small request

hey! right, i have a small request... im sure most of you must have made a text adventure at some point. i however have yet to. i been playing with opengl stuff for a while then kinda stopped programming for a few months, now getting back into it. i need a project to get started on. i made a (terrible!) 2d space battle game a while back, pong, 3/4''s of a breakout clone and a few other 2d shooting games. nothing great. but anyhows, i was gonna clean up the code for the 2d space battle game, started cleaning, woah! most of it i dont understand (yes, i did comment it, lots) but the methods i used to do some things was errr, stupid, long, untidy etc.. and i think it would be almost impossible to clean up. so prehaps i should start another game. well, i have a rough idea of how a text adventure could work... my rough idea being that the player position can be stored in a 2d array to keep track of where the player has been and where is is able to go next and so the game knows what room file to load. then live/energy etc.. and the inventory can be stored in a text file and loaded etc.. (quick question: say the player picks up an object from a room, if they return to the room then the object wont be there. but as the object would be written to the room file, would it mean that each time a room is left, the room file has to be rewritten with the object taken out (assuming it was taken)? and likewise if an object is dropped in a room) i got a rough idea as you can see. now, if any of you could possibly point me in the direction of some of your text adventure games for me to play to get to grips with it. (dont want source code, just the game) thanks for your time, alan