Text Adventure Games

These games follow the classic text-based formula: the system informs you that “you are in a maze of small twisty passages, all alike” or something similar; you type in your actions as go forward, east, take sword, and so on. If you like solving puzzles, these games will appeal to you. With text-based games, the adventure follows a defined path, and your responses are usually limited.

The following example is the start of the text-based game Battlestar, which you will learn about in the next section. Your commands are typed at the >-: prompt:

Version 4.2, fall 1984.

First Adventure game written by His Lordship, the honorable

Admiral D.W. Riggle



        This is a luxurious stateroom.

The floor is carpeted with a soft animal fur and the great wooden

furniture is inlaid with strips of platinum and gold. Electronic

equipment built into the walls and ceiling is flashing wildly. The floor

shudders and the sounds of dull explosions rumble though the room. From a

window in the wall ahead comes a view of darkest space. There is a small

adjoining room behind you, and a doorway right.



>-: right

        These are the executive suites of the battlestar.

Luxurious staterooms carpeted with crushed velvet and adorned with beaten

gold open onto this parlor. A wide staircase with ivory banisters leads

up or down. This parlor leads into a hallway left. The bridal suite is

right. Other rooms lie ahead and behind you.



&#gt;-: up

        You are at the entrance to the dining hall.

A wide staircase with ebony banisters leads down here.

The dining hall is to the ahead.



>-: bye

Your rating was novice.

Battlestar

Type battlestar at the command prompt. A sample session is shown in the code in the previous section. A man page is available by typing man battlestar.

Dungeon

Type dungeon at the command prompt. Typing help at the game prompt gives you useful information. You start out-of-doors and must find the dungeon entrance. There is no man page for Dungeon.

Paranoia

Type paranoia at the command prompt. In this humorous game, you play a secret agent on a desperate mission. Unlike most text-based adventure games, Paranoia lets you choose your actions from a menu. This is useful if you hate having to find a command that the game will understand. There is no man page for paranoia.

Wump

Type wump at the command prompt. You are out hunting the Wumpus, armed with some custom arrows and relying on your wit and sense of smell. When you start the game, you are given the choice of seeing the instructions.

Type man wumpus to see the man page.

Word Games

The following two games are versions of popular word-finding and word-guessing games.

Boggle

Type bog at the command prompt. This is a version of the Parker Brothers game Boggle Deluxe. You are given a 5×5 grid of letters. In the allotted time of three minutes, you type in words made up from the given letters. By default, you must use letters that adjoin horizontally, vertically, and diagonally without reusing any letters. Plurals and different tenses count as different words—for instance, “use,” “uses,” “used,” and “user” are all allowed in your word list. This follows the official Boggle rules. You can change these defaults, if you want.

At the end, the computer displays the list of words which it found. You can never beat the computer because it only allows you to type in real words. You will discover that the Boggle dictionary has some odd omissions; this can be annoying, but it isn’t very serious.

This game works well without color graphics, although the small size of the letter grid makes your eyes blur after a while.

A man page is available by typing man bog.

Hangman

Type hangman at the command prompt. You won’t miss the color graphics. The game is self-explanatory, but just in case, a man page is available; type man hangman. Hangman picks its words at random; sometimes the choices seem quite impossible to guess.