Text adventure games

I haven't been paying as much attention in the past few years, so I don't really know what the recent hits are. Um, "Galatea" was terrific, odd, and very replayable. The "Frenetic Five" series I remember as being goofy fun. "Lost New York" is older but still good if you like NYC history.

Also good were "A Mind Forever Voyaging" , "Border Zone" , "Moon Mist" and "Planetfall".

Worst text adventure game ever: Famous Five Go (something or other).

Anyway, perhaps I'll fire up the ol' Z machine and give it a go, finally.

i have SOME infocom games lying around here, if i could get that Direct Connect thing working - i could sort it out better.

I have recently written my own text adventure in C++, but now realise there are dozens of programs out there that can do it all for you.

Ste: I was going to do that myself, but thought about the parser and lost interest pretty quickly.

You are in a dark forest, trees align both sides
You can go N,E,S,W
What do you want to do:- get bent!

Zork Zero
Zork III
Zork I
Suspended
Zork II
Suspect
Stationfall
Spellbreaker
Sorcerer
Planetfall
Moonmist
Lurking Horror
Starcross
Infidel
Enchanter
Beyond Zork
The Witness
Ballyhoo
Deadline
Hitchhiker's Guide

also i have Trinity as a z file on my acorn somewhere...

http://ifarchive.giga.or.at/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/

There's a frotz for OSX in the frotz/ directory. WinFrotz is great for Win2000, so the OSX equivalent is probably worth a try.

Sounds ideal.

http://code.google.com/p/iphonefrotz/

i hope this helps bring back some audience for text adventures

from the first computer lulz thread. need help. see below.

http://www.applefritter.com/images/overview-201.jpg
got about '86, which, it turns out, was about the end of these knockoffs.

i played this text adventure game on it that i've been trying to remember. it involved getting a magic stone and going up a hill to visit an olde magick shoppe. then you dropped the stone in the gathering fog and it is--as far as i knew--impossible to reach down and grab the fucking thing! anyone? what is this game?!

was it infocom?

doesn't ring a bell

kingfish: I doubt it, but omg wouldn't it be fantastic.

wishbringer. You start the game by delivering an envelop to A magic shoppe. I tried this game tonight.

Yep, it sounds like Wishbringer, which was the first ever text adventure game I played (it was on my gran's computer for some reason, which had only Snake and this, and I played it loads and never got further than getting back from the shop and being constantly arrested).

that's totally it! wishbringer. i would always get to the shoppe, get out, fog sets in and the thing won't let me go in any direction at all. so i gave it up after awhile. this from wickipedia made me laugh:

Feelies

Included in the Wishbringer package are several items, which Infocom called feelies:
A book, The Legend of Wishbringer, that explains how the magic stone came to be (in the Solid Gold release, an in-game object included in the player's starting inventory instead of the packaging)
The envelope and letter to be delivered to Ye Olde Magick Shoppe
A "postal zone map" of Festeron
A plastic glow-in-the-dark replica of the stone

wah?! it's not the real magickal stone?!

what was the one where you enter a saloon and have to pee. enter ladies or gents...

then you step on a black spot and are whisked somewhere else then you look around and see things and gather them as you go along. It had a weird name like "ladies from mars" or something.

Lesbian Goddesses of Phobos.

Leather! Leather Goddesses of Phobos. My bad.

yes! that was it! I killed hours playing that one.

And depending on which bathroom you entered the game referred to you as a man or a woman, right?

Yep.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fd/LGOP_box_art.jpg

Feelies

The game featured no copy prevention as such, but like many Infocom games, it included puzzles that were nearly impossible to solve without hints from the accompanying documentation (the so-called feelies). Leather Goddesses included the following feelies, one of which was quite uncommon among Infocom's games:
A small scratch and sniff card which bore seven numbered areas (at certain points in the game, the player would be instructed to scratch a certain number and then whiff the resulting odor. Given the possibilities for a game featuring a "lewd mode", the scents were relatively innocuous, such as pizza and chocolate.)
The Adventures of Lane Mastodon, a 3-D comic book containing vital hints to the game
3-D glasses for the Lane Mastodon comic book
A double-sided map of the catacombs

This creative take on copy protection earned Leather Goddesses a SPA Excellence in Software Award for Best Software Packaging in 1987.

http://www.wurb.com/if/game/2186

"Slouching Towards Bedlam"

Neat victorian steampunk story so far, comes bundled with Frotz.

Slouching is, alongside Galatea and AMFV, my favorite IF game ever.

this is neat: http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/

Sloughing is one of the classics. Many classics come bundled with Frotz, actually.

ON IPHONE

Had a hunch I would fine something with this, and whaddayaknow:

There are only three Doctor Who Interactive Fiction Text adventure games I know of so far...

with links to all three.

Article here: The rebirth of grue

talking about the resurgence of the genre.

browser fun: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Unfocom

http://www.squidi.net/comic/if/view.php?ep=1&id=1

Since the backspace key had yet to be invented, the name stuck.[

erm, what

Anyone know where I can get to play Curses ?

ah, may have found it http://www.wurb.com/if/game/55

anyone know of any text adventures set in a futuristic kind of setting, like cyber punk of similar?

old or new

http://www.wurb.com/if/genre/4

Start on that page and knock yrself out, my man

woah, cool. thanks

Quintin Stone's Scavenger is like a post-apocolypse (Fallout-style) themed IF. Not quite Cyberpunk, but it was fun IIRC.

A Mind Forever Voyaging is the definitive cyberpunk IF classic.

I was a beta-tester for that! (Scavenger not AMFV obv) - I didn't like it that much :(

https://texturewriter.com/

Oh, interesting. A platform in the space between Inform and Twine could really work. (Also is that one of ours in the beta testing list??)

For other text adventure peeps, Sub-Q Magazine is a pretty good, pretty new publisher of IF works, though they do all seem to be disappointingly short.

Having played a few of the example games from Texture, I'm not that impressed. It's way more on the Twine side, with a bit of Quest thrown in. Not completely closing my mind to it, but would much rather play a proper parser game.

It feels like a gimmicky Twine at the moment but new media are welcome once they're debugged