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2004 Interactive Fiction Results

Posted by Zonk on from the go-W-young-man dept.

silent_knight writes "Early in October, the 2004 Interactive Fiction competition began. The results are now in! Be sure to check out some of this year's best entries: Luminous Horizon, Blue Chairs, All Things Devours, Magocracy, and Murder at the Aero Club. All entries (and interpreters) can be downloaded together for Windows and the Mac from the download page." As mentioned in the previous story, Linux support for these games is also easily available.

5 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Long live the Z-machine by murderlegendre · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wiled away a lot of hours in my youth playing the classic Infocom games. It really warms my heart to see this format prospering _twenty years_ later. You can get a Z-machine interpreter for just about anything, from Athlon64 to PalmOS.

    I wonder if any of the tradtional 'printed page' literary organizations will ever embrace I.F. as a legitmate form of literature, be it prose, poetry or just 'other'? Perhaps a Pulitzer for 'Best work of Interactive Fiction?

    --
    There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
  2. Great IF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I haven't played this years crop yet, but some of the past winners are amazing.

    A must run: Photopia (Winner 1998) http://adamcadre.ac/photopia.html - not another D&D type adventure, that's for sure

    1. Re:Great IF by Euro · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Oh yes! Photopia! Great stuff. I've never been a great fan of interactive fiction (mainly because Zork and its sequels constantly stumped me when I played them on the venerable C64), but Photopia was truly an experience. I remember getting the chills when I finished it.

      The great thing about Photopia is that for one, its puzzles are always obvious. So much so, that most of the time they don't even classify as traditional IF puzzles. There are some gems, however. Especially the IF mainstay, a maze, is done simply beautifully. Photopia focuses completely on story and that is a Good Thing by all accounts.

      Another great (but very different) piece of IF is Winchester's Nightmare by Nick Montfort. I also enjoyed Narcolepsy (also by Adam Cadre and winner of the 2003 XYZZY award for best writing), although I never finished it.

  3. Teaching Aid by micah_gideon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Has anyone out there ever tried to use Interactive Fiction to teach English as a foreign language? If so, how did you do it and did it work?

  4. Re:Blue Chairs should have won by Sigma+7 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Luminous Horizon is a well-polished game, but it's the third part of a superhero series and the story is nothing new. The most interesting part about it is the way it handles switching characters and hints.
    Actually, that isn't the problem with Luminous Horizon. The main complaint produced by the people that hated the game was that the game felt much too short and railroaded. In particular, almost all of the puzzles (save one or two) can be auto-solved by talking to the other character.

    The only manipulatable object would be the gizmos - they appear to be intended to solve one of the puzzles, but it turns out that they aren't really needed.

    Blue Chairs is far more interesting. It's hard to summarize, but it starts out with a drug trip at a party that turns into a dream sequence. Even if that's not your thing, it allows for some amazing writing. Highly recommended.
    Blue Chairs did have a somewhat weak beginning, and perhaps was a bit too wierd for some of the judges. The group of people that didn't like the game most likely didn't understand the concept or message behind the game.

    After seeing the comments after the results were announced, I ended up liking the game - however, this was after the 2 hour rating session where I was placing my focus on the puzzle aspects (which were trumped by All That Devours).

    There was one game that was widly considerd to be underrated: "Goose, Egg, Badger", as it's puzzles relating to interesting use of vocabulary (which I and some others didn't notice until judging was finished.) One other underrated game "PTBAD 3" was supposed to be a satire of bad text-adventures, but almost nobody understood that it was a satire - but even an improved rating wouldn't bring it past average.

    (Not sure why the OP suggested "Murder at the Aero Club" and "Magocracy" - those were actually average and there didn't seem to be any visible reason why it should have been higher.)