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61 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
61 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
Home Computers
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Adventures In Computerland
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Computer text games are a big hit in the USA (caption)
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Latest hit: text instead of graphics (caption)
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More and more home computer owners in the USA are buying games
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that have only words instead of graphics on the screen. The new
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"Text Adventures in Computerland" are holding players in check for weeks.
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"You are standing on the east side of a house. To the west there is
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a forest. What should I do?" Your eyes, sharpened on video games,
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search the screen in vain. There's no sign of a house or a forest,
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just the printed word. Is this some kind of joke, or...?
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The 100,000 fans of text games wouldn't say so. "Adventure," where you
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gather treasures in an underground labyrinth, guard them from dragons
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and thieves, and bring them safely to the surface, is already a classic
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among these games where the computer functions as the eyes, ears, mouth,
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arms and legs of the player. Simple commands like "Go west" or "Take the
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lamp," which the player types in response to the ever-present "what shall I
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do now?", lead to an astounding discovery: suddenly you are standing
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in a room full of garbage, in which only an empty birdcage seems to be worth
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closer inspection.
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The secret behind text games are the rooms, in which you live your fantasies.
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If the player wants to reach a certain goal, he can (and must) get involved
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in all kinds of things. It is up to him to decide which of ten possible
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directions to take, what to make of the rooms he has stumbled upon,
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and what to do with the objects that just happen to be lying about
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everywhere. He must experiment with these objects, and then avoid danger,
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or steer into the shoals, or fight with a sword, or even get shot by the
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butler.
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The most successful games of this type are put out in the USA by the firm
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Infocom. These young programmers have succeeded in establishing a real
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dialogue in the best conversational English between the computer and
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the player. A vocabulary of over 100 words enables the computer to respond
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to full sentences. Infocom games, which have taken their place next to
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the "Adventure" series, have distinguished themselves in the literary quality
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of their descriptions of action and locations. The game becomes a real
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prose adventure, in which the player himself is the hero.
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There is no shortage of games: there's "Zork" the Great Underground
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Empire, where you gather treasures; or "Enchanter," where you free
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the land from the evil wizard Krill with the help of sorcery;
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"Witness" is a traditional thirties Hollywood mystery, which must be solved
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in a limited period of time; and "Infidel" leads an abandoned, over-inquisitive
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researcher into a bizarre pyramid.
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Once you are infused with text games, which keep you busy all day long, you'll
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readily give up those "great" graphics games. And who can criticize this kind
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of entertainment--these games make learning English a pleasure.
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