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I learned English as a second language from playing Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards when I was a kid. Didn't know how to pronounce "Suit"
by smokel 3y ago
I learned English as a second language from playing Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards when I was a kid.
Didn't know how to pronounce "Suit" until I was about 18.
To this day I am disappointed by the "Point & Click" remakes. It was probably the first hint that society as a whole develops in ways that does not always align with my own interests.
Building a story out of text, as opposed to visual imagery, allows for a different kind of phantasy. I like both, and I sure miss the amazing feel of interactive text and graphics based adventures that Sierra produced in its early days.
- kazinator 3y agoYour English probably smells like the inside of a motorman's glove ...
- scrame 3y agoHow appropriate, you fight like a cow!
- ClassyJacket 3y ago>phantasy You really did learn English from videogames! :P https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantasy_Star_Online https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantasy_Star_Online Never played it but I heard it was pretty rad.
- PaulHoule 3y agoI think the original Phantasy Star was better, I played this port https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantasy_Star_Collection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantasy_Star_Collection In the Western tradition fantasy and sci-fi elements are kept strictly apart most of the time, but the game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_(series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_(series) broke that rule, I think the creator wanted to fit every idea he could into the first game. Ultima was vastly influential on western CRPG's but I think it was even more influential on JRPG's like Phantasy Star (which has that genre mixing), Dragon Quest, etc.
- anthk 3y agoDragon Ball merged scifi and fantasy lores since 1984. Also, Saint Seiya. And Star Wars, where DB owes a lot.
- LanceH 3y agoWasn't there a 'phantasy' on bsd. A LOTR inspired text RPG.
- smokel 3y agoHaha, no the use of "ph" was intentional in trying to allude to the psychoanalytical concept. I did happen to play Final Fantasy and Phantasmagoria, though :)
- qingcharles 3y agoLoved that game. You heard right.
- pavlov 3y agoSame here. English was my third language which I absorbed mostly from Sierra games at age 9-12. I didn’t speak it with anyone until years later. The Larry games certainly offered some interesting colorful vocabulary and cultural references which all flew over my head. The word “prophylactic” still instantly makes me visualize the shopping scene from the first game. The funny thing about learning a language this way is that English is forever stuck as a written language in my mind. I can speak it just fine [1], but it feels somehow a bit wrong. I’m guessing medieval clergy might have had a similar relationship with Latin. - - [1] Except for the pronunciation of the word “pear”. I still can’t remember if it rhymes with fear or bear. To avoid embarrassment, I stay away from food products containing this fruit.
- n40487171 3y agoIt's bear upside down!
- pavlov 3y agoI don’t think there’s a mnemonic that could overcome my peerless fear of pear…
- dumpsterdiver 3y agoSpeaking of pears is a perilous journey.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- plagiarist 3y agoDoes it help if the mnemonic highlights an absurdity of English, like "bare pear?"
- stevoski 3y agoIn New Zealand English, pear rhymes with both bear and fear. So in a pinch, you can just pretend you learnt English in New Zealand.
- fhars 3y agoThat was not a type-in adventure, though, that was distributed on disks, not as a printout to type in (what this article is about).
- PaulHoule 3y agoRemember that BASIC was developed on minicomputers in the later 1960s. I think the first book of type-in games was this 1973 book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games which David Ahl wrote to help promote DEC's minicomputers which I saw a lot of as a kid because I grew up in New Hampshire right next to DEC's headquarters in Massachusetts and DEC donated numerous machines to schools. Before my high school got a VAX (a 32-bit machine a lot like the 386) it had a PDP-8 which had a printing terminal and two video terminals and I think 24K 12-bit words. It could support three sessions running BASIC or boot up in a one session mode and run https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure Some schools had much nicer PDP-11 machines which had 8-bit words and could give each user a 64-bit address space so the BASIC experience was a lot like a top-of-the-line home computer. Dave Ahl saw micros were the future so he started Creative Computing magazine and came out with this sequel in 1980 https://doc.lagout.org/science/0_Computer%20Science/0_Computer%20History/old-hardware/TRS-80/More%20BASIC%20Computer%20Games%20%281980%29%28Creative%20Computing%29%28pdf%29.pdf https://doc.lagout.org/science/0_Computer%20Science/0_Comput... I had a TRS-80 Color Computer back then which was pretty unusual and my take was that most games from those books were pretty portable and you could usually get them working on any micro of the day with simple modifications if any. Now those text adventures were a special case, there is the issue of (1) not wanting to reveal the text, but also the fact that (2) is is cumbersome to express that kind of behavior in basic, and (3) the programs get very big. Text adventures of the 1980s were usually written in a specialized object-based interpreter. The most famous was infocom's z-machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine which is still used today. I think every Z-machine interpreter of that era was written in assembly, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer) developed his own interpreter that was simpler but more specialized than the Z-machine. Scott developed a BASIC version of his interpreter which you could type in, and also developed assembler versions of the interpreter for many machines like the black&white TRS-80, Apple ][, etc. Both the ZIL machine and the Scott Adams Interpreter had compilers which would turn human-readable code into a binary file that the interpreter would play. For what it is worth, there is an electronics teaching lab at Phillips Hall at Cornell University named after David Ahl that I often walk past on the way home from work.
- foobarian 3y agoSame but from Zork. The first word I looked up in a reverse dictionary was 'forest.' The word I could never figure out because it wasn't in the dictionary was 'stiletto' :-)
- BeetleB 3y ago> To this day I am disappointed by the "Point & Click" remakes. It was probably the first hint that society as a whole develops in ways that does not always align with my own interests. I'm torn by this. I played a lot in the 80s and 90s, and mostly took a hiatus till very recently. I too noticed the games are much easier - even way easier than the 90's point and click adventure games. However, I also realize that I'm now much busier, and if they were as challenging as the older games, I simply wouldn't be able to play them. I do appreciate that easier games now exist for people like me! The other thing I noticed: The storytelling in modern games is significantly better! People still make interactive fiction games that are solely text (think Infocom style), and from what I've heard they are superior to the old commercial ones. So there's always that.