Mystic Force - Worst Game Ever?

Well, I suppose this is sort of an announcement, and sort of a request for beta-testers.

Long ago, I wrote a DOS-based adventure game called Mystic Force:
http://www.sidneymerk.com/mystic.shtml

I wrote others, later, but this was one of the first and is definitely one of the worst. I tried to beat it a while back, when I first uploaded it to my site. I was pretty sure it was winnable, but even cheating by looking at the .DAT files (plain text) didn’t help. There are some notes about it here:

http://www.sidneymerk.com/mystic.txt

These kind of explain how the map is layed out, what to do and where (at least, as much as I could figure out), etc. One of these days, I’ll see if I can figure out the rest of it – or maybe it really is unwinnable at the point mentioned in the notes above. I’m not sure.

Anyway, if anybody is interesting in playing a clasically bad adventure game, there you go. If by chance you do solve it, I’d love to know how. Heh.

Beta test a game that even the author doesn’t know how to win? That doesn’t sound too fun. :slight_smile:

Yeah… it’d be a different kind of fun, I suppose. :slight_smile:

I just got around to looking closer at the Mystic Force portion of your website…it does look hilariously bad, but at the same time, something I would’ve certainly played had it been on a BBS back in the early 90’s (in between Trade Wars 2002, Legend of the Red Dragon, and MajorMUD).

The insulting parser messages are pretty funny, too.

I went on to write a few real BBS games after that. Mystic Force just sat around until I decided to zip it up and put it on my website. When I wrote it, though, I didn’t realize how bad it was. Most of the IF I’d played to then was kind of similar, so I probably just thought that’s how it should be. :slight_smile:

This is probably off-topic, but I’ve tried playing Breath Pirates and it seems to be pretty decent.

Colored text in text adventure games seemed to be the “in” thing those days.

That was 1998, if I recall correctly. That style of game was definitely on the way out. Even then, I got some flack for using QB instead of TADS or Inform (although not so much as with The Insanity Circle). It’s pretty decent if you stick to what works. None of my QB adventures had anything close to a real world model, so every command is specifically handled based on keywords. Each one works a little differently, and without any kind of real relationship between objects.