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jeudi, janvier 19, 2006

Flashback to the Halcyon Days


Good morning. A quick post before I delve into Lorna's meanderings which are back today after the holidays (with some advice about Libel which I am sure will please Hogan). For now I will just ask those of you who possessed some form of rudimentary computer (like a Commodore, and Amstrad or a BBC) in the 1980's to think back to the text-based adventure games. In these games the only "graphics" would be words which described the surroundings of your character and you would type in basic commands in the hope that these would get you to the next scenario.

"You are standing in a room. There are four chairs, a mirror and a box." Would be a standard scenario. It would have people like Eddie Aquilina racing with joy. You would then type things like "LOOK" or "SIT" or "OPEN BOX" and hope that the string of words that you just typed are understandable to the program. It would then reply with further descriptions based on your command (if you were successful) or contrive to be frustratingly stupid and limited. It was thus that the nine year olds of the eighties would wait till mummy left the room and then type "FUCK YOU" and giggle... waiting for the inevitable reply of "I do not know what a FUCK YOU is". Lovely isn't it. But if you did manage to get to the end of the text-adventure you could be lucky enough to convince your mum or dad to spend another five or six pounds to get you another one (no downloading in the eighties eh Ed?).

Anyways. defectiveyeti - which is a great blog in its own right - has come up with a faked text-based adventure. In it they imagine the main character George DoubleDuh Bush during his presidency. Read it here for a good laugh. And before gybexi gets his balls in a twist, yes, I did discover it on boingboing!

2 commentaires:

MaltaGirl a dit…

Oh how I loved those games! We had a Spectrum :-)

I always seemed to get stuck, though, and there was no internet to look up cheats on...

Jacques René Zammit a dit…

LSL. The dulcis in fundo of role playing games. Where the mission was indeed to get laid. I bought the Playstation version out of nostalgia... but its US surroundings make it boring. Monkey Island was cool...and there are some pratchett role playing games too though nothing beats the real thing. No copying in my time.... five pounds would be squeezed out of daddy to buy a random game collection that would have been advertised on the Classifieds of the time. No choice there... the guy would just say 20 commodore games for sale... an you go hoping for the best... and in my books the best always involved football management!