Not any action, but they had a pretty large vocabulary. There were some basic commands they all shared like LOOK and EAST and INVENTORY. They would tell you if they didn’t understand.
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Fizz@lemmy.nz 11 months ago
How did these text based games work? Could you really type any action and it would give a relevant response?
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
barsoap@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Try for yourself. Long story short: The devs would anticipate a lot of stuff you might try, and given that this is Douglas Adams the game can be quite snarky, but if not then you’ll see “I don’t know the word ‘foo’” or similar.
That particular game is notoriously hard and confusing and meant to be attempted several times before you’re able to get through it without triggering some dead-end in the beginning that will only become apparent in the end. It’s from another era. You might want to try Starship Titanic, also Douglas Adams, pretty much the pinnacle of text adventures (though it’s not a pure text adventure). All in all I’m just a tad too young to really have gotten into the genre, regarding point+click adventures I can recommend anything Terry Pratchett (multiple Discworld adventures) and pretty much anything Lucasarts, though the very early stuff (Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken) is quite rough around the edges.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I wouldn’t call Starship Titanic a text adventure. It’s point-and-click overall with some text elements in terms of things like certain descriptions. Sort of like a more advanced version of a Sierra On-Line game.
barsoap@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Fair enough but it’s definitely giving you the “throw random stuff at the parser and have the game be snarky” experience. It’s from the point-and-click era, the tail end even, but does a throwback to introduce those elements again.