Tetris. Oh, and Pac-Man.
Alone in the Dark, the first one. I could never get beyond the pirate in the front room.
I know you have to use the knight’s sword, not the old saber you find upstairs that breaks after a couple hits. What I don’t know is how to hit him. parrying his blows is easy, I could do it all day. Likewise, he to mine. If I wait for him to lift his sword before slashing with mine, I can hit him, but I’m left defenseless and he hits me too. So, I’m left with the option of both of us dieing, or a never ending sword fight.
How do you hit him and avoid being hit yourself?
That, and Weird Dreams. That might not be so difficult if the user interface wasn’t so damned fiddly, but as it is, I don’t think I’ve gotten more than three screens in. And to be honest, I don’t care to go any further. Alone in the Dark, though, I would like to continue.
Or not. Bastards took it down. :mad:
But it says its been taken down. My hopes are dashed again. 
There used to be a great site where you could play nearly every game that Infocom had released, online. You’d link up with the server via Telnet and play away. You could save and everything.
I was really dissappointed when one day the site owner said that he had to take the service down at Infocom’s request. I was thinking; why would Infocom care?? These games are all 20+ years old, they’re all basically abandonware anyways.
“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.”
By no means. Activision still makes money off them and is planning to release a collection of Infocom games in 2005.
Anyway, for me it’s ZORK I. I’ve been playing that game on and off since I was 10.
–Cliffy
I never beat “Impossible Mission,” but my brother could beat it on demand. Dude was a machine.
My game was “Raid on Bungeling Bay.” That thing kicked unholy ass. Anybody remember it?
Yes!! Loved that game. The heat-seeking missles they’d fire at you were the bane of my existence. I got to be a pro at that game. That, and Infiltrator II. I shoulda been a helicopter pilot.
Congratulationans Airman, the original Indiana Jones for the Atari 2600 remains the only RPG-style adventure game that I have beat. It took me about 10 years of playing off and on, and that was without any hints except those from the book! And it took me and my brother playing together to do it (where one of us controlled Indy’s movements, the other his actions with the other joystick.) We even developed a specialized vocabulary for it: when you were in trouble and needed to teleport back to the cave, you had to “Ankh out of there.” ANKH OUT! ANKH OUT!
Ecstatica for the PC. I haven’t installed and played it since I had my Pentium 90 machine, but I keep it because I mean to finally finish it.
Oh, and since this has turned into a thread about video games, I’m shooting this over to Cafe Society.
Sonic 2. By the time I was to face Dr. Robotnik, I was all out of life rings and it proved impossible to dodge his spike missiles/arms. I’d die instantly and if I wanted to face him off again, I had to replay the whole game (which kicked ass, but ended up kicking mine).
The cool thing about that is that there’s TWO endings, depending on whether or not you recover all the Chaos Emeralds. Also, loved all the music from that last level.
Oh, and Robotnik’s got all manner of interesting tricks depending on how you try to out maneuver his robot. IIRC, if you get behind him somehow, he lobs little egg bombs at you.
Might and Magic I: Secret of the Inner Sanctum.
Long and boring game, though I finally found out what the secret was online. I took me years to find a good site that would spoil the secret. I remember the relief of finding out what it was.
There was one puzzle in the 1990s PC game “The 7th Guest” that I could never solve. The game has a “hint” feature, but somehow that felt to me like cheating, so I just set the game aside. Since it’s a DOS game, I doubt that I could find any way to play it now.
I never completed Infocom’s “Zork III” on the Commodore 64. I just got kind of annoyed with it, since I didn’t find it to be nearly as much fun as the earlier Zorks.
Zork III was more complex and challenging than the others. It took me the longest to beat that one.
Did you ever get the chance to play Return to Zork? Although it was far removed from the original text adventure (being that it was chock full of graphics), I thought it was a great game.
Want some rye?
'course you do!
What was the puzzle in the 7th Guest, pinkfreud? I played more than my share of that, and of its sequel, the 11th Hour.
I can’t remember, but IIRC there was one version of Impossible Mission (maybe for the Atari?) that literally was impossible to finish – the game had a bug that prevented you from meeting all of the conditions needed to win the game…