I wish IF got rid of maps and rooms. You know, the purely mechanical simulation stuff. Mechanical puzzling could go too.

Think scenes and acts, instead, like a stage play. And choices, plenty of them. Overarching inevitable plot events and triggered events could go into this picture as well.

Oh, well, perhaps one day...

(Er, I meant Emily's map idea, with the swipiness. Zarf's is not without its merits as well. :) )

Okay, swiping sideways to a map is probably better than my idea.

Jmac, per-room notes are way too fiddly for the zen of iPhone (as I see it). I'd rather have a third screen which is a single notepad (for the whole game).

Zooming maps... not per-room, but per region. The typical IF game map is divided up into several broad regions. Once you have all the zooming conventions available (ie, the map is not behind your text), it makes sense to be able to zoom out to see other regions, and maybe zoom into one of them. (Although the map should still re-center itself when you switch back to the game and make a move.)

Oh, I love that map idea. And double-tap a room (a la text columns in Safari) to expand it, and reveal a field for adding room-related notes. Hmm...

I still find the background a little distracting, but I can also see the desire to have this on there.

At the moment I think I want the ability to swipe sideways from the text screen to a map screen and back again: that would free the map to be pinch-zoomable, while keeping it all close at hand.

I could be wrong about this.

Thank you for this nice review. I'm going to get an iPhone some day, and I'd love to play some IF and good old adventure games on it. If you ever come across (better) ones, please let us know.

I would imagine that the genre of computer role-playing games (CRPGs) is known to most people reading this, but the basic idea is tabletop role playing (like Dungeons & Dragons) brought to the computer desktop (or console).but where i can get them from ?

The Need for Speed (NFS) series is really the arcade counterpart to Gran Tourismo, with Project Gotham Racing (PGR) somewhere in the middle. I was a fan of NFS: Most Wanted, basically an updated Test Drive where you'd drive around a circuit on realistic-looking roads trying to outrun cops. Most Wanted 2 added a free-roaming map where you zoom around crashing into minivans and trying to get clocked at unfeasibly high speeds by the speed cameras. Despite more or less encouraging you to fling yourself at high speed into traffic, the cars are still perfectly rigid--the only concession to reality being that I think the headlights can break and maybe you can scratch the paint job up. I guess those are after-market parts so it's OK to mess them up a bit.

Personally I was more of a fan of the open-top Ferrari Testarossa in Sega's classic OutRun and its magnificent sequel. You could drive that thing at 295kph straight into some gigantic pixely rocks and it'd stay in one piece, after unceremoniously dropping you and your hot blonde girlfriend into the grass by the track. Now that's solid engineering.

I've generally preferred to play IF, graphical adventures, and cRPGs, in roughly that order, but like all long-time gamers I've occasionally dabbled in other genres. I spent lots of time with Test Drive on my Commodore 64 and later Amiga -- the Amiga version was much prettier!

One of my best gaming experiences of, well, ever, was the time I spent with Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed. It's truly a great game. Virtually every Porsche ever made from ~1950 to ~2000 is in there, and there are three modes of play: sandbox, in which you just choose a car, a track, and some opponents and have at it; a series of challenges based on the premise that you are auditioning to become a test driver for Porsche and must show your stuff by accomplishing various feats on various courses driving various models; and a factory racing mode in which you participate in a sort of racing league that begins in the 1950's and must win races to advance the clock and gain access to later Porsche models. These two latter modes undoubtedly helped make the game attractive to me, as I need stories in my games, no matter what their ostensible genre.

Most car racing games tend for me to be either so realistic they lose the fun factor, as in the Papyrus series of NASCAR and Indy Car racing games; or so unrealistic that they don't feel like driving at all, as in, well, Test Drive among many others. Porsche Unleashed somehow got it just right, though. It feels like driving, and each car handles very differently, but -- especially thanks to the Test Driver mode, which serves as a sort of extended tutorial -- it's possible to have fun right from the beginning. No other game has ever captured the sensation of really driving so well for me. The early 911's are downright terrifying in their tendency to spin, but oh, so fun once you figure out where the limits are; later models are faster but less dangerous and also somehow less fun; etc.

Oh, and the scenery you get to drive through is so gorgeous and evocative and very European: a winding road through the French countryside, a cliff-hugging road along the Pyrenees shoreline, a track through the Black Forest, the famous course at Monte Carlo, etc. Add in the ability to drive all these courses in any time, season, and weather, and it just gets better.

But anyway, enough of my gushing. I think you can still find the game in budget bins for $5 or $10, and it's a steal at that price even if you don't love Porsches like I do.

Yeah, I just noticed that that link's on the main site but not my mirror. I just added it.

The even web-2.0wnier IF web site these days is http://ifdb.tads.org/

(Not TADS-specific, despite the domain name.)

Repeatedly pressing the A button can still land some chains, however it wouldn't have any quickened explosions and wouldn't have a very high multiplier.

I see what you're saying. I can get a score of 1 trillion in 10 minutes, which doesn't mean a lot since the scoring system is just ridiculous.

One that's different from the PSP version is that the player's yellow avatar can move around in any area of the screen, where in the PSP version the player can't move all the way to the left or right of the screen.

I just wish the online mode wasn't a graveyard. Hopefully, they'll get it right with E5, but I think Q Entertainment is working on new games, so it might be a while until we see a sequel.

Thanks for your feedback Giraffalot.

They changed Every Extend so much with this XBLA release, and I'm not sure it's for the best.
Only the time-limited modes in E4 are worth playing, as getting a high score in the infinite mode only requires time and not skill. If you were bored enough, you could probably max out the score counter by simply pressing the A button repeatedly.
For that reason, only the time limited modes are worthwhile.

I reckon Minter's "this is not Tempest" is not meant to distance Space Giraffe from the gameplay of Tempest as much as it is to make people aware, that if they are expecting to pick up Space Giraffe and play it as Tempest, they will be disappointed.

There's a much more risk-and-reward based gameplay in Space Giraffe and you have to rely on audio cues as well as what you are able to see. This does make Space Giraffe "not Tempest" while in other ways it's clearly an offspring due to some of the similar game mechanics.

To keep this in line with the discussion you can say that the syntax is clearly Tempest while the semantics are very much brand new.

I always try to leave a comment. Sometimes I might go to a blog and it's all advertising and a product I'm not interested in, so I don't say anything, but otherwise I try to leave a comment. If you don't leave comments, how are you ever going to meet people? On my other blog, I've made some wonderful friends because of visits and commenting.