Announcement: CURSES Announcing "Curses", a new Infocom-format game: ===============================================

[Graham Nelson]

Your family have owned the house for generations, not that they ever amounted
to anything. Well, now it's yours, but you haven't any great ambitions; all
you want is to get away from the holiday packing, which is driving you mad,
and hunt around in the ramshackle old attic of Meldrew House for that student
map of Paris you know you left up there somewhere.

You certainly have no idea why Aunt Jemima's keen interest in horticulture,
your grandfather's early photography, how robot mice work, what Arthurian
legends have to do with the motorway at the bottom of the garden, Tarot
cards, the politics of George III, holiday snaps and Greek myths are all
about to become suddenly important to you... could you possibly be suffering
from a Curse?


"Curses" is a new version-3 format story file which can be played, hopefully,
on any Infocom interpreter capable of running general version 3 games. (Most
games were version 3: but be warned that some interpreters are hacked only to
work with one specific game.) The InfoTaskForce interpreter will run it, and
since that's been ported to most machines now this means it should be easy
to get going.

"Curses" is a fully worked-out and tested game which pushes the format to
its limits; it is about 115K long, larger than average, and has a comprehensive
parser (capable of working out implicit commands, and of asking clarifying
questions) with a vocabulary of about 700 words.

The story file contains full instructions and needs no other accompanying
material. It is public domain, though I retain the copyright.

"Curses" was written under an Infocom-format compiler called "Inform",
details of which are given in a similar announcement on rec.arts.int-fiction.

It may be found in the if-archive at ftp.gmd.de:

if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform

contains all the Inform files, including a copy of "Curses". See the Index
file there. There is also a copy in if-archive/games/infocom. Remember
that it must be FTP'd in binary, not ASCII, mode. There are interpreters for
Infocom-format adventures in if-archive/infocom/interpreters.

My thanks go to Volker Blasius for maintaining the archive, and to many others
(credited in the game) for helping with its creation.

--
Graham Nelson
Oxford University, UK
<ga...@phx.cam.ac.uk>