Trinity was the best for me. I still have the little cardboard sundial. I just remember being captured by the whole atmosphere of it.
Suspended was 2nd. (I’ve since lost the little board and markers that came with it).
I started on Zork, and did all 3 Zorks to completion - anyone ever use those little hint books that used the invisible ink? Of course, they all took me about 2 years to do, and 2 full spiral notebooks full of maps and whatnot.
I suppose Hitchhiker’s was mine.
It was very well written, but it was more “interactive fiction” than game. There weren’t very many puzzles to solve or actions required on the part of the player. My vote goes to Trinity. Also very well written, some great puzzles, and an ending that fit the game perfectly.
That was me forgetting to log in.
Hey! :P
I liked Beyond Zork and Zork Zero for some reason, even though they kind of sucked…but they had automappping!
Sorry, I cannot let such scurrilous blasphemy go unpunished. Zork Zero, a Steve Meretzky debacle, did suck, but Beyond Zork (by St. Brian of Moriarty) was a great puzzle game, second only to Spellbreaker for clever and difficult puzzles–remember the dust bunnies, or the dornbeast, for example?. It had its shortcomings–the RPG aspect was ludicrous–but it was overall one of the all-time greats, imo.
(I’m a big fan of the automapping, too–so much so that I wrote an automapping library for the Hugo i-f language so people can make BZ-style games.)
Ah, what’s the fucking point.
Oops. Let me rephrase that.
“I can’t believe no one besides Matthew Gallant mentioned Suspended.”
:D
Nah, fuck it, why not?
Some gutless twerp, hiding behind everyone else’s legs, decides to poke his nose in and utter his little witticism, then run off into the mist again. What gets me is the way he must be scanning the posts, eagerly, looking for any chance to make his little play. So he lights on “if you want to know the truth” – a phrase that means practically nothing, that’s just a casual way of writing “to be honest” – sue me, I read too much Catcher in the Rye when I was a teenager – and that’s his “in.” That’s his little ticket to shine for one glorious moment. And oh, how he pounces. He’s through like a rapier.
“We don’t?” What is that, the royal we? You presume to speak for the community at large, you throat-warbling zero? You get your thrills making coy little smartass remarks and then scampering off to giggle about it over breakfast?
So yeah, you got my goat. Congratulations. Color me Trolled! Make sure to write it down on the dry-erase board you’ve got set up next to your computer. You win, I concede. You are the Grand Master of Anonymous Internet Witticisms. I stand in awe of you, you fruitless fuck.
I couldn’t decide if he meant to insult you, or everyone else. The “We don’t” could be taken to mean that we (i.e. the rest of the Qt3 crowd) don’t want to know the truth or can’t handle the truth. I doubt that’s what he meant, but it could be. Anyway, he’s not worth all that effort you put into responding to him ;)
Why, thank you.
Actually, I was referring to the fact you butted your pin-head into a thread about favorite adventure games to tell us all the very important fact that you don’t like adventure games. As if we were all interested in hearing your pronouncement on the matter. Who gives a fuck? Come back when you’ve got a pair of tits and a cute haircut and I might pretend to care what you think.
Oh, this is truly a thread after my own heart! I loved these games so much. I guess maybe because so many of them came out in that magic time after I had discovered computers, but before I had discovered girls. I remember playing all night on my Commodore 64: Leather Goddesses, Planetfall and its sequel Stationfall. It think PF and SF had to be my favorites, though I can’t say why. They just hold a special place for me. A funny story: when I graduated from Infocom to Might and Magic ( the first one) I had my trusty mapping pencil, and I was so intent on the game, holding my pencil between my teeth, and started to feel sick. I looked at the pencil, and I had been holding it that way for so long, the paint had dissolved! probably lead based, too. Come to think of it, that explains alot about the following ten years or so!
I have been wanting for some time to get these games and play them again. Are they still available?
Most or all of the Infocom games (and even Cornerstone) are available at Home of the Underdogs:
http://www.the-underdogs.org/company.php?id=210
As far as I know, Activision is not currently publishing any of the titles, so if you’re in a deep moral quandary about whether to download from HOTU or not, you’ll probably have to look on eBay.
Indeed, Planetfall was the best game I played during my “youth”. It was really the game that got me into wanting to make games in the first place.
Zork was pretty good too. I even played a pirate one they made later on, I don’t remember it as well.
Anyone remember A Mind Forever Voyaging? I think that’s what it was called. Back in those days, ahving the most intelligent parser as akin to having the most polygons today in a 3D shooter.
The easiest way to get the original text adventures is the late-'90s CD-ROM collection from Activision with a title along the lines of “Classic Text Adventures.”
Regrettably, it’s out of print and it isn’t cheap when yoiu can find it. Though originally budget priced, it now goes for upward of $70 on eBay.
Peter
I don’t know if I’d call that the easiest way… :wink:
I wrote a feature on interactive fiction a few months back, and the entire intro was basically a love-story about the first time I played it. A brilliant, innovative idea, a really well put together game, decent puzzles (people always seem to forget about the middle part where you have to stop yourself being switched off) and really decent writing - especially in the final timeframe.
I think the Babelfish puzzle was the final time I played a text adventure. I never cared for the Infocom games, and despite several tries, never completed any of them.
I never completed any Infocom game either, for the same reason. Liked the storytelling but the vaunted parser was way too limited, and those puzzles were just bizarre. Probably not wholly unintentional from Infocom’s viewpoint since they sold lots of clue books that way…