Adventure Games. Now many did you complete without cheating?

[tezza]

Ok, lemme be first.

How many old-style, text-based, Adventure games did you actually complete, without using a cheat sheet or walkthrough?

For me it was all the original Scott Adams Adventures including the two-part Savage Island one (most satisfying).

And I ALMOST managed Zork 1 (98%). I had to cheat to get 100% though.

Gawd I must have had heaps of time back in those days! Either way I was considered very weird by my peers. Those days (1981-83) computer gaming was still pretty much a fringe activity, especially among adults.

Tez

[Erik]

I never got a perfect score without a walkthrough, but I did finish the original Colossal Cave adventure as well as Zork I without help. Heck, when I played there weren't any walkthroughs! :D

[chuckcmagee]

Hmm, think the answer is ONE for me. Pretty sure I made it thru a Leisure Suit Larry all the way without doing the walkthru thing. Like everyone else, I used the walkthru later to get the 3 or 5 points I had missed originally. Might be TWO, think I made it thru one of the Zorks too. Myst is maybe possible to make it, but it would take a LONG time to figure out some of the puzzles. The puzzle with colored marbles, I have no idea how you could figure that out without cheating. I still have Myst III sitting there, unopened.

[tezza]

Remember the map-making you had to do with these old text-based adventures. There was always a maze.

Speaking of mazes, I also remember Asylum on the old TRS80 M1 clone. I never finished that one and it drove me nuts!! I'm sure it drove people to a real asylum as (if I recall correctly) the program had a bug (or maybe it was Asylum II?). Anyway, you could never actually finish it due to the fault.

People went mad trying to solve it.

Tez

[atari2600a]

ah, Adventure Games: My genre of choice! I don't believe I have ever gotten all the way through one w/o a walkthrough. Hell, I couldn't even *start* Leisure Suit Larry w/o researching those damned questions! :P

[carlsson]

I don't think I've finished a single one. However I have written a few small ones myself, but got bored of debugging the map so I consider the last one I wrote for not quite finished. I mean, most of the time it is a good thing if you can come back from the location you were at before if you move in the opposite direction. Sometimes though it should not be possible on purpose. For a while it was popular to include mazes, deserts or forests you could not get out of without ending the game. That's rather silly I think.

[barythrin]

lol. Interesting topic. I don't think I've ever played a text only adventure game all the way through let alone cheated to get through it. I had a simple graphics game called "Castle" for my x86 (similar to dungeon hack where everything is an ascii character) which was fun and I beat that without cheating although I think you had to play it all the way through. I know I had a D&D game that was text for x86 also but I don't recall getting anywhere in it as a kid.

Graphically I beat The Black Couldron without cheating a few times although it took forever waiting for him to walk across the screen and then wait for it to load the next screen lol (I remember playing it off floppy until I realized how to get it on the hard drive and play). I never played the original Ultima's although I'd like to but the first one I did play (6) I definitely had to cheat and even then never finished the game. Got in an ackward situation of finding the main gargoyle and all my characters having boosted stats and high weapons but we couldn't kill him, he'd just fly out into the ocean a little and come back and get attacked again. I also killed Lord British in one of them (had to cheat) but that crashed the game lol.

Almost on topic we used to play the TSR games all the time though.. man those were fun with a group of us. We'd all make our character on the team, either change seats to control our character in each fight or just tell the person on the PC (whoever was fastest at navigating through these towns) what our character does. We'd have one person on the floor with the "journal" (came with the game) to read what the signs said, etc, and another person with the real D&D Compendium to know anything about the creature we were about to fight and if we could take them on or not, weaknesses, etc. Boy were those the days getting a group of friends huddled around a 1 player game but still playing it as a group.

- John

[Sharkonwheels]

Almost on topic we used to play the TSR games all the time though- John

Nope.
Not even CLOSE to on-topic... ;)

But, yeah, I think probably quite a few of us on here, over 40, played the TSR D&D and AD&D games.

Right?
Right?

Get your head out from behind the LCD, and fess up - you KNOW you did!

T

[barythrin]

Oh my mistake there.. yeah I meant the SSI versions of the TSR games. But yeah, I played the real thing too and used it while playing the computer equivalent which added to the fun.

[DoctorPepper]

Oh boy, this is embarrassing.

Even though text-based adventure games were and are my favorite type of game... I've never completed even one!

I've got Zork 1, 2 and 3 on my PC, maybe I'll start playing Zork 1 again just to see if I can finish it. Oh, and without cheating! :-)

[Terry Yager]

I don't think I've ever played any game for more than an hour-or-so. I have the attention span of a gnat.

--T

[DoctorPepper]

I don't think I've ever played any game for more than an hour-or-so. I have the attention span of a gnat.

--T

More like:

"I don't think I've ever played any game for more than an hour-or-so. I have the attention span.... Oh look at the pretty flowers!!!"

;-)

[willowmoon93]

Empire of the Overmind was the only text-based adventure game that I ever completed without using any hints, cheats, etc. I remember playing it on an Apple II+ at the school library. Liked the game a lot but man those Infocom games were by far the best. Unfortunately I only got so far with them before I had to resort to obtaining hints whenever possible.

[Terry Yager]

More like:

"I don't think I've ever played any game for more than an hour-or-so. I have the attention span.... Oh look at the pretty flowers!!!"

;-)

You got me pegged...

--T

[tezza]

Almost on topic we used to play the TSR games all the time though.. man those were fun with a group of us.


Agreed. I found they were most fun as a group. Some of the Scott Adams games were solved like this. One Scott Adams game (Pyramid of Doom) involved my whole family.

I was 23 at the time, and the rest of my family (six other siblings and parents) all lived in different places throughout the country. Anyway, one Christmas (must have been 1981) I bought my Model 1 clone with me back to Mum and Dad's place. The rest of the siblings were there too.

Microcomputers were new things, and everyone found it a curiosity. However, while there we (as in the whole family) started to play Scott Adam's "Pyamid of Doom". By the time I was due to leave after new year, we had made good progress and were about 80% through. The rest of the famly was addicted by this stage, and really wanted to solve the game.

This lead to a number of phone calls at all hours of the night and day once I was back at my place, with family member ringing saying things like "I just had a thought...have you tried yelling? Maybe the iron pharaoh will fall off the cliff?" and other such suggestions. My mother was the worst! She (even now) is a sports fanatic and very competitive. No way was that game going to beat her...hehehe

I had to let each one know if I made any progress by phoning. And these were the days when long distance calls (anything over 50km or so) in NZ were expensive!

It was all great fun, and eventually solved at last. The iron pharaoh was the hardest to deal with. The solution is both clever and novel, but also plausable (I won't spoil it by posting the solution here.).

Hats off to Scott Adams.

Tez

[tezza]

Oh boy, this is embarrassing.

Even though text-based adventure games were and are my favorite type of game... I've never completed even one!

I've got Zork 1, 2 and 3 on my PC, maybe I'll start playing Zork 1 again just to see if I can finish it. Oh, and without cheating! :-)

Yea, do it! It's very satisfying. You need time though and lots of it.

Tez