The Inside Woman Let’s Play recently reached a special section that I’d call a minigame: all the normal verbs and objects are disabled, and you play temporarily with an entirely separate world model and set of verbs. No more rooms and items and inventory; instead, you move via landmarks and the only way to interact with things is shooting them.
I’ve seen this sort of thing in various choice-based IF, but I can’t think of many other examples in parser IF. This makes some intuitive sense—parser engines tend to have very strong opinions on world models and how players interact with them, so adding a whole new one for a single section is complicated. Choice-based engines usually don’t, so building two world models isn’t much different from building one.
Still, Inside Woman probably wasn’t the first to do this. Are there other notable examples of parser IF with a “minigame” inside, where the world model and the way of interacting with it changes drastically for one section, then goes back to normal?
Hmm. One thing I thought of that had a distinctly separate-feeling minigame where the world model (and the way of interacting with it) changes drastically, is Focal Shift from IF Comp a few years ago. It’s primarily a parser with separate minigames to simulate hacking.
I think there’s also more parsers where the player character changes for a section and the new player character has dramatically different capabilities (i.e., become a ghost that can’t pick things up), but most of these wouldn’t meet your requirement about the world model, as I understand it.
I’m sure there are, but nothing springs to mind. The most common form of minigame within a game is a role-playing game (or RPG) to simulate a fight or battle sequence. There are many of these. A recent example is the very strange Home Party by Zeno Pillan.
James Brand by Peter Kirsch had a sequence inside a pinball machine.
Over Here! by Lionel Ange had a sequence inside a Pac-Man machine.
CC’s Road to Stardom by OK Feather had a game where you have to work your way through an asteroid belt.
There were a couple of 8-bit games back in the 1980s where you had to play an arcade game inside the adventure or you had to play an arcade game to get to the adventure. The names of those elude me at the moment.
EDIT: Robin Hood by Peter Kirsch had a short archery game inside it.
There are lots of examples of adventures within adventures, but they use the same method of interaction.
As Garry mentioned, there were quite a few games in the 1980s and 1990s that added arcade action (or other genre) sections in their text adventures; including Mad Monk (Merlin Micro Systems, 1982), The Desecration (Mind Games, 1982), Mad Martha & Mad Martha II (Micro-Gen, 1983), The Micro Mutant (Compass, 1991).
You may also be interested in looking at David Mullich’s The Prisoner from 1980.
Depending on what qualifies, I think Worldsmith has 2 or 3. It even starts out with a minigame preventing some players from reaching the “normal parser game”
At risk of sophistry, every parser game that switches to a choice-based mode for conversation is doing this - the extent to which it “counts” probably depends on how substantial the dialogue trees are.
Adam Cadre’s Lock and Key also does this, except that the regular parser section is about the first 5% of the game, and the mini-game is the remaining 95%.
Both Gateway games have code-unlocking shape-matching sections which are point’n’click (or arrow keys and enter).
The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian is already a special case, being a graphical parser game. At some sections it disperses with the parser entirely. There’s an arcade-style dragon-flying&shooting minigame, and several real-time swordfighting challenges.
My designer’s opinion is that a minigame in IF should be optional, fun, consistent with the narration and based on thinking/reasoning instead of acting.
sorry for the curt answer (and two/three days of absence), but having a referendum in Italy (field legwork) and a major mess in a foreign country to monitor (online scouring for reliable news) both RL and computer time available dropped into negative… (25 hours day ? naah, more than 30 hours day…)