>find pig

June 17, 2008 3:37 PM

Pig lost! Boss say that it Grunk fault. Say Grunk forget about closing gate. Maybe boss right. Grunk not remember forgetting, but maybe Grunk just forget. Boss say Grunk go find pig, bring it back. Him say, if Grunk not bring back pig, not bring back Grunk either. Grunk like working at pig farm, so now Grunk need find pig.

>_

posted by not_on_display (37 comments total)

P.S. I'll find my frog pig
posted by optovox at 3:41 PM on June 17, 2008 [2 favorites]

Grunk set pants on fire. Mmm. Grunk like fire.
posted by Burhanistan at 3:42 PM on June 17, 2008

not_on_display: " >_"

Nice touch.
posted by sveskemus at 3:43 PM on June 17, 2008

This was the winner of the 13th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition and can be downloaded and played on any z-code interpreter, available for pretty much any imaginable platform.

I played it a little, and found Grunk's narrative voice annoying. Given its victory, I assume it has merits I didn't play it enough to find.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 3:45 PM on June 17, 2008

I like his narrative voice, it reminds me of an Orc peon in Warcraft, tending a pig farm in the barrens.
posted by Spacelegoman at 3:49 PM on June 17, 2008

I enjoyed it. It's quite clever, for a lot of reasons.
posted by empath at 4:09 PM on June 17, 2008

(and I think most modern IF is overly precious and unengaging)
posted by empath at 4:09 PM on June 17, 2008 [1 favorite]

Here's a thing:

http://parchment.toolness.com/.

Makes it playable literally within the browser through JS, AJAX and stuff - though with one save only.

Bonus points for guessing which one I wrote.
posted by Sparx at 4:10 PM on June 17, 2008 [2 favorites]

Oh, I get game via this place. It good sometimes.
posted by not_on_display at 4:14 PM on June 17, 2008

"I like his narrative voice, it reminds me of an Orc peon in Warcraft, tending a pig farm in the barrens."

Me not that kind of orc!!

Hit

What Grunk hit?

Hit Grunk

Ow, that hurt!

Touch

What Grunk touch?

Touch Grunk

Uh..okay

Yeah...i'm a pervert
posted by UseyurBrain at 4:18 PM on June 17, 2008

Bonus points for guessing which one I wrote.

Seriously, £50 to the first right answer. Answer taken via mefi mail
posted by Sparx at 4:30 PM on June 17, 2008

within 24hours - gotta draw a line somewhere
posted by Sparx at 4:36 PM on June 17, 2008

The narrative here reminded me of this review of the Hulk movie by critic Peter Bradshaw. Here's an excerpt (no spoilers here except that, you know, Hulk gets angry and smashes things. And that the movie is bad.):

"Hulk. Smash!" Yes. Hulk. Smash. Yes. Smash. Big Hulk smash. Smash cars. Buildings. Army tanks. Hulk not just smash. Hulk also go rarrr! Then smash again. Smash important, obviously. Smash Hulk's USP. What Hulk smash most? Hulk smash all hope of interesting time in cinema. Hulk take all effort of cinema, effort getting babysitter, effort finding parking, and Hulk put great green fist right through it. Hulk crush all hopes of entertainment. Hulk in boring film. Film co-written by star. Edward Norton. Norton in it. Norton write it. Norton not need gamma-radiation poisoning to get big head. Thing is: Hulk head weirdly small. Compared with rest of big green body.
posted by onlyconnect at 5:13 PM on June 17, 2008 [3 favorites]

within 24hours - gotta draw a line somewhere
Should i send you 1 message for every game name or just put them all into one for convenience?
posted by Citizen Premier at 5:15 PM on June 17, 2008 [2 favorites]

Should i send you 1 message for every game name or just put them all into one for convenience?

Presumably Sparx isn't Plotkin or Cadre. That should save you a few messages.
posted by juv3nal at 5:24 PM on June 17, 2008

Better than Crysis. The graphics are all in my head.
posted by hellojed at 5:29 PM on June 17, 2008

My guess is in the mail, sparx. It's been too long since I've sat down with a text adventure, and now I have a whole list of them, so thanks for that as well.
posted by sysinfo at 5:43 PM on June 17, 2008

Sparx, please, please don't tell me you're Rybread Celsius. That boy hurt my brain bad back in high school.
posted by Weighted Companion Cube at 5:46 PM on June 17, 2008

xyzzy
posted by The White Hat at 6:00 PM on June 17, 2008

A slight double.
posted by flatluigi at 6:10 PM on June 17, 2008

Nice touch.

It's really the only acceptable use for the blink tag in 2008 other than for pissing someone off. No? I've always loved the way it looks here.

Hey! Pie taste like wall! Bah.

I think I will like this game.
posted by jessamyn at 6:19 PM on June 17, 2008

Photo of Grunk in the forest?
posted by homunculus at 6:37 PM on June 17, 2008

So Cookie Monster started writing interactive fiction???
posted by zeugitai_guy at 7:12 PM on June 17, 2008

oh my grunk
posted by mishaco at 7:34 PM on June 17, 2008

Google betrayed you, Sparx.
posted by onalark at 8:35 PM on June 17, 2008

It all so true!
posted by fleacircus at 9:07 PM on June 17, 2008

>fuck pig
That same thing Boss say to Grunk.

posted by loquacious at 9:36 PM on June 17, 2008 [2 favorites]

I have never really had the patience for text adventures (call me a heathen), but this one has got me wrapped up. It's sort of a meta-game, isn't it? When you play a text adventure, you naturally start writing in crude utterances like the things that Grunk says, and [SPOILER ALERT] all the Gnome's gobbledygook about alchemy -- about separating parts into their components and then using them in novel ways -- that sounds a lot like the thought process of a text adventurer.
posted by HeroZero at 10:04 PM on June 17, 2008

One thing I appreciate in the modern IF games is that they play fair with the gamer (except for the ones that don't, of course). By this I mean that in most cases you could, theoretically, start from the beginning and make it to the end without dying/losing/whatever based solely on logic and reasoning.

This wasn't the case with, for example, Infocom games and it always pissed me off. You had to use out-of-character knowledge from previous save games in order to win. My favorite example is TRINITY. Wonderful game. But there's a section where you walk through one of the white doors and are immediately exposed to the vacuum of space. You die, of course.

So you reload. Now later on you find a part where you can get inside huge soap bubbles being blown by a giant. Now you have to remember that one of those doors leads to outer space - despite never having been through the door in this iteration! - and go through inside the soap bubble, which freezes around you and provides breathable air.

That's bullshit. How does your character know he has to go through the door only once inside a soap bubble? Your character doesn't.

So that's one example of how IF games have matured in a good way; the idea that they should play fair unless deliberately setting out not to play fair, rather than not playing fair as a default.
posted by Justinian at 10:33 PM on June 17, 2008

Okay, I got the red key and opened the stone chest. There's some kind of magnet thing going on with the pie picture. Now what?
posted by hjo3 at 12:11 AM on June 18, 2008

If you kick the fountain enough, a black pudding comes out.
posted by kaibutsu at 2:14 AM on June 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

Sysinfo wins by a full hour. Check your mefimail. Everybody else who entered wins a free game by me, downloadable from the internets. Use the included walkthrough, as I am terrible at puzzle design. The last puzzle isn't given away, though, and is kind of cool, so let me know how you go with it.
posted by Sparx at 3:13 AM on June 18, 2008

Well, don't keep us in suspense! Which durn game is yours, sparx?
posted by Zed_Lopez at 10:11 AM on June 18, 2008

Well I know for a fact that Sparx ain't the guy behind Pick Up The Phone Booth and Die, but that's the only one I was able to eliminate.
posted by Spatch at 11:11 AM on June 18, 2008

Re: Grunk's narrative voice--like it or hate it, that voice is what makes this game distinctive. Without it, it would be just another "oh look, you're lost in a cave" text game. But with it, it somehow becomes clever(er) and funny.
posted by Ms. Informed at 11:49 AM on June 18, 2008

OMG - Spatch! - I am humbled by your presence.

It seems wrong to just come out and admit which one I am responsible for, seeing as three people were able to figure it out (nobody has told me how, yet). Suffice to say, when you start it up, there's a quote from a commodore 64 game.

I've downloaded Inform 7 recently and as soon as I've come to terms with its very different way of doing things (read: stay away from the pub long enough) I'll be doing another one - a sequel, but not necessarily for the previous one.

Just for historical interest, that unmentioned game was the first thing I ever compiled and was what made me realise that I could actually program (it's true, emulating a familiar system, say infocom games, provides the goal to which learning provides the path), despite dropping out of CompSci 101 to do modern poetry.

That kept me in gainful employment for a number of years after I had a few other languages under my belt. Prior to that, programming was what people in banks or academia did. Discovering FTP.GMD.DE literally changed my life, and I owe a large part of my past income to Graham Nelson, though not literally.

Which isn't to say that it is a good game. Andrew Plotkin did like it at the time, however, which geekgasmed me beyond the telling of it.

Admiral Jota (who wrote Find Pig) had this to say:

I think I gave it an A for a great concept, but a C for bad
spelling and grammar (they really grate on my enjoyment of a game), minus
a little for a couple not-so-great puzzles...

I didn't spellcheck the competition version (not knowing how to separate code from text - like I said, first thing I ever compiled) and the puzzles are occasionally pretty stink. It is kind of humourous though, on the "it still makes me giggle when I play it for vanity's sake scale.
posted by Sparx at 1:41 PM on June 18, 2008

Hint, hint. If you're stuck you can get hints by typing 'hint' and following the menu.
posted by Drexen at 3:34 PM on June 18, 2008