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. Fortunately, the past week has given me a brief respite, and I've started checking out the entries.

Although I have played and judged the competitors in previous years, 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[1. Some of them? Hopefully all of them?]</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 will aspire 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[2. Full disclosure. I am a personal acquaintance of the author, but I'm recommending his game because it is good, the best I have played so far.]. It's well-written and well-crafted, which--for those interested in how I "rate" a game-- are my two main criteria for what constitutes a good, and therefore fun, game. In a nutshell, "well-written" refers to the literary aspects of the game, and "well-crafted" refers to the technical implementation of the game. You might wonder if there can be a difference, but trust me, you can have a beautifully written piece of IF that is horribly bug-ridden; and you can have a technically elegant 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 reviewer's matrix.

A final Quite honestly, I'm not certain what to attain through this. Certainly not fame or glory. But perhaps by studying the games of others, I will be better prepared when I gather up the courage to submit a game of my own.