What IF?
Posted by sellout
ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire Copyright (c) 1981, 1982, 1983 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved. ZORK is a registered trademark of Infocom, Inc. Revision 88 / Serial number 840726
West of House You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
>Go East
So I got a chance to play with Galatea by Emily Short, and was quickly reminded how much I love interactive fiction games. (Thanks to Viaken for pointing me to it!)
I decided to share with the class.
Interactive fiction games are like books or stories that you control. Think of them as text-based role playing games. They have lost popularity in recent years because people have flocked to games that do not require reading… and thinking. As a starter for those who want to dive in I present here the IF game that started it all. Zork.
Zork is a fantasy, a sci - fi, an adventure, a whatever you want it to be. This as the first real IF game and one of the best games of all time that I may spend the next year trying to complete. Source code has been released by infocom, and they have since disregarded copyrights, so I took the liberty of converting them into zblorb files playable in modern z-machine emulators.
Download -> zork1.blorb | zork2.zblorb | zork3.zblorb
The game that got me hooked on IF again is Galatea by Emily Short, which is a full representation of a work of art that is alive, that you can converse with and end up with one of dozens of endings depending on how you treat her/it.
Download ->Galatea.zblorb
For those of you who are not enslaved to Micro$oft (*nix/mac users) these can be played with nfrotz or gargoyle (a graphical player that runs on top of nfrotz) You can easily apt-get or emerge either of these in Linux.
For windows users…. you might try Windows Nfrotzwhich is a windows compile of nfrotz, however I have not tested it and do not plan to.
Enjoy.
~sellout