old text adventure games

hey there!

not sure if this would go here, but i couldn't find anywhere else for it at the moment...

do you guys remember those old adventure games where everything was in HUGE pixels and you had to type in your actions and such?

whatever happened to those?

i heard that there were programs you can download that will allow you to run them on current computers. i have no idea what any of that means though, so if anyone has any info on those super nostalgic and entirely rad old games, like the early King's Quest or Moonmist (something like that) i would REALLY appreciate the tip-offs! thanks!

 

Yeah they slowly did away with those as kids lost thier imaginations and the more they loose the ability to think the more they need to make games real. Maybe soon when you get hurt in a game you will get hurt in real life, seems fair.

I know you can find ones to play old C64 and Atari and such on PC but have not found the test base.

It was based off a simple "if then" "goto" lines, can use a C64 emulator to write your own, is simple and fast.

i.e

10 Rem Game
20 Print "To enter press 1" ; "j$"
30 If j$ = "1" then goto 50
40 If j$ = "" then goto 20
50 Print "Welcome"

May not me 100% been well over 10 years so very very rusty

 

you know... i think you're right about the loss of imagination theory.

it's sad.. those games were so awesome. i played fable once a while back, and i think it's the closest "adventure game" i have seen that still seems to keep something of the old-school formulas. but then again, i only spent about an hour fiddling with it, and don't really know anything about the game other than what i saw.

i hadn't thought about writing my own.... thanks!

 

Check out limewire or other peer2peer networks for them.
Also check out one of my old favorites the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game. Douglas Adams spent a long time with infocom writing and customizing each and every response/situation etc.
He also did another one Starship Titanic, but it wasn't as popular.

 

oh infocom! yes! that was the name. my brother once tipped me off about infocom, but i couldn't for the life of my remember what it was called.

hmm... i have never heard of any douglas adam's games. sweet! i'll have to look into that. thanks, man!

 

I remember playing Douglas Adams "Bureaucracy". Adams wrote it just for computers, wasn't based on a book. Anybody remember the "Zork" series?

 

yeah like hugos house of horrors and the original police quest they were definately wicked. I'm not sure about programs about running them on newer computers because at my house I'm running on it a comp with like windows 95 thats just for games like that (original wolfenstein 3d oh yeah). There might be some crazy emulator that plays them. I'll look around.

 

i've been looking around online trying to find the infocom games and found this site if anyone's interested

http://www.latz.org/infocom/

 

95 will run dos just fine. better then it runs windows! unlike xp, which doesn't crash in windows as often but doesn't run dos worth kaka, mainly because it refuses to relinquish the neccessary resources. or so i've been told. both by real people and odd little messages on the screen.

98 is supposed to be the debugged 95. and everyone tells me 2000 is just fine, or atleast better then xp.

(and most of those infocom, electronic arts, sierra online, et c., text games were ported to dos. some of them created on it. i know i ran the hitchikers game on a 386 running win3.11. also zork and hamarabi. both were publicly released as basic listings somewhere like byte or dr. dobbs. i remember typing in hamarabi by hand, i'm not sure where i got zork, i don't think i had an internet connection at the time that worked. may have still been a few noninternet bbs's arround.)

hamarabi and the text based trek, both ran on my osi c1p and vic 20.

=^^=
.../\...

 

If you ever have a problem running DOS games on windows try Dosbox. It always seemed to work cool for me, especially with things like elite.

Damn I remember when the Zork games came out, I always wanted to get a copy and never did.

 

Monkey Island is awesome, though it's not a text game as much as it it point and click. But there's also text games without pictures at all...
www.mudconnector.com

 

There is a Birdman text adventure game on adult swim.com

 

oh wow! a birdman text adventure game.... that's just crazy. haha.

speaking of monkey island, that game was suprisingly awesome! i haven't cared much for pc adventure games since the rise and fall of the later king's quest. ALTHOUGH... kyrandia was pretty cool...

then again i was about 12 or something.

even so, i remember it being great.

i'll have to look into that dosbox thing. i don't really know too much about computers AT ALL... just that i loved playing those games as a kid, but can't seem to find them anymore, and the newer ones just aren't up to par.

 

nothing will really match the mispent youth on the old computer games, its more than nostalgia i'm sure. one of the newer ones interested me, a re-release or whatever of zelda. i don't have the console its out on but hearing they remade it almost persuaded me to buy one.

damn i just remembered i downloaded the black cauldron adventure game the other month, gotta find what disk i put it on.

 

secret of manna!!!!

 

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

 

I saw a java version of 'RedDwarf', but that was quite some time ago... sigh

 

Luisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards!

 

hahaha i used to have one of those on DOS and i used to try to make the characters have sex and do pervy things. They would always say "i dont understand that action" to 10 year old me, that was hilarious.

 

For an upgraded version of hitchhikers guide try this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_nolan.shtml