Retro games

Kai Beginner Joined: 21 Dec 2005 Posts: 23

Ditto on the old Lucas titles - anyone remember the first time they played as Guybrush Threepwood (I'm talking about the DOS-based games, kids Wink

)

Now to show my age:

[Infocom]

[Sierra]

[Dynamix]

[Legent Ent.]

[Interplay]

[Sirtech]

[Apogee/id]

[id]

[unknown]

[Broderbund?]

and the grandaddy of them all...

[Crowther & Woods]

A sidebar about text-based gaming to *really* show my age (Some info below from Wikipedia). For those who have no idea of what I am talking about, this was the penultimate way to game before a lot of you were born. The descriptions of areas or situations forced you to envision what you were really seeing. I can remember drawing maps of Zork on graph paper that covered an entire wall to allow all the connections to be drawn out. There were no "power-ups" or "cheat codes". It was just you and your own intelligence to figure a way through. Here is what you would have seen when you launched Zork, and your first "moves":
ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire
Copyright (c) 1981 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
Zork is a registered trademark of Infocom, Inc.

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

>look mailbox
The mailbox is closed.

>open mailbox
Opening the mailbox reveals a small leaflet.

>get leaflet
Taken.

So what do you do next? That was for you to figure out. The game had a built-in parser that could accept more complex commands such as, "put the lamp and sword in the case". It also understood directional and action commands: take, drop, attack, open, north, east, southwest, etc. But, the most important one was "verbose". This command made the game give you full descriptions of areas after each command instead of omitting details already shown to you.

This type of gaming is a lost art. It required talent of the highest order to script the game as well as design it without any kind of graphical framework - remember the designers worked from text and drawing to create them. It also challenged your comprehension skills at reading as well as creative thinking. Today's games while technologically amazing, fail to engage the mind of a player as the old adventures did.

Any of you who have not played a text-adventure before should try one, but I caution you: go into it with an open mind. You will be frustrated often; you will get confused often; you will say "this is stupid" numerous times, but you *will* eventually begin to visualize the world in your mind if you are of an open mind. That is when the hook is set. See if you can find Zork somewhere in the ether of the Internet, and give it an honest try. Don't play it for 20 minutes and say "it sucks" - there is no such thing as instant gratification in text gaming. Turn off the damned TV, radio, iPod and cell phone, and get out some paper and start taking notes as you play. If you give it a good effort, hours will have passed, and you will not feel like stopping.

Kai Beginner Joined: 21 Dec 2005 Posts: 23

Forogt one thing. You can download Zork here: http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/zork1.html

Kai Regular Joined: 08 Mar 2006 Posts: 80

Heh your not the only old enough Wink

I gotta admit I never got that far with any of them but used to amuse my underdeveloped mind my telling 'Frodo to put gandalfs magic herbs where the sun does not shine', which often gave a confused reply back! And I'm sure my friends dad had 'porno-adventures' with very basic pictures on his old '086 0.1mhz PC. Not all bad though we had one we used to take turns playing at school so it MUST have been good for us?

Also are fighting fantasy books a forgotten adventure (except for those involved with hobby/miniature games), I still have some and read them to this day?

Kai Beginner Joined: 21 Dec 2005 Posts: 23

I remember cursing at some of the games as I got older. In Adventure, for example, typing "f*** the building" would result with "A voice booms from above: 'How dare you swear in my game!!! you shall suffer a fate worse than death...". This was immediately followed by the game ending with a score of 0. I also seem to recall one game or another responding to "f*** you" with "The I/O port is not intended for that action:. Or something like that. If nothing else, we learned sarcastic comebacks to snide remarks. Wink

I was never much for the traditional D&D gaming, but knew some people who enjoyed it. These same people migrated to Magic which is still completely lost on me. If those books are in good condition, you could fetch a fair amount for them in the collectors market.