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I help run the Interactive Fiction Database. https://ifdb.org/I think that our list of games ranked by review scores is certainly the finest repository of extraordinary text-based games in the world. https://ifdb.org/search?browse Every game on that list is fantastic. For your reading convenience, the top ten are: Counterfeit Monkey, Anchorhead, Superluminal Vagrant Twin, 80 Days, Hadean Lands, Lost Pig, The Wizard Sniffer, Violet, and The Impossible Bottle. You can click the "Play Online" button on almost any game in IFDB to play it right there in your browser, without downloading anything. IFDB also includes all of the 20th century classics, including Infocom games, but IMO the modern games have long-since outclassed them. If you're curious, here's our list of top-ranked Infocom games. https://ifdb.org/search?searchfor=tag:infocom The top-ranked Infocom games are science-fiction games, topped by Trinity, Infocom's surreal "Alice in Wonderland" time-travel game, followed by Planetfall and A Mind Forever Voyaging.
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Counterfeit Monkey is great writing: To review, we're Alexandra now. I was Alex, before the synthesis. You were...
>I don't know
...oh boy. Okay. Okay. I need you on form here. This is going to be hard if you don't remember being Andra. Not panicking. As far as I can tell, the operation was a success. We're meant to be one person now, unrecognizable to anyone who knew us before.
hehe
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I just want to pipe in with a personal standout from when I used to play more IF, which is _King of Shreds and Patches_, Lovecraft in the London of Shakespeare, and worth a playthrough.
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Just want to agree with the fun that ‘80 days’ is :) There’s also ‘Magium’, which is not really a game so much as interactive fiction.
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Infocom adventure games are some of the grand-daddy's of text adventures. Zork is by far the most well known, but also pretty infamous are Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Leather Godesses' of Phobos and A Mind Forever Voyaging. As a warm-up, I'd recommend Moonmist. It's a mystery game listed as a "Beginner" game, and is great for introducing elements of the Infocom system. The feelies are available to view here:
https://gallery.guetech.org/greybox.html There are a collection of game files here:
https://eblong.com/infocom/ My preferred player is still Frotz. It compiles and runs on practically anything, my Psion, my Pis, Windows, everything. https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/frotz
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> feelies This is a term we're going to have to explain to the younger generation: when games were shipped in boxes, those contained at minimum a disc and a printed manual, but some companies came up with gimmick items you could put in the box and "feel", to enhance your immersion in the game. I still have my Ultima 6 "moonstone" and cloth map somewhere.
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They also sometimes included essentially proto-copy protection, e.g. you need this decoder wheel to solve some puzzle--which of course worked a lot better pre-Web. A lot of the original packaging could be rather unique generally but eventually they ended up standardizing for retail shelving.
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I still love the wheel and manuals of SSI Gold Box games. Apparently there wasn't enough space for all those texts so the games guide you to read say Page 31 for a certain long dialog. I actually think it gives a lot of immersion than modern day AAA games.
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I actually am from the box/manual generation and never heard it called 'feelies'.. I remember to register some games i would have to look up charts or keys in the manual, or on page numbers
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Loved my Peril Sensitive Sunglasses from HHGTTG
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It's sad that game publishers don't do it anymore since I don't know when. Everything goes online nowadays. Boring.
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Actually, there are a LOT of 'collector's edition' versions of physical games from publishers like Limited Run, Super Rare, and iam8bit. Check out this Cuphead package, for example: https://www.iam8bit.com/collections/collectors-editions/prod... Now, for many of us, they are prohibitively expensive, but they are available.
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That particular example is above the typical price, I think, but they're certainly called collector's editions for a reason. It's a shame, but I suspect the majority are purchased and left unopened.
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Planetfall is another by the same author as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Leather Godesses of Phobos and A Mind Forever Voyaging. AMFV doesn't get the love it deserves. It is more about real interactive fiction than puzzle solving. Hitchhiker's is enticing but pretty difficult--not as big an issue perhaps these days as it's so easy to "cheat" if you get stuck as opposed to calling the author :-) Trinity is another good one. As is The Lurking Horror--set at a thinly-veiled MIT campus where many of the authors were from.
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Planetfall
Enchanter Trilogy
Starcross (took place inside a space station -- map was wrap-around)
Suspended was harder but definitely very good
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Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short. https://github.com/i7/counterfeit-monkey/releases Maps and cheat sheets are in the "Counterfeit Monkey.materials" folder. If you don't want to install a parser on your computer, you can play it online by putting the link to the .gblorb file into https://iplayif.com/ I.e. https://iplayif.com/?story=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fi7%2Fc... Modern games are generally going to be more approachable than old ones. Tastes have changed considerably. In the days when you couldn't pull up a walkthrough in a few seconds, taking days to think of the next step was part of the fun, and just getting permanently stuck at some point was fairly common. Also, letting the player keep going even after they have done something to make the game unwinnable is now considered very uncool. Navigation is much less tedious these days as well, fast travel for example, although the exact mechanics depend on the game. And that's not mentioning the amount of CPU and RAM available, not only for the game's runtime, but also for tools like I7 (which was used to write Counterfeit Monkey). For an quicker introduction to modern "interactive fiction", as it's called these days, check out competition entries. https://intfiction.org/c/competitions/7 These are generally written in a shorter amount of time and the results are quicker to play through.
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My vast nostalgia for Infocom games--and the vast care and effort that went into those games--notwithstanding, they were written using 40 year old tech to run on machines that, at least initially, might have had a floppy disk and maybe 64K of memory (or less). Yes, they're more playable than a lot of graphics games of the time would be today, but they're from a different age. Still dip into them every now and then though :-)
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Already mentioned, but another hearty recommendation for Planetfall. I played that game in the 1980s, and I still enjoy playing it from time to time.
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Start here! --> A Dark Room [1] A Dark Room is awesome. It's also what got my kids hooked on programming once they learned they could use a browser's developer console to write JavaScript to change various in-game variables. Edit: A Dark Room isn't strictly a text-based game in the sense where there is much typing on a keyboard. It's more a point-and-click text-heavy game. But it still feels very much in the spirit of a classic text-based (typing) game. [1]: https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/
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If you reference XYZZY, you need to suggest Colossal Cave! I think this is the text game that inspired all the others (and the only game I've ever played on VAX/VMS). You may be able to run it with `advent` on Linux. There used to be an Emacs command for it (maybe `M-x adventure`?), but I don't remember it and I can't seem to find it on Google. It looks like there's also a Python version at https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/python-adventure
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Roadwarden is a recent text adventure that has some sections like the ones you want. The story is pretty good too.
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This is a fun one I played recently about shopping in a grocery store, called Aisle. You only have a single command you can give for the whole game, but there's a looot of them you can provide, and it gives you a different ending for each. Part of the fun is trying to figure out what you can say to find another ending. You can play it directly at the link below. Play: https://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2F...
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"Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle" popped into my head not long ago and I thought wow, that's a reference not a lot of people in this world would understand.
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…by Sam Barlow, now better-known for the live-action video games Her Story, Telling Lies and Immortality.
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One avenue for text games is the BBS “door” games of the 1990s, which you can still find online today (see: telnetbbsguide.com). Trade Wars 2002, Legend of the Red Dragon, and Barren Realms Elite are some classics. These are turns-based games where you log in each day to play your set of turns. It can be addictive.
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Trade Wars was a fantastic game, but that last time I played about a decade ago a lot of people had turned to automation which took a lot of the fun out of it, for me personally.
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Now largely forgotten, UK company Magnetic Scrolls produced some of the best examples in the genre - but it might take some work to get them running, as they had (non-interactive) graphics and a simple menu/windowing system which were state of the art at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ScrollsThe Pawn and Corruption received especially high praise. Hard mode: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Bureaucracy, both by Douglas Adams. Bureaucracy is outright sadistic. I solved it with a friend over a couple months after us both failing solo for much longer, and we celebrated our win with alcohol. I still remember the crushing hangover, Adamsesque in its dimensions and intensity. Worth it.
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Magnetic Scrolls! Thanks for the blast from the past. Here’s a great snippet from an interview with Anita Sinclair, one of the founders: How do you design your adventures?
We have three development systems. We've got the VAX, which runs UNIX, and all the machine-dependent stuff gets developed on that. So when we've finished writing a game, we then upload it to the VAX, which does all the cross-compiling for us for the different machines. We then have Mac II's and Xenix machines, which run AU/X and XENT, and we have sub-development systems on that. All our tools are written in C. https://msmemorial.if-legends.org/articles.htm/stnews4v4.php
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If you're a fan of Tolkien, check out MUME (Multi-user Middle Earth), a MUD that's been online since 1990: https://mume.org/Its unofficial community site is http://elvenrunes.com/ which has hosted forums and player-submitted "logs" (text logs of PvP fights) for over 20 years.
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I played MUME a ton in the mid to late 1990s, and still login once in a while. It's truly a hidden gem. Walking around the world often feels like being inside a Tolkien novel.
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WoTMUD was pretty awesome too, I haven't looked to see if it's still online for years.
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It is online and still quite active! Drop into the discord and say hello. I spent many of my formative years on wotmud.
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Is Trill still sitting at the Keep well, refusing to be useful?
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Any discussion of text games puts me in mind of the amazing blog and forthcoming book, "50 Years of Text Games": https://if50.substack.com/ Highly recommended and target of a recent Kickstarter which blew through its reserve by well over an order of magnitude.
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The Grapevine network[0] is a fun little community of different MUDs where you can connect and hang out with other people who enjoy text-based worlds.
If you're looking for something to play on your own, winners of the IF competition[1] are often excellent. [0]: https://grapevine.haus [1]: https://ifcomp.org/comp/2022
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Are there any inhabited and lively MUDS/MUSHes/MUXes still around? I miss those.
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Even though it's famous inside (and out?) of text game circles, this is a game I still wish had a wider reach. It really just does something with video games that I didn't think was possible before playing it, and haven't seen explored satisfactorily since. Unfortunately, you sort of need to know how to play text games to appreciate it. If anyone reading has tried text games and have found they just aren't for you, you can get somewhat of a proxy of the experience by reading through this community let's play of the game (https://adventuregamers.com/forums/viewthread/8481). Although long (like the game), I think it brings you on the typical journey of playing, even if you aren't necessarily making the connections yourself (which would normally be a big part of the appeal).
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Seconded! And put on the album "Eye in the Sky" by The Alan Parsons Project while you play. I happened to listen to that while playing the game and thematically it's very appropriate.
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I think you could do most of it as a point and click. Perhaps with the exception of that one command (if you know what I mean) because the mere possibility of it would be revealing in a point-and-click. But you could do that in a Sierra AGI type graphical adventure because that still has a parser. On topic, I would myself recommend Coloratura - https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=g0fl99ovcrq2sqzk - for the sense of wonder/unusual protagonist.
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If you want to try a multiplayer text game I'd recommend Akanbar. I would say it has the best qualities of many text games and MUDs with less of the weaknesses of its rivals. You don't need an emulator, you can play from the website, however it's usually advised to download a client to connect from (Mudlet, Cmud, Mushclient, TinTin) so that you can make use of triggers (copy and paste a line from the game into the client so that if that line comes up again your character will react automatically with a 'triggered' response) and aliases (shorten commands, make 'sh' sip health instead of typing it out everytime).
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For something that’s not a text adventure (the best of which are great), there’s also nethack. Be warned, it’s insanely difficult and a massive time suck.
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Or more broadly, rogue-likes. My favourites are definitely Nethack and DCSS (aka crawl). I would also like to try Cogmind (but it's unfortunately Windows-only), and maybe Dwarf Fortress. Other noteworthy titles are ADOM and Moria/Angband. There's a lot going on these days in this genre that kinda departs from some of the core ideas of a roguelike, the term "roguelite" is sometimes used. It's a fun rabbit hole to go down into, lots of really good games.
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Don't click. https://kittensgame.comI take absolutely no responsibility for the consequences of clicking this link. Remember: Praise the sun, and Zebras hate you for no reason.
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Tip: if you are like me and can't help but play games that are elaborate loading screens that sap your productivity, try using cheats. It gets rid of the pull to play fast once you jump through all the content.
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Check out the list on Mudlet ( https://mudlet.org), it's a FOSS desktop app for playing online test games you describe. Comes with a selection of good games pre -configured.
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Look for MUDs and MOOs[1] I've liked and played in the past a lot of these text based role playing games, especially when I was on a shittier dial up connection or remote satellite connections. I liked Aardwolf and Realms of Despair the most. I've played the IRE games like Achaea and Aetolia way too much. While those two definitely have a great lore and many active players, I have always loathed IREs pay to win "credits" style. Text based gaming is still alive and evolving. Just don't expect a AAA game and definitely not single player. [1] https://www.topmudsites.com/
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I would never recommend an Iron Realms game to someone for a couple of reasons. One being the pay to win aspects where players who pay real money to buy items get major advantages. Another being the amount of grinding required to level up. I'd recommend Akanbar instead. It has no pay to win features. Balance based real time combat loosely based on the old Avalon game (Achaea did not invent balance based mud combat, it came from the now dead game 'Avalon') and you don't have to learn a coding language just to become competitive and partake effectively in the pvp if that's a part of the game you have interest in. It sits in a sweet spot between complexity and simplicity and has a fun concept, well made guilds and a dedicated playerbase and admin.
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The IRE games are very well done. I too have spent many, many hours in Achaea, and more recently (a year or two ago) in Starmourn. You can get by without paying for credits, though it does involve more in-game grinding. For me, what made me lose my interest in these games is the role playing requirement. I understand that for some people that is part of the fun, but I could never really get into it.
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Very sadly, TMS was shifted to an archive-only format a short while ago. End of an era. It looks like Mud Connect is dead, too. Not sure there are any aggregators still standing? :/
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I loved playing Aardwolf years and years ago. I was a big fan of godwars type mostly. What a flashback!
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I just asked chatGPT if it could act as game master for a text-based rpg and it says "sure" and proceeded to start the story telling. Amazing.
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I just did the same thing. It sent me on a campaign to recover an ancient artifact, but it played out the whole scenario for me without stopping to ask what decisions I would make, and there was zero conflict along the way. Nice descriptions of the forest and labyrinth my character had to navigate though.
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I did this a couple of weeks ago. At first it refused, saying it was just a language model or something like that. I said "go north" and it just started up a game. I also tried to get it to play a game of Rogue for me w/ the old ascii graphics, but it held firm in its refusal on that one.
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It's not quite what you're describing, but it's an amazing game built entirely in ASCII: http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com (not playable on mobile). The guy who built the mobile app did a really interesting recording about how the blind community picked up on it in a way that hadn't anticipated thanks to screen readers.
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Saw this one today it's on Steam Warsim Realm of Aslona ASCII based kind of neat
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Check out ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery.) It’s been around for a long time and has a great story to it.
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>great classic Planetfall There's an extremely inside joke about me in Planetfall relating to the author's rather odd sense of humor. And, no, I'm not going to reveal it :-) Planetfall is probably one of the more accessible Infocom games even if less-known or less name recognition.
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Play CYPHER, Cyberpunk Text Adventure here: https://cabrerabrothers.com"Ever since you came back from the Moon colonies you've been struggling to get into the smuggling business again. Things aren't as easy as they once were though, especially without your old pal Eddie around. It was him who brought all the major players in the market to do business with. And boy did they line up to hire you. Even the Yakuza used to pay almost twice the standard rate for moving passcodes through the international borders inside your Synapse. All you've got now is a French crook that goes by the name of Lime, who cares more about setting up his own deals than bringing new quality customers on board to work with. You always knew working with that french bastard was trouble, only you never realized how much until one of the deals he had setup went wrong." # Make your way through the crowded streets of NeoSushi City! A deal that goes wrong. A beautiful young woman wearing red cowboy boots following you into a Yakuza nightclub. A pack of Retrievers hired to chop your head off and "Mr.Smith", a mysterious man who claims to be a friend in a world where everyone is after the passcode stored in your Synapse. Will you live long enough to see what it unlocks?" From the game's website: CYPHER Cyberpunk Text Adventure is unlike anything you have ever played before; it is a whole new dimension in game interaction and storytelling you can vividly experience from within the realms of your own imagination! Think of a book or movie you like the most, now imagine for a moment a limitless world of interaction and adventure where you not only take control of the main character of the story, but ARE the main character of the story! Every word you say, every decision or action you take is exclusively your own in the world of CYPHER. In Text Adventures you communicate with the game world through conversational English sentences, the same way you would do in a chatroom or writing emails. The story unravels into a thrilling interactive experience that will keep you on the edge of your seat for hours... as long as you can escape death.
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If you want to try a multiplayer text game I'd recommend Akanbar. I would say it has the best qualities of many text games and MUDs with less of the weaknesses of its rivals.
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Check and see if any of the MUDs are still online, WoTMUD was tons of fun.
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I would love to find a text-based, strategy game - imagine something like Master of Magic, Master of Orion 2, or Total War Warhammer, or something like that, but just text-based.
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Does anybody of a way to play text adventure games on your phone using text to speech and audio only? Last time I looked for something that did this I couldn't find anything. Seems like there should be a demand for it.
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For Android there's an app called Audio IF that might do what you're looking for.
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“Gostak” is a truly unique game. It’s like Zork, but many of the nouns and verbs are made up words.
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Pretty sure the Archlinux official repos had a package called "bsdgames" or similar that included a game like that. It's not there now. Maybe it got split up or sent to the AUR.
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It is bsd-games in the community repository, and trek in AUR. The bsd-games package includes Adventure, which is the traditional text adventure game. Those packages also include a collection of other text based games that demonstrate how varied text based games can be.
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You can read this blog(soon a book to be published) :
https://if50.substack.comIt goes over the most important and influential text adventure games.
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Anchorhead! My favourite game of all time.
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What about these games like Leisure Suit Larry? They were graphical but I think you typed the instructions?
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I’ve been looking for a text based game in the style of bootleggers. Those management style games are fun.
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There is a great one still active right now. It’s a crime text based MMO called Torn City
You can use my referral link https://torn.com/1514924
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telnet discworld.starturtle.net
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none would be my opinion. i started playing and writing these kind of games in the early 80s, and IMHO none comes near to something like bg2 or morrowind, if a retro experience is what you want.
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IMO Dragonrealms was great in the late 90s and early 2000s, but when I tried to get back into it in 2020 I found that rampant AFK scripting for skill progression killed my desire to put much time into it. It was supposedly still against the rules, but those rules were basically completely unenforced and people would just flagrantly violate them while the GMs didn't seem to care. I ended up canceling my account after about a month.
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Photopia Varicella Violet (these three impressed me the most)
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Hadean Lands is a great modern IF game where you learn alchemical rituals, and have to figure out the meaning behind them to modify the ritual to solve puzzles. And I’ll second the recommendation for Emily Short’s Counterfeit Monkey. Another fun interesting one is Aisle… the whole game is a single command, but you can enter all sorts of things, and get different outcomes.
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- Anchorhead. "anchor.z8". Not libre software, but cool. And, one day, it might be. You need a Z-Machine interpreter, such as Frotz. - Dungeon. That's Zork I-III, condensed. More pure to the original adventures than the Infocom's further changes. 70% of chances of being libre software in a very close future, few months of years. - Spiritwrak. A Zorkian adventure, but libre software. Good to play. - Spider and Web. "Tangle.z5". Like the movie "Memento", based on flashbacks on an interrogation. You must recall what you've done and how. - Vicious Cycles. "Cycles.z5". Close to the movie "Source Code", but the game came earlier. - All Things Devours. "Devours.z5". A time travelling puzzle. You can compile it from source: https://jxself.org/git/devours - Slashem. Not text adventures, but a roguelike. Buuut... Slashem comes from Nethack and that from Hack until you arrive to Rogue as the origin, and that game it's basically Adventure+RPG concepts+a top down view. Also, objects matter a lot on a text adventure because of their interaction. The same happens in Slashem, combat and proper usage of objects are equally needed to win.
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Years ago there was Nuke Zone, but not sure if it's still around edit: it is still around, but got renamed https://assault.online
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If you don't know who infocom are, check out their stuff, and as a companion check out the eaten by a grue podcast https://monsterfeet.com/grue/ Edit, autocorrect
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Here's one I made with ChatG, with DallE images too. But otherwise a choose your own adventure/Zork clone. Two stories: - your spaceship has crash landed
- Breaking Rad: what of Walt & Jesse cooked acid instead of meth (a friend's idea)
Needs you to have an OpenAI key. They're super fun https://pablo-mayrgundter.github.io/artificial-adventure/
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