A non-movieish text adventures thread (and can we maybe make one?)

Did you read the WSJ article?

I really haven't kept up (except with the obvious people) since about 2001 (or maybe earlier!) either. But you can always read competition reviews from years past (Zarf usually writes one) to look for places to start. (And let us know if you find anything.)

Did you ever play that one where you only get one move, and you have to repeat and repeat the game Groundhog's Day style to figure out exactly what that move should be? I forget the name of it but it's very good.

I too have a paperback copy of the Inform Manual! i also have a half finished sci-fi (ish) inform game.

was this inspired by the annual comp results being out?

http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html

*: Obviously I don't mean IF is better in general or anything, (or even that BC is better overall than even a quite good novel!) just that this really really works to the medium's specific strengths...

I was all into text adventures in middle school and was planning on writing one in Inform, just because the guy that made it was the guy that made Curses which was my favorite TA, but it was a little too complicated for me at the time. Maybe it still would be.

I doubt it! I mean I am pretty inept with computers, my programming experience is limited to light Perl and VB tinkering and I found Inform pretty usable, at least for for making conventional adventure-type games...

Seriously let's do this thing! I really want to enter a comp one year and know I'll never finish a game on my own :(

I think Curses is pretty much considered supreme in that huge old-school puzzley style format, yeah, although Muldoon legacy is mentioned in the same breath sometimes. I'm not an expert though.

Have you played Varicella, Dan?

For a second I thought you were saying Nelson was your teacher's assistant, and I was very confused.

There's a new game out by Nick Montfort! I am totally psyched about this!

Curses still stands up because of the quality of the writing, and though some of the puzzles seem a bit cliche now, their robustness has been a model ever since. i think that was actually part of Graham N's intention in writing them - as a way to demo the strength of inform as a language etc. I can never remember, was the source code for Curses ever published??

It's called "The Mercury Trucking Company: The Lowest Bidder of a Thousand Faces" and in classic sci-fi style it starts with you waking from a long sleep.

i'd be happy to share the source too.

i also liked the historical continuity with the infocom games, and for some reason the labyrinth that was Graham's library code intrigued me, and the style of the language suited me better - i'm still not fully OO-proficient.

it went all 16bit about 5 years back, but it's still the same language, they just updated the compilers and interpreters.

Yes TADS is free, I downloaded the version 3 one free of charge anyway. I had initially tried to code my text games from scratch in C. What a mistake that was, but at least looking at the way TADS deals with rooms, items etc I was at least on the right track.

Also, POV y'all?

I got up to 9/10 on a second go, but I can't work out how not to go mad on the reverse audio thingie.

There are a lot of parts that don't seem immediately clear (and I am generally not fond of time-based games, because they ask you to do everything again and again...). Anyway, where is the replacement harddrive?

Hint re disk:

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It's a replacement hard drive, not the. So you go where you'd get one of those.

I have no idea how to get into the f2 basement either :(

(GP rough POV wld be something like Varicella Metamorphoses Blue Chairs For A Change Misdirection or maybe Shade)

My POX is elsewhere.