GNARLED, palsied, tremulous old games players may remember the "adventure" genre. None of your fancy 3D graphics, just the good ones, the ones you built in your head as you read the text. I worked on games for both Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls, and I was reminded of them the other day when the human genome was (mostly) published.
Hmm, well the problem with this nifty 'data-driven' instead of 'parser-matching' nature of the Magnetic Scroll games is that it seems none of the games took much advantage of it. There was that guy on RAIF who posted asking about it, and no-one could bring up an example of this simulation-y-ness manifesting itself in a MS game they remembered. I've only played Fish!, and most of its puzzles seemed single-solution enough that it might as well have been parser-input-matching a la Infocom. (Also, you were supposed to be a fish-like alien in an aquatic (though technological) world for most of the game, which they took almost no advantage of simulation-wise). Have you looked into this any further with Knight Orc?
You know what, I haven't yet, only because I had been "saving" the last couple of scenes in KO so it does not mentally become a "dead" (or finished, more realistically) game.
I don't know if anyone else experiences the same thing, but to me, when I close the book on a game, it gets this "deceased" aura about it, since there is no reason to go back and play it. There are a number of games I have completed 95% of and intentionally left.
But yeah, I should finish that one, even though I do pretty much know what happens. :(
And yeah, Magnetic Scrolls didn't do a very good job getting the word out. For whatever reason, the emergent gameplay in Ultima 7 was very famous. But like Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls never really made a "bad" game, so they are still very much worth playing.
