Frotzed

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. 

It also happens to be a quite solid app.  You’re probably thinking it’s tough to do the amount of typing needed to play a text adventure on the iPhone.  And you have a point, but it’s not as bad as you think.  There are abbreviations for main commands in most games.  And for the most part, what you do type out is fairly short.  The fonts are absolutely gorgeous and clear on the iPhone, so it’s a pleasure to read.  Oh, and if you flip the phone horizontal, Frotz goes into landscape mode.

The coolest thing about Frotz is that it lets you browse the Interactive Fiction Database without even leaving the app.  And when you download a new adventure…it’s just there on your story list waiting for you when the download is complete (and that’s quite quick).

The author has done a good job of selecting the interactive fiction that comes with the app.  I was going to recommend you try Lost Pig, Being Andrew Plotkin or Varicella.  But it turns out all three are already there for you from the start.  A couple more I remember being interesting that are available for download are Ad Verbum and Galatea.  I also thought Textfire Golf was pretty neat on the PC, but it didn’t work well for me on the iPhone.

It looks like quite a few people are downloading this app, which is great to see.  It may be hard to believe if you grew up in the age of graphics, but text adventures were a pretty big deal back in the day.  It’s nice to see that these games are still available on the most modern of devices.

Oh, and if you would rather play some text adventures in your browser without any downloads or plugins, try this link.