I wouldn’t call Starship Titanic a text adventure. It’s point-and-click overall with some text elements in terms of things like certain descriptions. Sort of like a more advanced version of a Sierra On-Line game.
Not any action, but they had a pretty large vocabulary. There were some basic commands they all shared like LOOK and EAST and INVENTORY. They would tell you if they didn’t understand.
That was the most frustrating part of the game- finding out that you should have done something else ages ago and now you can never finish even though it let you keep going.
There were at least five Zork games I can think of that were purely text (graphical ones came later): Zork, Zork II, Zork III, Beyond Zork and Zork Zero.
Adams wrote most of the text of the game. He also created another INFOCOM game, Bureaucracy, which was basically impossible. And if you don’t believe me, check out a walkthrough sometime. There are multiple points where you’ll say, “well how would anyone ever think of that?” Especially when it gets to the airplane.
Yes! I remember that too! And yes, I was a huge Infocom fan. I think the only one I got all the way through without help was Wishbringer, but I can’t remember one I didn’t enjoy playing.
Hmm… I definitely had at least one of those for an Infocom game… Maybe I had that one? But I don’t remember getting to the end of the game. It was so long ago, I don’t remember. I just remember it was basically a FAQ where you had to use a special marker to reveal the answer.