Thinking that I really should go back and play some old favourite games, and some I’ve never tried, I’m starting this thread as a statement of intent!
I intend to play through old games, and note thoughts on them here as I go. This won’t be a quick project, and with recurring 3-month long neurological flares (next one likely starting mid June) my time and energy is very limited. But I really, really would like to go back to the old games, both familiar to me and ones new.
For starters I have just looked up my own personal list of my top 10 favourite IF games (just the top 10, but there are many many others that I admire). It is on IFDB at Vivs top 10 favourite IF games - Recommended List
Looking through that list I am especially keen to go back to the earliest games on my list, because those are the ones I played the longest time ago. So from the 1980s The Hobbit, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Guild of Thieves. And from the early 1990s Curses, which I played about halfway through soon after it was first released in 1993. But really need to have a fresh go. Aided by a modern walkthrough if need be!
I’ve just dug out my Lost Treasures of Infocom I and II game files to get Hitchhiker’s ready. And of course then that leads me to think I should have a fresh look at some of the other Infocom games. I played quite a lot of them back in the 1980s. But there are others I haven’t played. So yup, get to those too.
And I would very much like to look at some more recent games I didn’t get to, including a number of IFComp and SpringThing winning games. Which are a priority. And in the more modern era also opens up more choice based games rather than just parser.
So yup, a plan! Not sure which game I will start with. Those Infocom games are calling … But will report back in due course.
There will be spoilers in this thread, but I will endeavour to hide the key things as appropriate, as well as speak in more general terms. So it should be safe for most folks.
Preparing to start up my first play through, and I’m going to be looking at Knight Orc (1987) from Level 9 (Knight Orc - Details).
My initial reaction was to play it in the Commodore 64 format - I was a C64 owner back in the day. But it’s proving a bit too much of a hassle, and the graphics though nice aren’t enough to deal with the problems they then cause. So I’m going for the ZX Spectrum version instead, linked from the IFDB page, and using the Fuse emulator which I already have on my Mac. That allows saving snapshots, though I’m helped that the game is a three-part one, each part of which I can load separately on the Speccy.
More soon after I’ve had a good play! Meanwhile here’s a very thorough set of old reviews/articles about the C64 version (that I am not playing). gamebase64.com - The Gamebase Collection
I doubt you want to start over again, and emulators are obviously closer to the original experience, but I personally find it more comfortable to play Level 9 games with the Level9 interpreter (included in Gargoyle and Spatterlight), which offers all the modern conveniences of instant save and restore, multiple undo, screenreader support and so on.
EDIT: And most of the original pictures as well, though not the Commodore 64 ones as far as I know.
Reminds me that I should try to add support for more file formats to it.
Quick update: I’m going to play on the DOS version, with the pictures mostly off. Cos the font is so much nicer to read than the Speccy one! Playing in DOSBox on my Mac.
That is the downside, it is pretty picky when it comes to supported formats. The easiest is probably to save a snapshot in .sna format while running the Spectrum version in Fuse.
I renamed the GAMEDAT files to knightorc1.sna etc. And lower cased the .PIC to .pic files. And it now loads in Gargoyle and Spatterlight, using the DOS version. I will mainly play with the images off, but this is going to be so much better.
