The Hobbit: The True Story

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- Edo, May 12, 2022

Sometimes I'm just in the mood for a short game, and sometimes I'm just in the mood for some Tolkien.

This game is both, and it is parody done correctly.

The original was for MS-DOS. Each command was a separate BAT file. It may sound strange nowadays, but, if it weren't for seeing the DOS prompt instead of the good, old ">", you'd barely even notice that you weren't running an interpreter.

The Glulx version available here doesn't play very well for me. Glulxe spits out a few memory errors after each command, and, worse than that, I can't progress beyond (Spoiler - click to show)Smaug's Den because the cigar is not in scope (I can enter TREE or Showobj cigar, and it says (in Smaug) -- which should mean Smaug is holding it, but the game insists that I 'CAN'T SEE ANY SUCH THING').

It's a good time, though. Especially if you're a sick, twisted Tolkien fan like myself.

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- Fredrik (Nässjö, Sweden), January 3, 2009

Baf's Guide

Play an adventure without leaving the DOS prompt! Like Mecha-Godzilla: The True Story, this game consists entirely of .bat files, one for each verb. Game state is stored in environment variables. As for the game itself, it's a parody of Tolkien's work. To say more would be to repeat most of the game's text - this is a tiny tiny game, and should take all of ten minutes to solve. Worthwhile for the novelty of the implementation.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt