The annual <a title="The 16th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition" href="http://www.ifcomp.org/">Interactive Fiction Competition</a>, edition the 16th, has been underway for nearly a month, but vacation and classes and, well, let's face it, life in general, have delayed my chance to download and start evaluating the 25 (26?) new games to emerge in the <a title="Interactive Fiction" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction">IF</a> scene.

Although I have played and judged the competitors before, I have never written down my thoughts. I'm hoping that by announcing in this very post that <strong>I will, indeed, review the games that I play</strong>, that I will actually take some time and effort to contribute to the <a title="ifwiki.org: 16th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition" href="http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/IF_Comp_2010">literature already available</a>, most of it very insightful and informative, and some not-so-much. I hope mine to be the former, with one post per review when time permits.

In the meantime, I'll simply say that out of the half-dozen games that I have played, only one has stood out among the others:  <em><a title="The Warbler's Nest" href="http://jmac.org/warbler/">The Warbler's Nest</a></em> by Jason McIntosh. It's well-written and well-crafted, my two major criteria for what constitutes a good game. "Well-written" refers to the literary aspects of the game, and "well-crafted" refers to the technical implementation of the game. Trust me, you can have a wonderfully written piece of IF that is horribly bug-ridden; and you can have a beautifully programmed game that is riddled with grammatical and spelling errors. I have seen and played both. And within each year's competition, you can usually find games that span all corners of my particular matrix.