I haven’t played any text based games before, so I choose
this, the first text adventure ever made (1975).
Interactivity –
Move 1 grid in a N, S, E, W direction.
Get a story about the players surroundings. Move on or take action (take something,
attack, open, use)
Concept/Arena/Story
– set in a series of caves involving bears, dwarves, dragons and trolls. I only played a small amount of the game, but
I wasn’t given a story behind why the player is in the caves or what the goal
of the story is. I think it is this very
fact that leads one to want to keep playing to see what happens. The genre (Interactive Fiction) allows the
player to be a co-creator of the fiction and leaves a lot to the player’s
imagination. Later versions of this game
displayed an image with the scene descriptions.
Goal – to explore
and play out the story. There is no
scoring system as far as I could tell.
Challenge – Some
scenes have enemies that the player needs to deal with to advance ie. Throwing a bear at a troll to scare it
away. Others have puzzles that must be
solved in order to continue ie. Locked doors/grates and finding a water bottle,
filling it, then watering a bean stalk to climb. The biggest challenge was spatial awareness.
I ended up having to download a game map so I could I see were everything
was. Also, I got quite frustrated with
the commands. The website where I played
the game only listed about 6-8 commands so I got stuck early on at a locked
grate that I couldn’t open on those commands alone. I had to look up another site that gave more
commands. This site again, didn’t even
list all the commands, I found even more on yet another site.
Overall : Frustrating as hell (I kept getting lost, not
knowing the damn commands), but I kept wanting to go back to see what happened! Who doesn’t want to throw eggs and bears at
trolls!
I quite enjoyed the nostalgic aspect of this game. I remember growing up to some text based games but I am not sure if Adventure was one of them.
ReplyDeleteI did find this time around though that now that we have some programmatic knowledge I actually felt as if I were in a giant selection statement held together by a bunch of spaghetti code (if player chooses "walk north" GOTO LINE 440).
Perhaps not having any programming insight would make this game more enjoyable but for me it now feels like an interactive adventure book.
I didn't actually have too much difficulty with the commands however as I remember playing quite a few games of similiar calibre. If you type help in the command line the game also mentions what it can and can not understand and also gives you a historical context for the game as well that was quite interesting.