Well, I finally found a second game for the iPhone decent enough to post about.  The first was Aurora Feint, which I discussed briefly here.  Sure, Labyrinth and Cube Runner make good use of the tilt/accelerometer and are cool to show people.  But I can’t see myself sitting down to play either for more than a couple of minutes. 

It’s pretty ironic that the second game I really like makes minimal use of the iPhone’s gorgeous screen and is also the first thing I ever played on my Atari 800, lo these many years past.  Well, Frotz isn’t a game at all, really.  It’s just a way to play text adventures interactive fiction on the iPhone. 

I remember loving Scott Adams’ text adventures on the 800 and then later playing every single game in Infocom’s catalogue.  So I have a lot of fondness for these titles, even though I very rarely sit down to play them any more when I’m in front of the PC.  There are just too many other options out there.  But the interactive fiction community is definitely still thriving, and people are certainly doing creative things with text-only games.

I think it’s pretty cool to be able to play some interactive fiction on the go.  Frotz is a type of Z-machine, an engine for playing interactive fiction.  The name, Frotz, comes from a spell in Infocom’s Enchanter series (which was one of my favorites) that imbued items with light. 

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