I aggree with you dark.
In the early days of computing, well for the first decade I was
fortunate enough to be graced with my old t1850.
However after its subsiquent dropping at school, it was never fully
restored as I had to pull from other junk to fix things and those things broke.
And at any rate I had to rely so much on compression and memmory
hacking it just wasn't funny.
when windows came out I realised I had to review the screen with my
reader a thing I never had to do in dos.
so emersion in the game world just didn't happen.
Even so I always ran the solutions of games.
my text games are on choice of games.com, the eamon system, I have a
futureboy game on hugo which I play at times, and the lacuna game on inform7.
I have some zcode games, some agt and some tads but to be honest I
don't find time to actually play if anymore and when I have time I am
either to tired or am not relaxed enough.
Or a long game doesn't fit.
right now for instance I have just come back from a fathers day
thingy with the family.
I have another thing tonight.
between that I have some other offline thing I want to do with my aunt.
and its nice outside.
So I have a couple hours and I am not in the mood to put in the hard
yards to really play a long game.
If there is anything I do dig and go back to these days its the
fighting fantasy games at ffproject.org and this is only because of
the engine behind them.
I am to lazy to role dice, if something tells me I need to win to
continue and if there is nothing stopping me doing that then I do.
having an engine do it for you means no cheating.
I actually have to play.
Saying that if at some point in my life I inherit a 386 system with
dos 6 and a keynote gold sa or internal I have no issue in going back
to the games.
While most of my disks are old and may not work I still have them right now.
I have the games and old programs some of which I pulled from
people's drives ages ago, there is a chance though not likely.
I have the old keynote keysoft and mastertouch and wordperfect 5.1 software to.
There is no reason I couldn't drop back.
The synth I had is dead now, and I'd probably have to set a vm and to
be honest I havn't got that far yet.
At 11:12 p.m. 1/09/2012 +0100, you wrote:
Hi Sarah.
i must admit this is exactly why i no longer play many text
adventures, sinse I just got frustrated with about five out of six I
played ending as you describe, even when i tried those such as
glowgrass that were billed as beginner games.
I did however find some good ones.
Dreamhold by Andrew plotkin. This is a rather surreal magic fantasy
game where you play as a wizard who's lost his memory. It actually
serves as a general introduction to conventions and styles of if,
but I found it extremely playable on it's own and unlike other if
introductions I've seen, it was actually really nicely written with
an absorbing story and world. Probably the only puzzle dungeon crawl
style thing I've ever actually finished.
Worlds apart:
The single best if game I've ever played, beautiful writing, and
puzzles that all depend entirely upon examining your surroundings
and understand a very alien world and the identity of your
character. I've seen it cryticized because reviewers couldn't cope
with the alien concepts such as being able to mentally enter and
explore certain alien objects or communicate with different types of
animals and preferd standard if puzzles, but I personally found it
far easier than the normal if sinse it required much more an
understanding of a very different world, your character and her
relation to it than just some random leaps of logic. Note though
that this is a tads game, so you'll need a tads interpreter like
wintads or html tads to play it rather than the standard zcode one.
Pytho's mask by emily short.
A really nice, short (no pun intended), game with again a very
unique world and protagonist. In particular I really admire the way
all the puzzles come from the menue based conversation system,
rather than manipulating objects, which means this a very character
and story driven game, but all the better for that.
Lash by paul obrian.
A mix of scifi and historical, with a very unique idea, you
controlling a robot by textual interface in a post appocalypse
America that then has links back to pre civil war days of slavery.
Puzzles weren't too bad, especially considdering that to progress
you pretty much only have to explore and do a couple of actions, and
while there were a couple of object puzzles, (some I didn't guess),
these didn't really serve much purpose, and most of the crucial
stuff in the game is purely story driven or given to you in
environmental clues. Note though that the title lash is not idle,
and this game has some pretty nasty moments, albeit probably
historically accurate ones.
Earth and sky 1-3 by paul obrian, (note that the 2nd and 3rd are
glulx, requiring the winglulx interpreter to run).
In complete contrast to lash, these are really fun, pure super hero
adventures where you play as Emily and austin, who's parents have
made them super powered earth and sky suits then disappeared. There
is only really one puzzle I found hard in the second game, and
there is a walkthru if you need one, otherwise everything was doable.
Babel, (a tads game).
This is a scifi game set in an abandoned research base. it had very
much the feeling of a film like alien or the thing, sinse you are
wandering around trying to discover a desaster. The writing was
great and atmospheric, and most of the actions you need to take were
obvious from the clues you got in the environment such as journal
entries about the base, however there was one puzzle I needed the
walkthru for involving making a potion. The plot, while predictable
was also rather fun as well.
I've played several others, but these are probably my favourites,
and certainly these are some of the few if titles I've actually
managed to complete without extensive use of a hints file.
I must confess though, generally I just don't bother with if
anymore, sinse the "oh look, I should've opened the door by using
the dog whistle to call down the bird, pulling off it's beak and
using it to pick the lock" type of puzzles, not to mention getting
line after line of "I don't know how to put" type of response when i
try a perfectly simple thing like put cup on table just got far too
much on my whick.
These days, i much prefer text games such as the Eamon system that
employ a limited parza, thus limiting your choice of responses and
thus making it far easier to work out how to progress the game.
Also, I haven't mentioned here any of the few rpgs written in if
formats such as kerkerkruip or wumpus 2000.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
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