🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 20:16:38 -0400, Mike S. <Mik...@nowhere.com>
wrote:

>On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 16:50:19 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
><spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:

>My gaming started with the Atari 2600 but when I moved to a Commodore
>64 I started playing text adventures. Most of those from Infocom. The
>only two text adventures I ever actually finished was Planetfall and
>Stationfall. I still have the glow-in-the-dark purple rock that came
>with Wishbringer. It still works. :-P

I still have my Zorkmid, but unfortunately all the rest of my Infocom
goodies have been lost over the years. Those boxes were great, but
very bulky. I /loved/ the cardboard peril-sensitive "sunglasses" that
came with Hitchhikers Guide ;-)

>Fun fact. If you liked Infocom games back in the day, the best system
>to own was the Commodore 128. More Infocom games worked on that system
>then any other.

That's not actually true.

Not all games were available on every platform; e.g. the four graphics
(V6) games were only available for Macintosh, Amiga, Apple II (with
128k RAM) and IBM. These were probably the seven best-supported
platforms:

  IBM:        all 35 IF games (plus Fooblitzky & Cornerstone)
  Macintosh:  all 35 IF games (plus Quarterstaff)
  Apple II:   all 35 IF games (plus Fooblitzky) (v6 games need 128k
RAM)
  Amiga:      34 IF games (all except Border Zone)
  C128:       31 IF games (all V3-5)
  Atari ST:   30 IF games (all V3-5 except, probably, Sherlock)
  C64:        27 IF games (all V3 and Nord & Bert, Border Zone,
Sherlock)

The only C-64 specific product was "Mini-Zork I", a cut-down version
of Zork released on cassette as a cover disk on a British computer
magazine.

At least, so says the Internet ;-)

Of course, these days the best system for them is the PC. The Frotz
interpreter runs all the classic games and you can use emulators to
run the all the rest (like the sadly forgotten "Quarterstaff", which
was Macintosh only).

"Zork" aside, of all the Infocom games I probably enjoyed "Journey"
and "Crescent Hawk's Revenge" the most. "Journey" really wasn't much
of a game - it was more of an interactive novel - but it was a
charming fantasy story and had impressive graphics for the time.
"Crescent Hawk's Revenge" was a big departure for the company, being
more of an action-RPG, utilising the Battletech license.