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Interactive Fiction Competition 2000 Begins 75

Posted by michael from the attack-troll-with-sword dept.
karma_policeman writes: "(For those who don't know, the IFcomp is a competition among free, text-based games.) On Oct. 2, judging is scheduled to begin in the 6th annual interactive fiction competition. Anyone can play and judge the entries over the next six weeks. If you enjoyed the old text adventures, you'll likely enjoy the games in the IFcomp. Especially considering the parsers and writing in today's free competition games often surpass those in their commercial ancestors. There are 54 entries in this year's competition; it's well worth your time to take a look at it."
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Interactive Fiction Competition 2000 Begins More

Interactive Fiction Competition 2000 Begins

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  • good gracious, I thought I was the only one to remember those! Wow, yeah, you were part of the ACT team, it was all cold-war type stuff, like jummp a little man across the river or (my favorite) guess the passcode to the nuclear device before the timer went off... Those were SO cool, although I hardly ever managed to type the whole thing in on my little commodore 128. I should go on ebay and see if anyone's selling copies of em, they were good entertainment.

    Come to think of it, maybe someone _should_ start bundling some sort of simple interactive games into children's stories, a cdrom or a disk that held part of the story. To get to the end of the book, you have to beat the game or something like that. Or maybe even to teach some tech skills, read in the source from disk, compile, run, debug, I dunno. This seems like it would have a lot of potential to revive this "old" idea...

    Maybe if I was a hacker with kids to raise, I'd get really into this.

  • IF for beginners (Score:3)

    by Angst Badger ( 8636 ) on Sunday October 01, 2000 @10:22PM (#740789)
    This is a shameless plug, but you can get my free-beer introductory interactive fiction package, Adventure Blaster, at download.com. It's Windows only -- a habit I swore off years ago -- but it's a nice intro with a spiffy Delphi-based frontend, loads of help files, hints, and tutorials, and it handles the rather messy business of installing the appropriate interpreters. It includes ten games ranked by difficulty, many of which are quite good. (My favorite is Ian Finley's Babel, a sci-fi psychological thriller set in the chilly arctic wastes.) This link [cnet.com] should pull it up; otherwise just search for "adventure blaster".

    When Inprise is done porting Delphi to Linux, I'll have to port it over. Until then, just boot over to Windows if you have it, or recommend it to your OS-impaired friends.

    --

  • Starship Titanic took Adams and 30odd other people two years to produce. In the end it didn't sell enough to recoup costs!
    Part of the UK launch included a signing session at the HMV shop on Oxford Street. A representative from ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha [zz9.org], The Official Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy Appreciation Society turned up to hand out flyers. In two hours, maybe three people showed up!
    It's about fifteen years since the Infocom Guide game came out and people still talk about it. I can't imagine people talking about Starship Titanic in fifteen years, can you?
    Whether this reflects on how text adventures were more compulsive, or that Adams has completely lost it these days, is another thing...

    Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems

  • lp got messed up: links, linux, mirrors (Score:3)

    by dayeight ( 21335 ) on Sunday October 01, 2000 @10:22PM (#740791) Homepage Journal
    obBitch: man, I submit this each year, and of course /. doesn't post it, and this year they do. Michael is cool.

    obBitch2: the first year I don't enter, and damn, it gets /., so all of you check out the last couple of years comps as well:

    btw, ftp.gmd.de is going to be hammered, so check some mirrors at

    http://ifarchive.org/

    http://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXcomp etition95.html

    replace the 95 with appropriate year.

    usenet: rec.arts.int-fiction
    rec.games.int-fiction

    For those using linux, about 90% of the games should work for you, if not more. Check out
    http://interactfiction.about.com/library/weekly/aa 091100h.htm?terms=linux
    here for help.

    www.textfire.com is good and ifiction.tsx.org is a hoot
    http://members.dencity.com/petro/reflect.html
    http://members.dencity.com/petro/ludite.html
    of my games are the nicest darnded reviews me every got..... and play my games, for weird stuff: look for Rybread Celcius or bad reviews, one in the same... btw, Graham Nelson is a genius for reverse engineering the infocom data structure... I know I can't spell ...oh yeah, and my own feeble IF page here [pushove.com] theres a message board for posting about the comp games.
    i know i cant spel
  • I just finished an incredibly good game that was every bit as rich and involving as any of the old text adventures. It's called 'The Longest Journey'. You can't get it directly in the United States, you have to import it from Europe. (apparently no distributor in the States wants to pick it up, which is STUPID -- this is the best adventure game I've played in years, probably better than Grim Fandango.)

    Caveat: it starts pretty slow. The first ten hours or so (this is a LONG adventure) are interesting but won't leap out at you. But if you stick with it, it becomes just amazing further in. It's a shame there's not more wow factor early on.

    I imported mine from www.softwarefirst.com. It ended up costing a bit less than $40 including shipping, and I got it about a week after I ordered. They'll tell you the price in pounds, and your credit card company will convert it to $ for you automatically. It was every bit as easy as ordering from a US-based dealer, with the sole exception that you'll only know your final price to within about 50 cents until you get your bill.

    It's not just 'as good as' the text adventure games. It's BETTER. And I've played all the Infocoms and a good chunk of the freeware ones up 'til about last year. I speak from experience. Highly recommended.

    The Longest Journey is probably the finest example yet of what storytelling on a computer can be like.
  • True, but really, at least the people who are talking about ADVENT have at least the basic idea of what interactive fiction is. I get the feeling that at least half of the Slashdot audience has no idea what interactive fiction is, because they weren't using computers in the '80s. I wonder if it is possible to interest people in modern text adventures if they've never played Zork?
  • (Almost) totally off topic, but does anyone remember a PC computer game from the 80s that involved some kind of robots-take-over-the-world plot and you as a player had to do math in binary and hexadecimal to solve puzzles and win. It came out around the same time as Carmen Sandiego and it was targeted at early to mid teens. Obviously an educational title. I think it was from Broderbund.

    Anyone? Anyone?

  • Votezone.com [votezone.com] already have this moda aeration system, at least something down the same line as it. Basically what you have, is a certain rank. You can vote on software, write reviews, etc. on this site. The rank you have lets you do a higher amount of posting in one day, hand out more merit points, and have your votes on a forum weight more, thus you r score counts more than the basic one. There are also other privilidges which exist, going along with it.
  • There are a couple of things they're doing new this year. They're selling t-shirts and CDs with all the games at cost -- not bad for a completely fan-run competition. To participate, all you have to do is download the games, play five or more before November 15th, and then rate them on a whole-number scale from 1 to 10, 10 being best. You can record your scores on the actual site, assuming the site isn't Slashdotted then. Afterwards there's a lot of discussion about all of the games, with plenty of feedback to the people who wrote the games.

    Sargent
  • btw, ftp.gmd.de is going to be hammered

    As I recall, there was some discussion on raif a week or so ago when redhat 7 was released. Turns out ftp.gmd.de is a mirror, and none of us could get to the games because everyone was downloading the new version

    Somehow, I don't think things are going to get better now :)

  • Anyone remember this game? It was on Major BBS's back in the days before MUDs were big (or anything on the Internet really).. I can remember memorizing the entire maps. writing telemate scripts to follow players (and other cruel things).

    I think that is quite possibly the best text-adventure game ever.. Anyone know if that game is available anywhere (telnet?)...

    Greg
  • I am just worried that the original disks are going to start to fail from old age/bad environmental conditions/etc.

    I think this stuff qualifies as abandonware, since there is pretty much no hope for commercial gain, indeed, it would take some hacking to get them to run on a modern MS OS. (DOS boot disk at least)
    -
  • Way back in the mid 1980s there was a simillar product launched in the UK called The Quill, from Gilsoft. Available for the Sinclair Spectrum and possibly other machines.

    Many games were released, some challenging, others utterly awful. There were hundreds of games released, some from big software houses. Delta4 produced some really hillarious games. IIRC the author is now working in the anti-virus sector.

    The Quill improved with time. Graphical capability was available as an add-on, and later still data compression to allow really big games.

    I once got truely stuck in once game, and spent one day hacking around the data file format to find out what to type and where to get around one nasty puzzle. I then applied this to other games, but got stumped with the ones using data compression.

  • Yes! I remember these!
    I used to read them at school and doodle in the margins of the book the debugged code, then go home and type them into my IBM pc/Jr... :)

    :::Speaking of which, anyone else got one of these "future of computing" flashs in the pan..?
    My dad should have gotten suspicious when he went back to buy it and they threw in the 13 1/2 inch color monitor, the extra cordless keyboard and DOS 2.1 for free... I think they were just trying to get the damn thing out of the door before they had to deny that they ever existed (and deny they did! I swear, a month later, they said "the IBM pc-what?)
  • That's sad. Of course, he was mobbed at E3 in Atlanta when word got out that he was signing the free Starship Titanic posters they were giving away.

    I got my poster, but, I've never bought or even played the game. I guess it's a generational thing, as I tend to lump those style games as Myst clones. There are far easier was to look at ray-traced eye candy.

    Of course, people do idolize Myst and 7th Guest, so maybe the genre just peaked a lot more quickly than text adventure.

    But don't worry, being part of the Wolf/Doom/Quake generation, I'm now deathly bored of all the new titles of the 3d genre. All things must pass, I guess.
    --
  • Well, it is a yearly event, so get ready for next year. Check out the specialised languages, such as Inform and Tads, before trying anything in a more conventional programming language, because you get a parser, and, for those two, at least, portability, for free...
  • Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy!
    *me sighs deeply remembering the fun she had playing it on an ATARI when she was like 4* i had been reading for a year and yet I was playing the game.. does anyone know of a Windows playable format? the 5" floppy drive on the ATARI is broken and I had this craving the other day to play it :)
    ~me
  • maybe slightly off-topic, but I've got a project up on mp3.com that lets you hear a chapter, make a choice, hear the next chosen chapter, etc. Then you can create your own episodes to add on to it when there's a blank spot.

    MP3 StorySprawl [mp3.com]

    You can read and write the stories and links over at StorySprawl.com [storysprawl.com].

    tunesmith

  • SlashdotIF (Score:3)

    by faeryman ( 191366 ) on Sunday October 01, 2000 @10:32PM (#740806) Homepage
    You are sitting at your computer. Your 14.4 modem is humming, and your browser is open to a blank window.

    > OPEN slashdot.org
    Loading....done!

    >READ SLASHDOT
    1. "Masturbatory Habits of Geeks in Post Columbine Era - by JonKatz"
    2. "Signal11 Looses Virginity...to Natalie Portman!!! - by CmdrTaco"
    3. "Linus Admits he Decided to Write Linux While on LSD - by CmdrTaco"
    4. "BSD: FooBSD 0.0.0.2d Released -by Michael"
    5. "Interactive Fiction Competition 2000 Begins -by Michael"

    >OPEN 5
    Loading....done!

    >REPLY
    You need to specify how to reply.

    >REPLY INSIGHTFUL
    Sorry faeryman, I cannot allow you to do that.

    >REPLY INFORMATIVE
    Sorry faeryman, I cannot allow you to do that.

    > REPLY SOME STUPID PIECE OF CRAP THAT ILL WRITE AT 2:30 AM WHILE DRUNK AND IF THE MOD_SQUAD BETTER GIVES A +5, Funny TO ILL SOIL MY PANTS
    Posting...done!

    >OPEN beowulf.org
    Loading....done!

    >IMAGINE
    Imagine what?

    >IMAGINE A BEOWULF CLUSTER OF THESE THINGS!!!!!!!
    *drool*


    With love,
  • Anyone remember the Adventure Game Toolkit [markwelch.com]? All the coding was done with numerical indices (ie, you told the compiler that ROOM 4 exited NORTH to ROOM 7) and a lot of the parser and things were hardcoded, but it was loads of fun. I actually had a significant portion of a game written, but then I switched to the incredibly superior Inform [demon.co.uk] and my procrastinating habits finally caught up with me. I do intend to complete a game at some point though...
  • Probably have a bigger audience nowadays,
    though ironically fewer people probably have
    access to a BASIC compiler now than back then
    (when almost every home computer came
    bundled with it). But including a CD-ROM
    with Perl wouldn't be too hard. Actually be a
    better language to use, give kids some
    knowledge of non-linear programming without
    making them worry about all those variable
    declarations or header files.

    <oftopic>
    I know what you mean I cut my teal on QBASIC and dos 5/win3.1.
    Then Win98 came (still had my good oll 486/sx 20).
    This cool guy (geek cool) Showed me *nix and bash
    So I grabed a linux distro redhat 5 (just out of date @ the time)
    I was amazed at how the command line didn't have to suck
    I never used a wintell box since
    My SusE box has 'bwbasic' mabey you have one to
    </oftopic>

    I once played Quest if that counts for somthing?

    Oh mod gods please dont troll me It's only my second post
    --red5
  • At least you had feet. Back in my day we didn't have feet. We walked on our hands.

    And books. We didn't have books. We had tree bark with carvings on it. And we had to use our teeth to move the pages, since our hands were frostbitten from walking in the snow.

    And snow. We didn't have snow. We had giant hunks of ice that dropped randomly from the sky. That crazy Sky Ice killed 1 out of every 3 kids I knew.


    You little ruffians have it too easy these days. Damn that Al Gore and his cursed Internet Machine!



  • Yup, I remember - I still read it every so often. I never really managed to finish the adventure without getting blasted, eaten or something like that.

    Those where the good old days, when real men were real men, real women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri... :)
  • Sorry. Open-source creative endeavors are just another name for authoring by committee. They don't work. What you want is a MUD, not IF.
  • Don't get me wrong, I love IF. (See my sig.) What I'd love to see, and I don't really know if it's out there, is a game that adapts itself to the person who's playing it. The idea came from Ender's Game [ender.com] by Orson Scott Card [hatrack.com]. The 'game' in the novel is a program used to psychoanalyze the kids.

    That's probably a little out of reach for now. But what about a game that figures what the player seems to enjoy (mind bending puzzles, traps, fighting, strategy, etc), and works to change the game for more of that aspect.

    It's an idea...

  • Write yer own (Score:3)

    by jmac ( 29488 ) <jmac@jmac.org> on Monday October 02, 2000 @05:17AM (#740813) Homepage
    How pleased I am to see IFComp finally mentioned on Slashdot! I know people in the IF community have been trying to have this happen for at least the past couple of comps. I hope that this will help to not only generate more IF players, but also authors.

    One that note: I see folks have mentioned 'em, but nobody has done the service to the truly lazy and linked to 'em, so allow me then then to list off some favorite sophisticated interactive fiction authorship engines:

    Inform [demon.co.uk], based on the parser Infocom used in its games (as of the late 80s), is a fully object-oriented language with a C-like syntax. It's my personal language of choice for the little bit of IF dabbling I've done; you can see the source [jmac.org] for a small and silly game called 'Calliope' I wrote for last year's competition (I came in 23rd, heh (but I got to win an Honest Bob [dfan.org] CD anyway, hurrah)) linked from my own IF info page [jmac.org](which also has the compiled game, and links to lots of other modern IF games (much better than mine!) and authors I like). Inform is also open-source, and binaries exist for any platform you might reasonably care to name.

    There's also TADS [tela.bc.ca] and Hugo [interlog.com], about which I know little, but are both popular enough with other authors to be worth checking out for the interested newcomer.

    Have fun!
    J
    MacOS Open Source [jmac.org]
  • I feel obliged to mention another Linux interpreter for Infocom and Inform games that is not mentioned in the referenced pages. Check out:

    http://jzip.sourceforge.net/
  • For the TI-994/A there was a pretty easy-to-use text adventure editor. It was based off the engine that was used to power the Scott Adams text adventure series. It had a cartridge, and you loaded up the game you wanted either on cassette or disk. I never got far with it though(lost interest).

  • I've searched and searched and searched... what were the names of those books??? I remember them fondly... they gave BASIC source written for a few popular machines (PC, C64, something else IIRC), and porting the code in the books to the esoteric BASIC on my Mattel Aquarius (hey, I grew up poor... hell, I'm still poor) was fairly deep-magic hacking for a third-grader, which is what I was when I got my hands on those books. But what were the names of those books???

    Someone help!

  • Yup, just another example of bloatware. Why do so many fit onto a CD? Because IIRC, LSL&Land of the Lounge Lizards was half a dozen 5 1/4s. Kings Quest was the same way. And all this on a 286. In EGA (or VGA if you had the cash).

    Responding to your post: do we really need to share these games? Aren't the old game disks only a couple bucks anyway? Rather than give them away, we should just educate the unaware as to what they are missing out on.
  • the parsers and writing in today's free competition games often surpass those in their commercial ancestors

    Aye they do, but do they have the sheer playabity of the classic adventure?
    ..From getting the bird in the cage to Spelunker Today, the thing oozed class.
    If you should not have played it, go to Snacky Pete's [helikon.com] for a copy.
  • You should try Age of Wonders. It is kind of an RPG, kind of a millitary strategy game. Reminds me a little of Civ. Demo version on download.com, comes with two scenarios, which is like 20 hours of gameplay. Has a steep learning curve at the beginning, but if you stick with it, its pretty good.
    -
  • the choose your own adventure model for interactive entertainment is already a dinosaur. it still involves clicking links, rather than the end-user creating links. that is interactive. this other "interactive fiction" is no more interactive than switching channels on your zombie box.

    and while we're on a nearby subject, ZORK was the greatest text game of its day.


    1. INTERACTIVE [mikegallay.com]
      1. ENTERTAINMENT

  • Even these are having a comeback, a biggie on the student circuit is DopeWars, basicly trade wars with drugs
    ....and on the subject of trading games: Elite, will we see its like again?
  • Uhgg Slashdot, you got me excited again. I was just thinking of what *I* might enter, when the post said that JUDGING has begun.

    Kind of silly, Slashdot.

  • Interactive Fiction (Score:3)

    by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Sunday October 01, 2000 @09:20PM (#740823) Journal
    During my childhood, Interactive Fiction was choose-your own adventure books.

    And I had to walk both ways through 6 feet of snow to the library to get them.

    :)
    -

  • But I loved choose your own adventure books! This should be that much better, right? I've never seen anything like this before, but i think it looks like something really interesting worth checking out. Like i don't have enough things to do in lieu of homework... Anybody have some good suggestions on similar games to try first (ya know, the least complicated?)
  • I miss the good old days of BBS'ing with great text-based games like Trade Wars and Usurper. I really think the quality of gaming has gone way down hill since computer/console-based graphics capabilities have risen. Sure Quake 52 (or whatever they're up to) has incredible graphics, but will it ever match the addictiveness of games-of-old? I for one, vote no. I'd have to say the last game I REALLY enjoyed was the original Sid Meier's Civilization. I remember the summer night I bought that game in high school, and I played it non-stop for about 2 days...

  • It is dark. (Score:3)

    by pb ( 1020 ) on Sunday October 01, 2000 @09:30PM (#740826)
    You might get eaten by a Grue...
    > Use Brass Lantern
    I don't know what "Use" means.
    It is dark.
    > Turn On Brass Lantern
    You are in a cavern.
    There is an exit to the north.
    > N
    You are in a great hall.
    It says "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
    The room is full of passages.
    > N
    You see a display case in front of you. It says 'hof'.
    There are exits to the east, west, and south.
    > E
    You fall through a trap door.
    You are in a deep cavern.
    There are trolls lurking about.
    > Talk to Trolls
    The trolls heckle you.
    You are moderated down.
    You feel less intelligent.
    > E
    You step into a pool of slime.
    You see an amulet on the ground.
    > Take Amulet
    You have the Amulet of Karma Whoring +2
    > Wear Amulet
    You radiate light.
    The trolls cower in fear.
    You now have secret slashdot knowledge.
    > Go Home
    Using your new mastery of Slashdot, you go to your homepage, which is 'slashdot.org', because you have no life.
    > Shut Up
    You feel less intelligent.
    > Post to slashdot
    You post to the most recent article.
    Would you like to hear what the article is about?
    --> No
    What kind of post would you like?
    --> This is not News for Nerds
    You are moderated up to +2; you get three replies
    > Read replies
    Anonymous Coward: j00 suck Karma Whore; I 0wn j00!
    > Moderate trolls down
    You can't moderate and post in the same account
    > Switch to other account
    You have no mod points.
    Your other account was bitchslapped for abuse.
    > Complain to Malda
    There is no reply.
    > Switch to kuro5hin
    Your karma was 253 out of a possible 64,
    giving you a rank of Old-school Karma Whore.
    # _

    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • Re:Interactive Fiction (Score:3)

    by nomadic ( 141991 ) <nomadicworld@@@gmail...com> on Sunday October 01, 2000 @09:33PM (#740827) Homepage
    Hey, those were great...like "By Balloon Over the Sahara". Though the computer brand of interactive fiction DID predate them. Come to think of it, there was a choose-your-own-adventure-like series based (very roughly) on Zork; kind of funny how an electronic game spawned a paper one...

    FLASHBACK! Alright, this is a geek crowd, anyone remember that series of books where you the narrative was interrupted at parts, and you had to type in a program? Well, you didn't have to, but when the character in the book (who was actually supposed to be you) did, they gave you the source code to type in along with them. Everything was in BASIC of course, and you usually had to debug it in some minor way. Was kind of funny how the programs that controlled every time delayed explosives device or computer operated door were in BASIC. The books were pretty cool though, I rarely had the patience to type in the programs, but you could at least follow them and see what you were supposed to modify...

    MAN that takes me back.

    Ooh, anyone remember Badlands of Hark?
    --

  • There used to be some Choose Your Own Adventure stuff on the hidden sids of /., but I believe they have all been cleared out of the database.
  • Why are people posting fake adventure scripts that read like ADVENT, or tearfully reminiscing about playing Infocom games or reading adventure books?

    The IF contest isn't about paying homage to old classics, it's about writing new ones. Play Photopia [adamcadre.ac]. Play Spider and Web [demon.co.uk]. These are new styles, new ideas, new puzzles. Don't judge these games on 1980s commercial game merits; they're not month-long adventures with arcane puzzles to keep you going; They're short stories packed with innovation. Well, at least the good ones are. And it's your job to find those good ones and vote for them.
  • good gracious, I thought I was the only one to remember those!

    I'm sure everyone remembers them, but as with so many of the things "we used to do", people seem to have blocked them out of their collective conciousness.

    I think it's some kind of embarrassment. It's bad enough having today's generation (ooh, now I feel old!) laughing at 'Monkey Island' when we dig it up from the bottom of the hard drive, but if I tried to show them a text adventure, I'd get looked at as if I was some sort of prehistoric fossil.

    Just so the record doesn't hold me too badly in light of the above, I should mention that I do still enjoy text adventures. I'm one of the few who still actually writes the things. I'm quite pleased with the parser I've managed to create, and some of the stories, although in truth, I doubt they're really very advanced.

  • Hey, if you like IF you might also enjoy writing or reading collaborative fiction [prosebush.com].

    Basically, you read what others have written, and at the end of each contribution the story can be continued by anyone in any direction (as many branches as you like). If you don't like any of the choices you can add you own (or add something anyway just to make the story richer).

    We have set up a website to do this (Prosebush [prosebush.com]). And so far the response from people has been great! There are a few stories that are coming along really well, a few that are really silly, etc... All the guys involved in building the site were fans of old-school text adventure games and choose-your-owns... They really inspired the site in many ways...

    --8<--

  • I miss M.U.L.E. That was a great game!
  • Does the microsoft bug-tracking database count as interactive fiction?
  • I just found:

    Buckholtz, Eileen & Glick, Ruth: Space Attack: Micro Adventures No. 1

    On the amazon zshops I'm tempted but then isn't
    amazon the devil?
  • Telnet dune.servint.com 8888
  • I've been following these contests since they came out, and they're genuinely interesting. However, one of the major problems with them is that so many are "joke" games, so you really can't get to the meat of the best games out there. Usually there are two or three very high-quality games released with each contest (in my view).

    Check out ftp.gmd.de/if-archive for a whole bunch. The best are by Graham Nelson and Andrew Plotkin - "Spider and Web" is a personal favorite.

    But then again, I'm one of those freaks that thinks Zork Zero was the epitome of computer gaming. ;)

    Dave

  • No Star Trek IF Porn in the running! Infidels thats all anyone reads... :)

    But seriously, has someone hacked together a IF system, like TADS, for palm yet? Writing the instructions would be tedious, but would certainly make you look busy in those meetings.

  • I've been waiting for this one myself. Funcom, the same people making the SFMMORPG, Anarchy Online, also made the Longest Journey from the same engine. I understand L.J. has finally found a U.S. distributor, and should hit the shelves in November, though I couldn't tell you who is putting it out.

    The state of adventure games is miserable otherwise. Does anyone else think story telling and interactivity are basically at odds with each other? I really didn't have the patience for Grim Fandango, I liked the story but got really pissed at how contrived the puzzles were. It got to the point that I wished I could click the "I give up, show me the rest of the game" button.

    For anyone who missed it, here's a link to Old Man Murray's spot on analysis of the death of adventure games, very funny: click [oldmanmurray.com]
  • Getting offtopic, but how about the game Hacker? It was an old 5.25 inch disk game for the 286/386. You put in the disk and the game started up at a login prompt for some system you were supposed to break into.

    Heh, I bet that game wouldn't go over so well nowadays. :-)
  • The Incredible Erotic Adventures of Stiffy Makane [geocities.com]

    "This is easily the most amusingly horrible work of IF I've ever seen." - the first review [geocities.com]

  • these interactive fiction games will truly merit the name interactive once they look to create open-source architectures that allow for fictional frameworks, but let the end-users define the innerworkings of the game/entertainment, if not the parameters (ie. a user can submit a character, it can be chosen by popularity, usability, etc. and it can become part of the greater whole). that's a competition i have something to enter in.


    1. INTERACTIVE [mikegallay.com]
      1. ENTERTAINMENT

  • Some good games similar to this type are of course the Zork Trilogy, and some older Sierra stuff. Leisure Suit Larry, any version less than or equal to 5, Police Quest 1 or 2. Basically any game Sierra made before they switched over to the "click based exploring" is great.

    Just think, there are readers of slashdot young enough to have never experienced LSL! We can't let these great old games die. Maybe a napster for classic great PC games? :) I got a CD of these things, its amazing how many of these old games you can fit on one CD (400-500).
    -

  • Age of Wonders is a great game, Age of Empires 2 is a good games too, im really waiting for Warcraft III right now though, and Black and White. Black and white especially, looks like it has a great interface.
  • I remember playing those text games, right back to when I was a kid in school playing on an Apple IIe, so adictive...

    I agree with Swede2048, modern games do look very spectacular, but most are not as adictive as some of the classics, even the classic games with primative graphics (check out www.classicgaming.com) are still very enjoyable.

    While Quake IS a good game, I think it's being carried a bit too far. There are lots of similar games and already several versions of Quake itself, how can you keep playing the same thing? At least in the "early days" games were more interesting and imaginitive, and genuinly hard to get bored of.
  • Bah, choose-your-own-adventure books. :)

    I remember seeing the Zorks on sale for the Commodore 64, and wishing I had enough money to buy one :). Since then, I've played quite a few IF games acquired from a number of different source for several different platforms - most for free. I must say it is very cool now being able to play the Zorks and all other Infocom adventures (not to mention the frequently far superior productions of raif/rgif (note: rec.{arts,games}.int-fiction) regulars) on my Palm Vx. Ridiculously portable, these things are, and great fun.

    Although it is easy to spend a lot of time with them... :)

    It's encouraging to see /. mentioning the IF competition. I've wondered before how many slashdot regulars are likely to have been Infocom or general text adventure fans back in the eighties, and might not have known that there is still a very lively online presence of free (beer) IF authors and fans.

    If any are interested, have a look at http://www.ifarchive.org/ [ifarchive.org]. There's also a few other useful links at the competition site given above.

    Enjoy.


  • If you want to respond to a Jon Katz story, turn to page http://slashdot.org/faq/editorial.sh tml #ed700 [slashdot.org]

    If you want to respond to a CmdrTaco story, turn to page http://slashdot.org/faq/editorial.sh tml #ed600 [slashdot.org]

    If you want to suggest a story, go to page http://www.kuro5hin.org [kuro5h1n.org]

  • Text based gaming isn't dead. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This just sounds like a text based game competition. Contrary to popular belief, text based games are alive and well.

    The mud connector [mudconnector.com] has a listing of over 1500 mu*s, which, to the uninformed, is a Multi-User Whatever, normally Dungeon/Domain, but has grown to include Mushes etc. In a mud, everything is text based, and multiuser is the norm. On mud I used to play on had around 100 people on it at a time at its most popular (around a year ago). For the serious, I recommend a good mud client, Zmud [zuggsoft.com] seems popular (windows and shareware though), but any telnet client will do.

    Also, games like Nethack [nethack.org] are still being maintained and expanded. Pure text (although a QT interface is out there), for single player, but Nethack will always be on the top of any gaming list for me due to the style of gameplay.

    Ah, textbased. Sometimes (as in the case of many muds), it has the habit to be bad. In other cases (yah, nethack!) it can be the best gaming out there. Then again, blowing someone's head off, such as in quake or doom, is satisfying, and no mud will every match the visual appeal of 8 wolves chasing you, a single halfling, to the guards (a scene I've seen from Everquest).
  • Those people who wrote Choose Your Own Adventure might have it patented!

  • Well, i remember funny little text adventures myself, but those adventures just wouldnt satisfy the kids from todays world, i think they just need glamourous GL graphics and surround sound.
    But whenever i have the urge to do some textadventures i'll just login to a MUD.
    There are several nice muds to go online with and do some text adventureing. A nearly complete list of International muds can be found at www.mud.de [www.mud.de].

    Greets

    Timo

  • West of House (Score:5)

    by Kartoffel ( 30238 ) on Sunday October 01, 2000 @09:44PM (#740850)
    You are standing in an open field, with a boarded front door.
    A small mailbox is here.

    > OPEN MAILBOX
    Inside the small mailbox is:
    a leaflet

    > GET LEAFLET
    Taken.

    > READ LEAFLET
    "WELCOME TO SLASHDOT!"

    SLASHDOT is a game of adventure, danger and low cunning. In it you will explre some of the most amazing territory ever seen by mortals. No compter should be without one!

    A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the discussion.
    Your sword has begun to glow very brightly.

    > _

    --

  • If (like me) you wanted to try out some of the games, head over to the 1999 competition [textfire.com] page.
  • Yes, they do. They even occasionally surpass the best of the Infocom classics. Take a look at Curses or Jigsaw for particularly fine examples of the modern craft.

  • I don't think so, because:
    a.) there's no end to be found,
    b.) whatever your input is, you get the same response (this is not a bug) and
    c.) interactive fiction usually don't grow exponentially...

  • Nope, that's masochism.
  • Well, most MUDs are incredibly primitive in comparsion to an Infocom (or Inform) game, which this contest is about. I've never seen a MUD with a decent parser or plot. Essentially, MUDs are interactive Scott Adams' adventures rather than interactive Infocom adventures. If your only idea of a text adventures is from MUDs and the primitive adventures on floppy disk-less early 80s micros, you are really missing out on a lot.
  • I totally agree with you. I am a relative youngster compared with a lot of you (19) but i have been gaming on BBS's, Intellivision, Commodores etc since I was 6 years old, and I have to say that I haven't found a game I have enjoyed as much as the "classics" Things like the old Zork, "Quest" games, the NES classics, or some of the BBS games. The only games I have enjoyed in the past few years have been Starcraft, Civilization (I played it non-stop for about 2 years :) and Tie Fighter. I wish they would make games where gameplay comes first, graphics second. I still love throwing my PS, DC, and N64 in the closet and pulling out the old NES and playing games like Excitebike, Jackal, and Ninja Gaiden. Too bad Nintendo doesnt redo the original NES to make it more stable so I wouldnt have to blow in it every time I use it :)

  • OpenGL killed the TTY star (Score:4)

    by Chairboy ( 88841 ) on Sunday October 01, 2000 @09:46PM (#740857) Homepage
    OpenGL Killed the TTY star. Sure, there are cool 3d games out now, but it seems like there aren't really story tellers attached to them. Douglas Adams, for instance, worked with hoards of sweaty programmers to diagram a fabulously addictivt text game, hhgttg. His last attempt, however (Starship Titanic), was basically a modern attempt at the same thing, but not as good because they had to paste graphics onto it to get the attention of the 30 second attention span crowds to be commercially successful

    I say, throw down your 3d games of oppression! Throw down your Quakes, your Half Lifes, and get yourself some Leather Goddess of Phobos! Get some Zork, get some Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy! Hell, get Adventure!

    Hello, Sailor!

    The babel fish sails across the room and into an open waste hatch!

    Anyone can make not tea, access denied!

    HIT THORBAST WITH SWORD!

    See? It's all there, all in those little characters, many of you can probably remember where those lines are from.

    If anything, a true geek should marvel at the efficiency of a text based game. After all, wouldn't you say that compressing a vivid picture of Joe's Bar or a Vogon Airlock into 100 bytes (in the form of the character description) is incredible?
  • FLASHBACK! Alright, this is a geek crowd,
    anyone remember that series of books where you
    the narrative was interrupted at parts, and you
    had to type in a program? Well, you didn't have
    to, but when the character in the book (who was
    actually supposed to be you) did, they gave you
    the source code to type in along with
    them.

    Wow that sound way too cool...

    I am the avarage teen punk geek.
    So this is way before my time.
    Do you have the Title/Author or
    better yet ISBNS?

    Someone should write these in perl.
    I'd buy that.



  • As I was very fond of TradeWar and all the other types of RPG during my BBS days, I want to become one of the "judge", but the link /. has provided didn't give me info on how to JOIN IN THE FUN !

    I really want to relive the FUN TIME I HAD during the text-based RPG period.

    Can someone please help me, and tell me exactly how to join?

    Thank you !!

  • Aye they do, but do they have the sheer playabity of the classic adventure?

    > TELL TOLAN ABOUT IF

    Actually, interactive fiction is still developing. It depends on good writing skills, clever puzzles and good plots. Some of the more feature-enhanced interpreters out there let you use color, images and music, but they games themselves still have to be good in order to rank well in one of these contests. There's a good list of modern IF games at Bals guide to IF [wurb.com]. Inform, Hugo, and TADS are great game engines that are still going strong today. Get yourself an interpreter and download some games!
    --

  • obBitch: man, I submit this each year, and of course /. doesn't post it, and this year they do. Michael is cool. obBitch2: the first year I don't enter, and damn, it gets /., so all of you check out the last couple of years comps as well: btw, ftp.gmd.de is going to be hammered, so check some mirrors at http://ifarchive.org/ http://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXcomp etition95.html replace the 95 with appropriate year. usenet: rec.arts.int-fiction rec.games.int-fiction For those using linux, about 90% of the games should work for you, if not more. Check out http://interactfiction.about.com/library/weekly/aa 091100h.htm?terms=linux here [about.com] for help. www.textfire.com is good and ifiction.tsx.org is a hoot http://members.dencity.com/petro/reflect.html http://members.dencity.com/petro/ludite.html of my games are the nicest darnded reviews me every got..... and play my games, for weird stuff: look for Rybread Celcius or bad reviews, one in the same... btw, Graham Nelson is a genius for reverse engineering the infocom data structure... I know I can't spell ...oh yeah, and my own feeble IF page www.pushove.com/if here [pushove.com]

  • Re:Interactive Fiction (Score:3)

    by nomadic ( 141991 ) <nomadicworld@@@gmail...com> on Sunday October 01, 2000 @10:17PM (#740862) Homepage
    I am the avarage teen punk geek. So this is way before my time. Do you have the Title/Author or better yet ISBNS?

    Finally tracked them down; they were published by Scholastic [scholastic.com] back in the mid-80's, under the "Micro Adventures" title. Apparently they're out of print though, which is too bad; only online retailer who even lists them is Amazon. Probably have a bigger audience nowadays, though ironically fewer people probably have access to a BASIC compiler now than back then (when almost every home computer came bundled with it). But including a CD-ROM with Perl wouldn't be too hard. Actually be a better language to use, give kids some knowledge of non-linear programming without making them worry about all those variable declarations or header files.
    --

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