The Stack

Spoilers follow the break.

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So I say I’m going to blog the Comp, and then it takes me a matter of days to write my first post. Let’s rectify that. First up is Cold Iron by Lyman Clive Charles. Spoilers follow the break.

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The judging period of the 17th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition has been underway for over a week, and I haven’t even started judging yet. Just as well; an awful lot of entries seem to be getting post-last-minute updates. I suppose this means that modifying games during the judging period, if only to fix serious bugs, is tolerated more now than it once was, which must be a tremendous relief for the authors. Last year, Jason McIntosh, author of The Warbler’s Nest, wrote about the frustrations caused by another relatively recent change to the rules, that the judges are allowed to blog about the games. This put authors in the hellish position of watching everybody complain about problems that they could easily fix but weren’t allowed to.

On this basis alone, I had been planning for most of the year to reduce the trauma by sitting out this year’s Comp, instead spending the month of October playing other IF, like I did in 2009. (I was thinking of going through those few of maga’s recommendations that I haven’t got around to yet.) But the Comp this year has been getting an unusual amount of attention, possibly as an indirect result of last year’s documentary and related outreach efforts, and so there are actually a couple of people I know offline, rather than through the IF community, who are waiting to hear my opinions.

There are 38 entries this year, a respectably hefty number compared to last year’s 26, and, as usual, we’re expected to judge each after playing for no more than two hours. So let’s finally get started.

Unrestrained comments on various games in the Comp after the break.
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And now, the last game on my docket, submitted by someone going by the pseudonym “XYZ” — very fitting for the end of a sequence of 26. Spoilers follow the break.
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Spoilers follow the break.
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Spoilers follow the break.
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J. Robinson Wheeler is a familiar name within the IF community, although it’s been a while since he released anything apart from SpeedIFs and Whispers. In fact, his last real IF game was written in 2001… which, coincidentally, is also when my last real IF game was written, so I suppose I shouldn’t throw stones. Anyway. Spoilers follow the break.
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Spoilers follow the break.
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Spoilers follow the break.
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