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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.'"
clicky clicky
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
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.
Yes. In fact I've often thought that some Interactive Fiction games should be written specifically to learn a foreign languages from scratch. It's one area where the technology would could still produce commercially viable products. I'd do it myself... if only I could speak a foreign language.
Assume this was version in English for people who want to speak French.
To start with, the game engine could describe things to you in English, but be set in France. Any signs or non-player characters you come across would be French. Where you have to speak to characters you'd have to do it in French, with there being clues around if you don't know what to say. At an advanced stage of the game, the language that the game itself uses for descriptions etc. could switch to French.
As the parent poster says, you would be unable to progress without understanding.
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.
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.
Back? Some of us never left.
If this sig is witty, it was probably borrowed from someone else's sig.