Thursday, October 15, 2015

The Game of Dungeons v8 and Moria: Impasse

It appears that I've reached something of an impasse in regards to Moria and The Game of Dungeons.

Not that I've stopped playing them.  On the contrary, I'm progressing slowly but surely through both.  The problem is this: all of these PLATO games are incredibly front-loaded.  There's no plot progression, little in the way of interesting new places to explore, and no features that become available as you advance.  The games are what they are from the very beginning, and they don't change all that much as you progress.

Needless to say, this is a problem for a blogger trying to maintain a weekly schedule.  I've tried to have two games on the go at once to make sure that I'd always have something to write about, but currently I'm tapped out on both.  I've milked them dry.

So I'm probably going to abandon Moria for the time being, and focus my PLATO-time on finishing The Game of Dungeons (it doesn't feel like as much of a futile slog).  In the meantime, I'll move on to the next game on my list.  If I follow my list strictly chronologically, the next game is Oubliette, but that's another PLATO game.  I don't want to get bogged down in a third one of those.  There's also DND, written by Daniel Lawrence for the PDP-10 mainframe, but that seems to have been a port of The Game of Dungeons.  It got reworked and released as Telengard in 1982, so I'll pick up that thread when I come to it.

Given that I'm kind of burned out on these prehistoric RPGs, I think it's time to pick up another text adventure.  I have Adventureland on the list for 1978.  I see that it's the first text adventure game for microcomputers, and the first game from Scott Adams, so it seems like the perfect game to play next.

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