What text game gave you the most treasured memories?

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

"Circle Loopy Stinky Stinker"?

[RealNC]

Even though it's not my favorite text game (it's one of those "7/10" games,) "Hexuma" is the first text game I was able to play. The famous text games everyone knows about were all in English. I didn't speak English yet back then.



Hexuma is a German text game, and since that's my other native language, a pirated copy of it ended up on my MS-DOS PC soon after I saw the box in a computer store. The cover art and screenshots looked very enticing. There's some really great VGA pixel art in this game, which runs at 320x200 with 256 colors.

The learning curve wasn't as steep as one would imagine, since the game also supports mouse input in a way that's quite similar to a point&click game. Hovering over game objects immediately shows the object's name under the mouse cursor without having to click first. There's also a "first aid" function that when clicked shows a CYOA-style menu where you can choose between several actions to perform. However, using the parser is much faster, and is actually required for making progress, and once I got the hang of it, I was using it exclusively.

Some of the puzzles were brutal. Mostly because of their "guess what's in the author's mind" nature. They kind of make sense after the fact, but not while trying to solve them. Somehow I progressed through the game through a shitload of trial and error. It must have took me over a month to reach the end of the game. And then disaster struck. At the very last section, there is a copy protection question. Fuck. My pirated copy didn't include anything. No text file with copy protection answers, no crack, no nothing. I was pissed beyond belief. And I wasn't going to buy the game at full price. In 2022 money, it was like 100 dollars. That's way too much for a 13 year old.

I had to wait about 4 years for the game to pop up in one of those "classic games" releases that go for 10 bucks and was finally able to finish the game.

[Tdarcos]

Is Turbo Pascal a text adventure?

Tubo Pascal is a compiler. My point was to try and get you guys to think differently. While playing interactive fiction can be some fun, nothing compares to the satisfaction of having worked for hours solving your problems, and then you get it right, and you look up and you've spent 12 hours straight and never even noticed.

I never had as much fun playing a game as I did writing code. Which is an adventure in text.

[AArdvark]

I...actually knew it was a compiler. There was a RetroBits podcast about it.

Writing code that can do real world stuff can be more fun than playing computer games sometimes

[Jizaboz]

Writing code that can do real world stuff can be more fun than playing computer games sometimes

Right! I had more fun creating a couple of text adventures than I did playing a lot of them haha

Also, back when the newest IdSoft game was what I was into, I'd spend more time in the damn map editor and SDK than actually playing the damn game in most cases.

[Jizaboz]

Oh! And another one just came to mind.

The "modern" CYPHER - Cyberpunk Text Adventure really stuck out to me. It got horrible reviews due to a terrible text parser, bad spelling/English (it wasn't their first language), and the way some of the characters are portrayed. I actually really enjoyed the unique concepts and general theme and feel of the game! It had cool sound and visual effects. I even finished the broken mess.

[Roody_Yogurt]

If we're limited to one answer, mine would have to be Lurking Horror. One of the first two legitimately-obtained Infocom games I ever owned, I played it at a time where it was still a bit above my reading comprehension level. Without any knowledge of what "Lovecraftian" even meant, every new creature or eerie element introduced in the game really blew my mind, so it had the most "whoa" moments.

If we're free to spew as many games as we want, Ballyhoo, the other of the first legitimate games would also be up there. Funny how one has you perpetually in a freezing winter night and the other is a nice August night, and I spent so much time in each. As someone who has put so many hours into Ballyhoo, I know how to milk it for all its worth- like knowing which NPCs actually give useful responses about other characters- and without that knowledge, I can easily imagine how it hasn't aged well for the average person. Those bits of info can be very hard to find. That's part of the reason I covered Ballyhoo in my "Old-School Transcripts" project.

Later on (but before LToI), I legitimately owned Witness, and I have to agree with pinback that it is great. For me, more than any other Infocom game, it just oozed coolness and really nailed Classic Hollywood noir.

After I got "Lost Treasures of Infocom," of course, Planetfall had its big emotional moment, which still stands tall among of IF's big emotional moments, even if I can't argue with those who call it contrived and manipulative.

Wishbringer blew me away with just how well-designed it was, fairly moderate difficulty level with two solutions to every major puzzle. Its plot and set pieces aren't anything special, but it was the first game where the design alone really wowed me.

And when I got "Masterpieces of Infocom", playing A Change in the Weather and realizing that there was an online community writing IFjust like Infocom was a life-changing experience.

Lastly, when I finally got around to beating Necrotic Drift, years after its release, and I saw that the character that had me as its avatar gave a little speech using words I had written on this very forum (all to a very cool song by pinback, btw), it was just a really cool moment for me. I was going through a bit of a dark patch in life at the time and it really picked me up.

[ChainGangGuy]

Apartment F209. A tidy IF romp that got you in and out and on with your day.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Roody, that was beautiful. Thank you.

[pinback]

Apartment F209. A tidy IF romp that got you in and out and on with your day.

Oh man. Look, there's a walkthrough.

http://www.plover.net/~davidw/sol/a/apart97.html

It's strange, looking at that map. That's how it was laid out. A flood of real-life memories bursting from each rectangle (well, except the bedroom which I never went in after I piled all my boxes in there on the first day.) The kind of memories that you know very well you were miserable at the time, but now you look back on fondly.

I lived there with a folding cot, a folding chair, a folding table, a cat that hated me, and nothing else, and at the time I was like, what a mess I've made of my life, and now if you asked me if I wanted to live in an empty room with a folding cot, table, chair, and a hateful cat, I would be on my way there before you finished describing the offer.