Only slight downside I can see is that timeframe clashes pretty much with IntroComp. In particular the judging periods are identical. Which may affect judging and/or entrants for one or both competitions. But to be fair the year is pretty crammed.
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May i ask a silly question;
What constitutes a “parser game” for the purposes of this Comp?
Would it be, anything with a command line? In which case, would a DOS shell prompt qualify?
Does it have to have text based entry? If it “parsed” my voice commands, does that count?
Would it be, a game where there is an object based world model, with an input command parser of any sort.
What if it has a world model and object state, but no input command line? Say instead you clicked on things or pressed iconic buttons.
or are we talking a pure text-based experience, where graphics, sound and animation are not allowed. Perhaps restricted to “console style” text systems.
?
As others have said, I don’t see the point in an explicit “work on your game” period unless you want entrants to make their games from scratch during that period, which is a big difference to the nature of the competition.
I’m unlikely to get a game made from start to finish in two months, but I do have several already-started projects lying around, one of which I could probably dust off and enter. (Which one? Who knows!) On the other hand, someone who prefers to focus on their game solidly for two months can still do so with an IFComp/Spring Thing-type model. (They might feel at a disadvantage potentially competing against games that have been worked on for years, but they won’t be actually excluded.)
Honestly, I’m not sure what’s wrong with this.
Personally, I don’t like themes. They either enforce a development timescale with all the problems already given plus extra creative restrictions; or they’re nebulous enough (recent example: “a good time”) to shoehorn in whatever game I’d been working on already, in which case they might as well not exist.
There probably aren’t going to be enough entries in the first year (after revival) to worry about categories.
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Good questions!
The quick short answer is… Think Zork and you’re there. Location graphics also, sound effects also, but no mouse or joypad.
BUT… I’m open to voice input, text read out to the player etc. I think that would be very interesting. 
Adam
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To play the devil’s advocate: So a game in the style of the Legend Entertainment text adventures where a mouse driven interface supports(!) the parser would not be legit? 
I would have said, “game needs to parse textual input from actual or virtual keyboard; additional input aids are legit”. Not that there’s much to worry about, few authors are authors AND tech-oriented coders AND graphic artists.
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Haha, no that’s great, please play Devils advocate because I need to work out the kinks. 
I’m really looking for typing text inputs rather than the onscreen input words (I know the style you mean) that you click to form a command.
What I’ll be sure to do is provide some actual example screenshot of what’s in and what’s out. I’ll include these in the rules somewhere.
Adam
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Hell yeah! Worlds Apart was written in TADS. Parser doesn’t get much more serious (and sublime) than that.
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