Text Based Adventure Game on Xbox Live Indie Marketplace. Huh?

I love text based adventure games. Lets just get that out there right now. Zork and The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy are insanely fun, providing hours upon hours of enjoyment. To see a text based adventure game revival would be amazing, and when I first heard the news of one coming to the Xbox marketplace I got really excited thinking maybe it will happen. Sadly, I then remembered what made text based adventure games fun: the ability to type anything in the box and see what happens!

Please explain to me how you will do this on the Xbox? I started thinking maybe they will let you input on the controller keyboard, but then I realized that would be excruciatingly painful. Imagine playing an entire game typing out that on screen keyboard of death? Just thinking about it got me cringing.

I also figured maybe you could just plug in a keyboard and input your own commands, which could be cool. Unfortunately, that would isolate many gamers who don’t have access to a keyboard, limiting the user base before the game even launches. Seeing as how it’s a text based adventure game and people aren’t really clamoring for them, I don’t think it would hurt the outreach to much, but still in the end don’t think that’s the way they went.

Unfortunately, from the looks of the screenshots, not one of these options are how you input commands into the game. In fact, the catch is, you don’t. For every prompt there are a set of options you can pick as your response by highlighting and selecting. This made the game immediately uninteresting to me. Whats the fun of playing a game with pre-scripted responses with no graphics or interaction?

The reason these games were so fun in the first place was the feeling it gave you of ultimate control, though you were still limited in your exploration or action, that was all behind the scenes. I want to be able to type in what I want to do, just because it makes me feel like I am actually exploring an environment on my own. With pre-scripted responses the feeling of control is gone and it instead is just like playing Mass Effect without the graphics or gameplay. Not cool!

In the end though, Text Zedventure is only one dollar, so it isn’t like it will break your bank or anything. Maybe I will try it out and see if the pre-scripted options don’t take away from the experience, though I am very doubtful it won’t let me down. At least all proceeds from now until May 31st 2010 will be going to a charity to save the rhinos.