Tonight’s game is Time Secret. It’s a graphic adventure with a time-travel theme. The graphics are kind of interesting. Navigating the game is a little bit clumsy, because Japanese text entry in the 80s is nothing at all like it is today. It’s much smoother and streamlined now, and while I suppose I could get used to it, I would never want to go back to this style of text entry!

I did manage to time travel in the game once, and doing so changed the environment substantially, but I ended up dying before I got around to taking a picture. Maybe I’ll try again some day.

Text and graphic adventures in Japan had several means of interfacing. In my opinion, the worst case scenario is all katakana, by using the katakana directly on the keys. Some used romaji input of the Japanese language, sometimes converting to katakana, sometimes keeping it in romaji. Others used English, although sometimes the words are misspelled or have wild ways of shortening them that you wouldn't possibly know without looking at the manual. Often times games had some common words bound to the F-keys, allowing you to shortcut some typing time.

As time wore on, what became most popular was a menu-driven system, offering a list of choices for action, and often coupled with a pointer so you could choose which item you want to interact with.