Level 9's
text adventure games (today probably known as
interactive fiction) were amazingly good. Their best was probably
Snowball. You really had to understand how the
ship worked, or you'd never get anywhere (you could "go" to something like 10
million rooms, almost all of them totally uninteresting). The
plot was good, there was sufficient
humour to make things
interesting (the
hypodermic-wielding
robots were called "
Nightingales", but weren't
angels of mercy, and I won't go into the roboticised form-filling to get the
welder), and the coding was
tight (not that I ever tried to
cheat on the game).
I never finished it. Shame, really.