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Wow, the ad copy for Compuserve makes it sound like a really expensive electronic version of a magazine.
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I like the Zork game I still have it on my computer. And is the ORBQUEST game like a roguelike game or something like that? I don't know but maybe it is. The description (including the part that says it requires a cursor-addressable terminal) looks like it might be. All three games (not the Compuserve one) it looks like I might purchase it, but modern games aren't what I am looking for and the ads for modern games often don't explain much, as far as I can tell.
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Clearly, it's been FROTZed.
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Zork is a horrible game?
The article writer needs to die.
Horribly, and in a long, painful manner.
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He needs to get eaten by a grue perhaps ?
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ROFLCOPTER. This was great.
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For other game genres I'd agree, but with dungeon crawlers the expectation is that you will map out the dungeon and keep a list of what is in each room. Rather than use saves to stay alive, you keep at it until you learn the right sequence of moves. Much like the old Nintendo games, like Contra, where you can't get through unless you memorize the timing. Once you get to monster_c, you just go through and do it right. As long as you've been mapping your progress, it should take five minutes to type in the commands again.
FWIW I consider Graham Cluley's Humbug to be the best text adventure I know of. Zork bores the hell out of me.
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Too bad a real casino doesn't work like it did in SpaceQuest.
You save your game and then gamble. If you win, you save your game again. If you lose, you restore from save and try again. You end up with enough money to get through the rest of the game.
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Compuserve actually went so far as to have CB channels instead of names for those chatrooms.
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I just wanted to say that this comment is very good. You deserve mod points.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
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Anyone remember Infocom's Leather Goddess of Phobos? It came with a scratch'n'sniff card, one of the scratches was of a men's urinal (I think)!
Quite happily played it at school until one time the teacher came past and I hit the 'boss' key and the screen redrew showing a spreadsheet. It listed, I think, various S&M and other sex objects. Detention and no use of the school computers for a month. :-) now but :-( then.
Do any of the UK peeps remember 'L - a mathmagical adventure'? Yes, it was an educational game. You enter the library, the bookkeeper asks you what is the only word in the English language with three double letters in a row?
Flippy
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WTF: The Expand full text link gives an IIS "The page cannot be found" error!
Daily doses of fresh WTF served by IIS, must be destiny.
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np: Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts II (Ghosts I-IV)
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Anyway, read my second post.
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Puppy and Ecstacy don't mix. I've the emotional scars to prove it.
[pedantry]Ravers were people who attended Raves, not "addicts who attended parties". Raves could be considered parties but the more acceptable term in the past was "event". Typically the event was hosted by a DJ, eventually the better DJs became professional and took to remixing other artists music and publishing their back-beat tracks, this is where Crystal Method, The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk and Prodigy grew from. Many ravers took ecstacy (MDMA) as a way of enhancing their perception of the music and provide them with energy to dance to the music, they were not necessarily addicted.[/pedantry]
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Yeah, remember it well, one of my faves - the scratch n' sniff card that came with the game wasn't required to finish the game, you could say "smell the odor" or something like that at the appropriate time. If you did it in the toilet (sniff, that is), the smell turned out to be a piece of old pizza discarded in the corner.
One of the problems with finishing the game was the map of the catacombs... it was impossible to get out of the catacombs without the map. And of course the map came with the game materials/manual.... an effective method of punishing people with pirated copies...
A great game though. Still available around the traps for use with Frotz/WinFrotz, one of the z-machine interpreters.
FP
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*** You have died ***
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Absolutely brilliant.
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Sierra really went over the top, though. At one point on one of the KingsQuest games (forgot wich) you walked onto a screen and saw a car chasing a mouse. at that point, you (hopefully...) has something to throw at the cat. Throwable items as far as I remember, where: a stick and a shoe. Have nothign to throw? Bad luck. Threw to late and the cat succeeded? Bad luck. Throw the WRONG thing? Bad luck. That's nothign to do with challenging, this is plain madness.
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Man, what an ubergeek
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The only WTF I see here applies to the poster. So you apparently lack the imagination to enjoy and the intellectual skills to play vintage text games. For most people who were around in the 1980s and played these games, they rank among their all time favorite gameplay experiences. I'll take almost any Infocom game over any modern whizzbang gollygee flashy graphics game. To this day I'd put the Zork and Enchanter series from Infocom in my top rated games ever made. Please don't try to pass off your whinings as a WTF.
Addendum (2009-02-02 13:05): Also, megafail for trying to ridicule the CompuServe prize but only succeeding in demonstrating monumental ignorance of how CompuServe worked back then.
"I went looking for a new car and this one dealer said as an incentive they'd give me free gas for a year. OOOOOOH! Fakewows! Thats SOOO amazing, considering cars only need one tank per year..."
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Read the ad. It says the prize is "two hours of free time on Compuserve." And according to the ad itself, that costs ten dollars.
Maybe it means two hours per day for a length of time, or maybe the cost is actually more than five dollars an hour. But that's not relevant. What's relevant is the ad itself.
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Don't you mean:
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Some of those community games have, in my opinion, surpassed the quality of Infocom's best. Truly "interactive fiction" not just "text adventure", there. Got your interest piqued to revisit the revitalized scene? Try "Curses", "Anchorhead", and "Christminster" for starters.
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The version I played was xyzzy.
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Beautiful.
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Don't forget "Spider and Fly" -- ten years old, but how cool was the concept!
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If you were using floppy disks, you just put a new disk in and saved.
It only became a problem when you started using a hard disk, and your last save automatically overwrote your previous save, and there was no way to have staged saves or change the save name.
Of course, in this game, it didn't matter, you just ran through the sequence to get back to where you were last time.
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What I hated about the text adventures was, the maps were designed while on LSD. Anywhere in the game you could just lose yourself because going back got you somewhere completely different and places could just loop like a mobeius strip.
You're next to a house, there's a bicycle here.
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Still older youngsters here might not realize that "Citizen's Band (radio)" was a simulation of the "Western Union Telegram". Back before the age of the CB radio, sending and receiving telegrams was a big fad. You could send messages to business associates halfway around the world for mere dollars, in near-real time.
And ever more older-than-old youngsters here might not realize that "Western Union Telegram" was a simulation of the "smoke signal", a means of contacting neighbouring tribes, which were themselves an adaptation of the sort of signal fires one could relay from mountaintop to mountaintop to place an emergency call to Rohan all the way from Minas Tirith, should things become substantially more messy than expected, but only once, of course.
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Yes, but the packet loss on smoke signals were terrible, and you'd ping out in anything more than a light breeze.
The beacon fire wasn't particularly useful for gaming either, as it took a bloody long time to send any sort of binary signal, and sometimes when you needed to send a zero, you were unable to put the fire out.
Play-by-telegram sessions were notoriously expensive compared to their cheaper cousin, play-by-mail. The guy from Western Union tended to get a bit frustrated when the DM sent out the loot list after an encounter, and sometimes had a hard time comprehending who the "Mordekainen" fellow was.
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Ah! Memories! "It's dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." That line strikes more terror into geeks' hearts than any "Be afraid. Be very afraid." or "Do you know where your children are?" Modern gaming just can't compete.
Nice post! VERY hilarious!
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Ho, I never expected to see that Orbquest ad pop up again! I wrote that ad copy for the game, which I wrote in Ratfor (since a C compiler cost too much for me to afford but somehow I had a Fortran compiler.) It was a basic dungeon crawl, with a few things thrown in to make it more interesting. It used your CP/M ASCII CRT terminal as a graphics device.
I sold about a hundred copies and decided it was more fun writing software than selling it (I got very tired of writing up UPS shipment sheets, one per box.)
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And by the way, Ravers are actually a reference to rather powerful undead-like creatures described in the Thomas Covenant series of books written by Stephen Donaldson (Lord Foul's Bane, etc.)
The "Orbquest" on code.google has no relationship to the game I wrote. The original is gone (though I could probably rewrite it in a few days from memory; I still have a copy of the manual.)
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Finally, the goal of the game is clearly stated in the first sentence of the ad: "Find the glittering orb and get out alive, that is your quest." So I don't understand your confusion about the ad. Calling the game Orbfind didn't work for me...
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Walt,
I have been looking for information on Orbquest (and other old CP/M games) for my Adventure Game Museum, http://www.mocagh.org/ If you happen to read this (or anyone else with old adventure/RPG games for that matter), please get in touch! My contact info is given at the above site. Thanks
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That game continues to drive me mad, since I never beat it and we lost the disks during a move. Do you know of any extant copies, or maybe have any interest at all in rebuilding it for modern systems?
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I got hold of a 12-in-one collection of old games, including all 3 Zork games, and tried them all, but Zork2 was the worst...let me explain why: the head villain, a wizard, doesn't just sit around, he keeps popping up at random and zapping you with different curses, all starting with "F"...for example, "freeze", which makes you unable to do ANYTHING till i wears off, or "Fall", which can kill you if you try to climb a hill before it wears off, and worst of all, "filch". what's bad about that? well, to defeat the wizard, you need to collect 3 magic orbs, bring them to a specific place, use them to summon a demon, collect a bunch of "treasures", then give them to the demon-then it will kill the wizard. the "filch" spell snatches treasures away and puts them in a place you can only access AFTER the wizard is dead...and at least once, it made one the ORBS vanish, leaving me in a no-win position. after many attempts, i finally discovered a nifty exploit: after summoning the demon and giving it a few treasures, the wizard will simply stand in the room with the demon, allowing you to collect the rest of the treasures without his interference!
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