Non-English or Non-Euro/American IF?

I also hope to play some German games when I have improved my German. It would also be great if some of the classics were translated into English. Such games would be eligible for IFComp etc. but would require that the copyright holders could be reached and that they would grant permission.

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The DOS version is hard to come by these days. All the pages that feature abandonware actually have the same version circling around where the story file is missing. The game then doesn’t start after the title screen. I am doing a wild guess that this is the case for you.

Personally I prefer the Atari ST and Amiga versions as these have a more traditional interface where textual output is happening below the graphics in a split-screen UI. The DOS version though feels more Infocom’ish with a text-only interface while graphics of the current location may be displayed with a shortcut.

Anyway, I dug into my archives and found the working DOS version extracted from my own floppy image.


A few things to consider when playing the DOS version:

You have to start the game with the VGA flag, otherwise it will be text-only. So start it with:

LAAS -V

To show the graphic for the current location, you have to hit the DELETE key (ENTF in German). To switch between the two playable NPCs, type 0 on your numpad.

Oh and here a side-note:“Die Drachen von Laas” was planned to be released in English as well under the name “The Laasian Plague” but it never saw the light of day. The predecessor of this game (same engine different story tough) which was called “Ooze” in fact is also available as an English version. You can have a look at it here Ooze: Creepy Nites screenshots - MobyGames

Drachen_DOS.zip (1.0 MB)

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Yep, that is indeed the case. Thank you very much for sharing the playable DOS file. Those are some great graphics!

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I’m a chilean author and have published several works in Spanish. Check my profile for further info; you may also consider this web page for a nice fanzine, current news and published works.

[INCANUS]

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There were some IF games translated from Chinese that were submitted in IFComp 2017 - The Murder in the Fog, The Living Puppet, and The Fifth Sunday. On IFDB there’s also 汉初 by a well-known sci-fi author. Unfortunately, the original website that hosted these games (qiaobooks.com) appears to be down.

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There is a relatively young Ukrainian Interactive Fiction community, a few IF works in Ukrainian are currently in progress of making.

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Thank you very much for sharing that! Much appreciated. :grin:

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