I was also here for Infocom! Will the knowledge of the old classics die with us?
For all of our modern-day high-powered GPU babble, the Infocom games still have the best graphics possible.
I recently started playing Zork I again on a C-64 emulator, and it really holds up.
The key is to play like you would in the old days: No distractions. Be patient and thoughtful. And actually read everything on the screen, instead of skimming the text.
Since we're now trained to have the attention spans of methed-out ferrets, it can be hard. My tips are to turn the phone completely off, put it in another room, and turn down the lights. Also, do you map by hand on grid paper with a pencil.
Lately, I've seen people bragging about video games providing value because they take 40 or 50 hours to complete. An Infocom game could easily take days, weeks, or months to really explore and appreciate thoroughly.
Zork is great. Everything seemed to click into place at the end.
I had incredible memories of zork zero but wow, that shit is opaque. I unashamedly used a guide when I got stuck and it took forever still.
As an example for the latter: at a certain point in the game Okami, you have to get an item from a crying boy you are friends with. You get rather obvious hints the boy has the item. You can talk with him a bunch, and the first few times you get different dialogue. You get more unique dialogue if you try it at night.
He would not give me the item. I spent probably two hours first meticulously combing the area and then backtracking throughout the entire world, talking with most of the important NPCs in hope I missed something. I even thought I might have somehow softlocked or corrupted my savegame.
The solution I never figured out and got from a walkthrough: you have to attack the crying boy. Again, the game gives zero hints or indication you have to do this.
If u compare the zork and zero walk thru you'll get it. I love the added color and illustrations and world far more than other text games but when I finished it(I was recording) I said "this game should probably be illegal. I cant quit this quick enough!". Still nostalgic tho, and fun in that "I got thru it" way.
So I very much relate to your experience. The text parser can be picky too when you know what to do but the game has its own way of doing it. Then u miss the solution.(edit: typos)
There's a surprising amount of resources that aren't dead links regarding infocom stuff.
But those games were rightly hailed as pioneers of the genre, and were considered to be the very best in their time. By today’s standards, though, they would be universally panned as abusive of the player, if they could even be released at all.
just reached 1983 which has Planetfall
Since Infocom games run on everything from a Palm Pilot to a mainframe, there's no reason for them to ever go away, as long as we can find people still interested in building Z-Machines for the latest gear.
I’ve never heard this term z-machines, but it’s interesting, and invokes in my mind a machine that does anything you need regarding z. Specifically I’m reminded of zMUD, but that might be dating myself a bit. Is this z-machine idea your own, or did you happen upon it? Can you think of other memorable or especially useful z-machines in modern usage?
zMud was a MUD client, so in some ways not so dissimilar in the sense that they both allow you to play text-based games.
Trying to follow the timeline from that article, it's unclear from context name which came first, Zork, ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), or the word z-machine. I've heard of referring to other systems as [language name/interpreter name/etc]-machine, so that's the context that it reminds me of, but at the time Zork was written, perhaps that convention wasn't established yet? It's before my time, which makes the missing context harder to interrogate solo.