Adventure in text mode

My first computer was a Commodore 64, that was one of the most popular home computers in the 1980's. I used the computer mostly for games and learning to code, first in BASIC and later in 6510 assembler. As the screen resolution for multicolored graphics was only 160x200, I often played text mode adventure games. To be honest, the 40x25 text mode screen was not very pleasant, either.

Text mode adventure games were a popular genre in the 1980's but nowadays it seems a dead genre. The young people are more accustomed to playing 3d adventures than trying to guess the right verb to use in a two-word sentence to command the hero to some simple action. The early adventures used only literary descriptions of places and problems encountered had to be solved by giving commands like take bottle, enter building, use key, open door etc.


If you are ready to go back in time to the 1970's and 1980's, you might like to try the adventure. In Ubuntu, it is provided by the package bsdgames.

Tint is a Tetris clone

Do you still remember playing Tetris for hours and hours twenty years ago? Or are you so young that you have never heard of Tetris? In both cases you might like to try Tint - it is a free clone of the classic game from behind the Iron Curtain.

There are numerous versions of Tetris available for any moder Linux system. But Tetris was not a 3d game nor was it played with hexagons, or over Internet or LAN against a human opponent. On the contrary, it was a very simple game with extremelys simple graphics. Just like Tint today. Tint was meant to be a close clone of the original Tetris written by Alexey Pajitnov, Dmitry Pavlovsky, and Vadim Gerasimov.



Tint is a very lightweight game and it does not take a lot of hard disk space. In fact, the size of the deb package is only 14.1 kB (I had of course ncurses preinstalled). Could this be the smallest arcade game available for Linux?

Nethack is the game for geeks

Around 15 years ago I played for the first time Nethack. I should have been working on my MA thesis in medieval ecclesiastical history but I probably spent a lot more time online: reading the newsgroups, chatting in the IRC or in the university's internal bulleting board known as Portacom.

Sometimes I even played games on the Unix system. There were not too many games installed, but there were many online multiuser dungeon games I was able to play over telnet. And the famous Adventure was available and of course the Nethack.

I was never completely hooked on Nethack, but I completely understand those geeks who spent the nights hacking monsters in the darkness of the dungeons. Sometimes I have even tried to play Nethack with my Linux systems. It certainly is not for everyone, but it is one of the few playable games available for the Linux console.



Even if you might not fully understand the magic of Nethack it is certainly worth installing in the Linux system. If you are desperate enough you might even like to start killing the monsters in the deep dungeons!