So… how about a text-based RPG?

You might think that this is a strange question, but I do have a reason for asking – I’ve just finished coding one! (Well, the first version which will grow and improve over time, anyway.) I’ve been playing around with a free programming language called Just Basic recently and decided that, since I’ve always intended on producing a complete game one day, that I would finally do it. So, putting many other projects on hold for a while, I’ve been beavering away at this and after a thousand lines of code, have something reasonably complete and playable.

I remember back in the days when Infocom and Level 9′s text adventures were slowly being superceded by graphic adventures, when the likes of Zork gave way to Deja Vu, then Deja Vu lost ground to Maniac Mansion, etc. There was much debate as to whether the graphical adventures could really capture the atmosphere of the best text-based adventures – The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Guild of Thieves, etc. Though you hardly ever see a text adventure these days (even on the freeware scene), that question basically remains unanswered. With my lack of graphical ability (and Just Basic’s limitations in that department) there is no way I’m every going to create a game that manages to look anywhere near as good as what’s available nowadays (hell, I owuldn’t even be able to make something that looked like the original Maniac Mansion!). However, if I can evoke just some of the spirit of the great text-based games of the past, then I’ll be happy.

Anyway without further ado… you can download the public beta of my game from this page. Please feel free to leave a comment here with your thoughts on the game, or text-based games in particular.

This brings me to another thought – why, with technology going forward all the time, do we persist in either emulating older systems, remaking classic games and making games in the style of older games? There is, I think, one simple reason for this – no, it’s not nostalgia (oh okay, nostalgia is part of the reason); those old games were fun, and today’s games can dissapoint in that regard. Some of the older games disappointed too, of course, but the games we loved back then… guess what? We still love them. So though times change, video games are just like books, movies and music – true classics never go out of fashion.