I’ve got a new text adventure for you! It’s called “Wrenlaw”.
You can play it online here. It’s a pretty tiny game, as IF goes.
I’d love to say more about it but I should probably just let you experience it for yourself!
Category Archives: video game
Koholint Island in Crayon
Please click, and view a huge version
I drew this map of Koholint Island on one of those paper tableclothes at a local pizzeria last night.
Koholint is the setting of the fantastic Game Boy game The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, released in 1992. Given limited space, I had to exclude many of the details, but the eight main dungeons are there, along with Kanalet Castle, Yarna Desert, and of course Mount Tamaranch. That guy in the lower left is Link, the famous left-handed hero of Hyrule, and that vague curvy shape at the top is a seagull.
Text Adventure Stuff: HANDLED
I’ve uploaded some browser-playable versions of my IF games—the ones that aren’t already hosted at PR-IF.org (since the versions there are so pretty already). Crucially, Taco Fiction didn’t have any online play available anywhere, at all, so that has been fixed.
If you haven’t had a chance before, I hope you’ll give them a shot. There’s an introduction to Interactive Fiction (c/o the authors of Inform 7) that might help you if you haven’t played this kind of game before.
And please let me know if something is screwed up!
You can play Dig My Grave or The Statue Got Me High at The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, and while you’re there you should check out the rest of the Apollo 18+20 Tribute Album games.
“The Statue Got Me High”: Supplemental Material
The other day, prolific interactive fiction critic “Peter Pears” posted an excessively complimentary review of my IF “cover” of They Might Be Giants’s “The Statue Got Me High”. [Update, September 2014: that review is not there anymore] In the review he called out an aspect of the game that not everybody notices, namely that I stole the plot of the game from the finale of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
The rock song and the Don Juan myth both deal with statues, fire, and cosmic justice, but the similarities apparently are coincidental. A fan must have pointed them out to John Linnell after the song was released, leading him to introduce the song at a show in 1994 saying: “This song is based on the life of Don Giovanni, which I didn’t know when I wrote the song.” Yes: The game is a ripoff of two different artists’ work, and even drawing a connection between the works wasn’t my own idea. Continue reading
Westerado: a Roguelikesque Spaghetti Western
I haven’t played all of the games in adultswim.com’s online catalogue, but for the most part they seem rather slight. Burrito Bison Revenge is the best “launch-an-object-as-far-as-you-can” game I’ve ever played, but it’s still a launch-an-object-as-far-as-you-can game. It’s an arcade game.
Westerado is not an arcade game. Westerado, created by the Dutch studio Ostrich Banditos, is an open-world Western that you play in a browser—and I’d say it beats quite a few console and PC open-world games for depth, immersion, and freedom.