I'm going to hijack this thread and mention the modern spiritual cousin of terminal games (but not really a terminal command line game at all) "Caves of Qud"
It's like Nethack, only weirder. In a good way. Don't let the Early Access label fool you. It's been around for seven years already and is highly polished, and getting weirder all the time. In a good way.
Nitpicking, several years after the fact, but: most of these are not "command line" video games. They're terminal (and terminal emulator) games. "Zork", or even "Quest for Glory" are command line games: you play them by typing on the command line. The ones shown here (save Frotz) are not that.
I think an example of a theoretical command line game would be one that a user would pipe a command though the shell in to the game and get the resulting output.
The first time I used a computer was also the first time I played a computer game. And I'll call it a "command-line" game as it was played on a teletype machine.
"Star Trek" first came out in 1971. I probably played it in 1972-3 when my father brought home from work a teletype machine. All I remember doing is launching a photon torpedo and destroying a planet. For me it was (and still is) the best command-line-only game.
Am I nitpicking to point out that there's no such thing as a "command-line-only video game"?
Giving credit where it's due, the article mentions Infocom (to which I'd add -style) interactive fiction, which I think solidly count as command-line-only video games even if the command line in question is internal to the game.
I came here looking for DCSS. Anyone who likes roguelikes should take a look at it, if they haven't.
It's actively developed, so you can play it once, come back a year later, and there will probably be new things to try.
There's an active community, you can play over SSH with ASCII or over a webapp with tilesets or you can run it standalone on your PC.
Magic, extremely varied gods that favor you with powers for your devotions (these can have a drastic impact on playstyle), huge variety of classes... I could go on.
Yes! The game itself supports [PRINT_MODE:TEXT] in the ini. Depending on the version you might need a virtual x server to trick the game into starting though.
Used that to run it via wine + quemu on my android phone, at a whopping 5fps at embark. Didn't play for long, but was totally worth it!
I feel like Wikis and modern communication tools in general have made Nethack less fun. Nethack represents one extreme of roguelike design philosophy, where the focus is more on exploring and discovering things than solving tactical puzzles. The phrase "the dev team thinks of everything" illustrates this well; the game is full of interactions that are fun to discover and add to the illusion of exploring a world, but don't actually contribute to winning or losing. You can easily break the game, i.e. find techniques that make large parts of it pointless, and that's acceptable because the joy of discovering them makes up for that loss. If you read Wikis and watch expert players then you will never experience it and be left with only an easy and boring game.
The other end of the spectrum is DCSS, which sacrifices this sense of wonder to produce a tightly designed tactical challenge. There's little need for an external Wiki because that kind of information is built into the game. You can look up any entity in the game and get detailed information about its abilities. All useless/boring/unbalanced interactions are removed even if that makes the world less believable, e.g. you cannot sell items to shops, because that would necessitate tedious tracking of all junk items to recover their value, and the traditional roguelike "food clock" was replaced by an explicit countdown clock, because optimizing food usage so rarely made a difference (Nethack includes food, but also many methods to make it irrelevant). Assuming a skilled player, DCSS is the more difficult game.
I recommend playing both, but in the case of Nethack, only if you keep spoilers to a minimum. (Zero spoilers is unnecessary. I believe the game was originally designed around the assumption that players would be sharing information about how to win. Only improved communications have made this sharing too powerful.)
Weird to have a list of command line games and not even mention nethack. Like maybe its not interesting to mention because everyone knows it, but still.
It'd be like having a list of best fantasy novels and not mentioning lord of the rings. Its just odd. Even if you disagreed, its so famous that they would probably say why they dont think it doesn't make the list.
On this topic, there is still a community of players and creators around adventure games (or 'interactive fiction'). Check ifdb.org for reviews and recommendations.
I'd say modern IF games are often more playable than classic games, which are in some cases really unforgiving in this particular genre.
These are some of the games I would recommend: 'Fate' by Victor Gijsbers, 'Floatpoint' by Emily Short, 'Galatea' also by Emily Short, 'Photopia' by Adam Cadre, 'Aisle' by Sam Barlow, and 'Nightfall' by Eric Eve.
There's sixel [0] to display pics in text terminals. Also apparently the kitty terminal has a custom protocol to blit graphics on text terminals too [1].
There's a library with some impressive demos called "notcurses" if you are curious what kind of graphics can be displayed in a terminal ... the author uploaded some demos to YT showing the capabilities. It's been discussed in HN a bunch of times [2].
[+] [-] programd|3 years ago|reply
https://store.steampowered.com/app/333640/Caves_of_Qud
It's like Nethack, only weirder. In a good way. Don't let the Early Access label fool you. It's been around for seven years already and is highly polished, and getting weirder all the time. In a good way.
[+] [-] xyzzy_plugh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheRealPomax|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|3 years ago|reply
I'd consider "command-line-only" to mean "can be played with a dumb terminal".
[+] [-] blowski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guessbest|3 years ago|reply
> ./game go_west_and_look | cat events.log
[+] [-] lelandfe|3 years ago|reply
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead also has a tiles mode that is actually pretty great. The community has done some amazing work: https://cataclysmdda.org/
[+] [-] intelVISA|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intrasight|3 years ago|reply
"Star Trek" first came out in 1971. I probably played it in 1972-3 when my father brought home from work a teletype machine. All I remember doing is launching a photon torpedo and destroying a planet. For me it was (and still is) the best command-line-only game.
Am I nitpicking to point out that there's no such thing as a "command-line-only video game"?
[+] [-] dllthomas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anthk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kunwon1|3 years ago|reply
It's actively developed, so you can play it once, come back a year later, and there will probably be new things to try.
There's an active community, you can play over SSH with ASCII or over a webapp with tilesets or you can run it standalone on your PC.
Magic, extremely varied gods that favor you with powers for your devotions (these can have a drastic impact on playstyle), huge variety of classes... I could go on.
[+] [-] dusted|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Corazoor|3 years ago|reply
Used that to run it via wine + quemu on my android phone, at a whopping 5fps at embark. Didn't play for long, but was totally worth it!
[+] [-] salted-fry|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vvector|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] every|3 years ago|reply
https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page
[+] [-] mrob|3 years ago|reply
The other end of the spectrum is DCSS, which sacrifices this sense of wonder to produce a tightly designed tactical challenge. There's little need for an external Wiki because that kind of information is built into the game. You can look up any entity in the game and get detailed information about its abilities. All useless/boring/unbalanced interactions are removed even if that makes the world less believable, e.g. you cannot sell items to shops, because that would necessitate tedious tracking of all junk items to recover their value, and the traditional roguelike "food clock" was replaced by an explicit countdown clock, because optimizing food usage so rarely made a difference (Nethack includes food, but also many methods to make it irrelevant). Assuming a skilled player, DCSS is the more difficult game.
I recommend playing both, but in the case of Nethack, only if you keep spoilers to a minimum. (Zero spoilers is unnecessary. I believe the game was originally designed around the assumption that players would be sharing information about how to win. Only improved communications have made this sharing too powerful.)
[+] [-] guerby|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossfire_(1992_video_game)
Some of the contributed levels are ... a map of my university and some monsters were teachers at the time :)
[+] [-] bawolff|3 years ago|reply
It'd be like having a list of best fantasy novels and not mentioning lord of the rings. Its just odd. Even if you disagreed, its so famous that they would probably say why they dont think it doesn't make the list.
[+] [-] huydotnet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyuser583|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_af|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Emigre_|3 years ago|reply
I'd say modern IF games are often more playable than classic games, which are in some cases really unforgiving in this particular genre.
These are some of the games I would recommend: 'Fate' by Victor Gijsbers, 'Floatpoint' by Emily Short, 'Galatea' also by Emily Short, 'Photopia' by Adam Cadre, 'Aisle' by Sam Barlow, and 'Nightfall' by Eric Eve.
[+] [-] lrenn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lrenn|3 years ago|reply
http://breakintochat.com/blog/2013/02/18/amit-patel-creator-...
[+] [-] kerblang|3 years ago|reply
https://linuxcommandlibrary.com/man/robots
[+] [-] taviso|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeyBananas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MCrekt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markus_zhang|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emmanueloga_|3 years ago|reply
There's a library with some impressive demos called "notcurses" if you are curious what kind of graphics can be displayed in a terminal ... the author uploaded some demos to YT showing the capabilities. It's been discussed in HN a bunch of times [2].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
1: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/
2: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses - https://hn.algolia.com/?q=notcurses
[+] [-] tdeck|3 years ago|reply
https://jirkasnotes.wordpress.com/2019/07/17/xterm-does-grap...
Edit: a better demo: https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/tektronix.html
[+] [-] aidenn0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] remoquete|3 years ago|reply