Inform

Once upon a time, not so long before the video-games era, people needed the command-line and knowledge of esoteric commands like examine, look, take, drop, go south etc. to get into the mysterious worlds of dungeons & dragons. If you have nostalgia to the heroic times of text-based adventure games (nowadays called IF for interactive fiction), there is a short message : get Inform(ed)! Here’s a slightly longer message for those who have a mac running OSX and want to know the quickest way to get to a screen like and start playing Christminster (or another of 300 IF-games) (if you’re on a different system, things will be just as simple but you’ll have to find it out yourself starting from the Inform-Z machine page). step 1 : Get a copy of an inform installation and expand it to get an Inform-folder and place this in your Home-folder. step 2 : Go in the Finder to Inform/Games/MyGame1 and double click on the MyGame1.command file. A Terminal window will open and exit and you will see that a new file appeared in the Folder : MyGame1.z5. Double click it and a warning message will appear that this is the first time you will open Zoom, tell it’s ok and Zoom will launch and you can play your first (though primitive) Inform game! step 3 : If you want to play other games (such as Christminster), go to the Z- code archive and pick one of the 346 games. For example, click on the minster.z5 link and the file will download to your Desktop. Place it in the Inform/Games folder (not necessary) double click it and you should see the above wellcoming message. That’s it, start playing. step 4 : If you don’t know how to play such games, there are excellent tutorials available on the Inform site.