hulk go hole

August 18, 2012 7:12 AM

"Now that the Hulk has closed his eyes, shoved wax down his ears and is holding his nose, he is immune to the attacks of the space-ants. No, really. Just picture that scene for a moment and be glad that it didn't find its way into any of the Hulk movies." VGJunk takes a look at the baffling Incredible Hulk text adventure game.

Via Obscure Videogames.

posted by codacorolla (20 comments total)

BAD GAME WEAKEN HULK BRAND. HULK FIND NEW AGENT.
posted by Egg Shen at 7:31 AM on August 18, 2012 [7 favorites]

I was going to comment, but then some gas filled the room and permeated my skin.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:44 AM on August 18, 2012

Seems legit.
At least compared to the Dallas adventure.
posted by Mezentian at 8:00 AM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

That shade of green used for some of the dialogue is very pleasant.

#6ACF6F.
posted by Redfield at 8:13 AM on August 18, 2012

We clearly have to spend the rest of the day debating the existance of Hulk junk.
posted by The Whelk at 9:31 AM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

For a lot of other horrible text adventures, and some very good ones, someone has bundled something approaching every z-code game ever -- almost 1800 of them -- for download.
posted by Zed at 9:35 AM on August 18, 2012 [2 favorites]

When Hulk is angry, Hulk's urethra is angry.
posted by biffa at 9:56 AM on August 18, 2012

You wouldn't like Hulk's urethra when it is angry.
posted by klapaucius at 10:01 AM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

Questprobe featuring 50% of the Fantastic Four drove me mental with frustration in my youth. Someday I'll track it down and finally beat it but I imagine it's nearly as nonsensical as this.
posted by davros42 at 10:08 AM on August 18, 2012

Ways to make Dr. Banner angry (someone should make a game out of this list, I'd buy it)
posted by jcruelty at 10:59 AM on August 18, 2012 [3 favorites]

When I was a kid I was really into text based adventure games, yeah Infocom was the big fish in this particular little pond but I had a special place in my heart for the Scott Adams games. Sure, the parser sucked, but until a friend and I actually sat down and tried to write one and failed miserably, we didn't understand just how tough it was, "Hello, Sailor!" excluded.

Even being so young, like nine or ten, I knew enough to skip the superhero (tm) ones. They were almost egregiously bad. I seem to remember playing the SAGA games as a kid, then shifting to the Infocom games as a teenager, they writing was so much better. The Zork trilogy, the Enchanter trilogy, the whodunit/mystery "trilogy" were on a different level than anything that Scott Adams came up with, they really deserved the moniker of "Interactive Fiction".
posted by Sphinx at 11:04 AM on August 18, 2012

The Internet: solving old C64 games I could never get through a quarter of a century later.
posted by yerfatma at 11:17 AM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

If I have a disturbing dream tonight about angry space ants up The Hulk's bum, can I sue Metafilter?
posted by panboi at 12:12 PM on August 18, 2012

No you are required to write them down and post them.
posted by The Whelk at 12:26 PM on August 18, 2012

Some text adventures were bad. Like Rambo: First Blood Part II (warning: spoilers!) where you have to GET KNIFE QUICKLY during a knife fight.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:10 PM on August 18, 2012

I played the C-64 Spider Man game, and for years, I'll be haunted with the phrase:

Okay, I hit fan... SPANG!
posted by The Giant Squid at 3:27 PM on August 18, 2012

More SPANG!
posted by The Giant Squid at 3:29 PM on August 18, 2012

Back in the day, before the internet made walk throughs trivially easy to obtain, i actually made it through both hulk and Spiderman questprobe games, but they are incredibly stupid compared to some of Scott Adams' earlier efforts. The almost ridiculously unfair savage island two parter was the beginning off the end, but many of the earlier games fitted wonderfully interlocking puzzles with a surprising amount of humour into 16k of memory.
posted by Sparx at 3:51 PM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

@angrycat

it would be gross and maybe funny to some people
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 7:29 AM on August 19, 2012

Ha, the "hardest adventure games ever" post had just made me think of the Questprobe Spiderman game, and now the mention of the fiendish Natter Energy Egg has brought it all flooding back. We had it for the BBC Micro, and dear god, it was completely impossible. I don't suppose we even came close to finishing it. I encountered it again online a few years ago and was dispirited to realise grown-up me was just as flummoxed by it as child me had been. "SPIDER-MAN (tm) is no vandal!"

Two-countries-divided-by-a-common-language filter: one of the items you can find in Spiderman is "baby formula". I'm British, not American, and I'd never heard the term. I thought I had picked up a piece of paper bearing a chemical formula that, could I but find the necessary ingredients, would let me create a baby. It says volumes about the quality of the logic in the game that I actually thought that would be a plausible puzzle.

I still don't know what you were supposed to do with the baby formula.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 8:14 AM on August 19, 2012 [1 favorite]