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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."
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.
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.
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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.
There are several interpreters available for Linux - just do a bit of searching. And the game files are the same across systems.
As someone who didn't come first (33rd, actually)[...]
:)
I wonder how CML2 would've scored in this competition.
try doing a search on home made rpgs or games on the net and you might be suprised.
If anything it's depressing that the homebrew crowd has wasted so much time making hackneyed medieval and science fiction role playing games. One would expect grassroots movements to go off in wonderful new directions.
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
- 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.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.
Infocom ``z-machine'' version 5. Interpreters are avilable for just about any platform you can think of. As usual, Google has a fairly complete list of what's out there.
Frotz and Zip are popular choices. I personally use Malyon in XEmacs...
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
When you're done, check out Adam Cadre's Lost Anaheim Hills. It's good for a chuckle.
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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?
How are they wasting their time? Does making games you don't like invalidate the effort or skill that went into creating them?
Or, more appropriately, what other sort of RPG would you expect someone to make..
The concept of an RPG is fine, but what people create in that genre is banal. They're creating the equivalent of what Star Trek is to science fiction.
Um, in some geek circles Star Trek is the epitome of science fiction. And some people like handmade quilts over fleece throws. And some people really think the new VW Beetle is worth $5k more than comparable cars from Toyota. Some people prefer Western novels, some prefer pulp romance. Some people swear Mapplethorpe is an artistic genious, others see only dirty smut. We're talking aesthetics and subjectivity here, all we can have then are opinions, not facts.
I do not have a signature
Um, in some geek circles Star Trek is the epitome of science fiction.
True. What's funny is that *every* award winning science fiction author dislikes Star Trek with a passion, because it is just so bloody *terrible* on so many levels.
(Hackneyed themes are hardly unknown in "professionally" developed games. I'm sure many readers can come up with their own examples.)
how to invest, a novice's guide
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...
Zplet has moved, because pond.com's suckitude is increasing without bounds. (Without warning, they installed a new server some weeks ago, didn't restore the data on the old one, killed all the shell accounts, and didn't so much as inform their users afterwards...).
New location is http://www.speakeasy.org/~russotto/zplet/ifol.html
Also, I've finally made some file releases of the sourceforge ZPlet stuff so you can put ZPlet on your own page without messing with CVS.
The last entry
52 You Were Doomed From The Start 1.7281 1.42
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.