It goes on to show what a bunch of the same old fans of a media that's been dying for the past 4 decades can do: congratulate each other on being both authors and primary audience for the works. I suspect the poll was not heard of by all the Choice of Games fans and Twine zynesters or whatever.
I for one am glad that most of those lame early dungeon crawls from the early 80's were left behind, specially Scott Adams masochism. I'm also surprised how many seem to consider Level 9 games. There's an emulator for Android and from what I saw it's Scott Adams with primitive graphics. It's horrid, in other words, with pretty much no prose or purpose: you're just there, a kleptomaniac who also loves to push buttons and to find keys. And then there are things like Eric the Unready, another of those games people seem to play for the jokes - like indeed many commercial IF and point'n'click adventures. I played it for awhile through the javascript emulator on archive and found depressingly how this games, which back then no doubt were lauded for their good looking graphics, are now pretty unplayable because of them, like King's Field and Mistery Mansion indeed. Oh, the irony that the grandad to all these games, the mainframe Adventure, has better prose that can be read on smooth antialiased fonts but these others are tied to their blocky 80s pixelized graphical fonts...
It seems Infocom was totally in a level of their own, and even though most of their games were puerile fantasy dungeon crawls, there was enough of money rolling to back some more audacious projects, such as Trinity, A mind forever voyaging, Suspended and so on. OTOH, one of the top IF according to the small IF club was Lost Pig, a small dungeon crawl with dimwitted caveman lingo prose whose only redeeming quality seems to be that it handles pretty much all the player types, however silly. People play it for a laugh, they laugh hard at the silliness of it all, including the gimmick of a text parser, they show it to their friends for a while and then move on to CoD or minecraft, never to play other IF again. Well, some freaks will, but not before they decide to make their own silly game.
Anyway, it was good voting for it. So good I actually did it twice, as I'm sure others did too.
Perhaps with enough clones I can convince myself and my clones that Curses should indeed take pole positing for the unparalleled combination of great prose and great puzzle design. And I mean it almost as mean as itself.
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