It's Dark. You Are Likely To Be Eaten By a Zork Poll!

http://www.mrbillsadventureland.com/reviews/q-r/rtzR/boos.jpg
"Want some rye? Course you do."

http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/s/359139-return-to-zork-playstation-screenshot-killing-the-teacher.jpg
"Well you're late. Tardiness."

voted for the one where you get a pet pterodactyl.

http://www.thezorklibrary.com/history/image/moodock_moadikum2.jpeg
"You're not as dumb as you look."
"You're not as bad as you smell."

mordy's right that return is hugely underrated; it's because its entire demographic consisted of snobs.

also it came with the ENCYCLOPEDIA FROBOZZICA. i think i have my copy around somewhere, along with the 89275238952352 floppy disks the game came on.

yes! the encyclopedia was amazing. also, it came as a CD!

(the game came as a CD that is - not the encyclopedia)

couple different editions. actually later i picked up the CD version and i keep it in the same box, but i can't throw out all those disks.

Someone carrying a large bag is casually leaning against one of the walls here. He does not speak, but it is clear from his aspect that the bag will be taken only over his dead body.

The monkey grinder looks you up and down. "Peasants," he sniffs, adjusting a knob on his hurdy-gurdy. "Like unto sheep."

He turns the crank of the hurdy-gurdy, and the air is filled with the combined stench of five herds of sheep, accompanied by a cacophany of hateful bleating.

Return to Zork has the best interface. I wish more games had copied it. But I can't vote for it because it's so easy to make unwinnable that you have to use a walkthrough.

Never really liked the Zork text adventures (although Infocom made several great games) so I'm going for Grand Inquisitor, the most competently made graphical one.

i love ("love") how you can make the game unwinnable in the opening thirty seconds of return to zork and not know for hours and hours.

And the game sort of pushes you to do so, giving you some points for playing with the plant and not warning you when you try pulling it out. (If you erase the dead plant by e.g. burning it, it will reappear on the first screen still planted. Good luck figuring that one out!)

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I voted Return to, but I'll rep hard for Nemesis, it was very much a myst clone but had lots of really pretty and atmospheric sections and some quality puzzles. I guess it didn't really feel like a zork game at all (I don't think there was a single gag in the whole game, for starters) but I still loved it a lot.

I don't think I ever finished Grand Inquisitor, I want to try it again. Surely it should be on either steam or gog by now?

1

I was playing 1 the first time I came up on acid.. Good times

Ha, I pretty much remember none of this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJbxIN1iz8

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

http://www.gog.com/en/promo/zork_games

Every Zork game except the Quest ones for $14.36.

Would have voted for Zork II, as the one we actually had growing up and really my only experience losing myself in a text adventure at great (and fruitless) length.* The carousel room! The damned wizard! The letter-opener-in-the-keyhole puzzle! Getting the dragon to chase you to melt down the ice wall! So vivid, so complete, I sort of fill in my entire appreciation for the wonders of the genre based on this one game.

Also played the shit out of Return, despite it being really, measurably bad and flawed. On this thread: King's Quest I waxed on about the sense of reward in early digitized-speech games: getting to hear a new line of ACTUAL RECORDED SPEECH! was the equivalent of seeing four pixels change color in the older Sierra games: THANK GOD I FINALLY DID THE RIGHT THING TO MAKE THAT PUZZLE GO AWAY.

* - not counting the Infiltration.org-inspired one I made myself in 12th grade computer science