I completely agree with this - it was never about the complexity of the parser, it was the world that the story and words on the screen would evoke. I also like(d) "kind games" and not ones with unnecessarily difficult or obtuse puzzles.I was never a fan of unnecessarily-complicated parsers. They eat up precious bytes that could have been used for rooms, objects or puzzle logic. For me, distilling a command down to one, two (or occasionally three, so I baked that ability into AdveBuilder) words always seemed to be an integral part of the gameplay.
Besides which, I'm too lazy to type something like TAKE EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE DUCK, GO SOUTH TWICE THEN EAST ONCE, FILL THE WOODEN BUCKET AND GO NORTH in full .....
) words always seemed to be an integral part of the gameplay.Most adventure games for me are a little like a game of chess - try, fail, repeat with a change. I never felt the need to type complex sentences, and also the likelihood of a typo was far greater with every character typed so.... keep it short... no up arrow to retrieve the previous command in most games.
Level 9 did things with e,g, "take everything" but that's a simple parser. They would also go through and match only the words they recognised (v1 up to a maximun of 3). And then order them into verb/direction, object, NPC - so you could say complex things like "give to the troll the diamonds" and it'd result in something internally that would be "give diamonds troll", everything else ignored. That's good enough for me but I'd still probably type "give diamonds" or "give diamonds troll" because as @julie_m said, it's quite an effort to type long sentences on a BBC keyboard back in the day whilst playing a game.
Some of the later Level 9 games were quite sophisticated with their parser technology (and NPC movement) using their KAOS engine - so you could try e.g. Knight Orc or Scapeghost or Ingrid's Back or Gnome Ranger or (maybe) Lancelot. All of those were available for the C64 though too but no idea if you have played them.Any recommendations for anything remotely like an Infocom or Magnetic Scrolls game? Anything with a decent parser?
For me, if you want to dabble in some of the best I would start with one of the following and report back (we'll understand a little bit more about your "parser" likes then!):
1. Lords of Time - either the plain text or updated/expanded to the latest engine version
2. Village of Lost Souls - beautifully atmospheric
I used to despise games that had a temporal aspect - if you had to be in location X by move 20, but you'd have no clue (are you listening Dodgy Geezers?).
And I know the parser is simple in Twin Kingdom Valley but it oozed atmosphere, had great NPCs, and it was pretty easy to get your head around. Graphics were vector/flood fill based not bitmaps but pretty effective like the v2 Level 9 games.
I know it's much maligned as being unforgiving (and the parser is super simple) but the first adventure game I owned was Philospher's Quest (I think it came with the purchase of the computer). I spent so much time on this, actually loved it although it's a mish mash of so many things. Some of the Peter Kilworth's other adventures were far more brutal (Countdown to Doom....) and I wouldn't recommend.
Statistics: Posted by melchett — Sat Jun 15, 2024 10:47 pm