2004 Interactive Fiction Results 132
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.
Play In Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Play In Firefox (Score:2)
Re:Play In Firefox (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, downloading them and playing from the local copy is the probably the best idea. Or you could kill time by writing your own games (the language is called Inform and is pretty straightforward OO).
Re:Inform (Score:3, Informative)
Inform homepage [inform-fiction.org]
Re:Play In Firefox (Score:2)
Re:Play In Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Play In Firefox (Score:4, Informative)
Link to the original article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:China: Do Not Upload These Works to the Interne (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:and if you are interested in playing the classi (Score:2)
But for all IF noobs out there: do not play these first. This link takes you to the now-free Zork series. They are the "grandparents" of all interactive fiction (with Colossal Cave being the great-grandfather).
The point is that modern IF is generally story-driven. There is an actual plot and generally other characters involved. The Zork series is known as a "dugeon crawl." The location descriptions are quite im
Re:Best interactive fiction? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Best interactive fiction? (Score:2)
The issue isn't that HL2 is an FPS; if someone made a graphical game with anywhere near the literary depth of the stuff that's coming into IF annually, it'd be pretty impressive. Instead we keep getting Neuromancer rehashes and space operas.
Long live the Z-machine (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?
Re:Long live the Z-machine (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably not. The whole point of celebrating an artist is to commend the choices he/she made. The whole point of IF is to give choices to the player. Granted, there's still a lot of decisions when you write a game, but not to the degree that pre-written fiction has
That's not to say
Re:Long live the Z-machine (Score:3, Insightful)
Pre-written authors need ultimately only follow one timeline where everthing happens in sequence; IF authors have to anticipate the player performing actions at any given time under different situations, and account for that. (Has the player got the dingus to go through the puzzle door? Has he talked to NPC #2 and subseque
Re:Long live the Z-machine (Score:1)
Re:Long live the Z-machine (Score:2)
I just started playing Bedlam today, and it's really great. Very atmospheric steampunk scenario, and some quite clever coding I imagine.
Re:Long live the Z-machine (Score:1)
Re:Long live the Z-machine (Score:2)
Re:Long live the Z-machine (Score:2)
Moreover, even the best IF suffers from the inability to do any and every plausible action, and likely will for a long, long time. You can go up to the clerk, bu
Re:Long live the Z-machine (Score:1)
Re:Long live the Z-machine (Score:1)
I've authored and played lots of RPG "scenarios", adventures and camapigns, as well as written ordinary fiction and to some extent also computer games.
Writing a fixed story takes _far_ less work than authoring an interactive scenario.
When allowing for player/reader to make real choises you have to have a much more solid story, you have fewer tricks to use and you have to cover a lot more ground "just in case".
Re:Long live the Z-machine (Score:2, Insightful)
Probably not. The whole point of celebrating an artist is to commend the choices he/she made. The whole point of IF is to give choices to the player.
This was a very relevant comment, but it brings up another point.
There are numerous instances of art, in which the viewer is allowed to take their own path to the presentation. This can be as basic as the angle from which we choose to view a painting or sculpture, or as technical as an installation that contains audio / video / kinetics, and alows one to
Re:Long live the Z-machine (Score:1)
Nothing wrong with that, but some IF really isn't "games" anymore. By that I don't mean it's "something better", just that it's got little to do with, say, the rather formulaic in-jokey mock transcripts you see posted here. Even so, this story-oriented and/or experimental IF still functions along much the same lines as a "Zork"-style dungeon rom
Re:Long live the Z-machine (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Long live the Z-machine (Score:1)
And not only that, you can actually write and compile them on just about any machine too! I had some fun with my Psion Revo a while back...
Re:Long live the Z-machine (Score:1)
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if
In the 80s, some librarians and middle-school teachers embraced IF as a way to get kids interested in reading. That's fine with me, but I prefer to look at IF as a genre of its own, with its own aesthetics and critial vocabulary.
Somebody has to.... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Somebody has to.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Somebody has to.... (Score:1, Insightful)
In Korea, only old people make up new memes. [slashdot.org]
Hell, someone's added it to the slashdot wikipedia entry already.
Re:Somebody has to.... (Score:2, Funny)
"In Soviet Russia, Korean old people are for YOU!"
God, I feel dirty, now.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Funny)
Hopefully, the cross-reference will create a memetic explosion that takes out both cliches at the same time.
Hopefully.
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Funny)
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Re:Somebody has to.... (Score:2)
`In Soviet Russia, Korean old people are for YOU ... in Japan.'
Re:Somebody has to.... (Score:2)
1) Profit!
2) ???
3) All your Korean old people belong to us!
Wow. Four memes in one post. Is there one that I forgot?
Great IF (Score:3, Interesting)
A must run: Photopia (Winner 1998) http://adamcadre.ac/photopia.html [adamcadre.ac] - not another D&D type adventure, that's for sure
Re:Great IF (Score:2, Interesting)
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 s
Re:Great IF (Score:2)
Along the same lines of story-focused IF capable of giving the chills I'd also recommend Shade [eblong.com]. It's also fairly brief and can be traversed in a relatively short time.
Re:Great IF (Score:2)
I can also heartily recommend spider and web [eblong.com] by Andrew Plotkin. More of a traditional puzzler, but with nice plot and NPCs.
Half-Life 2 in ASCII! (Score:5, Funny)
> 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?
Celebrate the future, but remember the past (Score:2, Informative)
This is the game t
Re:Celebrate the future, but remember the past (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Celebrate the future, but remember the past (Score:1)
Re:Celebrate the future, but remember the past (Score:2)
A great game, although getting a Babel Fish was a pain, and the parts being trapped in the dark were frustrating. As was failing to feed the dog at the start, and then getting half way through and being eaten by said dog because it was
Re:Celebrate the future, but remember the past (Score:2)
Oh yeah???
Well, in the movie "the Crying Game," she's a MAN!
And in "The Sixth Sense," he's ALREADY DEAD!
Sheesh!
Blue Chairs should have won (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Blue Chairs should have won (Score:3, Interesting)
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 manipula
Re:Blue Chairs should have won (Score:2)
According to the authors "Stack Overflow" was meant to be a satire of bad text-adventures, whereas PTBAD3 was just meant to be a troll.
-a
Game reviews (Score:4, Insightful)
Check the newsgroups for reviews (Score:2, Informative)
-s
Re:Game reviews (Score:1, Informative)
You play the role of someone--I recall it being a university student, but I may be filling in details from memory--who takes a drug at a party.
The game basically consists of you trying to leave the party, and the events that occur along the way. There are subplots involving various characters, including romantic partners.
I thought the game was extremely well-written and refreshing in its execution. It is much more sophisticated than my brief description might suggest. The story is extremely
Re:Game reviews (Score:2)
/.'ed (Score:1)
Dang, I totally spaced the deadline (months ago) (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, here's Eric the Power-Mad Dongeon Master [ridiculopathy.com],
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.
histogram of ratings (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [imdb.org], iblist [iblist.org], and all the other similar sites would do the same.
Re:histogram of ratings (Score:2, Informative)
But yeah, It'd be nice if iblist did do that.
Re:histogram of ratings (Score:1)
Slashdotted (Score:1)
Where to get the games directly (Score:1)
ftp://ftp.ifarchive.com/if-archive/games/competiti on2004/ [ifarchive.com]
http://ifarchive.jmac.org/indexes/if-archiveXgames Xcompetition2004.html [jmac.org]
http://ifarchive.flavorplex.com/if-archive/games/c ompetition2004/ [flavorplex.com]
http://ifarchive.giga.or.at/indexes/if-archiveXgam esXcompetition2004.html [giga.or.at]
ftp://ftp.guetech.org/pub/guetech/if-archive/games
-Your friendly neighborhood competition organizer
Better than Z-Code (Score:3, Informative)
www.tads.org. But I *did* hit the preview key! (Score:2)
Re:Better than Z-Code (Score:2)
(Quick primer for people unfamiliar with these: TADS [wikipedia.org] is an authoring system and playing system for text adventure games. Z-Code [wikipedia.org] is a platform independent bytecode for text adventure games. Z-Code games were originally produced by Infocom [wikipedia.org] using proprietary tools. Inform [wikipedia.org] is a modern authoring system that also outputs Z-Code.)
TADS has its advantages (a friend of mine who wrote the above mentioned "Magocracy" used it to great effect), but it also has serious disadvantages that must be weighed. Perhaps its
Radley Manor: My dipply little IF effort (Score:2)
It puts you in the role of a kid who has batted a baseball into an abandoned house. No combat, no way to die for that matter; you win by locating the ball and walking out the front gate with it.
I recently recreated it with INFORM, to get familiar with the system so I could do more elaborate games. You can smell and taste stuff, and there's a lot more detail in the room descriptions.
Here's the compiled file:
http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/Ra
The Winners are all leaving. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The Winners are all leaving. (Score:2)
Wot No Slashdot? (Score:2)
Ah come on, we should have been way up there.
What with the misleading headlines and trolls, I'd have thought it was a no brainer.
cLive ;-)
Damn, 20 posts and slashdotted ... (Score:2)
erotic interactie fiction? (Score:1)
Re:erotic interactie fiction? (Score:2)
Re:erotic interactie fiction? (Score:2)
Re:erotic interactie fiction? (Score:2)
>x jack
Face like a slab of processed meat by-products left out in the sun too long,
haphazard hair plugs that look like he rubbed a glob of rubber cement on his
scalp and head-butted a cat, teeth so stained and discolored he must brush them
with molasses... you really picked yourself a winner this time, Trace.
Jack turns his head and looks you up and down. "So, darlin', how old are you?"
he asks.
[Enter a number or type "refuse"]> refuse
"
Re:erotic interactie fiction? (Score:1)
Re:erotic interactie fiction? (Score:2)
Coming soon - Slashdot Adventure (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Coming soon - Slashdot Adventure (Score:2)
Re:Coming soon - Slashdot Adventure (Score:2)
Oh, and you have still achieved nothing.
Re:Coming soon - Slashdot Adventure (Score:3, Funny)
You're trapped in a labyrinth of duplicate stories all alike.
You hear CmdrTaco chuckling in the distance.
>read slashdot
You're trapped in a maze of silly poll options all different.You feel slightly annoyed by the missing options.
A gaggle of trolls cowers away from your superior karma.
>whack troll.
A bright flash of light, a hollow laugh... One more GNAA member banished to -1.
>smoke crack
Aaahh. The joys of having mod-points...
Teaching Aid (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Teaching Aid (Score:1)
Re:Teaching Aid (Score:1)
Re:Teaching Aid (Score:2)
I've actually used the IF-optimized language Inform [inform-fiction.org] as a teaching aid for computer science. It's a great introduction to object-oriented programming and concepts for beginners.
Re:Teaching Aid (Score:1)
So -- I'm learning German now....any German adventure games out there?
Re:Teaching Aid (Score:1)
Re:Teaching Aid (Score:2)
Another possible idea is using AI to teach ESL writing. You can send students out to chat rooms, but they encounter all kinds of difficult things: slang, insults, cultural confusion, etc. An AI program catered to ESL learners could be very beneficial, es
The Real Question... (Score:2)
Great... (Score:4, Funny)
Saugus.net Halloween Contest (Score:2)
Saugus.net [saugus.net] has also opened up their annual Halloween Ghost Story Writing Contest [saugus.net] to interactive fiction entries. So far though there haven't been any takers.
It's a fun medium and it's a shame more people don't try writing for it.
Re:Other Infocom Interpreters (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Leave a Message (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh yes, the old "something is of no use for me, so it must hold no value to anybody else".
This is such a horrid mindset, and one so common today, that I could not resist the need to bring you one comment closer to your death.
Re:Leave a Message (Score:1)
This is a problem with the system. . . (Score:2)
I believe that it is possible to be indirectly sustained by giving freely of oneself. Giving in one area will create returns in unexpected areas. This system is based on invisible but universal principals and it works. --However, it requires Fai
Re:yeah have to say it (Score:1)