Text adventures.

You had to type a command, and if the command was written exactly right, it would do something. "Use torch on tapestry" "Kill Trogdor with acid potion". Any misspelling or grammar it didn't like would present a random error message "You can't do that" or "That wouldn't make any sense"

Thank God for the SCUMM engine with games like Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island where you had 9 fixed commands (icons) and you clicked on items in the world, and items in your inventory to make things happen. Still some challenging and bizarre puzzles, but at least you didn't have to worry about the grammar of the whole thing.

Did I mention the original The Secret of Monkey Island has been remastered in HD, voiceovers added, awesome music, and released both on the iPhone and the PC? Plus there have been 2 followup games (the 3rd one looks awesome), and this summer there is another company who has licensed the rights to produce 3-4 hour "episodes" to add onto the series.

I'm about halfway through beating the game on iPhone.

I'll stick to DragonBall . :)

(Nicki Poopdisturber)

What is an appropriate age for kids to play The Secret of Monkey Island?
Is there reading involved?

I'm curious how you know you're halfway through beating the game.

Because I played and beat the first Monkey Island game (which this is a remastered version of) through to the end about 15 years ago. :)

Next I will play the 2nd one (might have to boot up into DOS or use a DOS emulator;)), then Curse of Monkey Island which I have on CD, the 4th (Escape from Monkey Island) one and finally the Tales of Monkey Island of which I think 2 have been released so far.

I have a printout of my getting a perfect score on a printer terminal on Crowther and Wood's Adventure game, which was the original, unlike these new-fangled Zork rip-offs (which I never played, as I'd had enough text adventuring by then). I must confess to throwing away quite a bunch of line-printer paper (which the printer-terminal took, I think it was a DEC product, gotta love DEC :-) before getting the magic score. I also have the source for the game on paper-tape if anyone would find that useful...
:-)
Nicky - "plugh" and "xyzzy" are magic phrases you need in the game... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
History: http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html
http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/e_downloads.html - ahhh there's a 430 point version :-( tho PDP-10s pre-date me :-)
Wow - http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/b_cave.html didn't know it was based on a real cave!
John
(edit) P.S. went looking and found the paper tape and the source code (in Fortran) printed out, no sign of the perfect score, but I'll bet my house I haven't thrown it away :-)
P.P.S. I will admit to being over 30... plus it was the only time I ever used paper tape, which was pretty dead by then for most things.

Never did play Adventure. My Fortran days were with punch cards and a remote terminal which was watched like a hawk by the powers that be. The first adventure game I ran into was Asylum on a TRS-80 Model I, then on to the Scott Adams games on C='s and eventually the Zork series.

Hmmm... does that mean I'm not as old a pack rat as I first thought?? ;)

The "new-fangled" was a bit tongue-in-cheek, it was more I'd had enough text adventuring after all that to last me quite some time...
I did learn Fortran in my first year at uni though. It was the main engineering programming language for quite some time.