Join Us As We Waste Our Lives Playing Old Text Adventures

http://www.gb64.com/game.php?id=9896&d=18&h=0

Anyway:

http://www.monkeon.co.uk/swearadventure/

omg it looks just like them too!

No disrespect to The Thompson Twins, but maybe we should start with something a bit more canonical ;) Still, we got a few days to decide.

Ah, looks like you need Dosbox if you want to run the PC version of AMFV, otherwise the display is all screwy.

http://www.ifarchive.org/ has the "frotz" version of the z-machines for most platforms here

http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXinterpretersXfrotz.html

Good AMFV gallery http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/amfv/amfv.html

http://www.ifcomp.org/comp05/history.html

i'd love to get involved but i really don't have enough spare time right now to do this properly. really: i'll only hold you back. can i just watch and observe in a non-participatory way? i'll hang around this thread making supportive noises etc. like "ooh" and "aaah" and "shit" and stuff.

SCUMMVM!!

Er, anyone still up for this then?

going out now but will hopefully get my teeth into it this week, amongst my revision, cleaning my room blah bloody blah

get the DAT file from http://www.the-underdogs.org/zip.php?id=14 rename it AMFV.z5 and load it into zoom

Okay, serious revive for 2008. Let's do this thing yeah? Nominations? Forever Voyaging might still be a good start - I've only ever scratched the surface of that thing - but maybe something more linear might be a better intro?

To what, text adventures? Anything written since 93 or so would probably be a better intro -- those early ones were harsh. I haven't gotten past the surface of AMFV either. Start with, I dunno, Photopia or something.

Or, to put it another way, I just put Frotz on my iPod Touch and the only game I've added so far is Galatea.

I've played Photopia tho and it's pretty much on rails, yeah? The stupid harshness of the 80s games might be part of the point here; but I also want to exclude Colossal Cave style bullshit which are about point-scoring rather than a clear solution.

But hey, a trawl through the IF Archive starting with the 5 stars and working backwards could be good.

All right, as long as you know what you're getting into and have time to spare. Why not give Deadline a try?

Deadline looks tasty. Any other noms?

Anything by infocom should be worthwhile, I played planetfall and stationfall from the big infocom re-released in the 90s, they were great.

Not sure I'd have much time to do this though, what with scrabulous and poker and all those as-yet unplayed valve games and...

Hitchhikers? There's an online version

here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_nolan.shtml

bureacracy was probably my favorite

sp: "bureaucracy "

OK it's either Infocom January or Drink Myself to Death by February January.

As for modern ones, Curses is pretty good. I discovered this whilst I should have been doing my finals, and installed it on every machine in the computer lab, and a few weeks later, half the room were playing it...

IFarchive is definitely the place to start. The Infocom games are srsly archaic compared to the more recent stuff.

Yeah I still play the odd one.

I like the idea of doing something epic and quixotic tho. NB the idea of it.

FAIL

What now?

I planned to play some in the xmas break but didn't.

Also I started writing a basic one last year (I7) but it ground to a halt.

good beginning games:
Zork, Moonmist

I mostly only played the Infocom-made ones, but am up for whatever.

Yeah they are kinda... harder than you'd think to make. So many words.

I wuz a teenage Zork junkie

xp Yeah, and so many options. You have to guess everything a player will try to do, in every word combination imaginable. Not to mention all the concepts I7 doesn't know, like jumping over an object; it's incredible how often you run into these.

I'm also writing some massive stupid freeform Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-type-thing (20,000 words so far), which is a billion times easier to pull off. If the reader wants to do this, go here, otherwise go here. No headaches.

You could just implement that in I7.

I thought it was supposed to be even easier to define verbs now though?

It is, but there's always something that makes you stop. The idea of I7 is brilliant but the speed humps will always be there.

(I'm hardly experienced with I7, and I've never touched I6, TADS, etc.)

I can't remember whether it was I5 or I6 that I played with, doing a basic implement-your-house deal.

I do have a copy of the old IDM from when they first made actual O'Reilly-style copies of it.

Taste the Blood of Scrotum

(xp)

;_;

That whole history-of-games chapter of that is supreme. Twisty Little Passages is excellent btw if you've not read it.

There was a time when (a) I loved coding and (b) I had the time to pour into designing and debugging something with I5/I6. All that's gone. If it's not quick & easy, it's not going to happen.

I've used TADS a lot, it's pretty decent. But I've just been reading up on this Inform 7 stuff and it's looks a lot tastier, so I'll give that a go later.

are these the ones where you'd have to type in commands like "open box" and half the time you'd get a response like "i don't know how to 'open' something"?

Yup.

IF7 appears to be fun to use, with it's naturalistic source text. Although I'm not sure it's as versatile as TADS because of this. time will tell, the manual seems a bit lacking to be honest.

They're working pretty hard on the manual, specifically the bit with the examples.

It's nowhere near as versatile as I6 or TADS afaik, but for people like me who cannot be arsed with jiggery-pokery it's a little bit like writing in English. Even the debug messages are styled as pleasant prose.

I played 2 or 3 over the holidays but here's the rub - I don't have much patience now and the Internet means that if I get stuck, it's usually pretty easy to cheat.

Sucks, doesn't it? Nothing's a challenge anymore thanks to the internet. You can't even have a decent argument about something because the answer is inevitably on some website.

In fairness tho there are lots of ridiculous IF puzzles that deserve getting cheated on.

Reckon. That whole difficulty=longevity=value fallacy.

Of course I own and have read Twisty Little Passages. ;-)

(Were you on r.a/g.i-f back in the day?)

nah. I lurked for a while though.

I bet someone here knows how to write their own text based games. All you need is basic and if-then, print, and go to statements. (hint hint make one)

I was also mostly a lurker (in the mid-90s).

Also, you need more than that if you want to make a good one. Parser-making isn't all that difficult for a comp sci geek, but there's little point in reinventing the wheel (unless you like doing that sort of thing).

You are in I Love Music.

Ned Raggett is here.

> get raggett

Taken.

>

I know how to write in TADS 2. I wrote two games (one that won an Intro Comp award a year or two ago).

My fave three IF games: Photopia, Galatea and SLOUCHING TOWARDS BEDLAM.

I wrote two games (one that won an Intro Comp award a year or two ago).

detail plz

Neither were really great. One was called Last Ride of the Night and was a submission to Art Comp (didn't win anything). The other was called Southern Gothic. That's the one that won at Introcomp. They should both be easily google'able.

Oh yeah. I wrote them both in TADS. (I think... I might have written Southern Gothic in Inform. Can't remember at the moment.)

http://www.wurb.com/if/game/2920
http://www.wurb.com/if/game/2691

Links!

Brilliant!

i tried writing one from scratch in c++, now that was a challenge. After weeks of hard work i was told about TADS. Boy was my face red.

I remember spending a long time playing with some other IF scripting software (I forget when but it was ordered on 5.25" floppy from a PD distribution mail order company so we're talking some time ago, and if "interactive fiction" was the nom du jour back then I had no idea and it seems nor did the writer of the software), but by the time I found out about TADS and Inform I barely had time to play the demo games and "recommended IF" bundle I downloaded, never mind learn how to use them. That or the demo scene had made me lose interest in the idea of playability without graphics in favour of graphics without playability.

May not please IF purists on various technicalities (I guess the homebrew parser would seem rather dated now, and it did happily let me place an item I needed later inside something I couldn't get it out of, with no warning), but the text adventure I spent most time playing must be a DOS game called T-Zero.

Timetravelling museum dogsbody/librarian, weird ancient artefacts, dystopic futures, tons of wordplay and literary references, prisms and Moebius strips, topiary animals, and a little (but not too much) fourth-wall deconstruction gives you some handy shortcuts to cut down on typing slog... I loved the hell out of that game. I should've registered it. Wonder if the author ever did any others.

The problem with Photopia is that it's a great piece of writing but not, for me, a great game.

Today's nerd-find, for English Lit majors:

what happen when you mix Zork and Edith Wharton

West of an Old House, long in the Family
You are standing next to an old house.  It has large mansard roofs, big chimneys, and to the east is a formal Italianate garden with a circular courtyard, high hedges and an elaborate eighteenth-century-style trellis.
> e
You are in a formal Italianate garden with a circular courtyard, high hedges and an elaborate eighteenth-century-style trellis.  To the north is a pergola filled with statuary.  To the south is an old fishpond guarded by solemn-looking stone dogs.
> s
[...]

Oops. There a way to force word-wrapping?