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

[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.

But...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish it were nethack.

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.

Re:For some reason I read that as

[91degrees]

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

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)