Text

A few weeks ago, I spoke of my return to playing "point-and-click" adventure games on my PC. It seems that my regression into the dark past of gaming has finally hit bottom, as I have found myself now playing games that consist of mere screens of text. For buggery's sake, at least Pong had graphics. Why am I so keen to play such musty relics? Perhaps it has something to do with the variety of genres that were made in this format. These days, it seems that every new game on the market is set in "the hood"/a space station/a Tolkien-esqe elfland/some sort of near-future armed conflict, and consits of various forms of killing terrorists/orcs/aliens/policemen. Don't get me wrong, I have enjoyed these types of games, and do own many of these. And there are truly original games out there as well like Psychonauts (buy this game dammit!) and Shadow of the Colossus (Lawrence hates that game). But take a gander at some of the settings of the games in The Lost Treasures of Infocom collection I just got of eBay:

Planetfall/Stationfall: A forerunner to the Space Quest games, where you play as a space janitor with a robot sidekick.

Deadline/The Witness: 1930's murder mysteries.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Based on the book, and notoriously difficult. Called Infocom's greatest by many.

Ballyhoo: A goddamn circus-mystery game. Circus!

The Lurking Horror: Pants-crapping Lovecraft-style horror game. My personal favorite.

Zork series: Fantasy dungeon-crawls with a goofy sense of humor.

There's even more in the collection, and that's just Vol 1. The second volume includes Trinity, an anti-war adventure where the player travels through time and visits the scenes of historical and fictional atomic explosions, as well as A Mind Forever Voyaging, a highly political tale in which you take the role of a sentient computer that thinks its human.

While these games are mostly all puzzle-based adventures, they have intriguing plots and settings that are often apart from what is released and selling billions of each year. This is not some techno-fear screed though, as I will continue to play new games in the future, but I guess the point is that it is nice to take a break from the relentless crush of "the new", and experience what was groundbreaking twenty years ago, and remains so in many ways. Join me soon, when I'm sure I'll fall even further into the past of gaming, perhaps selling all my games to purchase an original Pong cabinet.