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Loyalists Preserve Past Through Text-Only Games
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "'You are at the edge of a clearing with an impressive view of the mountains. A trail splits off toward some standing stones to the southwest, while the main road emerges from the forest to the east and continues westward down the hill, via a series of switchbacks.' So begins 'A New Life' (downloadable from here), part of a group of game hobbyists going back to text-only basics. They try to keep the genre alive by posting their titles online for free and meeting in chat rooms dedicated to the craft, the Wall Street Journal Online reports. 'Console games are demanding,' says Mike Snyder, a 33-year-old computer programmer in Wichita, Kan. 'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more.'"
I have been eaten by a grue :(
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more.'"
I used to do this all the time with Everquest....
Zone, goto the restroom/get food/etc, come back and play more.
You wake up.
> get up
You can't get up, it's dark.
> turn on light
You turn on the lamp.
> get up
You can't get up. You've got a headache from that hangover.
> look in pockets
While you look in pockets, your house is demolished by a bulldozer.
Try Again?[y/n]
#$@@#$! That's the third time in a row! !@#%!#@ text games!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...all alike.
> kill troll with nasty knife
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Now if it told me to grab a beer while I was up I'd be addicted to playing.
Was the main exercise that tought me English pretty early. You just cannot go on without understanding, and you cannot go on without writing yourself. That forces you to learn the language in contrast to just cross-reading books or (blasphemy for actually learning English) chatting.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
QUAKE II
/ 043214&tid=112)
Copyright (c) 1991-2001. All rights reserved.
West of steaming pit of hell
You are standing in an open room west of a steaming pit of hell leading down.
There is a gun here.
>
(recycled: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/31
--
RageTech
Well in most console games I play you can hit the "start" or "Pause" button and still go back to the game... though I admit there is some nostalgia in the text only games... and during the early 90's everyone was clamoring more about graphics than storyline, but I find these days the blending of text and storylines in games such as Fable, Final Fantasy and really most RPG's these days is rather more enjoyable (for myself at least) than sitting at a command line "look"'ing at every little thing.
Addbo
Does Nethack qualify? Not quite text-only, but it will run on a terminal. IMNSHO, the greatest game of all time...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
... My blood pressure has gone up.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
clicky clicky
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
They'll produce wonderful text-based games, and people from the cities of MMORPG and FPS will travel out to them to buy blankets and marvel at their monochrome screens.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more.'"
It's called the Pause button. Frickin' old people..
The biggest part of these games, and the highest value of attraction:
No games graphics will ever beat text only's games:
WHY - Becuase its not limited by your PC, by its programming, and by Your Graphics Card, only your MIND.
You get a general mental version of the world your in, and you can assume its more detailed then wandering the plains in EQ2, unless your imaginaionally inept.
When I was a lad a game was considered advanced if it allowed the text to be in different colours.
Now its all about fancy smancy graphics, ah who needs em.
With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more.
same goes with all turn based games. like adom, chess, nethack and others. There is one problem about turns however - they are not MMORPG-able by definition. Some tweaks to the turn system must be made, so that other players wouldn't have to wait for other players. I'm dreaming about MMORPG version of adom, just like I'm dreaming about Diablo-like graphical version of adom. Sad is - that they will probably never happen...
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
solely for playing text-based infocom games : Trinity, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Enchanter... I've found a few online emulators for these accessible through SSH, but there's nothing like booting up the ol' Apple and getting blown up by the Vogons.
.. play those games linked, have a look at http://nickm.com/if/faq.html
The Era of Infocom is fondly remembered indeed.
http://www.latz.org/infocom/
Unfortunately it looks like at the moment the various collections from Activision are out of print. It's too bad. The design of the games seperated data from code quite cleanly making it possible to write a play enine for just about any platform. I have many of these wonderful classics on my Palm handheld.
Frotz!
No sirree, none of these sophisticated "text games" for us. Sometimes, a couple of us guys would get together over a few beers and try race a cursor off the line - without character repeat, and without them sissy arrow keys.
That is how we built character, and we liked it that way.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Let's see
text based -> sprites-> 3d ?
Nope, not in Kansas. Screw Darwin.
I loved them, I even wrote a few myself. But the affair ended abruptly with Scott Adams' "Savage Island" adventure. After that I stuck to games like the classic Star Trek (which I still enjoy today), and my first roguelike, "Temple of Apshai", which is where my current addiction to nethack finds roots.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
There are a lot of very good games available at www.ifarchive.org Many of them will take weeks to solve, have great story lines, and well designed puzzles/problems. Some of my favorates: "Cristminster", "Curses", "Jigsaw", "Anchorhead". For new players, "Theatre" is a good first game.
I've played Zork and Adventure and the like and, while very good, they're not quite as exciting as the games Sierra used to put out (KQ/PQ/SQ/etc), up until they went with the new mouse UI.
Oh well, back to playing Astro-Chicken.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Ahh... this brings me back to my days in Elanthia as Lord Sharvan Darvenshire, half elven ranger. In 9th grade I must have spent 50% of my time outside of school playing online with my friends. Computer dork, I know... but hey, you're reading /., so you're probably not one to talk! ;-)
The great thing about text MUDs was how easily (and quickly) GMs could add content. There was no 3d modeling, no conceptual drawings, downloadable patches, etc, so a festival or merchant could be whipped up in a matter of hours to days (depending on the extent)
Another nice thing about the "special events"? It was a REAL PERSON you interacted with. The merchant would alter your items, enchant them, etc.
Sharvan has since moved onto World of Warcraft... but I still have a soft spot for GS III (now Gemstone IV), as it introduced me to the world of online gaming. There are a lot of things that were in GS that I wish WoW had as well, but it's an entirely different environment so it's pretty much impossible. Totally different experiences.
I actually attribute my ability to type >120wpm to Gemstone. When you spend so much time in the game, and typing is the only way to interact, you learn to get around the keyboard quite well. Who ever said gaming was pointless?!
Excellent.
:)
Text only games remind me of radio plays. Both have better pictures than their visually enabled equivalents (i.e. I prefer radio to TV because it has more interesting pictures
And, for the more graphically inclined, check out these:
Interesting that this made it to the Wall Street Journal. (nostalgia) My first video game was Zork I running on an Osborne I, and I still remember figuring out to give Marvin "tea" and "no tea" in Hitchhiker's.... (/nostalgia)
I do think this is an unfair statement (FTA): "The plots of the games are often as minimalist as the graphics: To win, players must solve a series of puzzles, like finding the key to a castle door."
How is that less complex than any of today's graphics-intensive games? If anything, text adventures are more complex, because you have to read and use your imagination instead of simply killing villians and "walking" over their corpses to collect power-ups or keys or whatever. It's still "find the key to the door," just more literary than visual.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
I have been a MUDer for over nine years now, I have tried MMORPGs like Shadowbane, Ultima, and WoW to name a few, but I always keep coming back to the MUD that I have been with for all this time. There are many reasons, one is the community, on a MUD like the one I play there are only about 40 of us and we know each other well. Another reason is that the MUD that I play at least is about Role Playing, which is not something that can be truely done on a MMORPG. A good balance of PK and RP is what is needed, and MUDs can provide that. Also on a MUD you have to actually use your mind, your imagination. Another great thing I have found after my years of MUDing is an improvement in certain skills, I read faster, type faster, and can make things up on the spot that sound more reasonable. Overall I think that MUDs are great things, but they arn't for everyone but those of you who take to them they are much much better than a graphical game ever could be. By the way, the MUD I play is called Dark Mists http://darkmists.org/ [darkmists.org] and my character is Nij so if any of you want to stop by I'd be happy to show you around.
Utinam me logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant.
about the text only games (and the lame graphic games that followed like "Kings Quest") was that you spent 3 hours trying to figure out what the stupid programmer wanted you to do to progress the story. and it usually came down to something stupid and irrational like "Shove hotdog into light socket" which would allow you to open the portcullis and move to the next infurating puzzle. with today's modern games I can do whatever I want and make my own story.
Text based games, including MUDs and MUSHs are still alive and strong and have quite a following despite all of the hype and eye candy of modern console/pc games.
I play most of today's MMORPGs and have a lot of fun doing so, but they all are missing a level of immersion that you can only get in a text based game.
My favorite game ever is DragonRealms, a text based world with thousands and thousands of players that has been going strong since the early 90s!
I am glad to see people are still taking an interest in keeping this genre going. I hope some of the younger gamers give text based games a chance and do not miss out completely on these great worlds of fun.
But why? I think, because this game has an amazing commitment to making the game a social environment that anyone can get into. Even if you would brand the people who play D&D and roleplay as freaks (which I find myself doing time to time), you can really get into this game and its commitment to drawing you into the social community.
And I think this is true of all MUDs. MMORPGs like Everquest and WoW force you to make a community because you NEED other people to get items or take on big mobs. But on MUDs, Core especially, you can just glide into the environment and find a niche in the community, be it working in a shop or role-playing a certan race or character. That's why people come back to text-based games and why they are still around. Sure I enjoy all those games with crazy graphics and everything, but at the end of the day the MUD will still be there.
- A
Using the same game engine the Scott Adams text adventures had, there was an editor you could get for the TI-99/4A to make your own text adventures.
I remember using it to look through the source code of some impossibly-hard(or broken) text adventure games made in shareware land. One of them was based off of Fast Times at Ridgemount High, complete with Mr. Hand.
Ah, fun times. Never made anything useful out of it, but it was a nice entry into programming.
Computer is on /.
> Surf to
Page Loads - no recent stories
> Reload 7,512 times
A new story pops up
> Click on the story
Nothing to see here - move along
> Reload 389 times
You see the new story
> Write pithy First Post comment - hit Submit
Comment accepted - 8/8
> Reload page
Your comment is gibberish because you didn't preview it
> Reload page again
Comment moderated to -1 as Troll
> Change race to Elf
Change not accepted - you are now permanently cursed as a Troll.
"With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more."
Not true. If you were playing L.O.R.D., getting that sandwich could mean you got slaughtered, or missed that opportunity to get laid by a (female) character.
The Last Resort & Starship Traders http://www.ioresort.com/ , Materia Magica http://www.materiamagica.com/ , and Archmage http://www.magewar.com/ all have pretty good followings and I've been playing them for years.
Someone save me from this sanity.
medic!
was that if you didn't use the "magic word", then they could be really frustrating. As an example, if you typed "Throw hammer" and the magic word was "Fling hammer"... You had to have a copy of a Thesaurus around just in case.
In my case, I am part of the spanish interactive fiction community. It's page is:
http://caad.mine.nu/
If you speak spanish, it's an option. I believe that spanish community is the second of the world in number of members and annual production.
Pichuneke
Shhh...Be vewy vewy quiet. I'm hunting wumpus.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
I do enjoytext adventure games, although I haven't played in years. Best of all I could probably get away with playing them at work. All the windows folks would just think I'm writing perl scripts! ;-)
I hope in the comments of this posting we get a wealth of links to freely avalible or even low cost text adventure games.
Think Deeply.
I used to write text adventure games on the BBC micro. Only 32Kb memory as I remember, and you had to get the whole game and all data into that. Even with those limitations, the engines were getting pretty interesting. A lot of time was spent thinking how to compress the info down.
I remember thinking back then, I wonder how amazing the games will be when we have much more memory, like 128Kb or even 256Kb! Couldn't even conceive of 1Mb of memory.
I returned to it a few years ago because I'd heard there were still people developing them, but the engines really haven't advanced at all. It's a shame, with the capacities that computers have these days we really should be able to develop truely interactive fiction, but I don't think it's ever going to happen. A pity.
There is no light.
:(
> Improvise a light using the minerals from the cave walls, putting it in a piece of my shirt so the combustion can be controlled. I'll use some flints to light it up. The sweat in the shirt can provide enough moisture
Sorry, Macgyverisms not supported in this game.
> WTF?
Some of the very first computer games I ever played were text.
I used to play some sort of game, I can't remember what, on a teletype in highschool in the mid 70's.. Then I got a Ratshack cocoo and played text games on there. I got an IBM early on and played Zork and HHGTTG on a green screen..
Those were the days! I still have a copy of Zork I, II, and III text only on disk, I play them about once a year on a real IBM XT that I still have.
Hard to belive that these games were only about 30k total in size and still they were fun!
I say keep em around, they make you use your imagination. Modern games are just drool and click..
My favorite was Metal Gear Solid 3.
It is quite possibly the most famous of them all with 18 hours of nothing but pure text!
>_
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm somewhat surprised that nobody has mentioned the 11th annual Interactive Fiction Competition going on right now. However, today is the last day to be a judge.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
This space intentionally left blank
I loved Big Rig, I think this is the game that got me into computers... The a couple years later I saw KQ1-CGA version. I though I died and went to computer game heaven... Wow this makes me feel old...
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
"We have met the enemy, and he is lower case."
If you can find the DOS or Amiga versions of your games, you can use frotz on the .dat files.
Actually we use them as passwords, which is why it is so easy to break into Geek macines.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...all alike
This reminds me of the config utility that was implemented in a text based format.
:o)
I recall the famous sequence:
>Take SCSI
> Nothing happens
>Take SCSI
> It doesn't budge
>Take SCSI
> You have SCSI
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
You know what's going to happen? The authors are going to start with an emoticon for a smiling face, and the ASCII Art will go downhill from there and before you know it there will be screens full of . / \ . and everything but the ASCII Goatse guy will make appearances in the game.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
If you missed this one, it's truely a great BOFH episode...
i ng_the_savegame_panic/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/23/bofh_hitt
---
RageTech
Wow, IF goes Wall Street Journal! This made me remember my quest for a Z-Code interpreter for my phone (P910), and after yet another websearch I found something that seems to work:
"malinche" software lists a lot of clients, of which Frotz UIQ seems to work for me. Lots of other phone interpreters listed too (next to more "normal" plattform interpreters).
I was just trying to find Douglas Adams' Bureaucracy last night. I have such fond memories of playing that game on my Mac Plus that I still list it as one of my favorite games of all time.
As someone who played Zork I/II/III back on his Apple //e - let's not forget the other great text-only games Infocome produced. Deadline was a Clue like game, but my fav was always Hitchhiker's guide. You can play it online now here:
n .shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_nola
Yes, they do put some basic graphics up, but the whole text game is still there!
fak3r.com
And there are annual IF competitions with lots of new games.
So it's more than just a group of hobbyists that made one new game, it's a regular community.
'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more
Until the 9 headed white-eye pyro-dragon walks in and eats your. Then you come back and find yourself in the halls of dead. With zero equipment, and 10% less exp.
Or, even in a game like WoW, I can sit in a safe room go make a sandwhich and come back.
The allure of text games, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for MajorMud, is that you 1) use your imagination and 2) the boards are so small it is easy to build a community (especially back in the day of dial-up modems and the boards were all local to you).
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Last text based game I played was the "easter egg" hidden in Google Talk called wumpus (which now seems to be offline permanently).
.exe now.
I wonder if games such as Bard's Tale would qualify (probably not as there was a visual map - although the game could easily be written as text only since some levels were completely dark anyways). Bard's Tale was a great game - in fact, I'm looking for the
Hagrin.com
L.O.R.D. and Barren Realms Elite (BRE) were the best games ever. Ah my old 33.6k external modem...
I didn't want to get an ISP, BBS'es were too much fun. Alas, now they been replaced by a different addiction.
The great thing about text MUDs was how easily (and quickly) GMs could add content. There was no 3d modeling, no conceptual drawings, downloadable patches, etc, so a festival or merchant could be whipped up in a matter of hours to days (depending on the extent)
This is very true, and a huge limit on individual programmers' creativity. There are however some places where this simplicity and rapid deployment of content is still possible, without all the fancy graphics. One is Kingdom of Loathing, which uses only tiny hand-drawn pictures, most of which you can actually turn off and do without.
It's also hillarious, clever, fun, and a web-based MMORPG!
http://www.kingdomofloathing.com/
huhuhuhuhu
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
What I want is Trade Wars to come back. Talk about a fun game. Just hope you start playing the day the game is started.
As much as I love modern adventure games (and I recommend Trace Memory - it was great!), I just can't get into text adventures. I've tried a whole bunch of them, but the only one I ever liked was Shade. It was short and playable through one work day, idly alt-tabbing to the game, typing, then working on stuff some more. It was impossible to lose, too.
Are there any other quickie, no-death text adventures out there for people like me?
Funny, I had just recently gotten back into the text-based games, myself. Apparently all 3 Zork's are now freely available here .
Why not just play a turn-based RPG? There are a lot of them to choose from. Final Fantasy X has been out for years and STILL holds up. Dragon Quest VIII is coming out soon, that one will be fantastic. Turn-based RPGs, once you get sued to them, are a very acceptable alternative to text games, for those who want a non-realtime gaming experience, for their busy (or often-interrupted) schedules.
That all being said, I have killed a LOT of time with Zorks and other Infocom stuff on my old PDA.
VOTE!
I can do that in Quake. Hell, I spend most of my online time respawning anyway.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go play some Xbox, then go play more.
What does it say about your mental state when you read the article title and straight away assume that the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland have found some way of recapturing their days of death and violence but through the medium of a MUD style environment?
I am wrong, get help.
Natsu gusa-ya, Tsuwamono domo-ga, Yume no ato
Lordy... I loved Zork (yes, I am that old) but I can't imagine how cool the game would be if it read the text to you and you responded via voice. I think ppl might actually get back into "text only" games if they could interact via voice and tell the character what to do.
my cube has a window...
Btech online (ansi based); fight in 100 ton battletech mechs against players from around the world.
telnet to btech.dhs.org 3030 telnet://btech.dhs.org:3030
Online training page http://btech.ecst.csuchico.edu/~mux/
A review of 3030 http://www.combatsim.com/review.php?id=723
Another text based game, still kicking.
Text adventures are great. To dismiss them as obsolete because we have graphics now is as foolish as dismissing novels because we have movies. I'm a big fan of graphic adventures (and just about any other type of game), but I still appreciate text adventures. There is a level of interactivity in modern text adventures that graphic games haven't yet achieved. The extremely low development costs mean that lots of interesting and quirky stuff gets made.
The WSJ article oversimplifies a few important things. The IF competition is supposed to be limited to games that take two hours. The idea is to get more people writing games under the idea that a two hour game is much easier to make than a twenty hour game. But people still regularly release longer games. Anchorhead, mentioned above, too me about 30 hours.
It's also not fair to say that "just" 174 people voted. Judging is time consuming; you're expected to play to the conclusion (or for two hours, whichever comes first) at least 5 games. And while there is lots of good stuff, there is a lot of junk. So being a proper judge takes a healthy chunk of time and a willingness to suffer some bad games. It's far easier to just wait until the competition ends, then download the top rated ones. While text adventures are a niche market, I expect we're talking thousands of people who play the competition games. It's just that only a small subset vote.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Don't forget ASCII games like Angband and Nethack. I maintain an Angband variant named Entroband. it has a heavy japanese and tolkien influence. try it out!
http://artsci.wustl.edu/~bcbarnes/band/
-Brian
Ah... the joys of saving one's game to a blank cassette tape.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
There are a few contests out there dedicated to Interactive Fiction, and these contests tend to view it more as a literary form than a style of computer game.
The biggest is of course IF Comp, but there are other smaller ones dedicated to particular themes (like the annual Saugus.net Ghost Story Contest that invite both prose and interactive fiction entries).
Viewing interactive fiction as just a type of computer game is a little like viewing an audio book as just a type of CD. While it's in some sense true, a typical I-F title has just as much in common with a typical computer game as a typical audio book has with a typical pop CD...
This text-based game wasted so much of my time at the SUNY-Buffalo in the late 80's, I cringe to think about it.
Therefore, I would be remiss not to unleash it on the rest of you now once again.
Galactic Trader Online
Galtrader Telnet client
Enjoy...
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Sorry, I wasn't aware of any text adventures documenting the rise of the Orange Order designed to appeal to protestant terrorists.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I remember as a kid playing these text adventure games from Infocom or Scott Adams (no, not the Dilbert guy) and being in heaven. Yes, they drove us nuts, but they were definitely fantastic. :)
;)
:)
You see a machine marked "T Remover" with a door and a red button.
>open door and put tray inside
You open the door to the T Remover machine and insert the tray.
>press button
The machine whirs and pops. The door opens and little Ray whatshisname from 3rd grade pops out, picks up his marbles and scuttles off.
Ok, that may be a bit of an obscure joke, but I am sure some hardcore text adventure gamers know what I'm talking about.
Long live the art of interactive fiction!
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
I don't know... Every time I ask my son to stop playing, the answer is "You can't pause here" or "You can't save here". That must be the Parental Annoyance Mode.
On the plus side, he does seem a little interested in the text adventures on Games Knoppix.
I *loved* TW2002. I even got an original copy for my BBS (back in the ol' times).
:( I stopped playing online games since. It's not fun if you can't play because some bully just decides to have fun at your expenses.
I managed to make a map of the sectors, and find a cozy space to hide my ship.
But after a while I got PK'ed
A friend of mine made this a while ago... I've not really looked at it but it claims it's 'a Fighting Fantasy (FF) and Choose your own adventure (CYOA) gaming portal.'.. cept it's a wiki so anyone can add to it.
http://wikiventure.org/wiki/Main_Page
You are in your mother's basement. It is dark, and you can only see the glowing embers of phosphor highlighting text on an ancient 14" CRT display. On the left of the CRT display are various soda bottle beverages, including a recently opened Mountain Dew. You see a staircase to your left, and an obscenely large comicbook collection on your right.
>view monitor
The monitor displays a browser with the page open to "Slashdot: News for Nerds".
>read page
The page includes the following article threads: "Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD Not OVer Yet" and "Games: Loyalists Preserve Past Through Text-Only Games"
>read "Games: Loyalists Preserve Past Through Text-Only Games"
You are here.
-Krishna
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
Oh man, I have to know how to read to play these games!? That doesn't sound like much fun at all.
'Console games are demanding,' says Mike Snyder, a 33-year-old computer programmer in Wichita, Kan. 'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more.'"
Someone should invent a gaming console with a 'pause' button. Then go back to about 1983 and market it.
Couldn't we come up with a gaming architecture that worked the way *ix does? I think gnuChess works this way. Ie. there's a use accessible low level interface wrapped in a high level interface. You could use the game in text mode or fire up the higher level wrapper that provides the more demanding gui. Ideally there would be a standard gaming protocol for inter-layer communication so you could mix & match. Insert XML plug here.
Here's an old one and a new one in the same genre. These are internet-only multiplayer strategy games. Both can be played by telnet, TLR can also be played via browser but it's far less immersive that way.
:( telnet ioresort 23
New: Space Tyrant (GPL'd): telnet ioresort 9999
Old: TLR (not open source... the code sucks
Geeky modern art T-shirts
While I enjoy the FPS and the attmpts at RPGs like Galaxies and WoW, I still play gemstone IV because... well... You get more out of it. You use your imagination, and you can ::gasps:: really roleplay. Unlike the D&D games I used to play here in Albany, where roleplay consisted of the DM giving all the awesome stuff to his wife, and people acting like morons around the table.
:)
Gemstone is BY FAR the best MUD out there but I love them all anyway. I am glad the genre is staying alive. Even if I do pay $50 a month for text
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
Hmm, yes, let's do seeeeee!
vacuum tubes -> toggle switches -> blinking lights -> tty + text...
vacuum tubes? Irreducability complexity? oops. Oh Darwin, where are you when we need you most! Next...
Bah, ever since they introduced the written word, it has artificially limited the endless depth and power of the imagination. No words can ever truly encompass the richness of a thought. No language can ever capture the true brilliance of the mind's eye. The power of the mind was infinite, but, like that silly mathematical concept of infinite, as soon as you defined it, 'twas infinite no longer.
The gaming industry has spent millions of $US cents creating text adventures. Perhaps I can create a website for games of the mind, to remind gamers of the limitations of text.
Imagination before ASCII, that's what I always say^H^H^H^think.
I would like to play a text game that has really high quality sound. Good 3D effects with a really nice musical score.
I think that combination would really stimulate the imagination.
Imagine Zork III and you're standing by the sea and you can hear the waves lap against the shore. Then the earthquake hits...
With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more....'"
"'...Only to find out that you need to solve a puzzle involving a babelfish to continue. 6 straight hours and a full head of hair later, you totally lose it and decide to play some Counter-Strike.'"
Argh, it's so hard to make a joke these days :(
'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more.'
Obviously someone has stolen his pause button!
C17H21NO4
Then there's those of us who have taken text-mode game concepts, but modernized them to take advantage of current technology, without defeating the spirit.
http://lotgd.net/ -- Legend of the Green Dragon.
</shamelessplug>
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Ye can't get ye no flask!
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
What is there to "preserve"?
It's software.
Anyone with have a nut in their head can make it portable software.
Then it's self-preserving.
We'll be playing Hunt the Wumpus long after the oil runs out.
you can sit there at the login prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more
You can have this with graphically beautiful games too.
Tried to Login to a Blizzard WoW server lately? Replace "play more" with "try to login again" then you have it.
-Styopa
I wrote "Radley Manor," a haunted house adventure, using Inform. You play a kid trying to retrieve a baseball from an abandoned house.
.z5 interpreter . . . Frotz or the like:
You'll a
Radley Manor
I suppose now that the evil eyes lurking in the cave labyrinth and eating you whenever your fireberries go out, are grues?
I like this rant. Skip to the last page for a summary of the most absurd adventure game puzzle I've yet seen. This kind of asinine excuse for problem solving did not help the genre.
telnet tdome.net 5555
:)
Entering its 13th year of existence, ThunderDome can now boast of being one of the longest running MUDs in the history of the internet. In those years, ThunderDome has done much to advance the quality of game play, while adding much to the notions of what a diku-style mud should be.
Tdome offers a dark, and at times, humorous perspective on a futuristic world set sometime after the earth's destruction. Human society, formed mostly of roughly governed gangs, must now contend with aliens and mutated beasts for control of tdome's 15k rooms. Toward that end, players can choose between 13 different classes, and are allowed to log 3 of these characters on at once.
Guns (dozens are offered) and magic vie for superiority in the tdome world, while biological implants and learned skills offer additional methods by which a character might improve his lot in a life filled to the brim with danger and adventure. Inexperienced players soon learn that the inherent danger can be tempered by joining one of tdome's many gangs which offer a variety of advantages. Sanctioned gangs have their own bunkers from which to operate, and which offer cut rate rent costs and equipment repair.
If you are the sort that enjoys walking on the wild side, come seek the challenge of survival in a world gone mad. There should be plenty of room to accommodate you...Hell ain't half full yet.
telnet tdome.net 5555
You find yourself transported to a site containing a worthless slashdot story about text adventure games. You make a witty comment that you hear FORTRAN is making a comeback. Your post is moderated Troll.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more. There is such a thing as pausing most games, right?
Multi User Dungeons are text-based games that still have an enormous fanbase. Literally thousands of people play them constantly. They've been around for quite a while, too, and still keep a reliable player base due to originality of the games and the ability to use your imagination. Not to mention fantastic social qualities (on a computer, admittedly, but everyone knows pvp is funner anyway).
to embracing text in general and getting away from graphics. Text messaging people was great for a long while but the modern WWW graphics glut is influencing people to think they need all that glitz on their cell phones now. So the essence of the messaging, the transmission of information, is being lost to the "gee whiz" aspect and we know how well that works on the web.
I would love to see a resurgence of interest in Lynx. Especially with it coming with most distos of Linux and the shell being where true Linux geeks live. $lynx (url) and you're off. Easy, simple, transmission of information.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Sorry I would write more were it not for my Carpal Tunnel Syndrom...
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
Although I haven't downloaded this year's set of games, some of last year's were pretty good. Definitely worth checking out.
FTA: 'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more.'
And that's the kind of excitement I'm looking for.
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
if these guys still write love letters and mail them. and pick their dates up in carriages. and throw their cloaks over puddles of icky mud.
gentlemen of yore, i salute thee
oh brb gotta answer my cell...
I honestly read that as something to do with Northern Ireland.
I have to say, I love muds. I started playing them in 1999 and have been an afficionado ever since. My favorite mud is muddywaters at its demanding quest wise, but also has great hack and slash.
Tired of easy games? want something that really tries your imagination and problem solving skills? Play muddywaters!
See you there
Prof
"You stand before a mountain."
The mountain you see in your mind's eye will be unique and different from every other mountain experienced by anybody else who reads those words. Where is the limitation there? Compare that to a photograph, or a painting which boxes the person into a narrow, pre-defined experience.
Words are simple tools, yes, but they are designed to spark the deep wells of the imagination.
Only a writer frustrated by the fact that the particular mountain in his head cannot ever be perfectly transcribed to another person would complain. Better to be open to the reality that there are endless perspectives and then use those perspectives to cooperatively cobble together a universe in which to tell one's stories.
"You stand before a mountain."
-FL
Has no one considered that an excellent way to keep this genre viable would be to popularize it on the web?
For that matter, MUDs - basically the MMO analogy of text games - could also be moved to the web.
AJAX technology makes both of these possibilities much more feasible. Is no one taking advantage of these possibilities yet?
A popular link going around a few years ago was "the Hamlet text game", which was playable through a web page. The author apparently had a generic framework for making web-based text games, called "Nondescript." I'd always expected to see it catch on more - but apparently it hasn't, and the author's site is gone now.
With the web being so ubiquitous, and non-intimidating to so many, there's a huge potential to take these games back into the mainstream. Add the ability to create games that have light text interfaces (like maps, so that players don't have to press N a hundred times), and the potential for the genre to be revitalized is considerable.
In fact, it's already being done to some extent. Kingdom of Loathing is essentially a single-player text RPG, save that it has stick-figure graphics, integrated chat features, and some (optional) PvP features. Urban Dead is a web-based MMO which uses only text and a simple map. (Peasant's Quest also deserves mention.)
These games have a considerable following; but they're reinventing the wheel. If the previous generation of text-adventure and MUD authors could pull their heads out of 1984 and think about merging their experience with the modern, accessible technologies of today, we could find text games once again catching on like wildfire, this time through the magical power of the interweb.
My most vivid memory of text games has to be trying to get that damned fish in my ear in HHGTTG. It caused me more stress than any number of graphic gamess ever could. :)
On the other hand, I have to say that Leather Goddesses of Phobos was a very interesting game for ateen boy
'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more.'"
I do this in WoW all the time. Hit 'Stealth'. Go make a sandwich, etc. Come back, and I'm still stealthed. In the unlikely event (mostly depending on where I am when I go afk) that I die, I can just resurrect. Sure I'm out a few silver for repairs, but at least I have a sandwich!
And they said zombies weren't real!
brb so don't kill or kick me okay?
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
http://tmd.alienharmony.com/rw/
Remember Trade Wars 2002? Why not play it again, sometime soon? All you need is a telnet client.
Console games are demanding,' says Mike Snyder, a 33-year-old computer programmer in Wichita, Kan. 'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more.'"
I fail to see the difference between the demand of the player's attention between a console game and a text-based game. For similar Adventure/RPG games, a simple tap on the start or esc button will pause the game and I could go and make myself the sandwich. Of course, console games play at a higher pace, but I can always pause the game whenever I need to take a bite outta my sandwich.
Then he might be refferring to MORPGs where you can't really pause unless you return to a safe location. If that's the case, good text base games will have the same feature where you can get attacked or robbed when you're idling.
If he wants to make the argument that console games move at a higher pace, I'd agree. But I don't agree that you can't pause the game and go make yourself a sandwich argument.
HD Trailers
They're only bragging about text games to show that someone in Kansas can actually read. I wonder what the odds are that when you get to the end of the game it attempts to redefine classic text-game words like maving or science.
Back? Some of us never left.
If this sig is witty, it was probably borrowed from someone else's sig.
I just released Milestone 3 of my open source Crate Game Engine today. Currently the engine supports multiplayer text adventure games. To my knowledge it is the only multiplayer text adventure engine out there. Note, this is NOT like a MUD, it is for multiple players sitting at one computer.
In my case text adventures are a stepping stone on the way to graphical adventures, but I plan to support both for the life of the engine.
I Do C++
query: what's good at the IF Comp 05? Lots of titles and no descriptions (that I can find). Top 5?
I use them as throwaway names for VMs. If there's a VM that will only connect to the network once in three months it's name is xyzzy.
I also use them as names for temporary variables, but not as much as "bla" and "hunzst" (the latter I got from an issue of the German MAD Magazine).
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I tried getting into IF a few years ago. I downloaded a bunch of award-winning games, only to find that four of the first five I played had scenes involving non-consensual sex with children. One of them was moderately explicit... Something about a slave girl being raped by her master. I don't know what, if anything, this says about the IF community. If this is your kink, have at it.
What's AYBBTU in Japanese? ;)
http://ironrealms.com/
Go check them out, you'll be amazed.
I know it's not text based, but you could do things thru the menus at the top, pretty cool for those of us who don't take the time to read instructions.
Sometimes I comment just to hear myself typing.
There are even new text games under development using new platforms like Visual Studio and languages like C# and Ruby.
For example: http://www.tigermud.com/
telnet legions.org 5555
SecureThe.Net - Practical Resources for Securing Systems
Something that doesn't get excersized as much as it should these days.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Definitely try this one: Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents "Detective"
The MST3K guys watch you play this other bad IF game called "Detective" and make fun of it. It's pretty funny in a totally nerd kind of way...
The games that I really hated involved you having to perform some off-the-wall action to get a result that made no sense what so ever.
Modern text adventures no longer do that. There were a couple of playability problems that have been largely addressed by modern games. Remember that this is a genre that has seen a huge amount of input from many people fixing irritations (much like the OSS community) and has had two decades to polish out imperfections:
* Parsing -- Well, this will never be perfect as long as we lack human-class AI. However, modern parsing is *much* more reasonable than the original games, where you could play "hunt the verb". There are still a few bad games, however, any decent modern TADS-based game is going to be pretty playable -- might take you a little bit to get used to things, but you aren't going to throw your keyboard across the wall because you couldn't figure out what particular command the game wanted you to use. ADRIFT games are another story, and mostly suck badly at this.
* Missed an action somewhere in the game, now cannot win. Game designers have realized that this is frusterating. Modern text-based adventures don't do this. Basically, if you screwed up and you're going to lose, you lose right away.
* Illogical puzzles. Game designers have realized that most people don't want to spend time trying to SMELL OCTOPUS to have a bucket magically fall out of the air. These are pretty much gone. There are some things, though, that it helps to be familiar with the genre to play. For example, people new to RPGs probably don't immediately come up with the idea of talking to everyone in a town to solve a problem (after all, it's not what one would do in real life). People new to FPSes probably don't immediately think that smashing open every crate in the game (especially in random alleyways and houses) is a good way to get medical kits and ammunition. People new to text-based adventures may not think of trying to LOOK UNDER BED or realize that TADS-based games generally consider EXAMINE CLOSET and SEARCH CLOSET to be two different commands (EXAMINE being equivalent to LOOK AT and SEARCH meaning to try to find anything unusual). Most TADS games come with basic starter help like this that comes up if you type HELP.
If you're looking for a good (IMHO) game, I'd suggest downloading a TADS runtime (frob seems to be the latest-and-greatest implementation for Linux, though regrettably it doesn't use emacs keystrokes) and try Babel. That was the first text adventure game that I ever beat without help or hints.
I'd also like to point out the (even smaller than the standard IF community) AIF community, which produces adult games.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Another genre that hasn't got much attention recently is the graphical adventure game -- Lucasarts (Day of the Tentacle, Secret of Monkey Island, etc) and Sierra (King's Quest, etc) used to make terrific games in this genre, but after a burst of interest, around the time CD-ROM drives were introduced, for the Myst series, I haven't heard much about them.
The Lucasarts adventure game team largely got back together and is still producing games, but no longer at Lucasarts.
If you're interested in playing some of the classic Lucasarts games, you can do so in a nice cross-platform environment using the GPL ScummVM. At least one previously-proprietary game (Beneath a Steel Sky) that has even been released under a free license of some sort and is being distributed on the ScummVM website. I'm not a big fan of Sierra's games, but you can play their classic games using Sarien and FreeSCI.
One thing that I really miss in games these days is the healthy portions of humor present in many of these older adventures -- usually not scatological or crude, but just happy and upbeat tidbits in the game that made you laugh while playing.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
After being burned to a crisp by the dragon in King's Quest, you were told something about how by venturing too close to the dragon's flame, you made an ash out of yourself.
Telltale Games: Bone, Sam and Max
I too have a shameless plug in that I host free telnet text games. My URL is germane to the topic.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
... all alike.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
I haven't played a purely text-based adventure in years, sadly (other than wasting time at work with Adventure) but it makes perfect sense.
I mean, think about this: millions of dollars were spent producing the game engine for Tribes 2. Was it a popular game? Sure, but so was Zork, and nobody will ever convince me that the Zork engine was expensive.
Plus, how many people who've fragged a few people in a deathmatch can still enjoy reading? Ayuh, I thought so.
Just try to keep an open mind about it; I remember playing these games and having great fun, although some of the things that others have pointed out here (illogical puzzles, being forced to talk to every-frickin-other-character, weird grammar, etc.) are certainly true.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
It kills me I never figured out what the heck the deaf guy's hands were gesturing.
I think 2d images can really add to the text adventure and make it less of a "guess the keyword" game.
I am trying to remember the name of the Text adventure on my Vic-20, I upgraded to the apple pretty quick I forget, but I do remember loading the game from casette.
Need to get an Apple II emulator going and dig that stuff up.
Getting old fast, Shit!
'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more'
With any game that has a pause button, you can too.
Many other games only require short bursts of continuous play and many places/moments where you can leave the computer without fear of anything changing.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
There are probably other games like it, but Space Merchant (Realms) [1] uses a strange brew of unsynchronized turns and time-based turn "regeneration".
Each action you make costs (at least) one turn, and you can play at whatever pace you can handle. Play slow, and you might well find yourself podded (=dead) at your next turn. When you've spent your allotted turns you better sit in a safe spot, cause you'll be a sitting duck until you've regenerated some more turns.
Different, and fun, gameplay ensues.
[1] http://www.smrealms.de/login.php
"Good news, everyone!"
As I said before, the rest of my 30-minute interview wasn't included. It's not so much that what I said was taken out of context, as it is that what *else* I said would have helped it make more sense. I play a lot of console games. I know about pause. Sheesh. But the action is usually pretty fast-paced. That's the difference. Things don't *happen* in Interactive Fiction until to make a move. You don't *have* to pause. You don't *have* to reach a save point. You just get up and walk away. Simple.
I think the people here get a bigger kick out of making asinine comments than in actually discussing the topic. And most of it is just misinformed. MUDs? Browser-based games? This was an article about Interactive Fiction. It wasn't an article about Kansas and Sandwiches. Most people just read the blurb, and replied to get in a quick jab. A shame. The article was about a lot more than that.
:::: Mike Snyder
Big deal. What's all this talk about 'reviving' the text based culture? I suppose these grabasses haven't bothered to look around for Muds, Mushes, Moos and the like. Hell, I've been running a mush for the last 4 years and have a good number of people playing on there. There's no 'reviving'...just people who haven't played them noticing us people that do play them once again.
And free downloadable text games? Bah, get TF, go to winter.mushpark.com 3000 and create a character. Fully playable MMORPG...in all its textual glory...and it's not the only one.
I can't believe what a bunch of nerds we are. We're looking up "money laundering" in the dictionary.
It seems obvious that this would be a great way to increase the user-accessibility for sight impaired users, if we can offer text-only adventures, which work well with a Linux speech synthesizer.
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM