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Interactive Fiction Competition 2000 Begins

Posted by michael on from the attack-troll-with-sword dept.

karma_policeman writes: "(For those who don't know, the IFcomp is a competition among free, text-based games.) On Oct. 2, judging is scheduled to begin in the 6th annual interactive fiction competition. Anyone can play and judge the entries over the next six weeks. If you enjoyed the old text adventures, you'll likely enjoy the games in the IFcomp. Especially considering the parsers and writing in today's free competition games often surpass those in their commercial ancestors. There are 54 entries in this year's competition; it's well worth your time to take a look at it."

2 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. West of House by Kartoffel · · Score: 5
    You are standing in an open field, with a boarded front door.
    A small mailbox is here.

    > OPEN MAILBOX
    Inside the small mailbox is:
    a leaflet

    > GET LEAFLET
    Taken.

    > READ LEAFLET
    "WELCOME TO SLASHDOT!"

    SLASHDOT is a game of adventure, danger and low cunning. In it you will explre some of the most amazing territory ever seen by mortals. No compter should be without one!

    A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the discussion.
    Your sword has begun to glow very brightly.

    > _

    --

  2. OpenGL killed the TTY star by Chairboy · · Score: 4

    OpenGL Killed the TTY star. Sure, there are cool 3d games out now, but it seems like there aren't really story tellers attached to them. Douglas Adams, for instance, worked with hoards of sweaty programmers to diagram a fabulously addictivt text game, hhgttg. His last attempt, however (Starship Titanic), was basically a modern attempt at the same thing, but not as good because they had to paste graphics onto it to get the attention of the 30 second attention span crowds to be commercially successful

    I say, throw down your 3d games of oppression! Throw down your Quakes, your Half Lifes, and get yourself some Leather Goddess of Phobos! Get some Zork, get some Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy! Hell, get Adventure!

    Hello, Sailor!

    The babel fish sails across the room and into an open waste hatch!

    Anyone can make not tea, access denied!

    HIT THORBAST WITH SWORD!

    See? It's all there, all in those little characters, many of you can probably remember where those lines are from.

    If anything, a true geek should marvel at the efficiency of a text based game. After all, wouldn't you say that compressing a vivid picture of Joe's Bar or a Vogon Airlock into 100 bytes (in the form of the character description) is incredible?