Wednesday 17 October 2007

Your Adventure Awaits

>LOOK

Oval Office
You are standing inside a White House, having just been elected to the presidency of the United States.

There is a large desk here, along with a few chairs and couches. The presidential seal is in the middle of the room and there is a full-length mirror upon the wall.
What do you want to do now?

> INVADE IRAQ
You are not able to do that, yet.

> LOOK MIRROR
Self-reflection is not your strong suit.

> EXAMINE CHAIRS
There are several chairs arranged around the center of the room, along with two couches. Under one couch you find Clinton's shoes.

> FILL SHOES
You are unable to fill Clinton's shoes.

> INVADE IRAQ
You are not able to do that, yet.

> INVADE IRAQ
You are not able to do that, yet.

Whatever happened to adventure games? Before consoles ruled the roost they were everywhere. I remember probably my first introduction to the genre on my little rubber keyed friend the Sinclair Spectrum 48k. It was The Hobbit (way back in 1982!), and I hated it with a passion. For its time the parser was pretty advanced, as rather than merely understanding the usual "get ring" type commands you could type sentences such as "follow tiny little man to Mordor to throw ring into volcano" and it just might happen, if you were lucky.
At one point in the game, it was possible to drink wine, getting the player (temporarily) drunk. The game would then substitute "sh" for "s" in its responses (e.g. "You drink shome wine"). This caused extra amusement if the player entered the command "sit".

Even with all this 'advanced' stuff I still found early adventure games frustrating, and like many people resorted to typing in swear words just to occupy myself. This would often result in amusing responses and filled my juvenile mind with much joy and happiness.

Ah the good old days of gaming! So back to my question, whatever happened to adventure games? Well, they evolved into point-and-click titles such as Monkey Island and Sam & Max completely avoiding the need for the games to understand text entered by the player, and they were good and often very humorous. But they just don't make em like that anymore... or do they?

There seems to be a whole underground realm of these kind of games now available on the Internet, some of them previously commercial games and others created from scratch and available as freeware. If you miss a good adventure you could do worse than start here.

Were you an adventurer? Are you a Hobbit? Do you have any large gold rings you need to dispose of? Maybe someone can help on the GAMEOV3R Forum

4 comments:

CaptainD said...

Hi there!

Just wanted to thank you for mentioning the Top Ten Adventures I wrote a while ago - it's always nice to know someone else thinks what you wrote had some value.

Cheers,


Dave (CaptainD)

Lee said...

Hi CaptainD!

No problem, it's a great Top Ten. I just noticed you're a fellow brummy too :)

Lee

CaptainD said...

Heh not quite - I live in Birmingham but I'm from London. Don't want to pick up the accent really! :-D

Lee said...

Been trying to think of a come back to that but you got me! :-D