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I miss the Infocom games. One of the most enjoyable parts of them was the feeling that you were engaging with an actual person and their own personality, sense
by onan_barbarian 15y ago
I miss the Infocom games. One of the most enjoyable parts of them was the feeling that you were engaging with an actual person and their own personality, sense of humor, etc. The programmer and author of these games were often one and the same; at the least, they weren't a huge team of people writing off a spec.
I love many modern games but the better they get, the more they seem to be strangled by their own content pipeline; the requirement to produce AAA-level graphics, sound, writing, advertising means the scale of these things is very large and the appetite for risk is low.
All that being said, many of the Infocom games were stupidly obscure and irritating and relied on you doing something almost completely arbitrary at some given point to make things work. But they were just so good in so many ways that this was forgivable. All of the Zorks, the Enchanter series, Suspended, Starcross, Deadline... the list goes on and on.
It's worth noting that Infocom themselves moved into a dodgy neither fish nor fowl territory towards the end with added graphics and some pretty mediocre titles.
Almost 30 years on, I can't work on a house using a ladder and not think "It's too bad that the ladder analysis department closes at noon".
- jonhendry 15y agoI sometimes reflexively type 'l' or 'i' in Unix terminal windows rather than anything appropriate or functional.
- ramchip 15y ago> "It's too bad that the ladder analysis department closes at noon". Out of curiosity, what game is this?
- onan_barbarian 15y agoDeadline. Spoiler explanation in rot13: Gurer jnf (hfhnyyl) n frpbaq zheqre yngre va gur tnzr juvpu erdhverf n ynqqre sbe gur crecrgengbe gb pbzzvg. Lbh unq gb or va gur ubhfr gb gevttre gur riragf yrnqvat gb gur zheqre naq pbhyqa'g svg gur ynqqre vagb gur ubhfr. Gur tnzr unq n srngher jurer lbh pbhyq unir nal bowrpg gnxra njnl gb or nanylmrq, juvpu gbbx gur bowrpg bhg bs npgvba sbe na ubhe be fb. V qrpvqrq gb frr vs guvf jnf n ybbcubyr, naq guhf tbg gung zrffntr. Gurl jrer cerggl gubebhtu.
- ramchip 15y agoThanks. It's nice when IF games take into account these small details.
- starwed 15y agoYou should really look at modern IF, which retain all the good things you mention but have a more modern/humane approach to the actual game play. Lost Pig is a short, interesting one: http://pr-if.org/play/lostpig/ http://pr-if.org/play/lostpig/
- chalst 15y agoI have very positive memories of playing Graham Nelson's Curses. Nelson implemented the Inform language so that he could write Curses, making it a landmark game in modern IF games. The game is like the best of the Infocom games in how it builds up a world in terms of initially confusing parallels that start to fit together like jigsaw pieces; it's achievement is that it does this in a more sophisticated and rewarding way, to my taste at least. It takes as much time to complete as the bigger of the Zork games. You can play it online at: http://z-machine.appspot.com/game/curses/ http://z-machine.appspot.com/game/curses/
- onan_barbarian 15y agoI have a regrettable snobbery towards modern IF for reasons that I can't fully justify. When it comes down to it, I think Infocom games got me at the right age, where almost all grown-up writing (even writing that has to 'work' when chopped into little interactive fragments) seemed very sophisticated and interesting. It's a bit akin to a passage in one of Bret Easton Ellis' (yes, I know) early books where the 20-something protagonist realizes the Playboy centerfold is now _younger_ than he is and finds that it all doesn't work so well. Plus, I've lost the long attention span for this stuff. My 12 year old self would regard his current self as a gibbering, ADHD-addled chimp. I hope to have some time to rectify this, and maybe play some modern IF at some point (or even write some?)...