This year’s IFComp is incredible! There are so many rich and wonderful games, I don’t know where to start. I decided to start with parser based games which are my favorite. That should cover about one third of the games from my scan through the Game Guide. I have started three games so far just for a start. Great quality. The competition is really good this year. It will be hard to rank anything short of 5 stars.
As expected, every game I have touched has been excellent. Trying to play everything on my Raspberry Pi, I ran into trouble with TADS games. Gargoyle for the RPi will not open TADS games. Qtads was a possibility and it is even in the Raspi OS repository. It installed but only “blinks” when started. Just can’t make it work. I un-installed the repository version and began to compile the source code. A lot of dependencies and permissions! I managed to compile SBL2 after another stack of dependencies and permissions. I then tried compiling qtads again. More dependencies resolved. It compiled without error!
Don’t know if it’s available on Raspbian, but have you tried FrobTADS in a console? I’ve used it on other Linux distros before and it’s never caused a problem for me.
Thank you for the suggestion. I did try Frob TADS on the RPi. It was problematic since the RPi is an ARM based system. That causes a problem for many applications. Since RaspiOS is based upon Debian, most apps eventually get ported over. A problem that has developed recently is the slow transition to a 64 bit kernel. The kernel is now 64 bit but userland is still 32 bit. Zilf no longer works under RaspOS but it will work in Debian. So far, I have been unable to make it work.
PS. I am so reluctant to post reviews. I tend to like just about everything and my reviews would be slanted in that direction. Just no confidence…
There’s plenty of good things to say about this year’s games, all right.
Thank you for the update on Raspbian, too. I keep meaning to pull out the RPi I picked up last year and make something useful with it and I just haven’t gotten around to that project!