Rock, Paper, Shotgun

As it happens, I’ve recently been playing some Infocom text adventures. Guess what: Infocom were really rather good. Guess what else: there was one rather significant game they never released. And you can play some of it.

In a remarkable find by waxy.org (linked via the magics of QT3), amongst a complete archive of Infocom’s work is the game Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to one of the most famous and adored IF games of all time, Adams’ own Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. This was discovered on the somehow aquired “complete backup of Infocom’s shared network drive from 1989.”

Read the rest of this entry »

A while back Emily Short posted a link on Play This Thing to adventure game, The Baron, created by Victor Gijsbers. I’ve always had a deep-set love for text adventures (I’m sure the term “interactive fiction” makes everyone feel very intelligent, but they’re text adventures, and that’s how it should be). I remember sitting with my dad at the age of 10, helping him playtest Level 9 adveture games like Ingrid’s Back!. It would seem like the beginning of the career that was to come, if I hadn’t spent my teenage years aiming to become a microbiologist. As it was, it was planting the seeds of reality in my brain for when that inevitably failed.

I saw PTT’s link to The Baron, read that it was a game about moral choices rather than simple adventuring, and thought I’d check it out. I didn’t, however, read the rest of the entry – and I recommend you don’t either before playing. But then, at the same time, part of me wants to protect you and beg you not to play it at all.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well this is the best idea ever.

Someone has converted Pac-Man to a text adventure.

Which is the perfect way to end a harrowing day of no internets. Try to imagine it – from the moment I woke up to the evening, no connection to the outside world beyond a clockwork telephone. Frenzied attempts to set up yoghurt pots tied to string between my house and every other home and business in the world were quickly abandoned after too many peach melbas made my tummy hurt, leaving me to struggle on in a world without access to Wikipedia, Homestar Runner and Google Image Search. But I’m back, and to celebrate I’m playing a text version of Pac-Man – what a confusing mix of retroey goodness.

Read the rest of this entry »