IFDB now has a facility to let people poll members for game suggestions — a neat feature, which will let us hang on to the results of those periodic requests people make on RGIF, instead of seeing all that good advice vanish back into the ether.
I’ve started one myself, on games with accurate real-world settings. But check it out — this could be a valuable tool if you’re looking to do research on some particular aspect of interactive fiction that isn’t already tagged in any database.
The annual IF competition is now on! I’m reviewing the games here as I go along, and a number of other people are also doing blog write-ups. Here are the ones I know of:
Peter Nepstad
Victor Gijsbers
Aric Maddux
Gemma Bristow
J. Robinson Wheeler
“Newlin”
Michael Martin
Skeet
ralphmerridew
“Another Mr Lizard”
Joshua H
Wesley Osam
Nick Bronson
Mike Rubin
Nitku
Sarah Morayati (Lucea)
Stephen Bond
Russian reviews (if your grasp of Russian is like mine, namely nonexistent, you may want this comical Google translation instead)
Merk (Mike Snyder)
http://mybloglovesme.tumblr.com/
http://minimumsafedistance.org/ (warning: reviews don’t seem to be cut-tagged)
“Imrihamun”
Carl Muckenhoupt
Cesia (no cut-tags here either; the author claims there are no spoilers, but if you’d rather avoid seeing any information about specific games before you play, you may still want to be cautious)
Octopus Overlords forum (brief, largely unspoilery reviews; no cut-tags)
Wintericecrystal’s Youtube reviews
N. B. Horvath (detailed comments are cut-tagged; overview of comp scores are not)
Lucy
Dan Shiovitz
Jacqueline Lott
Jake Wildstrom (no cut tags)
George Dorn
Christos Dimitrakakis (no cut tags)
Ben Deane (no cut tags)
“Scatmania” (I confess to a little nervousness about the title of this blog, but it does contain reviews for “Violet” and “Grief” so far, and may eventually develop others. No cut tags.)
Auntie Pixelante (no cut-tags, review of Violet only so far)
Sam Kabo Ashwell
David Fletcher
George Oliver
Rob Menke
JDC
Reiko
Jimmy Maher
SPAG 53
Various authors
Something awful forum (comments on Nightfall and Violet mixed in with thread)
Magnus Martyr
Dylan Meconis
“Gaming Dungeon”
I notice that the Saugus Halloween Contest is once again open to IF submissions. Finished, short ghost-related games are due Oct. 23.
…is now out. To people who were not waiting for bugs to be fixed, this may seem like a pretty low-key build: a huge amount of work went into it, but much of that work had to do with improving internal code in preparation for an eventual release of the Inform source, rather than with producing new features. Assorted things are now more cleanly implemented and a better foundation for future improvements, but that doesn’t make for glamor in the change log.
However, of possible note to readers here: the latest build does (as I mentioned in an earlier post) allow for scenes to be given properties, which means that it is now possible to make rules about what is allowed to happen during a type of scene — as in
Instead of going somewhere during a restrictive scene: …
We do not yet have the ability to write generic rules about when types of scene begin and end, which I would also like; but this may improve matters somewhat for heavy users of Inform scenes.
In other news, it is now possible to define new directions freely — something that we felt was an omission from the outset, so I am glad that is checked off the list.
After all the various discussion of whether Apple would or would not allow it: it’s there. Craig Smith has a free-download version of Frotz available, which comes preloaded with a bunch of games (9:05, An Act of Murder, All Roads, Anchorhead, Balances, Being Andrew Plotkin, Bronze, A Change in the Weather, Child’s Play, Christminster, Curses!, Dreamhold, For a Change, Heroes, Jigsaw, Lost Pig, The Meteor, the Stone, and A Long Glass of Sherbet, The Act of Misdirection, Photopia, Slouching Towards Bedlam, Spider and Web, Varicella, Vespers, The Weapon, and Zork (MIT version)).
It also has a button that taps straight into IFDB, and downloading a new game adds it and its cover art to your game collection.
Plays a little slowly with Bronze, but faster than the reports I’ve heard of the game on other PDAs (and Bronze does whacking lots of pathfinding all the time). Older I6 games are faster.
IF cover art looks really nice on the iPhone screen, too.
Thanks to Vsevolod Zoubarev, there is now a Russian translation of Metamorphoses. I find this very exciting, though I cannot actually read a word of it myself…
To pass along the links from his email, in case anyone wants to try it:
Link to the archive with the game, short manual and the options.txt file
Link to the entry on the translator’s blog (in Russian)
Discussion on the local IF forum (which I can sort of make out with Google Translate…)
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 