zork-for-kindle.jpg

ZORK FOR KINDLE
Bill Ray, at TheRegister (UK) reported today that “Kindle users get Zorked out” and says it’s “Better than a bonkbuster.”  He discovered that “Kindle users can now lose themselves in the worlds of Zork I, II & III…”

Yes, for free too, in that Kindle 2’s, DX‘s and Kindle 3‘s  (UK: K3) can use the ‘Experimental’ web browser to go to kindlequest.com and play the “minimalist version aimed specifically at Kindle users.”  (I imagine that Amazon will be happier if you can use the WiFi capability with this.)  I tried it with the Kindle 1, but that model can’t handle the interactivity aspect since it handles only choices from rows of words instead of actual words.

Ray adds that “Zork was one of the first text-based adventures, spawning a legacy that led to generations of gamers screaming ‘pick up the bloody thing‘ while trying to guess the exact phrase required to complete the desired action….”

DownloadSquad’s Erez Zukerman headlines his report “Zork for Kindle makes e-paper a next-gen gaming platform”  In the picture at the top, from their site, you can see they’ve just used the Kindle’s web browser to go to kindlequest.com.

To get there:

Turn your wireless On – using the Menu’s topmost option

At the Kindle Home screen, you can just start typing “kindlequest.com” — the Searchbox will come up at the bottom to hold these words, and then you just move the 5-way button to the right until you get to the “go to” option.  Click on that to be taken right to the word game.


You may or may not see the following:

web


‘Welcome to KindleQuest.com! To jump in to a quick game at any
time, press ‘Enter’.

Type ‘help’ to get some basic system commands and advice.
Existing users can log in by typing ‘login ‘.


Zuckerman cautions that you’ll often have to press the Enter key twice and that the screen blanked out at least once while while he was playing and it was resolved once he hit the Enter key again, but it was of course confusing.

Technology Punch says that according to Wikipedia, “‘Zork was one of the first interactive fiction computer games and an early descendant of Colossal Cave Adventure…’” and adds that “Zork on Amazon Kindle and other e-Reader devices is condidered as the reinvention of three decades old game.”

PARCHMENT — and THE INTERACTIVE FICTION ARCHIVE.
At MobileRead Forums, Krystian Galaj writes:
“I heard this works on Kindle: http://parchment.toolness.com/ “

Again, to get to the website:

Turn your wireless On – using the Menu’s topmost option

At the Kindle Home screen, you can just start typing “parchment.toolness.com” — the Searchbox will come up at the bottom to hold these words, and then you just move the 5-way button to the right until you get to the “go to” option.  Click on that to be taken right to the many word games.

When you get there, you’ll see:
‘ Parchment is a web-based Z-machine interpreter by Atul Varma. It is powered by Tom Thurman’s Gnusto engine.

Below is a list of z-code based interactive fiction titles made available by The Interactive Fiction Archive. You can click on an entry to start playing it. ‘

There are a ton of these to try.  I haven’t tried any of them – am just reporting they’re available and hoping they’ll prove fun for some of you.

Via Andrys Basten’s A Kindle World blog

1 COMMENT

  1. I’m glad someone thought od doing that – InfoCom (the company behind Zork & friends) had many Interactive Fiction titles out. I cut my teeth on these games, loved them! They were the best “games” written at the dawn of home computing. Is my age showing?

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