Spoiler „The Pawn“
#magneticscrolls
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Another nitpick about The Pawn: some objects are designed in a weird way. The potion can‘t be picked up. You have to pick up the potion BOTTLE. Inside the bottle is the potion, yeah. This intricate world modeling is detrimental to the gameplay.
#interactivefiction #thepawn #magneticscrolls
The Pawn has some nasty little pitfalls. For example when the doors to hell open, there is mention of a porter BEHIND the doors. But if you go east, he immediately kills you. The porter actually spawns in your CURRENT room, but the description doesn’t tell you unless you do another LOOK.
#interactivefiction #commodore #c64 #magneticscrolls
The Pawn dishes out some blows against Zork, I think! The election poster for Gringo Baconburger seems to take a jab at Infocom‘s earlier offering!
#interactivefiction #magneticscrolls #infocom
Did you know The Pawn supported pronouns? Well not in that way, but still! Good interactive fiction parsers would be able to replace pronouns with their respective nouns.
Anyway, happy trans visibility day! 
#interactivefiction #magneticscrolls
The Pawn has some weird triggers and mechanics. You can only move the floorboards in the Tree Trunk Room, if you close the door first -- and perhaps have the white light, not sure about that...
There are a few situations like that, which make this rather good game slightly irritating and illogical...
#interactivefiction #commodore #c64 #thepawn #magneticscrolls
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By the way: The Pawn has an amazing yet tedious hint system. The hints are printed encrypted in the manual and the game itself decodes them. You really think twice before typing in three rows of gibberish and making one single mistake.
#interactivefiction #magneticscrolls #retrogaming
We are not yet continuing with Wonderland, but some days ago I upgraded the black A500 to 1MB of chip RAM by way of mainboard swap. And a quick session on one of the later savegames didn‘t reveal any crashes. Even with lovely graphics enabled! So this bodes well.
#retrogaming #commodore #amiga500 #interactivefiction #magneticscrolls
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…and we had to restart The Pawn. As we did not ask Kronos about THE FRIGGING WRISTBAND! Without that we don’t get the chest that we need to kill the rider with the horse with no legs. Oh how I hate such puzzle designs! Luckily this is a text adventure and we can skip all the exploring and catch up rather quickly.
#magneticscrolls #interactivefiction #commodore #c64
As we are currently stuck due to technical difficulties with Wonderland, we switch to a different Magnetic Scrolls game: The Pawn.
It is a humorous, weird fantasy text adventure set in the mythical kingdom of Kerovnia.
#interactivefiction #magneticscrolls #retrogaming
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Back in Wonderland with #magneticscrolls
We continue our exploration and find a well. We can’t take the rope, can’t use the winch, so why not climb down the well? Guess what: Alice doesn’t climb. She just falls. And yes, you can „die“ in this game. Well, you wake up, but the game is still over.
#interactivefiction #commodore #amiga
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Now the next step took us QUITE a while to figure out. We can use the blue fan to make us a bit smaller. Then we fit into the maid overall. And only then the rabbit will mistake us for his maid and take us to actual wonderland. Well he opens the door.
#magneticscrolls #interactivefiction
Before being one of the quartet of founders of Magnetic Scrolls and writing The Pawn, Guild of Thieves, and Corruption, Rob Steggles wrote a game for TRS-80 called Temple of Disrondu. It was only rescued from an old tape a few years ago. I give some extensive history background and embark on the journey (and get stuck quickly, but that's adventure games for you).
I totally forgot I had this. With the sheer length of time between the #ZXSpectrumNext Kickstarter and its final arrival, this package got packed away and overlooked. Until now.
Very nicely done, just need me to put the SD card in there with the #MagneticScrolls games on it.
Oh hey, Strand Games just released Tin Mug, an original work of IF built using their successor engine to the Magnetic Windows engine used at Magnetic Scrolls (and on which they are progressively remaking the back catalogue for modern and retro computers).
itch.ioThe Tin Mug by strandgamesAn illustrated short story for kids.
Possibly a minority opinion.
I enjoyed Magnetic Scrolls text adventure games way more than Infocom text adventure games.
So I got #onionos installed on my new #miyoominiplus , and threw some games on it. As far as I can see the #C64 games work, although I haven't tried multi disk games or games that require true 1541 emulation.
The gameboy roms all worked (no surprise there) and #scummvm works as long as I use the original files, I need to see how I can get #gog version to run.
#Dosbox has been a fail so far, looking into ways to use the GOG setup ...
I only have the #MagneticScrolls games for the #amiga, so that wasn't 1st prio (and I need to dig out the roms from cloanto).
I'm not a big Nintendo fan (except the GB of course) so no #NES or #SNES yet, also no #megadrive .
If you have tips or suggestions, post them, please.
Starting a new #interactiveFiction project: Viv plays through past IF #games https://intfiction.org/t/viv-plays-through-past-if-games/62211 #ParserGames #TextAdventure #Infocom #MagneticScrolls #IFComp #RetroGaming #IndieGames
The Interactive Fiction Community ForumViv plays through past IF gamesTaking a slight detour from Knight Orc tonight - I haven’t had long enough this week to give it a good play. Hopefully next week! However tonight I had a go at a shorter game, a replay for me. So here are some thoughts. Beware there are spoilers. All Roads by Jon Ingold (2001) This relatively short parser game won IF Comp in 2001. It sees you as a character who can step mysteriously between scenes, while you play through a story of intrigue in Renaissance Venice. There’s a lot to like about i...
Servan Keondjian talks about working on #ZX81 #BBCMicro #Archimedes, developing 3D engines, working with #MagneticScrolls & #RealityLab, creating #Direct3D and becoming part of the #Microsoft machine & his megaproject #Earthsim
Posting some things that this crowd may have never seen; here is an article I wrote about the graphical #textadventure game "The Pawn," by #magneticscrolls with thoughts on its design 30+ years later.
http://trottingkrips.caltrops.com/2019/11/04/the-pawn-by-magnetic-scrolls-1985/
trottingkrips.caltrops.comThe Pawn by Magnetic Scrolls (1985) – Reviews From Trotting Krips