@~First some snippets from Bill Hoggett, then some general stuff @~from me. News From Bill Hoggett Activision release Infocom titles on CD. Again. ----------------------------------------------- A new CD compilation has been released by Activision in the U.S., comprising of all but two of Infocom's games complete with documentation in .PDF format (easily read with Adobe Acrobat, for instance). HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Shogun are not included as the rights to both these games have reverted back to their authors. Sadly the CD, imaginatively titled The Masterpieces of Infocom CD, is only available by mail order direct from Activision in the U.S. and the price should come in just below œ20. Those with Internet access should check out Activision's home page for more details. ..on a similar note... ---------------------- Andrew Plotkin, the author of A Change In The Weather, So Far and Lists and Lists is heading a project to produce an interactive fiction CD titled The Great Underground Adventures which will contain about 20 of the best adventures released in the shareware domain in the last 2 to 3 years. More news about this as it nears completion, but the price is likely to be around $15-20 plus shipping. Now, if someone was to offer to distribute this in the U.K.... The Return of Scott Adams ? --------------------------- Scott Adams, one of the adventure pioneers on the home micro, is making a return after a decade out of the spotlight. Scott is currently working on a completely re-vamped version of Sorcerer Of Claymorgue Castle which will be available for Win95 machines sometime in 1997. Although still text based, it will presumably have a graphic user interface in the standard Windows style, allowing system commands like save and restore to be executed by selecting from a pull-down menu. For those who can't wait until the new release there are a couple of ways to play Scott's old games on the PC or Amiga, without resorting to the various emulators out there. Both methods require the old game files for Tandy's TRS-80 Model II computer. These may still be under copyright, as this was owned by Adventure International when it went under in the mid-to-late 1980s. As a result they cannot be made available through SynTax but those with Internet access can download the games by following the links from Scott's home page at: http://users.mwci.net/msadams/index.html Once in possession of these files, they can either be played directly, by using the ScottFree interpreter, which is available for both the PC and Amigas, or take a rather longer route to the same effect. This requires access to a machine capable of running Perl, then using the Scott2Zip Perl script to convert the TRS-80 data files to Inform source code. This can then be compiled using any version of Inform to produce final game files capable of running under any Z-code interpreter, such as Frotz or ITF. Both ScottFree and Scott2Zip are freely available and Net users can download them from: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/scott-adams/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- More News --------- Sierra On-Line have now released Rama, a multimedia adventure based on the best-selling series of books from Arthur C Clarke and Gentry Lee. They have also recently released the 7th game in the Leisure Suit Larry series - Love for Sail. This time, the hapless Larry is on a cruise ship full of beautiful babes ... you'll even find a pool full of nude Sierra employees and some obscene balloon animals on board! Richard tells me that he read about a legal fight between Acclaim and MicroProse over who has the rights to produce a game based on Magic the Gathering. As you know, I've been waiting for MicroProse's version for ages. Anyway, evidently there was a big argument in the summer that has only just been settled. The upshot is that Acclaim's strategy game Magic the Gathering - Battlemage was planned to be released before Christmas but MicroProse's more true-to-the-original-card-game version will be held over until spring or later 1997. Drat. - o -