Slashdot Mirror
Legends of Zork Goes Live
TinBromide writes "The developers over at Jolt Online Gaming have released Legends of Zork to the general public. It's a free, browser-based, adventure game based on the world of Zork. You play as a Traveling Salesman, recently laid off from FrobozzCo. You start off in a clearing, where a white house has a boarded up door. From there, you can do what you like. Explore the world, fight other salesmen in PVP, or try out your Darkvision Goggles in the dark — just try not to get eaten by a grue."
It's free in that you're given 30 Action Points each day, which are consumed by moving about and fighting. Their business model is that if you want more Action Points, you can purchase more.
'Course you do.
It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
> USE TORCH
You have no more action points.
*log on the next day*
You have been eaten by the grue.
> AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH.
What?
The mac logo on the back of your laptop is a shining beacon to attract men.
You could at least try to stay on topic for Zork.
O ye who use Macs :
Dost thou know the magnitude of thy sin before the gods?
Yea, verily, thou shalt be ground between two stones.
Shall the angry gods cast thy body into the whirlpool?
Surely, thy eye shall be put out with a sharp stick!
Even unto the ends of the earth shalt thou wander and
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
Quick! Before the server gets eaten by a grue.
Plays easy, doesn't require flash or other plugins, and everything actually is sort of "Zorky".
Most browser-based games have perks for paying players, and being able to buy action points isn't really the worst I've seen. It doesn't overly imbalance the gameplay, at least in my opinion.
Only time will tell how this really fans out, but I'm in positive spirits. (Between this and Battlefield Heroes I'm going to be spending even more time at my browser in the future :D)
From the site's creature list:
Dornbeast
The Dornbeast has 69 eyes that can paralyse their prey. Once immobile, the victim ends up wrapped in sticky secretions that are notoriously difficult to escape.
Was that description typed with one hand on the keyboard?
Am I the only one who reads "browser-based" as "play from work"?
Some day I'll develop a web browser impossible to distinguish from an excel spreadsheet.
"You | 50.22 | Have been | % | 3473N | B Y | a GRUE"
tried a day or two ago when I got the email (don't believe me? check my journal)
Move - encounter dice rolled and action happens.
Only once did I get chance to flee - a bunch of other characters were having it out - you could join a side or flee. I ran.
Not sure about how to go about doing things - there is a small window when it looks like you can do something. Maybe I haven't read enough to know how to try stuff.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
I love the art style. I love the monsters. I love the locations. I love the "feel". Very well realized, but, um, activisionâ¦. THIS ISNT ZORK! This is somethingâ¦.awful. This is some horrible, Frankensteinian aberration. This is heresy. This is a gut-wrenching vomit soaked, "find out you have cancer" thing to do to the zork series. W.T.F. ?!
This is *gasp* web-based. You've made a pretty decent web-based game, and given it the spiritual name of the most important game to EVER COME TO COMPUTERS. Do you see where I'm coming from?
DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU'VE DONE?! Kingdom of loathing is a great web based game, and in all honest more deserving of the title zork. Have you guys ever played nethack? Adventure? MUD II? Do you even KNOW who Richard Bartle is?
This is like a terrible thing to do with zork! Zork is a text-based game! text-based! that's why WE LOVED ZORK because we could imagine stuff - you know - WITH OUR IMAGINATION THINGY!!!!!
But text based games are alive and well - both multiplayer (in the MUD and MUSH community) and single player (in the interactive fiction community).
PS: whoever thought of the idea of buying coconuts for fucking action points needs to be eaten by a grue. you know about that, right?
Kingdom of Loathing anyone?
Since it's slashdotted already, I'm going to assume 30 points is thirty actions.
I could eat up 30 actions in a couple minutes... There's no way to get me to come back day after day when I can only play for a couple minutes for free... And I'm not going to pay insane rates to play for hours a day.
If they had an 'unlimited' plan for say... $15/month... I think they'd do a lot better.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Out of torches in the dark you are likely to be eaten by a grue there is no chance of save betcha wish yuo had Burma Shave!
I'm so awesome I don't need a sig file -Me
This is great. I'm glad to see games like this pop up because it reminds me of the old BBS days and games like Legend of the Red Dragon. You know, just with a few pieces of art thrown in.
When I was a kid, I looked forward to getting home from school every day to play Legend of the Red Dragon to use my "10 kills a day" or whatever it was. I can totally see myself looking forward to getting home to use my "30 action points a day" in this game!
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
I bet you can already embed a web component in an Excel spreadsheet. The key to change worksheets becomes your 'boss key'.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
as you play. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE
All you need to know is here:
In conclusion, if your friend spends $20, in one day, then you'll need to play 40 days to catch up with him. The rankings really just show which players have spent the most money.
I've been playing since the first slashdot story about this, and I think it's pretty well done, when the server isn't crashing. The need to pay real money to be competitive is really a shame. Everyone who tries it should know this going in.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
Beaten like a redheaded stepchild. Kingdom of Loathing beat them to every aspect of this. Except that it's a little less trivial to just buy your way to success in KoL.
(I know it's been mentioned a couple of times already, but it bears repeating.)
-#1075489
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
The best free, browser-based, adventure game based I've played in a while is Immortalix. The owener is constantly making updates and changes. http://www.immortalix.net/
I think the grinding in this game is just a small part of the overall game. The Fanucci cards interact with one another in pretty complex ways. Gambits create bigger bonuses than weapon upgrades if you set them up right.
Since it has only been three days, there aren't enough cards out there for anyone to have figured out how the underlying mechanics work. I don't think anyone has a face card yet.
The combat stances interact with one another in a way that no one has figured out yet, either. Unfortunately combat is pretty non-interactive so figuring out the matrix of how the attack/defense/attitude/magic stances interact doesn't do you much good.
Not that the game is great. Multiplayer needs food badly.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
It feels like a BBS door game. I'm disappointed, as I was expecting a text interface, and puzzles. Still, it can kill 10 minutes of my day.
Opera 9.64 works much faster than Firefox 3.08, but the "Cards" portion does not work in Opera. They recomend Firefox or Safari, but I think they should have made a bit more effort for Opera.
This version of Progress Quest has too much clicking!
First off... I enjoy various kinds of text games from the early Infocom games, to the King's Quests, to the Monkey Islands, and event a Zork or two. Yes, Legends of Zork took elements from the world of Zork, but it lacks challenge. In the text games, I like trying everything under the sun to try to get that one step further in the game, even if that meant starting over a million times. It was part of the challenge, part of the fun. This... I found very frustrating. It's like the game is so incredibly dumbed down that it's like a slightly interactive advertisement for something I don't want to buy into.
Games like Kingdom of Loathing and Twilight Heroes, are what lit a fire under me to create my own, Urban Legions.
Kingdom of Loathing is incredible. Since the day I stumbled upon it via Wikipedia (looking up "Trifids" of all things), I have been hooked and play it practically every day since. I love the sense of humor. I love collecting all the crazy items. After ascending about 8+ times, the quests are getting a little tedious. But, they add new content, which makes me want to play it even more. I haven't even broken into the Hobopolis or PvP sides of the game, and it's kept me entertained for 2.5+ years.
Twilight Heroes... I played for a while. Then, I got stuck on one of the quests. After a while, it got repetitive and I dropped it (mostly). I go back every once in a while. It's not a bad game. It's as easy to pick up as KoL. It's got a good sense of humor, and I've enjoyed playing it. Yet, it lacks something (for me, at least) to want to keep playing it. Maybe they've found that certain something that I lacked, and maybe I should pick it up again.
Urban Legions... Why did I create this game? Because I told my friend about KoL, how much fun it was, and we both agreed it was something we should try doing ourselves. During the creation of the game, we broke away from several traditions, but kept various elements we enjoy from playing other games. One of the things we broke away from is character creation. All characters start the same except for their names. You enter a name and an alias, and you're off and running. Stats? We limit it to Brains and Brawn. I mean seriously... How often do you roll for Constitution while playing D&D? We also wanted the game to play differently. The world is very much open ended. There is an over-arching plot that we continuously add to, but there are various side quests along the way. We are light years behind KoL in the amount of content, but of what we already have, we are already building a community of people who play on a regular basis and crave more (By the way... We love you guys and gals!). Like the others, KoL, TH, and LoZ, we provide a few turns per day with the options to subscribe for more turns per day or to buy a big block of turns that you can slowly whittle away. Sure, he and I would love to make enough money from this to one day quit our day jobs and focus solely on this and a few other projects up our sleeves, but the enjoyment we have of creating something that we are most proud of and trying to constantly out-do ourselves is also so incredibly rewarding.
So, back to Legends of Zork... As I said, I enjoy playing these kinds of game, if not for seeing "what not to do". One of the first things that irked me is the combat. I can't control what my character does in regards to combat, so why even go through the motions of creating a character? The next thing that bugged me... I went to my inventory to see what I thought I gained, but didn't. To get back into the game, the only way I could figure out was to go back to the map and into the location I was just at. This took another couple of action points to do. Seriously?! It takes an action point if I want to view my character and click ONE LOCATION on the map?! Are you fbleeping serious?! That ri
Urban Legions