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The Thinking Man's computer game ... Submitted by Duncan Bayne on Sun, 2006-02-05 20:34.
Recently, I've rediscovered a genre of computer game that I first came across as a child: the text adventure, or as they're more commonly known nowadays, interactive fiction. The idea is simple - there's a goal (say, preventing a missile launch, or simply surviving the adventure), many locations (known as rooms, even though they may be rooms, fields or dungeons), and a series of items you can collect or manipulate along the way. You control your character by typing commands; e.g. "north" moves you north, "take documents" would pick up the documents mentioned in the second screen-shot below, and "i" (short for 'inventory') lists the items you're currently carrying. Many commands vary between adventure games, but such staples as compass directions, take, inventory, and look are almost always identical. Some, but far from all, text adventures also have illustrations of some of the rooms; I've included some screenshots from the Seabase Delta game below, which has a few dozen illustrations (not bad going for a game that ran on a home computer with significantly less power than a modern cellphone). You can get text adventures for just about every type of computer. In my opinion the best adventures are the oldies - hence below you'll see screenshots of Colossal Cave, Zork and Seabase Delta, three of my favourites, and all very old. If you want to try out adventure games for yourself, three good starting points are:
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If you're talking RTS...
...then Starcraft is king. Blizzard Entertainment is something we should all admire: a company that makes money by making their games so damn good that you just have to buy them.
Some of the older console RPGs had excellent puzzles. I'm thinking particularly of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which is my candidate for greatest game ever made. If you want to get REALLY old, some of the RPGs for the SNES were soul-crushingly hard, but ever so satisfying.
A surprisingly great modern game is Dragon Quest VIII for the PS2. Gorgeous graphics, likable characters, and random monster encounters that could quite easily gut you like a butchered hog if you just try and coast through the fight. You need to be purposeful in each battle command you give, which is definitely a refreshing change.
I tend to prefer turn based
I tend to prefer turn based strategy games. (cut my teeth on the final fantasy series and final fantasy tactics).
But for good real time games with great plots and good puzzles I always choose the Resident Evil series. Limited ammo, practically unlimited opponents, and you have to use some hardcore logic any time you hit an impass.
That and nothing matches the thrill of getting backed into a corner by a roomfull of zombies and blowing the snot out of them with a shotgun or a grenade launcher (I'm getting chills just from thinking about the entrance of the police station and morgue in RE2).
---Landon
It all basically comes back to fight or flight.
Along the same lines,
Along the same lines, LucasArts's graphical adventure games from the early 1990s are pure gems of computer gaming. Sam and Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle, The Day of the Tentacle ... each had well-written plotlines and challenging puzzles to be overcome. There's a new emulator out called ScummVM that will let you run these old chestnuts on a new system.
Chicago
.... the best I have ever found is 1893 Chicago World's Fair Mystery.
You play a detective who wanders about the Chicago World's Fair tracking down a diamond theif. In order to get clues you have to solve very difficult puzzles while touring the World's Fair.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/tech/cst-fin-fair20.html
RTS
The designation "thinking man's game" is probably not fair as personal preference plays the largest role, but I'd say that RTS is more of a mixture. Chess is almost pure thinking; first-person-shooters are more action-oriented; and RTS combines both elements.
old school
My favorite text-based game was Zyll. And this one isn't exactly making you way through hell but it is "scary" http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/scarygame
Don't take this too seriously but wouldn’t real time strategy, or even turn based strategy, games be the real thinking man’s game?
I tried to make one
When I was in the 8th grade, I tried to make one of these. In my game, the player inevitably died and went to hell. And had to navigate his way through hell.
Would've been a good game but my BASIC code got all messed up. I wasn't a good enough programmer at the time.
Sometimes I think it would've been fun to get in on the videogame industry back in the old days when one person could stay up all night and write a game like asteroids, and it would be a good game.
Landon, that's all we had
Landon, that's all we had back in them days. We made do as best we could.
Duncan, I played a bunch of those and I don't think I ever finished a damn one. I did finish Zork Grand Inquisitor and Zork Nemesis (very dark and cool) which were not text-based and came out in the 90s. Let's see...I played the hell out of Planetfall, Hitchhiker's Guide, Cutthroat, all the Zork ones...there were others too. I got fed up with them after Hitchhiker's Guide required you to do about 7 ridiculously counter-intuitive things to get past this one part. Something to do with the towel and the babel fish.
I played a couple of those.
I played a couple of those. Didn't really understand which commands would register. Usually wound up just swearing at the computer in my commands.
---Landon
It all basically comes back to fight or flight.