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Interactive Fiction Competition 2001 Results
david.given writes: "The results of the annual text adventure game competition have been posted (remember when the competition started? You've played them, you've voted for them, now see who won. Much kudos go to Jon Ingold, whose game "All Roads" placed first. As someone who didn't come first (33rd, actually) but had a lot of fun anyway, let me extend my warmest thanks and gratitude to everyone who took part. Without you, none of this would be possible."
it's alive and well everyhwere on the 'net
like http://rpgtoolkit.com
try doing a search on home made rpgs or games on the net and you might be suprised.
Luser! TrollMUD (aka Slashdot) is the best text adventure game ever!!!
Michael Loves Me!
remember when we competition started?
Me now confuse?
I'm curious as to how many of 'yall haven't played interactive fiction. I got started back in the Infocom games (with Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy) and still spend some time playing with the competition's results each year.
If you're new to IF and looking for some good games, let me reccomend a few from past year's winners:
The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass of Sherbet (by Graham Nelson) is far and away my all-time favorite short piece of IF (though it still took long enough to get through that I had a great deal of fun -- not *too* short, by a long shot!). Photopia is one I also introduce to friends who are more interested in the artistic/story-telling aspect of IF -- it's a really, really beautiful story.
Forgive the rambling, but if you're new to IF (or have been away for a while), try these games; they really allow one to see how imagination compares favorably to the flashy graphics that all so often leave nothing to it.
Are there any of those nice games for Linux btw.?
david.given thinks "I worked my butt off on my game and it was much, much better than 33rd place. And I think that that Jon Ingold ingrade probably slept his game to the top. I wonder what I could do to get even with those morons so that they will KNOW MY PAIN!
/. them into oblivion!"
"Wait, I know! I'll
The glow of the screen illuminates your fingers.
> FP
I don't know how to 'FP'.
> Post 'FP'
Your post has been received.
Moderator: -1 Offtopic
Moderator: -1 Redundant
Moderator: -1 Overrated
You are dead.
You are sitting at a terminal.
The glow of the screen illuminates your fingers.
>
Having gotten a copy of the original Colossal Cave Adventure with my first PC, I have a soft spot in my heart for such creations, and hope they continue to be created and experienced forever.
I've heard plenty about how the Hugo-winning Harry Potter books are singlehandedly making the printed page fun for kids again. Perhaps the next generation, newly enchanted with textual adventure, will spawn a new surge of popularity for the beleaguered interactive fiction genre.
As someone who didn't come first (33rd, actually)[...]
:)
I wonder how CML2 would've scored in this competition.
One of Infocom's innovations Way Back In The Day was "z-code", a bytecode (much like Java has) that they could distribute their games in with only a platform-specific interpreter that needed to be written for each platform. A great many of these games are still distributed in Z-code form, and thus can be run practically everywhere (even my Palm Pilot!). TADS, another popular language/platform for these games, also has a Unix interpreter available.
There might be others with different interpreters that aren't cross-platform capable, but most (almost all?) of them are.
Just what the galloping shitburger is a *.z5 file? I wanted to download the game and check it out but, well, hehe - what to do with it? Is it compressed?
--jb
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
Nathan
At the risk of seeking buzzwords for the sake of buzzwords, are there interpreters that will run these games via web technologies like HTML (using basic links/forms), Java applets, or Javascript? Having asked the question, I'm not sure that any of the above would actually be more useful to me than a regular interpreter which runs as a Linux application, but I'm still curious.
I'm curious as to how many of 'yall haven't played interactive fiction.
I have, but I've heard they are commonly called "wet dreams".
The fiction part is easy, it's the interaction you don't wanna know about.
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
- XZip. for X-Windows
- WinFrotz for Windows
- MaxZip for Macintosh
- Frotz for DOS, WinCE, Amiga, OS/2, and Psion
- Pilot-Frotz for Palm OS
Run the appropriate interpreter, load the story file, and off you go.Also, the frotz stuff is fairly easy to write games for, so be sure to try your hand at it!
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Shamless self-promotion: The last application I wrote for Windows before I swore off MFC and moved to Linux was a front-end for about ten good text adventures called Adventure Blaster. It's a little dated at this point, but still provides a convenient way for Windows users to play some great games without facing the learning curve of setting up the interpreters. It also has a very extensive help system with walkthroughs and loads of pointers for newbies.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
1. Earth and Sky: Designed to be an interactive fiction version of issue 1 of a super hero comic book. Fun stuff, if you're into the super hero genre.
2. Moments Out of Time: A time travel story, allowing a character to go back in time before an apocolypse and record data for the future. You start the game, choosing from a collection of gadgetry to help you on your mission.
3. No Time To Squeal: Please, no jokes about the title for a second or two. This story (though a bit linear) packs an emotional whallop about a husband, his very pregnant wife, and his psychotic business associate.
Kudos to all of the authors. Personally, I think it was a pretty good year for the IF Comp, but some will argue with me on that point.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
All of these games are built into OS X blackbox.el doctor.el gomoku.elc meese.el solitaire.elc blackbox.elc doctor.elc handwrite.el meese.elc spook.el bruce.el dunnet.el handwrite.elc morse.el spook.elc cookie1.el dunnet.elc hanoi.el morse.elc studly.el cookie1.elc gamegrid.el hanoi.elc mpuz.el studly.elc decipher.el gamegrid.elc landmark.el mpuz.elc tetris.el decipher.elc gametree.el landmark.elc snake.el tetris.elc dissociate.el gametree.elc life.el snake.elc yow.el dissociate.elc gomoku.el life.elc solitaire.el yow.elc
don't mind me, just marking links so I can see them when I get home.
Gotta load some of those on my wife's Palm M105. She'll love 'em!
I'm in the middle of "Lost New York" now and am rather enjoying it, modulo a few annoying bugs in the inventory system. I'd recommend it as a nice example of how text adventures don't have to have anything to do with dungeons and monsters; this one is a mix of history, sightseeing, and puzzle solving.
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.
What if you made a game where you could stamp out chips, then linked them together in a cluster, and...
;)
Yeah, I know it wouldn't help in RL. But, if Slashdot were ever to be made into IF, I suspect that would be one of the steps necessary to complete the game. Probably with chips made out of hot grits stuffed down (and any veteran Slashdotters know the rest)...
Oh, yeah, I remember when it started. I entered the 1995 competition :-)
Be sure to play Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin. There's just about nothing i can say which wouldn't be a spoiler, but the game makes the best use of the IF medium that i've ever seen. It is a kind of genius that simply could not be expressed in a book or movie or anything else.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
I know there's zplet, which is a 'terp in Java. There's an HTML one somewhere, but off-hand I can't remember where. YOu can also play them through TELNET.. lots of fun.
When you're done, check out Adam Cadre's Lost Anaheim Hills. It's good for a chuckle.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Dan Schmidt also used to work there, and has entered the IF competition in the past (see this). Looks like he donated some prizes this year.
Has anyone else with pro game dev experience written IF?
Can someone please explain Rybread Celsius to me. Is this guy for real or what.
i still can't beat Zork. but i'll give the winners a try. next time i'll try to kill the grue.
Me and lunchbox here are going to kick your ass.
Comparing my rankings with the aggregate scores, here's my most overrated:
"To Otherwhere and Back": This game made no sense and was impossible without the walkthrough it was written around.
"The Gostak": Sure, it's neat to rewrite all the error messages in another language, but one needs referents to make sense of things.
"Film at Eleven": It wasn't bad, but it certainly didn't belong in the top ten.
And, conversely, the most underrated:
"Elements": This was the best of the abstract games, none of which fared well in this competition.
"A Night Guest": Sure, it's not epic, but it's well-written and it's fun.
"Best of Three": I suspect the conversation choice system bothered a lot of people, or perhaps they just wanted item puzzles. But this was a great story that had me playing long into the night.
you got modded up for that. that's beautiful!
Canada #2 The greatest faux-USA nation on earth
I played a few of the games from the contest last year, and most of them were great. My favorite was one where you played a djinn (or genie). Instead of operating like a human, the author created a system of movement based on fulfilling your destiny. If you took an action that was contrary to your destiny, you would lose power. Once all your power was gone, you were dead. It was a neat paradigm shift.
anyone know of a dos based software package that will operate as a door to play these things?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
This year's competition had a pretty pathetic group of entrys. Nothing like last year's competition. It seems like most of the reviewers would only recommend you play one five or six of these games.
However If you are a first time player or looking for something with an amazing story check out this winner from the '99 xyzzy awards.
Worlds Apart
----- 70% of all statistics are completely made up.
I remember a great Sopwith Camel flight simulator for the apple that had almost nonexistent graphics, but it behaved basically like a Sopwith Camel. We used to play that game all night.
Our first system came with two games: Adventure (by Softwin I think it said on the floppy?), and Brickout. I never played Brickout much, but we basically played Adventure night and day until we had all solved it.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
Thanks!
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
I've been thinking about picking up a good book for a week or so now -- but a piece of high-quality IF (and Plotkin certainly qualifies) will meet my mindful-entertainment needs just as well.
Thanks!
Scott Adams -- the first professional game designer ("Adventureland", 1978) -- released "Return to Pirate Adventure 2" a couple of years ago.
See this Slashdot article on Adams.
Literacy Weblog http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog
The last entry
52 You Were Doomed From The Start 1.7281 1.42
Thank you. I'll try a few
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
I'm someone who often has trouble understanding abstract, complex, or "artsy-fartsy" plots, but I found All Roads to be thoroughly understandable and very enjoyable. The concept of (*SPOILER*) a story starts with the protagonist's death and then has his consciousness jumping back in time further and further into the past isn't a new one, but it's an interesting one, and All Roads adds some interesting twists to the concept at the end.
...
I didn't find the story to be confusing (not more so than it was intended to be, anyway) until the very very end, and even then things became clear after a few more runthroughs. I just loved trying to screw around with temporal causality and seeing what you could and couldn't get away with. Yes, the game is a bit "linear", but that's because the future has already happened and you can't take any course of actions that won't lead you to that future.
There was some very, very brilliant stuff in the game. At one point, after jumping back in time yet again, you eventually "catch up" with a part of the game you've already experienced and your character automatically repeats whatever you did the first time around, no matter what input you give. That was really creative, especially because you have no idea what's happening at first, but once you figure it out, it's the first point in the game that confirms 100% that you're jumping back in time. Shortly after that, you find out it's a bit more complex than that, and I can't say I have total comprehension of the ending, but I still got a good feeling out of it.
As for your other reviews
"Colours" was pretty silly, yeah, but I found it had a certain bit of charm to it. A nasty bug can keep you from completing the game, and I was hoping for something more than "YOU HAVE WON" at the end, so I wouldn't really recommend wasting time with it unless you're a puzzle freak.
"Gostak": I also henzore bowenqo quit after onpexoz minutes. It might have orze fun if I'd figured out how to ligyung it, but I'm not a damn wezktronyi.
"Silicon Castles": As near as I can tell, this is just a chess game. The title screen has a chess quote, you're in a room with nothing but a genie chess board, and your genie happens to be a chess-playing genie: you didn't think to try actually playing chess? The genie's "brain level" can be adjusted, and I tried playing one game on the easiest level, but even at that level it seemed like victory would require actual skill at winning chess, not just knowledge of the rules, so I quit after one attempt. The dumbest thing was, the game didn't even recognize I was checkmated (and yes, I'm damn sure I was really checkmated -- I had nothing but my king left, surrounded in a corner by two enemy queens and no possible moves) so I had to resign prompting a serve "coward!" taunting from the genie. Maybe there's some form of plot if you beat the genie. I have no idea. People who aren't skilled at chess will never find out, and people who are skilled at chess probably wouldn't want to bother with this game anyway.
"Jump": I played the game to completion. In five minutes. I played it again, just to be sure I hadn't imagined it. What the hell? Here's a complete walkthrough for the game:
1. Find key to locker.
2. Unlock locker.
3. Take gun from locker.
4. At this point (after a few turns of waiting), the game automatically goes into a sequence where (I think) the main character (I think) shoots her (I think) abusive (I think) fater and then (I think) jumps off a cliff.
That's it. That's the game. Sure, there's "fiction", but where's the "interactive" part?
I also tried "Bane of the Builders" which was mildly interesting by very trivial, and "Crusader" which as pretty funny but also didn't have much substance to it.
I'm going to try out "Shattered Memory" now and a few of the others that look promising.