Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 23rd Apr 2007 22:47 UTC
"Clive Sinclair's ZX Spectrum is a quarter of a century old today. The machine that really launched the UK IT industry hit the streets of a depressed Britain on 23 April, 1982. Dark days, then. But lo, along came bespectacled Messiah Sir Clive Sinclair with the successor to his 1981 release, the black-and-white ZX-81. The ZX Spectrum boasted a visual cortex-melting eight colours at 256 x 192 resolution, blistering 3.5MHz CPU, and crucially, a crisp-repelling vulcanised rubber keyboard."
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Member since:
2005-11-16
There were some great text adventures for the Spectrum. A few lines of well written prose could create a scene much more effectively than a screen full of blocky graphics. The Level 9 adventures were particular favourites of mine, some of the puzzles in games like Snowball and Return to Eden were pretty fiendish.
As tonywob pointed out, the average game back then tended to be a lot harder than the games around today. That's definitely true when comparing text adventures with modern graphical games. You didn't get the same handholding, with tutorials and hints to stop you getting stuck, and without the internet you couldn't just look up a walk-through. It certainly made completing those games a real challenge, and gave you a real sense of achievement if you actually did it. Of course trying to play text adventures on the Speccy's rubber keyboard was a challenge of its own...
Actually, there are still some great text adventures being written by the amateur community, using adventure programming languages like TADS and Inform. It's well worth having a look at the games around today, this archive is a good place to start: http://wurb.com/if/