Top 50 IF list 2019

Benjamin.Slade@fakeEmailToMakeValidatorHappy.com (Benjamin Slade) — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 11:32:00 -0600

Emily Short wrote a blog post a fortnight ago or so discussing her nominees for Victor Gijsbers’ Top 50 Interactive Fiction Games of All Time list, 2019 edition. The contest closes on the 31st of July 2019 (i.e. in 2 days, as of the day I write this), and I was thinking about what games would be on my list. This has also resulted, perhaps more importantly, with me having a list of games I still need to play.

Both lists below have the games hyperlinked to their Interactive Fiction Database page, which generally includes reviews and game files to download (or links/suggestions of where to get the game).

First, my personal list of favourites/best text adventures/interactive fiction that I’ve completed or at least played most (er, at least half?) of, ordered roughly in the order I encountered them:

Game	Year	Author	Publisher
Zork I	1980	Marc Blank & Dave Lebling	Infocom
Zork II	1981	Dave Lebling & Marc Blank	Infocom
Enchanter	1983	Marc Blank & Dave Lebling	Infocom
Planetfall	1983	Steve Meretzky	Infocom
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy	1984	Douglas Adams & Steve Meretzky	Infocom
Wishbringer	1985	Brian Moriarty	Infocom
The Pawn	1985	Rob Steggles et al.	Magnetic Scrolls
Spellbreaker	1985	Dave Lebling	Infocom
The Guild of Thieves	1987	Rob Steggles	Magnetic Scrolls
Knight Orc	1987	Pete Austin	Level 9
Dunnet	1982	Ron Schnell
Curses!	1993	Graham Nelson
Spider & Web	1998	Andrew Plotkin
Counterfeit Monkey	2012	Emily Short
Coloratura	2013	Lynnea Glasser
Mentula Mancanus: Apocolocyntosis	2011	Adam Thornton

Some of these may be being boosted by nostalgia, but I think they all pretty much hold up and are interesting/innovative in some fashion.

Looking over the author names, I remember when playing Infocom games back in the 80s suspecting that “Marc Blank” was a pseudonym….i.e. Last Name: [blank].

Dunnet is an interesting entry also in that it was originally written in Maclisp for the DECSYSTEM-20, then ported to Emacs Lisp in 1992, and it is the Emacs version (M-x dunnet) that I’m familiar with.

A list of games I still need to play (never played before) or finish (haven’t made significant progress, though I spent a pretty long time with the Silicon Dreams games, Anchorhead, and Varicella, but don’t think I’ve made much progress (or I’ve forgotten what progress I made)), roughly in order of precedence (i.e. how soon I plan to play):

Game	Year	Author	Publisher
Anchorhead	1998	Michael Gentry
Cragne Manor	2018	[numerous]
Galatea	2000	Emily Short
Savoir-Faire	2002	Emily Short
Hadean Lands	2014	Andrew Plotkin
Varicella	1999	Adam Cadre
Endless, Nameless	2012	Adam Cadre
Bronze	2006	Emily Short
Balances	1994	Graham Nelson
Jigsaw	1995	Graham Nelson
Blue Lacuna	2008	Aaron Reed
A Beauty Cold and Austere	2017	Mike Spivey
Lime Ergot	2014	Caleb Wilson (as Rust Blight)
Suveh Nux	2007	David Fisher
Delusions	1996	C. E. Forman
Slouching Towards Bedlam	2003	Star Foster & Daniel Ravipinto
A Mind Forever Voyaging	1985	Steve Meretzky	Infocom
Trinity	1986	Brian Moriarty	Infocom
Snowball [Silicon Dreams]	1983	Mike Austin et al.	Level 9
Return to Eden [Silicon Dreams]	1984	Nick Austin et al.	Level 9
The Worm in Paradise [Silicon Dreams]	1985	Mike Austin et al.	Level 9
The Shadow in the Cathedral	2009	Ian Finley & John Ingold
Make It Good	2009	Jon Ingold
1893: A World’s Fair Mystery	2002	Peter Nepstad
Red Moon	1985	David Williamson et al.	Level 9
Shade	2000	Andrew Plotkin
Stationfall	1987	Steve Meretzky	Infocom
Rameses	2000	Stephen Bond
The Moonlit Tower	2002	Yoon Ha Lee
Bureaucracy	1987	Douglas Adams	Infocom

All of the games listed here, in either list, are playable in either Malyon or Gargoyle (with the exception, I think, of Hadean Lands), an admittedly rather arbitrary criterion.

Confusion: PDP-10 Zork

Benjamin.Slade@fakeEmailToMakeValidatorHappy.com (Benjamin Slade) — Sun, 23 Sep 2018 23:52:00 -0500

I grew up playing Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls, and Level 9 text adventures, with the Zork trilogy, the Enchanter trilogy, Planetfall, Wishbringer, The Guild of Thieves, The Pawn, Knight Orc, and Silicon Dreams being particularly prominent in my memory (somewhat re-activated through recent listening to the Eaten by a Grue podcast). I would have played all of these on an Atari 8bit or ST computer, and didn’t have any access to anything like a mainframe, and so never actually played the original Zork, which was written in the Lisp-derived MDL language (which formed the basis for the MDL-subset Infocom-specific ZIL language used for their subsequent offerings) for the DEC PDP-10.

Fortunately, some years ago, Matthew Russotto created Confusion, “a MDL interpreter which works just well enough to play the original Zork all the way through” and runs on Linux/Unix and presumably macOS. I’d tried to install this from Arch’s AUR a couple of years ago, without any luck. Inspecting the package build, the AUR Confusion tries to get around errors by using an ancient version of gcc. I found that a few fairly trivial fixes were enough to get it to compile with a recent version of gcc, and so was finally able to try the original Zork:

The most fun I always had in text adventures was exploring, and I’ve always found Infocom’s various “time-limit” elements (batteries running out, health deteriorating, &c.) somewhat irritating. I remembered that there’s a torch in Zork I, and that is also true in the original Zork, and I managed to obtain it early on so as to save my (trusty brass) lamp’s batteries. I then cheated somewhat wildly (though, to be fair, a lot of the puzzles I had figured out once upon a time in Zork I or Zork II; and the bank puzzle and some of the others I wouldn’t have patience for anymore).

The original code has some bugs in it which made things more interesting.

Narrow Ledge
You are on a narrow ledge overlooking the inside of an old dormant
volcano.  This ledge appears to be about in the middle between the
floor below and the rim above. There is an exit here to the south.
There is a very large and extremely heavy wicker basket with a cloth
bag here. Inside the basket is a metal receptacle of some kind.
Attached to the basket on the outside is a piece of wire.
The basket contains:
 A cloth bag
 A braided wire
 A receptacle
 The receptacle contains:
  A newspaper
 A blue label
There is a small hook attached to the rock here.

> untie braided wire from hook

 *ERROR*
 "FIRST-ARG-WRONG-TYPE"
 "First arg to NTH must be structured"
LISTENING-AT-LEVEL 2 PROCESS 1
Atom REP has neither LVAL nor GVAL

I had a similar issue involving the result of a disagreement with a suspicious-looking individual holding a bag. It turns out (thanks to Matthew Russotto for the following information) that this has to do with issues in saving and restoring files, and (failure of) either properly recording or decoding certain values. The balloon issue has to do with a record about the object burning in the receptacle. It is saved as BINF!-FLAG, which should be a boolean-type flag, but at some point it became an object (recording what is burning) and apparently isn’t decoded properly on a restore. Saving-and-restoring during a battle with the suspicious-looking individual produces a similar error to the balloon-burnable error, due to the THIEF-ENGROSSED!-FLAG (which apparently really is a flag) not being saved properly. The upshot (for a player) is that you shouldn’t save during either of these bits of the game.

With these additional lurking grues out of the way, I was able to make it to the end of the game:

Speaking of saving, MDL Zork only has a single restore file. It is stored in the MTRZORK directory and is named ZORK.SAVE. Of course you can create additional saves by copying out this save file to different names.

If you too want to play the original Zork using the original PDP-10 MDL source code, you should be able to build the MDL interpreter necessary from the release at Matthew Russotto’s site (where my minor patches should be incorporated): http://www.russotto.net/git/mrussotto/confusion/releases or from the git repo with my patches at https://github.com/emacsomancer/confusion-mdl.

Or, the easiest of all, install it via Guix (which can installed on top of your current distro as a standalone package manager), as I have created a Guix package which was accepted upstream (the package name in Guix is confusion-mdl). [note: this Guix package stopped building some time ago and I need to figure out what needs fixing. Right now, have a look at the mdlzork project at https://github.com/jordanhubbard/mdlzork , which provides a way to easily play early versions of Zork online at https://jordanhubbard.github.io/mdlzork/.]

Since I played through this right before designing the propositional logic homework for my Semantics class, my students are currently “enjoying” doing Zork-flavoured propositional logic translations, e.g.:

The thief only steals your things when you’re in the cellar.
Your sword glows blue whenever the thief or the troll is near and never any other time.
Whether or not you are lost in a maze of twisty little passages (all alike), the grues are lurking in the darkness.
The grues will eat you unless you bring a light source.

zork on The Neo-Babbage Files

Top 50 IF list 2019

Confusion: PDP-10 Zork