The results of the 2006 Introcomp are in. Congratulations to Mordechai Shinefield, whose Southern Gothic took top prize. The full results:
- Southern Gothic, by Mordechai Shinefield
- Child's Play, by Stephen Granade
- Nothing But Mazes, by Greg Boettcher
The other games, The Art of Deception, by she's long gone, Mechs, by Allan Crain, Sabotage!, by Felix Plesoianu, and Unyielding Fury, by Michael Pruitt, took Honorable Mention.
Over at IF-Review, Paul O'Brian reviews a text adventure based on Eragon, Christopher Paolini's book. Paul wasn't too pleased with the game.
As for the game itself, well, I wish the news was better. It's not that this game is out-and-out terrible. Worse games get submitted to every single IF competition. However, it suffers from some very serious flaws. The worst of these is the way it deploys a kind of "selective parsing" that makes it feel like a product of 1983, despite having been produced with Inform 6. Several times throughout Eragon, I found that the parser would claim not to understand a particular formulation, only to specifically require that formulation at a later point. This kind of thing is simply unacceptable in a text adventure — if you tell me a command is not understood, don't expect me to try it again.
