/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.4484483]

Are there any /lit/ approved text-based games?

Or games with books in them.

[Anonymous No.4484495]

>>4484483
http://playtheend.com/

[Anonymous No.4484494]

I like reading Elder Scrolls lore.

As for text games, try Amnesia. Way too convoluted and requires a map of Manhattan to even play properly, but it's got some sweer writing.

[Anonymous No.4484505]

A Mind Forever Voyaging (AMFV) is a 1985 interactive fiction game designed and implemented by Steve Meretzky and published by Infocom. The name is taken from book three of The Prelude by William Wordsworth:

The antechapel where the statue stood

Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone

[Anonymous No.4484511]

>>4484494
>I like reading Elder Scrolls lore
Mah nigga

>those feels when you start up a character just to collect all the in-game books, read them, and put them in the imperial sewer

[Anonymous No.4484516]

>>4484511
>>4484494
Isn't Elder Scrolls lore fucked up even more with each iteration?

Especially with ESO

[Anonymous No.4484522]

>>4484516
I stopped REALLY playing it with oblivion, that was the last good one. Everything was fucked up about skyrim. ESO doesn't even exist to me.

[Anonymous No.4484523]

>>4484522

Skyrim is miles better than Oblivion, silly.

[Anonymous No.4484524]

>>4484483
/lit/ generally said aproves 1970s Croation Text Adventures and Magnetic Scrolls but hates Polish Moral Plays very deeply.

[Anonymous No.4484527]

Alien Garden was one of the first non-game "software toys" released.[2] It was designed in 1982[3] by Bernie DeKoven and programmed by virtual reality pioneer, Jaron Lanier, and it was designed with an emphasis on the need for experimentation.

With a heavy emphasis on the artistic aspects of computer-generated simulation, Alien Garden was described by its creators as an art game.[4] At a time when the art game genre had not yet been recognized as even emergent, Alien Garden ranks among the very earliest art games.[5] Indeed its release predates Lanier's more famous art game, Moondust (often characterized as the first true art game[6]), by a year.

[Anonymous No.4484528]

>>4484523
Skyrim was a mass demographic tailored fps with swords. There was nothing elder scrolls about it.

[Anonymous No.4484529]

>>4484524
>1970s Croation Text Adventures

If only

[Anonymous No.4484532]

(1983, Flyghts of Fancie, Atari 800/C64) - A surrealistic pastiche of five episodes leading the player through events representative of the human experience from childhood to death.

[Anonymous No.4484533]

>>4484529
University of Dubrovnik has plenty of strange student projects in its archives.

[Anonymous No.4484535]

Moondust is a 1983 generative music video game created for the Commodore 64 by virtual reality pioneer, Jaron Lanier. Moondust was programmed in 6502 assembly[1] in 1982,[2] and is widely considered the first art video game.[3][4][5] Moondust has frequently been used as an art installation piece in museum exhibitions[6] from Corcoran Gallery of Art's 1983 "ARTcade"[7] to the Smithsonian's 2012 "The Art of Video Games".[8][9] It has also been used by Lanier and others in papers and lectures as an example to demonstrate the unexpected ephemerality of digital data.[10][11][12][13]

Moondust is also considered to be the first interactive music publication,[14][15] and it sold quite successfully.[16] With the profits from Moondust[17] and additional funding from Marvin Minsky,[18] Lanier formed VPL which would later go on to create the DataGlove and the DataSuit[19] and to become one of the primary innovators of virtual-reality research and development throughout the 1980s.

[Anonymous No.4484539]

Deus Ex Machina[44] (1985, Mel Croucher, ZX Spectrum/C64/MSX) - Based on "The Seven Ages of Man" from the Shakespeare play, As You Like It, this game charts the life of a defect as it evolves within the machine from inception, through growth, and eventually death.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwJBsYJ16IE

[Anonymous No.4484541]

Deus Ex is RAW-tier.

[Anonymous No.4484542]

Trigger Happy[4] (1998, Thompson and Craighead, PC/web) - A deconstruction of Michel Foucault's "What is an Author?", this retro-styled art game pays homage to Space Invaders. As the text of Foucault's essay filters in from the top, the player "deconstructs" it by shooting the words which in turn are hyperlinked to Yahoo search inquiries on the linked word.

[Anonymous No.4484544]

>>4484533
Link?

[Anonymous No.4484546]

>>4484528
Except for the lore

[Anonymous No.4484549]

>>4484483
And if you ask why it's because you didn't play it.

[Anonymous No.4484553]

>>4484549
Why?

[Anonymous No.4484554]

SOD[6] (1999, Jodi, PC) - An aesthetic art game hinting at private emotion by deconstructing Wolfenstein 3D, turning it into a Kafka-esque series of abstract black, white, and grey images where it is difficult to determine what to shoot.

[Anonymous No.4484557]

Laughed my ass off while playing Eric The Unready.

[Anonymous No.4484573]

>>4484549

because I'm sure japanese videogame makers are really tasteful and knowledgeable in their interpretations of european history and culture
are there any games based on writings of jorge luis borges? I think that could be fruitful

[Anonymous No.4484587]

>>4484549
I very much doubt it compares to pic related.
Then again few things do in any media.

[Anonymous No.4484604]

that skyrim book have you enjoyed most? for me was The Real Barenziah

[Anonymous No.4484625]

>>4484554
God, that looks like a mess

[Anonymous No.4484632]

Ramses and Photopia are pretty cool.

[Anonymous No.4484634]

>>4484495
This would be better if the platforming sections weren't so tedious.

[Anonymous No.4484655]

>>4484604
The Lusty Argonian Maid

[Anonymous No.4484666]

>>4484604
>not 36 Lessons of Vivec, Sermon 13
do you even CHIM

[Anonymous No.4484720]

>>4484544
What are you expecting, spoonfeeding? No, no, you have to travel to Dubrovnik and conduct your own research; otherwise they won't mean jack.

[Anonymous No.4484784]

>>4484666
>enjoyed
>36 Lessons of Vivec

[Anonymous No.4484789]

>>4484528
Skyrim's setting was waaaay more interesting than Oblivion's. Oblivion was the most generic boring high-fantasy setting ever, Skyrim's has a bit of character. Not as much character as Morrowind's setting, obviously, but way more than Oblivion's.

[Anonymous No.4484808]

#TeamNerevarine

[Anonymous No.4484854]

http://rdouglasjohnson.com/hamlet/

[Anonymous No.4486637]

>>4484483

Suspended was my favorite Infocom game, it had a unique hook of not exploring the world from your own viewpoint but from one of 5 sensory robots you could control. What Sensa (the electromagnetic field-sensory robot) reported within any given area would typically be wildly different from what, say, Auda (hearing and vibration-sensory) would describe. Just a beautiful work of game design

[Anonymous No.4486649]

>>4484483

I remember hearing about it when it was first released but I only recently remembered its existence and tracked down a copy, a God of War-type game set in the setting of Dante's Inferno, the game being of the same name. Its a profoundly weird mix, the game type itself is largely brainless button-mashing fun but the setting is so much smarter than the gaming vehicle carrying it. Its worth checking out and you can probably find it for under $10 for the 360 or PS3.

[Anonymous No.4486653]

>>4484523
There are people that legitimately believe this. Oblivion is not a good game, but Skyrim is so terrible that it's amazing by contrast

[Anonymous No.4486657]

>>4484789
>Skyrim
>interesting setting
What's so interesting about it? It's bland and repetitive.

[Anonymous No.4486659]

>did search
>"Curses" not mentioned in thread
Are you joking?
Curses is the classic.
It's based on T. S. Eliot poetry.
Srsly.

[Anonymous No.4486661]

Betrayal at Krondor. Better than the book?

[Anonymous No.4486665]

Lovecraft fans should check out The Lurking Horror

[Anonymous No.4486673]

>No YU-NO
What is this I don't even

[Anonymous No.4486674]

>>4486661
I just replayed this recently. I had no idea it even had a book

[Anonymous No.4486683]

>>4486665
Speaking of Lovecraft

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth has one of the most frightening sequences in video games I've ever experienced in my entire life(the hotel chase part). Even watching videos of it makes my heart beat a little faster.

[Anonymous No.4486690]

>ITT: No one has mentioned Angband

[Anonymous No.4487135]

>>4486690
But Angband is a roguelike, not text-based adventure (as most games, mentioned in this thread).

[Anonymous No.4487599]

>>4486673
yu-no
yuno was a fucking mess
the whole pornography thing detracted a lot from it, even if it was forced onto them
and the roundabout ways you had to go through to actually progress was awful
I mean fuck that game is just terrible to play

It is a pretty interesting title though. Not worth playing, but interesting if you're fine with wasting a most of your time on nothing valuable. I only ended up playing it because azuma uses it as an example of how otaku's interact with VN's and other such media, where they'll extract and re-organize data in order to form new events within the environment indistinguishable from the original media (simulacra), but I'm sure there are better VNs at this point that can portray the same concept.

[Anonymous No.4487610]

>>4486649

>largely brainless button-mashing fun

The very thing that /v/ claims makes a game good is exactly that which most other people would argue makes a game inane.

[Anonymous No.4487631]

>>4487610
>The very thing that /v/ claims makes a game good is exactly that which most other people would argue makes a game inane.
that's not really true, /v/ has more sense than that. They can distinguish between the kind of button mashing found in vanquish/God hand and the kind of button mashing found in god of war. And also outside of -competitive- multiplayer titles, I think /v/ mostly ignores those games that are truly depth-less in their -gameplay-.

However, for the life of them, they have no capacity to actually understand what the hell the differences are and have no ability to articulate any reason as to why they think one game is better than another. They can acknolwedge that there is a substantial difference though

[Anonymous No.4487637]

>>4487631
oh and also that they actually can't get past the gameplay. Like when /v/ tries to talk about sotc, it's pretty much entirely about either the mechanics of fighting titans or, as they say, TECHNOLOGY. Obviously the game is strong in both those factors, but it's clearly much more than that. I'm pretty sure they vaguely recognize that

[Anonymous No.4487665]

>>4487637
>>4487631

I've experienced playing games with people from /v/ and therefore talking with them about games and I've deduced the reason for that is that they have very few critical thinking skills. They are so very passive about what they do.

Once I had to explain to some guy that Limbo was set in a world between life and death. All he seemed to get was that it was 2D platformer with monochrome visuals so didn't 'get it'. Only afterwards did I realise that the game is called 'Limbo' after all. I felt it was ridiculous to have to explain what I did.

[Anonymous No.4487689]

>>4487610
When has there ever been a consensus on /v/ that button-mashing makes a good game?

[Anonymous No.4487701]

>>4487689
people who are bad at games call them button mashers

[Anonymous No.4487921]

>>4484625
It also plays like one.

[Anonymous No.4487945]

>>4487637
The main draw of video games is the pure mechanics of gameplay and I don't fault /v/ for placing an emphasis on it. This is just something that differs between boards, I think. If you gave /lit/ a comic, they'd say it's pleb shit, if you gave them video games, they'd say it's children shit. I get the feeling a lot of you book elitists don't understand what makes other mediums work.

[Anonymous No.4487947]

>>4484604
Daggerfall's unedited version is better.

[Anonymous No.4487963]

>>4486657
It's based around a cultural conflict and concepts of pride and nationalism. Nords are huge assets to the Empire and consider themselves the "true" Empire due to Tiber Septim which they worship as Talos. They oppose the degeneracy and failure of the Imperial decision to pursue peace, whereas they would gladly give their life for the right purpose. Both sides have a valid point once you get into them more - Imperials are weak, divided and they can't stand to lose another province.

Morrowind was also heavily based around irreconcilable cultural differences, with Dunmer wanting the inferior Imperials out of their country and let them worship their Tribunal.
Skyrim does a different spin on it, though, and Nords are fundamentally apart from Dunmer.

I don't think Skyrim is an amazing game, but I don't understand the hate for it. Really, every TES is flawed as fuck and buggy without fan patches, but they have very interesting lore and exploration that, for me, is yet to be reached in another series.

[Anonymous No.4487978]

>>4487637
As >>4487945 said, the chief defining feature of vidya is the gameplay, a fact that games nowadays are seeming to forget.

When you make a game that is basically a visual novel (not the comic book variety), you get a game that "game reviewers" give 10/10 but that /v/ hates. When you make a game that has no story (or very little story) and instead focuses solely on gameplay, such as Dark Souls, you get a game that /v/ loves but that "reviewers" are torn against.

I've gotta side with /v/. Games will never be as good as novels at telling a story and so should never try to be. They should play to their strengths instead of being some hybrid that only paid reviewers and "casuals" enjoy, because the casuals only like it because it's so close to another medium that they enjoy more, like movies or books

[Anonymous No.4487987]

>>4487978
I let people enjoy their "cinematic" gameplay, but the last time it really pissed me off was Max Payne 3.
I loved the first two games, and then they go and make basically Man on Fire with gameplay elements, put a bunch of pretentious filters on it and try to pass it off as social commentary. And of course it's rated highly by fucking everyone and is considered a masterpiece. Fuck this medium.

[Anonymous No.4488028]

>>4487978
Do you not realize what you're saying is the equivalent of films focusing purely on sound and cinematography and books focusing purely on prose and paintings focus purely on technical skill? Do you not realize how simple-mindedly you're approaching the medium?
Yes, video games as a medium bring a level of interaction with the -art- never before seen but that in no way means that video games are nothing but that interaction and that they must prize that interaction and place it at the forefront of their designs. Obviously video games shouldn't try to be books, that's just fucking stupid. But to completely ignore the relationship that video games have with books is just as stupid. There are certain aspects that video games can take from books and certain aspects they can't and certain aspects that they can infuse into it. VN's don't have shitty writing because video games inherently cannot have writing in it, they have shitty writing because they have shitty writers and the whole fucking genre is rooted in the pornography industry (japan's)

And jesus christ the industry is not fucking forgetting that video games are -games-, unlike the fucks on /v/ who never actually got away from the structure of 90s era gaming, where many of the biggest titles were little else but -gameplay- (and thus, they think, is the only fruitful route to take), the industry has actually managed to realize there is -more- to video games that just that interaction
cont

[Anonymous No.4488040]

>>4487963
>I don't think Skyrim is an amazing game, but I don't understand the hate for it.
Before Skyrim was released, Oblivion threads always devolved into Morrowind vs Oblivion contest with the majority preferring Morrowind. FO3 was laughed at for being Oblivion with guns, now /v/ is suddenly full of people who think FO3 is superior to New Vegas. Some even claim it has the better setting. You'll see that when they release FO4 and TES VI. /v/ is just a terrible board.

[Anonymous No.4488056]

>>4487945

No that's not true at all because /v/ hates games even when you're in complete control (i.e. when there is gameplay). They shit all over Proteus and Gone Home and deride them as not being real games despite the fact that you are actively interacting with the game at all times.

If you've spent any time on /v/ you know they dislike any game that doesn't have some kind of win-condition they can overcome.

[Anonymous No.4488069]

>>4488056
From what I've seen, they hate Gone Home for lasting like half an hour and being like 1/10 of a proper adventure game, not because of what you're saying.

[Anonymous No.4488070]

>>4488028
The industry recognizes that video games don't begin and end at solely the new functionality it brings in as a medium, they actually acknowledge that this new level of interaction only means something when stacked upon the layers that all the other mediums of art have built over the past two fucking thousand years. They're too tasteless to actually accomplish this well, for the most part, but at least they acknowledge it.

I mean fucking christ you assholes look at games like SotC and Dark Souls which bring so much more than just their gameplay and come out thinking; These are the pinnacle of gameplay! fuck story! fuck plot! fuck prose! fuck environment! fuck architecture! fuck atmosphere! fuck design! fuck art! Gameplay gameplay gameplay gameplay

Yes video games shouldn't be focused on simply telling a story because that's just as simple minded and utterly shallow as just focusing on the gameplay or just focusing on the graphics or whatever other fucking aspect. Video games involves aspects of almost every fucking art form that preceded it and what you're going to fucking tell me is that they should ignore all of that and just focus on making games be games

This is what we have for video games. The fucking -hardcore- fan and critics can't even get over the most obvious aspect of the medium.

[Anonymous No.4488074]

>>4487987

>And of course it's rated highly by fucking everyone and is considered a masterpiece. Fuck this medium.

I think that's something different altogether. Most of the people reviewing these games do it as part of an agenda and it cannot be ignored.

The people who called MP3 a master-piece are the ones who generally know their readership loves popular games and so they go ahead and call a fun-shooter posing as a serious game a master-piece because it's easy to do that (it re-affirms the hype and hope of their audience). Likewise you have Rock Paper Shotgun who desperately go out of to like any single under-dog or unknown title. Neither source is good at criticising games because they are always keen to back a certain-side. It's a problem beyond the typical objective vs. subjective debate.

[Anonymous No.4488076]

>>4488028
And do you not realize that I'm not at all saying that, and in fact I agree with you on most things you said?

I'm saying gameplay in games should be paramount. just as you are. I'm also saying that they shouldn't try to be books, just as you are. I never once said they should only be gameplay.

What I'm saying is that the gameplay should be first and all other things should be second, not the other way around -- not the way high rated games seem to be going which puts story first and then gameplay. The two should be merged seemlessly, like SotC or Ico or Journey or Dark Souls. They should not be Gone Home or The Stanley Parable, which are more akin to CYOA novels than games.

Story games have their place, but their place is quickly becoming "instead of gameplay games". Soon you will be able to get the same game on both Console and DVD, the DVD version being played by choosing actions via the remote.

[Anonymous No.4488091]

>>4488069

Well if those are their two arguments then neither is correct. The latter point sort of proves the problem with their stuck-in-the-90s as well which is something another anon brought up.

I thought Gone Home was an interesting idea but I'd be suspicious of anybody who showers unadulterated praise or hate over it.

[Anonymous No.4488098]

>>4488091
I haven't played it and I don't think it looks terrible or anything, but I agree it's far too short for its price and overrated for being just a experimental story.

[Anonymous No.4488115]

>>4488076
I'd like to add to this that the problem with the story games is not their existence but their prevalence, perverting the medium. I liked Beyond Two Souls, but I don't want the minimalist gameplay, heavily story driven game to be the norm that it is becoming -- *that* is where the problem lies

[Anonymous No.4488129]

>>4488076
>What I'm saying is that the gameplay should be first and all other things should be second, not the other way around
>The two should be merged seemlessly, like SotC or Ico or Journey or Dark Souls
Those are opposite ideas.
SotC Ico Dark Souls doesn't put gameplay -first and foremost-, they put it in-line with everything else as it revolves around the core themes of the game
this is the important part
the themes
the ideas
the concepts that build the game
gameplay facilitates it. music accentuates it. Writing pulls it together.
Games are not about the fucking gameplay and they're not about the fucking story and they're not about the fucking music
You shouldn't be whining about story games about too many story games because story games are the same fucking thing as gameplay games. Shallow misunderstood concepts about the nature of games

gameplay games are just as shitty as story games. The only difference is how well you can manage to waste your time -playing- them

[Anonymous No.4488165]

>>4488129
and of course I dont' actually mean that games need to be good on everything to be a good game but rather that in their design it must be acknowledged that the whole thing is intertwined
games like dwarf fortress entirely abandon facets of the game, they purposely bring it into a more primal form in order to explore separate depths than the standard form but they do so understanding that they haven't simply -focused on the gameplay-, they're completely rewritten the structure
/v/ on the other hand looks at it on a simple scale of focus and not focus. They can't go beyond such a notion, they can't understand how these functionalalities relate to one another

[Anonymous No.4488177]

>>4488129
>Those are opposite ideas
Maybe it seems that way, but I assure you they are not opposite. I don't know how to articulate this (an aforementioned fault of /v/), but they are not opposite. Since I mentioned it before, Beyond Two Souls would, by definition, be a seamless merging of gameplay and story, as you "play" cutscenes and story elements, but I would define it as a story game rather than a gameplay game. Pinning the subtleties to words escapes me, but I assure you it's different.

>Games are not about the fucking gameplay
I don't even...

[Anonymous No.4488214]

>games are not about the gameplay
>movies are not about the watching of a movie
>books are not about the reading of a book

[Anonymous No.4488271]

>>4488214

all correct

[Anonymous No.4488590]

I like the range of situations and little storylines in King of Dragon Pass.

Not always well written but the stories, music, art etc. marry so well and create a really enjoyable world with some surprisingly detailed lore.

It's worth playing, provides a unique experience.

[Anonymous No.4488597]

>>4488590
Hunting down the boar is the only option that actually is a solution.

[Anonymous No.4488651]

>>4488177
Yes, I know you don't understand the idea that games are not about the gameplay and I know you don't actually understand that they're not opposing ideas because I also know that you don't actually understand what it means to -merge [gameplay and story]- seamlessly. This isn't an issue of whether or not you can articulate your ideas, I understand what you're trying to get at perfectly fine. It's the same ideas /v/ has been spouting for years. And I'm telling you, it's nonsense. It's shallow and it ignores years of game development and it ignores many aspects of some of /v/'s favorite games.

I mean, do you realize what this dude actually said back up here?
>>4487945
>I get the feeling a lot of you book elitists don't understand what makes other mediums work.
This is completely moronic. The ideas leading up to this, the idea itself, completely absurd. It's the statement of someone who has never actually involved himself in any other medium, because the second you move beyond that initial format you'd realize that -what makes other mediums work- isn't actually as different as it first appears. At least, if we're talking about -quality-. The anon might have been talking about what makes the medium sell or successful or something more along those lines but that would go beyond the scope of ignorance I want to deal with so I'm going to assume otherwise.

[Anonymous No.4490038]

>>4488597
Yeah, that wasn't a very good example, there are much better scenarios

[Anonymous No.4490091]

>>4488597
>not using the hybrids to create an army of mounted pig-riders

[Anonymous No.4491504]

>>4484483
Fallout references all the major classical, from Don Quixote, via Moby Dick, to Siddharta and The Castle.

The playthrough is pure entertainment, and I promise it will inrichen even the most knowledgable among lits intellectuals.

[Anonymous No.4491899]

All games have shit stories, it's just how it goes

[Anonymous No.4491943]

http://fallingawkwardly.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/the-metaphysics-of-morrowind-part-1/