Jay Is Games has reviewed Lost Pig, and they’ve got a new Flash interpreter hooked up to let people play the game in their browsers.
Compared with playing on Zoom, it’s not so fast and smooth as I’m used to… but it’s not bad, and it’s certainly a fine way to introduce the casually-stopping-by crowd at JIG to new pieces of IF, without asking them to download anything extra.
Haven’t attempted a systematic comparison with the other recent Flash-based Z-interpreter, Flaxo.
JayIsGames gave a brief mention to To Hell in a Hamper: the use of the cover art there is a good sample of how outside bloggers would like to be able to show off IF. (Not that I’m obsessed with this at the moment or anything.)
The XYZZY awards were yesterday! Congratulations to the winners and nominees.
Recently, on a recommendation on this blog, I tried Ayiti, a UNICEF-sponsored game about the difficulty of making ends meet as a poor family in Haiti.
It’s deeper and more playable than some of the other political games I’ve mentioned here recently: the interface is mostly well-designed (though I had a couple of particular gripes); there’s enough variation from playthrough to playthrough that you have to adapt your strategy a bit even when you think you’ve cracked the game; and it didn’t feel like preaching to the choir, at least not all the time.
The other day I posted to Jay Is Games about the Commonplace Book Project games, and now there is a moderate-sized comment thread, in case you’re interested in reading some more reactions to Ecdysis, The Cellar, and Dead Cities. The thread also contains some hints about several of the chief puzzles. (And it appears that Dead Cities has even more possible outcomes than I realized myself.)
Last night, on a recommendation from Jay Is Games, I tried What Makes You Tick, a graphical adventure game built with LASSIE and meant to emulate things like the Monkey Island games.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 