Txt based games. Games made out of text only

[Gentlegamer]

I have the old Zork games on my GOG wishlist

[calthaer]

I remember spending long summer afternoons in the relative cool of the basement, sitting cross-legged in front of our VIC-20 and an old black-and-white TV, plucking away at Adventureland, Pirates Cove, and the vampire adventure from Scott Adams. They were all a few years out-of-date at that point - we got the VIC-20 used for $30 and then bought a bunch of cartridges from Toys R Us at greatly reduced prices (likely overstock from the video game crash). When I think of "text-only games" I typically think about these first.

Second, it might be about Rogue and its various flavors and incarnations (including spin-offs like NetHack, AlphaMan, and others).

I don't tend to play these games much these days. Not sure why. Maybe I just appreciate today's gaming a bit too much - the interface is streamlined, it makes things very clear and easy - even very difficult strategy games. Maybe I'm just "outsourcing" that, too - I do read blogs like Renga in Blue, where someone else plays these games and describes what happens. Those 5-minute blog posts distill an hour or so of gameplay - a lot of which doesn't sound all that fun. Illogical puzzles, tons of trial and error...maybe, like most of the rest of us, I just don't have the patience for those games any more.

[YoshiM]

I don't tend to play these games much these days. Not sure why. Maybe I just appreciate today's gaming a bit too much - the interface is streamlined, it makes things very clear and easy - even very difficult strategy games. Maybe I'm just "outsourcing" that, too - I do read blogs like Renga in Blue, where someone else plays these games and describes what happens. Those 5-minute blog posts distill an hour or so of gameplay - a lot of which doesn't sound all that fun. Illogical puzzles, tons of trial and error...maybe, like most of the rest of us, I just don't have the patience for those games any more.

This is pretty much my feelings on text adventure games (and probably some other past games as well). The parser was part of the puzzle and there's only so many words of the English language one can try in NOUN/VERB combos to achieve something. Even the full sentence setup of Infocom games didn't really make things easier as you had to try and slip into the mind of the writer to come up with potential solutions.

[Nz17]

Ah, yes, text-based games, from adventure games to action games to pinball games to Rogue-likes. During those pre-sprite days, there was quite the variety of computer game genres present, all created with just text, including MOO's and MUD's including BBS dial-up games.