Hi everyone,
I?m trying to find the name of an old adventure that I played on Windows (or even DOS?). I?m 90% sure it was text-based but had accompanying pictures for each scene. So the text box would say something like ?You?re sitting on the beach. The sun is shining, the sea is rather quiet.? etc, etc and there would be a still image of the beach scenery. Rather sure you had to enter text to play/interact.
I remember the story only vaguely. The general topic had to do with time travel and/or space travel; and with virtual realities. The main antagonist was, I believe, an artificial intelligence that tried to trap you in these virtual realities without you noticing; roughly a ?Matrix? style setup, but I?m very sure it predates Matrix by far. You had to find inconsistencies in the virtual reality to escape it; or had to use the in-reality rules in such a way that it creates a logical conflict breaking the virtual reality ? provoking a ?divide by zero? error, if you will. The virtual realities you had to escape from varied wildly ? they could be a jungle, an alien planet or any number of other places. There?s three I remember distinctly:
- One was the aforementioned beach. To escape that virtual reality, you had to break the system by walking up to the beach bar that would serve an unlimited number of cocktails. If you managed to make the barkeeper drink his own alcohol, he would lose control over the cocktail creation process and would keep serving unlimited amounts that kept filling the beach until infinity, bursting the virtual reality. Your beach towel also played a role, but I don?t remember which.
- Another one was a hell-style setting underground with fires threatening you. You would wander on narrow ridges that had steep precipices left and right. At one place, a number of monkeys would sit across the precipice on a different ridge. They couldn?t reach you, but could kill you by throwing rocks at you. I believe you could blow a hallucinogenic powder over to them that would send them into fits of rage so that they threw each other down the ridge.
- The final virtual reality was the inside of a space hangar or spaceship or space capsule. You were made to believe that you had actually destroyed the evil AI and were either safely home or on the way there. But it turned out that this was actually a last-ditch attempt of the AI to lull you in. You had to realize that you still were trapped in a virtual reality and still had to get out of this last one.
Not sure if I got the details all right; but that?s the way I remember the game? Any idea what this could have been? Thanks!