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2004 Interactive Fiction Results
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.
There's a Firefox extension called Gnusto that lets you play these games from your browser. Have fun : )
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Here is the article announcing the beginning of the competition. May be interesting.
> BUY HALF-LIFE 2
You cannot buy Half-Life 2. You can only rent it.
> RENT HALF-LIFE 2
You download a Steam client and supply your FrobozzcoCard number.
> PLAY HALF-LIFE 2
You cannot play Half-Life 2 on this computer without signing into your Steam account.
> LOGIN STEAM
You punch in your account information, but because you're in a little white house in the middle of nowhere, the computer's modem dials up the nearest internet provider and the game begins to download.
> WAIT
Time passes...
4.9 gigabytes remaining. (5.4k/s)
> WAIT
Time passes...
4.9 gigabytes remaining. (5.4k/s)
Your blood pressure just went up. (Oh, wait, this only *feels* like you're stuck in "Bureaucracy". Your blood pressure is actually just fine.)
> WAIT
Time passes...
4.9 gigabytes remaining. (5.4k/s)
Your UPS battery is fading.
> TURN OFF MONITOR
You turn off the monitor to conserve power. The only light is the "RD" light on the modem - a solid, but feeble, red. Clever.
> WAIT
Time passes...
You really think you can press "W" more often than I can tell you that Time Passes? I'm the computer here, remember? But have it your way - we'll skip a the next nine days.
> WAIT
Time passes...
It is dark. You are still unlikely to be eaten by a headcrab.
Grues, however, are another story
*** You have died ***
Your score is 0/150 (Victim of improperly-conducted usability study). Would you like to try again?
I played the first two when the winners were announced (because I was too lazy to judge this year).
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.
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.
It would be great if anybody who has tried one of these games could post something to give us an idea about it. "Luminous Horizons" is the only one I found with a README; it's a superhero adventure done in comic book style. http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/compe tition2004/glulx/eas3/eas3info.txt
My personal favorite from the IF Archive is Christminster, a quirky Pynchon-esque conspiracy puzzle. Reviews for this game (and more) are in Baf's Guide to the IF Archive:
http://wurb.com/if/
Oh, crap.
Anyway, here's Eric the Power-Mad Dongeon Master,
a z-code game that follows a night of D&D gone awry.
There are a few bugs, I guess, but folks say it's fun to play.
I like how they show the results as a histogram of ratings. This makes it easy to distinguish a game that everyone thought was mediocre from one that a lot of people liked, but a lot of others didn't. I wish imdb, iblist, and all the other similar sites would do the same.
These things never die man, they just grow old and read email in Korea.
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.