Hacker News Reader

Comment by minikomi | Hacker News Reader

Any suggestions for Infocom games? Just missed them I'm afraid - cut my teeth on nethack and commander keen.

Personally I found Trinity very good. The story starts in the cold war, and then takes you into a weird alice-in-wonderland like dimension, where you have to visit various places before a nuclear bomb hits.

The Enchanter, Sorcerer, Spellbreaker trilogy was also a lot of fun.

And of course Hitchhikers Guide to The Universe :-)

Two of the more critically acclaimed (or at least fan favorites) titles:

A Mind Forever Voyaging

Trinity

Both games really emphasize the narrative bankruptcy of modern games. The fact that people were developing games like this back in the 80s is kind of mind blowing. If Bioware put out 'A Mind Forever Voyaging' with nice shiny graphics the gaming press would be all over it as the greatest game ever.

It's hard to go wrong with any of them, really. You should play through the original Zork trilogy. I really liked their mystery titles, especially "Deadline"; I seem to recall that you had a lot more interaction with the other characters in the game (i.e. the suspects). The "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" game was pretty good, too; even though I'd already read the books, some of the puzzles were tricky to figure out. I think I still have my "Don't Panic!" button that came in the box with that one.

Forgot to say, also check out cschmidt's recommendation elsewhere in this thread for the Scott Adams adventure games. I played a bunch of those too, back in the day.

h2g2 is difficult to the point where it seems like a parody of the genre. Some of it makes stuff like monkey island seem trivial, and I find it hard not to assume that the whole thing was a big joke on the part of Douglas Adams.

Yeah, H2G2 is really, really funny and pretty much impossible. Spend some time fumbling around in each room (there really are some funny responses you should see!) and then refer to a walkthrough to advance to the next room. Save often - although even saving often won't help if you don't get the screwdriver in the first room. It really is a player-hostile game.

It's all very well saying "fumble around in each room" but most of the time you only have a half dozen moves before you die.

There are so many things that you have to do in order not to render the game unfinishable further down the line, and they're thrown in so quickly and so covertly that I cannot believe it isn't satire.

I mean, if you take it as anything apart from satire it's just unforgivably bad game design.

Adams was involved in writing it, and he was definitely into computers. He was the first person in the UK to own an apple machine. He would have almost certainly played zork/dungeon and such games, and therefore being Adams he would not have been able to resist parodying their ridiculous nature.

Hm, maybe you're right. Certainly Starship Titanic, which he also helped write, turned out to be a much better adventure game.

Douglas Adams was also involved with writing the Infocom title Bureaucracy, which was similarly odd in game play, though not as fiendishly difficult.

Two great adventure games by Westwood Studios and published by Infocom:

- Circuit's Edge: A cyberpunk game set in the Middle East http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuits_Edge

- Mines of Titan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_of_Titan

Wow.. So many interesting sounding suggestions. I'll start with Trinity and go from there! Thanks!

The Lurking Horror is set at an analogue of MIT, where most of the Infocom people went.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com