Interactive Fiction thread (ITT: You Can't Get Ye Flask)

Just attempted to play Galatea, which I've been told is quite famous among interactive fiction players. "Ask about sadness." "You can't put your question into words." "Ask about emotions." "You can't put your question into words." "Ask about future." "You can't put your question into words." Aagh! (The only interesting results I could get were from inputting "t death.")

So, IF players, what do you recommend to convince me the genre's worth it? (The only game in it that I've managed to beat is Spider And Web, and only with a walkthrough.)

My typical experience with IF:

The genre was a bit before my time, I admit.

edited 16th Jun '11 4:08:50 AM by Talby

I don't play many IF, but I liked Anchorhead very much.

The one who wrote the page sure is a fan...

edited 16th Jun '11 4:17:21 AM by Nyarly

While many mouths would froth at the idea, I think that any new I Fs should have a list of functioning words (and possibly phrases as well if those don't spoil too much) with a simple search function. Poking the parser several times in every new situation is no fun at all.

I remember playing a bit of really old one on an equally old computer.

I also played a bit of Le Passager Du Temps, but didn't go very far (I would probably have failed to leave the first screen at all if I hadn't seen my cousin play it first.

Why not a drop-down list like in modern programming environments? (or in the Half Life 2 console)

edited 16th Jun '11 4:27:52 AM by Medinoc

>Necro thread

That's not a verb I recognize.

>Post on thread

Which do you mean?

>Interactive Fiction thread (ITT: You Can't Get Ye Flask)

You successfully post on the thread.

>x my post

I'm a "new" fan of Interactive Fiction, having played it mainly since 2010. I got introduced to the genre through Hitchhiker's back in 2008, but really it was just for some jokes and I never even got close to beating it. My brother then, in 2009, found the Grue meme and started playing Zork, and I soon followed. We then got Frotz for the iPad and the rest is history. My favourite works are Spider and Web, The Dreamhold, Lost Pig, and The Weapon.

>Destroy post

Violence is not the answer to this one.

>Eat post

(First taking the post)

That's hardly portable.

edited 20th Feb '12 11:19:39 AM by PiratePete

I actually have an account and some reviews (mostly negative ^_^;) on IFDB. I also once wrote a review for Blue Lacuna, an awesome game once you get past the slightly pretentious opening. I've even beta tested a few games: Fate (decent), Pascal's Wager (good), and Condemned (meh).

The only thing I haven't done is write a real game, though I did make a little "toy" called "Spoiler Troll".

edited 20th Feb '12 1:18:08 PM by Ryusui

Nice! I'm very interested in these, although admittedly it's kind of for the novelty. And -

- Ryusui

Blue Lacuna! That's by the same guy who made Whom the Telling Changed! I've occasionally listed that as one of my favorite video games. I'm not sure why, but I just really like that one. I still need to play Blue Lacuna though.

Since we're here, can anybody recommend some top-notch games, aside from Zork?

I remember playing ancient MUD/MUSH games back in the day. If you thought "Get Flask" was tough to comprehend, toss other players in.

>examine thoughts

I actually enjoy IF for it's own sake. I don't really know why; it's probably due to having a lower barrier of entry and (when programmed well) more flexible controls than graphical adventures.

>plug shamelessly

I'm currently working on an IF game in Inform 7. It's sort of a Urban Fantasy minimalist RPG with a very flexible plot. Working title is The Seventh Day.

Played a few on Uncyclopedia a few years back... kept getting eaten by a grue.

Just made pages for the following games:

• Curses
• The Meteor, the Stone and a Long Glass of Sherbet
• A Bear's Night Out

These are also games I highly recommend.

Bout time Curses got one. It's a very hard and unintuitive game, but I respect it for it's oldschool difficulty and feel that did a large part to revive the genre. That, and the author created a user-friendly, flexible language kit that made games much easier to code without knowledge in 80s computer jargon.

Andrew Plotkin's one of my favorite writers. His gimics tend to be a little hit or miss with me, but the guy's got a good flare for description that lets your mind do the work and the settings are pretty memorable. The Dreamhold is a great game, not just as a tutorial, but as a good example of minimal storytelling.

I got bored playing The Dreamhold :| I felt like once you got into the curving hallway, it threw too many locations at you at once. All those rooms branching off... The lengthy descriptions got to be too much for me, too. Now I did end up liking it in the end — I even made a quotes page to collect pieces of the story together — but aside from the command tutorials, I'm not convinced it's the best introduction for a newbie. Then again, one of my first games was Zork I, which gives you most of the underground to explore and is pretty hard to make real progress on the first time you jump in, so maybe that's just my prose preferences talking.

Hours after making my previous post, I ended up making another page... for Dunnet, my actual first IF.

As for Curses... I'm currently in Alexandria, and I have some good ideas for where I can go from there. I just haven't gotten back to it just yet. Also, still stumped on how to get past that squirrel.

I kinda gave up after that bit. It's a very lengthy game, even by today's standards so you definitely have to go far down the rabbit hole to finish it.

Zork in spite of its clunky moments and occasional mazelike structure, almost stubbornly remains a classic.

It's a little hard to say why it works so well, but it's got a lot of charm and in hindsight is surprisingly playable given just how gosh darn old it is. Same goes for Adventure, which still has some great descriptive prose and memorable moments.

>KILL DRAGON

WITH WHAT? YOUR BARE HANDS?

>YES

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE JUST VANQUISHED A DRAGON WITH YOUR BARE HANDS! UNBELIEVABLE, ISN'T IT?

Zork 2 is a definite improvement and probably one of the best of the early IF games. The trick with the house, the keyhole, and the rug is a bit ridiculous though and stumped me for months.

I recently picked back up TADS and I'm making my way through the TADS 3 Tour Guide and its associated adventure, The Quest of the Golden Banana.

I'd like to see games make more use of listen to/smell/taste/touch descriptions, including and especially for things you wouldn't expect results from. The Dreamhold was pretty good about this. It had some smells for things, and there's a spell you can examine in a few different ways — examine, look through/in it, listen to it, feel it, pull/try to take it — and you can examine or try to feel some abstract things such as light and darkness. But dang it, you let me lick objects carved from the shadows of the world itself and then tell me "You taste nothing unexpected"?

(I'm kind of joke complaining here, and I do think it's kinda funny in its own way, but I would've also loved to see actual description, even if it was just "You taste nothing.")

edited 30th Jul '16 3:49:39 AM by Twiddler

Yeah the senses don't get used much if at all. It's coded as an automatic default prompt for Inform, but I've never seen it used.

IF for all its strides in thinking more abstractly still favors the visual medium even when it's just text.

I found a 1984 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde adventure game for the ZX Spectrum. It ends with a train jumping over a cliff to land safely on the other side and Jekyll getting redeemed at the last minute thanks to a priest and controlling his thoughts when drinking the potion. Any idea what namespace it would go under? it seems tropable.

I played a Wizard of Oz adventure game on my computer once but it always crashed. There's a Dracula game, a Sherlock Holmes game, and a Winnie the Pooh game too! Those all seem tropable too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBcO5Ym425E

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0006207

I also found 2 PC action-adventure games starring the duo, as well as a DS adventure game. http://www.gamefaqs.com/search?game=jekyll

edited 4th Aug '16 11:41:19 PM by lalalei2001

Hey, that's neat. It'd go under the Video Game namespace. Unless you meant the page title, then it'd either go under Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde or, if you needed to keep it separate from another game with that title, you could add some distinguisher at the end, like the year of publication, publisher, platform, etc. For example: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1984). Looks like VideoGame.Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde is being used to refer to an NES game, so you'll probably want to do something like that.

edited 5th Aug '16 4:06:50 AM by Twiddler

There's next to no info on the 2001/2010 PC games or the DS game, so I just used one page for all of them. If they can be split off later I'll do that, but here's the page as it is now ^^ VideoGame.Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde

I'd love to see what kinds of bad endings you could get in the ZX Spectrum game. Those tend to be fun in text adventures. Dracula's would be fun too!

edited 5th Aug '16 5:32:28 AM by lalalei2001

Good thinking! I separated out the NES tropes, since they made up the majority of the list.

I remember several near IF games from the Tandy Coco. We had Mickey Mouse's Space Adventure and the more whimsical Winnie the Pooh one. There was also one for Yellow Submarine and The War of the Worlds.

And one of the disks my brother got from the"software sharing" groups had walkthroughs for several dozen IF games, and the stories I imagined reading through those...

Ah, the things that capture a kid's imagination... I read game manuals many times over. I must have spent hours poring over the technology tree poster that came with Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. I even had it up on my wall, before the corners (where the thumbtacks went through) got too worn out. I wonder where that poster is now.

...Oh right, this is an IF thread. Hmm. Well, call me cheesy, but the Zork covers, with the words in stone bricks, and the partially open door with light behind it, and the taglines, it still inspires a sense of awe in me. Of course, I never saw one in real life, just the images on Wikipedia, but hey, just goes to show the importance of preserving information for the future.

Do FMV games count as interactive fiction?