Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Hullo! These e-mails keep on coming. Some highly-edible-sounding chap called Stephen mails news with news that Interactive Fiction Competition 2009 has started judging. That means that the – oooh! – upwards of 20 games can be downloaded by anyone, and then voted on by anyone with fingers still able to interact with a computer keyboard (i.e. Not Kieron, whose fingers were amongst the first things to go. They’re so moreish!). If you’re looking for opinions on them… well, last time around, Kieron linked to Emily Short’s blog as a good source for that kind of thing. So I’ll do it too. Seriously, this games journo thing is as easy as taking candy (and their tiny, defenceless heads) from babies. Toodles!

This is really neat. Picked up from Indie Games. They had Jim Munroe go to GDC with a press-pass and write up his experiences in the form of a text adventure. It’s actually more of a text-based game than a text adventure (i.e. you shouldn’t be having any problems with the parser as long as you REMEMBER the instructions at the start), and actually somewhat splendid. You can play it online in Java here, for the java-hating here and for those who use an IF interpreter, its actual code is here. And some more explanation follows…
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The mysterious Bill sends this to us this, though worries it may prompt “Old” comments from the thread. We fear not people who say Old, because we have the delete function. It’s Champion of Guitars. It’s Guitar Hero… but Interactive Fiction. It may be satire. Go play!

Yeah, screenshots totally don’t work with Interactive Fiction, do they?

The IF Comp 2008 awards‘ results were announced a couple of days back. It’s… well, I don’t pretend to be anything other than a casual observer of gaming’s one true art-subculture, but seeing their yearly competitions is something which always makes me happy, even if I barely touch any of the actual games. That said, I was following Emily Short’s takes on the entrants, and given her rep, I wasn’t surprised that her three stand out games ended up comprising the top three (Albeit not in her chosen order). Namely: Violet, Nightfall and Everybody Dies. I’ll try and give the two runners up a proper play in the next few days, but here’s my take on the victor. It’s really rather neat.
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The 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is well under way, with simple downloads to get you all the games and all the interpreters you’ll need, in two easy bundles, as well as on bittorrent.

There’s 35 games in the finals, and once you’ve signed up you can contribute to judging them. So go take a look, and let us know your impressions. Cheers to Erlend for reminding us about this.

There’s more Interactive Fiction in the world than there are mad hobos, but Aisle stands out as both an approachable entry point to the form and as a fascinating, deeply affecting experiment in its own right. It’s from way back in 1999, so I can’t hope to defend against snotty cries of “OLD!”, but I’m guessing few of you will have played it. More of you should.
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As it happens, I’ve recently been playing some Infocom text adventures. Guess what: Infocom were really rather good. Guess what else: there was one rather significant game they never released. And you can play some of it.

In a remarkable find by waxy.org (linked via the magics of QT3), amongst a complete archive of Infocom’s work is the game Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to one of the most famous and adored IF games of all time, Adams’ own Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. This was discovered on the somehow aquired “complete backup of Infocom’s shared network drive from 1989.”

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Writing about interactive fiction is always dangerous, because the hardcore IF crowd immediately appear to abuse you for liking something that’s merely a derivative of Galtaria VI or something that you’re supposed to have played if you want to be in their gang. Well guys, I’m not in your gang, and if I appreciate playing a game, then you can all live with that. There – I told them.

With that established, I strongly recommend you put aside forty-five minutes to play Photopia. Adam Cadre’s game won first place in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition, and comes to my attention now thanks to the ever excellent Play This Thing. It may well have come to your attention when it was mentioned in Kieron’s IF feature. Also, it features space, and this is SPACE WEEK!

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You may notice that today has had a certain Obscurity-heavy vibe. And, if that pun-heavy title hasn’t informed you, that’s not going to change with this post. I suspect we’re trying to pick up the slack as Simon Carless of Game Set Watch goes to guest edit Kotaku for a week, leaving Karsden Mörderhäschen from Schadenfreude Interactive to guest edit Game Set Watch. We expect this trend to sweep across the blogosphere, and predict that Bill Dubious Quality will take a sabatical week to be with Rock Band, allowing Leigh SexyVideogameLand to cheerily disturb his readers with things she’s thought about a lot involving SpaceOrifices or something. Oh – and she’ll leave her net home in the hands of the sorely-missed Only Serious Student of Videogaming, Francesco Poli, returning from wherever he is to tell people about his favourite mildly right-wing sex fantasies.

Where was I? Oh yeah:

This year’s IF prize has been announced.. While voting was tight away from the top spot, the run-away winner was Lost Pig by Admiral Jota. We hope he’s sitting down and singing about Gold Medals tonight. All the entries are still available to download, obv.

Ironically over-convoluted headline out of the way, this follows neatly on from the Text In Games feature. Especially because Mike Rubins dropped me a line about Vespers 3D because of it. It even ties into my note in the comments thread that it’d be interested if more developers looked for Interactive Fiction for more inspiration of story and structure. Because that’s exactly what Vespers 3D is.

IF aficionado will recall Vespers as winner of the 2005 IFComp as well as receiving multiple awards at the XYZZY ceremonies. What Mike and his team is doing is adapting the game for the most serious attempt at a text-adventure/First-person shooter hybrid since the immortal Typing Of The Dead.

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