*Beep* *beep* | Adventure games are back
[Image: hugo3]Thanks to Corvus Elrod’s excellent cool-stuff-spotting skillz (yes, with a z), I ran across The Brainy Gamer’s series of posts about searching for Narrative in old games, by replaying them.
Way cool.
He started out by plunking down with a copy of one of Infocom’s old text adventure masterpieces: A Mind Forever Voyaging (my personal favorite of the bunch? Planetfall.) What really impresses me is that he actually managed to get his hands on one of the old school copies, box, components, and all. That is not easy to do.
Cruising through his gameplay diaries, though, have really made me excited to fire up some adventure games. Or maybe even some text adventure games.
About eight years ago, I programmed my own text adventure game. I should go find what I made, compile it, and throw it up here for everyone to laugh at.
I didn’t realize it until later, but what I actually made was a text adventure game engine. I did it all in Microsoft QBASIC, and I was obsessed with getting it all set up so that basically all I had to do was enter room descriptions and tell it which directions the player could go.
Looking back, it was actually a pretty impressive system. I built a whole dictionary for the game to act on, including standard text adventure commands - inventory, i, north, south, e, w, open [blank], stab [blank], eat [blank], and so on. It was a lot of fun to make, but if I remember correctly, I never figured out how to let the player save their game and resume it later. Kind of a deal killer.
Regardless, I am now totally back in adventure game mode. I think I’m going to log into Steam tonight and pick up a copy of the new Sam & Max games, or at least episode 1. I played it briefly on my friend Spencer’s computer a couple months back, and it looked like good fun (although nothing could be as good as the original).
This is something that Tony touched on a while back with Portal; we’re starting to see thinking games again. Games like Portal, that make you stretch your brain a little bit, and then lets you enjoy the gentle vibration of snapping it back into place afterwards.
As I think back over some of my favorite games, almost all of them have had some element of that. Some puzzleness. Something to make me feel like success was as much a feat of mental strength as it was dexterity and luck. Hugo 3. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. God of War II.
It might be cyclical; the Myst craze happened a long time ago now. Maybe it’s time for another big game-culture swing. We’ve got games like On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness to look forward to.
Adventure games are back. Totally.
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* Ten What the hell? 20 points points if you can get the extremely obtuse TV reference in the post title