I learned to spell by playing KQ1 and SQ1. Well, playing the games and having parents whom I could ask questions like "how do you spell 'search body'".
It's not just kids without exposure to English who struggled with typed English interfaces!
On the brighter side: I lived through that period when the games transitioned from text-based interfaces to point-and-click ones. What a relief that was!
I understand the nostalgia for Infocom games of people like Jimmy Maher - I also have a soft spot for beautiful and polished writing, but this definitely was a way forward for games in general.
I think the next evolution on it was classic JRPGs, like Dragon Quest/Warrior. There was still tons of dialogue, but the point-and-click was replaced by speak-to-everyone-and-try-stuff. It was still mostly linear, but it felt more interactive than just finding the right screen region.
I hated the transition to point and click, because it turned into "hunt for the right pixel" -- with text based games you generally only needed to be in the vicinity of the object you were trying to manipulate.
Absolutely, but precision was also a bit of a problem for the text based games. I remember Space Quest was the king of this, requiring frequent saving to make it past certain sections where a single accidental button press could cause you to fall off a ledge or step on something that just killed you.
If you, say have a movement disorder, this happens all too often.
Still I have so many great memories of Sierra’s games from my childhood that I can’t bring myself to hate all the foibles.
My favourite pixel hunter was and still is Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis :-)
Can't imagine myself playing that kind of game again but back then this semi-serious and comfortably safe (no real danger and no sierra deadends as well) gameplay felt right for the 7-8 year old.
Yeah, the pixel thing... Not as bad as most parser-based games but still.
But did the industry find a better way to tell a story without resorting to action-packed gameplay? I mean, Grim Fandango kind of slow story supplemented by visuals?
No offense to Grim Fandango, which is a great game, but for Sierra-style adventures, I don’t want to be told a story. I don’t want to feel like I’m moving on tracks through a ride, flipping a switch or solving a puzzle to keep the train moving.
Like the best interactive fiction, in classic Sierra games you’re interacting with the developers’ world to create the story. Free-form text input is key to this distinction. Play-throughs of richly written games like The Colonel’s Bequest are much more rewarding because your character isn’t limited to exploring the world via “look/talk/touch/use”.
Well, some of that free range kind of feeling can be achieved by introducing local non-linearity into the game, i.e. make certains parts of the game independent of each other.
Then, as the player progresses to the next episode the non-linearity would become a single step to the next episode, without any cross-episode interdependencies. Most well-designed adventure games have this branch-narrow-branch-narrow structure, where bottlenecks make sure the player is ready to proceed to the next level.
What was no very good about Sierra-style design is that they did introduce this non-linearity but there were often inter-episode links introduced. (e.g. "had to pick up this item a couple of episodes back it's late now"). So resorting to walkthroughs was the only way to avoid this kind of meaningless backtracking. It a very shady way to lengthen gameplay time!
I agree, though in the better games (most of them, I would say) this kind of thing was a) hard to get yourself stuck in if you were making a careful play-through and/or b) not fatal, only costing you the "best" ending or some final score points.
The best games (again, I'd cite The Colonel's Bequest) had numerous game-stage dependent side-quests and optional puzzles or secrets that made for rich replay value.
Overall, I wouldn't undersell the value of the possibility of failure & the frisson it provides over a carefully guard-railed world.
There's certainly an aggressively evil way to structure games like this. The first that comes to mind is Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it's hard to escape the impression that the sadism towards the player was meant to be part of its charm.
It's not just kids without exposure to English who struggled with typed English interfaces!