Text the Halls: Results
Posted by Terry Fri, 04 Jan 2008 09:54:00 GMT
And it’s all over! The winner is Pacian, with the excellent Snowblind Aces – which also finished first with a unanimous Miss Congeniality vote! Congratulations also to Akhel, who managed a very close second place with The Snowman in both the main vote and the MC vote. Finishing third is TIGSaga in the main event (keep an eye out for TIGStory!), and My Magic Tire Hoax in the MC vote (probably the most imaginative entry to the contest).
You can find the rest of the results in this thread.
Despite the low voter turnout, I think it’s safe to call this contest a success! The overall standard was amazing, especially for a contest where many were writing their first piece of interactive fiction. Everything, all the way down to tenth place is worth playing, and if you haven’t played them yet, you really should.
We definitely need to have another one of these text adventure contests!
Edit: IF blogger Jason Dyer has reviews up of the top three, Snowblind Aces, The Snowman, and TIGSaga. Definitely worth checking out. I’ll try to keep an eye out for more reviews if they crop up.
Congratulations Pacian !!!
“We definitely need to have another one of these text adventure contests!”
I’m all for it.
But, but…there’s no pictures!!!
Just kidding. I’ll have to check these out sometime. Congrats to all awards takers!
Nice work Pacian! I certainly would’ve voted for it but I was a little busy with things to be able to play most of the other titles. I really did like Panorama though, I know it wasn’t really IF like the rest were, but it was a rather cute little experience and I hope the author considers writing again, if not for my own pleasure in a post-work afternoon.
Fucking hell.
Yep, that would probably be my reaction too.
Grats Pacian!
…the fuck? The forums are down again!?
“Fucking hell.”
that’s the single greatest exceptance speach i have ever heard. double congrats.
and now i only get to know the first place winner? poo.
The forums are back up, but now they won’t display any topics. To quote:
“Database error
Please try again. If you come back to this error screen, report the error to an administrator.”
I hope that Derek is reading this.
I finished reviews for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners at my blog. I might also do the 4th place winners (Breathe and My Magic Tire Hoax) next week.
Very, very nice reviews Jason, thanks :)
Also, I don’t know what the Golden Watermelon of Discord is, but thanks anyway, heh.
The Golden Watermelon of Discord may be related to IFComp’s Golden Banana of Discord, which is awarded to the game with the greatest disparity of ratings (i.e. the greatest amount of discord among the judges).
Of course, the Banana, by its nature, cannot be awarded based on the evaluation of only one person, so fuck-all if I know what the Watermelon is. Sorry.
“We definitely need to have another one of these text adventure contests!”
Let’s not. I think the low voter turnout shows most agree with me.
Well no, the low voter turnout shows that we shouldn’t set text adventure contests at Christmas. And we especially wont have the deadline as Christmas Eve.
Besides, why wouldn’t we host it because people who don’t want to vote on it wont enjoy it? We’d host it even if it was just 1% of our readers who enjoyed it, because at least those 1% were glad to have been part of it. At least that’s the way I see it.
No, you should not host it if less than 1% of people enjoyed it. Time would be better spent hosting competitions of creating games people actually enjoy. Besides, text adventures offer nothing more than the graphical sort than a lack of good-looking cartoony graphics and humorous sound clips.
For example, I would like to propose a “Cock Snorkeling” game competition. Cock snorkeling is a wondrously enjoyable pastime of mine and I can’t wait to share mine and cock snorkeling with the world through a competition here on SIGT!
Well, you know it didn’t exactly take much of our time away from us. Most of us were probably busy with christmas and I can see Derek now in tophat and monocle drinking cocktails to Bob Marley.
At least it took a lot more time for the people entering the contest than it did for us to host it. I use that.. conservatively because I honestly had nigh-on-nothing to do with organising it, but I’m sure all those responsible spent the time they spent doing so gladly. The site did not suffer as a consequence, that would be the plus side of having multiple editors.
What it all boils down to if I’m reading your words correctly is that you simply don’t care for text adventures, and you’re not alone in that. But again I reitterate that people did enjoy this contest and its chosen style, they just weren’t -you-.
Voting turnout was low and so clearly we’ll just have to do a better job next time and getting people excited about it. There’ll also be contests down the line which will be a lot broader in scope, so if that’s more to your liking I hope you’ll still be around for that then.
I enjoyed the games, but I chose to abstain from voting because, frankly, I’m lazy.
Here’s one non-voter you shouldn’t be speaking for, jerk!
I want us to have another IF competition because I’d have an entry. I was too busy with Christmas etc. to learn Inform/Adrift/whatever, as were several others. If we had one in the summer, not only would the number of submissions and votes increase greatly(perhaps even exponentially), but the general quality of the entries would be higher. Keep in mind that IF is at best a novelty genre and that it was practically everybody’s first crack at it.
I didn’t vote because I didn’t have time to fiddle around with the half-dozen interpreters and play the games enough to form opinions of them.
So please, do another IF competition. You could call it “What IF?”
I’m still the only one who can’t access the forum this yesterday?
Can’t acsess the forum, help !!!
I’m pretty sure the plan at the moment is to have one in the summer, so look forward to it Bob!
Also in regards to the forum; Yes, it’s still down for everyone. It was either Kotaku linking to a forum thread which caused it, or the servers were having a cocktail party for New Years and it got kinda messy. Expect them back up - ….eventually.
Why hasn’t anyone posted any news about Michal Marcinkowski’s new game? http://www.berserkergame.com
To whatever wise guy (or girl, last time my post was edited I think ARelativelyHotGirl was behind it) edited my last post to say I like cock snorkeling, that is just childish attacking someone for having an opinion. Anyway, I actually think that would be interesting. “Make a game that somehow involves cock, but not anything that would get an AO rating, you sick fucks.”
Does anyone have the download links to the entries?
Because the forums are down, I can’t access the threads of the games.
Actually I found the download links from here: http://ifwiki.org/index.php/TexttheHalls
Petri: You can find them individually on the IFWiki.
You can also download the lot here on my site, except for the online Java game Breathe, which you can find here.
Congratulations Pacian!
Congrats, Pacian. I voted for you, so I can include myself in the “voted” percent of the site. I’m also one of the percent who enjoyed the contest.
Yeah, I agree that we should have another IF contest - and *no*… “Cock Snorkeling”. I don’t even know what that is, but I still know it would be an unfortunate idea.
We need to come up with a name for these forum crashes. How about “The Great Cataclysm of January ‘08”?
Every time the forum crashes, a Farbs cries.
I can already see the headlines:
TIGSource Forums To Be Accessible Again great cataclysm finally over?
One very probable reason for the low voter turnout besides the fact IF’s are quite niche is the fact most of the entries needed separate programs to be run instead of being ‘install and start playing’ types. And a lot of people are lazy. Very lazy. Especially at Christmas Eve.
The Great Cataclysm has ended…for now.