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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.'"
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.
clicky clicky
...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.
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...
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Well at least I knew the game wanted me to put the salt on the slug. There are worse examples.
Dark Reflection
Way back when, a friend of mine made a "DOOM area" for our MUD, Powerstruggle. It was exactly like what you describe, with +- 260 rooms with descriptions like that. I think it was based on Doom episode 3, level 5 or so.
It was seperate from the rest of the mud - hitpoints worked differently, and you couldn't take items from outside into it. Doom weapons had commands like "fire west" that would fire up to three rooms in that direction; there were minimap commands, that showed a 5x5 area around you; monsters would be asleep at first, until they were woken up (say by nearby shots), and then they'd have pretty nice AI. And there was deathmatch, for a number of players. Rather good, for 1995 or so.
That said, real PK muds like Genocide (still exists, telnet geno.org 2222) or Tron (down, as far as I know) were much, much better. Doom deathmatch was weak compared to good 40 player Geno team wars, with some of the best players doing 200 commands per minute... and every room had beautifully detailed descriptions (you could go exploring while you were dead and waiting for the next war).
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
This isn't a property of text games per se, but of 1980s adventures in general. It was once LucasArts hit on the idea of eliminating all possible deaths and all the no-win situations that modern adventures really got going: Loom, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle... That liberated the player to walk up to dangerous pirates and insult them to their faces and know that however embarrassing the consequences, it would never be fatal to the game.
Most of the modern text games I've seen follow this ethos; they make it hard, if not always impossible, to lose - or at least, to lose without knowing it...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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?
NetHack is console-mode, but not purely text. It does have some graphics, even if the graphics is on the tty level.
For a pure text game, try a MUD; I would say the Two Towers is the best one in existence.
Of course, note that around 99% of development time in a game goes into graphics and sound. If you take these two away, you suddenly get something with two times of magnitude more depth. And if a game has been developed for more than ten years (like NetHack or T2T), you get extreme results, a lot better than the typical sell&forget new-fangled stuff.
Just compare NetHack and Diablo. Or, T2T and MMORPGs. If you're literate, the extra playability is worth a lot more than the graphical bells&whistles.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
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
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RageTech
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.
the thing with text games is that it'd be easier to get new adventures put into them, and also pretty much anyone could code one (or at least make a world for one if there are editors to make them, which I guess there would be). I only discovered MUDding last year and it was great til I stopped playing for work or exams or something.. cant remember =_= didnt help that I played on an american server and had to stay up till 6am to get anyone else playing =p
which is totally what she said
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
I suppose now that the evil eyes lurking in the cave labyrinth and eating you whenever your fireberries go out, are grues?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I prefer SLASH'EM myself, like Nethack but much, much worse.
SLASH'EM is generally regarded as significantly easier than Nethack once you learn how to play them both.
It's a lot harder when you're starting out (especially coming from a Nethack background, and learning that things like drain resistance are just as integral a part of a safe ascension kit as magic resistanc, reflection, etc), but once you've ascended a few times in each then slash'em has a lot more "outs".
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Back? Some of us never left.
If this sig is witty, it was probably borrowed from someone else's sig.
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.