While I've always loved the Infocom games, I was partial to Magnetic Scrolls: The Pawn, Guild of Thieves, Jinxter and so on. Magnetic Scrolls games came with a

While I've always loved the Infocom games, I was partial to Magnetic Scrolls: The Pawn, Guild of Thieves, Jinxter and so on. Magnetic Scrolls games came with a little bit of graphics (or, in the case of the later Wonderland game, a whole graphics environment, including a visual inventory you could drag stuff around in), and also had a more sophisticated parser. For example, if you had a green bottle and a brown bottle you could do something like: > put water in bottle Which bottle? > green The green bottle is now filled with water. This also worked with modifiers in-sentence ("put water in the blue bottle"), and it could handle complex sentences like: "go southeast and get the harmonica and the bottle and then get the knife that is on the table and use the knife to cut the sandwich". The internal data model was also more abstract, and therefore more flexible. For example [1], if you needed to cut something, you could use anything that was sharp enough, because the data model didn't require a specific object. If you had a knife, you could cut a rope, but if you also had a vase, you could break the vase, then use one of the shards to cut the rope with. All the Magnetic Scrolls games are playable today on many platforms through Magnetic [2], and you can find the files online. The original Magnetic Scrolls developers were able to recover the old source code from tapes [3] and will be remastering the other games, and releasing the code. A remastered version [4] of The Pawn came out recently for multiple platforms, including mobile. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/4760332/In-my-opinion-What-are-you-made-of.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/4760332/In-my-opinion-... [2] http://msmemorial.if-legends.org/magnetic.php http://msmemorial.if-legends.org/magnetic.php [3] https://strandgames.com/blog/magnetic-scrolls-games-source-code-recovered https://strandgames.com/blog/magnetic-scrolls-games-source-c... [4] https://strandgames.com/games/thePawn https://strandgames.com/games/thePawn