Interactive Text Adventures Come To the Kindle

dotarray writes with news that Amazon's Kindle will now play text-based adventure games, such as Zork. From the article: "... And it makes a ridiculous amount of sense: text is gorgeous and easily-readable on the e-ink screens, the lack of color isn’t a problem, and – let’s face it – the sort of people who are likely to buy an e-reader are exactly the sort of people who are likely to love vintage games. ... The developers have also integrated a save-game feature so you can pick up where you left off, using Amazon’s Whispernet feature – and promise that they are looking to put more modern Z-machine games into the system, too. (Squee!) Unfortunately, it’s not perfect. The Zork family of games are notoriously frustrating (even when you’re not eaten by a Grue), and the Kindle’s text entry system doesn’t help with that, especially when entering numbers. A full keyboard would make things more fluid, but – really – if you want that, why not just play on your PC?"

Comments

Inventory

[Lissajous]

You have:
First Post

Re:Inventory

[jimboindeutchland]

You have been eaten by a Grue

Re:Inventory

[Culture20]

You have:
First Post

>give First Post to Troll
The troll accepts your gift, and not having the most discriminating tastes, eats it.

The troll, disarmed, is cowering and begging for forgiveness in the gutteral tongue of the trolls.

Re:Inventory

[kriston]

Have more fun in my archive here: http://kriston.net/games/

But...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish it were nethack.

It's time to come back

[VincenzoRomano]

For Infocom.

For some reason I read that as

[assemblerex]

"Interactive Tax Adventures"

Re:For some reason I read that as

[91degrees]

You are in a maze of convoluted tax forms, all alike.

From TFS

[Anonymous Coward]

And it makes a ridiculous amount of sense

No, ridiculous sense is not sensible enough! We need to be more sensible! Prepare brains for.... LUDICROUS SENSE.

choose your own adventure?

[bhcompy]

If you want to go to the castle, put in SD card 2.
If you want to go to the dungeon, put in SD card 3.

Re:oh boy zork

[Wordplay]

Which obvious response do you want? The one about there still being an active group of IF fans who'll want this, or the one about an entire generation of people who were never exposed to it to begin with?

Inform 7

[Securityemo]

For those who felt a creative urge when hearing this, take a look at http://inform7.com./ It's easy to use, but it helps if you're a programmer since the way the "english langauge" and grammar gets translated to objects and relations have some gotchas.

Re:Inform 7

[SteeldrivingJon]

If nothing else, try the IDE. It's really quite well done. When you click 'Go' it turns the source code into a game, starts the game in one pane of the IDE, generates a map of locations you've defined, etc. There is extensive documentation and examples, including a recipe book of code snippets.

It's available free (as in beer) for Mac, Windows, and (I think) Gnome.

Also, there's a recently-published book about writing games with Inform 7, "Creating Interactive Fiction With Inform 7"

Slashdot on the Kindle

[Mr_Silver]

For those of you who want to read Slashdot on your Kindle, I've been told by a couple of people that AvantSlash renders it reasonably well. One day the flaws in the mobile version of Slashcode will be addressed and we won't need to use something like this to read Slashdot on the go.

As soon as I get my hands on a Kindle, then I'll make any updates to get it to look better but that won't be probably until after Christmas. Patches always welcome though.

Clearly sends a message to Apple

[CODiNE]

"Now we go ZORK man!! Z O R K!! Wuddayagonnado?? Wudyagunndoooo???"

Zork

"Damn".

I can has good textadventure?

[SlothDead]

I still have hope that one day, one of the star authors (Stephen King, Ken Follett etc.) will write a "Choose your own Adventure" book, or a text adventure. I mean, the concept is so great, but all we get are "You are the hero fighting the evil wizard" style books.

Re:I can has good textadventure?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're ignorant of the great literary IF works, such as those by Emily Short. You really should check out the modern IF scene.
The annual competition is going on right now, and although there's a lot of crap, there's some gold in there too.

I'd love to see some good interactive fiction

[kyz]

Zork is somewhat overrated; it's from a time when adventure games were a grab-bag of fantasy cliches and "zany" objects. The past two decades have been spent retconning it into something grander than it actually was.

However, there's some amazing interactive fiction out there; atmospheric, tight writing. Totally immersive story. Brain-wrenching puzzles. It'd be great to read / play these on a Kindle. Some of my favourites:

• Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin - possibly the most unreliable narrator ever. See how long it takes you to work out what's really happening.
• Varicella by Adam Cadre - renaissance period intrigue.
• Anchorhead by Michael S. Gentry - Lovecraftian horror.
• A Bear's Night Out by David Dyle - adorable kid's story

Other couple I like are A Day for Soft Food (have you ever wanted to roleplay as a cat?) and Trinity (a mix of high fantasy and nuclear history)

Re:MUDs?

[bartyboy]

And to complete the MUD experience, the Kindle has a refresh rate equivalent to a 1200 baud modem. You know, where you can read faster than text can appear on the screen.