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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."
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.
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.
Nathan
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.
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.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
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.
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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.