Infocom Maddness

hamster

Hey,

I recently got going on Interactive Fiction again. Before I knew it I was playing Zork 1 again. This time I mapped it out and took notes as I went along. I played this years ago but I never got into it... I guess its because I never bothered mapping these things.

But now it's thrilling - a 90K adventure (Zork) in a Zcode inform reader - I'm using WinFrotz (I think the Frotz was picked from a spell name in another text adventure - called Enchanter).

I wished I had more time to play these... but curious has anyone completed any of these games and how long did it take you? For the record I have been mapping Zork I for maybe 3 days now.

What was it that made these games so addictive? The mapping? The puzzles... the sheer peace of it all?

hamster

Mapping new locations for fun...image attached

Trode

Never played Zork, oddly, but I was a fan of the old graphic adventures(or IF as they're known now) in the C64 days. I came close to finishing a couple, too. I think a large part of the appeal was the way so much of it happened in your head. In a sense, they had graphics unsupassed to this day, as no amount of bump-mapped, specular-lit, physics-enabled splendour can come as close to reality as the pictures conjured in your imagination by cold descriptions offered in a few lines of text. Of course, this often jarred with the fact that the game often wouldn't let you do something you knew would work, if only it would listen. Many an afternoon was spent typing out different ways to say 'smash down DOOR with SHOVEL', rather than trying alternate, and probably correct, solutions.

Earthhorse

I downloaded A Mind Forever Voyaging a while ago but to be honest I couldn't figure out what was going on. I was typing things in and nothing was happening. Maybe I should have read the manual.

Fair play to you on mapping those things out. I did something similar when playing Mean Streets a few years ago. Not mapping but taking notes of what the different characters said and their relationships. Still didn't finish it though. I should really go back to it.

hamster

Actually I found the mapping more devious than I though.. in the maze I ended up having to drop objects which is standard enough - but I had a lously thief taking my stuff if it were considered valuable!
As for rooms I have mapped each direction - Essentially I had to - to get the true links between rooms - especially those links that went to a previous room from another link. So say for example I went north, later I'd discover that I travel back to the room going down or up.

Hey, yesterday I just noticed that Graham Nelson (Designer of Inform) has released version 7. Version was out since 1996. Have a read! Even none programmers can bang an interactive novel. The language took an exciting turn - you can use english to describe your objects and design. Seriously, it doesn't sound as potentially vague as you think.

http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Inform%207.html

hamster

If you want a good story I'd recommend Anchorhead or Theatre. You get these and more at Baf''s interactive fiction guide.

http://www.wurb.com/if/index

There is a lot of changes starting to happen. With Inform v7 - they are integrating blorbs (using metadata) to pull in the original history docs and images that came with the earlier games. A bit like TOSEC but no where near as big.