95
This New Handheld Aims To Bring Back The Magic Of '80s Text Adventures | Time Extension
(www.timeextension.com)
Yay more e-waste.
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
95 points (96.1% liked)
RetroGaming
22394 readers
794 users here now
Vintage gaming community.
Rules:
- Be kind.
- No spam or soliciting for money.
- No racism or other bigotry allowed.
- Obviously nothing illegal.
If you see these please report them.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Sadly, I doubt it will get much traction, a portable device for text adventures, without a keyboard?
Ok, you can use suggestions, but that can spoil the gameplay....
I could live without the "guess which commands even work right now", aspect of the original gameplay.
I don't have the game patience I had back then.
I remember playing one of the Zork games. It may even have been the first one. I felt like I knew what I had to do. There were a bunch of crows blocking my path. And there was a field with a scarecrow in it. And I could not figure out any command to take the scarecrow or take its clothes or do anything with it. And I was totally stuck and stopped playing the game. Not fun.
Can you not do a choose your own adventure book on a standard eReader with anchor links?
Yes but that won’t allow the game to track stats, inventory, etc, or to dynamically change the text based on game state, so you’d be strictly limited to traditional CYOA book conversions.
This looks to be aiming for something more advanced.
That sounds like a software issue more than anything. You can "run" Doom entirely in a PDF document (by PDF supporting embedded javascript). Any ebook reader supporting that feature set of PDFs would be able to handle "full fledged" games.
There are plenty of Android-based eReaders available too, so you can just do a CYOA app geared directly (or having a specific mode) for such e-Ink devices' particular graphics.
Couldn't you just develop these games on phones/tablets, with full color and a keyboard?
Just like the rabbit r1, this could have been an ~~email~~ app
Yes, but there’s definitely some appeal to playing text based games on an e-ink screen. As for colour, sometimes less is more - the Playdate is also B&W and has built a terrific community.
Sure. I prefer reading books on an e-ink screen as well. But that's for books, not a game genre that peaked 45 years ago.
I just can't see a product like this having enough demand. Hopefully they find a way to make it work, because I totally get wanting to own a specialized object like this.
It’s absurd that this doesn’t have a keyboard.
More interactive than CYOA, more restrictive than traditional text adventures. Kind of point-and-clicky. IDK. I'm intrigued and will keep an eye on it. I hope they release the SDK well in advance of launch at least.
Without a keyboard, that sounds terrible. Or just a glorified e-reader.
I was just thinking about texting adventures and if there were any with like trained llm backends
Didn't Tom Hanks invent this in "Big"?
Looks good
I’m excited to see what weird and archaic form of DRM the creator decides to bake into this device, just like their gameboy games
I personally like the idea and can see the appeal, it looks like it might being going for a more modern style "point and click" or gamebook type text adventure and tbh the free-form type your command text adventure games can be a pretty frustrating if the parser programmed poorly.
Keyboard or not, I don't need another Lithium Ion battery in my house.