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No new postsDid anyone used to like/still likes text adventure games? Which are the best ones you have played?
I used to be really into text adventure games, one of the first ones I played was “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” I never could get to the end though!
I also used to really enjoy these ones http://www.rinkworks.com/adventure/ and completed many of them! I’m excited to see that they are still there, I haven’t looked at them in years!
Does anyone else play them?
I’ve always preferred the kind of what Legend did by having both graphics and text. They even have the option to turn the graphics completely off, if the player so prefers and the commands can be given with a mouse from a verb menu, if typing is not your thing. I think they did got a lot of things right and their parser also was pretty smart. Recently I’ve actually been playing Fredrik Pohl’s Gateway 2, which is a great sci-fi tale.
Karlok will be with you in a second.
I grew up on graphic adventures, but I’m perfectly aware of the “freedom” text adventure gives you, and its advantages over graphic adventures. Legend Entertainment was aiming for a “perfect balance”, and one could argue that they’re the only company who achieved this. That balance is unexplored territory and thing developers should strive for, IMO.
Recently finished: Four Last Things 4/5, Edna & Harvey: The Breakout 5/5, Chains of Satinav 3,95/5, A Vampyre Story 88, Sam Peters 3/5, Broken Sword 1 4,5/5, Broken Sword 2 4,3/5, Broken Sword 3 85, Broken Sword 5 81, Gray Matter 4/5\nCurrently playing: Broken Sword 4, Keepsake (Let\‘s Play), Callahan\‘s Crosstime Saloon (post-Community Playthrough)\nLooking forward to: A Playwright’s Tale
I haven’t played a lot of text adventures, but Hadean Lands was brilliant and it has made me want to try more.
I got my start on text adventures back in the day, 1986 - C128.
Favorites are Trinity and Beyond Zork.
I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.
My favorite is Suspect.
It’s a very cool game where you’re invited to a costume party at a mansion, and a murder happens there soon after you get there. You’re framed for the murder, and you have to try and find out who did it before you get arrested.
It features a real clock and everyone moving around on a schedule, so you have to be in certain places at certain times to do certain things. But there’s so many people and things to interact with, and so many different things to see, that it’s just a great experience.
And there’s so many crazy things you can do too. (like racing to the crime scene before it’s discovered and then hiding the body) So much fun.
Infocom: A Mind Forever Voyaging - Trinity - Border Zone - the Lurking Horror
Legend Entertainment: TimeQuest - Eric the Unready - both Gateway games
Magnetic Scrolls: Alice in Wonderland
Adam Cadre: Photopia
Jon Ingold: All Roads - Make It Good
Graham Nelson: Curses - Jigsaw
Michael Gentry: Anchorhead
See you around, wolf. Nerissa
I got started with graphical adventures, and really only got access to text adventures later on. By that time, I had grown tired of fighting with text parsers so I never really bothered with them. 
I’m sure there’s a lot of quality text adventures around, but there’s only a select few that grab my interest enough to actually try them. And with my backlog, that’s only bound to happen if one of them would get chosen for a CPT. 
I could be persuaded to try these: A Mind Forever Voyaging, The Lurking Horror, Legend Entertainment’s catalogue, Anchorhead and Hadean Lands.
The truth can’t hurt you, it’s just like the dark: it scares you witless but in time you see things clear and stark. - Elvis Costello
Maybe this time I can be strong, but since I know who I am, I’m probably wrong. Maybe this time I can go far, but thinking about where I’ve been ain’t helping me start. - Michael Kiwanuka
My very first game was “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” We had just gotten our first Apple][ computer and found it at the Mac Store. It was on floppies in that hilarious box (which I still have). I hadn’t read the book so didn’t know anything about the story and laughed out loud so many times family kept asking what the heck was so funny. The Babelfish puzzle especially was a hoot.
My next purchase was the Infocom collection with “Zork”, “A Mind Forever Voyaging”, “Wishbringer”, etc. I was hooked.
When CDs came out we bought a new Pac Bell PC that came bundled with a number of games (remember those days?) including “Myst” which blew me away. That started my constant game collecting. Over the years I amassed hundreds, saved all the boxes which I consider art, and drove people crazy with how to store them. Finally I relented and allowed them to be flattened to fit into storage boxes with the jewel boxes on shelves.
When boxed games dwindled with the advent of downloaded games, I scoured the web to find good deals on titles in boxes I didn’t have, but finally had to join everyone else in downloading the newest games. Too bad. I miss the fun of opening a box and, if you’re lucky, finding little extras with the game like maps or pewter figures. Ah, well.
I did actually try a few text adventures when growing up, but it really wasn’t until graphical adventure arrived that I saw the light and fell in love with adventure games.
And I say “try” because, with the exception of The Hobbit (1982) where I followed a walkthrough to the letter, then I never managed to complete a single one!
(Damn you Babel Fish puzzle in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 
)
I probably should give them another try - but I wont!
The thing is that I still have nightmares about wrestling with the awful text parsers, that only ever understood about 0.00001% of what I was typing, and you can only takes so many “¿qué?” before something gets thrown out of the window.
You have to play the game, to find out why you are playing the game! - eXistenZ
I got started with graphical adventures, and really only got access to text adventures later on. By that time, I had grown tired of fighting with text parsers so I never really bothered with them.
I probably should give them another try - but I wont!
The thing is that I still have nightmares about wrestling with the awful text parsers, that only ever understood about 0.00001% of what I was typing, and you can only takes so many “¿qué?” before something gets thrown out of the window.
Right now I don’t have the time to write a passionate piece in defense of text adventures, so I’ll try to clear up one tiny little problem that seems to bother both of you: Parsers have rules, just like puzzles. You both like puzzles, don’t you? Read the rules. Stick to the commands the parser allows. Don’t behave like this idiot and you’ll be fine.
See you around, wolf. Nerissa
I played Zork and Spellcasting. Not much else after that. I don’t think I finished any of those but I messed around with them.
I have my eye on a few ones (cough Plundered Hearts cough) to try but I’m basically waiting for the right time since I’ll probably stumble with the interface and language at first until I get used to it.
Text parsers might have improved a great deal since then, but those early parsers really was quite horrible, add on top that I am a non-native English speaker and was terrible at English spelling at the time, and .. well .. you know the say “once bitten, twice shy”?
You have to play the game, to find out why you are playing the game! - eXistenZ
Don’t behave like this idiot and you’ll be fine.
Wow Karlok, good find!
I lost my adventure game virginity with text adventures. I think the first couple Zork games came with my dad’s TRS-80 back in 1980 or ‘81, and I remember playing them with a buddy that had a really warped sense of humor, and a potty mouth. Although we really enjoyed actually solving the puzzles and advancing the stories, he insisted in occasionally typing in stuff like that shown in the video above, just to see the responses. Usually after consuming a fat spliff. But I digress.
I actually have The Lost Treasures of Infocom collections (both I and II) on floppy, which I can no longer play, as well as many of the games in those collections in digital format, and I still occasionally go back and replay them from time to time. The text parsers never really bothered me…after a little Maui Wowie I could never think beyond three-word phrases anyway.
By the way, I searched for the TreasureQuest game shown in that video but came up empty. It looked like it might have been fun back in the day…was it a real game, or just made up for the youtube vid?
Life is too short to drink bad wine…
TreasureQuest is probably fake. If Google hasn’t heard of it… 
This one also made me laugh. It looks like this guy really has no idea what a text adventure is.
See you around, wolf. Nerissa
(Damn you Babel Fish puzzle in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I think that the legendary status of the Babel Fish puzzle is one of the biggest scams in gaming history. It started with marketing by Infocom, including of course the t-shirt. After that it just spread through word of mouth and my bet is the vast majority of people who talk about it on the internet have never even tried it.
The puzzle is actually extremely simple especially when compared against other text adventure games where what you’re expected to do can be quite random. If you read the final solution without having attempted it for yourself then sure, it sounds crazy difficult. But the game allows you to walk through that solution one small piece at a time, and each piece by itself is pretty simple.
Compare that with say (spoilers!), drinking exactly 3 beers at the bar in that game or knowing to lie down in front of the bulldozer without having read the book. That’s the kind of crap text games often throw at the player, and the Babel Fish puzzle should be praised for being an actually decent and solvable puzzle.
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