News in 2006

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January

• Reviews Exchange - Issue 7 (January 2006) is now available. Contains reviews of the Finish the Game Competition, IF Competition, Adrift Game of the Year and other recent Adrift games.
• The Non-Comp Review Project 2005 reviews most of the non-competition IF games from 2005 (excepting AIF and non-English works). Organizer: Greg Boettcher.
• SPAG Issue 43 released on January 7th. Contains reviews of several games from 2005.
• InsideAdrift27 Contains feature list of the recently announced Adrift 5.0 and the InsideADRIFT awards'.

February

(no news)

March

• The Inform Designer's Manual, 4th ed. by Graham Nelson, and The Inform Beginner's Guide, 3rd ed. by Roger Firth and Sonja Kesserich are once again available as professionally printed books. DM4 is orderable at any bookstore with the ISBN 0971311900, such as via Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0971311900 . IBG is available exclusively from Lulu.com: http://www.lulu.com/content/168554 . DM4 will soon be available from Amazon.co.uk with the same ISBN. There will also be a hardcover edition of DM4, coming soon.
• Baf's Guide now has an experimental RSS 2.0 feed for reviews; the feed URL is http://www.wurb.com/if/feed
• String Theory - Emily Short reviews The Witch's Yarn (Keith Nemitz; publisher: Mousechief Games) for IF-Review.
• Adventure Lauded by Commerical Developers. William Crowther and Donald Woods received a First Penguin Award at the 6th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards.
• Original CYOA series back in print!
• InsideAdrift 28. Anticipation for Adrift 5 mounts. Also, contributions by Christy Henshaw and David Whyld.

April

• Reviews Exchange - Issue 8 (April 2006) is now available. Contains reviews of the games in the recent Adrift Writing Challenges Comp, other Adrift games, and a review of Ghost Train (Paul T. Johnson; 2003; Z-code).
• Something about Interactive Fiction by Terrence Bosky is the latest feature article at MobyGames.
• SPAG Issue 44 - Interviews with Graham Nelson and Emily Short on Inform 7! Reviews of Akari's Story. All Hope Abandon, The Baron, Damnatio Memoriae, Dracula: The First Night, Pantomime, The Potter and the Mould, Threnody, and The Warlord, the Princess, and the Bulldog. And a "specifics" feature on The Baron.
• Treaty of Babel is a new community standard for IF bibliography.
• Inform 7: Public Beta released on April 30, 2006. See http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Welcome.html

May

• Swat version 0.51 released on May 3, 2006. See Storytronics.
• >interactive, "a story of unrepentant geekiness and unrequited love" by Jim Munroe. Requires Real Video.
• Dinosaur Comics #778 - Wouldn't it be totally neat if life was more like a text adventure game?
• "Games with no pictures? Yes, they really did exist" - written by Tom Leupold for his Gamester column for Inside Bay Area.
• InsideAdrift 29. Features include 'Inform 7 and what effect its release will have on ADRIFT', 'View From A Newbie', 'ADRIFT forum digest' and an interview with Richard Otter.
• Cardinal Points 2: Legend Entertainment - article by Karl "Orikaeshigitae" Parakenings.
• Alloys and Allies - Paul O'Brian reviews Bronze (Emily Short; 2006; Z-code) for IF-Review.

June

• Writing interactive fiction games with Inform by David Ledgard for Adventure Classic Gaming.
• Let's Tell a Story Together. A History of Interactive Fiction, © 2006 by Jimmy Maher.
• You Make The Call - article about Malinche Entertainment and Howard Sherman, by David P. Willis for Ashbury Park Press, 20-Jun-2006.
• King's Quest III Remake, released on 19-Jun-2006 at Infamous Adventures.
• General Protection Fault: June 25, 2006 - "You are in a maze of twisting passages all alike."
• SPAC 45 is out! Note that SPAC is a Spanish publication.
• Dinosaur Comics - June 30th 2006 - Hover your cursor over this comic; the IF content is in the tooltip.

July

• Reviews Exchange Issue 9 is out in both HTML and PDF versions. Games reviewed: For Love Of Digby; The Potter and the Mould; It's Easter, Peeps!, SERE - Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape; The Warlord, The Princess & The Bulldog; The Reliques of Tolti-Aph; Damnatio Memoriae; and Pantomime.
• SPAG #45 issued on July 17th. Contains "A Look at IntroComp 200(?5?)" by Mordechai Shinefield, and reviews of The Amazing Interactive Turing Machine, Deadsville (IntroComp version), Finding Martin, Ghost Train, Glass, OMNIQuest, Swineback Ridge, There's a Snake in the Bathtub, and Voices of Spoon River.

August

• "Eragon Vs. Bygone Era" - Paul O'Brian reviews Eragon (author unknown; 2005; Z-code) for IF-Review.
• Reviews Exchange closes. On 12 August 2006, Robert Street announced that he had to step back as editor. It was decided to incorporate new reviews in the bi-monthly InsideADRIFT newsletter.
• Text adventure games: from the front lines to behind the scenes - posted by Howard Sherman for Adventure Classic Gaming, 18-Aug-2006.

September

• "Cyberthunk" - Geoff Gander reviews The Ludicorp Mystery (Cal 'Bees' Henderson; 2006; Z-code) for IF-Review.
• Lacunae - an article by Stephen Bond that reviews the IF-Review of The Ludicorp Mystery as much as it reviews the game itself.
• GeekList: Fond memories of nights spent typing (a look at Infocom's games) at BoardGameGeek.
• Interview with Brian Moriarty - posted by Erik-André Vik Mamen for Adventure Classic Gaming, 15-Sept-2006.
• TADS 3 version 3.0.12 is the first general release of TADS 3. Released on September 15th with a bundle of manuals: Getting Started in TADS 3, TADS 3 Tour Guide, System Manual, Technical Manual, and Library Reference Manual. Some pages have been moved around on the TADS site, particularly the docs; update your links! (And a patch for TADS 2 was released too.)

October

• IF Comp Coverage Begins at Etoychest.org. During the comp period, Karl Parakenings, aka Orikae, will be interviewing IF Comp 2006 authors and reviewing games from earlier competitions in the meantime.
• The annual Adventure Convention in Coventry, England is scheduled for sometime in late October. (Embarrassingly, the IFWiki doesn't have any real information on this long-running annual event; perhaps people on the CASA forum would know more?) Organizer: Doreen Bardon.
• The Bobby Blackwolf Show, a podcast, interviewed Stephen Granade about the IF Competition. October 8, 2006.
• The Non-Comp Review Project has a new chief, Peter Mattsson, and he is looking for reviews for any and all games released in 2006 outside of a competition. (See the rgif announcement.)
• SPAG #46 issued on October 17th. Reviewed in this issue: Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies, Dreadwine, Eragon, Escape from the Crazy Place, Gilded, The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, Off the Trolley, Provenance, Snatches, Son of a..., A Spot Of Bother, and Time to Shine.
• Making your day with a visit to McDreamland. Emily Short wrote mini-reviews for IF-Review of The Retreat, No Famous, and Dreadwine, all of which were entries to the IF Dreams mini-competition.
• Electronic Literature Collection Volume One was published by the Electronic Literature Organization in October 2006. This collection is both a web and a CD-ROM publication, and contains many electronic literary works, including a few works of IF: All Roads, Bad Machine, Galatea, Savoir-Faire, and Whom the Telling Changed. Visit the collection's homepage for complete information.

November

• Imagination poster. (Okay, so it's not a reviews or news item. But it is IF-related.)
• Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics by Trey Jones. This little CYOA in HTML is from November 2005, but, y'know, we're just finding out about it now.
• SPAC 47 - The latest issue of SPAC, the Spanish IF newsletter, has been published.
• Book and Volume Joins Slamdance Finalists - article at Grand Text Auto.
• InsideADRIFT 32 contains an interview with Jason Guest; reviews of The Amazing TV Caper, Locked Out, The Mystery Of Brackly Hall, The Sisters, Unauthorized Termination, Winter Wonderland, and The Wumpus Run; and articles by Stefan Donati, Ren, C. Henshaw, and editor David Whyld.

December

• IF Comp T-shirts can now be ordered. Mike Snyder has once again graciously agreed to handle t-shirts for the competition. You can order a 2006 IF Competition t-shirt from http://www.intfiction.org/tshirt06/. You have until December 17th to get your order in.
• Westfield Chandler Publishing, a new IF publisher founded by David A. Cornelson, reveals its existence. See the rgif announcement.
• Game Couch: Interview with Mike Gentry - December 14, 2006.
• Interview: Nick Montfort - Jason Rohrer interviews Nick Montfort for Arthouse Games.
• "Guess the Author" - Greg Boettcher reviews An Escape To Remember (2nd IF Whispers group; 2006; Z-code) for IF-Review.
• "Informless" - Shamus Young reviews Inform 7 for Twenty Sided: "Inform tried to allow programming without the use of a programming language, and what they built is programming with a confusing language that has nebulous rules."
• Inform 7 Code Poem Challenge - posting on N. B. Horvath's Blog.
• Best of Interactive Art or Fiction. Jay Is Games invites its visitors to vote for their favorite casual games that were reviewed on its site in the last year for its Best of Casual Gameplay of 2006. Nominees in the Interactive Art or Fiction category include Floatpoint, Façade, and the works of Andrew Plotkin (Zarf). Results to be posted January 1st.
• User Friendly (Dec. 20 webcomic). Zork refs in this one and the following day.