I played quite a few text based adventure's, but right now can only remember the name of one: 'The Quest for the Golden Eggcup' on the Commodore 64. It perhaps was the only one I actually ever completed. It was a bit of a comical game: I remember that if you cursed, you got transported to a room without windows and sand on the floor. If you dug in the sand you found a note that claimed to have been written by God, and was a warning that you should not curse. If you dug a little deeper you found a latch that you could go through to get transported to the starting location of the game. If you cursed for a second time, you again got transported to the same room, but this time there was no note and no latch. All you could do was start over at that point. I liked the game a lot.
What I did not like so much in text based adventure's in general was the fact that the text based commands you could type were not always recognized by the game engine. For example, you could know what needed to be done to solve a puzzle, but could not find the magic word combination that the developers had come up with to solve it.
Only slightly exaggerating here, but it might have gone somewhat like this:
> You are in a large room, and in the middle stands a table. Upon the table stands a lamp.
$ get lamp
> You can't do that to a lamp
$ take lamp
> You can't do that to a lamp
$ pick up lamp
> You can't do that to a lamp
(slightly frustrated)
$ kick lamp.
> You kick the lamp, which falls over and sets the table, the room, and yourself on fire. You have died. Press 'N' to start over.
Side note: did anyone else here play online MUD's ?
