[bernds74]

Well, clicked on it thinking it might be about an old favourite Infocom game, but apparently it appears to be about an old favourite Firaxis game...

Are you the author of the web site? Please make sure the PgDn key works for scrolling through the page. At the moment it switches images which are just barely on the screen.

[glimshe]

I was also here for Infocom! Will the knowledge of the old classics die with us?

[reaperducer]

I was also here for Infocom! Will the knowledge of the old classics die with us?

For all of our modern-day high-powered GPU babble, the Infocom games still have the best graphics possible.

I recently started playing Zork I again on a C-64 emulator, and it really holds up.

The key is to play like you would in the old days: No distractions. Be patient and thoughtful. And actually read everything on the screen, instead of skimming the text.

Since we're now trained to have the attention spans of methed-out ferrets, it can be hard. My tips are to turn the phone completely off, put it in another room, and turn down the lights. Also, do you map by hand on grid paper with a pencil.

Lately, I've seen people bragging about video games providing value because they take 40 or 50 hours to complete. An Infocom game could easily take days, weeks, or months to really explore and appreciate thoroughly.

[anton-c]

I played thru zork and Zork zero not long ago.

Zork is great. Everything seemed to click into place at the end.

I had incredible memories of zork zero but wow, that shit is opaque. I unashamedly used a guide when I got stuck and it took forever still.

[jorvi]

Was this "be clever" stuck, or "bad game design" stuck?

As an example for the latter: at a certain point in the game Okami, you have to get an item from a crying boy you are friends with. You get rather obvious hints the boy has the item. You can talk with him a bunch, and the first few times you get different dialogue. You get more unique dialogue if you try it at night.

He would not give me the item. I spent probably two hours first meticulously combing the area and then backtracking throughout the entire world, talking with most of the important NPCs in hope I missed something. I even thought I might have somehow softlocked or corrupted my savegame.

The solution I never figured out and got from a walkthrough: you have to attack the crying boy. Again, the game gives zero hints or indication you have to do this.

[aidenn0]

It's been 20 years since I played, but IIRC Zork Zero is probably worse than the median Sierra game for "bad game design" stuck. It's pretty bad.

[anton-c]

I was waiting to get dunked on with an "oh it wasn't THAT hard" reply, haha. Thanks for vindicating my feelings. I've not played a ton of IF but could tell it was pretty rough.

[anton-c]

Bad game design stuck. Some of the connections are so obtuse youd have to be a chess computer to see the item being relevant in that way later. And plenty of chances to bone yourself early in a playthru with no fixes(undo being an option lost 1000 turns ago). Frequent sequential saves help, but I feel there's a whole article ranking the friendliness of adventure text games and I'd rank it on the meaner side, haha. They got better at avoiding those situations in their future graphical adventures(but not totally, damn bonding plant in return to zork). Not to mention the map is so immense good luck finding where you dropped the hard hat or whatever.

If u compare the zork and zero walk thru you'll get it. I love the added color and illustrations and world far more than other text games but when I finished it(I was recording) I said "this game should probably be illegal. I cant quit this quick enough!". Still nostalgic tho, and fun in that "I got thru it" way.

So I very much relate to your experience. The text parser can be picky too when you know what to do but the game has its own way of doing it. Then u miss the solution.(edit: typos)

[ghaff]

I think it’s probably also very tempting to just give up on a puzzle and just find the solution or at least a hint online. You pretty much couldn’t do that back in the day.

[glimshe]

Most of these games had hint books ("invisiclues") and selling them was a big part of the business. Some companies actually sold more hint books than the games themselves due to piracy!

[ghaff]

Yeah but those came later. I think Mike started those in biz school and later joined Infocom where he did (ran?) marketing. Even with BBSs there just wasn’t a lot of info out there unless you called one of the authors you knew :-)

[anton-c]

I plan on making a video on zork. I'm sure there's others but it'll be a nice deep dive into a few infocom games. Gonna do one on Odell down under and MECC too.

There's a surprising amount of resources that aren't dead links regarding infocom stuff.

[p_ing]

Don't forget Chivalry.

[bernds74]

For interactive fiction at least there are still people interested in it, and people are preserving Infocom history in particular. Other games might get forgotten over time unfortunately, especially on more obscure systems. Nobody ever brings up Turrican anymore when discussing game soundtracks...

[zoky]

Not just the classics, there is actually a thriving interactive fiction community producing new games regularly. The annual Interactive Fiction Competition usually gets 60-70 entries each year.

https://ifcomp.org/

[7thaccount]

Yep. There are new converts as well like myself. I like modern titles ranging from AAA titles like Doom to smaller indie titles like Kentucky Route Zero which is more like an interactive theater play than a traditional game. However, IF just really scratches an itch when done well and exercises the brain in a different way. I've played with the old INFOCOM games (Zork, Planetfall...etc), but they don't grip me the same way the modern titles do. They're also obscenely hard in ways we don't typically do these days. I noticed the new Doom game lets you modify the difficulty and damage percentage done to you or enemies at any time. As an adult with little time I love not getting stuck in boss battles for hours. Life is too short. Old games didn't have any of that lol.

[glimshe]

Save states and walkthroughts/faqs/hints can provide the help you need, although some people think these are cheating. I'm fine "cheating", though, as long as I'm "cheating myself" and not others.

[ghaff]

I think a lot of players liked the insanely hard. A Mind Forever Voyaging was really well written but relatively easy—which is probably why I especially liked it. But I don’t believe it sold especially well.

[zoky]

Some players might have enjoyed extremely punishing games, but I think most players—and game designers—simply didn’t know any better. Creating a challenge that still feels fair is a difficult balance. Look at the old Sierra adventure games, for example. While they are excellent in terms of storytelling and creativity, they tend to be absolute garbage in terms of gameplay by modern standards. Many of the puzzles were outright impossible unless you had a guidebook, and you sometimes wouldn’t even be told what you did wrong earlier in the game that made the game unsolvable (looking at you, Space Quest jetpack puzzle).

But those games were rightly hailed as pioneers of the genre, and were considered to be the very best in their time. By today’s standards, though, they would be universally panned as abusive of the player, if they could even be released at all.

[reaperducer]

For interactive fiction at least there are still people interested in it, and people are preserving Infocom history in particular. Other games might get forgotten over time unfortunately, especially on more obscure systems.

Since Infocom games run on everything from a Palm Pilot to a mainframe, there's no reason for them to ever go away, as long as we can find people still interested in building Z-Machines for the latest gear.

[aspenmayer]

> there's no reason for them to ever go away, as long as we can find people still interested in building Z-Machines for the latest gear.

I’ve never heard this term z-machines, but it’s interesting, and invokes in my mind a machine that does anything you need regarding z. Specifically I’m reminded of zMUD, but that might be dating myself a bit. Is this z-machine idea your own, or did you happen upon it? Can you think of other memorable or especially useful z-machines in modern usage?

[mionhe]

Z machines are the interpreters that allow you to play the same game code on whatever hardware you want.

zMud was a MUD client, so in some ways not so dissimilar in the sense that they both allow you to play text-based games.

[reaperducer]

I’ve never heard this term z-machines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine

[aspenmayer]

Before the page even refreshed for my original reply, I thought, "huh, I bet the Z is for Zork," and wouldn't you know, it is. That's a pretty good name, when you can grok it from context.

Trying to follow the timeline from that article, it's unclear from context name which came first, Zork, ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), or the word z-machine. I've heard of referring to other systems as [language name/interpreter name/etc]-machine, so that's the context that it reminds me of, but at the time Zork was written, perhaps that convention wasn't established yet? It's before my time, which makes the missing context harder to interrogate solo.

[glimshe]

Turrican will be preserved like Infocom. But I fear they will all be forgotten in the depths of a digital computer history museum. I'd love with LLMs could really bring the excitement of text adventures back. It has been tried but so far it's still in the text version of the uncanny valley.

[lucy_gatenby]

“Oh boy, are we gonna try something dangerous now?”

[danesparza]

To be clear, I thought the article was for this game, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetfall

[DidYaWipe]

Yeah, why is the article entitled "Planetfall," when it has no apparent relationship to the game?

[Narishma]

It has relevance to the game it discusses, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

[DidYaWipe]

I searched the article for the term, but found no explanation for its relevance.