The results of the 2006 Spring Thing are in! Congratulations to Victor Gijsbers, whose game De Baron/The Baron took first place. Robert Street's The Potter and the Mould came in second, Robb Sherwin's Pantomime came in third, and David Whyld's The Warlord, The Princess & The Bulldog came in fourth.
Eric Eve, who is best known for his work with TADS 3, has released a new z-code game, Swineback Ridge. It's a short puzzly game Eric wrote as part of his experimenting with Inform 6.
Your horse went lame five miles back, so you had to leave him at some peasant's farm and continue the journey on foot. It would have been tempting to rest awhile, accepting the peasant's rustic hospitality, but the king's orders were explicit - make for Swineback Ridge with the minimum of delay. Weary though you are from battling against rebels in the east, the king insisted that he needs you here, to take command of the hopelessly outnumbered army up on the ridge ahead, an army that's your homeland's last, best hope to turn back the barbarian hordes and avoid the fall of night.
For the tenth time today you wonder about the urgency. The last you heard General Chorza was in command of the army up on the ridge, and you know Chorza of old, a fine soldier and a good commander. So what is it that Chorza cannot handle himself?
Issue 8 of The Reviews Exchange, a quarterly IF newsletter focusing on the ADRIFT community, is out. It's available in PDF and HTML formats. This issue includes the results from the ADRIFT Writing Challenges competition and reviews of several new ADRIFT games and a handful of older ones.
Adventure Classic Gaming has an interview with Josh Mandel, who helped create Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist, Space Quest V and VI, and Callahan's Crosstime Saloon.
Many fans were upset with Sierra On-Line that you had not been fairly credited for your work in Space Quest 6: The Spinal Frontier. The box cover of the game only credited Murphy as the author, though the game documentation inside acknowledged both you and Murphy as the game designers. In retrospect, why did you think Sierra On-Line had done this? Over the years, had there been any exchange between you and Murphy or between you and Sierra On-Line concerning this oversight? How bitter were you about this experience?
I wasn’t very surprised. Sierra had a longstanding policy – long before I got there - of removing from a game’s publicity and/or credits the names of anyone who didn’t actually work at the company when the game was finished. And I wasn’t bitter because I understood that this would probably happen back when I decided to leave.
It's Three-For, er, Monday here with three new TADS 3 extensions.
Read-Eval-Print Loop, by Kevin Forchione, allow you to develop and test bits of TADS 3 code in a REPL environment reminiscent of those available with LISP and Python.
msg_custom, by Greg Boettcher, makes it much easier to make cosmetic changes to the standard TADS 3 messages, such as having them use contractions or not or having them be less formal.
SayQuery, by Eric Eve, extends the possible NPC conversation interfaces in TADS 3. It allows you to have TopicEntry objects that allow most anything to be asked or said in conversation.