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I also highly recommend trying out Device 6, which uses a completely unique technique to tell a story using text. I wasn't a big fan of the puzzles, but the presentation and atmosphere are top-notch.
SimonChris fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Feb 10, 2016 |
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Feb 10, 2016 22:52
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SimonChris posted:I also highly recommend trying out Device 6, which uses a completely unique technique to tell a story using text. I wasn't a big fan of the puzzles, but the presentations and atmosphere are top-notch. I actually played this game (and did a report on it) for my experimental literature class. It's really fun, 10/10 would recommend to the point of speaking in memes
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Feb 10, 2016 22:58
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Replaying Beyond Zork now, I'm reminded about things that tripped me up when I was young, like figuring out which monsters needed to be just attacked to death, and which needed to be puzzle-beaten. Like the Dorn beast is early and easy to remember, or the slug. But like the cruel puppet I can't recall if there's a trick to it or it just needs its face smashed in. EDIT: poo poo, I forgot to let the monkey grinder smash the fairy before I gave him the sea chest. Is there another way to deal with that or should I just restart? Potsticker fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Feb 11, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 05:39
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You'll need DOSBox to run it, since AGT was never updated past 16-bit, but Cosmoserver is a fun oldie. You play as a freelance plumber and programmer trying to log on to his computer, find a fix for his program, and eat something before he passes out. The bulk of the game takes place on a simulated BBS system that is Totally Not Compuserve, though the clock is always running and things happen whether you're there for them or not- so you have to play through a few times, figure out what happens when, and chart the best course through the game.
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Feb 11, 2016 06:48
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Pope Guilty posted:You'll need DOSBox to run it, since AGT was never updated past 16-bit, but Cosmoserver is a fun oldie. You play as a freelance plumber and programmer trying to log on to his computer, find a fix for his program, and eat something before he passes out. The bulk of the game takes place on a simulated BBS system that is Totally Not Compuserve, though the clock is always running and things happen whether you're there for them or not- so you have to play through a few times, figure out what happens when, and chart the best course through the game. If you're into simulated environment games, I can also recommend Digital: A Love Story and emily is away.
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Feb 11, 2016 09:09
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Potsticker posted:EDIT: poo poo, I forgot to let the monkey grinder smash the fairy before I gave him the sea chest. Is there another way to deal with that or should I just restart? Update: cleared Beyond Zork I also ended up using the palimpsest too many times (I forgot it was limited use) and lost track of the minx (I think it ended up trapped in the idol) and had to restart anyway. And yes to my own question, I missed something important since the ___ of Dispel was behind the fairy. At least I'm pretty sure that's a non-random location for that item, even if the exact item name is fluid. Since it's been many years, I was kind of surprised at how much I did remember, and at how short the game is when you know how to do everything. Also the puzzles are a whole lot less satisfying when you're not figuring out what you need to bring to any given location. One thing that I had remembered wrong was that items do not sell back for their purchase price. For some reason I had thought that it was the sort of game where you couldn't get stuck due to money because if you accidentally sold the wrong thing you could always get the full price back on a refund, but when I accidentally sold the Hurdy-Gurdy with the goblet and caterpillar still inside, even though I hadn't gotten past the Christmas Tree monsters yet I had to buy it back, retrieve the items and sell it again and noticed the loss in Zorkmids. There is more than enough money overall to make mistakes, so it isn't so bad.
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Feb 12, 2016 09:05
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:I will buy them all on steam as soon as you do so friend http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=624095069 You can start by voting for it on Greenlight  . I'm also looking for beta testers, so people can PM me if they're interested.
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Feb 14, 2016 16:27
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C.E.J. Pacian is looking for more testers for his new game. His previous games are rad and so is this one, just sayin'.
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Feb 17, 2016 16:42
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Was a big fan of the graphical IF from Legend Entertainment. My absolute favourite text adventure was Eric The Unready. So much fun was had back in the day.
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Feb 22, 2016 12:35
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Necrotic Drift features graphics and sound and is about a group of losers stuck in a mall infested with various undead D&D monsters.
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Feb 22, 2016 19:06
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http://www.failbettergames.com/fundbetter/
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Feb 22, 2016 20:00
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Bumping my own thread because
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Feb 29, 2016 16:42
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Emily Short posted her usual monthly IF link collection. There's a few good ones.
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Feb 29, 2016 16:50
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Make it Good is a masterpiece noir whodunnit set in a world that lives on its own, rather than wait for the player to bumble along. A very ambitious piece that nails every goal it set for itself.
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Feb 29, 2016 17:37
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Ah, from the author of amazing games All Roads, Till Death Makes of Monkfish out of Me and the Textfyre joint The Shadow in the Cathedral. Aaaaand I see that Textfyre closed their doors and put their games out for free. So you can now just download Shadow and Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter, both games so big and good that people* happily paid real dollars for them. *: not many though
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Mar 1, 2016 06:43
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Jon Ingold runs Inkle now. They're, uh, doing okay.
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Mar 1, 2016 09:36
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Holy poo poo, Ingold is behind 80 Days! That's all the push I needed to get on board with that poo poo.
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Mar 1, 2016 10:04
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Another great game is Coloratura, set from a properly alien perspective. Edit: There's an LP: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3664930&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1 Cumslut1895 fucked around with this message at 11:38 on Mar 1, 2016 |
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Mar 1, 2016 10:38
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Photopia is good, Galatea is good, Shrapnel is good, Choice of Robots is good, Aisle and 9:05 are good Avoid Heroes Rise and the other two games in the trilogy at all costs, though. They are on Steam and they are terrible.
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Mar 1, 2016 10:56
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For Choice of Games, I thought Mecha Ace and Black Cat have been the best ones I've played. They are basiclly CYOA Gundam and Lupin stories, so if that's what you're into you should have a good time. To the City of the Clouds was good too, which is kind of a little Indiana Jones in South America, but doesn't really feel like it's a straight rip off. I read the LP of the Wrestling one around here, and it seemed okay, but I felt that the story was a bit too confusing and the backstage antics were a lot more depressing than I wanted so I didn't end up buying it. I also didn't think Hero's Rise was that bad, but it sounds like the series must have gotten really bad since when it first came out, reactions seemed much more positive than all the negativity that I see commented on nowadays.
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Mar 1, 2016 11:44
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Potsticker posted:For Choice of Games, I thought Mecha Ace and Black Cat have been the best ones I've played. They are basiclly CYOA Gundam and Lupin stories, so if that's what you're into you should have a good time. Heroes Rise (it should probably be titled Hero's Rise, though) is terrible. I only played it recently and, for a lot of it, it kind of feels like someone's first attempt at a CYOA IF. It is rough and unpolished and has a lot of cringe-worthy things like the use of the word 'slugger' as a kind of catch-all term, including for swearing and general expletives. On my Steam review, I said the first and second installments struggle to reach what I'd consider average quality. The prose has some really awkward phrasing and rather sophomoric handling of things like sex, gender politics, and that sort of thing. In the second installment, there is actually a sequence where the plot grinds to a halt and a bunch of characters burst in and have a big heated discussion about the importance of using the right gender pronouns. Now, this is the same series that has a female character basically defined by the size of her rack. It's just a mess. There's too many characters and the ones that are there aren't exactly fleshed out in any meaningful sense. The plot just kind of happens around you and you're painfully on-rails. The series really doesn't respect player choice and agency. There are choices that amount to traps where it feels like the author is waiting in the wings to leap out and go 'AHA!' There are also choices where your character just suddenly acts like a moron. For example, you choose 'infiltrate the supervillain hideout', so you walk in the front door in your full superhero costume. Yeah. The author gives you three or four choices and you sit there and you have to consider, as a player, if the author is going to make you an idiot and make you wonder why the choice was even there in the first place. When I say respecting player choice and agency, I feel that Choice Of games need to be careful about it. When you've got a text parser, I think it's more acceptable for a choice to result in a blind bad end. However, if you present a player with A, B, C or D, it's a bit of a dick move if any of them make them feel like an idiot or result in an unavoidable game over or negative consequence. I think Choice of Robots is the best Choice Of game yet and handles player choice incredibly well, to the extent that it's in my top 10 list of IF. When you compare something like Choice Of Robots to Heroes Rise, it becomes abundantly clear how poorly Heroes handles choice and consequence. In Robots, you never feel like you've been cheated or that the author has turned you into an idiot - you've had enough feedback to know if you're going to be going down a bad path. But, even then, the bad path might be able to be turned around depending on your choices. And I say this as someone who has died at the first possible end point in Robots. I think a lot of people like them because they are very much based around wish-fulfillment and creating your own idealised self. You set your name, gender, sexual orientation, what your love interest looks like, the color of your powers, and all that sort of thing. The story amounts to 'You're great and everyone loves you; when people say you're wrong, you're inevitably right'. Oh, and Heroes Rise has what amounts to in-app purchases that tell you what the optimal choices are if you want to get the 'best' ending - which probably explains why the choices are so drat obfuscated and difficult to figure out.
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Mar 1, 2016 12:28
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I very much enjoyed 'Choice of Broadsides' and 'Choice of Romance'.
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Mar 1, 2016 12:39
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I love the Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin games too, especially Spider and Web. Hadean Lands gets huge points for the consistent alchemy system, but the time travel replay feels a bit too much like a tech demo - a good one, but still. Also, there's an odd genre of IF which is the "single player MUD" where every NPC plays just like a PC and the rules of the universe are hero agnostic. I can only think of a few games in that genre, and they're mostly old ones that bit off way more than they could chew, like the Spectrum versions of The Hobbit and Sherlock. With all the modern hoo-hah about multi-agent systems I wonder if it's time to revisit them since before we have agents wandering around on the web it might be nice to have a game where you aren't obstructed by an unconscious policeman or welcomed by "a parade of elves led by dead Gandalf". Inform 7 seems to have some big chunks of architecture devoted to doing this kind of thing, then generally advises you not to use them. I'm not sure why that's happened.
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Mar 1, 2016 13:13
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Milky Moor posted:<snip> Was the IAP thing added later? Either that or I was blind. Thanks for writing this up. I don't really remember too many lovely trap choices, maybe I managed to accidentally avoid them, but I do recall some lame forced plot events that funnel you towards the ending. There's one part in particular that even after everything was revealled in the end I thought didn't make a lot of sense with the choices I had been making. Still, I came away with a positive outlook overall, though I will admit I've never felt the need to replay it or explore different routes like I did in Mecha Ace and Black Cat. John F Bennett posted:I very much enjoyed 'Choice of Broadsides' and 'Choice of Romance'. Choice of Broadsides I couldn't get into at all because if you don't choose to be a man it genderflips the entire world which basically means just changes the names and pronouns. It somehow felt worse than if the game didn't address your gender in any meaningful way at all. I guess it's like that it felt like the author(s?) didn't want to write different scenarios or interactions based on a player's choice and instead took the laziest way out.
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Mar 1, 2016 13:37
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Potsticker posted:Was the IAP thing added later? Either that or I was blind. Any time. I'm always happy to talk about things I've played, particularly IF because there's very little places to discuss them! It's not wholly bad. There were bits and pieces of each I liked - the second had some choices that felt hard to make, although I don't know if they actually result in anything different. The third part had a great concept that was squandered in the race to finish the story - it was over too soon. All in all, Heroes Rise feels like Zachary Sergi rushed out three drafts. There's promise there but, in my opinion, he needs to tighten things up across the board - gameplay mechanics, prose, writing, characters... Unfortunately, though, they are probably the only IF games that I steer people away from if they're exploring them on Steam.
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Mar 1, 2016 13:53
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The early Choice of titles aren't very good, tbh. They've been putting out really good work recently, though.
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Mar 1, 2016 16:30
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Sounds like it was written by a 14 year old...
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Mar 1, 2016 17:01
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:Sounds like it was written by a 14 year old... This made me curious and so I actually decided to go and find out about the author's background. He's apparently a television writer. I say apparently because there's no credits to his name and the most concrete information I can find is that he writes pilots for television. He's got four books on Goodreads, but they're all his Choice Of games. I did kind of hope it was a particularly earnest kid.
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Mar 2, 2016 06:03
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Milky Moor posted:This made me curious and so I actually decided to go and find out about the author's background. Tbh if was a kid under the age of 16 it would actually be pretty promising. Dude sucks though if he's promoting himself on goodreads
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Mar 2, 2016 06:15
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:Tbh if was a kid under the age of 16 it would actually be pretty promising. Dude sucks though if he's promoting himself on goodreads Yeah. Somehow, this has reminded me though, that you can set your own theme song in Heroes Rise (seriously, the trilogy is big on personal vanity customisation) and one of the options is My Heart Will Go On. I don't know why, but it's there. Needless to say, I picked it and kept thinking of this particular cover whenever my hero was doing something Cool.
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Mar 2, 2016 06:32
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Milky Moor posted:Yeah. https://youtu.be/PX7zPlQjAr8
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Mar 2, 2016 15:54
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I dunno if it's got any better since, but back around the time INFORM 7 was new the documentation was mostly "here's a couple of sample games, figure it out yourself", which was especially funny given that it was being promoted as a natural language system that was easy to use.
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Mar 2, 2016 16:34
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The Inform 7 documentation these days is incredibly detailed. I think the natural language angle actually hurts it a bit, as the more you know about programming the harder it becomes to find out how to duplicate things that you could normally do in your sleep, but none of the problems I've had with it have been with the documentation.
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Mar 2, 2016 16:41
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Wasn't it released with two in-built manuals, a Writing With Inform guide and a "what if you wanted to implement X" Cookbook? I'm pretty sure the documentation was pretty good from the start. There is more now, as well. And yeah, I thought the natural language thing was a cool idea, then I tried it and thought "man, I wish it was more like Python".
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Mar 2, 2016 16:43
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I think Andrew Plotkin's crazy text-only make-your-own-Myst-Online thing is in Python.
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Mar 2, 2016 17:20
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So if I wanted to make my own game I'd pretty much have to learn code, yes? Some guy told me to learn C
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Mar 2, 2016 18:54
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If you want to make your own 3D engine from scratch, you need to learn C, yes. For most people there are other, simpler options, though. If you just want to make a text game, there are much, much simpler options. Try Twine: https://twinery.org/ Or Choicescript: https://www.choiceofgames.com/make-your-own-games/choicescript-intro/
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Mar 2, 2016 18:57
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The Ice-Bound Concordance is interactive fiction with a difference. The RPS review: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/02/the-ice-bound-concordance-review/
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Mar 2, 2016 22:48
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Megazver posted:The Ice-Bound Concordance is interactive fiction with a difference. The RPS review: I am filled with desire. Sadly, I am not also filled with money. It'll have to wait until payday.
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Mar 2, 2016 23:05
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al-azad posted:Legend Entertainment was like the Image Comics of the scene. They put out a lot of experimental or subversive material with a very friendly UI. You can play Timequest for free while most of their catalog can be easily found with some Google-fu. Well if we're going to link to Archive.org let's go bananas. Spellcasting 101 Spellcasting 201 Timequest Gateway Spellcasting 301 Eric the Unready Gateway 2 - Homeworld Manuals, copy protection feelies and hintbooks
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Mar 3, 2016 13:56
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