TextAdventures
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Interactive fiction meets interactive typewriter, pilfers the kingdoms of Zork (video)
You are standing in an open field as usual, or perhaps you're in the darkness, likely to be eaten by a grue, but the words aren't etching their way into your soul from the familiar computer terminal -- they're on freshly printed paper. Like a player piano, the Automatypewriter lets you play games like Zork by automatically keying in letters via a series of solenoids and fishing line to tell you where you are, and it records your input, too; every time you type "XYZZY" in vain, it's an Arduino board that sends signals to the text parser, which directs a hollow voice to pity your foolish word. Forget the iPad typewriter -- this is old-school. See it in action after the break, or hit the source link for the schematics to build one yourself. Just be sure to install Planetfall, too.
Text adventures arrive on the DS via unofficial channels
We can't tell you to download them (in fact, we'll tell you not to), but we can definitely applaud the technical achievement. A homebrew genius called papafuji has ported a massive selection of classic text adventures and early graphic adventure games to the DS, including all of Infocom's text adventures and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams' interactive fiction.These aren't just barebones ports, either: you can save games, and you can choose to enter text via an onscreen keyboard or handwriting input! And the game engine contains shorthand functionality for common commands like cardinal directions and "get". Some of the games are public domain, but most aren't, and we aren't sure which games fall in which category. Therefore, we're officially warning you: if you download these games, there's a good chance that you are a pirate.[Thanks, Joq!]
Japanese hardware sales, Feb. 19 - Feb. 25: text adventure edition
You wake up disoriented, in a dark room. You have no idea where you are.>lookIt's a dark room. You can't see anything. We know you're disoriented, but do try to keep up.>look exitsFine. Okay. You stumble around the room until you find a wall. Keeping one hand on the wall, you walk the perimeter of the room, looking for doors. You find a door on the east side of the room. You also find a key hanging from a hook on the wall. And by "find" we mean "get poked by." We hope you find some Neosporin on this adventure.>advise readers to click post break
Infocom: from Zork to business software
"You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here."If you've never experienced the bliss of staring at the above -- the opening line of text adventure classic Zork -- you're missing out on one of the formative titles in video game history. This week, The Escapist takes a cursory look at Infocom, the company behind Zork, and what became of them. In short, they blew it on a piece of business software called Cornerstone (yuck). While The Escapist piece (ironically titled "The Short, Happy Life of Infocom") is far too short to encapsulate the company's meteoric success or their similarly swift demise at the hands of Activision, lucky for us, there is an exhaustively researched study done by some MIT students (natch) in 2000 that is still taking up residency on the web. Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc. is available in an easy to read, 50-page PDF here so, if The Escapist piece whets your appetite for text adventure, you can have seconds.See also:Interactive phiction: Zork phone demo is online
Stuck on hold? Zork is the new soft jazz
Forget Michael Bolton, Zork is the best hold music ever! From Zasterisk:"I was tinkering with Asterisk and the Festival text-to-speech engine, and wrote some short Asterisk::AGI scripts to read back live weather reports. After that, I thought I needed something more interactive to work with..."Now Zork is back! Listen as the eerie voice of Festival takes you into the Underground Empire, and marvel as you explore this world with your dial pad, unlocking the secrets within!"You'll need to install the Asterisk open source phone-switcher (*NIX only, that includes you Mac users), the Festival text-to-speech application, and then let Zasterisk work its special brand of magic, turning that boring phone tree into a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Too much work, you say? Good news! On March 13th the project's creator, simon, announced "over the next few weeks I'll be putting a public beta online for you to call in to." A few weeks is, like, right now! We're officially on the lookout.[Via Boing Boing]
