Adventure Gamers - Forums

Karlok - 10 July 2015 03:27 PM

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.

LOL, is that real? “north but prepare yourself for a tiger attack by putting your hands… dead” and “lets go into the pond… this game is bull**** , you can’t even fight back”

On a topic related question, which very good and accessible game would be good to get accustomed with the genre?

wilco - 10 July 2015 05:10 PM

Karlok - 10 July 2015 03:27 PM

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.

LOL, is that real? “north but prepare yourself for a tiger attack by putting your hands… dead” and “lets go into the pond… this game is bull**** , you can’t even fight back”

 

On a topic related question, which very good and accessible game would be good to get accustomed with the genre?

I was able to finish A Mind Forever Voyaging without looking anything up, it’s more exploration than puzzle solving. Takes itself a bit seriously but it’s pretty good.

Detective Mosely - 09 July 2015 11:49 PM

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.

That sounds like fun! I did a google search for this game and came accross this: http://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/q2xs0fz0l0wlmychzaqw6g/murder-on-the-hill is this the same game?

Edit: Nevermind, I see it’s not the same… Looks interesting though!

Iznogood - 11 July 2015 09:50 AM

Venkman - 10 July 2015 03:55 PM

I think that the legendary status of the Babel Fish puzzle is one of the biggest scams in gaming history.

It might later have grown to a legendary status with t-shirts and everything, similar to the infamous goat in BS, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was a very difficult (and funny) puzzle, that a lot of players (including myself) got hopelessly stuck on.

It is not without reason it has this legendary status.

The goat seems more legit because anybody who speaks of it has actually experienced it. (I personally would need to refresh my memory on that puzzle, but I did play the game through.) Babel Fish has become more of an annoying internet meme, with probably only like 25% of the people who bring it up having actually tried it.

It’s hard to argue with you when you can honestly say that you had a tough time with that puzzle, but I definitely don’t understand it. Were you new to adventure/text games at that time? I fired it up a few years ago to finally try it for myself and I solved it in like 15 minutes. It’s like “okay, this is happening so I just need to plug that leak with x item”...“oh okay now that’s fixed but this is broken, so I need to add x item” etc. and it follows so logically.

Obviously different puzzles stump different people at different times, but it’s really difficult for me to believe that the BF is all that tough for a moderately experienced player. There are much more obtuse puzzles in that game. I’m not even trying to brag about my elite adventuring skills because I doubt I’d ever finish that game (and that goes for many text adventures) without help. But not due to the BF.

Would love to see an honest poll of people who’ve legitimately tried it without help and how difficult they found it. Maybe I’ll make one.

Brittasha - 10 July 2015 08:25 PM

Detective Mosely - 09 July 2015 11:49 PM

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.

That sounds like fun! I did a google search for this game and came accross this: http://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/q2xs0fz0l0wlmychzaqw6g/murder-on-the-hill is this the same game?

Edit: Nevermind, I see it’s not the same… Looks interesting though!

No, this game I was talking about is this:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspect_(video_game)

I also had the Lost Treasures of Infocom package, which is really the only reason I’ve played many older text games.  I was still a kid at the time, and was looking around the store for a new adventure game to buy and I found that.  And the box made the games sound really good, with very little mention that the games were only in text and did not have any graphics.  I was not happy at first, as I had only played games with graphics up until that point, but I definitely ended up getting my money’s worth and then some.

Suspect, Deadline, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and The Lurking Horror were the 4 that I got the most enjoyment out of.  Zork games never did much for me.  Much the same as the King’s Quest series, I’m not big on games that are just about wandering around and “adventuring”.  I like a more story driven experience.

And yeah, I am one of the many that never made it past the Babel Fish puzzle.  When you try to do something so many times and fail it’s pretty natural to assume that you just can’t do that thing.

Venkman - 10 July 2015 05:27 PM

I was able to finish A Mind Forever Voyaging without looking anything up, it’s more exploration than puzzle solving. Takes itself a bit seriously but it’s pretty good.

Thanks. I’m going to look into it.

Karlok - 11 July 2015 08:36 PM

I don’t know what “the genre” is. Text adventures are as varied as graphical adventures. Really. The modern ones have better parsers though. Just like graphical adventures have better graphics than they had in the nineties. You liked Her Story, didn’t you? The developer, Sam Barlow, also made an interesting experimental text adventure called Aisle Only ONE turn and the game ends. Many different endings possible, depending on your creativity and of course the game’s parser.

This is cool, I just messed around an hour with it using all the verbs I could think off. I can how it relates to Her Story - using the limited options to uncover a more story behind it.

Karlok - 11 July 2015 08:36 PM

Some text adventures are all about story. We’d call them interactive movies if they had graphics. In linear Photopia your commands move the story along, no puzzles. You’ll finish it in about one hour. It’s very good, try it! All Roads is very linear too and has one puzzle, solvable in more than one way. The point of the game is understanding what is going on, which I assure you is not easy. I loved it. A Mind Forever Voyaging is far less linear, and the input of the player is needed for exploration mostly.

IMO the excellent Legend games with their combination of parser and graphics are a great way to start too, especially for a seasoned adventurer like yourself. Or Infocom’s light and easy Wishbringer . The writing is first-class and you can solve the puzzles by logic or by magic.

Anchorhead is easy and very atmospheric.

Thanks! I’ll try them out.
Last year I started to play Curses! but was having a hard time getting stuck in every corner and ended up giving up.

Treasure Quest sounded familiar, so I looked it up in my inventory, then in Wikipedia.  It’s a puzzle contest game surrounded with controversy and the page on it is an interesting read.  It won’t let me copy the URL however.

It’s not a text game so the one in the video is not the same.

I remember starting the game but losing interest quickly.

Karlok - 12 July 2015 09:14 AM

wilco - 12 July 2015 06:31 AM

Last year I started to play Curses! but was having a hard time getting stuck in every corner and ended up giving up.

Curses is very very hard and, like most older text adventures, unforgiving: make a mistake early in the game, pay for it many hours later. Great game, but it took me ages to finish it, and I needed a walkthrough.

I started to get a sense of that when I couldn’t even leave the first few rooms…

I played Photopia now (great short story a use of colors) but and even without puzzles I still managed to get stuck for while in the labyrinth becauseI missed the wings clue…    Maybe the absence of visual feedback throws me off or I just plain suck in these games!
Anyway, I’ll press on and play more games since it does interest me.

Iznogood - 12 July 2015 09:24 AM

Venkman - 11 July 2015 07:14 PM

It’s hard to argue with you when you can honestly say that you had a tough time with that puzzle, but I definitely don’t understand it. Were you new to adventure/text games at that time?

Yes, I had tried a few other AG’s before this, but I was still very much new to the whole genre. If I gave it a try today, then I don’t think it would give me a lot of troubles. You have a good point though, and I believe that one of the reasons it became legendary, is that it wasn’t just experienced adventure gamers that played this game, there were also a lot of Douglas Adams fans that gave it a try, and even though it is very much in the spirit of the book, then the solution was also very different from anything in the book.

Incidentally, when I originally played Broken Sword, then I didn’t really think twice about the goat puzzle. I might have checked a walkthrough or I might have solved it on my own, I honestly can’t remember, but I didn’t really think it stood out from all the other puzzles in the game. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I realised it was considered something special.

BS1 is one of the few adventure games I completed without hints (not a huge brag - I played it while I was recovering from surgery and put a lot of hours into it, just hammering away at puzzles), and I do not remember the goat. The one problem I do recall having was not finding a hotspot for an item.