They do what I do, but better, and with nothing but text…
I’m home sick with a bad cold this weekend, so I’ve been spending the better part of my day relaxing at my desk and playing a few selected games from the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. Though I have played IF games before, this actually happens to be my first time ever voting in this comp, so I’m not always sure what I should be expecting in a good entry. I’m hoping I’ll still be able to judge the games somewhat reasonably, nevertheless.
See, the thing is, while I started playing computer games reasonably early for someone my age, I wasn’t really around for Infocom and other commercial text adventures. Hell, I wasn’t really around for the early Sierra games that still used text parsers, either. I fell into the genre rather late, once the “verb coin” interfaces from Full Throttle and Curse of Monkey Island became the defacto standard. As such, the text parser interface in adventure games has been something I’ve never had any particular nostalgia for, resulting in me dismissing it as obsolete and unnecessarily difficult to learn. [1]
- I did make copious use of the DOS prompt in my childhood, and can sort of barely make my way through the Unix command line when necessary, but when confronted with a GUI as an alternate option, I’ll almost always choose that instead. As would most computer users, at that. ↩
Life Flashes By
Cubert Badbone, P.I.