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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!"
# 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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
Right is wrong when left is right.
Now I can finally prove my intelligence to that *$&#@& door on the Heart of Gold so it will open for me!
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
"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!"
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
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...
Love the Third Amendment?
..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.
Just wear your Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses until the article goes away.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It is very dark... You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.
Decode these
Anyone have a babelfish translation of the article?
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
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...
production levels across the nation dipped visibly when Adventure first came out
Kind of like Slashdot?
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
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.
Forty-second post.
The real question is, will it come with a small bag of space ships?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
All your search engines are belong to Douglas.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
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)
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
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.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
The old Infocom boxed game came with a pair of Joo-Jaglan Peril Sensitive Sunglasses!
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
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?"
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
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?"
/sig
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
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
"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??
...more a sort of apres-vis!
You must think in Russian.
Yes, that's right, I never found the pyramid. Leave me alone.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Hey, this is the Guide we're talking about here! How is it possible for anything to be off-topic?!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz