Hi Hayden, Yeah, I know. When I first played the Infocom games I had hours and hours of fun playing through them. There were lots of puzzles, lots more character interaction, and of course lots of descriptions you simply can't get through an an audio only medium. Sure I don't have anything against updating the text adventure style game a bit by adding ambient sounds, a little music, and/or attack sounds , etc but that isn't what draws me personally to those games. I'm drawn to the story more than anything else. The chance to get so involved in the world, the story, that I actually think, feel, and act like the character I'm playing. Every character is different, and offers different ways to handle the same situation.
For example, let's assume you are playing a Justice League game and you are being attacked by some of Dark Seid's power demons. Batman will fight them using stealth, unarmed combat, and weapons like his batarang to pick enemies off from a distance. Black Canary is a black belt, master of martial arts, so she too will be able to do a lot of damage through unarmed combat. However, she also has a super power, the Canary Cry, which can render multiple aponents unconscious at the same time or kill them if she really goes supersonic sound. Obviously Black Canary's Canary Cry is handy to have if you are out numbered or facing some enemy like Doomsday, Dark Seid, or Amazo who would ordinarily over power Black Canary in unarmed combat situation. Zatanna, definitely one of the coollest super heroines, would probably whipup some nasty elemental magic to clean the floor with the lot of them. She might hit the power demons with a huge elemental fireball or blast them apart with a lightning bolt, or she might turn them all to ice freezing them in place. Zatanna is probably the most virsital character as she has a lot of magic powers at her command including the ability to heal herself in the middle of a combat situation. Its interesting how many different ways you can actually play a roll playing game just by selecting different characters. I often find that this degree of fflexability and an unlimited world of exploration well makes up for the lack of sounds and music. If there are several different characters to choose from and a degree of randomness through dice throws that you've got a game that has incredible replay value. Its random and you aren't going to play the same character twice in a row if you decide to switch from character to character from game to game. I havent' found many audio games besides Entombed that comes close to this degree of nearly endless replay value. As far as low tech goes I think we often forget that board games, card games, etc are still incredibly low tech too. Even if you add sounds like shuffling a deck and stuff they are still are considerably low tech compared to Shades of Doom or something like that. If you play the actual board or card games themselves they don't get any more low tech than that. Chess has been around for close to a thousand years, and although computer versions are available the manual board game is just as popular as it ever was. So I think sometimes people make too much of low tech verses high tech games. There is plenty of room for both. Cheers! On 3/21/11, Hayden Presley <hdpres...@hotmail.com> wrote: > Hi Thomas, > Here here! Sometimes I like text games even more than audio, for the simple > reason that you can get so much more descriptionwise out of text then audio, > without high costs for good actors. Some of the best games from the 80's (in > my opinion) were, of course, text adventures from Infocom. Oftentimes there > are more puzzles and possibilities in text--again, no need for high costs as > far as sounds and sound design goes. Sometimes, there aint nothing like good > ole low-tech! <Grin> > > Best Regards, > Hayden --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
