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FactsAreUseless posted:What makes a good text adventure vs. a bad one? What do you enjoy doing in a text adventure? I haven't really played any. A lot of it is a matter of details (sensible responses to examining things or "wrong" actions, grammar). I like games with interesting (but not too difficult) puzzles, but there's good IF that doesn't really have puzzles at all, like Galatea. Here are LPs of all the Infocom games (probably requires archives): http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3102387 Of the Infocom games, I think the best is either Trinity or Spellbreaker. They're hard without being blatantly unfair the way Zork II and Hitchhiker's Guide were, and they have interestingly weird settings. They established the "crazy quilt" setting/genre that's still very popular in modern non-commercial IF. Edit: Although I guess Hitchhiker's Guide was also "crazy quilt." Worst Infocom game (of the ones I've played or read LPs of, at least) is Starcross. The writing style is terse and humorless to the point of being rude to the player (the default response to examining an object is "the [object] is as described"), the plot/puzzles are very mechanically minded (there isn't even much attempt to disguise that the NPCs play a role more like vending machines than actual characters), there's a stupidly unfair "puzzle" (touching the skeleton instead of searching it) worse than anything in Zork II, and the setting is a lot less interesting than it could have been (lots of alien organisms described as looking more or less like Earth animals).
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Feb 3, 2016 23:18
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It's kind of hilarious how often Infocom used the same basic plots. Explore the ruin full of traps (and sometimes monsters) to find treasure: Zork I, Zork II, Infidel, Hollywood Hijinx. Teleport around collecting random junk for vague plot reasons: played for laughs in Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Hitchhiker's Guide; played straight in Zork III (although the teleportation is less of a focus there), Trinity, Spellbreaker. Fix the high-tech facility: the Heart of Gold in Hitchhiker's Guide, the space station in Stationfall, the planetary life supports systems in Suspended, the planetary life support systems again in Planetfall, the alien object in Starcross. Nord and Bert arguably fits into this category as well, just in a very weird way. Wander around until you find the missing person: Ballyhoo, Sorceror. Solve the murder mystery before the deadline by timing your actions according to the suspects' schedules: Deadline, Suspect, Witness.
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Feb 5, 2016 19:11
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Bieeardo posted:I'm old-school, Scott Adams and Infocom all the way. I played some of the Legend games, but they really didn't do it for me, and the simple noun-verb parsers other engines used drove me up the wall. I think my favourite game from that era was Trinity. Here's an interesting article about "what people see in Photopia": http://lilith.gotdns.org/~victor/?q=content/analysis-adam-cadres-photopia I'm not a fan of it myself, though. It's not really interactive, and before I read the article I wasn't quite sure what the "point" was supposed to be. The maze puzzle was cool, though.
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Mar 15, 2016 06:39
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