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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it kind of reminds me of those old text adventures where you had to guess what the computer would understand

>get sword

I don't know what "sword" is.

The awful thing is that the old Infocom parser was better at figuring out what you are saying than many of these sexy new NLP systems...

Yes. There is a reason why we don't have text based adventures anymore. Because we can have new ones with beautiful graphics and interfaces.

The human-machine communication issues are the same in both cases. When a video game doesn't understand what you're trying to do, nothing would happen or you get a negative, non-specific feedback. You think it is better because you get distracted by the colors, lights and sounds but the communication channel is as narrow, if not narrower actually.

By the way, what OP says may be true of a game like Dunnet. I don't know if it is no more maintained or if it is kept that way because nostalgia, but more recent text-based games (that is, one that could have been programmed by your father instead of your grandfather) do way better than this. Just try some popular MUD (the MMO version of text adventures), I'm sure you'll be surprised.

The parser in text adventures got really, REALLY advanced.

Some of the current interactive fiction (as the genre is now called) would surprise you.

Have any recommendations?

The best place to look for cool and innovative (and free!) IF games is the Interactive Fiction Competition [0].

Anything by Andrew Plotkin [1] (aka Zarf) is guaranteed to be interesting. Other indie authors of renown to look for are Emily Short and Adam Cadre. But also look for new authors! Mind you, modern IF focuses less in puzzles and more in narrative or exploring the boundaries of the medium.

One of my personal favorites is "Spider and Web" by Zarf, because I love its Cold War-esque setting. Mind you, it can be difficult! The best IF games also explore the console interface itself, such as in "Fail Safe".

An example of a particularly innovative game is "Rematch" [2]: it's a single move game (i.e. you win or fail in a single input, which can be quite complicated and shows off what modern parsers can do). It's sort of a "Groundhog Day" where you must prevent a disaster in a single move, and if you lose you replay it again, and again, and again, till you get it right.

Many of these games can be played in a browser, without installing anything.

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[0] https://ifcomp.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Plotkin

[2] http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=22oqimzgf8snv002

Thanks so much!

For anyone else interested, I'll save you five minutes:

        sudo apt-get install gargoyle-free;
        wget http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/Rematch.gam;
        gargoyle Rematch.gam

Zork is one of the first games in this genre and it's surprisingly good at parsing commands.

You can play it at https://classicreload.com/zork-i.html or http://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/5zyoqrsugeopel3ffhz_v...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork

The Infocom games were actually after a lot of earlier games like Colossal Cave (aka "Adventure") and the Scott Adams (not the Dilbert guy) adventures. As such, their parser was actually pretty advanced compared to the 1970s games and understood whole sentences rather than the traditional two words.

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