heh, he should have tried the train driving game based on real bullet train routes and it came with a specially-made controller …
here’s the wiki
Densha de Go! - Wikipedia!
They had one at California Extreme (Bay Area arcade expo):
Sorta hard to understand given the Japanese text, but I managed to transport at least one load of passengers without killing everyone.
Thanks for the Sabotage ID!
I wanted to have something else to add instead of a plain thanks, so it took me a while to recall this (another Apple II game):
Adventure #8: Pyramid of Doom, a text adventure from (not that) Scott Adams. My family and I liked Zork and the other Infocom games we tried; we found this at a department store, I think. It was okay; the thing that I remember was that the interpreter response for doing something nonsensical was “You be weird. Cut that out.” Googling that gave exactly one hit: this review from 15 years ago if you want to know more.
i bet that was cool as hell …
In the early 80’s I held the town record on Dig Dug for months on the tabletop arcade console.
Oh, I forgot about Autoduel! It was based off of Car Wars, a table top game made by Steve Jackson games. I don’t remember having a good time with Autoduel. Mainly because I found it difficult and I just kept dying.
Never played any Autoduel, but my brother and I played a lot of Roadwar 2000… hell of a lot of fun, many late nights trying to build the best fleet of vehicles. (Buses and flatbed trucks were the best, because you could put a lot of dudes with guns inside/on top.)
In a drawer somewhere, I still have the mini tool kit that came with the game.
I had forgotten about the tool kit that came with Autoduel. I used to like Car Wars, so liked Autoduel too.
I remember Scott Adams’ Voodoo Castle and The Count. Just okay. They weren’t as good as, say, Infidel. To win this Infocom game, you literally had to decipher hieroglyphics.
Someone gave me a disk of DOS shareware games in the mid80s that had a couple memorable ones-- “Round42” and “Stryker”. I remember mostly Round42 (it was labelled as Round42x), a space invaders type game with a maze stage, very nerve-wracking sound effects, and each stage was more complex and faster. There is a youtube video of someone getting through all 42 “rounds”. I could only manage about 30.
As a kid in the late 80’s I spent a lot of time playing The Ancient Art of War on DOS. It was one of the first RTS games. Don’t think I’ve ever seen it mentioned since those days.
the first warcraft game… it was so clunky and had obnoxious aspects… such as the road-building aspect … i played it for about an hour and moved on to number two and forgot about it as did most of the world (I bought the battle chest that had both and some expansions)
I’m still trying to find a text-based game we had for the Apple IIc. I asked about it here once years ago but no one could come up with anything. I swear this game existed but no one seems to remember it.
It was strictly text-based, no graphics at all that I can remember. You were on a space station or something and you had to try to escape. You had to navigate through different corridors with color names. I don’t remember what all you had to do to win the game but I do remember you had to sabotage a tractor beam before you could take off or your ship would get blown up. And there was a time limit, if you took too long to do whatever it was you needed to do you’d get a game over… or the station would blow up or something.
This would have been in the 80s. And Google has been absolutely no help. I was reading through this thread hoping someone would mention it. I suppose it could have been share-ware or something that came bundled with something else. It just pops up in my brain from time to time and bugs me.
When I was a kid I loved the Windham Classics series of games – five graphics-and-text-prompt games based on books like Treasure Island, Swiss Family Robinson and The Wizard of Oz. They also did Below the Root, which was probably my favorite but nobody I’ve mentioned it to remembers it.
Check out a list of Infocom games. There are a few that might fit your description.
The story sounds like the Death Star escape part of the first Star Wars (episode IV). Was there a text based SW game?
Likely, this was either Planetfall, or its sequel, Stationfall.
Here’s a list of IF games from IFDB when I search for “tractor beam”.
There is indeed a Death Star themed game, but maybe it’s Oo-Topos?
I thought it was answered just recently in this thread (as an unlicensed Star Wars text game):
When I was a kid, there was a Star Trek game. There was a grid of sectors, and there was a Star Base in one of the sectors where you got repairs, more energy, and more photon torpedoes. Your job was to enter each sector and clean out the Klingons. There might be one Bird of Prey in the sector but, if you were unlucky, there could be as many as three. Photon torpedoes were best because they were your most powerful weapon and cost no energy. Phasers used energy, which was dangerous because you needed your energy for shields and movement.
I mentioned the genre. The Star Trek variants date from the early 1970’s; you are probably thinking of Super Star Trek. It was so popular that I doubt it can be considered forgotten, but how many times are you going to sit and play it?