Tag: adventuregames

A Complete Playthrough of the Original Zork Games

Three videos of a Youtuber called SwimYBO going through all three of Infocom’s classic Zork games. Zork was originally made for the PDP-10 by a number of students at MIT as a larger and funnier version of Colossal Cave, and was made all as one game. When remade for a variety of home microcomputers at the time, it was written in a special language, ZIL, for a virtual machine called the Z Machine. So, the game writers wrote their games once for ZIL, which had a Z Machine written for each of the target platforms. This explains how they were able to relatively easily port for every platform under the sun, back when there were over a dozen, and also why most of their games looked like they were the output of a simple terminal emulator.

Infocom was bought by Activision, used as a brand for a number of weird titles like an NES game, and eventually the Zork name would be applied to a pair of Windows graphic adventures. The property currently lies dormant in the hands of an uncarring megacorp, along with many other old computer game settings, characters and properties from over the proliferating decades of time since Pong.

Anyway. SwimYBO’s playthroughs go through the entire game and reveal all the puzzles and solutions, but they do leave some of the descriptions and game lore unrevealed for a player who might come to them later.

Zork I (“The Great Underground Empire,” 29 minutes):

Zork II (“The Wizard of Frobozz,” 30 minutes):

And Zork III (“The Dungeon Master,” 34 minutes):

Sundry Sunday: Steamed Hams, But It’s An NES Game

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

So despite the fact that you likely already know all of this, I still feel like I have to explain it all for people who might not have soaked their brains in US popular culture, yet still care enough about video games that you’re reading Set Side B. Let’s get it out of the way as quickly as feasible.

Premiering December 17, 1989, The Simpsons has been on the air for approaching 35 years. We in the United States are going to have to come to terms with the fact that it’ll probably be the reigning television fact of our lives. When it began, the NES was still the hot game system, and that was eons ago.

Premiering in the 7th season, during the time when most people still agreed The Simpsons was the best show on television, was the episode 22 Short Films About Springfield, in which the writers created a loosely-connected sequence of miscellaneous stories about the many side characters in The Simpsons. One of those stories was “Seymour and the Superintendent,” where Bart’s principal hosts his boss Superintendent Chalmers to a home-cooked meal, but due to a sequence of comical events serves him Krusty Burgers instead, covers it up in a variety of unlikely lies, and nearly burns down his house. Colloquially this has become known as “Steamed Hams,” after one of the lies Principal Skinner tells.

In 2017, a popular meme went around the internet in which people remade, remixes, or otherwise re-did that story, alone of all of them in the episode, the season, and among the long long run of the show.

In fact, those memes are still being made, and this post’s subject is one of them. It’s a video simulating what a Steamed Hams game would have been like if it were made in the style of the Bart vs the Space Mutants and Bart vs The World games on the NES. It was made by Penney Pixels, it’s four minutes long, and it’s here, and here:

There is an actual game version of the Steamed Hams, of which a playthrough is recorded here, and can be downloaded here. There’s another version of Steamed Hams too, and it can be played on GameJolt here. Both of those are adventure games.

I thought Steamed Hams had come up here before, but a quick search didn’t find anything, so I’ll just leave it at this. I’m sure in the next 35 years there will be hundreds more game versions of Steamed Hams. Maybe after all that time, I’ll be able to bring myself to mention it here again.

Upscaling Classic Sierra On-Line Adventures

Hackaday’s Matthew Carlson points to an effort to make the graphics in old Sierra On-Line Adventure games better. The graphics in the games in question weren’t stores as raster images, but rather drawn with vector commands, so theoretically it should be easy. But as the video demonstrates, the resolution of their coordinate system didn’t take into account the possibility that someone might come in later and draw the art into a canvas with higher resolution, which causes some weird glitches that had to be accounted for.

Hackaday: Upscaling the Sierras – eviltrout: How classic Sierra game graphics worked (and an attempt to upscale them)