Wabewalker

location: United States, California, San Francisco

mood: working

IF Comp ’09. Ulcers on standby.

What started out pathetic ended pretty well. Three games were close enough to perfect to earn the coveted “10” score:

Magic

A parlour magician with PTSD battles killer bunnies.

Nightfall

London has been evacuated. Figure out why and stop a disaster.

Violet

Try to avoid distractions while you write your thesis. (A lot better than what its premise suggests.)

Links and notes:

IF Comp 2008 Reviews

The furries have invaded. I repeat, the furries have invaded. Last year, elf slash; this year, werewolf sex.

location: Home

mood: exhausted

So, yeah. IF Comp 2008. Lookin’ bad, lookin’ real bad.

Why do I do this to myself every year?

location: 2821 Mission College Blvd, Santa Clara, CA

mood: accomplished

Oh, right. Almost forgot: Reviews for the 2007 IF Competition are now up. I only managed to finish three-quarters of the games before the deadline. Tot it up to a combination of apathy and a late start.

Sorry to all those who feel shortchanged by a lack of acerbity. I'll get around to the post-deadline reviews before the end of the month year decade.

mood: accomplished

Yet again I manage to make the deadline with minutes to spare. Fortunately, the last three games to review all sucked.

Full scores with my play notes:

IF Comp 2006 Reviews

mood: accomplished

Whew. Cut it pretty close, and I had to drop some games which acted funny on my computer (normally I’d download a different interpreter — this year I was just lazy); but with 11 hours until the judging deadline, I finished all 29 games that would run on my machine.

So much for starting early this year; damn job got in the way. I should’ve quit so as to put more time into the game reviews.

Full scores with my play notes will go up later this evening:

IF Comp 2005 Reviews

Man, I’m sick of looking at that post with my Aunt going crazy, so here’s an IFComp status update:

Last year’s almost-winner Jason Devlin (Sting of the Wasp) almost wins again, bumped down by an inexcusable runtime error in Vespers.

I’m 2/3 of the way through the games, and I only have this weekend to finish them. This may be the year that I don’t review all of the games.

Distress, by Mike Snyder. Go get it. Best two hours so far.

mood: ecstatic

Hey, Zorkers! It’s October, and you know what that means!

That’s right, it’s time for the Annual Interactive Fiction Competition! This year, I can play thirty-six of the games, and have already finished five, one of which hasn’t made me writhe in agony.

So if you want to join, go sign up as a judge, download the games, and crush the souls of pretentious authors! It’s fun!

Well, the votes are in, or will be by midnight tonight.  This was a fairly mundane competition, with nothing spectacular on either end of the spectrum.  Strike that: there were a few well-crafted entries, just none that garnered the coveted “10” rating.

On the whole, the entries were of high quality; only one appeared to be a joke entry.  As usual, the games can be divided into two groups: traditional puzzlefests (i.e., text adventures) and the grandiose experimental games (i.e., interactive fiction).  I expect that the intellectual exercises will take the majority of the top spots in the ratings, as these monuments to programmatic ego appeal to the arty types that dominate the competition judging.  But who knows?  Last year, “Risorgimento Represso” surprised many by taking the second-highest spot, despite its lack of aesthetic pretensions.

Anyway, on to the reviews!