Gayla

I realize that you're replying to the previous post rather than talking about the subject of this thread (ie., text games) since most text games don't have any graphics at all; they're just words. But I think there are some people who also think that many text games focus too much on fighting, and they get bored with the typical settings of high fantasy or space opera. Personally I don't like to do a lot of fighting and killing when I play a game. I'd rather solve mysteries, which sometimes can involve danger and suspense. But everybody has his/her own preferences, and text games have something to offer for a wide variety of preferences. The only preference it can't cater to is if you don't like to read sentences or type on a keyboard! But if you like to read and can type with at least one or two fingers, you might want to check out some text games. The key is to choose a game that suits the way you like your games to be. That's why I recommend that people read reviews as a first step to deciding which game they want to play. Mild spoilers below... For example, "Augmented Fourth", by Brian Uri, has a quasi-medieval setting, but you won't see any elves, dwarves, and dragons there. In this game you play in the role of a musician whose only possession is a trumpet. He gets thrown into a deep pit because he played "Ode to a Duck" for the king, and it turns out that the king hates ducks. Escaping through a hole in the bottom of the pit leads to a abandoned granite mine and eventually to an isolated village built inside a dormant volcano. The musician discovers that when he plays "Ode to a Duck", a real duck appears. The village has a handful of eccentric inhabitants with equally eccentric dwellings. The musician eventually finds pieces of sheet music that he can use to solve the puzzles of the village, to get himself up out of the volcano, and to defeat the tyrannical king on the surface. "Curses", by Graham Nelson, begins in a contemporary setting, in the attic of a very old mansion. The mansion has been in your family for many generations, but for some reason all of the members of your family are cursed, in the sense that whenever you try to complete a project, you always encounter too many obstacles and things don't quite work out for you. Curses! Foiled Again! You explore the attic, encounter the ghost of an ancestor on the roof (he died while eating chicken because he choked on a bone), go on a time travel trip to the 1920's, and find some interesting uses for tarot cards. There's more (much more), but the general idea is that you need to investigate the origin of the curse and figure out a way to break it. Graham Nelson is a highly educated academic sort of person, and I'm sure that a lot of the literary references in "Curses" zipped right over my head. But I found "Curses" to be fun as a game and his sense of humor to be down-to-earth and not at all stuffy. "So Far", by Andrew Plotkin, has a fantastical setting totally unlike our own world. It's not traditional high fantasy or high-tech space opera, it's just an incredibly different sort of place. It might be in another dimension or on another planet. The themes of "So Far" involve jealousy, betrayal, and forgiveness. It's sort of abstract rather than plot-driven, but I really enjoyed exploring the fascinating world that Plotkin created. And lastly I'll mention "Finding Martin", by Gayla Wennstrom. Arguably it doesn't belong with the above three games in terms of public acclaim, but I had to include it here because the author (me) really wants to get people to play it. "Finding Martin" hasn't won any awards, but it did make it into the final top five in the 2005 XYZZY awards in two categories (Best Game and Best Puzzles), out of a couple hundred eligible games that year. This game has a contemporary setting in which you need to find and rescue Martin, an old friend from your school days who has recently disappeared. His sister, Rachel (who both annoys and intrigues you) seems to know more about you than she should, and she asks you to try to find Martin by going out to the old family home in the remote mountains of New Mexico. The house was built by Martin's uncle, a contractor who was fond of secret passages and bizarre tricks involving the fixtures of the house (such as how to fill the bathtub). Martin's father, who was an eccentric inventor monitoring signals from outer space, built an elaborate model train system that goes through the rooms of the house and can deliver room service from the kitchen. Martin's mother was a dancer/actress who now works as a choreographer in New York City. She's currently working on a musical production to be performed in Central Park entitled "The Life and Times of Ginger Rogers". Martin is half native-American on his mother's side. His paternal great-grandfather left Budapest during the 1930's and eventually worked as a physicist at Los Alamos. During the game you'll go on some time travel trips during the past 100 years, centered on the locale of Martin's house. You'll also take some quick trips to places like New York City, a remote island near Bora Bora, and a Japanese tea garden. While playing the game you'll discover some bizarre devices that enhance each of your five senses, creating fantastical possibilities in otherwise ordinary settings. For example, you can see your surroundings through a sort of a "fiction device" (allowing the possibility that a dirt path can be a yellow brick road) and you can hear translations of languages such as Japanese, Tiwa, and Tahitian, as well as do lip-reading and understand the languages of animals. -- Gayla

The latest issue of SPAG Magazine is out. SPAG stands for the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games. It specializes in the sort of text games that can be played by individual people on their own computers, rather than by logging into a MUD and interacting with the other players who happen to be online. This quarterly newsletter, edited by Jimmy Maher, is in its 45th issue. This issue includes commentary and reviews about text based games. You can read it on-line or get a free subscription via e-mail. The web site has been freshly redesigned and has a new look. The following games are reviewed: The Amazing Interactive Turing Machine Deadsville (IntroComp version) Finding Martin Ghost Train Glass OMNIQuest Swineback Ridge There's a Snake in the Bathtub Voices of Spoon River

Ah yes, the game "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy." At the beginning of the game, the player's inventory shows this: You have: a splitting headache no tea And then later there is the absurd puzzle in which you need to get "Tea" and "No Tea" at the same time. It's the kind of game in which you generally can't figure out all of the puzzles on your own because some of the solutions are improbable to the extreme, but the writing and the ideas are so funny that you don't seem to mind having to ask your friends for hints or search the Net for a walk-through. I still have a copy of that game. I think the puzzles in this game were planned deliberately to be absurdly improbable because this was consistent with Douglas Adams' writing style; He would always start a sentence so that you would be lulled into accepting the sentence as being perfectly normal, but by the time you would get to the end of the sentence he would throw in an astoundingly unexpected phrase that would be hilarious. Like looking inside your pajama bottoms and finding a pot of petunias.

Incredible Machine! I really loved that one. You could make your own machines too. I also really liked Zork and the other Infocom text-based games.

I forgot to mention the classic text-based games by Infocom, such as "Zork." These games inspire a lot of nostalgia for those of us who played them decades ago. Activision is the company that currently owns what used to be Infocom, but they aren't selling Infocom games any more. You can buy Infocom games at collector's prices on sites such as E-Bay, but free copies can be found by those who search for such links on Usenet groups. Players of these games usually want to get PDF's of the printed manuals too; Infocom sometimes tried to discourage bootlegging by including puzzles that were difficult to solve without access to printed materials purchased with the game. For those who aren't quite certain what a text-based game actually is, it's a game in which the player types in simple sentences that usually take the form of commands. Like the following excerpt from Zork: Since the days when Zork was first popular, players have been able to get text games with more lush descriptions and more developed plot lines (not necessarily done in settings resembling medieval dungeons). But I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for games like Zork, and I think many others feel the same way.

You might want to take a look at my game "Finding Martin", a large text-based game with a fantasy/scifii/mystery plot involving time travel. This game is available for free download at The "Finding Martin" Homepage. It was named as a finalist in the 2005 XYZZY awards in the categories of Best Game and Best Puzzles, and some of the people who've played it told me that they found it quite addictive. The web site has a walk-through if you find yourself stuck. You can also send me e-mails to ask for hints if you want to avoid accidentally seeing spoilers in the walk-through. I like corresponding with players since it's a good way to meet people who like the same sort of games that I do. Or, you could check out some other text-based games such as "Augmented Fourth" by Brian Uri, "Curses" by Graham Nelson, and "So Far" by Andrew Plotkin, available at Baf's Guide to the IF Archive. (IF stands for Interactive Fiction, which is what they call text based games nowadays.) All of these games are available as free downloads along with the free interpreter that you'll need to play those games. Baf's Guide also gives instructions on how to download the interpreter(s) for all of the text games in the archive. For game reviews check out Brass Lantern, SPAG, and Reviews by Dan Shiovitz. The latest fashion in text-based games these days seems to be for authors to write shorter games that aspire to artistic interactive fiction with dark themes. The ones that I've recommended tend to be older games that focus on fun adventures and challenging puzzles. "Augmented Fourth" has a great sense of humor and is one of my favorites. But there are games suiting a wide variety of preferences in the IF Archive, from religious to pornographic, from horror to slapstick, from deep to silly.

Yes, the amount of data in recording past moves has been a problem for me too, even though my game is a text adventure and not a 3D graphics game. My game doesn't work easily on all platforms; it needs some work-arounds to handle paging memory issues on some operating systems.<<2. How would the computer handle what would happen if you bumped into yourself and thus changed your past? Would an AI routine kick in and do what it thinks the player might have done? or do you disappear instantly and retake control of your past self... now that it's past has been altered? the latter would certainly tick off players if they had gotten far in the game, only to accidentally bump into their past selves and have to start way back at an earlier point in their gameplay.>>The instructions that come with my game give very strong advice recommending that the player do a "game save" before each time travel trip. Some players don't like unforgiving games, but others don't seem to mind them as long as the author is up-front about it.However, just "bumping into youself" is not necessarily a paradox. After all, that's one of the coolest things that can happen! In my particular game I do it like this: When you first push your way through the time portal, you feel weak and insubstantial. In order to survive, you absorb some of the essence of the surrounding environment. This enables you to keep from fading away entirely, but it's not enough to make you visible to the people in that time period. And you won't be able to manipulate any objects there until you get yourself a pair of special gloves that enable an electromagnetic connection. But you can still affect the past by dropping things there, even if you haven't gotten the gloves yet.The second time you push through the portal, you try to draw essence from the surroundings but there isn't enough available because it's already being drawn somewhere else. So you trace the flow of the essence and discover an invisible presence lying next to you. You take some essence from this guy, and as you do so, he becomes visible! It's your previous self. You realize that the reason you can see him is because you have absorbed some of his essence. But he still can't see you, so there's no paradox unless you lock a door that he's about to go through or take the object he's about to take or something like that.Three trips to the same time period are permitted, but on the fourth trip there isn't enough extra essence to support so many versions of yourself, and so you shrink into a singularity and disappear.There are some exceptions to the rule about being invisible to the natives of that time period, but explaining that here would be a spoiler.<<3. Programming-wise, how would the computer dynamically alter the entire history from the point of a change in the past all the way through the future? Say you knocked a guy out for one hour, and he missed his dinner, and thus spawned a whole chain of mistimed events... the computer would need to take a couple hours sorting through all the various effects that this would have on not only the man and his future, but also the other people this affected and their futures....>>True, true. Time travel without influencing the past would be boring, but, on the other hand, I just can't swallow the idea of changing the past from one state of certainty into a different state of certainty. It just doesn't make sense to me in a single-world scenario. The multi-world scenario is a different ball of wax, of course, but I haven't gone there in this game.So my game has a limited set of opportunities to influence the past, areas in which there is a inversion of uncertainty and an opportunity for circular causation. For example, you might look at a patch of dirt and get a migraine headache, feeling sick because you are fairly certain that this is just an empty patch of dirt, but you can't help suspecting that you might have sensed the possibility that a sycamore tree could be growing there. Anyone else would think that there already is a tree there, but as the agent of the causation you have uncertainty about it. You can't actually see or climb the tree until you swap the uncertainty into the past, enabling you to go back and plant a sycamore seed in the patch of dirt without violating the principle of conservation of uncertainty.One of the things you need to change in this game is the motivation for the person who will eventually invent the gloves. But of course you can't actually see or use the gloves until you actualize their invention, so you'll have to take care of that the hard way...I guess my game is pretty hard to play, only two people have finished so far as I can tell. There probably aren't that many who are interested in something that's so challenging to actually win. So don't be mad, there's not really any competition here.

Here's a suggestion for a time travel game, but I should point out that it's a text adventure without graphics and that I wrote it myself. But it's free... While playing, you can run into yourself and end up cooperating with or interfering with the actions that you've already taken on a previous trip to the same time period. The game is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it presents a consistent philosophy about time travel paradoxes, involving the conservation of uncertainty. It's got a well-developed story line and people have told me that it was fairly addicting and fun to play. The girlfriend of one of my early beta-testers told me she was very glad when her boyfriend and his roommate finished playing the game, because they hadn't talked about anything else for a couple of weeks and she felt like a gaming widow! The name of the game is "Finding Martin". Here's the link for a free download: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ This web page provides a free download of the game executable, playable on any PC running Windows. The game is in the later stages of beta-test, close to release.