Re: Announcing: Fyleet, Crobe, Sangraal

["Adam Atkinson" <ghira@mistral.co.uk>]

On 28-Aug-99 01:05:03, Andrew Plotkin said:

>But it's uncomfortable to be faced with a Crobe-master who says "You can
>give things to me", and know that "give object to crobe" isn't the right
>answer. I have to think about what to type, which isn't ideal. It's not
>just a matter of ignoring all the four-word commands.

In the particular case of the Warden of Crobe, I think he tells you
the syntax the first time you meet him. "give wombat" is no big
surprise. Who else are you going to be giving it to? Not a problem.
I admit the first time I wanted something back from him when
playtesting Crobe I'd forgotten the word was "request".

>And I do get frustrated when no version of "examine" works. Even if it
>would produce a "nothing interesting" message every time, it's still part
>of my navigation instincts, and I feel a bit blinded when it's not there.

I think Sangraal understands "examine". Crobe and Sangraal (written in
that order) were amongst the last Phoenix games written. Sangraal has
brief/normal/verbose, and examine.

>I realize that this is an exercise in historical restoration, not a new
>game project. Nonetheless, I'm not tremendously motivated to get into
>these games.

One issue-ette is that permission was conditional on making only
unavoidable changes. And as you say, Graham wanted to implement the
games as they were, not the games as they would have been had they
been written in the 1990s. Adding a "restore" command was necessary
- the Phoenix way of doing it would just be unreasonable. And perhaps
impossible with most versions of Frotz/Zip.

We COULD give "inventory" and "look" one-letter abbreviations, but
this could break something. e.g. in Sangraal we'd almost certainly
need to worry about what this would do to Klingsor's library.

-- 
Adam Atkinson (ghira@mistral.co.uk)
What's yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice? Zorn's lemon.