Re: Announcing: Fyleet, Crobe, Sangraal

["Steve Young" <steveyoung@eclipse.co.uk>]

Adam Atkinson wrote in message
<714.908T1006T13143847ghira@mistral.co.uk>...
>On 27-Aug-99 21:32:03, Adam Atkinson said:
>
>>The games were all written with the two-word parser in mind, so there
>>shouldn't be any NEED at all to say "go north and throw all but the
>>ancient key under the bed".
>
>Thinking about it, even when I play games which do allow me to say the
>most contorted things, a transcript of my commands would look just
>like something from a two-word game. The only exception would be the
>"turtle, follow me" kind of syntax you need to talk to people in
>infocom games.
>
>Do people _really_ make very frequent use of the full power of
>advanced parsers?


I don't believe people ever have, though I could be wrong. I know I
always use as simple as commands as I can get away with.

This thing with advanced parsers that could do all elaborate things
started taking place in the mid 80's, with the authors and companies
believing that was what the public wanted, whereas in truth most of the
adventurers hated them and only wanted something that could understand
what they were trying to say or do. Instead of correcting the problems
of guess the verb, they ignored that and made the parser as elaborate as
possible.

> Give map to Thorin and ask Gandalf to open dungeon window and pick you
up, then kill Elrond with sword.

The Hobbit has a lot to answer for.

Steve