Interactive Text Adventures Come To the Kindle

dotarray writes with news that Amazon's Kindle will now play text-based adventure games, such as Zork. From the article: "... And it makes a ridiculous amount of sense: text is gorgeous and easily-readable on the e-ink screens, the lack of color isn’t a problem, and – let’s face it – the sort of people who are likely to buy an e-reader are exactly the sort of people who are likely to love vintage games. ... The developers have also integrated a save-game feature so you can pick up where you left off, using Amazon’s Whispernet feature – and promise that they are looking to put more modern Z-machine games into the system, too. (Squee!) Unfortunately, it’s not perfect. The Zork family of games are notoriously frustrating (even when you’re not eaten by a Grue), and the Kindle’s text entry system doesn’t help with that, especially when entering numbers. A full keyboard would make things more fluid, but – really – if you want that, why not just play on your PC?"

Comments

Re:Inform 7

[SteeldrivingJon]

If nothing else, try the IDE. It's really quite well done. When you click 'Go' it turns the source code into a game, starts the game in one pane of the IDE, generates a map of locations you've defined, etc. There is extensive documentation and examples, including a recipe book of code snippets.

It's available free (as in beer) for Mac, Windows, and (I think) Gnome.

Also, there's a recently-published book about writing games with Inform 7, "Creating Interactive Fiction With Inform 7"

I can has good textadventure?

[SlothDead]

I still have hope that one day, one of the star authors (Stephen King, Ken Follett etc.) will write a "Choose your own Adventure" book, or a text adventure. I mean, the concept is so great, but all we get are "You are the hero fighting the evil wizard" style books.