IF Comp Reviews
October 3, 2009In case you’re dying to check out some comp reviews, I’ll post here the places I know of that are posting them as we go along.
Philip Armstrong
Sam Kabo Ashwell
Renee Choba
Cobalt Nine
Riff Conner (Minimum Safe Distance)
Conrad Cook
Ben Dixon (Another Mr Lizard)
George Dorn
Elizabeth (runnerchild)
Shane Fitzgerald-Gale
Jeremy Freese
Frozen Isles Productions (warning! short reviews all in a single post, without spoiler cuts)
Victor Gijsbers
N. B. Horvath (all in one long uncut post)
Christopher Huang
Denis Klotz
Amanda Lange
Yoon Ha Lee
Juhana Leinonen (Nitku)
Michael Martin
memegarden
Rob Menke (grid of reviews but nothing actually posted yet)
Wesley Osam (Super Doomed Planet)
George Penrose
Jenni Polodna (Pissy Little Sausages)
Proactive Apathy
Rhian (Blasting Requires Dynamite)
rxpi
George Shannon (newlin)
Dan Shiovitz
Mike Snyder
Michael Neal Tenuis
Mark J. Tilford (ralphmerridew)
Matt Weiner
Jake Wildstrom
WinterIceCrystal (video reviews)
Russian forum reviews in Russian and via Google translate
Octopus Overlord reviews (posted to a forum, no spoiler cuts or space)
See also: reviews broken down by game, on ifwiki.
I’ve listed a few others at the IFWiki: http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/15th_Annual_Interactive_Fiction_Competition#Reviews
Here’s one I was previously unaware of, which I found by searching Google Blogs:
http://gamesjournal.wordpress.com/
Hello. I’ve noticed that there’s one entry written in german this year. Are there any german reviews? I was searching Google and found nothing.
Not that I could find either. But if I hear about such a thing I’ll put up a link.
I’ve just started posting my own reviews as well, although they’re likely to come slowly.
Same here. I hope I have time for them all.
I posted reviews last year under one of my other handles (Imrihamun) and I’m going at it again this year (see linked website) with a revised and slightly more clinical schematic.
I’ve begun blogging my reviews.
I’ve increased my spoilers space, and changed the syndication setting to “short”. Let me know if this qualifies now as spoiler space. If not, how much spoiler space need I provide?
What I mean by “not spoiler-cut” is that the reader doesn’t have to click “more” (or some equivalent) in order to see the spoilers. For a single review, that’s probably not a problem, and you’ve given a bunch of lines of spoiler space, which is great — but if you have numerous reviews on a page, it might be hard for the reader to scan down the page to the reviews that interest him without also browsing the undesirable ones.
I don’t know the details of your blogging software, so I can’t tell you more specifically how you might do that.
Now in process of switching over to a wordpress blog (which I’ll announce once I have it formatted to my liking). How do I create spoiler space (or show only the first paragraph of a post) in the word press blog?
I’ve moved my reviews to a wordpress blog. I will be deactivating the three existing reviews at my original blog shortly. Please update the link to my reviews
http://gpenrose.wordpress.com/
Along with other advantages of WordPress, my reviews are now correctly spoiler-cut.
Sincerely,
George Penrose.
I’ve updated the link — thanks for letting me know.
Some more comp review sites I have found, probably updated in the next time:
http://www.infodarkness.com/if/reviews.html
http://www.allthingsjacq.com/interactive_fiction.html
http://frater.wordpress.com/category/interactive-fiction/
Worth keeping an eye on, perhaps, but all I can see for now is 2008 or earlier reviews on these sites.
Maybe the folks who run these sites and blogs will post 2009 reviews in the next weeks. It’s still very early in the comp. As you wrote, it’s worth keeping an eye on.
btw. one of those sites is run by Jacqueline A. Lott from IntroComp. And she reviews IFComp games every year, as far as I’m concerned.
As far as I’m concerned, deep in her heart she’s reviewing them every moment of her life.
Not at this moment.
I saw this year’s IF comp as an occasion to open a blog and post reviews, too: http://amaraterramia.wordpress.com .
I hope I’ll be able to write regularly. It would be cool if you could add me to the list above.
Greetings,
Michael Neal Tenuis.
Added, and thanks.
In case this is of interest, I’ve indexed most of these by game title in an LJ post (basically an organized linkdump):
http://yhlee.livejournal.com/1585896.html
(Uh, except I forgot to add my own to the index. I’ll fix that today…)
I’ll keep updating this from time to time as I check the blogs listed in this post.
Very nice work, Yoon Ha Lee!
Hi,
Just to let you know, i too have started to post IF comp reviews here:~
http://gruelove.wordpress.com
Thanks.
Hi! Chatted with you briefly yesterday on IF MUD. I’ve also started posting my reviews. They are located here:
http://second-truth.blogspot.com/
Thanks — I’ve added the link.
[...] via Parchment or Java. Several people — well, everyone who’s reviewed it (here’s review central) — have pointed out that this is a minimal word puzzle that doesn’t need to be in the [...]
Hi, I’ve started posting reviews.
(You can use my last name, Weiner, if you want to.)
[...] It’s just that I don’t necessarily have that much to say about them, and one of the other reviewers has probably said most of what I want to. Also that I realized it was silly to write a review that [...]
Hey, just a quick note to say that memegarden’s back up. Thanks!
I’ve posted some thoughts on the games to my website. http://www.ricordius.com/others/ifcomp09/index.html
I’ve added links to reviews of all the games on their IFWiki pages: http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/15th_Annual_Interactive_Fiction_Competition#The_Entries .
It’s basically like Yoon Ha Lee’s list of reviews sorted by game (see above in the comments), but a bit more complete.