Text Adventures – we’re not dead yet!

I haven’t yet played any of these games on my DS, but’s it’s an interesting idea. There’s something totally geeky about the fact that this stuff even exists of course.

What this guy has done is basically port a load of classic text adventures over to the DS and has add an interface for entering text in to the console to play them. You can use either an on-screen keypad or use a special shorthand which includes characters for common words such as ‘get’ or ‘go north’ and so on.

It’s interesting, and even humourous, to note how much activity this is creating on the ‘net. We have all the killer graphics in the world, we have the next generation that’s just arrived (or has just arrived properly, before the 360 didn’t have any competition) and everyone is cooing and ahhing about the graphic capabilities. And then this just throws a spanner in the works. It’s just plain text. If you’re lucky you might get a few 16-colour EGA screen shots thrown in for a treat.

There’s actually a whole load of people still into these kind of games. What would be interesting to find out is whether those who play them now grew up with them originally in the 80s, or if some of them have got into them at a later date purely based on the characteristics of the genre alone. Do people view these through rose-tinted spectacles, or do they still offer an appeal to the modern gamer – desensitised as they are by more graphics, more gore, and generally more bling? By the way, this stuff is now known as interactive fiction rather than text adventures.

At a time when people are beginning to discuss the importance of character, plot and script writing in video games, as well as the part these things have to play in advancing the artistic power and value of the medium, this is an interesting event. This is a medium that perhaps more budding game designers should try their hand at sometime – because the only thing you’ve got to keep people interested IS the character, plot and scriptwriting!

I think I’ll just have to go and have a look and see how well these things play….

For those of you with DSs that have a flashcard of some sort in them (mine is flashed so that I can play homebrew and images of games I already own), here’s the link to the games – papafujis DS Adventures Page.

But it may be worth a look anyway for those of you interested to see how it looks.

~ by thesynapse on 21 May, 2007.