i am a sord lol

So at xyzzysqrl's urging insistence ennui, I decided to poke my head into the judging of IFComp, the competition where people try their hardest to make you forget about the horrors that Douglas Adams inflicted on the text parser world.

Or maybe make you relive them.

I'm going to try my hand at judging some of these this year, and I'm going to do a staggered shuffle motif: One game that actually catches my attention, four that are purely randomized. I'll only do these in sets of five, and I'll post my thoughts here as I do them.

The rules are simple: judge based on two hours (no more, but less is okay as long as you make a good faith effort to play through as close to 2 hours or 'done' as possible), judge at least five out of the eighty fucktillion80+ entries in this year's melting pot. Scale of 10. I can do that, and once I've got five games under my belt, I'll have a definite rubric set in stone, I think.

Me and interactive fiction kind of have a punch-punch-kiss-kiss relationship; I grew up with ZORK and even less-known games like Enchanter, but I also, uh... never did well in them. Ever. My brain just lacks the grasp of text adventure, and even newer choice-based ones kind of leave my eyes glazing over unless I'm in the right mood for them. So this will be interesting.

Stay tuned.