wrightkg

Something about what's behind the toilet in the bar at the beginning of the game. A tricky kind of copy protection to be sure.

Airport_Whiskey

da5id_nz

sdoig

Jim Treacher

People with PCs can play too.

pkittie

Which can be played online (on your Mac) with 1250 other games from 1980 onwards (including some of the previously mentioned games):

[www.virtualapple.org]

pkittie

pkittie

da5id_nz

You're the bomb!

pkittie

> There is absolutely no way to escape the Vogons
> if you didn't pick up the mail.

Thank you! That's what I needed to know. I'm going to install HHGTTG again and retry that. Oh wait, there's no floppy drive here ... gaaaah!!

PocketCoil

then throughout the rest of high school (and after), we would do this for each new infocom game released. man i missed the good ole text based days. i remember us also sitting down and talking about lode runner when it was first released on the apple 2, we thought how cool it would be to play the game from a 'head on' view. again this was like 1982, 83 well before the term 'first person shooter' was coined.

man i also miss the days of staying up for days at a time programming 'demos' and 'intros' for the apple 2, c-64 and then the amiga 1000. ah, the good ole days of assembly programming by night and pascal programming classes by day for high school credit...

kneehighspy

Jim Treacher

Mike the Dog

DrMeteorologist

[l9memorial.if-legends.org]

...who knocked out some really interesting stuff.

I'd recommend Snowball, an epic (7000 rooms, or so they claimed) science fiction adventure, the Time and Magik fantasy trilogy, the satirical Worm in Paradise (and its two predecessors), and, for something totally different, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, based on the popular 'youf' novel.

Magnetic Scrolls...

[msmemorial.if-legends.org]

...did some great games too, although they committed the sin of having rather nice graphics.

BonusKun

[www.richardlowe.com]

The same site has a bit more about Adventure and lots about Zork.

[www.richardlowe.com]

[www.richardlowe.com]

Have fun looking. Remember to keep the lights on.

Chilly Hollow

the IF archive is definitely worth a look for those still interested in playing. it's not sci fi, but the game "Curses" is very good, in classic infocom style.

trillian44

pkittie

However I do remember playing a game on my Dad's computer called "Adventure". One was always lost in the West Hall of the Mountain King...

pkittie

Electroqueen

Anyway, much respect for Planetfall as I can hardly remember ever again playing a game that made me feel so strongly about a character (Floyd). The eating and sleeping requirement was also a great addition to the genre as it really created a sense of urgency.

Other obscure games I remember playing:

Queen of Phobos (great vector graphics including some nifty - at the time - animations)
Kabul Spy (yet still so topical)
Time Zone (on 6 freakin' disks!)
The Mask of the Sun (nifty color graphics)

Mario's Pants

jinchoung

cybereality

FrankenPC

artki

Episode 7 covers several Infocom games. [www.virginworlds.com]

Episode 6 covers Zork. [www.virginworlds.com]

robg33

Jim Treacher

I love that the NBC show Chuck is full of Zork references. Maybe Chuck is 10 years too young to even know what Zork is, but so what?

Jim Treacher

(Actually, there are other authoring languages out there, but Inform is my favorite.)

stefan_jones

sorry, here's the link....

Ron88keys

Ron88keys

Here's a link to a gallery of the box art and goodies that came with many of Infocom's gray-box titles: [infocom.elsewhere.org]

PCGuy

[web.archive.org]

...but I believe that they have taken thegame down, though the page still exists. The same link does take you to a retrospective of the game, including an interview with Steve Meretzky however.

Ron88keys

now i've got an itch to play some zork(s) again along with the others, gotta search usenet now....

kneehighspy

gods-n-clods

[www.wurb.com]

My favorite is Metamorphoses, a winner in 2000.

You can also write your own very easily with Inform7, a beautiful development environment.

[www.inform-fiction.org]

While I love MUDs, they don't come close to the experience of well written and well designed IF, which are like living/playing through great novels and bring all the literary theory about being "ludic" and about hypertext fiction to life... And don't get me started about the hypertext fiction academic wankers... IF rooolz!

Liz Henry

FellTheDabus

sgranade

Yes, but the babel fish puzzle is early in the game, so it's not that hard to restart and get the mail. It's clearly a situation where there's only room for one "object" on the satchel, so you just have to remember that there's an object that counts as more than one thing so the cleaning robot can't grab everything. Anyway, you should be picking up everything you see in a text adventure.

I thought it was much harsher to have to remember to feed the dog (so it wouldn't eat the microscopic space fleet). Sure, you don't HAVE to do that in your time at the pub, because you can do it when you're Ford. But if you get through both times at the pub without feeding the dog, then you REALLY can't win.

Captain Valiant

Sam

The computer tracked what items etc. you got too - you could build things from them, trade them etc. if you knew the right action codes. You really needed a huge notebook to keep track of what was going on.

There was a map, too, to keep track of where in the galaxy you were.

[en.wikipedia.org]
[www.the-underdogs.info]

wererogue

Which is why it did not bring nostalgic tears to my eyes the same way as the others (although they all had some of that.)

92BuickLeSabre

semiconscious

The worst part was that you'd often find that a particular puzzle was unsolvable because you didn't pick up a particular object five levels earlier. For example, when you leave your house at the beginning of the game, there's a large pile of mail sitting next to the door. There is absolutely no reason why you'd think to pick it up. But when you get to the Vogon ship, you need the mail to distract a robot and get the babel fish. There is absolutely no way to escape the Vogons if you didn't pick up the mail.

SeanOHara

I had honestly forgotten about both of them, but just seeing "Today's Stellar Patrol"...

I hear sethmad about Zork, but these two just blew me away.

92BuickLeSabre

I think I agree about Trinity; it's so cool and evocative and well written. But that one scene with Floyd in Planetfall is the best scene in any text adventure.

Captain Valiant

Thassodar

sethmad

MercuryPDX

ShawnC++

Aegis: Gentleman mercenary for hire...

xot