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From: goetz@cs.buffalo.edu (Phil Goetz)
Subject: Re: New/Old Games
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Date: Thu, 22 Sep 1994 21:34:34 GMT
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In article <9409202025591.bnewell.DLITE@delphi.com>,
Bob Newell <bnewell@delphi.com> wrote:
>(Reply to a message originally in rec.games.int-fiction...)
>
>This starts me on a different train of thought.  Recently I've acquired and
>(after suitable agony writing a format conversion program) started to play
>the old Scott Adams games.  Compared with Curses or the Adventions games, or
>even most Infocom, the Adams games have no prose at all, no size, a simple
>two word parser that looks only at the first three letters of a word, etc.
>Then, why do I, and many others it seems, continue to find these games
>charming and well worth playing?  I'm inviting discussion on this... is it
>pure nostalgia?  Curiosity?  The desire to "cruise" with something smaller
>and simpler from time to time?
>
>Bob Newell 

I think that the simplicity, in terms of size, length of text, number
of objects, and parsing, all combined to make it much easier to focus
on what was important to the game.  Scott didn't often rely on a single
phrase to do what was needed (like in Lurking Horror when I was stuck
for half an hour trying to come up with the phrase "lower ladder").
He didn't have characters, which are a problem in the Infocom games
because you don't know what the capabilities of the characters are
and you just have to hope that there isn't some more sophisticated
way of interacting with them that you haven't thought of (this stopped
me cold in Witness).

I won't swear by this, but I think he played fair with the player more
than Infocom did.  I completed lots of Scott Adams adventures.  I have
NEVER completed an Infocom adventure without help or a hint book.

(AND, he used the 3-line status line:
Location, Objects, Obvious Exits.  I NEED the obvious exits line.
Somehow I miss text saying "and a path running northeast" when it's
embedded in a 2-paragraph description; I had to give up on Lurking
Horror and read the hint book to discover there was a stairway going
up in the middle of a hall.)

Phil goetz@cs.buffalo.edu
