Something about reading news about text adventures and interactive fiction every day but seldom getting around to playing any of those games I read about can get to me just a bit. On one trip to the Interactive Fiction Database, though, a new review on the front page managed to pique my interest and point me onward. For all the games I haven't ( Read more... )

I've been keeping my "other" online presence running, although I haven't had to say much about it here to keep up the pretence of regular updates. Part of keeping my Tumblr topped up is to use its queue, although this does sort of detach me from what hypothetical other eyes might see. However, when I happened to see the "recently updated" section ( Read more... )

The Renga in Blue weblog aggregated on Planet IF has been working its way through a series of early text adventures for a while now. While it's moved a lot slower than The Digital Antiquarian, it has pointed out some intriguing obscure works on its way from the first mainframe-based games to the simple BASIC adventures squeezed into early home ( Read more... )

Continuing to follow the Planet IF aggregator, I noticed a very interesting piece of news being passed along. The documentary "Get Lamp" had featured images of design documents for some of Infocom's interactive fiction, and I'd eventually sorted out they had come from the files of Steve Meretzky, who the Digital Antiquarian consistently describes ( Read more... )

Making up an icon (for Dreamwidth's slightly more ample confines only) from a screen shot from "Get Lamp" to illustrate "adventure games" was fine and well, but I still don't seem to make a lot of time to play them. However, in continuing to follow the Planet IF aggregator, I somehow managed to hear about a tiny little game called "The Northnorth ( Read more... )

I was playing some of the simple adventure games included in computer magazines pretty early on, and I suppose the thought of "making one myself" did come to me as I tried now and again to get started on the BASIC tutorials that came with my family's computers. It was easier to do things with "IF-THEN" statements than with parsing text strings, ( Read more... )

Keeping up with the Planet IF aggregator, I managed a while ago to pick up on some announcements of a get-together about "interactive fiction" at a thoroughly convenient day-trip distance from me, and resolved that even though I don't play anywhere near as many "text-based" games as I could, it would still be interesting to go to. Last Saturday, I ( Read more... )

While I've long supposed the "Planet IF" aggregator to concentrate on "interactive fiction" games, specifically typing in commands to move around the game's described-in-text world, handle objects, and solve puzzles, in the past few months I've noticed enough references to start really catching my attention to "choose your own adventure"-type games ( Read more... )

It's been a while since I first learned about one group of "visual novels" (or "visual novel-like 'indie games,'" anyway) by Christine Love, long enough that I can't remember exactly how I did it. When I was playing through her "Digital: A Love Story," though, I already knew she'd named a later game "Analogue: A Hate Story," which did pique my ( Read more... )

Before I had this journal, I had a home page, but even though the journal links to that page I haven't revamped it for quite a while. "Linkrot" is one thing; it's something else to look at things you said you were interested in and wonder if it's quite the same now. After a certain amount of unproductive thought about mere possibilities, I at last ( Read more... )