Lost Pig

Quote: Grunk think that pig probably go this way. It hard to tell at night time, because moon not bright as sun. There forest to east and north. It even darker there, and Grunk hear lots of strange animal. West of Grunk, there big field with little stone wall. Farm back to south.

Orc English really bad bad. Me prefers to spare me self that pain.

I think I saw this played as a group at Fig Boston. The audience would shout out commands and someone at the front would type them it. They had people voicing the characters. Its worked out much better than expected, people were laughing.

Its amazing how much better these games (now known as interactive fiction) have gotten since Zork or Planetfall. Its much better at understanding what you type.

And google shows that the lost pig was the game played live: http://bostonfig.com/interactive-fiction/

In case anyone else overlooks it, this will take you directly to a playable-in-browser version of the game:

http://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A//mirror.ifarchive.org/if-a...

(Driven by Parchment[1], which is truly awesome and let's you play tons of different IF games!)

[1]: https://code.google.com/p/parchment/

I used this game to intro kids to command-line usage in a recent Linux-for-kids class I taught. Worked wonders.

Once they were comfortable with the IF parser, moving to CLI was much easier.

I played this months ago. It's a highly entertaining game that serves as a great introduction to text-based games (formally called Interactive Fiction).