Geoff Gander reviews Kook U, an anonymously-written game set on a college campus. In the game, you play the university's Usenet administrator who's called upon to deal with Usenet abuse. Geoff thought the game did well given its size and scope.
The new version of Zoom, a Mac and Unix interpreter for z-code, Glulx, TADS 2/3, and Hugo games, fixes issues people were having with being unable to save TADS 3 games. It also adds support to Glulx, TADS 2/3, and Hugo saved games to match those of saved z-code games: you can double-click saved games in any format and have the game open properly, the skein and transcript are saved along with the game, and the iFiction window now displays and opens saved games for non-z-code saved games.
IF Gems is a collection of quotes from reviews of IF Competition games. The quotes are organized by topics, and as such provide a guide to what reviewers have and haven't liked about competition games. If you're working on a game for the IF Competition, I'd recommend looking through them.
Version 4W37 of Inform 7, the design system for interactive fiction, adds a number of examples and improves how names are parsed. You can now have objects that are recognized in part by number, unit, or relations, so that phrases like "BOX OF CRAYONS" will refer to a box when and only when it contains crayons. There are also a number of bug fixes, so as usual, consult the changelog. Both Mac and Windows versions are now available, with the Unix versions to come later.
Ever wanted to have a Flash application to play z-code games in a browser? Now, thanks to Peter Rogers, there is such a beast: Flashonate. It's a little slow, but does work, and since the source code is under the GPL, others can work on improving it along with Peter.