It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a Catchall.

Want some rye? Course ya do!

Nemesis and GI are firmly in the Myst style (first person screen-by-screen navigation) of adventure games. Nemesis is mostly a 'serious' game with dark themes - which was a surprise at the time, but Grand Inquisitor is more in line with the humour of the text based games. Both are great though.

* * *

I restarted Pawn and "walkthroughed" my way back to where I was, this time dealing with that pesky adventurer right off the bat. Now on to new areas...

Eleima wrote:

Although this thread has me super intrigued by the original text based Zorks.

They are unlikely to have aged well, and I say this as someone who was just gushing about how much I loved them and how they changed my life. A couple of the puzzles are really obtuse, and they can be "impolite" as far as letting you get in a no-win situation. But I'd absolutely love to hear the opinion of somebody playing them for the first time now!

AND I'm finished with The Pawn. Although I mostly ended up using a walkthrough to get through it because, damn, that game is not good. For a whole lot of reasons.

It seems to commit almost all the cardinal sins of text adventures (with the exception of it not having a maze puzzle - although it tries it's best to include one due to the excessively confusing map layout in places).

Also...it doesn't have an ending. All that happens is you step through a set of doors into a programming den, whereby the programmers hand you some debug codes and then bugger off down the pub. While, admittedly, was generally the real life ending to the average day in Britain in the 80's...i would have preferred even just a simple "congratulations" and close to desktop.

OH WELL. I guess these are supposed to improve over time, so maybe I'll have more luck with their next game, The Guild of Thieves.

Most important thing I learned while playing this game : The Golden Joystick Awards here in the UK started in 1983 and is still going strong today. :O

pyxistyx wrote:

It seems to commit almost all the cardinal sins of text adventures (with the exception of it not having a maze puzzle - although it tries it's best to include one due to the excessively confusing map layout in places).

Jimmy Maher called it "a nasty, nihilistic little game with a mean streak unusually wide even for its era".

(His blog, The Digital Antiquarian, is a well-researched treasure trove of information about the history of computer games. His Hall of Fame includes a lot of great adventure games.)

beeporama wrote:
Eleima wrote:

Although this thread has me super intrigued by the original text based Zorks.

They are unlikely to have aged well, and I say this as someone who was just gushing about how much I loved them and how they changed my life. A couple of the puzzles are really obtuse, and they can be "impolite" as far as letting you get in a no-win situation. But I'd absolutely love to hear the opinion of somebody playing them for the first time now!

They haven't aged well as far as game play goes. Each Zork seems to have an element of Plotkin's worst tenet:

Cruel: can get stuck by doing something which isn't obviously irrevocable (even after the act).

I like to think it didn't feel cruel to the Implementors designers at the time, maybe it was their way of increasing replay value.

Where they still shine, and the reason I still extol their virtues 30 years later, is the fantastic world of Zork's Great Underground Empire, misruled by the Flathead Dynasty.
IMAGE(https://www.thezorklibrary.com/history/image/zorkmid-1zmcoinbelwitfront.jpg)
The stories themselves are clever and imaginative, well worth a run through the entire series with a walkthrough close by. Beyond Zork remains my all time favorite. I paid full price for it when it came out, and it was worth every penny to me.

You can cheat your way through each edition in a couple of hours.

misplacedbravado wrote:
pyxistyx wrote:

It seems to commit almost all the cardinal sins of text adventures (with the exception of it not having a maze puzzle - although it tries it's best to include one due to the excessively confusing map layout in places).

Jimmy Maher called it "a nasty, nihilistic little game with a mean streak unusually wide even for its era".

(His blog, The Digital Antiquarian, is a well-researched treasure trove of information about the history of computer games. His Hall of Fame includes a lot of great adventure games.)

Haha, yeah, that description sounds about right

bepnewt wrote:
Eleima wrote:

Same here. I replayed Nemesis not too long ago and it's still awesome. I expect Grand Inquisitor will still be as well.
Although this thread has me super intrigued by the original text based Zorks.

I only played the Zork text games, with Beyond Zork being the only minor outlier to that. It sounds like I should check our Nemesis and GI.

-BEP

Also Return to Zork, then Nemesis then Grand Inquistor. But yes.

Tanglebones wrote:

Want some rye? Course ya do!

"Who's like us? Damn few!"

Running Man wrote:

They haven't aged well as far as game play goes. Each Zork seems to have an element of Plotkin's worst tenet:

Cruel: can get stuck by doing something which isn't obviously irrevocable (even after the act).

I like to think it didn't feel cruel to the Implementors designers at the time, maybe it was their way of increasing replay value.

Not just Zork!

I think every Infocom adventure I ever played had something early in the game that you needed to do for reasons you had no way of knowing about on your first playthrough. Usually with the result that you got pretty far into the game and then discovered that you couldn't finish it.

I guess that's a sort of replay value, but yeah.

Fortunately more modern interpreters let you enter multiple commands at once, so one trick for those big games is writing down a list of commands in a text file and pasting it in to get back to where you were.

(And modern parser interactive fiction is less cruel and less likely to need it.)

I enjoyed Zork, but I think I spent ten times as long playing The Witness and Planetfall.

I miss packins and feelies.

Of the Infocoms, I spent a lot of time with Zork I, Wishbringer, H2G2, The Lurking Horror, Planetfall and Beyond Zork. I had a second wind in the late 90s/early 2000s of being into IF, and played a lot of the Plotkin games and Anchorhead (still the creepiest game, IF or otherwise, I've ever played)

Interview with Emily Short, re: Interactive Fiction and it's community.

I was recently thinking about games that have branching story lines or choices that affect the game in some way like The Walking Dead or The Witcher 3. Story is a big part of games for me, which is why I was always drawn to adventure games. Interactive Fiction games are distilled down even further by eschewing graphics altogether.

My question then to those who have played more recent IF games: are there any games that have significant choices or paths that affect either the overall story or the outcome of the game?

This seems like the perfect format for just this style, and may even make these games way more replayable. I realize that there is often a big puzzle element as well for many IF games, but I just wanted to know if there are some that are more story-driven and that allow meaningful choices. Kind of like a choose your own adventure built into an IF parser.

PaladinTom wrote:

My question then to those who have played more recent IF games: are there any games that have significant choices or paths that affect either the overall story or the outcome of the game?

Oh my, yes. There are indeed. If we're sticking strictly to parser fiction (Twine-likes have their own structures that can get just as interesting) here's a few examples:

Alabaster (story file, play online) has eighteen endings, and is structured around a conversation.
Bronze is a bit more straightforward: it plays like the usual explore-the-castle puzzle game, but it can play out in a few different ways.
Aisle is one I keep going back to as an example of a storytelling technique that takes advantage of the interactive medium. It's a one-move game, and which move you enter determines how it ends.

Some more unusual things:
The Icebound Concordance is all about deciding how the story should end. Or stories, as the case may be.
Blood & Laurels is difficult to get ahold of, but it uses some advanced AI under the hood.

There's lots more, of course, depending on exactly what you're looking for. Though there's also plenty of room to innovate!

And you can go further afield to visual novels and link-based fiction like howling dogs.

Oh my, indeed.

Many thanks!

Man, I want to get more people to play Stories Untold, but I don't think it's a big enough game to justify its own thread, so I'm not really sure where to take the recommendation.

Seriously, everyone should try Stories Untold. It's small, interesting, and cheap. It's real good.