Apple on the iPhone?

Huw Williams sent this update:

Just wanted to mention that Eamon is now available on the iPhone via "iBasic", a simple little app by Akeysoft Group that lets users play a few different Apple II games.  No frills, but still kinda neat. :)

http://iphone.akeysoft.com/iPhone_Playground/Welcome.html

Gartin Manor re-released

Greg Gioia has sent me an updated version of Gartin Manor, 26 years after it was originally released.

This update corrects some of the room connections and descriptions and fixes a bug in the flee routine. Additionally, he does describes the method of returning to the main hall. This is important because the original reviewer could not find an exit!

Interested? Why not download it at http://www.eamonag.org/programs/Dos33/d3_144(2011edits).dsk? You can then post your own review by commenting below or by writing on the wall of our facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/EamonGuild.

Thanks Greg!

Wade Clarke's responses to Leadlight reviews

Wade Clarke emailed me a few months ago to respond to some of the Leadlight reviews. His email is reprinted below:

"Thanks for showing me your EAG article about Leadlight. You covered a good cross-section of opinions in your links to reviews.

I think ultimately that Eamon, or at least my game, is not as archaic compared to modern IF as it may seem at a glance. For instance, the ability to type more than two words often adds little to a game, and a recent survey at intfiction.org demonstrated that in modern games, people only need to type two words 80% of the time anyway. Another point of interest is that even a straight Eamon 7 can take punts at abbreviated words, something Inform cannot do at all (unless the programmer specifies every abbreviation manually).

Combat with random elements is a design choice that has fallen out of favour rather than something which is actually invalid, and I noticed there wasn't a single reviewer who admitted they might simply be bad at this game :) … they just blamed the invisible die rolls and spammed their save games, rather than think about how they were playing. Like in a console survival horror game, you can definitely become a better player by making judicious choices based on experience.

I think the most valid criticism of the game was that some people felt the heroine did not react enough to all the horror. And I realised in retrospect this is a function of the fact that no description can be longer than 255 characters, so some emotional reactions which would have required longer pieces of prose to pull off successfully, had to be dispensed with within a sentence, and looked glib as a result. But this only bothered a minority of players, so I figure it's an okay trade-off considering the fact that I managed to keep paying off all the interactive scenery in room descriptions of 255 characters or less. And that I had to manually justify them for the 40 column screen as well!

I just received my copy of Juiced GS today, and I like your quote about building a ship in a bottle. That is certainly how I feel about the game."

Eamon on Adrift

Last month, Wade Clarke sent an interesting thread on one of the forums for Adrift, a modern IF system.

If looks like someone has developed an Eamon converter for both Inform 6 and Adrift 5. Check out http://forum.adrift.co/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=7203

Announcing Leadlight

In case you didn't hear the news, there's a new Eamon game out there. Written by Wade Clarke, Leadlight is the first Eamon game to have ever made it into the annual Interactive Fiction Competition. While Leadlight didn't win, it came in 14th place out of 26 entrants, it really offered an opportunity for the IF community as a whole to be exposed to Eamon, perhaps for the first time.

I honestly think that it would have scored better had it not been on the Eamon system. As much as I love Eamon, I think we can all recognize that it is archaic in comparison to modern IF systems. When reading some of the IFcomp reviews, complaints about the game ranged from the lack of modern IF shortcuts to inability to UNDO a death in combat to the chunky lettering on an emulated Apple screen to the random nature of the combat to just the fact that it's on an emulated system.




But there were some good things too! One reviewer called it "the perfect Halloween treat--perfect for a night when you want some creepy thrills" while another states "this game is highly recommended to all those who believe they might like a game with random combat and unfair death traps, for it is surely among the best games of that type." I was surprised by the number of people who weren't completely put off by Eamon! Then again, there were mixed emotions. "I am fascinated to say that I simultaneously got really into this game and also have almost nothing good to say about it."


This snippet of a review may sum it up best:

This would have been a pretty damn good game twentysomething years ago. It has a coherent setting, it's good at gestural, tell-you-as-you-need-it information-delivery, it has hints of a plot that is, if not particularly striking, at least somewhat considered. (It seems highly likely that we're either hallucinating or caused all the horrors with our BRAIN.) The trouble is that IF has improved rather a lot over the past twentysomething years.

Since you're here, reading this blog, I can only imagine that you've played Eamon and are familiar with it. In a way, these complaints are similar to the old complaints about the older v4 Eamons when v7 was widely available.

So what do you think? Have you played it? Are these accusations fair? Should Leadlight be judged compared to modern IF standards or should it be judged in the Apple II/Eamon context which was the basis of its creation?

Mapping Eamon

I've made many maps during my days of Eamon but have always wanted an easy way to make clean crisp maps. I recently came across Trizbort, a free tool designed for "interactive fiction" uses such as Inform and TADS. That didn't stop me from trying it out on Eamon!

Here's an example map (click for more detail):

The Beginners Cave

Check out http://trizbort.genstein.net/index.php to give it a try.

Eamon on Facebook

Interested in talking to others about Eamon? Want to show your support for the website? Go to the Eamon Adventurer's Guild facebook group and click on the "Like" button!

I want to "advertise" the website, so to speak, but also have a community wall available which would allow discussions to take place. Let me know what you think!