Colossal Cue Adventure: a Zork-style text-based programming adventure game
adventure.cueup.com
adventure.cueup.com
RTZ was even better than Myst, its cultural successor.
I realized, a few months ago, that Rebecca Snoot from RTZ is Rayanne Graff from My So-Called Life. WHAT? Yes, it's true.
You are in front of a white house...
Pick up rock, throw it at vulture...
Remember to dig up the bonding plant -- if you cut it, you won't be able to get into the comedy club by the cliffs of desperation later on.
Want some rye? Course ya do!
It's now been 20 years since that game came out. Woah. Two decades. 1993. It's still vividly seared into my mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Zork
If you can find an ISO of it, it'll run in DOSBox, I believe. Beware, though, that you need the encyclopedia that comes with the box -- awesome primitive copy protection.
Great game, good times. Any other RTZ nostalgites here?
I still have my original copy in my closet somewhere. I should set DOSBox up and see if I can make it go.
That was one of he first games I played on my super-computer (200Mhz) back in the day (along with King's Quest VI)!
The intro music was fantastic, and the live-action videos made the graphics even better.
I had my girlfriend (now wife) follow a guide and talk me through the entire game so she could experience it. The "want some rye?" line is stuck in her weekly-quotes, too!
For some reason none of us could get past the swamp at the witch's house. I was 5 or 6 at the time so I don't blame myself, but when I figured out how to run it via DOSBox I was very very careful to poke everything with my walking stick (or whatever it was).
Feel free to call me a youngster that is spoiled by modern games if you want.
"look around" used to be "look" even in the old days iirc and in these days "l" is the common alias. It seems like you have given to many functions to a "use" verb, in the case of the switch the verb is usually "pull".
The navigational verb seems a bit odd, go is usually used with a direction, like "go north" (which is expected to have the alias "n" btw). What you seem to be aiming for is the enter and exit verbs, for example "enter door" or "exit cage".
"take" is usually "get", having "take" as an alias is probably good though.
"look at me" and consequently "x me" is almost always implemented in text-adventure games and here I expect something fitting and hilarious. ;)
For this game most of my points doesn't matter, but I recommend having implementations of the "x", "l" and "i" aliases.
A minor glitch, you don't seem to be able to look at the "chips".
Btw, I'm really loving the concept so far. :)
changing get will take a little more work, so for now I just aliased it to take.
"go north" is already in the game, just later...
really appreciate the feedback!
For that matter, serious consider using an existing IF engine.
Or, a shorter answer to your question: no. :)
A couple of minor issues I tripped over due to experience with other text adventures:
- Consider adding the standard text adventure shortcut commands: "x" or "examine" for "look at", and "i" for "inventory".
- I found it surprising that "look at inventory_item" didn't work. "look at boat" or "look at vest", for instance.
- How about "help command" for each command listed in the "help" output?
I kinda expected "x chips" and "x radionuclides" to do something, at least as a joke. (Out of curiosity, did you get some inspiration from "no tea" there?)
Also, how about "x me", "talk to me", and "help help"?
Any way you could provide scrollback?
Do you mean scrollback across refreshes or something else? (you can email me at robbyw@cueup.com since HN will start time-limiting our conversation at this depth)
Thanks! Most of them seem to work, except for "talk to me" and "help help".
> Do you mean scrollback across refreshes or something else?
No, I meant scrollback within a single session. I'd like to scroll back through the log of my interaction with the game, all the way back to the logo and preamble.
(I probably would have made the radionuclides examinable, if I hadn't been too busy making all the verbs apply to pigs. There's probably a lesson in here somewhere.)
First puzzle: You might think you have to do an exhaustive search of all possible seeds for the random number generator, but it turns out they've made it easy for you. The initial seed is at one extreme end of the possible range....
Second puzzle: Just create a stack, and walk through the string pushing and popping as you go.
By the way, I'm sure there's a mistake in there. I got the answer x (and I checked it by hand) but it only accepts the answer x - 1.
Third puzzle: My approach used dynamic programming algorithms. If you're unfamiliar with this technique, you'll probably want to find a different way to solve it.
First, I used dynamic programming to find all routes of the form (north|east)+ (i.e. all routes in which the rabbit only goes north and east). That didn't work, but it was clear that the rabbit could only double back on itself a limited number of times, so I extended my code to find all routes of the form (north|east)+((south|west)+(north|east)+)
Clearly this version doesn't have pig paths.
Unfortunately, I can't get the numbers to fit, even with accounting for 00, and using an actual roulette board order.
My mistake was feeding the mod 36 output back in as the next seed; it's the output from the RNG itself, and a good thing too...
http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/Other-rando...
Of course, that info page can't tell you what seed the VAX in the game is using....