Textadventures on the Amiga - Did any of you play them?

[Puni/Void]

We've had many discussions about point-and-click adventure games in the past. Titles like Monkey Island, Zak McKracken, Maniac Mansion, have been mentioned tons of times. Then, what about the text-based adventure games? Did any of you play those? I must admit I haven't tried many of them myself, but it would be interesting to hear if you had or not. If you have play them, which will you recommend?

[Demon Cleaner]

I haven't played any so far. Also there are about 90% of the text only based adventures by Infocom, so I don't know if any of them is Amiga only.

[TiredOfLife]

Hmm can't be sure.
That type of thing was popular many moons ago.
I think that I only played that type of game on my 64.
Can't remember much on the Amiga.
I think I have some Scott Adams stuff somewhere.

[Teho]

I came across several and tried playing them. But never got very far in any before giving up completely. Mainly because I got mad at the stupid parser not understanding 98% of the commands I entered, seemingly. I just hated that.

The one I got farthest in was definitely The Neverending Story text adventure, but that was on the C64. I don't know if that game was on the Amiga at all.

[Harrison]

Trying to get a text adventure to understand what you type was a very infuriating experience.

You are in a room. Exits are to the North and South. You can see an apple on a table.
"Pick up Apple"
You cannot perform that task.
"walk to table"
You cannot do that.
"pick up apple on table"
You cannot do that.
...
and so it goes on. :angry:

But many text adventures did work much better than that.

I played a lot of text adventures on 8-bit systems, such as The Hobbit and Gremlins, and many on the ST and Amiga too.

My favourite text adventures on the Amiga were by Level 9. Their "Time and Magik, The Trilogy" is probably the best traditional text adventure compilation you can get for the Amiga. The first two games are ports from the original 8-bit releases, with 16-bit updated graphics, and the third game, The Price of Magik, was specially written for the 16-bit machines and is the best of the three included.

If you want to try some text adventures on the Amiga then I recommend "Time and Magik, The Trilogy". Level 9 created some very nice artwork for this collection, that is used to depict each new location you visit in the games and it's very nicely done.

Another series ported to the Amiga is the Zork Trilogy. I originally played the first game on the BBC Micro, and the Amiga Zork Trilogy doesn't really add anything new, being a plain text interface and not adding anything new for the 16-bit era such as some nice static images within the games. The 16-bit only sequel, Zork Zero did add a nicer looking interface screen and some additions such as luminated capitals at the start of chapters, but other than that it was very much the same as the previous games.

Infocom also released a lot of other text adventures on the Amiga, and most of their games were released my Activision in 1991/2 on the Amiga in compilations called The Lost Treasures of Infocom 1 and 2. These includes all of the Zork games, along with some of their other really good text adventures such as Sorcerer, Planetfall and the famous Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is a must play for any Douglas Adams fan as he actually wrote the text adventure!

The other big text adventure developer was Magnetic Scrolls, who released some very famous and worth playing games on the Amiga such as The Guild of Thieves and The Pawn. But their later games are some of the best text adventures seen on the Amiga. Fish! is a very good adventure with you viewing the world through the fish eye view of a gold fish in a tank. And Wonderland is another of their Amiga games that added a custom WIMP interface to the game allowing you to open windows to show different in game information such as images of your location, items you were carrying etc...

Another text adventure that I enjoyed was published by Rainbord and was called Legend of the Sword, This introduced a very nice graphical interface with an auto mapping feature and icons you could click to input commands such as compass directions, going in and out of doors and up and down ladders and it ghosted out the icons you couldn't currently use. It was showed images of your correctly location throughout the game.