Zork text-based any good?
Don Macron
jdse...@onramp.net (Jef Sewell) wrote:
> As far as I'm concerned, INFOCOM made some of the best games ever written,
> so by all means, play Zork 2.7 (2.7 is a port of the mainframe version
> originally running at MIT. The series was sold as Three Separate Zorks, I,
> II, and surprise III. Pieces of all three of them are contained within
> 2.7. FWIW, Enchanter, Sorcerer, and SpellBreaker were the semi-sequels to
> the Zork Trilogy. All of these games were so incredibly original,
> especially Z1, Z2 Enchanter and Sorcerer, just mind-blowingly inventive
>
> (Our Dad bought us the first IBM PC when it came out and brought home Zork
> I in a kind of cheap ziploc bag with poorly made documentation. To my
> shame I admit we were disappointed that there weren't any graphics. It
> only took a few days of my twin brother and I playing it to get hooked BIG
> TIME. Played a bigger part of my formulative years than music or books...
> Way bigger.
>
> I know you weren't looking for a biography, but jeez, with a question like
> that I couldn't resist...
>
> In fact, come to think of it, my signature even has a nostalgic reference
> to it...
>
Heck - you're far from alone...I am a wizard on a MUD (Lost Souls -
ronin.bchs.uh.edu:3000, check it out!) where I am coding a 'Zork' area -
and a little shrine to Marc Blanc, Dave Leibling and co. who made such a
wonderful thing. How many of us spent hours as a kid in the glow a CRT,
standing "East of White House"?
By all means, play the game, treasure it, worship it, cherish it, memorize
it!!! (I _still_ have one of the old original zork t-shirts from the
TRS-80 days!)
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Andrew C. Plotkin
any good? Abraham K. So...@unix.cc. (296)
> Zork is still rated as being one of the best adventure games of all
> time. At the time it came out, it was considered to be the greatest of
> them all.
Agreed.
> IMHO, i think they should try and make a graphical ver. of the
> original trilogy.
<gut response>: You're out of your mind.
<second response>: But I bet Activision will try to do it anyway.
<conclusion>: I bet they will. And it'll suck.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
Barry Brumitt
In fact, come to think of it, my signature even has a nostalgic reference
to it...
Check it out,
Later, Jef
Just your .sig? Check my username...
Barry, ex Enchanter/Sorcerer addict
--
Barry L. Brumitt | bel...@frc2.frc.ri.cmu.edu | Disclaimer: Opinions
Robotics Grad Student | PGP Available Upon Request | given herein may not
Carnegie Mellon | http://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~belboz/ | be the opinions of
"Who is John Galt?" | *Skydive!* (D-15427,SL JM/I93) | FRC, SCS, RI, or CMU
Ritchie Brock
Is this game any good? I've fiddled with it a little
bit, but is there a purpose, an ending, etc., or do
you just roam around picking up stuff and putting them
in the treasure case?
Thanks,
Joe
---
--
* Joseph A. Bell (NOT Ritchie Brock) *
* Northern Telecom / Bell-Northern Research *
* Email: jb...@utdallas.edu *
Bill Barol
>I've got Zork 2.7 on one of CD-ROM Today's The Disc!
>Is this game any good? I've fiddled with it a little
>bit, but is there a purpose, an ending, etc., or do
>you just roam around picking up stuff and putting them
>in the treasure case?
adventure, right? Then yeah, it's good. Ten yrs or so ago I was seriously
hooked on these things. The radio vs. TV analogy holds here: text
adventures allowed my imagination to paint a scene in a way that was
essentially unbeaten until Myst came along. Stick with it. There's
definitely a purpose, and an ending-- I can still remember the rush I felt
when I got there.
bb
__________________________________________________________
Bill Barol
bba...@pipeline.com
"Fine Comedy Since 1989"
Jim Elliott
versions of the classic Infocom games, running on the Mac? By
"current" I mean that they work fine without any crashes on all
current Macintosh platforms, including System 7.5 and mulitple monitor
setups. But I want the original, honest-to-goodness Zork I, II, III,
Enchanter, Planetfall, etc. with their text-only interfaces. I still
have them on 5.25" floppy for the Apple II, but no longer have that
machine and really want to play them again. It's been long enough that
the puzzles will no doubt require some thought again.
--
Jim Elliott------------------...@asylum.sf.ca.us
"There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive
feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted
out under the guise of virtue." -- Erich Fromm
Abraham K. Song
Zork is still rated as being one of the best adventure games of all
time. At the time it came out, it was considered to be the greatest of
them all. IMHO, i think they should try and make a graphical ver. of the
original trilogy.
Spader,
Abraham K. Song, the Doctor
Jef Sewell
Well, the goal is ultimately to put stuff in the treasure chest, but
solving the number of incredibly well-designed puzzles is supposed too
serve as the real purpose of Zork. The treasures are just trophies for
your cleverness.
As far as I'm concerned, INFOCOM made some of the best games ever written,
so by all means, play Zork 2.7 (2.7 is a port of the mainframe version
originally running at MIT. The series was sold as Three Separate Zorks, I,
II, and surprise III. Pieces of all three of them are contained within
2.7. FWIW, Enchanter, Sorcerer, and SpellBreaker were the semi-sequels to
the Zork Trilogy. All of these games were so incredibly original,
especially Z1, Z2 Enchanter and Sorcerer, just mind-blowingly inventive
(Our Dad bought us the first IBM PC when it came out and brought home Zork
I in a kind of cheap ziploc bag with poorly made documentation. To my
shame I admit we were disappointed that there weren't any graphics. It
only took a few days of my twin brother and I playing it to get hooked BIG
TIME. Played a bigger part of my formulative years than music or books...
Way bigger.
I know you weren't looking for a biography, but jeez, with a question like
that I couldn't resist...
In fact, come to think of it, my signature even has a nostalgic reference
to it...
Check it out,
Later, Jef
--
>kill troll with sword
It's curtains for the troll as your sword removes his head.
Almost as soon as the troll breathes his last, a cloud of sinister
black smoke envelops him, and when the fog lifts, the carcass has disappeared.
Your sword is no longer glowing.
David Caldwell
->I've got Zork 2.7 on one of CD-ROM Today's The Disc!
->Is this game any good? I've fiddled with it a little
AAAAAAAACK! Any good???? This game is the definitive adventuire game.
Definitely the best I've ever played! Of course I have fond memories of
when my dad first introduced it to me when I was 8 years old on our PDP-11
(Yes we had one at home...), so maybe my objectiveness is tainted by my
still-child-like love for the game. I'd say give it a try.
->bit, but is there a purpose, an ending, etc., or do
->you just roam around picking up stuff and putting them
->in the treasure case?
->
Well..yes...the object for most of the game is to collect all the
treasures and put them in the treasure chest. But trust me. Its way harder
than it sounds. After your done with that, you get to play the endgame. I
didn't pass this game until I was 12 or 13. So I guess I spent abour 4 or
5 years playing it. Pretty good longevity, I'd say :)! But anyway, *I*
think its great.
-David,
who just last month finally learned how to kill the thief.
->Thanks,
->
->Joe
->---
->--
->* Joseph A. Bell (NOT Ritchie Brock) *
->* Northern Telecom / Bell-Northern Research *
->* Email: jb...@utdallas.edu *
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
\ I'd love to stay here and be normal /
/ But it'a just so overrated! - Blur \
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
Jef Sewell
WHOA! You're in luck, Activision released The Lost Treasures of INFOCOM
Versions I & II in the past couple of years for about $50 each. Clearly
this is the best bang for buck of any computer game available today.
There's a Mac version, and I recommend Version I. It's got the Zork
Trilogy and Enchanter Trilogy, all around amazing stuff. Check it out...
Paul F. Snively
magu...@hercules.cs.uregina.ca (Rob Maguire) writes:
> For those out there who liked Zork, and Encounter (Apple ]['s I think),
> Adventure, and all those goodies will probably also like MUDs (Multi-
> User Dimension or Multi-User Dungeons..Have they officially named
> those things yet), MOOs, LPMUDS, DikuMUDs, TinyMUDs, TeenyMUDS, blah,
> blah, blah...(rec.games.mud)
Warning: I loved Infocom's adventure games, and I hang out on
LambdaMOO. The two don't compare at all. Infocom's material was
well-written, had a plot, and had a very sophisticated understanding of
English, given the technology of the day and the limitations of
microcomputer resources. The MUDs etc. lack the quality of writing as
well as the good technology in understanding English.
> Another great thing about those text adventures is that they were so easy
> to program. BASIC was perfect for those things...I'd be churning
> them out once every cuppla days to my friends at elementary school
> (yes...elementary school, whaddya expect, programming in BASIC I think
> was made just for elementary school hackers and nerds to fiddle around
> with a prog lang). I hated IBM's, but the nice thing as a kid is
> that they always came with some BASIC prog. I'd go over to my friend's
> house, he try to show me his new 386 (new back then), but I'd just
> call up basic and play one of my games.
Maybe yours, but the Infocom adventures weren't easy to program: Zork,
originally called simply Dungeon, was written in MDL, a dialect of Lisp
used at MIT. When Infocom was formed and they wanted to reimplement
Zork on microcomputers, they stripped some functionality out of MDL and
called the result ZIL, Zork Implementation Language. The runtime
system for ZIL was called ZIP, the Zork Interpretive Processor. To
port an Infocom adventure from one machine to another, all they had to
do was to port ZIP (which was about 12K on a TRS-80 Model I) to the new
machine.
In any case, the effort necessary to support Infocom's work was
non-trivial, since the system had concepts like on, under, behind, etc.
and all of the objects had qualities such as weight, bulk, sharpness,
and the like. And the process of ensuring that all supported verbs at
least give interesting `it didn't work' messages when applied to all
possible combinations of objects can be a real drag, to say the least,
although default messages take care of many situations.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul F. Snively "Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean
ch...@shell.portal.com that there's no one out to get you."
Rob Maguire
>In article <383pj7$r...@crchh932.bnr.ca>, Ritchie Brock writes:
>
>>I've got Zork 2.7 on one of CD-ROM Today's The Disc!
>>Is this game any good? I've fiddled with it a little
>>bit, but is there a purpose, an ending, etc., or do
>>you just roam around picking up stuff and putting them
>>in the treasure case?
>
>If I read yr post right you're talking about the old Infocom text
>adventure, right? Then yeah, it's good. Ten yrs or so ago I was seriously
>hooked on these things. The radio vs. TV analogy holds here: text
>adventures allowed my imagination to paint a scene in a way that was
>essentially unbeaten until Myst came along. Stick with it. There's
>definitely a purpose, and an ending-- I can still remember the rush I felt
>when I got there.
>
Related to text-based adventure were the roguelike games, rogue, nethack, moria.Stuff that could be played on any basic terminal. I never cared for nethack
or rogue, but Moria caught my fancy, and I'll take it over any really cool
graphics game any day.
For those out there who liked Zork, and Encounter (Apple ]['s I think),
Adventure, and all those goodies will probably also like MUDs (Multi-
User Dimension or Multi-User Dungeons..Have they officially named
those things yet), MOOs, LPMUDS, DikuMUDs, TinyMUDs, TeenyMUDS, blah,
blah, blah...(rec.games.mud)
Another great thing about those text adventures is that they were so easy
to program. BASIC was perfect for those things...I'd be churning
them out once every cuppla days to my friends at elementary school
(yes...elementary school, whaddya expect, programming in BASIC I think
was made just for elementary school hackers and nerds to fiddle around
with a prog lang). I hated IBM's, but the nice thing as a kid is
that they always came with some BASIC prog. I'd go over to my friend's
house, he try to show me his new 386 (new back then), but I'd just
call up basic and play one of my games.
Can any one of you remember that game for Apple Computers (long before Macs)
that was exactly like a text based game, but had those generic
3d perspective hallway drawings. It was called Ahklibeth, or something
like that. I loved this game, but it really sucked when our family
got our first mac. Does any one remember what game I'm talking about.
P.S. Is there a Mac Version? :-) (j/k)
bob
magu...@cs.uregina.ca
Jerome Chan
compilers and intepreters there.
--
The Evil Tofu (Only Human)
Joe Cassara
<ap...@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> Excerpts from netnews.comp.sys.mac.games: 20-Oct-94 Re: Zork text-based
> any good? Abraham K. So...@unix.cc. (296)
>
> > IMHO, i think they should try and make a graphical ver. of the
> > original trilogy.
>
> <gut response>: You're out of your mind.
Sounds like a good idea to me. Read on...
> <second response>: But I bet Activision will try to do it anyway.
I really don't think so, IMHO. They already have RTZ and the rights to
sell the
classic adventures on CD-ROM.
> <conclusion>: I bet they will. And it'll suck.
They really can pull it off and make it work if they stick to the original
story. MADE, Activision's adventure development system, must be totally
revamped. There are just too many bugs in RTZ. Rendering the environment
in 3D (ala Myst) would be fabulous, along with keeping it in the player's
point of view. We've never seen what the adventurer looks like, and I
hope we never do! :) (Remember the mirror in Zork I?) I think that
putting it in graphic form would get the general public interested in
sharing the magic of Zork- the REAL Zork, that is...
-Later
=====================
= Joe Cassara = "...they're too busy playing with their PCs
= jcas...@gate.net = instead of their Pee Pees."
===================== - Neil (...GOD) Rogers
Timothy E Young
: I've got Zork 2.7 on one of CD-ROM Today's The Disc!
: Is this game any good? I've fiddled with it a little
: bit, but is there a purpose, an ending, etc., or do
: you just roam around picking up stuff and putting them
: in the treasure case?
What's Zork 2.7? I enjoy the text-based Infocom adventures
alot! They're EXTREMELY challanging and literate- and the text based
interface allows them a versitility not possible on today's graphic
presentations.
If you want something different try to find one or more of
infocom's classic titles. I'd recommend: The whole Zork series,
Deadline, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (co-written with Douglas
Adams), The Leather Goddesses of Phobes, The Lurking Horror, and
countless others...
Teej
: Thanks,