The Best Websites for Downloading and Playing Classic and New Text Adventure Games
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III. Here Be Dragons: the (Pre)History of the Adventure Game
III. Here Be Dragons: the (pre)history of the adventure game The past is like a broken mirror, as you piece it together you cut yourself. Your image keeps shifting and you change with it. MAX PAYNE 2: THE FALL OF MAX PAYNE At the end of the Middle Ages, Europe’s thousand year sleep – or perhaps thousand year germination – between antiquity and the Renaissance, wondrous things were happening. High culture, long dormant, began to stir again. The spirit of adventure grew once more in the human breast. Great cathedrals rose, the spirit captured in stone, embodiments of the human quest for understanding. But there were other cathedrals, cathedrals of the mind, that also embodied that quest for the unknown. They were maps, like the fantastic, and often fanciful, Mappa Mundi – the map of everything, of the known world, whose edges both beckoned us towards the unknown, and cautioned us with their marginalia – “Here be dragons.” (Bradbury & Seymour, 1997, p. 1357)1 At the start of the twenty-first century, the exploration of our own planet has been more or less completed2. When we want to experience the thrill, enchantment and dangers of past voyages of discovery we now have to rely on books, films and theme parks. Or we play a game on our computer, preferably an adventure game, as the experience these games create is very close to what the original adventurers must have felt. In games of this genre, especially the older type adventure games, the gamer also enters an unknown labyrinthine space which she has to map step by step, unaware of the dragons that might be lurking in its dark recesses. -
Download Twisty Little Passages: an Approach to Interactive Fiction
TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES: AN APPROACH TO INTERACTIVE FICTION DOWNLOAD FREE BOOK Nick Montfort | 302 pages | 01 Apr 2005 | MIT Press Ltd | 9780262633185 | English | Cambridge, Mass., United States Slashdot Top Deals I got about a quarter of the way into this and had to stop. In Montfort's words, Infocomwhich was founded June 22, by Lebling, Blank, Anderson, and seven other MIT alumni, "began work on the foundation of IF while the plot of ground that it was to be built upon had not been completely surveyed. Slashdot Apparel is back! Genre fiction is a type of literature, and trying to actually seperate one from the other is a fool's errand. I think what you may be getting at is the fact that writing a compelling IF world is literally NP hard. Hitchhiker's Guide project, which began in February and was slated ambitiously to be completed by the following Christmas. Friend Reviews. Instead, what this book really is is a very comprehensive history of the form. There's really not that much meat there; Montfort goes into a detailed history and categorization of riddles that isn't all that relevant to IF. Played them, loved them, but goddam that transparent crystal 3D mze was a killer. Nick Montfort. Montfort then discusses Adventure Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction its precursors including the I Ching and Dungeons and Dragonsand follows this with an examination of mainframe text games developed in response, focusing on the most influential work of that era, Zork. The reviewer's memory of Monty Python's a little weak. -
New Adventures Introduced At
March, 1988 Vol. V, #3 $2.00 New Adventures Introduced at CES By Shay Addams Flu-stricken Tom Snyder and not-yet Blubbermen (Steve Meretzky), Gamma ctivision kicked off the first day of flu-stricken Peter Reynolds presented an Force in Pit of a Thousand Screams (Amy the Winter Consumer Electronics overview and example of lnfoComics. Briggs) and ZorkQuest: Assault on Egreth AShow in Las Vegas with a press ''We wanted to do something that Castle (Elizabeth Langosey)-feature conference where President Bruce Davis wouldn't be just for 14-year-old boys and comic book themes and will even be sold announced a deal with Telecomsoft to 35-year-old men," Snyder sneezed, "to in comic book and toy stores. Snyder's distribute all the Firebird and Rainbird create a kind of computer game that even company developed the concept and titles formerly handled by Firebird my mother would play." InfoComics will creates the graphics, and Infocom is Licensees. Davis also said Activision just have no puzzles or goals-by assuming a producing the programs, which are bought Triton, a direct-marketing firm, to different character's persona at key supposed to last four to five hours and sell launch direct mail sales (so start watching intersections of the plot, you change your for $12 suggested retail. InfoComics will that mail box). perspective rather than the story itself. be released for Apple, IBM/100% com Next, Infocom President Joel Berez patibles andC 64/128 in March. announced Infocom's "three-part strat "A French Film Director's Dream" . After the press conference, Sandy Ward egy," which is already in progress: Panning, zooming and other cinematic showed off Micro Illusions' Land of supporting existing adventure fans, with techniques are combined with "minimalist Legends on the Amiga. -
Wild Kratts®: Ocean Adventure! Now Open!
Summer/Fall 2019 News and Events for Members, Donors, and Friends WILD KRATTS®: OCEAN ADVENTURE! NOW OPEN! The Strong Unearths Rare Atari Footage through Digital Preservation Efforts While digitizing U-Matic tapes (an analog videocassette format) in The Strong’s Atari Coin-Op Division collection, museum curators and library staff recently discovered a wide range of never-before-seen footage—including video of Atari’s offices and manufacturing lines, its arcade cabinet construction practices, and company-wide staff celebrations. The footage also includes gameplay of many of Atari’s popular titles, as well as video concepts for games never released. The video collection offers an unprecedented look at the inner-workings of Atari at its height at a time that it helped to lay the groundwork for the modern video game industry. The museum’s digitization efforts are made possible, in part, by a grant from the Rochester Regional Library Council. Screenshot from unearthed Atari footage. Fairy Magic Storybook Summer Through October 31 Weekdays, July 8–August 30 • 11 a.m.–3 p.m. Take a magical stroll through Spend the summer with your favorite storybook characters! Listen to Dancing Wings Butterfly story readings at 2 p.m., take pictures with featured characters, and Garden. Listen to enchanting enjoy activities based on their stories. music as you walk among hundreds of butterflies and July 8–12: How Do Dinosaurs…? whimsical flowers, including Meet the Dinosaur from Jane Yolen’s popular series, orchids and begonias, and recreate story scenes with toy dinosaurs, and make check out fairy house doors a dinosaur headband and feet. -
Shaping Stories and Building Worlds on Interactive Fiction Platforms
Shaping Stories and Building Worlds on Interactive Fiction Platforms The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Citation Mitchell, Alex, and Nick Monfort. "Shaping Stories and Building Worlds on Interactive Fiction Platforms." 2009 Digital Arts and Culture Conference (December 2009). As Published http://simonpenny.net/dac/day2.html Publisher Digital Arts and Culture Version Author's final manuscript Citable link http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/100288 Terms of Use Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. Shaping Stories and Building Worlds on Interactive Fiction Platforms Alex Mitchell Nick Montfort Communications and New Media Programme Program in Writing & Humanistic Studies National University of Singapore Massachusetts Institute of Technology [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT simulates an intricate, systematic world full of robots, made of Adventure game development systems are platforms from the components and functioning together in curious ways. The world developer’s perspective. This paper investigates several subtle model acts in ways that are mechanical and nested, making the differences between these platforms, focusing on two systems for code’s class structure seemingly evident as one plays the game. In interactive fiction development. We consider how these platform contrast, Emily Short’s Savoir-Faire (2002), written in Inform 6 differences may have influenced authors as they developed and of similar complexity, exhibits less obvious inheritance and systems for simulation and storytelling. Through close readings of compartmentalization. -
A Chronicle of Map Interfaces in Games
Maps, Navigation and Transportation: Find a way DIS ’20, July 6–10, 2020, Eindhoven, Netherlands Paper to Pixels: A Chronicle of Map Interfaces in Games Z O. Toups,1,3 Nicolas LaLone,4 Katta Spiel,5 Bill Hamilton2,3 1Play & Interactive Experiences for Learning Lab / 2Participatory Live Experiences Laboratory 3Computer Science Department, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, USA 4Bridge Lab, Department of Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis, College of Information Science and Technology, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA 5e-Media Research Lab, KU Leuven, BE & Centre for Teacher Education, University of Vienna, AT [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ABSTRACT More than physical navigation, maps navigate the complex Game map interfaces provide an alternative perspective on and dynamic world of human culture. Maps on news media the worlds players inhabit. Compared to navigation applica- show political and socio-economic divides. Maps can show us tions popular in day-to-day life, game maps have different where people like ice cream over frozen yogurt or can be used affordances to match players’ situated goals. To contextualize by sports commentators showing us where specific athletes and understand these differences and how they developed, we have placed a ball or puck over time. present a historical chronicle of game map interfaces. Starting Despite that ubiquity, maps in and of themselves are generally from how games came to involve maps, we trace how maps static, a relic of the paper to which they owe their creation. are first separate from the game, becoming more and more There is so much more that maps can provide users given the integrated into play until converging in smartphone-style inter- growing ubiquity of computation and the increasing digital faces. -
Chapter 1 Introduction
I. Introduction This is it. This is your story. It all begins here... Auron (FINAL FANTASY X) Compared to film and especially to books, computer games are a very young medium. The first computer game SPACEWAR! dates from 1962. It was programmed to run on a DEC PDP-11. As these computers were quite costly2, it was not until the commercial breakthrough of the integrated circuit (IC) at the beginning of the 1970s that commercial computer games became a viable option3. At first, they could only be found in Arcade halls, but by the early 1980s they had also found their way into our homes. Nowadays, of course, we cannot imagine a world without computer games, a fact that made Nicholson Baker recently write: “I’d never held a video-game controller until last fall. Which is a pretty sad admission, as if I’d said in 1966 that I’d never watched ‘Bonanza’ or heard a song by the Rolling Stones” (2010, p. 53). Between the early 1980s and today, computer games have come a long way. If we look back at game history we can see that the original two categories of computer games — i.e. visual action based games that stem from SPACEWAR!, and maze-like story games that started with the 1975-76 game THE COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE — grew into a multitude of games and game genres. In the beginning the maze-like story games seemed to remediate literature (as interactive fiction or electronic novels), particularly since they only consisted of text. When graphics were added (especially full motion video), their descendants were seen as a remediation of film (interactive cinema)4. -
Creating Video Games for the Visually Impaired Anthony Russo, Neal
Creating Video Games for the Visually Impaired Anthony Russo, Neal Sacks, & Steven Vandal WPI IQP MBJ 0007 Professor Brian Moriarty April 12, 2012 Introduction The video game industry has expanded rapidly in recent years, growing from a 9.5 billion dollar industry in 2007 to a 25.1 billion dollar industry in 2010. This growth is due to the common interest that almost all Americans now hold in games, as a seventy-two percent of all americans play video games on a regular basis (ESA). However, because games rely heavily on impressive graphics and are primarily an immersive visual experience, very few games are made with the blind or the visually impaired in mind. In the 1970s when video games first emerged, it was virtually impossible to create a game that did not involve some sort of visuals. This is mainly due to a lack of technology, as almost all computers, games, and electronic speakers and displays could only output crude, pixilated visuals and rough, synthesized sound. However, technology has steadily improved to the point where games that do not need visuals are a possibility. Games for the visually impaired are an untapped industry, especially with the technology that exists today. By conducting interviews with the visually impaired we discovered what types of games the visual impaired prefer, what they would enjoy to play, and what ideas they have for developing these games. The History of Video Games for the Visually Impaired There are many games that can be played by the visually impaired. Interactive fiction and other text-based games have been popular for a long time, though to a lesser extent in recent years. -
Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky
Jerz 1 Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky Dennis G. Jerz Digital Humanities Quarterly Table of Contents Introduction Part I: Colossal Cave in Code Part II: Colossal Cave in Kentucky Coda: Adjusting the "Adventure" Timeline Introduction "Colossal Cave Adventure" was not the first computer game; nor was it the first game to accept textual commands, nor the first program to emulate something resembling conversation.1 Still, by using terse, evocative prose to simulate the exploration of a well-defined environment, and later by sharing the source code in order to let other programmers build upon his work, programmer Will Crowther set in motion a series of events that demonstrated the transformative cultural potential of the emerging internet. “[L]ike any significant program, Adventure was expressive of the personality and environment of the authors” (Levy 133). We know this environment was informal, collaborative, noncommercial, and as one might expect, highly technical. Yet "Adventure" has remained mysterious, in part due to Crowther's self-admitted fuzziness of memory when it comes to dates, and to his personal Jerz 2 choice to keep a low profile.2 Little evidence has been available to counter common but faulty assumptions – for instance, that Crowther's original "Adventure" was a sparse map-like simulation, and that all the magic and gaming elements were supplied by Don Woods. Inaccuracies are often perpetuated in published accounts, due to the inaccessibility of two -
Two Canine Heads Are Better Than One in PHOGS!
ALL FORMATS LIFTING THE LID ON VIDEO GAMES Issue 36 £3 wfmag.cc HoundedHounded OutOut Two canine heads are better than one in PHOGS! CARDS AND DICE YOUR STORY LOSS AND FOUND The growing influence Code an FMV Making personal games on video game design adventure game that deal with grief get in the 4K Ultra HD UltraWideColor Adaptive Sync Overwatch and the return of the trolls e often talk about ways to punish stalwarts who remain have resorted to trolling out of “ players who are behaving poorly, sheer boredom. and it’s not very exciting to a lot of Blizzard has long emphasised the motto “play W us. I think, more often than not, nice, play fair” among its core values, and Overwatch’s players are behaving in awesome ways in Overwatch, endorsement system seemed to embrace this ethos. and we just don’t recognise them enough.” JESS Why has it failed to rein in a community increasingly Designer Jeff Kaplan offered this rosy take on the MORRISSETTE intent on acting out? I argue that Overwatch’s Overwatch community in 2018 as he introduced the Jess Morrissette is a endorsements created a form of performative game’s new endorsement system, intended to reward professor of Political sportsmanship. It’s the promise of extrinsic rewards players for sportsmanship, teamwork, and leadership Science at Marshall – rather than an intrinsic sense of fair play – that on the virtual battlefields of Blizzard’s popular shooter. University, where motivates players to mimic behaviours associated with he studies games After matches, players could now vote to endorse one and the politics of good sportsmanship. -
Patterns, Dungeons and Generators
Patterns, Dungeons and Generators Steve Dahlskog Staffan Björk Julian Togelius Malmö University Göteborg University New York University Faculty of Technology and Department of Applied Department of Computer Society Information Technology Science and Engineering Malmö, Sweden Göteborg, Sweden New York, NY, U.S.A [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT This paper addresses the domain of dungeons, the type of This paper analyses dungeons, of the varieties commonly levels with a spatial puzzle quality first introduced in Dun- found in role-playing games, into several sets of design pat- geons & Dragons [31] and typically found in \roguelikes" terns at different levels of abstraction. The analysis fo- such as Rogue [59], Moria [40], and Hack [24], and com- cuses on mechanical patterns that could be either straight- puter role-playing games (RPGs) such as Bard's Tale [37] forwardly instantiated or recognized by a well-defined pro- and Ultima [28]. We identify a relatively large set of de- cess. At the most concrete level a set of fundamental com- sign patterns at different sizes and levels of abstraction { ponents were identified, followed by a long list of micro- micro-, meso- and macro-patterns. The motivation for car- patterns which can be directly instantiated. Shorter lists rying out this analysis is to find patterns that can be used of meso- and macro-patterns, which can be identified me- for pattern-based or search-based dungeon generation and chanically, are also identified. The direct motivation for for this reason the granularity is finer and the level of de- this analysis is to find building blocks and objectives for tail of the pattern collection is higher than what is typical a search-based procedural dungeon generator, however we for pattern collections. -
Ficções Interativas Entre a Literatura E a Computação
Ficções interativas Entre a literatura e a computação Janos Biro Esta obra é livre e deve permanecer livre. Pode e deve ser reproduzida no todo ou em parte, além de ser liberada a sua distribuição. Este livreto foi escrito, impresso e montado de modo independente em Goiânia-GO com os recursos coletivos da Impressora Anarquista (@impanark) e está disponível em PDF gratuitamente. O mercado editorial é injusto, apoie produções independentes. Como citar este livro: LEITE, Janos B. M. Ficções interativas: Entre a literatura e a computação. Contrafatual, 2020. Contrafatual, 2020 contrafatual.com Ficções interativas: Entre a literatura e a computação Sumário Apresentação ............................................................................................ 4 O que são ficções interativas? .................................................................. 5 Exemplos de ficções interativas ............................................................... 7 Como jogar ficções interativas ............................................................... 10 Como criar ficções interativas ............................................................... 11 História das ficções interativas .............................................................. 14 Teoria das ficções interativas ................................................................. 21 Apresentação Sou atraído por livros e por computadores desde antes de aprender a escrever. É uma relação que mal consigo compreender. Descobri o mundo das ficções interativas em 1999, e antes disso tinha