Someone at the college I went to (they allowed gaming for the first 3 weeks of every semester) mapped the entire thing by dropping inventory items. I still recall one series of commands to get oneself out of there: “South South East Up”…
Yes, i put curved arrows between the rooms. It wasn’t all that messy. I suspect it was developed as a map on paper, and not just as random directions.
Absolutely. It took me a few attempts but I recall donning it in a single evening. It mostly involved dropping different items in each room and tracking from that. It would actually be fairly easy if the thief didn’t periodically come by and take things.
And of course you could also just buy the map.
Never finished it, sadly. It was on my friend’s computer. That and “Sex Vixens from Space” took up a lot of our adolescence, though.
On the non-erotic side, we also played the hell out of Phantasie III: The Wrath of Nikademus.
IIRC, one of the drawbacks to dropping things in rooms to mark where you’ve been is that the thief could wander through later and pick them up. So, just because you enter an empty room doesn’t mean you haven’t already been there before.
I remember having to save a lot and also frequently just starting a new game. Luckily the twisty maze wasn’t too far into the game so you could get back pretty quick after a restart.
Ha!
You know that you can play all those games online?
Sex Vixens requires a C64 emulator
If you play Leather Goddesses of Phobos online, how do you scratch and sniff?
Just go without a shower for a couple of days before playing.
As I recall, though, the Thief would say something along the lines of:
“Why would somebody leave a(n) [insert object name here] lying around. I guess I’ll just have to move it.”
So at least you had fair warning in the maze. In fact, the thief didn’t just do this in the maze. Any where the thief could go, he could move things on you. He’d also steal the platinum bar from the room it was in once you solved that puzzle if you didn’t pick up the bar yourself and left in the room. I always wondered what the full range of the thief actually was. I’m pretty sure he never went above ground.
And I beat Zork in college as part of the Lost Treasures collection (though, I had played it earlier in early high school without solving it) which included the maze map so I didn’t have to deal with the frustrations of mapping it out with the objects moving around.
I don’t know why I never finished it when I played it when I was younger. Probably because I didn’t know at the time how to solve mazes that weren’t euclidean. (Would find out about the “drop an item” thing later.)
Anyway, the one clue I ever got for that game was when I played it in early high school my (future) brother-in-law who was dating my older sister mentioned that he had never finished it but the only way to finish the game fully was that you had to let the thief steal the jeweled gold egg.
I think that he could only go in naturally-dark rooms, like a grue (other than his own lair, which I think might have been illuminated).
And those games were definitely not designed to be won on any given playthrough. The expectation was that you’d have many, many playthroughs, and each time, you’d learn a little bit more and be better equipped for the next time (even though you’d probably already screwed yourself out of doing it right this time).
I remember in the first one, for instance (not Zork 1; just Zork, no bloomin’ A, B, C, or D), you had to absolutely perfectly beeline it to the Torch, with a maximum of one wasted move (including things like turning off your flashlight the move before moving into a lit room), because there were points later in the game when you wouldn’t have it, and the total capacity of the flashlight was exactly one move longer than all of the things you had to use it for.
Yeah, and I have played some of them since.
And you had to attempt to open it prior to it getting taken.
I’ll take “What are things we should NEVER start a thread on?” For $500, Alex.
I had whole collections of the original Infocom games. I played most of them but could never get through but two without hints. The first one was Wishbringer, the other was Trinity. I don’t think I ever finished Wishbringer without using one of the wishes, but it’s been so long that I don’t fully remember. Trinity took me years to finish, but eventually I got through it.
I played the Zork games, liked them, but got lots of hints for them. Some of the other ones I started and just didn’t like so never finished. I had copies of Lost Treasures of Infocom, but sold them a few years ago. I really should go back and play through some of them.
One thing LucasArts did when they got into graphic adventure games was that they decided, with Monkey Island, to eliminate dying and dead ends, or locked out situations.
I would be more interested in text adventures today if there was not death or lock out situations.
Have you played any text adventures from the past few years, or even somewhat longer than that? I am by no means an expert, but it seems that death or lock-out situations, certainly at least unfair situations requiring multiple playthroughs to solve, are considered passé.
I have not. Any good ones?
I believe it is possible to lock yourself out in Monkey Island but it’s niche. If you run out of T-shirts to light the cannon with to get onto the island.
One of my favorite parts of Zork III is a bit of an easter egg that also provides an alternate solution to one of the puzzles.
There is a location where you’re on the banks of a sea, and most turns the room is empty. But if you get there at the right time, or wait a bit, you see a man pass by on a boat.
And if you say “Hello, Sailor,” he gets really excited because he longed to hear those words and he reward you a vial of liquid he tosses your direction.