28 replies to this topic

[Chuck D. Head]

/ BUY DVD
- YOU DONT HAVE ENOUGH GOLD
/ BUY DVD CHEAPER
- I DONT UNDERSTAND THAT
/ BUY DVD ON HALF.COM
- I DONT UNDERSTAND THAT
/ WATCH MOVIE ONLINE
- I DONT UNDERSTAND THAT
/ DOWNLOAD MOVIE FROM PIRATE SITE
- YOU ARE SITTING IN FRONT OF A COMPUTER MONITOR. A COLORED BAR ON THE SCREEN INDICATES A FILE IS LOADING. AS THE BAR APPROACHES COMPLETION, YOU HEAR A LOUD NOISE BEHIND YOU. YOU TURN AROUND TO SEE FEDERAL AGENTS AND MPAA LAWYERS RUSHING THROUGH YOUR SHATTERED FRONT DOOR. YOU REACH FOR THE PHONE TO CALL YOUR LAWYER, BUT BEFORE YOU CAN DIAL, SOMETHING STRIKES THE SIDE OF YOUR HEAD WITH A HEAVY BLOW. AS YOUR CONCIOUSNESS FADES, YOU TASTE THE BLOOD FROM YOUR WOUND AS IT TRICKLES INTO THE CORNER OF YOUR MOUTH. YOU ARE DEAD.

[Impaler_26]

I watched Get Lamp a few weeks ago and i have to say it was average at best. It was interesting to hear how fascinated people seemed to be by the original Adventure back then. But there was way too much redundant babble of Fans which made the movie pretty boring.

IMO not worth 45 bucks...

[BydoEmpire]

I watched it over the last couple of days, and most of the "inside Infocom" extra and I definitely enjoyed it. I do wish they had gone into more details about the games themselves, and the style is a bit scattered. They also spend a lot of time talking with and about modern text adventure game creators, which is kind of a mixed bag, imho. Not quite as much "nostalgic" factor as I was expecting. Regardless, it was still an interesting and fun documentary and worth your time. I enjoyed playing text adventures back in the day, but I was fairly young at the time and never came close to finishing any of them. Seeing some of the maps of Zork makes me not feel so bad - the game is huge. Infocom's own research showed most players never finished the games, either; and some of the interviewees talked about how you could spend an entire year playing one game. It does make me want to play some of them again, but I just don't have the time.

One other thing that struck me, is that Infocom was really one of the last (mainstream) creators of truly mature games. Not boobs and bullets 'mature' like you see in modern games, but actually mature in story, characters, and especially thought process required to play the games. Games based on reading and writing take a certain maturity to see through, I think. It was interesting to hear that a lot of their early customers were doctors and other professionals, because personal computers were expensive and the games were expensive. The design of the games was such that it appealed to older gamers.

IMHO Get Lamp is definitely worth watching. I wouldn't say it's the best gaming- or computer-related documentary I've seen, but overall entertaining and worth my time (I borrowed it, so I'm not judging $$$ value). I haven't had a chance to explore the 2nd dvd of bonus content.

Edited by BydoEmpire, Fri Mar 11, 2011 9:38 AM.

[DemonoidTentacle]

There's something about Text Adventure games that have always captured my imagination. I recently went through all my old C64 disks trying to find the name of one I used to play a lot, but couldn't find it. I have a large amount of pirated C64 disks and a lot of them have multiple games on them, without labelling the lot.

I wrote one last year on a program designed to make modern text adventures on my mac. I can't remember what the program was called, but it was very easy to use since no programming skill was required. I'd love to learn a little bit of coding so that I could do a homebrew text adventure for the C64.