Text adventures: Which ones to play and how to play them?

[MrPopo]

Yeah, the Carousel room sends you in random directions, so that alone means when you finally see how the rest of the rooms fit together you'll probably have to rearrange things.

[Ack]

It was pretty fun to toy with, I admit. Maybe I will do it again some day and share it with folks for fun.

[Erik_Twice]

Let's bring back the discussion to this thread

Yep. Lost Treasures of Infocom is a great way to play text adventures. I may try to get through Zork later this year, and I may also give A Mind Forever Voyaging a shot too. Are there any others I should play? My wife has fond memories of Plundered Hearts.

I think I'll start with Enchanter, if you want we can play it together, perhaps make a thread and play it with other Racketeers

The iPhone version of Lost Treasures of Infocom seems a better way to play these games than Frotz, in that it has Invisiclues included and autocorrect (I tend to make a lot of mistakes when using my phone). I also have yet to find a way of adding Infocom's games to Frotiz on my iPhone so I guess I don't have a choice in that matter.

That said, I'm a bit unsure of playing the game with an already-resolved map since mapping seems part of the fun. What are you guys thoughts on this? I think I might not actually need to game on my phone.

On an unrelated matter: Is there a list of what platforms were this games released on? If I like them, it would be cool to get physical copies.

[MrPopo]

Infocom games were written in an Infocom specific language called ZIL. This let them write a Z-Machine interpreter for a variety of popular computers at the time (remember, this was during the 80s, so the IBM Compatible hadn't yet swallowed up the market). So the games tended to have releases for every platform available at the time; they did the work one time to write a Z-Machine for that platform and then include that in the disk alongside the story file for each new game.

[marurun]

There are even web-based Javascript interpreters for z-machine code and Frotz (updated, modern version of the z-machine interpreter).

[Erik_Twice]

I was mostly asking for collection purporses though it seems all versions used practically the same packaging, only one of the Atari ST versions seems meaningfully different (They are uglier, but also very cheap). I don't really mind which version they are since I don't think I would play using the original disks.


By the way, I tried The Infocom Collection on my phone. It has Zork for free and it seems a lot of work went into it. But my phone's screen is very small, I'm not sure if I'll jump ahead. (If you can't tell, I'm very bad at making pucharsing decisions)

Interestingly this version is very different from the one I played, which I think was the original MIT game. I hit impassable terrain very quickly, seems the map was streamlined.

[MrPopo]

The very original game was split up into three (what we now know as Zork 1, 2, 3). So things that used to be intertwined had to be split up.

[Erik_Twice]

The very original game was split up into three (what we now know as Zork 1, 2, 3). So things that used to be intertwined had to be split up.

Oh, I didn't know that! I think I should read about it or watch Get Lamp.

[Erik_Twice]

So I finally started playing a text adventure and it wasn't Enchanter but Wishbringer! It's a lot of fun, much more accessible than I expected and the writing is great.

I didn't make it to the Magiv Shoppe in time, but in return I drew almost all of the map:

FirstWishbringermap.jpeg (257.64 KiB) Viewed 2915 times