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2004 IF Competition Games Available
An anonymous submitter writes "For the last ten years, the readers of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction have held a yearly interactive fiction competition. For fans of the old Infocom games as well as for newcomers to the genre, the competition is a chance to enjoy some of the best short adventure games available anywhere. And now, this year's entries are finally available for public testing. Visit IFcomp.org to download the games and interpreters for all of your favorite platforms. For the next six weeks, judges will play, score, and review." The website explains Windows and Mac installation pretty well; you'lll have to figure it out on your own for Linux but there is plenty of help available (i.e., "apt-cache search infocom" for Debian).
I would just like to note that the IF community is still going strong, still maintaining its IF-specific programming platforms (see TADS 3, Glulx, Inform, Hugo), and have even published books (Inform Designer's Manual, Inform Beginner's Guide, Twisty Little Passages) and has a theoretical analysis book in the works for future publishing. If you're looking for a game, stop by http://www.wurb.com/if/ or check out the archive at http://www.ifarchive.org/ where all of the free games and interpreters are there to be downloaded for free. Visit rec.arts.int.fiction or rec.games.int.fiction if you want to discuss building or playing games and if you're really in need of an IF fix, stop by the ifMUD at ifmud.port4000.com:4000.
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Modern IF tends to avoid such problems (and also things like mazes, hunger puzzles, etc). There's an annoying bit of a trend toward "puzzleless" IF, but there's still lots of good new IF that incorporates puzzles but doesn't have the "traditionally annoying" factor.
For what it's worth, by the standards of modern IF, all of these things would be considered design flaws. The games that win the annual Comp, especially, tend to play fair and usually have puzzles that are both logical and well integrated into the storyline.
There are two main IF platforms (TADS 2/3 and Infocom/Inform/Z-Code/Glulx). As you can see in the list of IFComp entrants, most games are written using one of these two, and most discussion on r.a.i-f is about one of these two.
There are also several second-tier platforms (Hugo and Adrift for example), which attract less people, but have enough followers to survive. They are usually less discussed on r.a.i-f (except for the occasionnal whats-the-best-platform flamefests) but often have dedicated forums where fans gather. They attract a slightly different bunch of people than TADS/Inform/r.a.i-f, for example it looks like Adrift attracts people more in interested in quick-n-easy graphical development.
Then there are many other platforms, either older ones that have done their time, or platforms that never really took off. Alan was in this tier, but is right now going back to second tier, with a new major version in the works after several years without updates.
Overall, the reason there are so many platforms is that there is no commercial competition, and that several (if not many) people enjoy writing their own platforms (a not uncommon subject of discussion on r.a.i-f). A handful of fans is enough to have games produced for a platform and sometimes submitted to IFComp, so every year or so you are in the need to download an exotic interpreter of some sort.
That said, note that judges do not have to play all the games, especially those for which there's no interpreter on their OS. Playing five games is the minimum to become a judge, and as you can see, a TADS and a Z-Code interpreter are more than enough to cover that.