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July 26, 2011 3:40 PM   Subscribe

I want to play more games like Nethack, Dwarf Fortress, Liberal Crime Squad, etc. No, not rogue-likes: games with a similiar "made of text" interface.

Yeah, strange question, I know. And I'm sure there's no shortage of games back in the day that were forced to use this sort of thing.

But there's something about the simplicity (or lack thereof) of all that text that I like. No limits- any genre's fare game, as long as it's got that look and style. More recent stuff is ace though.

Any recommendations of good stuff?
posted by Askiba to Computers & Internet (10 answers total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
Goblin Camp.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 3:44 PM on July 26, 2011


ZZT is a game creation system from Epic (yes, Unreal & Gears of War Epic). It's basically a simple object-oriented scripting language plugged into a character grid with some basic game functionality built in (movement, shooting, enemies, inventory). Think LittleBigPlanet for DOS.

Of course it runs beautifully in DOSBox. And don't miss MegaZeux, a ZZT clone that's still actively developed.
posted by skymt at 3:52 PM on July 26, 2011 [1 favorite]


There's some neat stuff being made with libtcod, which is intended exactly for this sort of thing. Some of them are roguelikes but many are not. I can confirm that Pyromancer is fun, but I haven't played most of them.
posted by theodolite at 4:46 PM on July 26, 2011


Kingdom of Kroz!
posted by jozxyqk at 4:50 PM on July 26, 2011


ADOM, because it feels more 'open' than nethack. There's about 20 caves instead of one and there's above ground space so you can explore one cave, then if it gets too tough, you can go back up and try another cave system. The only problem is that later in the game it gets very hard, much harder than nethack.
posted by rainy at 6:53 PM on July 26, 2011


You could look into old BBS door games... TradeWars 2002 still has a solid player community, and it's one of my favorite games ever, of any genre. It's a multiplayer space empire strategy game; games can last weeks or months, and you're allotted a number of turns to play each day, meaning some small amount of time investment each day.

(I didn't know this, but the Wikipedia article mentions that in 2009 PC World ranked TW the 10th greatest PC game ever! High praise!)
posted by JumpW at 9:50 PM on July 26, 2011 [1 favorite]


Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game. Playable online.
posted by j03 at 2:57 AM on July 27, 2011


ASCIIpOrtal!
posted by qbject at 5:56 AM on July 27, 2011


operation overkill
posted by k5.user at 7:07 AM on July 27, 2011


You'll get a real kick out of Shoot 'em, a 3D ASCII shooter.
posted by Ted Maul at 8:27 AM on July 27, 2011


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