Originally Posted By Elfstone (27 JUN 2003 12:13pm)
I'm totally familiar with the problems you mentioned. When I started playing my first few IF games my English wasn't even good enough to understand more than a line or two without looking up the words in a dictionary.
I would go as far as calling IF my personal English teacher.  

Sure, I had a bilingual class in school and learned more advanced English than usual from scratch, but text adventures provided me with a certain vocabulary even before my first English class ever (examine, extinguish and the like). But enough of that.

When I first played I had to save a LOT and restore even more often. You can play as many IF as you like but you will never avoid restoring games regularly. In fact it's part of the experience to replay parts you know in a minimum number of moves. At least if the game uses a time limit of some sort, the most famous being a lantern that provides light for a limited amount of turns. IF are not that user-friendly as other adventure games. You have to live with dead-end experiences.

I'm familiar with the constantly-stuck thing as well. I rarely finished a game myself. I never finished any of the commercial products without help. But I got better in time, that's for sure.
Even if you played a lot of IF you can still make a stupid mistake like forgetting to examine something and becoming stuck.  

Or maybe that's just me, I don't know.

A special problem that I encounter every time is keeping an overview of things in the description to examine. I end up regularly using "look" in order to remember what I haven't examined yet. Sometimes I read a room description and type all nouns in the parser so that I don't have to read the whole description again.
I usually use the "script" command as well. It prints the whole text in a game session to a file you can later look up. Can be funny to read what you have done in the game.  

I wouldn't agree with Zork having no goal, it has. You have to collect treasures and place them in the case in the house. Of course, you first must find the case to know about the goal. It's not given to you in the first place. Zork isn't the best game to start with if you are new to IF. Neither is Adventure/Collossal Cave which is quite difficult to navigate.
Amateur IF are possibly the best way to getting started.

Originally Posted By Ron (27 JUN 2003 9:20am)
I haven't got any problems with navigation in IF, and although I get stuck with some of the verbs the way of input & interaction isn't much of a problem. And mapping is just essential I guess.

(I tend to only 'examine' my inventory items and often forget to try other verbs like feeling, touching, squeezing, rubbing etc. But that's just something I have to learn by playing more IF)

Gamaholic, did you encounter the same problems in Infocom games (like Wishbringer) because of the very open, 'dead-ended' and sometimes seemingly pointless playing style that's needed to finish the game?

(I just played the 'Pentari'-demo, and although it's not exactly a newbie-game as far as I know, the clear definition of playing goals you receive at the end of the demo makes it look like a nice game for me to play...)

Originally Posted By Ron (27 JUN 2003 2:02pm)
English isn't my native language either, and playing games in a foreign language when you've only had a few years of english class (Started with Zork when I was about 14 or 15 I guess) is asking for trouble.

But even now I still keep looking things up. Especially games in a certain scene (medieval, science-fiction) often use quite exotic words. They add to the atmosphere, though. (Obliterated? Quarry? Howard doesn't make things easy for foreigners!)

I'm not that pleased to read that saving and restoring is that common in games. It makes the game more of a challenge maybe, but I think I'd like games with less, or at least more obvious, dead ends a lot more. Maybe the more experienced players have some tips to deal with this.

(Still, it's nice to read that others have stumbled upon the same problems. Quite amazing that the genre is still alive.

)

Originally Posted By HowardS (30 JUN 2003 12:55am)

The save/restore process really is part of the game experience if you stop and think about it.