🚀 go-pugleaf

On Wed, 26 Apr 2017 08:01:16 -0400, Tim O <n...@thanks.com> wrote:

>On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 16:50:19 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
><spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>The first computer game I owned - barring whatever came on the
>>"Getting Started" diskettes for my Apple IIc - was Zork I. It wasn't
>>the first video game I played - that was probably Pong - or even the
>>first computer game - my memory is hazy in this regard, but I think it
>>was Ultima I - but Zork is where I officially count my start as a
>>computer gamer. Not dependent on an endless stream of quarters or the
>>use of somebody else's hardware, I could play Zork whenever I wanted
>>and at my own pace.
>
>The old game post made my spidey sense tingle, I haven't read the
>group in a long time. ;-)
>
>My first computer game was for my first computer, the Atari 800xl. It
>was Temple Of Apshai. A Dungeons & Dragons type adventure game.
>Everything about it appealed to me at the time -sprawling levels, cool
>monsters, character creation. At the time it looked to be the early
>80's rendition of Skyrim. I somehow ended up with the game before
>having the computer and the anticipation was bonkers.
>
>Unfortunately, I think it was written in Basic and was pretty much
>horrible. The setup for PC gaming letting me down for decades! haha
>
>The first video game I played at all was Atari Stunt Cycle. They had
>it at the 7-11 at the corner of my neighborhood and my mom gave me
>money to play it. I've thought about buying the machine just for the
>sake of owning it, but its pretty one-dimensional for home use. Once
>you commit the throttle settings for the bus jumps to muscle memory
>there is really nothing else to do.
>
>I also had Zork for the 800xl. I was never huge on text adventures (I
>loved stuff like Castle Wofenstein), but my buddy took graph paper and
>made a map of the word. I'd love to see that map again. If I remember
>correctly there were a couple of direction anomolies with the world,
>adjacent rooms you could only access from on direction. This caused
>him to have to re-draw the map multiple times since it wouldn't fit
>into a perfect N-S-E-W grid of blocks. He finished the game, I never
>bothered to do it even with the map.

Zork was evil that way. You'd start in a room and go East. You'd think
that the new room you just entered would have a corresponding door to
the West but no, often that passage would enter from the South or
North or wherever. And some nasty passages would loop back to the same
room, often without telling you it had done so ("A maze of twisty
passages, all alike"). It made mapping very unintuitive. 

I remember my first playthrough of an Infocom game was simply to go
through all the rooms and try to map the connections. I'd start in a
room, go East, then try to get back to the original room. I'd repeat
for all possible directions in each room. It was a laborious process
and often left the game in an unwinnable state (usually because I had
taken to long just trying to get the lay of the land rather than solve
the puzzles, many of which were timed) but it was a necessary step.
After I had a map, I could then go back and try to properly play the
game.

Strangely, I sort of got into pen-n-paper role-playing that way. Even
before I really knew what D&D was, I was playing a "let's pretend"
game with my friends where I led them through adventures that was made
up of "rooms" connected by twisty corridors. The maps I drew looked
exactly like the maps I drew up for Infocom games. It was only years
later we added dice and rules (and my maps became more realistic).

BTW, if you want to see some really nice Infocom maps, check out the
Zork Usergroup Maps at http://gue.cgwmuseum.org/ Here's a nice one; my
maps never looked this good ;-)
http://gue.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?pub=4&item=34&id=5&key=zork1_zug_map_2