Saturday, September 15, 2012

I.F. Only

Well, it's been awhile since my last post, and I'm still playing Skyrim. Other than that, I have a whole slew of things to announce.

Today, I'll just announce the arrival of a second channel of mine. It's called I.F. Only. The 'I.F.' stands for Interactive Fiction, also known as the text adventure. You can find the channel here:

http://www.youtube.com/amethystnewyork

If you have a YouTube account, feel free to stop by, subscribe, leave comments, and what-have-you. I announced the channel about a month ago in my 121 Subscriber Special, but not everyone watches those things. It's okay. I don't always watch them either.


 As for what's going to be on this channel, I am currently posting videos that are edits of extended interview footage from the Interactive Fiction documentary, GET LAMP. This was filmed and edited (etc.) by Jason Scott, and it contains interviews with literally dozens of Interactive Fiction authors/programmers, as well as people who were amazed and thrilled by these games. These extended interviews are available on archive.org, but I've cleaned them up a bit and added subtitles where necessary (mostly when Jason says something off-camera that may be a bit hard to hear, or to indicate what the interviewee may be talking about, since most of the footage is of the answers to Jason's questions. The questions themselves have mostly been edited out.).


This year's Interactive Fiction Competition is about to start. This is an event where people submit their games to win prizes, or just to win. I'm signed up to be a voter this year, and I'll be playing through the beginning of these games, and recording them as Let's Plays / Reviews. I'll give my opinion on the game, and what score I've given it. I can't release these videos until the competition is over, which is November 15th. So be on the lookout for these vids in mid-November. There were 38 games submitted last year, but I'll try to get to them all.


In the meantime, I'm going to attempt to put up a Let's Play of an excellent Interactive Fiction game, Earth and Sky. This came out in 2001, and has two sequels. I'll be recording the LP with my daughters. I tried to record this a month or so ago, but the recording failed for some reason. With a bit of technical support from the awesome fellows at the CamStudio forums, I may have fixed things. I hope. If all goes well, we'll play through the sequels as well.

I hope to see you at I.F. Only!