I didn't play Zork until '81 at the earliest because that's when the IBM PC came out. My aunt had an IBM and I played Zork at her house one family visit. I don't remember playing it for very long. It's a text-based adventure where you have to figure things out as you go along. I think I got bored of the obscure solution to the game and went back to pursuing my aunt's huge scifi/fantasy book collection.
I've recently started to love playing retro games within other games. One such is Zork within Call of Duty Black Ops. At the menu screen, you are looking from the perspective of your character strapped to a chair in an interrogation room full of monitors. If you rapidly pull left and right triggers (or maybe R1/R2 on Playstation) you will get out of your chair. Then you can roam the room and find an active computer. On the computer, type "zork" and the game begins.
In this text-based adventure, I grabbed all the items I came across and went into the trap door in the floor of the house. Below was a thief, and I fought him for a second and got cut, so I left and entered a gallery with only one painting and an artist's atelier (workshop). Nothing there, so I turned around and went the other way (you just type "north", "south" or whatever) and quckly passed the thief and came across a troll in the next room. I had an elven sword I'd gotten in the house, so I fought the troll and it killed me in a few turns. I guess I was supposed to avoid it or do something more clever. Well, anyway, I wasn't going to persist in this obscure puzzling any longer (not my thing really), so I went and played COD Black Ops and finished it.
Black Ops was a great game. Made by COD "B" team Treyarch, the team that made COD Big Red One and World at War, both games I really liked. They were the last of the COD games I played before Modern Warfare came out, a game series I wasn't into. I thought the Black Ops series was more of the same, and avoided it, but I was wrong. The zombie mode was particulally fun and I hope Mark can finish his copy of the game so we can play it together.
Comments
Cary Woodham
02/24/2018 at 12:44 AM
I remember when my brother Jeff discovered the Zork secret in one of his Call of Duty games and he played that for a while.
I never could get into text adventures as a kid, which is strange since I do like point and click adventures. But there was one text adventure that I played as a kid, but it was more like a proto-point and click adventure. It was called Mickey's Space Adventure and you still typed in commands like in Zork, but the game had graphics with words next to the objects so you knew what to type in. That was the very first game I ever beat, and even though it was a little kid's game, I WAS a little kid at the time. I still remember the sense of accomplishment from beating that game, and it's one of the reasons why I like reviewing kids games now. Sorry, I guess that didn't have much to do with Zork.
KnightDriver
02/24/2018 at 11:32 AM
I didn't get into them either. I once bought a text adventure homebrew game for the Atari, but I didn't get very far in it. Having some graphics at least and those word choices shown would go a long way to keeping me interested, I think.
Super Step
Contributing Writer
02/24/2018 at 10:02 PM
Text adventure doesn't seem like it would appeal to me, but I'll never know until I try and I'm curious.
KnightDriver
02/25/2018 at 10:59 PM
It seems rediculous at first, but you get drawn into it. I jusr have little patience for them.
SanAndreas
02/24/2018 at 11:15 PM
I had a pretty good size collection of Infocom text adventures in the 80s. Zork I and II, Enchanter (a spinoff of Zork), Cutthroats, Suspect, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which was actually my introduction to the series, when I showed this game to my sister, she got me the books), and The Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which was of a decidedly adult nature - the first part of the game, you had to pee and the restroom you picked determined what sex you and your companion were, just to give you an idea if you've never played this.
All of the Infocom games came with little toys and maps - "feelies" -like you see in collectors' editions of video games these days, and in a lot of cases, the added extras were clues to the game or served as a form of copy protection, as you couldn't win the game (in the pre-Internet era) without the information from the feelies. For example, Leather Goddesses had "scratch and sniff" points which were gross, as well as a comic book which told you how to solve a certain puzzle.
Now you can buy an iOS app from Activision that lets you play all of the Infocom games (except Hitchhiker's Guide due to licensing), and the feelies are included in the app. Well, except for Leather Goddess's scratch 'n' sniff stuff.
KnightDriver
02/25/2018 at 10:55 PM
I've heard of Lether Goddesses. . . but never played it.
Cool that there's an iOS app with a lot of text adventures on it.
Matt Snee
Staff Writer
02/25/2018 at 11:10 PM
I remember Zork. A little too adult for me at the time.
KnightDriver
02/25/2018 at 11:11 PM
If there had been like one picture or a wire frame dungeon like Wizardy, which was out the very next year, I might have gotten hooked on it.
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