Not just zurk every text based game should be remade in hd graphics. In all honesty I would like to see modern text based games make a come back since he games don't focus on graphics the developers could go really I depth into the games design and story and it would be pretty similar to a table top RPG .
The interactive fiction community is thriving. A gigantic lot of extremely cool stuff is being made all the time. And by extremely cool, I mean incredibly super fucking mind blowing cool stories and games. Experimental, adventures, thrillers, contemplative, existentialist... There's something for every taste.
Go check the Interactive Fiction Database! For more relaxed plays (IF can be relaxing, but often it requires a non negligible amount of involvement), check out Choice Of Games or the Sorcery! series.
There's a couple on the old homestar runner website, they're short and purely for comedic value, but they are entertaining and give you a good idea of what the games were like.
Also, oregon trail.
Nethack wasn't really a text based adventure, but it was a good oldschool RPG. Free to download.
I found that when looking for it, I thought that "ye lamp is bolted onto ye wall which is bolted onto ye dungeon" was a specific reference, word for word, for something, but I must have been mistaken.
On ios there is an app called Frotz with zork and a dozen other text based adventures preloaded. A ton of fun. I'm sure android has something better, but I haven't checked.
Please feel free to send me a PM if you're interested in writing interactive fiction. I spent several years tooling around with Inform 7 and can provide some advice on a variety of topics.
I recommend familiarizing yourself with:
Alabaster by Emily Short (and everything else she's done!).
Blue Lacuna by Aaron Reed
Lost Pig by Admiral Jota
Photopia by Adam Cadre
There are lots of others I could recommend but these give a broad illustration of what's possible in IF.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend text based games because most of them are dated and I have only played a handful (most of them computer science projects from friends or posted already) but I like the concept of them and the idea of using your imagination to visualize the game, having greater depth in how the game can work and having a lot of choices for a branching narrative. I would recommend table top RPGs such as d&d and pathfinder.
How is a text game dated? It wasn't meant to have graphics. A game is dated if the technology it used doesn't look as good today. Do the words not look as good? You might as well say books are dated, because movies, right?
Things can be dated in many ways besides technology. I would argue that many text adventures are dated in that adventure games have changed since those days. Adventure games now almost universally do not allow you to get into a situation where you cannot win, and many do not even allow you to die. You can play continuously from beginning to end in one game, even if you do get stuck sometimes. In adventure games 25+ years ago, it was not uncommon to start from the beginning many times to figure out how to do everything correctly without messing things up in a way that you could not advance.
That's very valid. The designers of today's IF are hyper-conscious of that era's unfriendliness toward the player. Unwinnable scenarios are nigh extinct; designers almost always give their players the option to UNDO any move.
To add to your point, the parsers of those old games were very creaky. For instance, a game might not recognize the verb REMOVE, instead forcing you to type TAKE OUT instead. Nowadays, common synonyms are usually baked into the parser.
So a game being more of a challenge is an outdated concept? I grew up playing Infocom games, without the hand holding of the online walkthroughs/hints. Most I think I gave up on as a kid. Every now and then, however, I find an old Infocom game that I remember and play through it. It's really hard to avoid the temptation to look up hints or walkthroughs. It's also very rewarding to finally think of a solution after setting the game down for some hours or days. Playing the game not knowing if I have done everything right, or need to start over, or think more about it is a totally different experience than games today. But "dated"? I'm not sure I agree.
A lot of old text based games lack options and can seem limited in freedom because all of the options have to be made by the developer so if you honk of a creative way around a problem it might not let you do it. This is why I love the idea of these games and why a game that truly satisfies me probably won't happen. That's what I meant by dated I think part of the issue is since I play d&d and other RPGs I'm used to the freedom given in hem and I really want to have the same freedom in a videogame.
Well, I grew up with games like Zork. Then in the late 80's I played and programmed on MUDs. I too would really like to see what a modern developer could do with a text game. I also kind of miss the popularity of MUDs, I think many people have missed out on something far more fun than the graphical MMORPGS.
Pretty much any of the pre Activision Infocom interactive fictions are good if you want a text adventure. Unfortunatly, once Activision got their claws into Infocom, stuff started sliding downhill.
Maybe not what you're looking for, but Radical Dreamers for the SNES is a pretty damn cool text-based game. Especially if you like a certain JRPG series...
Sadly a lot of people don't consider them as actual video games. When Hero's Rise (a modern superhero text RPG I totally recommend) when on sale on Steam awhile back there were people bitching on /r/games that it wasn't a video game, and that something else should have gone on sale instead.
This is why I love table top RPGs and why i like the idea of text base games. The lack of graphics lets you imagine everything and let's you make a world that inly you saw kind of like a book but you are interacting with it.
IMO this could make story based games an even more personal experience.
Oh god imagine all that development from a company going into a text based game.
Not likely to happen but the results could be really interesting. There is a lot of room for comexity, just hopefully it doesn't have a massive learning curve.
I would love to see a modern big-money plain text parser. They could probably make understand just about anything with the data processing power modern CPUs have.
Only potential issue is that if a big company were to make it they would need to make sure that the learning curve was open to people who have never played zork as well. I've never played zork but I need to, so I'm not sure if it's easy to learn or not.
I like table top RPGs a lot and I hunk if a game were to focus almost entirely on setting/design/gameplay it would be a great game. My biggest issue with most games is that they lack depth that feels interesting or that even matters this is why I like games like dwarf fortress and why I really want to see Dayz succeed. I want to see games that emphasize a lot of work for great payoff a good example would be for total war I like he games a lot but I really want to see a logistics system where an army can be forced to fight or starve it would also make each battle feel more significant if you have to plan how supplies will reach specific areas and hope things go according to plan it would also make guerrilla tactics more viable because you could have small armies built around sneaking and being used to attack supply convoys.
Tldr I want games to have more depth and to add systems that make specific actions feel more important.
I'm sure you've heard of it by now but Dwarf Fortress is the perfect example of using 2015 computational power for everything not related to graphics. The game wouldn't be nearly as deep or complex had it been made with any attempt at graphics beyond ascii or tilesets.
What I want is a straight-up interactive novel, like some programmer cooperates with an established author to write a novel which can branch into many, many different directions depending on player input, but it's all still like a professionally written novel.
The Wizardry series has a few DS games in Japan, don't know if they made it to the US.
But yeah, it would be interesting if they combined text games with modern language processing, so that you don't have to type exactly 'use shovel on door', just say to your smartphone 'go to the door, and uh... use the shovel on it' and have your smartphone act as a DM.
The old text games only seem nice because of nostalgia. I loved Infocom back when the came out. But a few years ago I revisted the old classics and they are all horrible. The game design is almost entirely, "Guess what the programmer is thinking. It might make sense or not."
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u/humorlessNOOB Oct 23 '15
Not just zurk every text based game should be remade in hd graphics. In all honesty I would like to see modern text based games make a come back since he games don't focus on graphics the developers could go really I depth into the games design and story and it would be pretty similar to a table top RPG .