Infocom and The Gallery of Zork

As I've mentioned on several occasions, I was a huge fan of Infocom's text adventure games back in the day. Actually, I should say that I AM a huge Infocom fan because even though it has been quite a while since I've played through an entire game of theirs, they still hold quite a fascination for me.

I won't torture you fine folks by prattling on for 10 pages in this post about how cool I think Infocom is (although I could!). No, I reserve the right to that hero-worship post later, but for now I just wanted to let you know about a cool website I stumbed onto this evening - The Gallery of Zork.

You might see scans of the fronts of game boxes at some Infocom tribute sites, but the guys at The Gallery of Zork really kick it up a notch. Yes, they offer high-resolution scans of the boxes (front, back, sides, and inside), but they also offer scans of pretty much every other Infocom item ever produced - the manuals, flyers, advertisements, Invisiclues books, newsletters, and all the the miscellaneous pack-in "feelies" that Infocom was famous for like the scratch n' sniffs from Leather Goddesses of Phobos, the pocket fluff and microscopic space fleet from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the swizzle stick from Hollywood Hijinx. Where my own copies of those items made off to I have no idea.

But perhaps best of all you can play ALL of the Infocom games online right on their website - and it won't cost you a single zorkmid!  I've seen some websites where some of the games are offered for online play, but it really looks like these guys have all of them! The Java box you play them in is somewhat small which is a little distracting, but that aside it seems to work great. I suppose you could even make the box bigger by reducing your monitor resolution while you were playing - I might try that.

If you want to skip directly to their online playable games page go to http://www.accardi-by-the-sea.org/Infocom/Online/. They have them all set up quite nicely.

If you would like to take a look at all the goodies for a particular game before you launch into playing it, or if you just want to check out all their other cool stuff, then go to their homepage at www.accardi-by-the-sea.org/ and just start wandering around. Lots of great stuff to see there if you are an old school adventurer like me. So don't Z around for more time to pass, head over there and take a L!

The Arcade Flyer Archive

Today's post is a "check out this site" post. I discovered the Arcade Flyer Archive a long time ago and actually their "About Us" section describes themselves better than I could so here it is:

"The Arcade Flyer Archive (TAFA) is a digital repository for advertisement flyers that are used by the coin-operated amusement industry to promote the sales of its games. Over time flyers represent much more than a marketing brochure. They capture a unique blend of the industry's history, graphic design trends and advertising campaigns. Most importantly, they bring out the nostalgia of countless people who have grown up with the culture of video games, pinball machines and arcade games. Unique cabinet designs, attractive artwork and real screen shots -- all of which represent the visual language of coin-operated games, make flyers sought after items for collectors and effective tools for restoring games to their original factory specifications."

They have high-resolution scans of flyers from all over the world - the Fronts, Backs, and Insides (if they have one - Mad Planets doesn't).

They also have zip files of Flyer Packs that you can download and unzip into the Flyers folder of your MAME fronted (MAMEUIFX if you downloaded it from my previous post). Then you can check out the flyers from all the games directly from the Flyers tab in MAME. The Flyer Packs are much smaller/lower resolution than the individual flyer scans they have posted but it lets you get more or less all of them at once so it's a very convenient place to start your digital flyer collection.

So if you like that sort of thing (like I do) go to their website here and check it out.

Retro Uprising

I just came across this website called Retro Uprising which allows you to play all kinds of old arcade and console games through your browser. To play some of them (mostly arcade games) you have to install ArcadeOX which is an application that allows windows applications to be run through your browser - and that sounds like a security risk to me so I didn't risk installing it. And some games were too laggy to play - but some worked well.

I did notice they had a bunch of old Infocom text games on there that you could play if you like and those worked fine. So check it out and run the java games just beware about installing anything.

Retrouprising.com