1983: Suspended | Hacker News Reader

1983: Suspended

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The article mentions the difficulty of playing Suspended for modern players without access to its documentation or the included 'feelies' (a map, tokens of the robots, an in-universe lottery ticket).

They are preserved at http://gallery.guetech.org/suspended/suspended.html for anyone wishing to attempt the game.

The game itself is preserved at various abandonware sites, such as at https://www.myabandonware.com/game/suspended-1nz which seems to have versions for most platforms it was released on.

The source code for the game has been recovered and is preserved at https://github.com/historicalsource/suspended although there is no currently known preserved compiler that can translate this code into the playable .ZIP format ("Z-machine Interpreter Program", not to be confused with the archival format).

I can attest to the difficulty in playing without the physical materials/documentation. In my youth I spent so much time playing a pirated copy of this game without getting very far. Later in life I learned some more details that really opened up the game for me.

This was a deliberate form of copy protection.

A little bit sub-optimal in terms of communicating that they wanted you to purchase the game: if they told you this was copy protection, you could have just got copies of the relevant materials instead.

You can compile! There's modern day ZILF which will take original source files and compile them into .z files that can be used with a Z-machine.

http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/ZILF

An iOS app called The Lost Treasures of Infocom included the "feelies", as 3d models, alongside implementations of the games. Sadly, it is no longer available due to lack of backward compatibility (they never bothered to update the app for newer OS versions).

I have that for windows. I believe it came with a bunch of floppies and a book with images of the hints for all the games.

I also have hitchhiker's guide, with the panic sensitive sunglasses (black cardboard glasses with no eyeholes), pocket fluff (a cotton ball) and a microscopic space fleet (an empty clear plastic bag - afaik)

I thought the title was a joke at first, like it's 1984 when you're banned, but if you're just suspended for a bit then it's 1983.

I love Infocom games. But I was (and still am) always frustrated by the opacity of the controls.

I have no idea what I can type, or do with things. It's difficult to discover your abilities by flailing around. So I never end up finishing any of them, which is a shame.

Would it have been so hard to give a rundown of the vocabulary and parser to players?

Didn't some of them respond to the "help" command, at least to list basic verbs?

I agree they were pretty hard to win, but at the same time, when you figured out the solution to a puzzle it was pretty satisfying.

Modern IF games play with this trope of "hard to guess the exact words/solution". Some will incorporate the wrong input into the theme, as in that spaceship game were typing invalid input will make the game respond with "bzzzt... didn't get bzzttt that... you're bbbzrzzt up, can you bzz repeat?".

In others, like Spider & Web, where you're being interrogated, the "wrong" action will make the interrogator respond "that's not what happened, don't lie to me".

In "Photopia" there's a maze puzzle you cannot actually win because the game is intentionally withholding information from you. When you give up, the game frees you by telling you the one detail you missed.

I do agree I didn't finish most of the "oldschool" text adventures, though.

The zork maze had me befuddled as a child. Then I saw a map a realized the location weren’t on a grid so going North then South wouldn’t end you up in the same place..

I got pretty far in a few of these but only finished one. I think the pc versions had better in game hints than the Apple //e ones did.

Did you ever read the manuals? Every single one of them had a section that gave you an idea of basic commands common to all adventures, as well as ones specific to whatever the particular game was doing - Suspended's set of six robots, Enchanter's spellcasting, Deadline's character interation and interrogation, Nord & Bert's goofy wordplay, etc.

This game is one of the unusual experiences referenced in M.C. Frontalot's song "It Is Pitch Dark" (which is all about text-adventure obsession).

https://genius.com/1219782

Wow. I'm a fan of text adventures (sorry, Interactive Fiction) but I never heard of this game. The premise seems intriguing... will have to play it!

The premise to the game is very cool, in fact I’d say it’d be a better alternative than just dying. Just put the body into a state of sustainable long term hibernation and have a link to the brain that allows you to interact with an outside world and lets you do useful things for as long as possible.

At the same time, what would that sort of existence be like? You can't see the way a normal person can, or hear, or smell. If you can do those things all you'll perceive is the inside of a freezer. Instead, you have to get your senses through peripherals, as in this game. That's what intrigued me about this game, it's an entirely different kind of existence.

This is a fantastic (and tough) game that truly painted a mental picture through a text-only interface.

http://monsterfeet.com/grue/

They have reviewed this game and have a spoiler section you can avoid, should you want to play it.

Very highly recommended for anyone interested in text adventure games.

Nothing like that cover would be injection molded. Vacuum formed probably.

Very interesting. I wonder if the developers of Duskers played Suspended. They seem spiritually very similar.

I haven't played it yet but just the concept is extremely atmospheric.

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