nemesis <nam### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
>
http://parchment.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/parchment.html?story=http://parchment.toolness.com/if-archive/games/zcode/curses.z5.js

  I really miss the text adventure games of the 80's. They don't make that
type of games anymore.

  And by that, I'm talking about *graphical* text adventures, not purely
textual text adventures.

  In a graphical text adventure the upper half (or about half) of the
screen was the actual image (usually with vector graphics and sprites)
of your current location. The lower half of the screen contained the
normal textual description and the command prompt.

  And the image was (usually) not just a decoration, but served a real
purpose. It was interactive.

  For example, the textual description of the location might not have
described an apple at all, but the image might show an apple somewhere.
You could then write "examine apple" and it would describe the apple.
You could then "take apple" and the apple would actually be removed from
the image (and added to your inventory).

  Likewise the image might show a door (not necessarily mentioned at all
in the textual description of the location), and if you "open door", the
image of the door would change to show an open door.

  But that's not the only reason why I liked graphical text adventures.
Call me unimaginative if you like (I really don't consider myself to be,
but whatever), but I really like it when the text adventure shows me an
image of the place, rather than showing me a 10 lines long boring
description.

  Oh, and the best text adventures back then had a unique image for every
single room. (Many of them reused parts of other similar images, which was
easy as the images were usually drawn using vector graphics, but nevertheless
they usually showed something for that room that made it unique.) Maybe if
you were in a maze then some images might have been repeated (but mazes
were usually frowned upon because of adding only fake difficulty and not
real content).

  I have never seen such a graphical text adventure since the 80's. Adventure
games went into two completely different directions:

1) Almost pure graphics, ie. point-and-click graphical adventures.
2) Pure text. No graphics. Nada.

  You won't find graphical text adventures anymore, which is a real shame.
(Or at least I haven't found any, even though I have searched.)

  Nowadays hobbyists will write so-called "interactive fiction". I find
many of these games to be very boring. They are more like choose-your-
adventure books (with one single path you can take) rather than real text
adventure games. They concentrate too much on the story and too little on
gameplay. They often lack puzzles which are interesting and require ingenuity.
They are not games. They are "guess the command to advance in the story"
programs.

  If I want to read a short story, I'll read a short story. What I want is
to play a text adventure. A graphical one.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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