Dork for Zork

So GameTap has a bunch of free games until June... and since they're free, I've been trying some games that I've known about but have never had the chance to actually try.

And I found Zork. A text-based adventure game from the Apple II days. The entire game is 100 kilobytes and it is awesome. There's no graphics; you get to use your mind! It's like a Choose Your Own Adventure book but you get to type what you want to do besides just turn the pages!

Sorry if I'm two decades late to the Zork party. I'm still at the point where you type dirty things into it like the first time ANYONE used the PictoChat function on their DS (remember the April Fool's game Wangdoodler in the Game Informer a few years back?). It's funny seeing your computer respond to you "Suicide is not the answer" or "I do not recognize the word 'masturbate.'" Ahhh, childhood.

Once you get the interface down (look, go, take, jump), there seem to be no limits to what you can do. The game makes you feel that you could do anything as long as you can figure out the right configuration of words. I managaed to jump into the Grand Canyon within 5 minutes. Awesome. Just like real life.

GameTap also has a few other text-based imitators, including a sci-fi game called Suspended which is way less user-friendly, and there are a handful of Zork sequels also for free play until June. Anyway, I gotta go back into my imagination now. Bioshock is cool but there's just something incredibly addictive about the possibility of doing anything in a game, even if you can't figure out how to at first.

"Punch door." "You broke your hand. Good job whiz kid."