Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days?
xyzzy@lemm.ee 1 year agoOf course. I’ve played a number of them, although Zork quickly slowed its age (in terms of game design) compared to later text games.
Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days?
xyzzy@lemm.ee 1 year agoOf course. I’ve played a number of them, although Zork quickly slowed its age (in terms of game design) compared to later text games.
Harryd91@lemm.ee 1 year ago
To be fair I would expect someone with a user name such as your to have played your fair share of them. I would usually get frustrated when my graph paper maps stopped making sense… Likely a ‘me’ problem I think
xyzzy@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Some of them didn’t make it easy. Not all games were laid out on a strict grid (in fact, the very first one had numerous curving connections), and more than a few of the early games included a maze to intentionally make graphing difficult. Back then it was a lot easier to plug away for a couple months on a game like that, since there were so many fewer games and they were such a novelty.
The dungeon crawler games like Wizardry made the same assumption about the player (“Of course they want a big challenge! How else will they get their money’s worth?”), and look how many people play that series today. Very, very few people have the patience in a saturated game market.
I think later text games corrected those initial assumptions and the parsers became very good, and many even added graphics, but by then most people had moved on.