Tag: Act of Murder

IF Competition: Riverside

Okay: after some discussion with various folks, I’ve decided to go ahead with blogging about IF Comp 2008 games. The consensus from people who weighed in was that they prefer reading reviews spread out over a long time than seeing a big splat of new material right after the comp ends, and that they felt the distributed discussion was better, especially if the full review set was combined in one place at the end.

Therefore: I will follow the same format as last year, which is to say, there is a cut tag before I say anything at all about a game, positive or negative; after the cut tag will be comments without spoilers; after the general comments there will be additional spoiler space, followed by more particular commentary.

In the interests of not accidentally spoiling people via feed-aggregation sites, I have temporarily set my RSS feed to “summary” rather than “full” mode, so that (with any luck) it won’t just splat all this stuff onto Planet-IF willy-nilly. To those people who can’t stand summary-mode RSS feeds, I apologize, and I’ll set it back to the regular format when the comp is over.

We will start with “Riverside”.

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IF Competition Discussion: General Observations & Favorites

I’m done playing the games I’m going to play this year (skipping the Windows-only games, Jealousy Duel X which apparently runs on the Macintosh only under Classic, and the Quest game, which Spatterlight refused to cope with), and have submitted my votes.

A list of favorites and thoughts on the competition as a whole follow the cut. There are no specific spoilers for specific games, but people preferring to remain free of influence may want to skip reading until they’re also done playing.

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IF Competition Discussion: Act of Murder

For the first time since I can remember, the annual IF Comp has relaxed the rules that prohibit judges from discussing games during the competition period. That being the case, I will post some of my reactions here as I go along, but I will try to protect the innocent by hiding all substantive comment, including whether I liked or did not like the piece, behind a *more* tag.

I’ve also settled on a (possibly awkward — we’ll see) two-part format for this. The first part will be a description of the game in a non-spoilery mode, the kind of thing you write for people who are deciding whether to play; then there will be spoiler space; then there will be comments intended for people who already have played. The post-space bits will be more like my usual comp game reports — some stuff about my play experience, together with gripes, spoilers, etc., but above all, specificity.

Okay. First up: Act of Murder, by “Hugh Dunnett”.

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