Looking For An Adventure

[sparhawk]

I'm trying to remember the name of an older game which came out during the 90ies. I think it had at least three parts. It was a fantasy where you walked a lot in some forest. You had a room in a tavern and in the night, you woke sometimed up, and when you went down there was some ghost there. I think in the tavern room was also a lot of garlich hanging. I thought it could be Quest For Glory but I think ti was a different one.

Any ideas? It must have been between 1994 and 1998 somwhere. Is there somewhere a more or less complete archive list of games where one could look? I found an adventure archive site, but I didn't find this game there. So either it must have been indeed Quest For Glory 4 or it was not listed there.

[Arumakani]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Glory

[Darkness_Falls]

I don't think I've ever played that game Sparhawk, but the only other one that I can think of that it might be is King's Quest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Quest

[sparhawk]

It was definitely not Kings Quest and also not Kyrandia.

[Arumakani]

http://www.adventuregamers.com/index.php

[sparhawk]

Seems it was indeed QFG4. I finally ofund a site with more screenshots and there was also the room included that I remembered best. Now the obvious question is - How can I make this game run? VMWare?

[demagogue]

Yeah, it sounds so much like Quest for Glory.

By the way, QfG1 was the first game I remember playing that featured breaking into someone's house and sneaking around like a thief to steal something. I loved that thrill and was one of the first things I thought about like 8 years later when Thief came out.

[Darkness_Falls]

On WinXP? If you have the game and it just won't work on the newer OS, you might be able to use the Program Compatibility Wizard (under Start > All Programs > Accessories) in WinXP. It says for this:

Welcome to the Program Compatibility Wizard

If you are experiencing problems with a program that worked correctly on an earlier version of Windows, this wizard helps you select and test compatibility settings that may fix those problems.

 

Otherwise, I don't know. A 'MAME' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAME) might work, but you'd still need a license for the game. I had never heard of VMWare before...

[sparhawk]

MAME is an aracade machine emulator. It wont help here. VMWare could do the trick, the only problem is that I would need to relearn all that MSDOS crap I already forgot. And I don't know where I could find a soundblaster DOS driver right now.

[Darkness_Falls]

True, I'm not sure what I was thinking. You're not needing to emulate anything since you played it on the PC. For some reason I was thinking you played it on a console (e.g., Amiga or Commodore) and were needing to emulate; in which case you'd need an emulator. Obviously, MAME wouldn't be the correct emulator, though. Disregard my MAME comment Good luck on your quest for gaming glory!

[Ishtvan]

I seem to remember getting it to run on Win95 a long time ago, so it might not need pure DOS drivers. Don't know much beyond that though.

[sparhawk]

I found some GPL code that deals with the sound drivers. That works well, until I hit a key. then I get some DPMI page faults. DOS and it's fantastic 32bit interface.

[sparhawk]

Now I finally managed to make it work. I used DOSBox which is an emulator and it seems to wwork quite fine. Now I have to look at some of my other games and see if I can also make them work.

[demagogue]

Oh, I'm surprised I forgot to mention that when you asked the direct question. I've been playing these games for years using Dosbox, right down to Space Quest 1.

 

Note that in some cases you may still need MoSlow (to slow the processing down, esp for pre-1990 games) and something to emulate an old soundblaster (VSound? I forget the name just now), even using Dosbox.

Edited July 23, 2006 by demagogue

[Darkness_Falls]

Anyone here ever play Guild of Thieves? I just stumbled upon it. Naturally, it made me curious:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/guild-of-thieves

Wondering if it's any good.

 

Hmm, nevermind. Saw some screenshots; looks like a text adventure w/ graphics...

[demagogue]

YES!!! God, I loved Guild of Thieves (and its prequel even more, The Pawn). Man, it was Thief before Thief ... it had you looting the castle/manor with the guards, the temple, the crypt, the bank, the cemetary ... it was hilarious, a great set up and story (being watched by the Master Thieves while you apply for the Guild by stealing everything in the region), and the puzzles were logical and tiered (for lack of a better term, e.g., went from easy to harder over the course of the game, so it gives you a learning curve). And best of all ... lots of stealing stuff. The back of the game read: Why buy this game when you can steal it?

 

This and the Pawn were hands down the best IF games ever in my opinion.

It is a text adventure (IF) with graphics, but I think you shouldn't knock it just because it's IF, at least in this case (or unless you just really hate IF).

But if you like Thief, you should really give it a shot, I think, since it really is uncanny at places, being a medieval thieving game after all.

 

If time and initiative are on my side, I hope to remake this as faithfully as possible as my first TDM FM (I mentioned this months ago: clicky). So you might wait for that and get the same experience in FPS-adventure style.

Edited July 24, 2006 by demagogue

[Darkness_Falls]

Wow, demagogue! Thanks for sharing. I was ready to dismiss Guild of Thieves after looking at the type of game it was; not thinking it would be anything I could get into. However, you say it is the sequel to Pawn?? I used to love Pawn! When it came out for the Commodore 64 that game would immediately transport me to that fantasy land it was set in. Wow, I didn't know there was a sequel to it??? Very cool! I will have to put Guild of Thieves on my list of things to check out now. Thanks for the info, and good luck with your adaptations to FPS-adventure style! Look forward to seeing.

[Ombrenuit]

I'm actually very interested in these adventures, especially Guild of Thieves. I've always been curious about playing a text adventure, is there any chance there is an emulator for them that I could use? I would really appreciate it. If I could buy it off the 'net, I would be more than happy to.

Edited July 27, 2006 by Ombrenuit

[sparhawk]

Some adventures you can play via the C64 emulator. "Mask of the Sun" and "Wizard of Oz" are among my favourites. As for DOS games, you can use that DOS emulator I mentioned above. I still have several games from DOS times that I want to play every now and then.

[Ishtvan]

I think QFG4 was one of my all-time fav. games. Love the music, too.

[sparhawk]

I started to play it again, but I forgot how to get over this chasm right in the beginning.

[demagogue]

@Ombrenuit

 

You can play them (The Pawn and Guild of Thieves) on both the Amiga emulator and C64 emulator. Both emulators are very easy to find online and set up, as are both games for both systems; Google is your friend here.

 

Amiga has much better graphics (relatively speaking here! NB, The Pawn and Guild of Thieves have "graphics" in that the text is accompanies often by a picture of the room you're in, sometimes nice for atmosphere, but not necessary to the game at all, which is entirely text based)

 

C64 is how most everyone played it originally, so it has the nostolgia factor, maybe not so important to you. Also, setting things up is a little easier and more user friendly for the C64 emulator than the Amiga, so since the graphics don't matter so much it maybe worth just sticking with the C64. But then again if the graphics are there, may as well go for the best. It's a personal preference thing, anyway.

 

I agree these two are the best choice for trying out IF, though. A lot of people like Infocom, which was very prolific and over a wide range of themes (zork and Hitchhiker's Guide), but Magnetic Scrolls (makers of Pawn and GoTs) were the best in my book; only a few games but all of them quality and you can feel how much love they poured into them.

Edited July 28, 2006 by demagogue

[sparhawk]

The graphics for The Pawn was always very nice, so I would go for the Amiga. IMO this adventure was one of the last of this type, right? Afterwards, the adventures started with clickable interfaces.

[Maximius]

I think I may be able to claim that I played one of the oldest internet games as well as the oldest text adventure pretty much ever. When I was a kid, my mother worked for the Tobyhanna Army Depot in Tobyhanna, Penn. She was the assistant to some bigwig, I barely remember because I was like 8 or 9 at the time. So one week they are really busy and she has to do work at home and she had brought a teletypewriter back from the office. It looked like a giant blue typewriter with a phone cradle on top. The paper was ribbon paper that fed up through the middle of the machine from a box on the floor. She would dial a number, Im assuming now a DNS access number, and when the modem started place the phone on the teletypewriter. Then you could interface with the computers at the Depot.

 

So one night my mom is like "check this out" and she lets me read some of the text. It said something like "You are in a cave, to the left is a passage leading to darkness, to the right is a heavy wooden doorway that looks locked." "To go left, enter L, to go right enter R." And so I did and I think I got eaten by something in the dark passage. I played for about an hour, looking for keys and finally a sword to kill the monster. I remember beating it and wanting more but that was the only game she knew of. This had to be around 1979/80.

Edited July 28, 2006 by Maximius

[demagogue]

I'm almost certain you are talking about Adventure, which is the first IF and was also making the rounds on Arpanet (early military version of the internet) in the period you're talking about.

 

From wikipaedia for interactive fiction:

 

Adventure

Around 1975, Will Crowther wrote the first text adventure game, Adventure (originally called ADVENT because a filename could only be six characters long in its operating system, and later Colossal Cave).[1] It was programmed in Fortran for the PDP-10. In 1976, Don Woods discovered Adventure while working at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and obtained Crowther's permission to expand the game. Crowther's original version was a quite accurate simulation of the real Colossal Cave; Woods' changes were reminiscent of the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, and included a troll, elves, and a volcano inspired by Mount Doom.

 

In 1976, the game began spreading on ARPANet, and has survived on the Internet to this day.

Edited July 28, 2006 by demagogue