Highlights from The 1999 IF Competition
The results are in!! After just over a month of energetic reading and playing by 153 separate judges, including yours truly, the winners of the 1999 Annual IF contest have been announced. If you’ve never heard of the IF contest before, check out my article from a few weeks back, which provides the basic information about how the contest is run and what its aims are. There were thirty-seven entrants altogether this year, and many of them were excellent indeed, pushing the boundaries of the genre as its audience continues to multiply. All of the games can be downloaded at ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition99/. Over the next few months many of the judges for the contest will be posting reviews of the games at various places around the web – in the meantime here’s a list of the eight games that were the standouts for me. My own opinions didn’t always agree with the preponderance of the contest judges’ – the game that I ranked first, for example, finished up in eleventh place! I’ve placed both my own rankings and the contests in brackets above each summary – the only way to make up your own mind, of course, is to download a few of these wonderful works of IF and try them for yourself. The highlights of the contest, then, listed in alphabetical order:
A DAY FOR SOFT FOOD Contest Ranking [4] / My Ranking [8] In this piece of IF, you step into the role of an enterprising pussycat out to earn himself a tin of chicken-liver from his foul tempered human “provider.” The prose is lucid, imaginative and amazingly unsentimental – a truly effective simulacrum of cattish existence. Some of the puzzles you have to solve are curiously unintuitive, at least for a human brain, but cat aficionados should find this one a real joy.
EREHWON Contest Ranking [11] / My Ranking [1] An instant classic. If Lewis Carroll were alive and a whiz at TADS programming he would have produced something very much like this, I think. In an inverted version of our world, somewhere in the streets of Erehwon, Aksarben, you are an angst-ridden teenager who goes on a quest to earn his place amongst the big kids who run the local roleplayers club. Not everyone will appreciated the physics-related in-jokes, but even a scientific ingenue like myself appreciated the witty prose, the thickly-layered verbal gags, and the pleasantly skewed atmosphere. I confess to being utterly mystified by the fact that this treasure finished outside of the top ten – perhaps its length and variety produced headaches in some judges, and the two-hour time limit on playing each game can’t have helped in this regard. I hope that the author isn’t too frustrated by this result, at any rate, because I’d love to see more work from him.
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