If you’re tired of Minesweeper, don’t like the free word games Shuffled Row and Every Word, and don’t want to pay $5 for the new Scrabble game, then how about old-school text adventures?
On Friday, Kindle fan E. Yagi announced on Amazon’s customer discussion pages a new website, kindlequest.com, that presents 19 different text adventures–including a few Zork titles–for your amusement. Of course, to play you’ll have to have online access.
A list of games available at KindleQuest.com:
I tested in on a latest generation Wi-Fi Kindle and the site loaded fine, although a couple of times the page would hang after I entered a command and I would have to reload the page to get everything to show up properly. If you want to give the interface a trial run before hitting it up on your Kindle, it plays fine on a regular PC browser.
Remember to type “help” without quotation marks for some introductory commands. Also, here are a few Zork-specific commands if you need a cheat sheet, thanks to another Amazon customer named Abraxas:
> n, s, e, w
Short for “go north”, “go south”, etc.> nw, ne, sw, se
Short for “go northwest”, “go southwest”, etc.> u and d
Short for “go up” and “go down”> i
Reveals a player’s inventory> verbose
Gives full descriptions after each command (rather than omitting details already given to the player)> score
Displays the player’s current score, number of moves, and rankingAnd you can shorten “look” to “l”. I also found the game wants prepositions. You cannot omit them. Just use “look at ” instead of just “look “.
Originally posted at Booksprung.com
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Is this legal?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infocom
“With the exception of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Shogun, the copyrights to the Infocom games are believed to be still held by Activision. Dungeon, the mainframe precursor to the commercial Zork trilogy, is generally assumed to be in the public domain and is available from The Interactive Fiction Archive as original FORTRAN source code, a Z-machine story file and as various native source ports. Many Infocom titles can be downloaded via the Internet, but only in violation of the copyright.”
Thanks for letting me know. I’ll look into it.
But is it piracy? // Sep 28, 2010 at 11:37 am
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[...] you recall when I told you about KindleQuest, a website that runs adventure games like Zork for your Kindle? Amazon just released an app that [...]
parchment in article mode is way better.