by Tdarcos » Thu Dec 09, 2010 6:58 am
AArdvark wrote:They should have Bob and Doug's Excellent underground adventure...or something.
I find it ever increasingly difficult to play text adventures or RPGs. I just don't seem to have the patience anymore. Time was I could play stuff like Jinxter for weeks, thinking about solving the puzzles all day long then going home and trying stuff out. Now if I can't solve something in two tries I just give up and log onto facebook. Maybe it's the huge amount of useless information we're all swimming in these days.
Text-Based Adventures at one time were state of the art in puzzles. But we've gotten more power and capability in computer games.
Compare a text adventure vs. We Create Stuff's
Map pack for Portal which is a complete replacement for the standard game, and might actually be a better set of puzzles than the original. I know much more of them stumped me than the ones in Original
Portal.
"Video killed the radio star." - The Bangles
A visual and audio-based puzzle is going to be much more interesting than a text-only puzzle unless the game creator is a very good writer. In one movie or TV show they pointed this out where kids in a classroom are reading the first sentence of
Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
So the teacher asked, why didn't he say "It was a crazy, mixed up time"? The kids finally got it: because he wanted to create a literary allusion, he wanted to show us something in a different way.
Today in film you could do the whole thing with pictures too, possibly without sound, and it might be more powerful than the original if done right.
Every new medium brings new ways to tell a story. What IF needs to do is work like radio and do a better job of painting pictures for the mind.
[quote="AArdvark"]They should have Bob and Doug's Excellent underground adventure...or something.
I find it ever increasingly difficult to play text adventures or RPGs. I just don't seem to have the patience anymore. Time was I could play stuff like Jinxter for weeks, thinking about solving the puzzles all day long then going home and trying stuff out. Now if I can't solve something in two tries I just give up and log onto facebook. Maybe it's the huge amount of useless information we're all swimming in these days.[/quote]
Text-Based Adventures at one time were state of the art in puzzles. But we've gotten more power and capability in computer games.
Compare a text adventure vs. We Create Stuff's [i]Map pack for Portal[/i] which is a complete replacement for the standard game, and might actually be a better set of puzzles than the original. I know much more of them stumped me than the ones in Original [i]Portal[/i].
"Video killed the radio star." - The Bangles
A visual and audio-based puzzle is going to be much more interesting than a text-only puzzle unless the game creator is a very good writer. In one movie or TV show they pointed this out where kids in a classroom are reading the first sentence of [i]Tale of Two Cities[/i]:
[color=red] It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. [/color]
So the teacher asked, why didn't he say "It was a crazy, mixed up time"? The kids finally got it: because he wanted to create a literary allusion, he wanted to show us something in a different way.
Today in film you could do the whole thing with pictures too, possibly without sound, and it might be more powerful than the original if done right.
Every new medium brings new ways to tell a story. What IF needs to do is work like radio and do a better job of painting pictures for the mind.