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Interactive Fiction?


Andy Sheets

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So I was playing Infocom classic The Lurking Horror last night (and doing badly since I couldn't fully remember how to properly input commands), and it started me wondering about this genre. I seem to recall reading somewhere a while back that there are sites out there dedicated to keeping this genre alive through freeware and shareware. Does anybody know anything about that, good sites or specific games that are distinguished? I would think that with the advances in technology, there would be some good games around, even if done by amateurs. Maybe there's just a bunch of crap out there, but I'm curious.

 

I used to play these games all the time when I was a kid. I had so many of the Infocom games that my dad actually started urging me to get games that had graphics, as if he cared one way or another about video games :)

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Ahh, The Lurking Horror, one of my most favorite of all text adventures. They do amazing things with prose in that game. Stationfall and Beyond Zork are other ones I'm particularly fond of (though technically Planetfall is before Stationfall I prefer the sequel). The Spellbreaker trilogy is quite enjoyable too.

 

Interactive fiction is definitely alive and out there, kept going by a few stalwarts who continue to embrace the genre. I am not too familiar with it these days as I prefer "adventure games" versus straight IF, but I did scrounge up a couple of links.

 

The Interactive Fiction Archive

 

The 9th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition

 

The archives appear to be related to the IF competition, so I'm guessing it's past entries from the comp.

 

I picked up the first Infocom Archive, though I was slightly disappointed because it didn't have my favorite text adventure, Nord & Bert Couldn't Make Head Nor Tail Of It. I love words and wordplay, and that game is absolutely brilliant for puns and spoonerisms.

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Yep, ifarchive.org is where you need to go. There's a small, but very hardcore & prolific, "interactive fiction" scene still alive producing some supposedly excellent text adventures ranging from a very small scale which offer a small scene that's rich in description & interaction to large scale adventures on the scale of Infocom's classics.

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