lexyeevee

troublesome fox girl

hello i like to make video games and stuff and also have a good time on the computer. look @ my pinned for some of the video games and things. sometimes i am horny on @squishfox



in Inform text adventures, it is not uncommon to limit the number of items the player can hold at once, but then also give them a backpack or other kind of container that can hold an unlimited number of items. (i don't know the motivation for this; i suppose it encourages you to put useless junk somewhere and not keep getting distracted by it?)

anyway

in the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy text adventure, which is infamously goofy and tricky, there is such a container, which douglas adams boldly named:

the thing your aunt gave you that you don't know what it is

and you can in fact refer to it like that. by its full name. every time. if you want.

savvier IF players will just call it thing though


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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

On SpinDizzy MUCK I reference this constantly (in that I have a The thing your aunt gave you that you don’t know what it is, and which I always refer to by name in full).

And of course in the original game you’re actually required to collect as much stuff as possible into it; during the final puzzle, it’ll ask you for a random item that you encountered during the game and it will always choose one that you don’t have in your The thing your aunt gave you that you don’t know what it is, unless you picked up every single damn thing possible.

Yeah hhgttg remains one of my favorite text adventures of all time specifically because it’s so antagonistic and deconstructive to text adventures in general.

I have fond memories of puzzling through it with friends (when it was brand new) and it taking us months to figure out that we had to somehow know about the fucking cheese sandwich

like seriously this was what my best friend and i would talk about at recess every day, we had notebooks full of things we’d figured out and charts of the footnotes and every subtle bit of wordplay

the game isn’t very long if you know what you’re doing but that isn’t the point