Old School Text Based Adventure For The Atari - Wizard And The Princess

Back in my day we had these things called text adventures. There were games that were just text, but there were also ones that came with pictures. There was one screen at a time, nothing on the screen moved and you typed in what you wanted to do. Go North. Go South. Use Rock. When shit went down it, the description was written under the picture. Some times the picture would change to show the danger. The games worked for the limitation of the time and as games got more complex, these kind of games stopped getting made. But there was something different about them, something that even today's games don't utilize.

The controls of the game were only text. You typed it what you wanted to do. If you wanted to go to another screen, you would have to type in the direction you wanted move. Your options were limited to the 4 points on a compass. North, south, east and west. And out of those, you could only travel in the areas that were open. The game would tell you when you entered a new screen. 'You are in a clearing, there is a house to the east and a lake to the north.' Type in go north if you want to go to the lake and go east for the house. When you were a pro, you could just type N and E to move. There was also items to interact with and you would have to type things like get rock and use rock. And if you typed I, your inventory of items would pop up. Not that helped because you usually had no clue what you were doing. And you had to be specific when you typed in your actions as the game only recognized certain words like use, look and get. But type in build boat, stomp scorpion, or any other command in the English language and you will get the same message over and over, 'I don't know what ____ is.'. Man that can get on your nerves.

One of the text adventures I played as a kid was Wizard And The Princess. I played it at an age when the things on the screen could scare me. And yes I am not ashamed to admit that :p. You started in an empty town. The only option you had was to go north. That was it. Then you entered the desert. And that was when the game got hard. It was an open desert with several screens that were all, well, a desert. Some of the screens had rocks and if you kept typing directions you might get to a screen with a wild animal that is blocking your path out of the desert (I want to say it was a lion but I don't remember exactly what it was, no wait, it was a rattle snake). What do you do? The answer is get rock and use rock on the animal to move passed it. But there was only one rock you could get that didn't have a scorpion under it. And if you get rock that has a scorpion under it, it is death. The only reason I knew how to do it, and what rock it was, was that I had a sheet with all the answers. I used the sheet when I got older to beat it.

Those games got replaced with more complicated gameplay and stories that are delivered with writers and voice actors. And yeah, there are obviously a lot of advantages, but not everything that was left behind was just out-dated aspects. Using typing as the way to interact with a character is a different type of gameplay. It made players think in a different way that other games do and added an aspect of story telling. If it could be done, this site would be a good way to bring those games back as we could reward users who played them.

@whatageek

*my upvotes/rep disclaimer: https://steemit.com/steemit/@whatageek/my-steemit-account-where-i-stand-on-bots-self-votes-and-multiple-account