Frotz in the iPhone App store

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.

Vespers, some years late

I’ve been meaning for a long time to play Jason Devlin’s “Vespers”, and today is the day I got around to it.

It wasn’t quite what I expected. From various references to it, I had thought it was going to be a game about moral choices in a Christian (or coherently anti-Christian) framework, when in fact it’s pretty theologically dubious; it’s perhaps better described as a horror story with morally-framed puzzle solutions.

But more after the cut.

Continue reading “Vespers, some years late”

Vespers 3D Blog

Michael Rubin heads a project that’s intrigued me for a while: a 3D graphical version of Jason Devlin’s “Vespers”. While it allows the player to navigate a three-dimensional space, Rubin’s version still deals in some textual input and output, and it’s a bold experiment in the form.

If, like me, you find this project intriguing, you may want to follow Rubin’s blog, The Monk’s Brew, in which he talks about some of his design decisions and posts screenshots and project updates on the work in development.