You have been eaten by a Grue (Zork & other old IF games)

So, perhaps my search terms are just wrong, but despite the high percentage of Homestucks in these fora, it looks like there aren't any threads for old-school text adventures/IF games.

So! General thread for all things Zorkly or Infocom-ish. Anyone else play these games Back In The Day (or, maybe not so Back In The Day, if you discovered them through MSPA)? Anyone manage to beat the HHGG game? Do you bemoan that Kids Today are growing up thinking Xyzzy is just a Cards Against Humanity thing and don't appreciate it's True Origin in Adventure?

 

i suck at text games but during my freshman year i hung out with one friend of mine during physics class, and mostly we just listened to music but at one point we decided we should try to play Zork.

He promptly killed our character at least 5 times within one class period. At least 3 of those were 100% on purpose. I have still never finished Zork.

 

I haven't done much in the way of old-school text adventures, but I have played more than my fair share of graphics-less roguelikes. I love a good dungeon crawl, and I'm fascinated by early internet culture.

 

Aaaaand now I'm playing Zork I on Newgrounds. Current location: The Troll Room.

 

I technically did, but I had a walkthrough.

 

Yeah, same for me and my brother. (I have zero regrets about reading the hintbook, since there are some very entertaining things in there.)

 

Yeah, and I wouldn't have been able to appreciate all the funny stuff in the game's writing if I was screaming in rage trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do.

 

Yeah. We appreciated it for one blind playthrough as far as we could get (answer: pretty far, but not past "I hope you fed a dog a peanut butter sandwich hundreds of turns ago"), but after that we were done trying. It was kind of nice to get to appreciate the Babel Fish puzzle from a first-time player's perspective once, though. As absurdly unfair as the actual game is, I can't help but admire the loving care put into making ridiculous fake difficulty into an art form. :'D

... Which also reminds me that I should really check out Bureaucracy sometime, or at least read an LP of it, because that looked inspiringly infuriating.

 

Okay, there was some fun stuff in Zork but having to visualize where in the area my character was got mentally exhausting.

 

I freely admit I have never finished HHGG, even with the hintbook. (So kudos to @LadyNighteyes for that). There is sooo much fake difficulty that I'm only really appreciating now as an adult how OTT it was. =P

Do you mean within each room, or do you mean "okay, now I'm west of the white house, and I went north twice, and..."? Because the latter is definitely hard! There are maps out there. I know I reaaaaally appreciated the maps that came with the collection we bought when I was in middle school. Which, oddly enough, is what set off my interest in making maps for video games (Zork included).

BTW, when you say graphic-less roguelikes, do you mean completely sans graphics, or do you mean ASCII-graphics games like Nethack?

 

@Quicksilver The mental map part. I did find a map, but for whatever reason it was still really fatiguing. The fact that I didn't know what I was looking for didn't help. I got to the dam and was still wondering, "Okay, when does my underground adventure start? Does this game have a plot, or do I just wander around?" (ETA: I did get to the coffin room and saw the gates of Hades, that was pretty neat.)
I mean ASCII-type, like NetHack. I actually think the setup Angband gives you, with the multiple terminals, is exactly the amount of information I need for a dungeon crawl.

 

Huh! Well, that makes sense as a thing to be frustrated about. :) (If you feel like trying that kind of game again someday, you might find ZorkZero a better experience -- ingame mapping, plus a low-graphics frame around the text window that shows you which ways you can exit your current room and changes design based on which general region of the game you're in.)

I have never played Angband, although I should someday, just because of its history. Nethack is an old favorite of mine (and my introduction to the genre). I also really like the rather-more-recent Drakefire Chasm (very minimal roguelike where you are a dragon and eat things).

 

Angband can get intense! The biggest change when I started playing it after NetHack (besides Angband just being bigger) is that you're not supposed to clear each level of the dungeon. Monsters sometimes appear closer to the surface than they "should" be, and you've got to learn to evaluate when it's time to just run the fuck away. But on the other hand, sometimes really sweet loot also appears closer to the surface than it "should" be and then you can pull off sweet maneuvers and it feels incredible. Or you dive to a dangerous depth for your level to tiptoe around looking for the sweet loot and hoping you don't come across a pack of phase hounds or a grape jelly. (I hate grape jellies. Jellies should not move at all, let alone that fast.)

 

I screwed up the Babel Fish puzzle one step at a time once so I could properly appreciate how BS it was.

 

My dad used to obsessively play (and I think still does occasionally play) a Zangband derivative called Troubles of Middle Earth which I don't think is even on the internet anymore.

 

ToME still exists, it's just got a new name now, because they sell it for money: http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=ToME

 

Yeah, but he played a specific edition of it with a stupid number of races and classes and practically every character, location, and object named in Tolkien's legendarium in it somewhere. That version is hard to find.

 

THAT SOUNDS AMAZING. Oh man I wanna fight Feanor in a dungeon, holy crap.

 

No wait. I wanna fight Eol. I very much don't wanna fight Huan because Huan is friend, he is best dog. Fighting him would make me sad.

 

Don't think Feanor or most of the Silm characters who definitely died/went into the West were there, but, e.g. Gollum was a super-annoying enemy who sometimes showed up when you weren't expecting him in early game. And the random orcs who the Hobbits ran into in the books were all in there. So were several named Eagles, though they were friendly by default if your alignment was Good.

I never got very far in because I could never figure out what I should be doing, though.