Games everybody should know

Games for Spectrum, C64, Amstrad, Amiga, Apple ][ and the rest of the 8-bit and 16-bit platforms. Pleas for help, puzzles, bug reports etc.

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Gunness
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Games everybody should know

#1 Post by Gunness » Tue Jun 15, 2010 10:00 am

Most retro sites deal with only a single computer, so there's a natural centre which people can gather around. And there's usually a number of games that most, if not all, users have played and consider to be classics.

In here, though, we're a wildly varied lot, and with such a large selection of games and computers, it can be difficult to nail down an "Adventure 101" list. But I'm sure it's possible (I've always been told it's admirable to be a bit naïve ;)).

So I'd like to see your list of games which most adventure-minded people can be reasonably expected to know and, as the inevitable runner-up, an overlooked gem which everybody ought to try.

My own list:
- Adventureland
- Zork I
- The Pawn
- The Hobbit
- Colossal Adventure (Level 9 edition)
- hmmm....something by Brian Howarth (dunno, Gremlins or Robin of Sherwood perhaps - his games just seemed to be played by just about everybody at one point)
- Curses
- Photopia (perhaps?)

And the runner-up:
- Mindwheel (just because I think it's so incredibly well written)

Anybody else?

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Re: Games everybody should know

#2 Post by Mr Creosote » Tue Jun 15, 2010 10:50 am

Deadline, because it was one of the first non-treasure-hunt games, i.e. a game which showed a text adventure can grow into other story genres as well.

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Re: Games everybody should know

#3 Post by dave » Tue Jun 15, 2010 12:17 pm

For Scott Adams it's a toss up between Adventurland and Pirate Adventure (even though these are not the best examples of his work).

For Brian Howarth I would go with Gremlins, I spent hours trying to beat that game (and eventually managed).

For Magnetic Scrolls I'd favour Corruption over The Pawn (my personal preference).

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Re: Games everybody should know

#4 Post by Gunness » Tue Jun 15, 2010 1:11 pm

Yes, I'd probably go with Gremlins, too. It seemed to circulate heavily in, er, various backup copies ;)
dave wrote:For Magnetic Scrolls I'd favour Corruption over The Pawn (my personal preference).
Interesting. Excluding Myth, which wasn't in widespread distribution, I'd say that Corruption is probably the least known of MS' games. Again, I'm not looking for a "best of" list, merely games that most users can be expected to know and perhaps have played.
My reason for including The Pawn is that Anita Sinclair et.al. caused quite a stir when they launched a game with an Infocom-like parser and graphics on top.

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Re: Games everybody should know

#5 Post by Alastair » Wed Jun 16, 2010 11:30 pm

I'm not too familiar with the modern scene so I'll stick to listing games from the classic era. This list is based partly on my experience but mostly on what I've read about the early history of text adventures, so the list is biased towards historical interest.

Colossal Cave Adventure - Preferably a full conversion of the original 350 point game, though any version should suffice. As this is the original adventure all adventurers should know of this game.

Zork I - The best introduction to the world of Infocom, and where would the genre be without Infocom?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Apparently it was the first computer game to lie to you, trust programmers to be honest and authors to be less than so! Also, it contains two of the greatest puzzles in text adventures: the babel fish, and "it is dark" (it may be repeated ad nauseam throughout the game but there is a sense of real achievement when you solve if for the first time).

Adventureland - The first text adventure that you could play at home, unless you were rich enough to have a mainframe or mini in the basement!

Pirate Adventure - One of the first adventure games that was more than just a treasure hunt.

The Hobbit - I'm in two minds about this, at the time this game was highly rated - a text adventure with graphics, a parser that could accept more than the standard two word commands, non-player characters that would do their own thing, it played in real time (as in the game continued even if the player did not do anything), even the bugs were celebrated, and all this on a home computer. However it hasn't aged well, with the goblin dungeon being one of the most frustrating things you can experience in adventure gaming.


Some more suggestions from the historical perspective would be to include some games from Phoenix/Topologika. Yes, they are frequently cruel and the lack of an examine command makes them atypical of the genre, but all adventurers should give at least one a try. Solving one will put a well earned smug expression on your face.

I have also read good things about the games by Greg Hassett, notably Enchanted Island Plus and World's Edge. Some day I'll get around to trying them out.

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Re: Games everybody should know

#6 Post by Mark » Thu Jun 17, 2010 7:54 am

Gunness wrote: My own list:
- Adventureland
- Zork I
- The Pawn
[...]
Thinking back a few decades... didn't The Pawn have this totally cool three-step help system?

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Re: Games everybody should know

#7 Post by Gunness » Thu Jun 17, 2010 12:05 pm

@Mark: well, "totally cool" might be a stretch :) As I remember it, you had to enter a code from the manual to receive the various hints. A bit cumbersome. The revised Infocom releases did this in a somewhat easier fashion.

@Alastair: good to see H2G2 in here. Personally I found the babel fish puzzle really infuriating and not very intuitive. To each his own :)
As for The Hobbit, I think it's deserved it place among the greats. In the early 80's everybody played it at some point or another. I agree that the NPC's are more dimwitted than fun or useful (with Thorin and his constant singing being an exception). I guess that Philip Mitchell was just too ambitious with his Inglish parser (or perhaps he blatantly oversold it). The magazines were stuffed with tales of bugs ranging from the bizarre to the highly annoying, perhaps even more so in Sherlock, where you could ask the cabbie to drive himself somewhere, simply eliminating him from the game. In The Hobbit, as I recall, you could have various object kill themselves ;)

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Re: Games everybody should know

#8 Post by billy7720 » Sat Apr 09, 2011 2:12 am

I have "Jewels Of Darkness" which was a take off of The Hobbit by Rainbird.

LOVE this game and STILL enjoy it.

Too bad I can't find "Silicon Dreams" by Firebird for the IBM PC. I think I have the Apple // version though and have never had the heart to part with it! Plastic box, manual and 5.25 disk.
Jewels has the cardboard box, manual and 5.25 diskette. Both are in MINT condition.

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Re: Games everybody should know

#9 Post by Richard Bos » Wed Jul 30, 2014 1:22 pm

Acheton. It's almost as old as Adventure (and about as old as Zork); more importantly, it's the first of the Phoenix/TSAL games, and therefore, ultimately, led to the creation of Inform.
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Re: Games everybody should know

#10 Post by Gunness » Wed Jul 30, 2014 1:40 pm

... and the review is online - a terrific read, too!

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Re: Games everybody should know

#11 Post by Richard Bos » Wed Jul 30, 2014 1:49 pm

Gunness wrote:... and the review is online - a terrific read, too!
Thanks.
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Re: Games everybody should know

#12 Post by ahope1 » Fri Aug 01, 2014 10:40 pm

Richard Bos wrote:Acheton. It's almost as old as Adventure (and about as old as Zork); more importantly, it's the first of the Phoenix/TSAL games, and therefore, ultimately, led to the creation of Inform.
Hi, Richard. Could you expand a bit on why you say that the Phoenix/TSAL games led to the creation of Inform? I was under the impression that Infocom's Z-code was the obvious and main influence on Inform?

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Re: Games everybody should know

#13 Post by jgerrie » Sat Aug 02, 2014 1:01 am

Alastair wrote:I'm not too familiar with the modern scene so I'll stick to listing games from the classic era. This list is based partly on my experience but mostly on what I've read about the early history of text adventures, so the list is biased towards historical interest.

Colossal Cave Adventure - Preferably a full conversion of the original 350 point game, though any version should suffice. As this is the original adventure all adventurers should know of this game.
I've been fiddling with trying to convert the original FORTRAN source code of Will Crowther's ORIGINAL version of Colossal Cave Adventure to Basic for some time...

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Re: Games everybody should know

#14 Post by Richard Bos » Sun Aug 03, 2014 10:27 pm

ahope1 wrote:Hi, Richard. Could you expand a bit on why you say that the Phoenix/TSAL games led to the creation of Inform? I was under the impression that Infocom's Z-code was the obvious and main influence on Inform?
On its target, yes. But ZCode is only the machine code of the ZMachine. Infocom's actual legible code was in ZIL, which is much more like a variant of Lisp than like imperative languages like Inform and TSAL.
More importantly, though, if you read Inform 6's Designer's Manual* you'll find, in the introduction, that Graham Nelson went to Cambridge at the time of TSAL, and was influenced by it in his work at the time. I can't tell how much of TSAL itself has filtered through to Inform - perhaps not much, because the language is so much more modern than both TSAL and ZIL, but I do think that we can safely say that if TSAL hadn't existed, neither would Inform.

Richard

*An exercise, by the way, which I recommend to any budding implementor, regardless of whether you plan to use Inform 6: even if you skip the technical parts, The Craft of Adventure is well worth reading and contains a lot of sensible ideas. The whole book is better written than any IF programming manual I've read, perhaps better than any programming manual of any kind. And if nothing else the typography is miles ahead of most and metric sh*tloads ahead of K&R's.
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Re: Games everybody should know

#15 Post by pippa » Mon Aug 04, 2014 8:02 pm

Richard Bos wrote:On its target, yes. But ZCode is only the machine code of the ZMachine. Infocom's actual legible code was in ZIL, which is much more like a variant of Lisp than like imperative languages like Inform and TSAL.
Speaking as a non-programmer who can usually more-or-less follow the logic of programs by reading source code, despite being totally hopeless at actually writing it myself...

To me it looks like ZIL and Inform share an object-oriented approach, where objects have their own routines outlining how they react to different verbs. This means Inform seems to have a lot more in common with ZIL than with TSAL (where the verbs all have routines describing how they act on different objects. Not to mention TSAL's weird insistence on using assembly-language-style relative jumps instead of proper IF...THEN...ELSE statements! What's that all about?)

Out of curiosity, does anyone know what sort of language Graham Nelson's two Galaxy's Edge games were written in? Was it more like Inform or TSAL? Or something else? (And how much is he embarrassed by that photo?)

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