What's your opinion of them?

I wish modern games would bring them back. I quite enjoy controlling the game entirely from the keyboard without need for mouse. Especially for gaming on the go, such as in airports or on a flight =)

But, of course, more importantly, it allows for a much richer range of input from the user than a mouse does. Man, I miss the old glory days of adventure gaming.

Especially with the Infocom games. Their parser is amazing. Scarily so.

The Spellcasting trilogy isn't a slouch either.

Karl

It'd be interesting to see an FPS controlled by a textual interface

USE GUN ON SOLDIER

No not THAT soldier, the enemy one!!!

^
Typing of the Dead.

Any plans to bring that on GOG??

look here:

http://www.loonyboi.com/if/quake/about.htm

I have a fondness for text parsers since I fully believe the text based adventure games I grew up on helped me with my reading and spelling skills when I was younger. :3 Interactive Fiction titles still keep the parser alive and well and a lot of good ones are made each year (which reminds me, I need to check out the winners for the 2010 IF awards to see what I might have overlooked...).

All really got you covered... Sorta.

"Use gun on oblivious potty-mouthed jerk"

-Yahtzee's Orange Box review

Karl

LOL

USE GUN ON ENEMY SOLDIER
AGAIN
AGAIN
AGAIN
AGAIN
AGAIN
...

Actually, I'm sure there was an IF rendition of the first map of Doom. It was surprisingly good fun!

It wasn't all SHOOT SOLDIER. Sometimes, you had to GET the RED KEY and UNLOCK RED DOOR too!


Text parsers definitely have their place in prototyping game design, I feel. In a full game though, they're a lot of work for the player.

I'd dare to argue that this entirely depends on the type of game you're going to play. I wish that MMORPGs would find their way to using a text parser (again), because that is effectively the only single way to develop decent non grinding quests.
Right now, people (including myself) do not even bother to read the text. Click NPC with Quest marker, click accept, head to the mark on the auto map, use item or kill monster, return to NPC and click on reward. Repeat with every NPC in game.

You should have to lead a conversation, react on the NPC, search for hints in the reply, like, you know, you'd do with a human person. Your words should influence the NPC's behaviour and there could be a VAST amount of real quests involving imagination, creativity and fun instead of sheer repetition.

Parser for conversation and parser for main gameplay are two different things.

As a purely conversation interface though, their limits are even more pronounced than as a main interface. The language is a potentially huge barrier to overcome (though, I suppose you could always create your own, in-game language which would mean that every player has to overcome the same barriers to play), but that still leaves you with a mountain to climb in terms of creating an accessible game.

the problem is that's not accessible, at least not in an MMO, sure that went fine back in the day, but now if a game isn't successful as WoW it somehow automatically sucks.

Nostalgia aside, text parsers have a lot of downsides and not too many strong advantages. Aside from the simple truth that the mass gaming market would never accept a text parser in the newest Call of Freedom Bullet Halo, there are a couple technological issues that just make a mouse/trackball/gamepad a better choice for many modern games:

- Even a deeply sophisticated parser can't anticipate the words that every person will choose to try to solve a problem, typos aside. Even if you accept the greater burden of knowledge required of the user, there are more opportunities for the game not to know what's going on, so in any real-time sort of game there will be an opportunity for a given gamer to lose out because the machine doesn't know what the player wants

- Text parsers are going to require keyboards for the near future. Even the very best vocie recognition software isn't good enough for games, and the cost of maintaining a library of voice commands in a hojillion languages for the games is going to be prohibitive. Consoles don't have keyboards. (Yes, I know they do. But aside from That Mythical Guy You Know - who *never exists except in your stories* - you've never actually met someone who has one)

- Typing isn't as efficient as steering, and being constrained to use a less efficient system when there exists a clearly available mechanism to increase efficiency is one of the best ways to anger your customer base. Interestingly, that's not applicable to games alone, so I can easily point out that the leading case of speeding tickets and aggressive driving in cities is improperly low speed limits relative to road conditions, which is a passably adequate metaphor.

That said, I loved Heroes Quest (which became Quest for Glory) and still prefer the original with the text parser to the redone version - but in part that's because the game was designed with the parser in mind. Parsers are pretty fun, and they do allow for a slightly more rigorous understanding of what's going on than exclamation points over heads and a shaded in map telling you where to go.

But then, Quest for Glory never made $90 million a month. So we pretty much all know what the chances are of text parsers coming back.

I don't exist?

I too, have plugged a USB Keyboard into my Xbox 360.