Koma - A Text Adventure Mac OS
Welcome to another installment of Geeky Friday. Today, unfortunately, it seems we’ve reached a …
And so begins a few hours of wasted time. Well, at least for those of us who grew up in the “good old days” of computer gaming, it may. If the above doesn’t look familiar to you, it’s probably because you’re quite a bit younger than I am :). For those who aren’t familiar, before we had color screens, hard drives, or anything resembling OS X, we had text-based computer games.
Get inside the character's mind! About This Game In this mind-twisting and thrilling VR horror quest, you will explore the nightmarish hospital to find the buried answers deep within a game characters psyche. The latest Mac Adventure game reviews, an overview of best Adventure Games on the Mac and new releases. Though it can't profess to offer much consequential player choice, this lovely literary mystery deftly blends art and text in a delightfully interactive way.
As you can see from the quotes above, all you need to play a text-based game are a keyboard, a screen, and an active imagination! This particular game is called dunnet, and it’s included with every copy of OS X—I’ll tell you how to launch it in just a bit.
In text-based games, you interact with the game through a simple language parser, using two-word commands like get shovel, dig rock, and attack bear. You can also move about by giving compass directions such as East (or just E). Based on what you tell the game to do, you’ll see a new output blurb appear, describing the result of your action, your new location, etc.
Over time, as you explore and solve puzzles, more and more of the world is revealed to you, and additional objectives become apparent. It may sound quaint and outdated in today’s world of ultra-3D high-res games such as Doom3 and Myst, but text-based games can be fun in their own way, given a chance.
To play dunnet, all you need is a Terminal window and an open mind—you’d be amazed at what kinds of images your mind can draw, given the basic descriptions provided by the game itself. Launch Terminal (in /Applications: Utilities) and type (or copy and paste!) this, followed by the Return key:
emacs -batch -l dunnetThat’s right; dunnet is sort of hiding inside of the emacs text editor. When the game starts up, you’ll see the output above (excluding the get shovel bit—consider that your first clue). From this point on, you’re really on your own, but here are a few basic commands to help get you started:
help– Some background on the game, as well as basic commands and objectives.inventory– Tell you what you’re carrying.saveandrestore– Saves and restores the game, so you can remember to go eat occasionally.quit– Quit the game.
There’s no way this will replace modern gaming, but if you’re umm, of my vintage, or just want to know what we considered leading edge back in the day, give this a shot. If you find the concept of text-based gaming intriguing, then you might findA History of ‘Adventure’interesting reading—it covers the history of Adventure, the first true ‘interactive fiction’ text-based game.
And if reading about Adventure whets your apetite to try the real thing, Lobotomo Software has afree OS X version available—happy exploring!
Text-based adventure games, known as “interactive fiction” in gamer’s parlance, are making a slow but steady comeback thanks to a Mac-friendly programming tool called Inform 7.
“It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.”
These words are bound to strike a chord of familiarity (and perhaps terror) in the heart of anyone who played computer games in the late 70s or early 80s — it’s the hallmark of Zork, a legendary text-based adventure game published by Infocom, back when computer game graphics were primitive and 3D acceleration was non-existent.
That gaming genre — interactive fiction — mostly went the way of the dodo once graphical adventure games came on the scene. Over the years, graphic complexity has increased in adventure games until we’re left today with titles like Feral Interactive’s forthcoming Mac conversion of Fable: The Lost Chapters. In recent years Zork has even resurfaced with a visual reincarnation: MacPlay’s Zork: Grand Inquisitor.
Interactive fiction is making a comeback, thanks to Inform 7, billed as “a design system for interactive fiction.” Inform is now 13 years old, and its newest implementation, Inform 7, has been three years in development.
Unencumbered by complicated computer programming syntax, Inform 7 uses instead a natural English language-style interface. The free software, which runs natively in Mac OS X and Windows, uses a one-window interface. Inform creates and manages interactive fiction directly.
Koma - A Text Adventure Mac Os Download
If you’re more interested in playing interactive fiction than writing it, it is published in files called “Blorbs.” These blorbs (a reference to a nonsense word found in some old Infocom games) can be played using Zoom, a “Z-Machine” designed to run text adventure games written in ZCode — the same format Infocom used to develop their own adventure games. The Zoom Web site also contains links to repositories of interactive fiction you can download.