Aug 21

Well, it's not an emulator in the strictest sense of the word, but it does play the massive catalog of Infocom Z-Machine interactive text adventure games. If you're tired of expensive, tilt-happy titles that tire out your pale, strangely thin wrists, you can now slowly piece your way through hours of exhilarating "Open Door"
"CANNOT OPEN DOOR. WHAT IS DOOR?" action.

Nobody plays interactive adventure games for the adrenaline rush, but the stories are often great and occasionally brilliant. They're also great fun for a stop-and-start time killer, as you can resume where you left off without too much trouble, working your way through a game at whatever pace you choose.

The app is surprisingly full-featured, considering the stripped-down aesthetic of the games. It handily organizes your downloaded titles and even provides an in-app web portal to the Interactive Fiction Database, where you can download more public domain text-based games than any single person could play their way through. The most obvious downside here is that you're stuck with the on-screen keyboard, and during the course of a typical game you can expect to peck out thousands of words, many of which will do nothing.

Any text gamer that hasn't been held up by social stigmas or distracted by flashy new games and their "graphics" won't be stopped by a slightly undersized on-screen keyboard, and its hard to argue with Zork, The Hobbit and The Hitchhiker's Guide in your pocket. [TouchArcade via Kotaku]