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