infocom
Latest
Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy playable for free online
The BBC has released a free online version of Infocom's classic PC text adventure The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the game's initial release. Designed by "Hitchhiker's Guide" author Douglas Adams, Infocom's game mixes humor, sci-fi, and frequent player death for an experience many regard as a high point in the text adventure genre. The BBC's latest adaptation follows up on a previous 20th anniversary re-release, and boasts improved in-game navigation along with a virtual keyboard suited for touch screens. If you plan to play through this one, remember to save frequently. That bulldozer is a killer. [Image: Infocom / BBC]
Zeptolab's new Pudding Monsters, Infocom games and more now available on iOS
Today's the last Thursday before the big App Store freeze, which means this is basically developers' last chance to get on the marketplace before the big holiday rush. As a result, then, there are a ton of big new releases, all available now for your purchasing pleasure. ZeptoLab is the company behind the App Store's breakout hit Cut the Rope, and they're back with a new game called Pudding Monsters, where you slide little puddings around the fridge to combine them into larger creatures. It's a lot of fun, and only US$0.99. Activision's surprised us all with a title called Lost Treatures of Infocom, which is a collection of old text adventures from the company's storied past. The first Zork is available for free, and you can get a number of other old Infocom games by in-app purchase. Crescent Moon has released a sequel to its Ravensword RPG called Ravensword: Shadowlands. This is a big, bold release with great graphics and really deep gameplay, and you can grab it today for $6.99. Jordan Mechner, best known as the man behind the Prince of Persia games, is back with a new one called Karateka. The reviews on this game's other platforms haven't been great, but maybe it'll do better on iOS. It's $2.99. Square has released the remade version of Final Fantasy 4, and it's not cheap: You'll pay $15.99 to go back to play through the old Japanese RPG. 11 bit Studios' Anomaly Korea is finally here -- it's a really good-looking reverse tower defense game published by Chillingo. It's $2.99 as well. Parashoot Stan looks like a well-polished falling game that might be worth a try, out for just 99 cents. Shadow Warrior is an iOS rerelease of the old PC title from 3D Realms, and it's out now for free to try, $1.99 for the full game via in-app purchase. I haven't heard much about Ronin, but it looks like a well-made action game, available today for 99 cents. Disney's dropped its Where's My Holiday spinoff of Where's My Water and Where's My Perry, featuring some free levels from the two popular games. Grab it for free, and it'll give the kids something to do while you're wrapping the presents and cooking Christmas dinner. And finally, everybody's third favorite worm (after Earthworm Jim and the Worms) is back for the holiday season in Super Mega Worm vs. Santa 2. Just 99 cents for days and days of happiness? Yes please. Man, that's a lot of great new games! We may see some more new titles later on this week, but from here on out, there will mostly be just sale and price drops. The App Store freezes tomorrow, and most developers now have their ducks in a row, hoping that when all of the new iPhone and iPad owners make their way to the store next week, their apps will be the ones they're downloading.
All of the Zorks down 40 percent on GOG this weekend
Do you prefer the text-based, imagination-requiring Zorks of yore, or the slightly more recent (but still wicked old) adventure game Zorks? Guess what: It doesn't matter! You're buying all of them, because the entire Zork franchise is 40 percent off today on the GOG storefront.
GOG asks: Want Return to Zork? 'Course you do!
"Want some rye? 'Course you do!" That's literally the only thing I remember from Return to Zork, Infocom's FMV-filled 1993 graphical adventure game. I think I might have enjoyed playing it, though, so I'm happy to see that it's now available on GOG. For just $5.99, you too can enter a world of people offering you rye, and solve the dual mysteries of who offered you rye, and whether or not your character wanted some. Also, there's something about the Great Underground Empire of Zork being found "beneath the Valley of the Sparrows."
Livescribe hack lets you play Zork with (smart) pen and paper
Livescribe's pen certainly seems like a hackable enough device, but for some reason we haven't seen many hacks or mods that make the smart pen even smarter (or dumber, for that matter). One big one quietly popped up last month, however, and has apparently gone largely unnoticed until now. YouTube user "chipos81" has managed to port Infocom's Z-Machine virtual machine to the pen (the Echo, specifically), and you know what that means: Zork on paper. Look down. Examine link. Go past break. Watch video. [Thanks, Charlie]
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.
Zork to return in MMO form
If you're old like me, you may remember the classic world of Zork. It was a text-based adventure game (and series of games) created in the late 70s that was the inspiration for most, if not all, story-rich computer games of our day. Well, now it will be coming to an internet browser near you as a persistent MMO. Dublin-based Jolt Online Gaming is joining with Activision, who owns the rights to Zork, for a browser-based MMO centered around the world of the Infocom classic. "The Great Underground Empire has recently fallen and the land is in disarray," the game's website describes. "The stock market has collapsed, leading even mighty FrobozzCo International to fire employees from throughout its subsidiaries. A craze of treasure-hunting has swept through the remnants of the Great Underground Empire. It's a dangerous time to be a newly-unemployed traveling salesman, but it's also a great time to try a bit of adventuring."Check out the official website for more information and to sign up for up-to-date news on the development of this game.
Community plays collaborative Zork, grues tremble in fear
Normally considered single-player experiences, the text adventure genre has just taken a large step in a collaboratively multiplayer direction. Several members of the Idle Thumbs forum community have designed a special forum-bot that plays text adventures with other members. His name is Ziggy.At the moment, Ziggy is programmed to play Zork, a classic text adventure made by Infocom in the late 70s. In a thread started by Ziggy, players post replies with commands like "go north" or "take letter." Ziggy then replies, performs the commands, and continues the game.The Ziggy threads allow for commenting as well, giving players the chance to discuss moves before executing them. This makes the whole a great deal more collaborative, although so far it hasn't been helping. The first play-through of Zork resulted in death at the hands of a hungry cyclops, and the second at the hands of a hungry grue. It's clear that after two losses in a row, the adventurers could use a little extra help in their third attempt. Anyone know the way to the Great Underground Empire? [Via GameSetWatch]
Charming hand-drawn Dungeon map predates Zork
Everyone should know that we're big fans of Zork here at Joystiq HQ (it's one of the 10 most important games, remember?). So it's doubly exciting to see this map pop up all over the place today. At first blush, it may appear to be a charming, hand-drawn map of Infocom's seminal text-adventure game, but upon closer inspection it doesn't match up. Why? Because it's a map of the mainframe version of Dungeon, the antecedent to Zork, "equivalent to Zork I + about half of Zork II + the endgame of Zork III." Better still, there's DOS, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux versions to go along with the map, so there's no excuse not to play it![Via Cathode Tan]
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!]
Imagination beats everything
RetroBlast's Motivational Poster Contest has come to a close, and the winning Zork entry is pretty spectacular. Simple, but spectacular, we'd love to order one if we could. Infocom's games always took place inside your head, because they were just text on a screen, but they were some of the best games ever written.Check out the winners and all the other entries. Have a favorite that didn't make it to the top? Still want to design your own? Let us know about it.
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
Interactive phiction: Zork phone demo is online
Remember ZoiP (née Zasterisk), the open source implementation of the text-adventure classic that you play on the phone? Installation required rolling up your sleeves and installing some *NIX-y stuff which, despite my urgent desire to experience this, I never got around to doing. Fine, the real reason I never got around to doing it was because the project's author, simon, promised to have a call-in number available to test the project out. Why do today what someone else will do for you later, y'know what I'm saying?It's later and, true to his word, simon's put the public beta of ZoiP online. All it took was a little linkage from Boing Boing, Make: Blog, digg, and ... ahem ... Joystiq to get the old motivation meter up. Here's how you do it: Call 416-548-7557 (Toronto, ON, Canada) which is the "best quality." Otherwise try 360-226-7386 (WA, USA) which is "a little choppy." Or use a SIP-compliant program like Gizmo and add zoip@demo.zoip.org and dial out. This method worked the best for me (and it's free). I'm not sure if it's just me, but some calls seem to go much better than others in regards to voice recognition. On some, I can roll right through, other times I'm stuck repeating myself more often than "blue" in Brain Age. He warns to speak naturally, as "careful enunciation actually seems to make things worse." Give it a shot and let us know how far you get.
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]
