91: Pwned

Image Text

I'm sure a discussion of the reason for the disappearance of adventure games in favor of RPGs would be fascinating.

Description

First off, two references have to be explained: Counterstrike is a reference to either the expansion of the Half-Life franchise, or the Command and Conquer-franchise. Either way, it describes a graphical game which runs in “real-time” and thus asks the player to make decisions to survive in the game in “real-time”. The “grue” mentioned in the comic text is a reference to a predator in the game franchise Zork. Grues fear light, but love to devour adventurers entering the dark. Therefore, you cannot win the game without owning some light source.

Zork is a typical text-adventure, in which you play turn-based (like chess). The computer spits out some textical context, you enter a command (GO <direction>, TAKE <object>, KILL <person>), and the computer responds by giving the outcome of your command. This scarce context arose from the fact that games in the 1970's and 1980's needed to run on limited memory and microprocessor capacity. During the last 20 years, these barriers were broken down, and games in graphical context, and running in real-time were made possible.

Randall returns Counterstrike to the text-context of Zork, stating thereby that no player used to the real-time, graphical atmosphere of the former would have any appeal to the turn and text-based dynamics of the latter. And yes, that indeed is a initiation to the discussion mentioned in the image text.