These are the things that every parser player is going to recognize, no matter what games they have or haven’t played. I played Aisle many years ago, so I don’t recognize any of the “classic” lines from that. And I’ve never played Planetfall (yes, yes, I know), so I’m not going to recognize Floyd’s lines.
But “You can’t go that way” and “As good-looking as ever”? Those are universal.
“As good-looking as ever” was invented by Graham Nelson for Curses. It’s only universal because he copied it into the Inform standard library.
The closest Infocom came to a universal examine-me response was “That’s difficult unless your eyes are prehensile.” (Zork 1/2/3, Planetfall, Starcross.)
Or “That would involve quite a contortion!”
Or “That would involve quite a contortion!”
Hm, that’s an interesting one. It’s in nearly every game, but not in the examine verb… Looks like it’s primarily a response to “ENTER FOO” when you’re carrying the noun.
There is nothing but dust there.
Or examining body parts (like your eyes) in Steve Meretzky games. That works as well.
I never beat the game but I’ve heard enough people reminisce about it to have it stuck in my head:
Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.
Society was an exquisite thing; we love it all the more now that it is gone.
From part 189 of 500 Apocalypses by Phantom Williams.
There’s also a line in Curses, in the scene where you entomb yourself in the pyramid and wake up after thousands of years, beginning “Centuries, now…” , which sends a cold tingle down my spine.
That game is such a glorious mess, but that’s what makes it so memorable. I remember the goblins were particularly annoying, so the one time my friend and I beat it we simply decided to forget about the ring and head straight for Mirkwood. On an earlier attempt, we made it all the way to the dragon where we picked up (literally!) Bard and asked him to kill the dragon with his bow. After refusing several times, he then tried to beat up the dragon with the bow. Turns out you had to explicitly tell him to shoot the dragon.
Though while nowhere near as iconic, I prefer the singing in the Delta4’s parody game The Boggit:
We’re dwarfs, we’re dwarfs, all doomed to die
We’ll probably finish in the dragon’s pie
So we’ll take ol’ Bimbo Faggins, a real cement head
Hopefully ol’ Daug will eat him insteadSing: Hog the gold! Pass the buck! Split Bimbo’s share between us!
Across the Wiffy Mountains, all through dark Berkwood
We’ll drag ol’ lardball with us, he’ll do as dragon food
And afterwards we’ll celebrate, in Thorny’s treasure hold
With ale and nosh and diamond rings and imitation goldSing: Hog the gold! Pass the buck! Split Bimbo’s share between us!
For whatever reason, when I try to think of spine-tingling lines the first things that pop into my head (for reasons I cannot always explain) are all by Brian Moriarty. There’s the whole Magick Shoppe bit in Wishbringer, though that’s not a single line. But also Trinity:
And Loom, if it counts as IF:
(If you’ve played Loom and say “that’s not the line!”, you’ve probably played the VGA version where a lot of text was changed. Apparently without Brian Moriarty’s involvement.)
Ooh, spine-tingling lines! I have to say that Suspended has a lot. Like, my favourite are definitely Poet’s death lines through the acid, which are (in order):
Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head
And before you know it I’ll
wake up dead… A puddle of lead.
I fear I’m about to be one with the cosmos.
Warning: I detect the presence of other worlds.
SYSTEM FAILURE: Farewell, sweet prince.
Oh oh. Trouble…
“You have won”
(filler text because you cannot just post a quote)
The first one I’ve attempted:
nu zi-ik ku-it-ki a-pi-ni-iš-šu-wa-an
ú-wa-an-na Ú-UL ta-ar-ra-at-ta-ri
nu zik kuitki apiniššuwan uwanna natta tarrattari
then you anything like.that to.see not can-2s
“You can’t see any such thing.”
On second thought I may need to rearrange the lines for a proper seal. This is a bit unwieldy.
How about this…
Oh yeah. There we go. And with clearer spaces between the words too!
And the obvious followup:
nu zi-ik KASKAL-it
a-pé-da-an-da
pa-a-an-na Ú-UL
ta-ar-ra-at-ta-ri
nu zik palšit apedanda pānna natta tarrattari
then you path-INSTR that-INSTR to.go not can-2s
“You can’t go that way.” (Or literally, “you cannot leave using that path”.)
“Which do you mean, the X or the Y?”
More updates! I modified the code that generates the cylinder models so it puts a small ridge at the beginning, to make it clear where you start rolling. I went over my grammar again, and apparently the ablative case is used instead of the instrumental case for the path you’re taking…probably. (But later on, the instrumental was entirely replaced by the ablative, so either way the ablative is definitely right for some time period.) The PI sign isn’t used for the sound pi in Hittite; swapped that for PÍ. And I made a couple other little aesthetic changes to make it all look nicer.
“You can’t see any such thing.”
“You can’t go that way.”
The 3D printers in the lab are currently down for maintenance, which ruins my plan to get these printed before all the students come back for the start of the semester. But hopefully I’ll have the physical objects within the next week!
My plan is to put one of these in the general prize pool for IFComp, and make the other a special prize for the highest-placing game that makes non-trivial use of a foreign language (i.e. a language other than the language of gameplay). Or maybe I’ll translate a third phrase (“That’s not a verb I recognize”?) and put two of them in the general pool.
There will also be a note that if someone wants a seal with their name on it instead of one of the IF phrases, I can do that too—that’s actually significantly easier than these translations! Names are shorter and don’t require any actual translating.
Side note: wondering why there are all those weird vertical streaks through the wedges in the 3D renders? It’s because the program first lays out the strokes on a flat surface (each stroke being a subset of a rectangular prism, since that’s the shape of an ancient stylus), then takes a bunch of vertical slices through that flat surface, and reshapes those slices into a cylinder. Those vertical lines you’re seeing are the edges of a slice.
But I can use an arbitrary number of slices—the more slices, the smoother it gets—and eventually the smoothness exceeds what the 3D printer can handle, at which point it’s not noticeable in the final product.
