Spring Thing 2006

It has commenced: the Spring Thing 2006. Four pieces of interactive fiction have been entered, among which is my The Baron.

I am not allowed to discuss the game during the voting period, which lasts until the 23rd of April, but I sure hope you will take a look at the offerings. Unfortunately for those who are new to IF, you need no less than three different interpreters (Z-code, Hugo and Adrift) to play these four pieces, but following either the instructions on the Spring Thing page or here, you should be fine. (And it works under Linux too!)

The best place to talk about these pieces is the IF newsgroup: rec.games.int-fiction. (Which you can either access through a newsreader, a good mail-program like Thunderbird, or a webbased interface like Google groups. There are actually two IF newsgroups, the other one being rec.arts.int-fiction, but the latter is for authors and the former for readers.)

I definitely recommend you to play all four pieces and submit your votes before the 23rd. :)

Comments

  1. To be clear, I am not allowed to publicly discuss my piece. You can always ask me questions in private by emailing me. (Domain: lilith.gotdns.org; user: victor; syntax: user@domain.)

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  2. Heh! I didn't know you were into IF.

    So that's two things we have in common, now, that and the Forge. Cool. :)

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  3. It is even in the subtitle of my blog. ;)

    Do you hang out on the rec.games/rec.arts newsgroups, and if so, under what name? (Mine is, ubsurprisingly, Victor Gijsbers.)

    What kind of IF are you most interested in?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Regarding r*if, used to, a while ago, under my real name as well, Joao Mendes. In the meantime, real life got a stranglehold of me and I had to let go of something...

    I may get back when Mike Roberts finally releases T3. (I get the development mailing list, so I'll know... :) (Although, I'm hearing interesting things about I7 as well... we'll see)

    As for IF, I like easy games, both long and short. Puzzleless is cool, but so is puzzley, as long they're easy puzzles and they support the story. My favorite so far is Tapestry, although I absolutely loved All Things Devours from IFComp'04.

    Speaking of which, I still can't believe Blue Chairs won that Comp...

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  5. I liked All Things Devours, too. In fact, it was perhaps the only IF game I ever really enjoyed for its puzzles. (Which obviously proves that the "hard but logical puzzle" is more to my liking than the "don't forget to examine everything and freely associate in a bizarre way puzzle".)

    Actually, I don't think Blue Chairs was bad at all. I quite liked the first 1/3 and last 1/3, and it was only the middle part, with its surreal and - to me - uninteresting puzzles that turned me off.

    I still remember with fondness the point in Blue Chairs where the protagonist realises that a t-shirt saying "127.0.0.1 There is no place like home" is not exactly cool.

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  6. :)

    By the way, in case you care:

    My Comp04 Reviews...

    I had fun writing these. Alas, I didn't get through playing even half of Comp05. Pity...

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