Monthly Archives: May 2016

A Year Without Zombies: Envoi

Posted on May 30, 2016 by Sam Kabo Ashwell

Over the course of 2015, I did my best to avoid consuming or buying any media that contained zombies. It was about as difficult as I expected it to be, but more frustrating. In much the same way that vegetarians are … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 1 Comment

Pandemic Legacy

Posted on May 29, 2016 by Sam Kabo Ashwell

Pandemic is a co-operative board game in which you play an international response team fighting against global disease outbreaks. There’s a lot of Arkham Horror in Pandemic‘s genes: the gnawing sense of anxiety that you’re always just on the brink of being … Continue reading →

Posted in board games | 4 Comments

Narrow Parsers

Posted on May 18, 2016 by Sam Kabo Ashwell

The standard interactive fiction parser is the product of decades of refinements, but in its outline and general concerns, it remains broadly similar to the suite of actions available in Adventure. For a long time, many of the assumptions about improving the parser … Continue reading →

Posted in interactive fiction, parser-based | 9 Comments

Rebuild 3

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Sam Kabo Ashwell

I first encountered the Rebuild series on ArmorGames. Its surface was doing a good job of fitting into the popular YAY ZOMBIES aesthetic: grimdark colour scheme, blood-splatter fonts, post-industrial-soundscape music, gross rotting zombie front and centre in the splash screen. But beneath that, … Continue reading →

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Scarlet Sails (and a discursion about game size)

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Sam Kabo Ashwell

Scarlet Sails (Felicity Banks) is a fantasy pirate adventure, written in Choicescript; originally entered in IF Comp, it has now been polished up into a commercial release. The classic Choicescript formula is a story that follows a career over many years; Sails, instead, … Continue reading →

Posted in cyoa, interactive fiction, review | 1 Comment

IF Comp Unmuzzled

Posted on May 3, 2016 by Sam Kabo Ashwell

This year, IF Comp is planning to experimentally relax its long-time ban on public author discussion; as long as authors don’t encourage voters to break the rules (most obviously, by getting people to vote in bad faith), they can in theory … Continue reading →

Posted in interactive fiction | Tagged | 11 Comments