David Kinder has posted about recent releases to the IF archive, and as usual there’s a bunch of games I never heard of and I suspect may have had no announcement at all.
The Musician, by Phillip Skains.
Iraqi Invasion: A Text Misadventure, Interactive Propaganda by Anonymous.
Housekey, Part I, by Arien Holthuizen
The Care and Feeding of Adjuncts, by Eric Remy
The Airport, an interactive waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, and waiting… by Cascadian_Patriot.
Somewhere, an Interactive Poem by Kazuki Mishima.
Sporkery 1: There Will Be Sporking, by David Hughes.
Teacher Feature, by Paul Equinox Collins.
I know some of these titles the authors might have considered not for the general public, but this many works just slipping by is a bit ridiculous.
The author of Snowblind Aces has a new “IF shoot-’em-up”.
Link to story at IndieGames.com
Just a note that Thursday, March 6th is the deadline for second-round voting for the XYZZY Award finalists.
Courtesy GameSetWatch comes a pointer to the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities and specifically a wildly obscure IF game called Real Life: The Greatest Adventure of All.
Real Life: The Greatest Adventure of All, an “interactive novel” by Relational Systems Corporation, is billed as a simulation of life, to help you figure out where you’re going, or perhaps how to avoid getting there.
Also fun on the same website: the original packaging for Mystery House
Roberta and I couldn’t afford typesetting so we cut/pasted words from magazines.
and a map from Infocom’s hint service before the Zork User Group.
The deadline for nominations is tomorrow (Sunday the 24th) at midnight Eastern Standard Time.
Emily Short has posted about a new short work, and I have decided to review it. It is short -– as in two minutes or less short -– so you may want to play first and then read this after.
Read the rest of this entry »
Link to website
This is a remake of a Spectrum game done in CYOA menu style. The remake has ports for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and the Gamepark GP2X (!).
In honor of this conversation thread, I bring forward two examples of emergent gameplay in IF that are not normally cited as such. I am defining emergence here as “allowing solutions to problems unanticipated by the programmer that come out of the complexity of the underlying system.”
Suspended by Michael Berlyn (1983)
When Suspended was in beta, Steve Meretzky (a tester at the time) solved
Suspended in 42 moves. I made him do it while I watched, so I know it was real.
(Original post by Mike Berlyn here.)
Suspended includes an overall “optimization puzzle” which reflects the number of casualties, and completion of the game is of a high enough complexity and variance that it can be called emergent gameplay.
The other thing that allowed emergence to happen was the player was allowed to “short-cut” and sacrifice robots for the sake of reaching the end state. This made alternate routes of solution a built-in capability of the system.
Moral: Optimization can cause emergence even in a normally non-emergent game.
Verb! by Neil deMause (1998)
The setup here is the only verb allowable is TAKE, and any new use of the verb TAKE scores a point. People scored much higher than the author thought possible, because the coding was generalized; all it did was check for valid uses of TAKE and that no use was repeated.
Moral: When wordplay is coded in a general way instead of hard-coded, complexity arises naturally.
Someone’s working on a remake of Melbourne House’s The Hobbit.
They are working in C++ rather than something modern like TADS, but I am supposing they are aiming for an authentic parser. The original is difficult to recommend because the response time is sluggish, so hopefully a remake would at least fix that issue. The more pressing concern is, will the emergent gameplay be preserved?
The Snowman was second place in the Text the Halls competition. My review is down below.
Read the rest of this entry »
Renga in Blue 