The Boston IF meetup for July will be Wednesday, July 28, 6:30 pm Eastern time.
We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.
Note: Nick Montfort is checking into the possibility of returning to in-person meetups at MIT. This may be possible for September. (Our August meeting will defininitely still be online.)
We don’t want to lose track of our online friends, so we’re considering running both kinds of meetups in the future, perhaps alternating. What are your thoughts? Please let us know on our mailing list.
Aaron spoke at BangBangComp synopsis of his 50 year history of text games. His newsletter has started to incorporate other types of games e.g. play by mail (PBM) games. There are also play by email games.
Zarf inform6 compiler fixes. New release of inform6 is coming out soon. Fixing lots of bugs
Kay mentions coming to MIT and attending a talk. Monster Island
Kay is playing Journey, (the Quest Begins) the final infocom game. Carrington has “been finished” by Journey.
Zarf mentions Lucinda’s Door’s of Moria puzzle.
Resource allocation mechanism is the least favorite feature of infocom.
mention of all the different flavors of Zork. Zork Zero is next. Then post post infocom Return to Zork.Zork Nemesis. Zork the Grand Inquisitor. Zork Underground.
Discussion about CDR of games for infocom
Zarf recounts going into Borders’ encounter where CD of Shareware and Masterpieces that had Zarfs came on it. IceBreaker 1975 Arcade Game by Andy Rlooney? 3CDroms with his software in it.
Opinions on Zork flavors discussion– good times!
Grand Inquisitor Enchanter series
Infocomics and Mines of Titan
Carrington and Kay tried to get a copy of some infocom abandonware, no even numbered lessons, couldn’t figure out how to run the program for APril fools and Dave mentions that getting it to run is the metapuzzle.
Snide mention of CYOA adventure books
Beyond Meanwhile
Trial of the Clone by Zach Winersmith
Pier Moran’s How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read. HB/FB/UB/BB notations havent/forgotten/bought book. Student Read Book (SRB) another way to read a book!
Meanwhile from Jason Shiga
HopScotch by Julio Cortazar
Wikipedia
Horror short stories with chooser
Maze by Chris Manson (text , multisequential) 1984
Nick’s looking for working hardware donations from the Boston/NY Area
Commodore block monitors, additional apple2C’s 1702 monitors and stuff in Boston and NY
connector. Apple2C, that makes it think the SD is a floppy drive
Cheesing games. Wizardry RPG apple2 game ; write to disk immediately after you died– but if you were able to catch it before it flickered hack. Or you learn sector layout on disk and use your sector editor. Bards Tale. They used to have a game that charge for recovering your character. This is the current model for iPhone games.
Hugh software that works on emulators work but it doesn’t work on real machine. Screen update is different on emulators:. Actual hardware refresh is different from emulator. You can try things out on multiple emulators. Sometimes Registers are different. Sound Code was shared across emulators. C64 Rom revisions are different (background colors are set in earlier version)…
Kay an Carrington gave a talk last night for Joco Cruise, Jonathan Colton fans. on infocom text adventures “We Played All the Infocom Text Adventures.” Will be on their podcast soon. They are currently playing Journey (barely a text adventure game) right now. Their favorite one was Trinity and Kay liked “Hollywood Hijinx.” Carrington says “Trinity” or Mind Forever Voyaging or Bayou.
Flights of Foundary is happening. Zarf and many cool people are speaking. Packed with lots of talk.
Thomas Disch’s Amnesia. Tom Disch(lots of work) also wrote the first of the Prisoner Novelizations. Portal interactive novel Rob Swigart
Nick gave us 256 perl script game “Ely” that you can type in your command line. We had fun.
perl -pE'BEGIN{say"you ok?";$p=" something$/"}$m=$_;s/.i(\047m| am| was)\b/really/i;s/.you./what about i/i;s/.always./can i be specific/;s/[?.!,].//;s/\b(i|me)\b/you/gi;s/\bmy/your/i;.2>rand?s/.*/huh/:s/$/?/;($_="you had said$p")if.1>rand;$p=": ".$m'
People’s reactions to Aaron Reed’s blog 50 Years of Text Games. Right now they’re talking about Hitchhiker’s guide– was it a good game or bad sci-fi?
Douglas Adams was not very involved in Starship Titanic. Book mostly written by Terry Jones.
Thomas Mack played about 200+ games in one year. Read his blog with statistics analyzing his review sfrom playing all the games from IFcomp in 2019.
Discussion about what the experience of conferencing is during the pandemic. Demoparty experience, meetup format, during the pandemic. PR-IF is looking to return to the Trope Tank in September, hopefully.
Find the fish games
Visual novels. Text with faces on them
Zarf adding features to inform6 compilers.
Curveship-js update. Want to generate narratives in different languages.
Has Zilch ever been released? Yes, in some form. Discussed why Inform 7 filesize vs Inform 6.
In PunyInform creates such small files. It’s a separate library. Somewhat simpler parser and strips out class related features that require Z5/Z3 games. Discussion about interpreter and Inform6 language and OOP that are not necessarily native to the way Z machine works. Addressing in PunyInform is different.
