Polite Dissent

12 Responses to “ When Men Were Men, Women Were Women, and Hard Drives Were 30 Megabytes ”

1. H
   August 14th, 2005 at 11:26 pm
   

   Aaaaahhh. Good old Leather Goddesses of Phobos. This came out the year after I finished college and before I started law school. I was working like a fiend to save tuition money, so expensive nights out were out of the question. For a few weeks after work I’d head over to Mag’s and we’d play this on his Mac SE – Mag was the first person I knew to get a home computer. Damn. That was a long, long time ago. What started out as a pleasant trip down memory lane has turned into a comment that makes me feel like an old geezer.

2. TayJK
   August 15th, 2005 at 5:13 am
   

   Ah, Zork. I remember playing those awhile back (in the mid-late ’90s), and not knowing how to beat most of the puzzles. Now I have one of the Infocom collections that collects all the text-only Zork games, along with a few other Infocom games.

   I also remembering playing one fan created text-only freeware game called Curse (or maybe it was Cursed). The whole thing starts with finding a map in the attic, and goes into time travel, participating in Greek Legends, and lots of other crazy stuff. One of the funner games of the time. Man, when I read what I just wrote, I sound like I played these games back in their hayday, not 10-15 years later.

3. Jon H
   August 15th, 2005 at 11:40 am
   

   It’s a great thing that Infocom game interpreters are available on current operating systems, so if you can get your hands on the game data files, you can still play them.

   There are also souped-up programs for playing the Infocom games, which provide additional functionality and modern conveniences.

   I even had one for my PalmPilot. Nifty, but it was a pain to play.

4. Jon H
   August 15th, 2005 at 11:45 am
   

   A multiplayer online game I used to enjoy was “MegaWars” on CompuServe. Each turn was displayed as a 10×10 alphanumeric grid.

   You could choose one of several kinds of ship. They even sold cool blueprint-style drawings of the ships. I had four of them covering a wall in my bedroom as an early teen. I kinda wish I still had them.

   I once played using my father’s teletypewriter/thermal printer. I used up a whole roll of thermal paper, because each turn used up a page worth of paper. At the end, there was a huge drift of paper under the table…

5. Scott
   August 15th, 2005 at 12:13 pm
   Official Comment

   When I was about ten or eleven, I was at friend’s birthday party and his father (a computer science professor at Virginia Tech) brought home one of the university’s terminals. We hooked it up with the mainframe with the old telephone handpiece cradle and played Star Trek and Adventure for several hours. Like yousaid, we did use up reams and reams of paper…

6. Chris Brown
   August 15th, 2005 at 1:10 pm
   

   I’ll go back even further and say I always will have a warm place in my heart for the games that came on casette tapes, like Lemonaid Stand and the first version of Oregon Trail.

7. Ryan Murray
   August 15th, 2005 at 2:19 pm
   

   Three words: Pool of Radiance

   That game was awesome, and had horrible graphics.

8. Jon H
   August 15th, 2005 at 2:35 pm
   

   I remember my first computer of my very own. A Sinclair ZX81, built from a kit. (This was even before they got together with Timex.)

   A friend of mine, a bit older, was in the Air Force at the time, in Dayton. He was tasked with evaluating the ZX81’s utility. His report stated that it would be useful as a doorstop. (The ‘81 was a thin black plastic wedge, one piece, with flat membrane keyboard.)

9. Anonymous
   August 15th, 2005 at 5:24 pm
   

   If you liked the SNES RPGs then go to http://www.gamingw.net/ … :)

10. Mag
    August 15th, 2005 at 11:34 pm
    

    Leather Goddesses of Phobos…. Mmm. The best part: the scratch and sniff accessory card. Truly, a work of genius.

11. Nevin
    August 16th, 2005 at 6:45 am
    

    There is still a thriving text adventure community (though they prefer to call it “interactive fiction” of “IF” these days). Devoted people make games for free, and the best of them are much better than anything that was made in the 80’s. (TayJK — you’e thinking of the game “Curses”, which kicked off the new age of IF development.) Of course, there are bad games, too. That’s what happens when everyone just makes them for free. Some games are puzzle-fests, like the old Infocom stuff, while others treat IF as an emerging literary form, with all the confusion and experimentation that implies.

    I haven’t played much IF lately, but I keep intending to get back into it. If you’re interested, a good place to find links and reviews would be Xyzzy News (http://www.xyzzynews.com/) and SPAG (http://www.sparkynet.com/spag). http://www.brasslantern.org/beginners/ has some advince about how to start downloading and playing modern IF. http://www.ifcomp.org/ is an annual IF Competition that usually contains the best and worst of the community. Two good things about the “IF Comp”: First of all, all the games are required to come with a walkthrough (look for a text file with the game, or try typing “help”), and secondly, if you download previous year’s games, you can see which ones got the best ratings and avoid the bad ones.

12. Katie
    February 10th, 2006 at 7:52 pm
    

    IFs are great, and yes the free ones are better then the old ones. Well graphics do not make a game, my favorites for PC are still Half Life 2 and Deus Ex. While I’ll put up with bad graphics for a good story/gameplay DX is a good example of CPU used for the good of humanity. The old games were good, and some of them I was too young to remember but rediscovered later. But in terms of plot/characters I all the best are newer PC games. That said, many of the games contain crappy gameplay and requirements that -trash- my comp. Still, a select few actually use the modern capabilities to their full advantage. It’s not a win-win situation, that’s, for sure.

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