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.

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

[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.

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...)

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.

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.

I got karma to burn...

[Metallic Matty]

Forty-second post.

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.

the Google answer

[loqi]

All your search engines are belong to Douglas.

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.

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: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 ;-)