emshortif

Long, in-depth article on Photopia

From Jordan Magnuson, over here. There’ve been gazillions of reviews of Photopia over the years, but Magnuson is a thoughtful reviewer with (it appears) a lot of gaming experience in general, but less experience with IF. So I find it interesting what he has to say.

Clockwords: Prelude

Clockwords is a word/defense game by Gabob, who previously did Now Boarding (mentioned here). This time, they’re using a story that I wrote to go with their gameplay concept. I’ve really enjoyed this — it’s exhilarating seeing what the artist has done with my suggestions, and fun to work on something a little different from my usual format. The core gameplay lets you build words, but (in contrast with most word games) in a way that doesn’t absolutely restrict you to a set of letters on the board. If you’re the kind of person who gets frustrated by all the great words you can ALMOST make in Boggle or Scrabble, Clockwords might be up your alley. What’s more, as you play you gain the ability to manipulate which letters are available for future use.

This installment is just the Prelude; future installments will contain a lot more of the plot, and more variations on the core play.

Latest HiS

On an iPhone game in which you psychoanalyze Achilles. Clearly I couldn’t leave that alone.

Jay Is Games does Make It Good

Here, and using the Parchment implementation.

Game Master as parser

“Action Castle” is apparently a tabletop semi-RPG where the game-master pretends to be an IF parser. I found this narrative of play amusing and fascinating — especially because, when I was a young teenager, I would often play the parser this way for my own friends. (I always did allow the parser to understand all the commands, but there were annoying mazes and unfair plot arcs.)

New Homer in Silicon

…in which I talk about romance plots in games, including some IF and some other stuff. Partly a response to an article in NowGamer.