many planets exploding.

Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

The game has been available for online play on Adams' website for awhile now.

How Fitting

[Zebbers]

My professor for an awesome intro physics class called 7 Ideas that Shook the Universe played part of the audiotape today for the class. He said the easiest way to describe space was through that: "Space, Is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you might think it's a long walk down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." "

Re:nerd ID card

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Stop crowing about being the "article submitter." Nobody is impressed.

2. Don't be so sensitive. Not every negative comment about HHGTTG is a personal attack on you for expressing your fondness of it. I would be willing to bet that the grandparent post came from somebody who was a big fan of the series long before you had even heard of it.

Suddenly the room goes quiet for ONE question

[Provocateur]

illustrated by Rod Lord, who won a BAFTA for his graphics for the original Hitchhiker TV series

It was animated?

Thanks, I'll be here all week.

Re:Suddenly the room goes quiet for ONE question

[theantipode]

The Guide entries were animated... and they took up a considerable part of some of the episodes.

Re: Close but no cigar

[BitterAndDrunk]

If you BUY the sandwich as Dent you can't get it as Prefect, rendering it unrecoverable. IIRC. It was a long time ago and this WAS the most frustrating Infocom game ever. Well, next to Infidel. Infidel may have been really cool, I always died in the desert.

Yes, that's right, I never found the pyramid. Leave me alone.

Re:Babble Fish Puzzle.

[Chainsaw76]

I had been working that puzzle for days. me and my 2 roomates.. it was freshman year in college.. I was on my way to class, and all of a suddent he junkmail solution hit me.. I did an about face, and ran back to my dorm room..

Never did make it to class.. or graduation for that matter.

-Jason

illustrations...

[CmdrTostado]

.. apparently 'the new version of the game will be illustrated by Rod Lord.
He will have trouble topping the original illustrations...

Writing these things was my first real job

[Deep Fried Geekboy]

Seriously... well, unless you count my brief employment as a rocket scientist at the Propellants, Explosives and Rocket Motor Establishment.

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

[XNormal]

Some copies of the C64 version of the Infocom game had an opening picture featuring the green eyeless alien and a thumb. It was displayed while the game loaded and wasn't part of the original game. It was added to an illegally distributed copy.

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...

Re:Opening picture for C64 version

[DirkGently]

Erm, do an image-google for "dont panic".

Re:Opening picture for C64 version

[Anonymous Coward]

ehmm have you actually done this?
the fourth picture (the one from taiwan) is something to panic about..

Re: Close but no cigar

[bobbozzo]

I bought HHTG and Leather Goddesses of Phobos at the same time when I was about 15.

I didn't get very far in HHTG, but in LGoP, I never got out of the apartment!

However, with Starcross, which was also later rated as among their hardest games, I was able to get through the entire game up to the machine to make oxygen without any hints.
I couldn't figure out the machine, but that was because I hadn't had Chem yet, and the descriptions of the machine make no sense if you don't know what O2 molecules would look like.
Once I got the O2 working, there were only a few steps to finishing the game.

So...

[jwdb]

... any chance of finding the original game anywhere? If the company's bankrupt, not much chance of purchasing it....

What's the copyright status? Abandonware?

Jw

Re:So...

[Feneric]

Activision bought Infocom and occasionally rereleases all the original Infocom titles. However, (please correct me if I'm wrong) I believe that HHGTTG (along with the original three Zorks and "Zork Zero") has a somewhat different status and that it was deliberately released into a status that's not quite public domain but still allows free private usage.

Re:So...

[jwdb]

Does that mean we can get it from Activision? From P2P?

Jw

Re:So...

[Feneric]

It means that it's both on some Activision collection CDs (look for the Lost Treasures of Infocom; there have been a few different releases at least one of which includes HHGTTG) which are at the moment out of print (but still findable here and there and which get rereleased every so often) and available through the web. I seem to recall that Douglas Adams' official site made the release in around the time of his death, and I think it still may be available there. If not, do a Google search for hhgttg.z5, HHGTTG.z5, hhgtg.z5, and other related variations. You'll need Z-machine software to run it, but that's readily (and freely) available for virtually all platforms. Check here for a quick list of links of Z-machine apps by platform. Of course, all this is assuming it's really legal to do so; again I reiterate that I really do believe it was so released... Douglas Adams' official site seems to be suffering from the /. effect right now so it's hard to get the final word.

Re:So...

[atcurtis]

I have the original game on a 5¼" floppy in the original box which comes complete with a microscopic space fleet and no tea.

Pity I don't have a disk drive to read the floppy with anymore...

The Spelling Nazi

[dapyx]

I hate being the French Spelling Nazi, but somebody has to do it. It's Après-vie. :-)

Re:The Spelling Nazi

[Bullet-Dodger]

I hate being the French Spelling Nazi...

Yes, and don't you wish you hadn't?

Re:nerd ID card

[dapyx]

Because of what you said here, you will probably be the first one against the wall when the revolution comes.

I don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a little bit interested in this game, but I probably won't go play it. If I did it would be to check out the pictures for 5 or 10 min...

Text adventures with random assed puzzles always kinda pissed me off, actually. Yeah, I didn't like Liesure Suite Larry or Kings Quest or Myst or any of that stuff either. 'Of course! Sharpen the ginzu knife on the concrete stairs! I don't know why I didn't think of that before!'

So if someone started coming out with new text adventures and expected you to pay for them (say $20 a game?) would you go for it? I wouldn't.

Re:Text adventures... Why new parsers won't help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Revive them? They never died.
Do a search on google, and tray a search for SPAG too, it's a great site.

The problem with text adventures are that there are some serious problems still to be sorted out...

The classic is, imagine standing before a door with a key....

Open door
> The door is closed.
Open door
> The door is locked.
Unlock door
> With what?
Unlock door with key
> The door is unlocked.
N
> The door is closed.
Open door
> The door opens
N

Ok, so a clever interpreter would know you had the key, know when you wanted to go north that you wanted to unlock the door.. So it would look like this..

>N
You unlock the door, open it and go north.

BUT.... This way of thinking kills the game in the end, as it gets like...

N
> You unlock the door, open it, go north, take the sword, sharpen it on the stone, kill the dragon and you have won!

So it's not really about the parser and interpreter, it's about the writer getting the balance of engine stupidity and intellegence just right. A better parser is nice, but in the end the playability is down to the skill of the writer.

Another problem is that NPCs are very very hard to do well in text adventures. Anything more than robot responses, and you are attempting writing something that should pass the turing test.

42

[cyrax777]

no txt

Good Gravy...

[DLWormwood]

Vogon "spametry" CENSORED

You should be HELD BACK for writing such stuff!

Seriously, did DNA every discuss spam as a cultural menace before he died? It would be precisely the sort of thing Vogons would be in to, wouldn't it?

Belgium!

[Anonymous Coward]

If it doesn't play OGG files, I'm not buying it!

/. Icon

[Arthur Yossarian]

With all the new HHGTG stuff coming out over the next year (new radio play, movie, etc.), I think Slashdot should make a HHGTG icon. After all, LOTR got an icon when the movies were released. The original mascot (spherical green alien with its tongue sticking out, giving a thumbs up) would fit nicely.

Re:/. Icon

[Tim Browse]

I can't let that one go by...Douglas hated that mascot - absolutely hated it.

I'd go for a 'Don't Panic' icon.

Re:/. Icon

[Sean D. Solle]

Seconded. I remember Douglas becoming utterly exasperated when the subject came up at TDV - he had no idea where the damn thing came from - it just turned up one day on the cover of the US editions.

Re:/. Icon

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly the only possible icon for Hitch Hikers would be a dressing gown.

Or maybe no tea, but it's a bit hard to show that graphically.

Douglas Adams' Other Interactive Fiction

[Feneric]

I'm glad the IF version of "Hitchhikers' Guide" is coming back. I hope they take it further and bring back some of his other IF titles. "Bureaucracy" is deserving, and I've not had the opportunity to try "Starship Titanic".

Re:Douglas Adams' Other Interactive Fiction

[rpillala]

Starship Titanic kind of counts as IF but not really. It's probably very cheap now if not cheaper but I wouldn't go out of my way to find it.

Ravi

"Offtopic"

[mrchaotica]

Hey, this is the Guide we're talking about here! How is it possible for anything to be off-topic?!

Re:nerd ID card

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, Pratchett's funnier than Adams ever was, and more consistent to boot.

His use of footnotes is stellar.

Whatever you do...

[Suit_N_Tie]

Don't type "look up"... ever...!

Re:Text adventures... Why new parsers won't help.

[monkeyfarm]

Another problem is that NPCs are very very hard to do well in text adventures. Anything more than robot responses, and you are attempting writing something that should pass the turing test.

I'd propose that crafting an AI that can function in a kick-ass text-based adventure game where the "graphics" are in your mind the same way they are in LOTR (Rivendell and Moria are STILL cooler in my head than the movies could even hope to be) is much more noble (or Nobel heh...) than creating AI that pretends to be a chick for geeky men...

I took the towel :-(

[mihalis]

I was playing this via Frotz on my Palm Pilot Pro circa '98. Ford Prefect asked me to accept his towel, and I did and he left and the world blew up (at least, that's how I remember it). I was very affected by it at the time. I can clearly remember thinking "On no, Ford, don't go..."!

Later on on my PC I managed to do the trick with the fish, the junk mail etc, and I got into the famous maze of darkness, but for some reason it was less immersive than playing on the Palm, I lost my determination somewhere.

Re:Text adventures... Why new parsers won't help.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would really like to see that too. It would be great for creating an atmosphere if the npc really did seem to be aware of you as much as you are aware of it.

Realism for me has always been based on how much I can interact with the game world, not how many polygons it contains. Imagine trying to thread a needle in an fps. It's too huge a leap from todays engines. However in interactive fiction you can give the player that capability in a couple of lines of code.

Emily short is one to watch for pushing the boundries of interaction in text adventures.

Re:nerd ID card

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo. Here's a cluestick.

What about Bureaucracy?

[Trejkaz]

Bureaucracy was really cruel too. Some might say far more cruel than the Guide game.

Re:What about Bureaucracy?

[Radius9]

I made it all the way through that one up until the airport. It was the airport I never figured out until years later looking at a hintbook. The really frustrating part was that I guessed the signs pointed in the opposite direction, just didn't follow them for long enough.

23

[Sunnan]

Naw; it's just a parody of Asimov's The Last Question, which see. Adams' is funnier, but it wouldn't be as Cosmically Mindboggling if it weren't standing on the shoulders of SF classics.

As for picking the number 42 out of thin air, it would've been much funnier if he'd used the real magic number, namely five. Or twenty-three.

Re:Text adventures... Why new parsers won't help.

[EddWo]

Wasn't this the sort of thing that douglas tried to do with Starship Titanic. IIRC it had a much more complicated natural language parser that was supposed to let you converse with the NPCs until you got the answers you were looking for.

I never actually played it so I don't know how sucessful it was, but it sounded interesting at the time.

Hmph...

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah? - Zaphod Beeblebrox

Re: Close but no cigar

[Macgrrl]

Infidel is one of the few I finished.

Hoopy - noun NOT adjective

[trib]

ANAL HHGTTG fanboy alert!
As I recall, "hoopy" is a noun, meaning "really together guy" and NOT an adjective as used in the /. story. To quote HHGTTG, "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is."
Thus, Ford is an/a hoopy, as opposed to being hoopy.
Don't believe me? Check the HHG Project.

Re:Hoopy - noun NOT adjective

[Anonymous Coward]

The example you give does not support what you say. It's perfectly acceptable to put an adjective in front of a noun to create a noun phrase. Change "hoopy" to "silly" and we get "that silly Ford Prefect". You would have us believe that "silly" is now a noun?

Re: Close but no cigar

[Otto]

If you BUY the sandwich as Dent you can't get it as Prefect, rendering it unrecoverable.

As I recall, if you buy it as Dent and put it in the thing your aunt gave you, then you'll have it when you're Ford (it's in the thing, and the thing follows you around).

And you can go back to any of the later scenarios, even after you've beaten that scenario, once you acquire real tea and not Artificial Tea Substitute. You don't have to remove your common sense particle in order to get the real tea either, you have to do that in order to have tea and no tea simultaneously.

In any case, I remember reading a comprehensive guide to all this many moons ago, and one thing I do remember was that once you reach the dark, it's impossible to screw up unrecoverably. All the dead end scenarios happen before you get to the dark. It may take some massive effort to actually win, depending on how bad you mess things up, but it's winnable at that point.

Well 42 is related to 23 ;-)

[RedLaggedTeut]

42 = 2*3*7

So you got 2 and 3, and the 5 is the prime that is missing in the product of the first 4 prime numbers ;-)

Re:Well 42 is related to 23 ;-)

[Sunnan]

It's also
05 + 14 + 23 = 42

So maybe there is something to it.

Text and Graphical Games and Utility Functions

[RobertFisher]

As other posters have mentioned, interactive fiction has thrived in an online community connected by usenet groups, webpages, and annual contests since the disappearance of Infocom. A few people have attempted commercial programs, but there does not appear to be much of a market for them, particularly when you can obtain Infocom-quality games or even better for free. If you are curious, take a look at this website.

With regard to the graphical versus non-graphical issue, one should point out that the medium only carries the message. Graphics games have all of the same problems of story-telling and entertainment, but must devote such a huge amount of effort to depicting everything graphically that very little effort is devoted to the depth of gameplay in general.

Speaking of game development, here is one of my thought-provoking usenet posts from over ten years ago on the issue of NPCs. Evidently someone else thought it was thought-provoking as well, as it had been excised and stored on someone's website this entire time. The context was interactive fiction, but you can easily see that the same underlying ideas can be applied to graphical games as well.

From: bobf@piglet (Robert Taylor Fisher)

Subject: Use of Utility Functions in Interactive Fiction

Date: 20 Apr 92 19:29:23 GMT

Early attempts at simulation of characters in Interactive Fiction relied upon the use of "scripts." Each script was painstakingly written for each character, taking into account what the player might actions the player might perform. Take, for instance, Mrs. Robner in Infocom's Deadline. After opening the door for the player, she would state something, and head off to eat breakfast. However, nothing the player could do could change her course of action. Thus, while the script method produced lifelike, believable action, it did so at the cost of flexibility.

An alternative method relies upon the use of "utility functions," which are commonly seen in economics and game theory. The basic concept is very simple. Let x1 and x2 be two choices which a person has available to him. Also y function U(x) in such a way that if the person is rational, U(x1) > U(x2). The actual values assigned are arbitrary so long as they retain the order of the preferences. This concept is easily extended to any number of options {xn}.

Usign utility functions, one can design characters with built-in preferences which will determine that character's actions. To make things more realistic, one can also make the utility functions dependent upon time so that characters will tend to be more dynamic. As an easy example, take the simulation of hunger. If the current time is t and the character last ate at time to, then we could simulate the character's need for food as a utility function which is proportional to the amount (t - to). One could make the function's value inversely proportional to the size of the character's last meal, c. Thus, the form of the utility function for acquiring food would be like U(eating)~ 1/c * (t - to). This is just an arbitrary example -- better forms for the function could probably be chosen. If one were to compile dozens of these functions, each of which depends on time, the program would take the character and evaluate the functions, determining which option has the highest value, and then enable the character to carry out that action.

The form of the function may also have some conditional dependence. For instance, suppose we had an option for striking the player. The function may have a clause reading (if player strikes me) then add X to function. In this way, the characters would take into account how the player interacts with them, and react accordingly. Perhaps most excitingly, the characters can also be allowed to interact among each other using slight alterations to this scheme, possibly having extremely subtle effects on their interactions with the player. All that would be necessary would be to to r

Clap, Hop, Kweepa.

[billmarrs]

'nuff said.

Hoopy frood.

[NotZed]

I think you meant to say "You sass that hoopy Rod Lord? Now there's a frood who really knows where his towel is.". Not that I know who he is, oh phillistine I am.

Oh well.

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 isnt it? It proves you exist and so therefore you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says god. "I hadn't thought of that." And promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

"Oh that was easy." says man. And for an encore he proves that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.

Re: Close but no cigar

[cmpalmer]

I played a dozen or so Infocom games, IIRC Starcross was the only one I finished (once I figured out that the reason the gun misfired the first time was that there was a needed silver rod stuck down the barrel -- Aaargh! Thanks for reminding me).

Re:nerd ID card

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's a crying shame that four different moderators scored this perfectly valid comment as "overrated" (hoping to avoid metamods) until it was in the -1 basement, so I am repeating it now at 0, so at least some readers will see what was said:

I'll hand in my nerd ID card if you so deem it necessary, but I for one amd damn tired of anything related to HHGTTG.

Best thing was "Consult Guide"

[grantdh]

Absolute funniest bits though were if you typed in "consult guide about (whatever)" eg:

consult guide about heart of gold

Back would come this long spiel asking how you'd heard about it, it didn't exist and would you please check yourself in for reconditioning.

All sorts of other gems lurked within, just waiting for you to ask about them.

A close second was saying to Ford Prefect:

Say to Ford what about my house

response: It's not a house, it's a home

Crack up :)