The Legend of the Missing Hat. Brass Lantern Downloading and Running Text Adventures: Z-Code and AGT. Z-Code Z-code games are, to some extent, the most complex of the ones discussed in this article.
Z-code games are written for a virtual machine known as the z-machine, which was developed by Infocom. All of Infocom's text adventures ran on the z-machine, and the text adventure language Inform creates z-code games by default. Z-code game files come in several varieties: .z3, .z5, .z8, and sometimes .dat. The different filename extensions have to do with what specific flavor of the z-machine they are supposed to run on, but since z-code interpreters will run any of these without complaint, you don't have to worry about these details. Most z-machine interpreters are variants on one of two basic types, Frotz and Zip. Once upon a time AGT bestrode the world of amateur interactive fiction like a Sauroposeidon. The AGT interpreter was originally only available for MS-DOS, but Robert Masenten wrote AGiliTy. Twine: a tool for creating interactive stories.
Essays and reviews on narrative in games and new media. GameSetWatch. ['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short.
It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Deirdra Kiai's Life Flashes By.] Life Flashes By is a meditative conversational piece partly about art and artists. It talks about art for art's sake and art for a commercial audience; about genre and literary work; about traditional and interactive media. It especially talks about the different kinds of rewards the world offers to people who choose these different options, even though the animating vocation may not be much different at all. The protagonist, Charlotte, is a writer of modestly successful literary novels. The character sketched by this retrospective is not entirely likable. There are moments when we see other characters trying to reach out to her, befriend her, like her -- only to be rebuffed.
She doesn't always end up lonely. The Interactive Fiction Magazine. Home : Inform. Interactive Fiction Top 50 of all time (2011 edition) People were asked to send in a list of between 1 and 20 of their favourite IF games of all time (in no particular order).
The number of points a game got was the number of lists on which it appeared. 35 participants cast a total of 437 votes on 183 different games; only the 48 games with 3 or more points are listed below. More information can be found here and here. News & updates (RSS) Details Games and Awards 1st Place: Spider and Web, by Andrew Plotkin2nd Place: Lost Pig, by Admiral Jota2nd Place: Photopia, by Adam Cadre4th Place: Anchorhead, by Michael Gentry5th Place: A Mind Forever Voyaging, by Steve Meretzky6th Place: De Baron, by Victor Gijsbers6th Place: Blue Lacuna, by Aaron A. This is version 6 of this page, edited by Victor Gijsbers on 1 October 2011 at 04:25 PM. Interactive Fiction. Interactive fiction was the first great computer-game craze.
Through the early 1980s, the most sophisticated, complex, involving games available were the text adventures. Everyone agreed. Go look up up old videogame rating charts; Infocom was always on the list — with several games. Of course, advancing graphics eventually washed away IF’s supremacy. By 1990, all the text game companies were closed, or about to be. I’ve been part of that community for a decade and a half. You can play my games freely (and for free). (Okay, except for Hadean Lands. If you’ve never played IF before...
Everyone’s heard that IF is hard to play. Furthermore, most situations in every game are amenable to a handful of common commands. (Click for PDF version, HTML version, print-quality bitmap, or others. If you still feel overwhelmed, I recommend you start with The Dreamhold, listed below. Interactive Fiction. Playfic- Online Interactive Fiction. Planet IF.