Uh… I agree with this in terms of 1982, but not in present terms. The 3d of the demo looks fantastic. And, as maga pointed out, you can add things into text that you can’t convey with visuals, such as abstract thoughts, connections, fleshed out descriptions, etc. The written word is the only format (outside of voice-over monologues) which can convey the inner thoughts of a character, outside of their expression. Expression can say a lot, but text can convey the idea without it being misinterpreted. 3d is also the easiest way to navigate and maintain a spatial awareness, outside of imagination, which is the realm of text. I’m also really happy to see the Vespers demo – that also looks fantastic.
so did the 1982 game 
but yeah, we’ve come a long way in graphics and they are far from the crude excuses the 80’s allowed. the upcoming Thief looks fantastic
truth be told, the demo reminded me of Metroid Prime, where you could indeed gather info on things around by pointing at them and text displaying on the HUD
that said, next you drop the parser and have an automatic “examine” with such narrative scraps and that’s about the only contribution I can see from the IF side of things… I mean, taking things in FPSs is just running over them and opening doors is just blasting them
Hah. And, yeah, I’m looking forward to Thief, although I won’t be playing it for awhile.
Yeah – more “interactive Pac-Man” then interactive fiction. You can have more than point and click in a 3d game, though. I keep bringing this up – but Paper Sorcerer has limited IF in it, with Shadowgate type commands for viewing objects, text for character’s speech, and some narrative also laid out as text.
It almost seems like the two formats cancel each other out, or “conflict with each other” sounds more accurate …
Why would you bother building large and intricate 3D spaces when you can build the same space with 3 lines of text?
Why would you bother making the player read lines of descriptive text when they can see the environment in beautiful 3D already?
And the problem is if you’re going to include the 3D environment, it has to be very well done otherwise you’re better off not including it.
And of course if you’re going to have the text-interface element, it has to be useful and not distracting otherwise you’re better off not including that.
Again, it seems like a bit of a balancing act 
You are being unfair. Here is a counter-example:
There is absolutely no reason why a text adventure has to have poor text just because it also has graphics.
Ah, memories… Gateway is one of the hardest games I’ve actually finished on my own when I was still too young to have proper experience with IF.
And when I say “finished on my own”, I mean that I did my very best and got surprisingly far, and still had to consult the hintbook on some few key points. But I still consider to have finished it on my own.
Don’t agree with this at all. I’m betting the examples you’re thinking of are when a book is later adapted into a movie, and not vice versa. Film and prose have different strengths and weaknesses, so when you take a noteworthy piece of one and convert it to the other you’re generally going to lose a large part of whatever it was that made the original good in the first place, even before taking regression to the mean into account.
As maga pointed out, description of visuals is not the only thing text can be used for.
Back on topic, the demo looks great. I’m not sure how the text part is going to integrate with the 3D part other than simply adding flavour, and I’m intrigued as to what kind of puzzles/interactivity you can come up with, (sadly I don’t have a Windows computer I can offer to try it on); but I’m definitely looking forward to finding out more!
Funnily enough, I preferred the movie version of Lord of the Rings to the book version. It was nice to watch this epic fantasy adventure without being bogged down with Tolkein’s somewhat stodgy writing. And it didn’t have Tom Bombadil, either, which can’t be a bad thing.
I preferred the movie of The Player to the book. And though I haven’t read The Godfather, I think just about everyone thinks the movie is better.
More to the point is what sedm says. If you think of your project as a text project that you then add extraneous visuals onto or convert into visuals, it probably won’t work. (Though Vespers 3D!) But if you conceive of the text and visuals as going together, it might. I don’t know that anyone says “Alice in Wonderland was a great book, but all those pictures kept getting in the way!”
I’d say just about everyone would say that even having not read the book. Which, frankly, is most people in our illiterate crackhead age.
fact is that movies are second grade derivative “art”, if so much. There’s not a single great movie that is not based on a book and the experience is usually meh against the original. Exceptions are pop-culture mashups of many influences, like Star Wars, Back to the Future etc
BTW, I always find it fun how about the whole Battle of the Pelennor Fields is basically 2 paragraphs long in the book, while taking about almost the whole movie. I also hate Gollum in the movies. They turned a ruined old and creepy fellow into almost a nasty Mickey Mouse and almost as adorable…
I did read the book. The movie is better.
The same is true for Silence of the Lambs, The Bourne Identity, and quite a few other popular movies.
Is it true the other way around? Sure, often.
But comparing the two mediums as a whole and attempting to say “this one is better than the other” is kind of ridiculous. It’s like asserting that all vegetarian food tastes better than all food with meat in it (or vice versa).
Yeah, that’s the one I was going to mention in this thread as well. I think the movie is strictly added value for Lord of the Rings. I was also going to add “come at me bro” but I guess you’d have my back in this brawl?
I was conflicted on how to answer this. My first thought was to respond in the same spirit, with “lololol” but on reflection, I genuinely mean this: I’m sorry you’ve never seen any good movies, namekuseijin.
instead of being sorry you could name a few so I could watch and eat my words out 
Because I don’t feel like being particularly constructive, the third or fourth movie that came to mind (after The Long Goodbye, which is based on a book, and Donnie Darko, which I’m not positive stands up) is Eureka.
…well, I see it’s out on DVD somewhere now, so this isn’t as trollish as I thought. Enjoy!
Okay, had to do that. I’m at work, so I’m not going to be cross-referencing any of these:
Seven Samurai
Yojimbo
(Basically, insert random Akira Kurosawa movie here, and it probably makes this list. Some where novelizations.)
Spirited Away
Princess Mononoke
(Basically, any movie by Hayao Miyazaki. Some were based off novels.)
Pan’s Laybrinth
Chinatown
Alien
Brazil
Die Hard
Dr. Strangelove
It’s a Wonderful Life
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Network
Pulp Fiction
This Is Spinal Tap
A very short list. I really can’t waste any more time with this one. Anyone else want to throw some out there? Geez.
I’ll take you up, namekuseijin, but let’s head over to the Off-Topic forum so as to avoid further derailing this thread.
Japanese have a fondness for audio-visual productions far greater than written works. The way I see it, script writers are in far more demand than proper writers. That said, Yojimbo is based on a novel. Much of Miyazaki’s productions were born manga.
Pulp Fiction is obviously based off tons of pulp fictions, as are SW and BttF. Again, a mishmash of literary references, not drawn from any single book in particular and yet owing much to them. Chinatown is very Chandler-esque.
so, ok, I’m really pushing it a bit too far: clearly there are movies not-based on (particular) books. They still need writers. and they drown in comparison to great movies based on books.
Okay, last post on this – no more derailing.
Yojimbo was inspired by multiple novels. No work of art is an island – everything is inspired by something else, and unless you live in a cave, it’s going to be a mish-mash of influences. (And, even if you live in a cave, from a mish-mash of experiences!) It’s the influences you choose to use in your own art that’s important.
Okay, back to 3d and Text. 
Did anyone play The Entertainment (free game that relates to, but is technically separate from, Kentucky Route Zero)? It uses 3D first-person graphics and relies heavily on text. Okay, there’s no parser, but inner thoughts and conversations are displayed solely through text. The result is, I think, a good example of text integration in a 3D game. (It’s also an interesting example of player inactivity, but that’s a whole other debate.)
In fact, I’d go as far to say that The Entertainment would work neither as a piece of pure IF nor as a voice acted 3D game. As an IF game it would lack almost any interactivity (you’re a bar-fly, meaning that your interactions consist of looking with the mouse and occasionally clicking – but nothing more), and as a voice acted 3D game it would be missing the inner thoughts, which are indeed integral to the narrative.
It’s not an import of IF as we know it into a 3D setting, but it does at the very least present a possible role for prose within a 3D setting.
YES. (I am a huge KRZ fan, and I love the bonus content so very, very much.)
It’s also one of the coolest things that I’ve seen for the Oculus Rift.
I think that technique (little floating snippets) could be great for the kind of stuff maga was saying earlier in the thread: