Monthly Archives: November 2009

Touché, aaronius

By Rubes | Published: November 23, 2009

Occasionally I surf around the IFDB looking for goodies. I really like the way it is set up, as it takes a number of cues from other community sites that encourage engagement and social interaction. Often I’ll find myself weaving my way through games, reviews, and lists before realizing how much time has passed, and typically I’ll come out with a couple of new games to add to the play list. I also absolutely love how it is so smoothly integrated with Zoom (and others, like iPhone Frotz), which so effectively feeds the immediate gratification beast. Anyway, I digress.

I was flipping through some IFDB pages the other day, looking for some choice information on this year’s IFComp winner, Rover’s Day Out, when I noticed that it had already made someone’s online IFDB poll:

“Games with Impossible-to-film moments”, by aaronius.

Okay, I [More...]

Posted in 3D/if, Vespers, game design, interactive fiction | 2 Comments

Congratulations, You’ve Been Kickstarted

By Rubes | Published: November 21, 2009

In what will amount to essentially a formality, the Jason Scott Sabbatical is set to be officially Kickstarted in just a few hours.

Scott, the digital historian, archivist, and documentarian (not to mention unusually entertaining writer and speaker) responsible for such intense goodness as Textfiles.com, archiving Geocities, the highly recommended BBS Documentary, and the soon-to-be-almost-certainly-highly-recommended text adventure documentary GET LAMP, is going on paid sabbatical. Scott recently lost his day job, and since he was doing all of this wonderous stuff on the side in his spare time, not having a steady income seriously jeopardized future progress on these projects. So he took matters into his own hands and, thanks to Kickstarter, a whole mess of supporters stepped up to the plate for him. A few hundred, actually.

Kickstarter is a pretty [More...]

Posted in miscellaneous | 1 Comment

IFComp, I Hardly Knew Ye

By Rubes | Published: November 19, 2009

Rovers Day OutAnd, there we go. Another IFComp come and gone, with the winners announced this past week. It sounds like the 15th Annual was on par with most, although there appeared to be significantly fewer games overall than in the past (24, compared with 35 last year, 43 in 2006, and 36 in 2005). An ominous sign? Not the way I see it. As others have pointed out elsewhere, this year could be considered an excellent year for IF — in particular, non-comp pieces. We saw quality, ambitious works such as Aaron Reed’s “Blue Lacuna” and Jimmy Maher’s “The King of Shreds and Patches”, not to mention Textfyre’s release of their first two commercial pieces, “Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter”, and the acclaimed “The Shadow in the Cathedral”. So there was certainly no shortage of good IF this year.

This year’s Comp had one relatively clear-cut [More...]

Posted in adventure games, interactive fiction | Leave a comment

Long Live the Animator

By Rubes | Published: November 11, 2009

You may have noticed (if you’ll allow me the fantasy that anyone is paying attention) that it has been a while since the last Vespers update. This is for many reasons, of course. It might just be easiest to say that it’s because there hasn’t been a whole lot to report. I wish that wasn’t the case, but so it goes.

Most of it, as usual, originates from the animation side of things. What began as a promising venture with three local animation students eventually fizzled out. One of them made a little bit of progress over a long period of time, but couldn’t get much further due to classes and other obligations. Another never really got off the ground. The third did actually get a lot of quality work done in the time we worked together, but life issues with women and career eventually derailed that train, and he [More...]

Posted in Vespers | 4 Comments