I hope some of those other Infocom tools eventually get open sourced for historic curiosity, but ZILF is probably going to remain the modern answer for how to compile these files.
"if let" just breaks my brain, it feels backwards to me and takes me a minute each time to work out what's going on. In 40 years of programming I've never seen a syntactic construct that I found less intuitive. And it would probably be easily fixable, if it was more along the lines of "if x matches Some(let z)".
Same here. Hollow Knight was simply wonderful - the graphics, the music, the characters, the boss fight designs, the melancholic feeling of the world. It's hard to say whether it was my best gaming experience ever because there's stiff competition, but it's definitely in the nominees. And I only heard about it way after the Kickstarter campaign.
It is that bad, at least for me. I enjoyed the first 8 hours of Silksong, but it turned very quickly after that because the punishments were just completely outweighing the rewards. No health upgrade in that time, no meaningful combat upgrade, and just an endless amount of bullshit.
Like those birds that will always mirror your movement to stay just out of reach, move erratically otherwise so you're guaranteed not to get a hit in (forget about hitting them with your spear when they're in the air), and just when you managed to get under them where you might be able to land a hit they'll drop down on you to deal contact damage and flutter away again.
10 hours in, and I've not even started the game since Saturday afternoon, when I was expecting not to be able to drag myself away from it (being a huge fan of the first Hollow Knight).
With everything doing 2 points of damage, including environmental hazards, the player is at effectively 2.5 hitpoints for a large majority of Act 1, as opposed to 5 in Hollow Knight. This changes the feeling of the game from "oh, a challenge, let's see what will happen and I'll learn" to "shit, a new room, I don't want to explore because I'll just get killed, where was the last bench, can I even get back here?"
Some guy once famously noted that wealth is not measured in gold or silver, but in goods and services. Mansa Musa didn't have a Ferrari F40, or an RTX4090, or air conditioning. He couldn't buy a trip to low earth orbit or get cancer treatment if he needed it. Many people in this day and age are vastly more wealthy than he was.
I visited the Biltmore Estate years ago, the home of the Vanderbilt family. It occurred to me during the tour that all the end result of all this wealth was approximately equivalent to having a 5 bedroom McMansion. A huge percentage of the sprawling property was dedicated to housing servants who performed tasks like laundry, changing the water in the (pre-chlorine) pool, taking care of the horses and carriages of visitors, or preparing meals that today are mostly completely automated or unnecessary. The end result was housing the owners and a few guests in conditions substantially worse than the average modern suburban home.
That's definitely a reasonable way to think about it. Another though is in terms of social status and ability to direct human labor, in which case most people are not more wealthy.
You rarely see modern dictators on these lists but populations and economic prosperity have exploded to the point where historic kings can’t really compete.
“social status and ability to direct human labor” doesn’t require ownership just control.
In the US congress controls in the funding, but in a dictatorship the guy at the top can unilaterally allocate billions and then manage how it’s spent. It’s not total control of all government assets but it is control of a significant fraction of a modern economy.
Just as a thought experiment, suppose he wanted to fund Doctors Without Borders or some other international charity. Do you really think he’d have trouble sending the equivalent of 1 billion USD in Chinese government funds to that org? How about 2 billion? Obviously at some point it wouldn’t work but where exactly that line is says a lot about the power he has.
That one way to measure wealth. Another would be to measure it in terms of how much labor you can get from your fellow humans. Mana Musa was far more wealthy by that measure.
Yeah, but this completely ignores the relative access to resources as others at the same time. That’s kind of the point at specifying a date for these discussions. If a cure for cancer existed during the time Musa was alive, you can rest assured he would have had access to that information and those services.
Sure Musa didn't have those things, but not because of a lack of wealth. There is no point that you could increase his wealth to such that he would be able to afford those things. It takes some amount of resources and labor to produce an air conditioner, and Musa definitely could afford those resources and labor. Likewise, you are not richer than Carnegie or Rockefeller because you happen to own a microwave, you have orders of magnitude less capability to procure resources and labor, even if you have access to a slightly different set of resources and labor. Whatever you can currently afford, they would be able to afford if they were to spend their wealth in today's markets.
But by that argument we are all dirt poor, provided humanity isn't wiped out, because future generations will have more technology than us. Which to me is kind of a worthless way to measure how wealthy anybody is.
It is if you compare yourself to other people living around you or at the same time. After all they are the ones your competing for a limited amount of resources with.
Comparing the wealth of people who lived hundreds of years ago in entirely different societies/economic systems is quite pointless, yes.
Indeed, it depends. I think the way this list works it's relative to the available resources at the time, i.e. what percentage of the available wealth did they control?
Perhaps this is a good place to mention that someone is working on remaking the SMAC engine, the project is called "glsmac" on github.
Unit graphics seem to be one of the major sticking points since the game used some kind of ancient forgotten voxel format.
Well, clicked on it thinking it might be about an old favourite Infocom game, but apparently it appears to be about an old favourite Firaxis game...
Are you the author of the web site? Please make sure the PgDn key works for scrolling through the page. At the moment it switches images which are just barely on the screen.
I was also here for Infocom! Will the knowledge of the old classics die with us?
For all of our modern-day high-powered GPU babble, the Infocom games still have the best graphics possible.
I recently started playing Zork I again on a C-64 emulator, and it really holds up.
The key is to play like you would in the old days: No distractions. Be patient and thoughtful. And actually read everything on the screen, instead of skimming the text.
Since we're now trained to have the attention spans of methed-out ferrets, it can be hard. My tips are to turn the phone completely off, put it in another room, and turn down the lights. Also, do you map by hand on grid paper with a pencil.
Lately, I've seen people bragging about video games providing value because they take 40 or 50 hours to complete. An Infocom game could easily take days, weeks, or months to really explore and appreciate thoroughly.
Was this "be clever" stuck, or "bad game design" stuck?
As an example for the latter: at a certain point in the game Okami, you have to get an item from a crying boy you are friends with. You get rather obvious hints the boy has the item. You can talk with him a bunch, and the first few times you get different dialogue. You get more unique dialogue if you try it at night.
He would not give me the item. I spent probably two hours first meticulously combing the area and then backtracking throughout the entire world, talking with most of the important NPCs in hope I missed something. I even thought I might have somehow softlocked or corrupted my savegame.
The solution I never figured out and got from a walkthrough: you have to attack the crying boy. Again, the game gives zero hints or indication you have to do this.
I was waiting to get dunked on with an "oh it wasn't THAT hard" reply, haha. Thanks for vindicating my feelings. I've not played a ton of IF but could tell it was pretty rough.
Bad game design stuck. Some of the connections are so obtuse youd have to be a chess computer to see the item being relevant in that way later. And plenty of chances to bone yourself early in a playthru with no fixes(undo being an option lost 1000 turns ago). Frequent sequential saves help, but I feel there's a whole article ranking the friendliness of adventure text games and I'd rank it on the meaner side, haha. They got better at avoiding those situations in their future graphical adventures(but not totally, damn bonding plant in return to zork). Not to mention the map is so immense good luck finding where you dropped the hard hat or whatever.
If u compare the zork and zero walk thru you'll get it. I love the added color and illustrations and world far more than other text games but when I finished it(I was recording) I said "this game should probably be illegal. I cant quit this quick enough!". Still nostalgic tho, and fun in that "I got thru it" way.
So I very much relate to your experience. The text parser can be picky too when you know what to do but the game has its own way of doing it. Then u miss the solution.(edit: typos)
I think it’s probably also very tempting to just give up on a puzzle and just find the solution or at least a hint online. You pretty much couldn’t do that back in the day.
Most of these games had hint books ("invisiclues") and selling them was a big part of the business. Some companies actually sold more hint books than the games themselves due to piracy!
Yeah but those came later. I think Mike started those in biz school and later joined Infocom where he did (ran?) marketing. Even with BBSs there just wasn’t a lot of info out there unless you called one of the authors you knew :-)
I plan on making a video on zork. I'm sure there's others but it'll be a nice deep dive into a few infocom games. Gonna do one on Odell down under and MECC too.
There's a surprising amount of resources that aren't dead links regarding infocom stuff.
For interactive fiction at least there are still people interested in it, and people are preserving Infocom history in particular.
Other games might get forgotten over time unfortunately, especially on more obscure systems. Nobody ever brings up Turrican anymore when discussing game soundtracks...
Not just the classics, there is actually a thriving interactive fiction community producing new games regularly. The annual Interactive Fiction Competition
usually gets 60-70 entries each year.
Yep. There are new converts as well like myself. I like modern titles ranging from AAA titles like Doom to smaller indie titles like Kentucky Route Zero which is more like an interactive theater play than a traditional game. However, IF just really scratches an itch when done well and exercises the brain in a different way. I've played with the old INFOCOM games (Zork, Planetfall...etc), but they don't grip me the same way the modern titles do. They're also obscenely hard in ways we don't typically do these days. I noticed the new Doom game lets you modify the difficulty and damage percentage done to you or enemies at any time. As an adult with little time I love not getting stuck in boss battles for hours. Life is too short. Old games didn't have any of that lol.
Save states and walkthroughts/faqs/hints can provide the help you need, although some people think these are cheating. I'm fine "cheating", though, as long as I'm "cheating myself" and not others.
I think a lot of players liked the insanely hard. A Mind Forever Voyaging was really well written but relatively easy—which is probably why I especially liked it. But I don’t believe it sold especially well.
Some players might have enjoyed extremely punishing games, but I think most players—and game designers—simply didn’t know any better. Creating a challenge that still feels fair is a difficult balance. Look at the old Sierra adventure games, for example. While they are excellent in terms of storytelling and creativity, they tend to be absolute garbage in terms of gameplay by modern standards. Many of the puzzles were outright impossible unless you had a guidebook, and you sometimes wouldn’t even be told what you did wrong earlier in the game that made the game unsolvable (looking at you, Space Quest jetpack puzzle).
But those games were rightly hailed as pioneers of the genre, and were considered to be the very best in their time. By today’s standards, though, they would be universally panned as abusive of the player, if they could even be released at all.
I have incurable nostalgia for the genre (both graphical and pure text adventures) but it's hard to play them without a walkthrough nowadays. The games are simply not fun by modern standards. Their mere existence was a miracle back then and a lot of the excitement was related to interacting with the computer at all. I'd love to be able to recover this sense of wonder but I suspect that most of it was about discovering the world as a child.
I wasn’t a child; post-college but also at a stage where I was willing to devote more time to games than I am today though never a serious gamer. I also knew/know a lot of the people involved early-on. I do fiddle with the games now and then but not super-seriously.
For interactive fiction at least there are still people interested in it, and people are preserving Infocom history in particular. Other games might get forgotten over time unfortunately, especially on more obscure systems.
Since Infocom games run on everything from a Palm Pilot to a mainframe, there's no reason for them to ever go away, as long as we can find people still interested in building Z-Machines for the latest gear.
> there's no reason for them to ever go away, as long as we can find people still interested in building Z-Machines for the latest gear.
I’ve never heard this term z-machines, but it’s interesting, and invokes in my mind a machine that does anything you need regarding z. Specifically I’m reminded of zMUD, but that might be dating myself a bit. Is this z-machine idea your own, or did you happen upon it? Can you think of other memorable or especially useful z-machines in modern usage?
Before the page even refreshed for my original reply, I thought, "huh, I bet the Z is for Zork," and wouldn't you know, it is. That's a pretty good name, when you can grok it from context.
Trying to follow the timeline from that article, it's unclear from context name which came first, Zork, ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), or the word z-machine. I've heard of referring to other systems as [language name/interpreter name/etc]-machine, so that's the context that it reminds me of, but at the time Zork was written, perhaps that convention wasn't established yet? It's before my time, which makes the missing context harder to interrogate solo.
Turrican will be preserved like Infocom. But I fear they will all be forgotten in the depths of a digital computer history museum. I'd love with LLMs could really bring the excitement of text adventures back. It has been tried but so far it's still in the text version of the uncanny valley.
Although I haven't played with it and can't tell you whether it can compile the open source Zork.