Many of us older ponyfans will remember or at least know about the old text-based adventure games- games that were sometimes a contest with mysterious requirements, sometimes a contest with an obstinate text parser, and sometimes a contest to keep from falling out of your chair laughing. Brought to us most famously by Infocom, these include the Zork series, as well as a few based off of other things (including even The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).
In the time since, many fandoms have had fics written as though they were these games- several for the aged Ranma 1/2 fanfiction community, and more recently the renowned You Awaken On Razor Hill (warning: not for the more temerous bronies among us, or those that are not fond of Warcraft).
So... someone ought to do it. And so if I know someone's got to do it, why leave it on another pony's withers?
Ergo: My Little Pony: Text Adventures are Magic
OR
Zork Pony
You have perfectly captured the frustration of not having a text game recognize your command. "Okay, what if I write it like THIS? NO?? Okay, how about THIS? AHHHHHH!"
Ha! I like what you're doing. Such a wacky style of storytelling, and I almost forgot about those games back then. Tracked!
For your next trick, combine the text with the blocky sixteen color graphics of the original King's Quest game. Where you have to carefully walk up the stairs using the arrow keys, and one false step will send you to your death. (At least you have more than three saved game slots.)
You must have been speaking about Shampoo's/Ryoga's quest earlier.
You have no idea how fast that made me read this. I used to read EVERY Ranma fic, so you just hit me in the nostalgia. Hard.
Pinkie Pie breaks the fourth wall, once more. News at 10, film at 11.
I love you for this.... seriously. I've been getting used to all the youngsters and their fancy newfangled gizmos and their loud music :D
The only thing that would make this better is if you just developed it as a real interactive fiction file. I'd consider hooking up one of my old text terminals to a linux terminal server so I could play it in proper vintage style.
http://www.ifarchive.org/
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Ever hear of the trope "The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You"? That's half of Pinkie in a nutshell.
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I know what that's like thanks to Zork being on CoD Black Ops. Me and my friend actually once tried "eat the door" to get in that house. It replied with "I don't think it would agree with you."
Are you planning on doing more chapters? Because this is really good.
Well, the thing about Pinkie is this: she's the Element of Laughter.
I think a lot of people forget about the potential in what that really means- they have her break the fourth wall constantly, or doing such consistently ludicrous things so often that it no longer really mean things.
She's the Element of Laughter. She will break the fourth wall when it's funny, but only when it's funny, and only because it's funny. Once it stops being funny, it's no longer something she would do- because that's not Laughter, that's Annoyance. It's part of why her failures to engage her Cutie Mark/Element result in a much more serious Pinkie Pie- or at least a less ludicrous one.
The episode with time-traveling Twilight really stands out for this- she acts considerably less loopy and random there, because while being silly can be funny, being silly instead of supporting your friend and being there to help stabilize her when she's clearly suffering a similar mental break to the time she ensorcelled the entire town isn't funny- it's failure to be a friend.
Hence why she's only popping up now and then in this fic so far- To use Pinkie's 4th-wall immunity properly, you have to use it relatively sparingly, but consistently. Otherwise it stops being funny.
Anyway, thanks for reviews and encouragement!
Thanks everyone. I'll produce more chapters with time, just don't expect it to be actually regular- life is hectic and I write mostly as a release, rather than a truly consistent hobby. And thank you especially, Ms. Moondancer- part of really getting a grip on this particular format of writing is grasping the interaction properly, and I was worried I'd overdone it or twisted it wrong.
1519995 applied your concept to an old project of mine on a whim
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0dv61-jaRQ
very incomplete of course; would you be interested in working on it with me?
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You know, a funny thing happened last night.
I was tooling around on the internet and found this thing called ADRIFT. It's a program for making and playing text games, pretty easy to use, and it includes a map both in editing mode and in play mode.
Consider. It. On.