I beta tested 9 of the IFComp games, and I don’t feel like it would be fair to give starred reviews right now, as I feel biased towards them.
So my plan is to give unstarred reviews on IFDB and then add the scores after the comp.
I’m also still working on Hard Puzzle 4.
By the way, has anyone found a way to run Alice Blue on Windows or in a browser that emulates Linux?
The requirements are rather extreme even if you have Linux. It will only work with a single desktop environment on the major distros. I think it’s roughly impossible without installing one of those, though you could always do it in a virtual machine.
I e-mailed the author asking if there is any other way. I even read the code to see if I could tweak it to work on a different platform, but I think this is one game I’m just going to have to sit out on, unless they write back. 
At the beginning of the comp I started reading the code to see if it could be easily modified to run in, say, the bash environment/terminal that comes with Git and other similar things. It looked to me like the author did a bunch of things in a more system-specific way than necessary. After five minutes of global search-and-replace it still seemed fairly do-able, but then I put it down and haven’t gone back to it.
So I could be completely wrong. But I’ll take another look tonight to see if I can modify it without too much work.
Edit: Oh, man. It wants to open new gnome-terminal windows and do floating-point arithmetic. Hrm. OK, fine, I’ll work around that.
Oi. I’m not sure that was worth the work, but it mostly functions now. It’s full of pauses (which seem to be deliberate) and super-slow-and-irritating typewriter effect. And the walkthrough in Alice-Manual.pdf is wrong in places (it’s not too hard to figure out how it’s wrong and what you should do instead, but still). Gah. And find someone to proofread, dammit. Or at least run your text through a basic spellcheck.
Ugh. Seriously. Yup. I can believe that this game is two hours long. And at least half of it will be waiting for it to respond to your commands. What a terrible idea. I took a quick look and didn’t see how the delays were coded. But I guess I should leave them in for the authentic experience anyway.
Oy. Just how many errors are in this walkthrough, anyway?
Oh, come on. Just how long does this ending sequence go on for? Oh. There are twelve, one for each room, aren’t there? OK, at least they’re not as long as some of the others. Oops, spoke too soon. Oh well, at least that was the last one.
And…let’s see. Save and restore at least tentatively seem to work. Good enough.
So. Put this file in the directory where the original aliceblue script is. Download the Git version control software (you may want to cancel that download and choose the “Portable” version instead so you don’t have to install it) and unzip or install it. Then you can probably just drag my modified script onto git-bash.exe to run it. Or you could run git-bash, cd to the directory (something like cd /c/Users/You/blah blah blah/ALICE BLUE/Alice/) and then enter ./aliceblue-win.txt.
aliceblue-win.txt (232.2 KB)
Let me know if that works for you or if it still has problems.
I will check it out! It sounds intimidating, so I will probably wait a day or two
I don’t know that it’s actually intimidating: I think you just explore and it makes sounds at you when your score goes up. It was a little confusing and artsy and I don’t think I understood it at all, but it didn’t seem threatening. It was just slow and I was trying to debug so I wanted to rush through it, and that was frustrating.
Edit: oh. I’m an idiot. You probably meant running it. Sorry, I was trying to be complete with the instructions and probably made it sound worse than it is. Three steps:
aliceblue and README.txt are).Hopefully that should just work.
You mean there are people who don’t have git installed already?
Shh…this is phase one of my sneaky plan to get more people using version control.
It worked! I finished playing it. I couldn’t play .ogg files so I downloaded VLC media player which worked perfectly.
Very interesting game! I typed up my thoughts at IFDB.
The slow effect may be an artifact of the programming. I noticed it paused at certain words that I thought were for emphasis, but the source code had nothing there.
Thanks for your help