Lavonardo

Very much in the interactive fiction vein, with a healthy dose of classic and ultra-violent videogames thrown in for good measure.

• Telltale Games, who have singlehandedly birthed the episodical adventure game with Bone and Sam & Max recently received a nicely round six million dollars in venture capital.
• Yet another variant of the Z-Machine, Ziggy uses forums for input and output, and the effect is quite an odd multi-player experience.
• Rockstar continues its defiant progress: Manhunt 2. The release of the game has now been suspended following bans in both United Kingdom and United States.
• The H.P. Lovecraft 70-year anniversary games are out. My own effort got sidelined almost in square one.
• Mr. Grownup Gamer is blogging his way through the entire Zelda-series.
• Top 10 massively multiplayer games/worlds holds quite a few surprises: WoW at #1 is not one of them, but the 15:1 advantage enjoyed by Habbo Hotel over Second Life definitely is.
• A games writer for Guardian bravely tries to organize the writing of a multi-author text adventure on a blog.
• There’s a wiki for everything, and multiples thereof on hype-y subjects. Interactive fiction certainly doesn’t carry hype, but the jointly authored site on the subject provides lots of information.
• IGN’s games of the summer feature has very optimistic (but also vague) release date for Bioware’s inbound science fiction extravaganza Mass Effect.

Peter Nepstad’s self-published interactive fiction game, 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery just extended its audience by a large chunk.

A download version off Manifesto Games site sure makes things easier than dealing with a non-traditional web shop (which seems to have been replaced by the common Paypal lately).

Definitely something tasty for the inevitable not so optimal summer days.

Recently sighted game-related links:

• The third part of the history of computer role-playing games is out. This one concentrates on the decade starting from 1994 - and covers many of the classics of the genre such as Planescape:Torment and the Baldur’s Gate saga.
• Unsurprisingly, a videogame on Lost has been announced. No statement on which seasons this will cover - if it’s up to the third, the spoiler-averse in the audience (including me, obviously) will avoid this until the third season is available on dvd - expectedly in september.
• Bethesda Softworks has bought the Fallout IP. If the resulting game combines the storylines of the previous Fallout installments with the graphics of Oblivion, its arrival will be a happy day indeed.
• Keyboard pad for xbox 360 - how long before the first Z-machine (and Zork, naturally) makes it into the Live Arcade…
• World Without Oil, an alternate reality game launched on mayday eve. Haven’t played with it at all yet - seems US-centered on a first blink.
• Publishing a game based on George R.R. Martin’s still-to-be-completed septalogy a Song of Fire and Ice suddenly bankrupted Guardians of Order. The sad history of the franchise doesn’t deter Green Ronin from trying out the very same move.

Three interesting articles on interactive fiction popped up this week:

Peter Nepstad kicked off a contest on creating a game based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book, a collection of story fragments. The story fragments are short - might be an opportune time to dust off the compiler and give this a shot. Not for the contest part, but to have a first decent programming project in a long long while. And woo, on the double, looks like Manifesto Games is picking up the distribution on 1893.

Textfyre is a phenomenally bad name for the latest company trying to make it in the less-than-obvious niche of commercial interactive fiction (last known successes: Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls). But they’ve signed up the author of Anchorhead, Michael Gentry for the first games. Which means that I’ll certainly give the first product a shot.

Gamasutra ran an interview with Emily Short the co-author of Inform 7 and a bunch of good games.

Best enjoyed with a quality browser.

• A surprisingly large-scale prank played at the superbowl.
• WTFCNN? - mercilessly reporting on the yellow-press-like headlines uncomfortably often sighted on CNN.
• Interactive fiction on the DS.
• Wave Bubble, just the device to eliminate cellular phone traffic nearby. Probably approaching illegality in the continental states and un-gentlemanlike conduct all over the world.
• Laws of physics that do not apply in Hollywood.
• The finnish wikipedia hosts a seminar on wednesday evening to celebrate the breaking of 100k barrier in the number of articles.

Recent pickups or changes on the blogroll.

• Katuoja attempts to move into daily article mode.
• AC/OS, semi-interesting open source-related discussion.
• Emily Short has converted her wide-encompassing pages on interactive fiction to blog format.
• Juha Ylitalo is an old schoolmate - his blog concentrates on photography.
• Original Signal, a cleanly designed aggregator of dozens of other blogs.

First collection of links in a long while.

• H.P. Lovecraft’s Case of Randolph Carter as hypertext. The interface is iffy, but the concept interesting (seek out Anchorhead for an even better experience).
• An overview of parallel computing. 50+ pages, probably not that light reading.
• Gonegaming’s awards for 2006.
• An absolute treasure trove of unusual articles in wikipedia. In some cases mere “unusual” is definitely an understatement.
• In the beginning (like, seven years ago), there was korsoraattori, now there’s a a new dialect of SQL for the folks from northeastern Vantaa.

The license and registration, please.

• The release imminent release of Windows Vista is accompanied weird alternate reality game: Vanishing Point (and a related wiki).
• Lounasblogi, about having lunch in downtown Helsinki would be much more usable were I able to actually have lunch somewhere else than the ghetto of Pitäjänmäki.
• Playing Fair with the Player, first new article about interactive fiction in quite a while.
• Feltron’s annual report - great idea, great design.
• What do 200 calories look like. There is quite a difference between celery and peanut butter (more than 30 times of weight).
• The initial set of Firefox 3.0 requirements is out. Nice.
• The music of Veronica Mars.
• Mapperz - an interesting blog/newssite on geographic web.
• Video on demand never got off the ground - how about books on demand?

The longest night of the year will be easier with the following:

• An interview with Michael Gentry, author of one of the greatest recent IF games, Anchorhead (a special edition of the game is now in the works, with a demo already out).
• Inside dirt on the effects of the second Pirates of the Caribbean.
• Top Ten of dangerous toys (no, not the band - but actually lethal devices for kids).
• Universal Text Imitator. For the times when lengthy non-sensical, but syntactically correct phrases are called for.
• The worst loser award of 2006 goes to Michael Crichton.
• A collection of heroically geeky animals.

Utterly failed this year’s interactive fiction competition.

Thought I’d catch up on many games while travelling, but always had better things on the agenda.

Another october, another annual interactive fiction competition.

The very first game tried crashed Spatterlight, but a quick update of the interpreter brought in a working version.

This time I’ll be more vigilant in trying out at least half a dozen games.

Had dinner at the closely located Rock Bottom brewery/restaurant. A decent burger accompanied by their North Star amber ale neatly tied the lengthy day together.

Snapped a couple of pictures of the nightly Boston from my own balcony, and from the doors of balconies in the corridors. Which sadly didn’t open more than four inches - so precision was needed. As would have a tripod, most of the images turned out to be on the “shaken, not stirred”-niche.

The top floor of Radisson, at 24 above the ground did provide an excellent view to most directions, but one towards the downtown/financial center was not available.

I finally remembered to check out the finnish version of System of a Down, Taunon Systeemi, as pointed out by Mr. Musicnaut. Not for purists (as is apparent from song titles and the names chosen by the band members), but worth checking out for everybody else.

Also, in an attempt to stave of sleep by surfing, noted that Emily Short has re-done her interactive fiction page. Curiously, a link to her magnum opus, City of Secrets is absent, as is some authoring-related material offered previously.

And trying to view this sizable work of pixel art takes a while. Especially behind a slow link.

You have been sentenced.

• Get Lamp is a forthcoming movie about interactive fiction.
• A mean, but pointful strip, showing the lack of clothing on the emperor.
• Yet another worth1000-contest, this one about outdoing Escher.
• nethack on DS.
• Classic video games, re-enacted with common household objects.
• Google re-launched writely.
• A blog that concentrates on roguelike games sounds like an interesting concept (and could be more frequent than an entry every two weeks).
• Important skills for origami-retreats held in the outback: how to open a bottle of beer with just a piece of paper (and yes, you’re so much better off with pretty much any other object).
• Iron Sky, the next movie by the guys who did Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning has a writer: Johanna Sinisalo.

Some things to check out in case the games get boring.

• Zork over IP, which goes to show that no matter what the platform, a Z-machine implementation will soon be ported to it.
• Moleskine has expanded its product range to city guidebooks.
• The deepest hole ever drilled into the crust of Gaia.
• This must be the biggest page on the web, after all it covers the deep sky in some 8.1 nonillion pixels. Something to scroll through in a long-winded and badly ventilated meeting.
• A draft of a history of interactive fiction.
• Future of pinball is a forthcoming document of Williams’ Pinball 2000 project. A project that was supposed to bring the game into the 21st century, but was instead untimely shut down.

On its traditional release date, april thirtieth, the inform programming language got updated.

Got updated in a big way. Bigger than anyone would have expected.

The language itself has changed unexpectedly - it no longer looks like a second cousing to perl, but is english. A small and well-defined subset thereof, but english nonetheless. And it’s compiled in two passes, first the natural language is translated into an inform program, which is subsequently compiled. Double-ten on the nift-o-meter, and bound to increase the ranks of authors.

The programming model is changed from object-oriented procedural into rule-based logic. But my language theory is rusty, and might be quite wrong in the analysis.

The compiler is no longer a command line tool, but has evolved into a full-fledged frontend. A scarily effective one. One that places a lot of previously unseen tools into the hands of the author. Again lowering the barrier for new authors.

And it looks like the whole thing just got evolved from the jurassic era into the 21st century - meaning the vast chunks of documentation (unfortunately not in easily printed form) are waiting to be digested.

The tool is out for OS X and Windows right now, but the relevant USENET groups are already teeming with individuals who are going to take this to new systems, or wrap it in a multi-platform Java solution.

Yes, the above sounds like an extended advertisement, but it isn’t. The price is the same it has always been, exactly zero dollars. Despite the toolset being in public beta-phase, I do expect to take a plunge into its depths soon.

No squinting required, just a sharp click.

• Russell Beattie quit blogging. His notebook was usually only mildly exuberant about things sighted near the horizon. Critical when needed. And well-written to boot. Will be missed. Now I need another source of Valley Optimism.
• Mobygames put up a semi-decent introduction to interactive fiction. Especially good is their concise history of things post-Infocom on page seven.
• A big list of free programming books.
• Al Gore is back? According to this article in Wired, he is. Or may be. Who knows with these fickle democrats.
• It’s not hard to guess who’s the worst president ever, according to the Rolling Stone.

Two instances of interactive fiction (text adventure games if you wish to be vulgar) have recently been employed as parodies.

First up was a tale of the war in Iraq, followed by a story set in the World of Warcraft. As I’ve thus far avoided bites of the WoW-bug completely, can’t say much about the subject matter of the latter, but the former is spot on, and much closer to the command-response cycle than the WoW-parody.

The second Gulf War as rendered in a mock-text adventure game.

Glorious. Some of the comments include bits that would by appropriate in the game as well. But you have to wallow through a trough of inanity to reach them.

And it’s indeed been a busy month, did not get to play any of this year’s games.

Been slowly (real slow) catching up with the old greats, right now playing Jon Ingold’s All Roads.

This year’s annual interactive fiction competition is now in public play&review-phase.

With 36 games in all, this could be a long october. Or not, since usually I run out of energy around the fourth or fifth game. And at least two of the ones tried before that have been phenomenally bad.