Urgh. I can’t remember much about this game, but I’ve been trying to remember the name of it for-darn-ever.
I remember the cover had presumably the main character’s forearms visible, one with a big shiny silvery bracer over one forearm. The story involved, as far as I can tell, waking up and discovering you had a big shiny silvery bracer over one forearm and couldn’t take the thing off. It was a text-based game but the sort they had in the early-mid 90s – that is, a big static picture over a parser.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? No, it isn’t Curse of the Azure Bonds.
If it was a pure text adventure it might be indexed in the Interactive Fiction Archive. You might poke around in the DOS games there to see if any title jogs your memory.
The Pawn by Magnetic Scrolls/Rainbird/Firebird. Great parser, cool graphics for the time. Game drove me freakin’ nuts. I used to sent letters to the company pretty much every single week as I got stuck. Finally, they just sent me a walkthrough written in a single substitution cipher.
Nope. I had the same experience with Ultima 3. I got stuck trying to find the moon gates or something, wrote Origin Systems, and they answered my question. Actually, now that I think of it, they might have had a telephone help line set up for people who were stuck in their games.
Game drove me freakin’ nuts too, I was just hoping I would be able to play and finish it now. So many games back then where I could not get beyond the first few screens, not actually knowing the Exact Freaking Combination Of Words they expected me to use.
The parser on that was actually pretty forgiving. I never found myself stuck with any combination of words problems. However, some of the puzzles were ridiculously difficult, like one that required building a lever out of random parts scattered throughout the realm to dislodge a boulder. There is no way I could have figured that out on my own, so I wonder if there was a character in the game I was supposed to ask a question who would have hinted me toward the answer.
