The best text adventure games?

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Spare-Flair

Supreme [H]ardness
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So I just bought a mechanical keyboard and strangely, I feel like typing everything now instead of pointing and clicking or playing modern games.

You always hear about games like Zork, etc. but I seem to have trouble getting into them. I played old keyboard parser games back in the day like Police Quest 2, etc. which were pretty good games but that's a graphical adventure. I supposed that I could look up the old Space Quest/Kings Quest games too but I'm mostly looking for the "Go West", "Look around", etc. type games as well like Zork, Amnesia, etc.

What are your favorite text based games from back in the day? I'm guessing there will be alot of infocom type games at the top of the list? Preferably ones that are well self contained and do not require me to download a giant manual with maps and charts, fake phone books, and color decoder rings, etc. and what not like some of them came with back in the day.

Maybe something with a bit of flair too? (although not neccessary). Shogun for instance is not considered to be a great Infocom game but at the same time, it has a beautiful style with nice borders, nice text, and cool painting style graphics sprinkled throughout and it's not just black with white text.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfWRY0F1PRk
 
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My favorite would have to be Trade Wars. It's a sci-fi trading game where you would build up a fleet and explore the galaxy. It was sort of like a text based Eve.
 
kumquatsrus said:
hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy?
Click to expand...

I heard that that was one of the most impossible text games of all time. You could fail to get the Babelfish early on and then it was impossible to actually complete the game much later. You also have to be intimately familiar with the books which I haven't read in over 10 years but maybe that would be a good excuse to read them.
 
I've been trying to remember a text game I played maybe 8 years ago. It was really fun, would love to play it again if there was still a community. Lets see if anyone knows what I'm thinking of.

You only played once every 24hrs.
Pretty sure each player was a rival nation.
Strategy based, you spent your turns on deciding economics, waging war on other players, how to attack, etc.
Can't remember much unfortunately :(
 
You're looking at somebody who spent his every free moment, while at university, playing Infocom text adventure games. One time, I actually rode my bike 20 miles to buy the newest Infocom title. And that was twenty miles back as well.

If you can find it, the jewel in the crown is Trinity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(video_game)

The final section of the game occurs in the pre-dawn hours in the Los Alamos desert, before the detonation of the world's first nuclear explosion - a sequence unrivaled in all of gaming. Gamers today will always talk about 'the story'. No game has even come close to having a 'story' as sophisticated as Trinity's. The entire game is a story - every second of it.

The amazing thing is that in this game you only have to kill one thing: a baby lemming. It's an excruciating moment in the game.
 
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