Oh sweet memories. I’m saying that although I was not really into text adventures back then when they were highly popular. I used to play them nevertheless but it was rather difficulty back then. Infocom was one of the major game makers back in the days and since most of their games were text adventures they had to excel in story telling. And that they did. This changed a bit when graphics were added to the adventures, not animated graphics if you mind, just some background images that would fit the setting.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is a classic text adventure. I’m writing this because the game is currently playable as a browser game over at the BBC4’s website. To be precise, the 20th anniversary edition is playable that contains background images. If you want to take a look a the original version of the game without images you can do so at the website of Douglas Adams.
The major problem that I always had with these types of games was to discover the known vocabulary. The AI can obviously only react if it knows the words that you write. If you write pickup toothbrush and the word pickup is not in the vocabulary guess where that’s leaving you ?
Right, you need to find the appropriate known word for the task. Get Toothbrush or maybe Take Toothbrush. This was really frustrating and it still is, hehe. Plain simply commands work best most of the time.
The BBC was nice enough to include a link to the original game hints by Douglas Adams which is a series of questions and answers. They are not helpful all the time and do contain some red herrings. I just discovered that the original game contained a verb list and I thought it would be great to include the list in this article. Makes it a lot easier, don’t you think ?
ANSWER, APPROACH, ASK, BLOCK, BUY, CARVE, CLIMB, CLOSE, CONNECT, CONSULT, COVER, DANGLE, DESTROY, DRINK, DROP, ENJOY, ENTER, ESCAPE, EXAMINE, EXIT, FILL, FIND, FOLLOW, GIVE, HANG, HIDE, JUMP, KILL, KNOCK, LIE, LIGHT, LISTEN, LOOK, MOVE, PANIC, PULL, PICK, PLUG, POINT, PUSH, PUT, OPEN, READ, RELAX, REMOVE, SAY, SHOOT, SHOW, SIT, SLEEP, SMELL, STAND, TAKE, TASTE, THROW, TOUCH, TURN, TYPE, WAKE, WALK
The story is excellent and if suggest you give it a try if you have some time at hand. Oh, you can die in this game. Pretty fast actually. It took me 19 turns to die the first time, can you beat that ?
Text-based games definitely are a little outdated, though I’m gonna check this one out. If it’s as much fun as the book was, it’s definitely worth trying