Text adventure Games still around
You are in a small hallway, there are doors to the North and West….
The Wall Street Journal Online has an article about the continued existence of the text adventure games. You know the genre, before the advent of 3d graphics, role playing games were basically interactive novels of a sort. Read, then type “look north” or something, “open door” “go north”, etc… and be presented with more text.
I remember well those games… in fact I remember writing one or two. (Playing many others…) They relied on an imagination and sometimes frustrating solutions to puzzles. (You think it’s a pain to go to track down a security key in something like Jedi Outcast or Jedi Academy….), try backtracking through “go south, go west, go west, go west, go north, go west, go south” and try to turn around and get back….
Anyway the 11th annual interactive fiction competition is underway for those that still craft the text only games. The games involved in the competition can be downloaded here and from a seperate site there is an interactive fiction faq.