1. regexes were could be maybe only dreamt of when you were doing programming,
   
2. and they were heavily bound to the Unix way. (Now they aren't; it's such an useful and mighty tool that they are available under nearly every language and nearly every platform. Nearly.)
   

I'd played the Crowther-Woods "Adventur" game - sometimes referred to as Colossal Caves - on an old Cifer computer running under CP/M rather than MS-DOS, and I was delighted to get my hands on the version of it that Level 9 wrote. I thoroughly enjoyed that and its two sequels, Adventure Quest and Dungeon Adventure. Another superb game of theirs was Lords of Time, which I played through a number of times.

Level 9 had a knack of writing games which were testing but not stupidly obscure. I remember one text-only adventure game where, to get the crucial piece of equipment (a key) you had to smell a flower, whereupon the pollen would make you sneeze, and when you whipped your hanky out of your pocket, the key would come with it. But you couldn't find the key by Searching your Pocket, oh no, much too simple! *Grrrrr!* That sort of stupidity really used to wind me up.

There were two early high-level programming languages. Fortran stood for FORmula TRANslator, and was for the maths-biased uses, and I was told that Cobol (which I never knew anything about) was for business and admin uses. The only low-level language I ever tried was Assembler Language, but I never got very far with it.

I believe Colossal Caves and Zork were the first two computer games to get widespread attention. I'm not sure which was around first, but I found Colossal in the mid 1980's. I never played Zork, though - more's the pity. I would have liked to have a decent crack at it, but it needed a bigger computer than any I ever had access to, and by the time I had one, Zork had been superceded by games I preferred.

The original Crowther-Woods adventure game, Colossal Caves, did have one outstanding use for the designers of the very early computer chips such as were used in the Sinclair Spectrum and the Oric. If you could play the game and finish it successfully, your new chip had been properly designed.

I always reckoned that Eye of the Beholder 2 (The Legend of Darkmoon - came out in the early 1990's) was the only "first person view" RPG that got close to Might & Magic 3. That and its predecessor (Eye of the Beholder) were designed by Westwood Studios, but they handed over the design for EOB3 (Assault on Myth Drannor) to some other people who weren't nearly as good. No EOB4 was ever made.

The other one, which I thought was a total waste of time and effort, was the way that areas respawned automatically when you left them. I don't know about you, but I tend to select one area as "home base". In MM6 it is usually New Sorpigal, in MM7 it has to be Harmondale, and in MM8 it is usually Alvar. Whichever one I picked in the Wizardry games, I had to fight my way through it whenever I returned, and that got to be both a bore and a distraction from what I was trying to do.

The thing that I liked about the Eye of the Beholder games was that I could import my party from one game into the next. There was one point in EoB2 where you could regenerate a whole series of monsters (demons, IIRC) by closing a door, and I once spent I don't know how long regenerating and killing them to get my party up to the point at which the wizard and priest could learn the top spells - like Time Stop - in EoB3. It was very satisfying to find out what the Dark God actually looked like! But at any level, he was a lot easier to dispose of then Dran Draggore at the end of EOB2.

There isn't anything bad about the map in the Heroes game. It's not inherently worse, and it's not inherently better, it's just different. My personal preference is that I would rather travel from place to place across real country than along a map, but I'm fine with anyone who prefers otherwise. Wouldn't it be boring if we all liked the same thing?