Yeah, I’ve been around since text adventures weren’t retro.  I played (and beat) the Zork games when they were new.  I’ve played MUDs and Moria.  The last thing I expected to be doing last night on my PS3 was cruising around an ASCII map as an asterisk.  But I did.

Keep reading to find out about Caverns of the Bandit King and why it’s more important than you might think…It’s a funny story, really.  I was going to the Playstation Store and one of my kids said something and I looked over as I thought I was clicking the store icon, but I accidentally launched Playstation Home.  I hadn’t been in Home since their new Xi game had launched within Home.  I say “within” because it really is within Playstation Home.  It’s sort of a proof-of-concept game that dances around the fourth wall in a more clever way than I’d given it credit for.

It was pretty clear to me that Xi was intended to show (especially) third party developers a lot of different things they could do within Playstation Home and to their credit, they’re doing things I’ve not seen done in other Home areas.  In a nutshell, Xi is a long drawn out ARG where people are artificially paced and forced to go through a lot of side missions/games to collect items or learn information toward some final goal of unraveling a mystery (I’m not interested in spoiling anything about Xi, so I’m avoiding all the plot info here.)  This sounds incredibly boring until you realize that a lot of what they have you doing is, well… not so bad at all.  I found some of the activities to actually be fun.  None of them I’ve played yet have been hard by any means…  all you folks that beat Ninja Gaiden and Killzone 2 on the hardest skill levels?  Yeah, you’ll probably want to go somewhere else…  you’re not going to get that kind of experience in Home.  In fact, many aspects of Xi could almost be considered a “participation game” where you’ll eventually get through it.  The way I look at it though is that if you’re entertained at the end of the day, that’s good enough.

I’m new to Xi and as such I haven’t opened many things (again, the pacing is intentional) but I’ve played an arcade racer that reminded me of the classic game Space Harrier (minus the shooting, there was no shooting), I’ve played some brain teaser/puzzle games via the PS3 web browser (Xi has you do some internet sleuthing as well and pops the browser up so you never have to leave Home – wow, you know someone at Sony is waiting to use that phrase once Home becomes more feature filled.)  Finally, last night, the last game I tried was the text adventure Caverns of the Bandit King.

I never intended to play Caverns of the Bandit King when I realized it was a text adventure, but I noticed how they cleverly avoided having to type and thought I’d give their interface a shot.  Somehow, the green monochrome text hit me square in whatever part of my body controls nostalgia.  I read the intro to the game.  I felt I could still easily resist playing.  Then when the game started, I wanted to see how truly horrible the game was so I played for a couple minutes.  Sure, the game is simple and after finishing it, I’m not terribly sure you could even lose (short of quitting) but I felt… good while playing it.  While it wasn’t a blatant copy of anything I’d played, it made me fondly think of those games.

CotBK wasn’t terribly long, but I ended up playing to completion and earning my “fragment piece” which I’m assuming puts me one step closer to solving some larger mystery that I don’t even know about yet.  As a proof of concept, the many varied areas of Xi seem to be a success.  I was playing on a Tuesday night and there were a LOT of people in every area I attended.  Thankfully a lot of the areas have interactive devices (web terminals, Holopods, computers, etc.) that you do NOT have to wait in line for like the arcade machines in the bowling alley… you can just walk up to an in-use machine and go into your own instance.  I encourage anyone that hasn’t completely written Playstation Home off to go into Xi with an open mind and not only look at it for what it is, but for what it might be the precursor to when all the creative minds from your favorite development houses decide to buy into Playstation Home.

Hey, you know that spoiler-free promise?  I lied… there aren’t any fish to catch.  Don’t waste your time…

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