Playing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I'm finally properly playing this via DSLinux and Frotz...

This game is 22 years old, yet still undeniably a masterpiece.

Much smarter than those pitiful games the big developers come up with these days!
It seems to have a proper response to every single interaction I can think of.
Very fun, because that also makes it extremely easy to go and kill myself :)

For some reason, most of today's stuff doesn't do that; unless something needs a reaction, it doesn't happen.

well.. devs tend to stick in things that might not -need- a reaction, but there are so many more things in any given room today that it would be impossible for everything to have a unique action... and very confusing for the player.

But I hear ya.

You might want to check out story tron. This is a concept by Chris Crawford (a fairly outspoken critic of all things game-play related)

http://www.storytron.com/

I believe their sdk is free and cross platform as well.

It will be interesting to see if they ever finish this thing, and if anyone utilizes it.

The site is a little vague about what this actually is. At times, it seems similar to an old infocom parser (such as the one Hitchhikers was written in), and at other times, it comes off as some sort of AI middle ware for more "modern" games.

are you talking about the text adventure, because i didnt know about another hitch hikers game?

Ah, the Infocom text adventure - great game. As far as my memory serves me, it actually followed the book quite closely.

don't panic

its got a maze in it, so i dont like it.

Took me a while to figure out to "open eyes" after waking up in a dark room, and not being able to see anything. :-?

I was always kinda partial to Snowball myself.