Suggestions for text adventure games

So I just played through The Warbler's Nest after this week's Worth Reading feature and decided I wouldn't mind giving text-based adventure games a more serious go. I've never really played any before so I'm officially soliciting suggestions for good ones. There sure are a lot of them out there and I don't really want to sift through the bad ones. I think the Zork and Adventure games are the most obvious suggestions. Anyone have anything beyond this?

The Ace Attorney series is amazing. Great localization, great humor, great characters, compelling stories, great music, nice puzzles... the game's are just fantastic (even the "worst" ones in the series). There's also Nine Hours, Nine Persons and Nine Doors which has a crazy story, but can be a bit divisive as well. Both of these are for the Nintendo DS.

@uber_skedy: The Lurking Horror is really creepy! I played it for a while. I should pick it back up...I would recommend "cheating" with a map you can find online though. There's challenging, but then there's just annoying. :-)

@FluxWaveZ: I think you misunderstood what type of text adventure the OP is talking about. :-)

@FluxWaveZ: I would like to second the Ace Attorney nods. The visual novel genre is a nice intermediate step between text and adventure games. They strip out the character movement for menu's and avoid being pixel-hunts or suffer from tenuous logic.

@wewantsthering said:

@FluxWaveZ: I think you misunderstood what type of text adventure the OP is talking about. :-)

I guess so? The ones I listed are text based adventure games, so I guess it would have helped me to be more specific. 999's more of a Visual Novel, though.

If you have an iPhone or iPad, especially if you have a wireless keyboard, I highly recommend download Frotz. Most classics are playable that way. Some suggestions (outside of the obvious Zork, all of which are awesome):

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (yeah, there was a text adventure, and it was great)

Planetfall

A Mind Forever Voyaging

Leather Goddesses of Phobos (if you want a little sexy in your text)

Photopia

Spider and Web

http://www.1up.com/features/top-5-interactive-fiction-games All of these are pretty good introductions. It's been awhile since I've played these but they should still hold up.

http://ifdb.tads.org/ This is also a good place to go and just search around.

Hugo's House of Horrors

Its a graphical text adventure.

You still type in commands such as GET KEY, but it shows what you are doing with graphics.

Awesome! Thanks duders for all the suggestions, I think that's the rest of my weekend taken care of.

@wewantsthering the Lurking Horror sounds interesting, I've got a softspot for horror fiction and grid paper, seems like a good place to start.

@FluxWaveZ said:

@wewantsthering said:

@FluxWaveZ: I think you misunderstood what type of text adventure the OP is talking about. :-)

I guess so? The ones I listed are text based adventure games, so I guess it would have helped me to be more specific. 999's more of a Visual Novel, though.

They aren't though really because they're graphics driven right? I don't think they're really classified as text adventures are they? I may just be missing something, but they seemed like a different genre to me.

http://www.xyzzynews.com/ is a good spot to check out for a large variety of content quickly. Specifically I would recommend looking at games made by Adam Cadre, Andrew Plotkin, and Emily Short. Don't bother with Zork unless you are interested in history. Early Infocom has some terrible puzzles and a shallow parser.

Yeah, fuck Zork. I said it.

I recently played through You Find Yourself In A Room, and I thought it was pretty damn good!