3 ms·

Is there any good modern analogue to Infocom games that I can plan on my iPhone slowly?

• brians 8y ago
  Yes! All the Zarfhome stuff, like Hadean Lands or Dreamhold. Deathless: City's Thirst and Choice of the Deathless, both set in Max Gladstone's lawyers-are-wizards-are-lawyers "Craft" series.
• i_don_t_know 8y ago
  Frotz is available on the AppStore. It's an interpreter for these types of games. The base install includes several games and you can download more from within the app through the link to the IFDB.
• jackhack 8y ago
  Slowly? the iPhone is many thousands of times more capable than any of the target systems these software were built for -- typical was a 1 megahertz 8-bit CPU with 32 kilobytes of RAM. Even the most inefficient ZIL interpreter will spend most of its time in a stall loop.
  • egypturnash 8y ago
    I think “play slowly” in this case means “take it out during odd moments of the day such as waiting in a line or riding a bus and poke at the puzzles instead of catching up on Twitter”. I am pretty sure that even a first-generation ZIL interpreter spent the bulk of its cycles flashing the cursor and waiting for the player to type something.
    • jackhack 8y ago
      Thank you - that makes perfect sense. I obviously forgot that there's a human element to all this.
    • aaaaaar 8y ago
      I thought "slowly" was a reference to the reduced typing speed on the phone.
• wool_gather 8y ago
  If you have a pre-iOS 11* device, "The Lost Adventures of Infocom" should still be for sale in the App Store. It has a dozen-ish of the actual Infocom classics. Best on an iPad, but I think it's usable on a phone. *They didn't -- and won't -- re-build it to cross Apple's 64-bit barrier, so you can't play it after iOS 11.