Fforde computer game?

I just wanted to make a message that said "computer games".

I bet if Thurs 1-4 had stayed in control, there would have soon been a first-person-shooter Eyre Affair in the works over at Goliath...

depending on age you could have all types of wonderful games.

for children:
"Where's the dodo?"-children have to find out where the dodo is hiding.or a matching game

abstraction lovers:
"History the way it never was"- you control the character to change history to what you see fit. sort of like sims except you control everything from what country's have wars, what person discovers the theory of relativity, and the utter destruction of time itself.

give me a few and I might think of more.

I like what you've come up with so far!

I would love a Thursday Next text adventure. :) Like the H2G2 one Douglas Adams made.

I'm pretty sure Mr Ff has given disapproval to fan fiction, so unfortunately, he probably isn't too keen on games. Not that it'll stop us thinking.

I quite like the idea of a time playing-with game, (not necessarily Nextian), though probably you'd have different points you can enter and leave, with weird effects depending on what you do (Dropping phones in stone- age bad, but nothing like as bad as doing it in Victorian times).

Or maybe a resource management game, where you have to arrange a book, from basic outline to masterpiece, somehow. Possibly you'd release it at various "levels" of "story-ness", (short story, dream, anecdote, novel, epic, concept, pitch) which require various amounts of detail as things go on. you'd get resources by achieving the quality at the achieved level, but you'd get punished if you didn't deliver plot/ action/ characterisation at the expected level. Plan would be you'd need to work your story up to a novel and hold it there.

Hmmm, actually, as an RPGer, I'd be interested in seeing how you'd do rules for Bookworld characters in a way that fits something like Fforde's ideas while keeping options open.

Daffy! Your back! And your front! All of you is back! Have some pie& (Sorry, but I ran out of exclamation marks)

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My computer beat me at chess, but I won at kickboxing

Why a-thank you. I just recently managed to escape from Gitmo.

:)

:)

:)

So! A-hem hem. Sniff.

So are there other text adventurers out there?

I've not played H2G2, but have done a few others. I'd like a Nextian IF, maybe if it played abstract textual games in places.

I enjoyed the six Zork installments quite a bit. I still do, but I have to use a Commodore 64 emulator to get the proper atmosphere. Enchanter was particularly funny.

I enjoyed H2G2 and Collosal Cave - even liking "The Very Big Cave Adventure" in the days of the Sinclair Spectrum. (Note to most Fforumites: ask your grandparents about the Sinclair Spectrum.) Beurocracy was another fine game. I even went out and bought a BBC micro so that I could play that outpouring from the mind of Douglas Adams....

I think graphics spoilt RPGs, reducing them to hack/slay/click box to continue and most modern ones seem to have lost the sense of adventure.

I agree completely with your last statement.

Well, the prior one as well, but then I'm a fanatic about anything even sort of related to Douglas Adams' work.


Here's a great (but paraphrased from memory) quote from a computer-science seminar lecture he gave in the late '90s:

"[The Hitchhiker game] was, as far as I know, the first program ever written that deliberately lied to you. And this has apparently started something of a trend!"

The Very Big Cave Adventure... didn't that have a scene with a bull and you fed a bomb to it to get rid of it... "That's a-bomb-in-a-bull!"
One of my earliest experiences of the art of puns.
I don't remember much else about the game... Did love text adventures though!

So what's the first computer game everyone can remember playing?

Some thing with Donald Duck, where you had to do temporary job games like running trains and keping shelves stocked so yo could get enough money to put stuff in a playground.

Earliest one I remember getting really enthused about: The Incredible Machine

Missile Command

I can't remember if mine was Paganitzu (all class, ye gods I wish I still had it!), good old Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego, or some other text based game I can't remember the name of, that was chock full of werewolves and vampires.
...There was this great command "Throw Garlic" which one seemed constantly required to do when encountering baddies. I always thought was dumb... Why throw away the only protection from vampires you have?

We had a VIC-20 which had its own versions of popular videogames, so we played Froggie instead of Frogger and I remember our excitement when Dad hooked it to the colour TV on occasion! When we moved up to the Apple II+ there was something with a submarine, something called Microwave, the unforgettable Zork trilogy ("I'd sooner kiss a pig...") and one which involved firing at parachutists, a game I have recently discovered exists on my iPod...

I remember being jealous of my cousins with their Atari and Ms Pacman, Q-bert and one adventure game which might have been Castle Wolfenstein. Then I set aside videogames for several years until I worked for Sony and was expected to be able to offer gaming advice for PlayStation fans, so took home something called Final Fantasy VII and have since seen months of my life happily sacrificed to RPGs.