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Games Entertainment

Interactive Fiction Competition 2001 Results 91

Posted by michael from the lie-down-in-front-of-bulldozer dept.
david.given writes: "The results of the annual text adventure game competition have been posted (remember when the competition started? You've played them, you've voted for them, now see who won. Much kudos go to Jon Ingold, whose game "All Roads" placed first. As someone who didn't come first (33rd, actually) but had a lot of fun anyway, let me extend my warmest thanks and gratitude to everyone who took part. Without you, none of this would be possible."
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Interactive Fiction Competition 2001 Results More

Interactive Fiction Competition 2001 Results

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  • it's alive and well everyhwere on the 'net

    like http://rpgtoolkit.com

    try doing a search on home made rpgs or games on the net and you might be suprised.
    • try doing a search on home made rpgs or games on the net and you might be suprised.

      If anything it's depressing that the homebrew crowd has wasted so much time making hackneyed medieval and science fiction role playing games. One would expect grassroots movements to go off in wonderful new directions.
      • It's much easier to complain about unoriginality than it is to create *anything*. Have you made anything we could summarily dismiss? Do you have the experience with IF to make judgments about the entire medium?

        (Hackneyed themes are hardly unknown in "professionally" developed games. I'm sure many readers can come up with their own examples.)

  • Hrm? (Score:2, Funny)

    by base2op ( 226729 )
    remember when we competition started?
    Me now confuse?

  • If 'yall haven't played this stuff, try some time. (Score:5, Informative)

    by cduffy ( 652 ) <charles+slashdot@dyfis.net> on Friday November 16, 2001 @04:46PM (#2576311)
    I'm curious as to how many of 'yall haven't played interactive fiction. I got started back in the Infocom games (with Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy) and still spend some time playing with the competition's results each year.

    If you're new to IF and looking for some good games, let me reccomend a few from past year's winners:

    The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass of Sherbet (by Graham Nelson) is far and away my all-time favorite short piece of IF (though it still took long enough to get through that I had a great deal of fun -- not *too* short, by a long shot!). Photopia is one I also introduce to friends who are more interested in the artistic/story-telling aspect of IF -- it's a really, really beautiful story.
    Forgive the rambling, but if you're new to IF (or have been away for a while), try these games; they really allow one to see how imagination compares favorably to the flashy graphics that all so often leave nothing to it.
    • Shamless self-promotion: The last application I wrote for Windows before I swore off MFC and moved to Linux was a front-end for about ten good text adventures called Adventure Blaster [cnet.com]. It's a little dated at this point, but still provides a convenient way for Windows users to play some great games without facing the learning curve of setting up the interpreters. It also has a very extensive help system with walkthroughs and loads of pointers for newbies.
      • I found Adventure Blaster in the archive, and although I didnt find it particularly usefull, the standalone interpreters which came with it seem fine.

        Thanks!

    • I'm in the middle of "Lost New York" now and am rather enjoying it, modulo a few annoying bugs in the inventory system. I'd recommend it as a nice example of how text adventures don't have to have anything to do with dungeons and monsters; this one is a mix of history, sightseeing, and puzzle solving.
    • Be sure to play Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin. There's just about nothing i can say which wouldn't be a spoiler, but the game makes the best use of the IF medium that i've ever seen. It is a kind of genius that simply could not be expressed in a book or movie or anything else.
      • I've been thinking about picking up a good book for a week or so now -- but a piece of high-quality IF (and Plotkin certainly qualifies) will meet my mindful-entertainment needs just as well.

        Thanks!
    • I played a few of the games from the contest last year, and most of them were great. My favorite was one where you played a djinn (or genie). Instead of operating like a human, the author created a system of movement based on fulfilling your destiny. If you took an action that was contrary to your destiny, you would lose power. Once all your power was gone, you were dead. It was a neat paradigm shift.
    • A low tech system (well, back when I got it, the Aplle][+ was state of the art) and a good imagination will get you much better graphics than any max'ed out gaming system.

      I remember a great Sopwith Camel flight simulator for the apple that had almost nonexistent graphics, but it behaved basically like a Sopwith Camel. We used to play that game all night.

      Our first system came with two games: Adventure (by Softwin I think it said on the floppy?), and Brickout. I never played Brickout much, but we basically played Adventure night and day until we had all solved it.

  • Are there any of those nice games for Linux btw.?

    • Re:Linux (Score:2, Informative)

      by michael ( 4716 )
      There are several interpreters available for Linux - just do a bit of searching. And the game files are the same across systems.
      • Since nobody seems to want to post it, the "old reliable" interpeter for Z-Code games, Frotz, is available for darn near all UNIX platforms. Many Linux distributions have a UnixFrotz package.. Debian's is actually fairly up to date. Or, you can get the source yourself from the current UnixFrotz [csubak.edu] maintainer. His page also has links to the IFArchives and other ZCode interpeter projects.

        Disclaimers: I help the maintainer with cross-platform issues. Also, UnixFrotz is now GNU GPL.

    • Almost all of them run on Linux. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by cduffy ( 652 ) <charles+slashdot@dyfis.net> on Friday November 16, 2001 @04:53PM (#2576352)
      One of Infocom's innovations Way Back In The Day was "z-code", a bytecode (much like Java has) that they could distribute their games in with only a platform-specific interpreter that needed to be written for each platform. A great many of these games are still distributed in Z-code form, and thus can be run practically everywhere (even my Palm Pilot!). TADS, another popular language/platform for these games, also has a Unix interpreter available.

      There might be others with different interpreters that aren't cross-platform capable, but most (almost all?) of them are.
    • Actually, almost all of the games can be played on most platforms. There are, for example, frotz front-ends for Palm, WinCE, Linux, Windows, and a whole bunch of others.


      Also, the frotz stuff is fairly easy to write games for, so be sure to try your hand at it!


      -WS

  • 33rd? 33RD?!?! (Score:3, Funny)

    by fobbman ( 131816 ) on Friday November 16, 2001 @04:47PM (#2576320) Homepage
    david.given thinks "I worked my butt off on my game and it was much, much better than 33rd place. And I think that that Jon Ingold ingrade probably slept his game to the top. I wonder what I could do to get even with those morons so that they will KNOW MY PAIN!

    "Wait, I know! I'll /. them into oblivion!"

  • You are sitting at a terminal (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16, 2001 @04:48PM (#2576325)
    The glow of the screen illuminates your fingers.
    > FP
    I don't know how to 'FP'.
    > Post 'FP'
    Your post has been received.
    Moderator: -1 Offtopic
    Moderator: -1 Redundant
    Moderator: -1 Overrated
    You are dead.

    You are sitting at a terminal.
    The glow of the screen illuminates your fingers.
    >
  • Having gotten a copy of the original Colossal Cave Adventure with my first PC, I have a soft spot in my heart for such creations, and hope they continue to be created and experienced forever.

    I've heard plenty about how the Hugo-winning [slashdot.org] Harry Potter books are singlehandedly making the printed page fun for kids again. Perhaps the next generation, newly enchanted with textual adventure, will spawn a new surge of popularity for the beleaguered interactive fiction genre.

  • CML2? (Score:2, Funny)

    by O2n ( 325189 )
    As someone who didn't come first (33rd, actually)[...]

    I wonder how CML2 [slashdot.org] would've scored in this competition. :)
  • Just what the galloping shitburger is a *.z5 file? I wanted to download the game and check it out but, well, hehe - what to do with it? Is it compressed?

    --jb
    • no. A z5 is zcode. It runs on the Z-machine: the imaginary computer that Infocom created for their games. The z-machine has emulators for just about every platform in existance, many of which are downloadable from (iirc) here [ifarchive.org]. Frotz [ifarchive.org] is probably a good bet unless you're on some funky platform.

    • Explanation of the Z5 format (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tsar ( 536185 ) on Friday November 16, 2001 @05:04PM (#2576399) Homepage Journal
      Z5 is the an interactive fiction story file format (Z for Zork). You need an Infocom/Inform interpreter to run it. These include Frotz and Zip, and are available for many platforms, such as:
      • XZip. [eblong.com] for X-Windows
      • WinFrotz [concentric.net] for Windows
      • MaxZip [eblong.com] for Macintosh
      • Frotz [geocities.com] for DOS, WinCE, Amiga, OS/2, and Psion
      • Pilot-Frotz [geocities.com] for Palm OS
      Run the appropriate interpreter, load the story file, and off you go.
    • Wow, a troll who's not anonymous? The ifarchive and competition pages both describe in great detail how to run the games. "z5" files are Z-machine bytecode version 5; they'll run in any Z-machine interpreter. A convenient example would be Frotz, freely available for the platform of your choice from the self-same link in the original post.

    • Infocom ``z-machine'' version 5. Interpreters are avilable for just about any platform you can think of. As usual, Google [google.com] has a fairly complete list [google.com] of what's out there.

      Frotz [google.com] and Zip [google.com] are popular choices. I personally use Malyon [ifarchive.org] in XEmacs...

  • My opinions (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gblues ( 90260 ) on Friday November 16, 2001 @04:55PM (#2576363)
    I don't know how the hell "All Roads" won. It's a confusing, pointless game that does a very poor job of storytelling. More of my opinions on the IF competition entries can be found in my diary: here [diaryland.com].

    Nathan

    • Re:My opinions (Score:2, Insightful)

      by CaseStudy ( 119864 )
      "All Roads" won because nobody really hated it enough to give it a competition-killing score. The best game in the competition, "Moments Out of Time," had some funky menus and didn't work right on the most popular interpreter out there, causing some people to give it a 1 or 2.
    • I'm someone who often has trouble understanding abstract, complex, or "artsy-fartsy" plots, but I found All Roads to be thoroughly understandable and very enjoyable. The concept of (*SPOILER*) a story starts with the protagonist's death and then has his consciousness jumping back in time further and further into the past isn't a new one, but it's an interesting one, and All Roads adds some interesting twists to the concept at the end.

      I didn't find the story to be confusing (not more so than it was intended to be, anyway) until the very very end, and even then things became clear after a few more runthroughs. I just loved trying to screw around with temporal causality and seeing what you could and couldn't get away with. Yes, the game is a bit "linear", but that's because the future has already happened and you can't take any course of actions that won't lead you to that future.

      There was some very, very brilliant stuff in the game. At one point, after jumping back in time yet again, you eventually "catch up" with a part of the game you've already experienced and your character automatically repeats whatever you did the first time around, no matter what input you give. That was really creative, especially because you have no idea what's happening at first, but once you figure it out, it's the first point in the game that confirms 100% that you're jumping back in time. Shortly after that, you find out it's a bit more complex than that, and I can't say I have total comprehension of the ending, but I still got a good feeling out of it.

      As for your other reviews ...

      "Colours" was pretty silly, yeah, but I found it had a certain bit of charm to it. A nasty bug can keep you from completing the game, and I was hoping for something more than "YOU HAVE WON" at the end, so I wouldn't really recommend wasting time with it unless you're a puzzle freak.

      "Gostak": I also henzore bowenqo quit after onpexoz minutes. It might have orze fun if I'd figured out how to ligyung it, but I'm not a damn wezktronyi.

      "Silicon Castles": As near as I can tell, this is just a chess game. The title screen has a chess quote, you're in a room with nothing but a genie chess board, and your genie happens to be a chess-playing genie: you didn't think to try actually playing chess? The genie's "brain level" can be adjusted, and I tried playing one game on the easiest level, but even at that level it seemed like victory would require actual skill at winning chess, not just knowledge of the rules, so I quit after one attempt. The dumbest thing was, the game didn't even recognize I was checkmated (and yes, I'm damn sure I was really checkmated -- I had nothing but my king left, surrounded in a corner by two enemy queens and no possible moves) so I had to resign prompting a serve "coward!" taunting from the genie. Maybe there's some form of plot if you beat the genie. I have no idea. People who aren't skilled at chess will never find out, and people who are skilled at chess probably wouldn't want to bother with this game anyway.

      "Jump": I played the game to completion. In five minutes. I played it again, just to be sure I hadn't imagined it. What the hell? Here's a complete walkthrough for the game:

      1. Find key to locker.
      2. Unlock locker.
      3. Take gun from locker.
      4. At this point (after a few turns of waiting), the game automatically goes into a sequence where (I think) the main character (I think) shoots her (I think) abusive (I think) fater and then (I think) jumps off a cliff.

      That's it. That's the game. Sure, there's "fiction", but where's the "interactive" part?

      I also tried "Bane of the Builders" which was mildly interesting by very trivial, and "Crusader" which as pretty funny but also didn't have much substance to it.

      I'm going to try out "Shattered Memory" now and a few of the others that look promising.

  • At the risk of seeking buzzwords for the sake of buzzwords, are there interpreters that will run these games via web technologies like HTML (using basic links/forms), Java applets, or Javascript? Having asked the question, I'm not sure that any of the above would actually be more useful to me than a regular interpreter which runs as a Linux application, but I'm still curious.

    • I know there's zplet [sourceforge.net], which is a 'terp in Java. There's an HTML one somewhere, but off-hand I can't remember where. YOu can also play them through TELNET.. lots of fun.
    • www.pond.com/~russotto/zplet/ifol.html

      That's the home of Zplet, which is a rather nice java interpreter, which, iirc, handles save/restore functions now as well.

      But you're right, it's not a whole lot better than a standard interpreter. (Especially as pond.com seems to be down at the moment.)

      • Zplet has moved, because pond.com's suckitude is increasing without bounds. (Without warning, they installed a new server some weeks ago, didn't restore the data on the old one, killed all the shell accounts, and didn't so much as inform their users afterwards...).

        New location is http://www.speakeasy.org/~russotto/zplet/ifol.html [speakeasy.org]

        Also, I've finally made some file releases of the sourceforge ZPlet stuff so you can put ZPlet on your own page without messing with CVS.

  • I'm curious as to how many of 'yall haven't played interactive fiction.

    I have, but I've heard they are commonly called "wet dreams".

    The fiction part is easy, it's the interaction you don't wanna know about.

  • My Top Three Faves (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Yekrats ( 116068 ) on Friday November 16, 2001 @05:08PM (#2576429) Homepage
    Being one of the entrants to the Competition (5th place, yay!) I was not allowed to vote, but we were allowed to send in our top three favorites for a "Miss Congeniality" vote. In that light, here were my three favorites:


    1. Earth and Sky: Designed to be an interactive fiction version of issue 1 of a super hero comic book. Fun stuff, if you're into the super hero genre.


    2. Moments Out of Time: A time travel story, allowing a character to go back in time before an apocolypse and record data for the future. You start the game, choosing from a collection of gadgetry to help you on your mission.


    3. No Time To Squeal: Please, no jokes about the title for a second or two. This story (though a bit linear) packs an emotional whallop about a husband, his very pregnant wife, and his psychotic business associate.


    Kudos to all of the authors. Personally, I think it was a pretty good year for the IF Comp, but some will argue with me on that point.

    • It would be really nice if the competition site had such one-liner descriptions of all the entries, preferably by the authors themselves. It's too early for either XYZZY News or SPAG (interactive fiction web-magazines) to have reviewed them yet.

  • Ex Looking Glass folks (Score:3, Informative)

    by allagash ( 139838 ) on Friday November 16, 2001 @05:57PM (#2576719) Homepage
    Sean Barrett [std.com], the 3rd place winner, used to work for Looking Glass Studios, the game company which produced Thief, Flight Unlimited, the original System Shock, and many more games. He's quite a smart guy, too; he has KnuthBucks [std.com].

    Dan Schmidt [dfan.org] also used to work there, and has entered the IF competition in the past (see this [dfan.org]). Looks like he donated some prizes this year.

    Has anyone else with pro game dev experience written IF?

  • i still can't beat Zork. but i'll give the winners a try. next time i'll try to kill the grue.
  • Comparing my rankings with the aggregate scores, here's my most overrated:

    "To Otherwhere and Back": This game made no sense and was impossible without the walkthrough it was written around.
    "The Gostak": Sure, it's neat to rewrite all the error messages in another language, but one needs referents to make sense of things.
    "Film at Eleven": It wasn't bad, but it certainly didn't belong in the top ten.

    And, conversely, the most underrated:
    "Elements": This was the best of the abstract games, none of which fared well in this competition.
    "A Night Guest": Sure, it's not epic, but it's well-written and it's fun.
    "Best of Three": I suspect the conversation choice system bothered a lot of people, or perhaps they just wanted item puzzles. But this was a great story that had me playing long into the night.
  • anyone know of a dos based software package that will operate as a door to play these things?
  • This year's competition had a pretty pathetic group of entrys. Nothing like last year's competition. It seems like most of the reviewers would only recommend you play one five or six of these games.
    However If you are a first time player or looking for something with an amazing story check out this winner from the '99 xyzzy awards. [xyzzynews.com]

    Worlds Apart [igs.net]

  • The last entry

    52 You Were Doomed From The Start 1.7281 1.42

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