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Interactive Fiction Competition 2002 Underway
An anonymous reader writes "The games of the 2002 Annual Interactive Fiction Competition are now available from the IF Archive. Visit it or ifcomp.org
to download the games."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
You be the judge.
I was born around the same time as interactive fiction. Which means that I was way too young to play it, and when I grew old enough to own a computer, the genre had already disapeared from the shelves. So, there's no sentimental, "remember-the-good-ol'-days" value for me in IF.
I discovered the genre at the same time as I discovered Linux, back in around 1996. Among the few games that shipped by default with, what was it at that time? RedHat, I guess, were a few classic Scott Adams (not the Dilbert author!) games. As soon as I tried them, I didn't completely... dislike them. I liked the idea, and I love to explore and draw maps, but they were too much of the (what I learned afterwards) "guess the verb" category, something that is rightly considered a major flaw in modern IF. So, I went on to other activities, and another Linux I installed later didn't contain them, so I forgot about IF (I didn't even know the term).
Then, somehow, I remembered them in 1998, and decided to give them a second shot. Looking on the web (was I still using Altavista? wow), I found not only them, but also other, seemingly better ones. So I downloaded Theatre (a good fantastic/horror game) and finished it straight. Man that was good! And from then on, I was hooked.
There's something in (good) IF you don't find in modern, 3D-graphics games: substance, content, plot, atmosphere, characters, adult themes (not that kind of adult - though such games exist, too).
Theatre and Anchorhead are two excellent horror games. The latter is simply the best game in the Lovecraftian genre - seriously, I mean it.
Worlds Apart is an excellent SF game. By SF, I mean Science-Fiction (with capitals), as in "the author created a whole new and fascinating universe for this game", and the prime motivation of the game is actually discovering it... and yourself.
Spider and Web, an excellent spy story, is told in way that is one of the most innovative I've seen. Used in a movie, a la "Usual Suspects", it would be excellent, but this is even more magnified in a gaming setting.
Most of the games by Adam Cadre are excellent too, from Photopia, which is an almost puzzleless game that left me astonished once I finished, to the excellent Varicella (read the intro of the game on his site, you'll understand I hope), I-0 (hot, hot) and Shrapnel (what a crazy storytelling - not for newcomers), it seems this guys only produces goodness.
Same goes for other people like Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin, but I haven't played their games yet, so I can't comment.
Babel (the second game I played) is an excellent thriller-like game, in which you are trapped in a somewhat devastated Antartic scientific station, and try to understand what went wrong... and who you are.
I could and should go on and on... I like playing games, but foremostly, I love to read - science-fiction, like a lot of the geeks around, though I don't mind some more classical books. IF marries the gaming and the litterature together, and has offered me emotions that I never thought I would experience in front of a PC; I'm more used to them in front of a theatre screen or with some dead-tree in my hand.
How many times have you been in bed, thinking again and again to the game you just finished (tetris-mares don't count!), pondering life, the universe and everything?
Damn, I can't believe I've just written all this incoherent stuff - I wish I was a good writer, and able to sum this up in a few brilliant sentences. Well, here's a shitty conclusion: IF can be great, go try some good one! (you have to see it for yourself, and so on)