Oh please. I had to try to explain Pong to my 11 year old.
“Well, it was bigger than the cable box and you had dials that moved a bar up and down on either side of the screen. And a pixellated square that bounced back and forth, so it was like playing ping pong.”
“What else did it do?”
“That was it.”
“Whatever. Can we play Super Smash Brothers on the Wii now?”
Don’t even get me started on explaining to her why floppy disks are called floppy. My husband actually went further back and explained to her how he used to carry a deck of cards around while she got that glazed-over look in her eyes and fired up her DS. Freaking kids these days.
My daugher too was amazed and intrigued when I explained that you can play solitaire with an actual deck of cards. Not only that, but there are so many more variations with a real deck than on a screen. She tried it…then decided it was too much work, and went back to the computer version.
He likes puzzles and consequently did enjoy it a bit, but he finds the possibility of grues a bit nervewracking. The funny thing is, he’d happily play some modern game with fully animated 'orrible monsters that come down and kill his character, no problem. 7 year old imagination is a powerful thing though: the mere words on the screen leave much more room for fear than actual pictures.
I’ll try to get him interested again when he’s a bit older. For a start, forcing him to spell and type are worthwhile skills that he doesn’t develop just pointing and clicking.
I don’t have kids, but I’m happy to say my nephew knows enough to understand the profound difficulty of ascending a foodless monk. Of course, he’s even more game-obsessed than I am.
That said–as much as I love the old text adventures, Zork: Grand Inquisitor is my favorite Zork game.
I installed my Larn through MacPorts. I think that download file is for people who want to… compile it themselves. twitch
HQX files generally predate OS X.
My friends were horrified when I was suggesting hooking up my Intel Quad Core 2.66GHZ PC with GTS 250 FX graphics card to a HDMI TV, all for playing Nethack ASCII.
There are installation instructions at that site. Apparently Stuffit Expander will work on binhex files now. Whodathunkit? You could probably use the Unix utility ‘unbinhex’ or ‘xbin’ as well.
MacPorts is a utility for installing open-source programs that have been ported to Darwin, the core of Mac OS X. You install it on OS X and run it at the command line. It connects to a server and allows you to select, download, compile, and install programs. One of those programs is Larn.
Whenever I tell whippersnappers about Pong and Zork, and how cool they were, I remember how I glazed over every time my grandfather talked about playing with a stick in the yard. And how ecstatic he was when, one wonderful Christmas, he got the put-the-ball-on-a-string-in-the-cup game.
God, I’ve turned into my grandfather. And Zork is my put-the-ball-on-a-string-in-the-cup game.