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A comment on Text-only video game shows how genre can be beautiful, innovative and complex.

Re:Text-only video game shows how genre can be beautiful, in... by sjackso on Thursday January 22, 2015 @02:50PM (#8931310)
Oh cool, he finally finished it! Hadean Lands was kickstarted five years ago [1], receiving $31337. (Read that number carefully; this article rounds to $30k and completely misses the fun.) At the time, it was astonishing to many people that a piece of interactive fiction could pull in five figures of crowdfunding.

Andrew Plotkin has been releasing really excellent games for years; Spider and Web was my introduction to interactive fiction. (Talk about getting thrown in the deep end of the genre...)

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zarf/hadean-lands-inter...

EDIT: The game's author has, for some years, been posting Hadean Lands design and progress notes at the Gameshelf blog: http://gameshelf.jmac.org/author/author6b0d4/

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Re:Text-only video game shows how genre can be beautiful, in... by Kronopath on Thursday January 22, 2015 @08:33PM (#8932953)
Spider and Web is a work of genius. But I'll warn you: if you have any interest at all in playing it, stop reading about it. Go in knowing as little as possible, and just work your way through. You'll do fine.

You can even play it for free online, so you have no excuse: http://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/tangle/

I just impulsively picked up the Hadean Lands bundle after reading this article too. I look forward to playing it.

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Re:Text-only video game shows how genre can be beautiful, in... by zaroth on Friday January 23, 2015 @03:14AM (#8933889)
I spent far too long just reading along with this walkthrough (http://www.allthingsjacq.com/intfic_clubfloyd_20080904.html) this game would drive me insane ;-)
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Re:Text-only video game shows how genre can be beautiful, in... by Kronopath on Friday January 23, 2015 @12:41PM (#8936139)
But then you're denying yourself the experience! It's not so bad, really.
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Re:Text-only video game shows how genre can be beautiful, in... by Kronopath on Friday January 23, 2015 @04:10PM (#8937290)
...besides, that transcript totally skips over the most climactic scene in the game. It's a travesty, really. Don't bother with it.
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