
Curses, Release 10
==================

I have produced a slightly revised new release of "Curses" (along
with the very substantially revised release of the compiler Inform
and its associated files and manual).  The new edition includes
44 minor improvements: fixes for rare bugs, a couple of minor new
things which can be done and so on.  However, there is no substantial
new material: it's simply a cleaner, nicer version of Release 9.

Enlargement of "Curses" is in progress, and there will one day be a
beautiful Advanced-story-file edition, replete with annoying
quotations and much extra material: today is not that day.

"Curses", for those who will otherwise email me to ask, is a game
designed to run on any Infocom-standard interpreter.  The game is
a single (binary) file,

  if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform/curses.z3

at the FTP site ftp.gmd.de.  However, to play it you do need an
interpreter.  General (very portable) ANSI C source for these
can be found in if-archive/infocom/interpreters, as can executables
for some machines.  It is not difficult to get an interpreter going,
and once you have, you can also play the story files from the
"Lost Treasures of Infocom" games, so it isn't a total waste of
time even if you hate "Curses".

As "Curses" opens, you're hunting about in the attic of your family
home, looking for a tatty old map of Paris (you're going on holiday
tomorrow) and generally trying to avoid all the packing.  Aunt Jemima
is potting daisies and sulking; the attics are full of endless
distractions and secrets; Greek myths, horoscopes, sixth-century
politics, a less than altogether helpful demon, a mysterious bomb plot,
photography, ritual, poetry and a dream or two all get in your way; and
somehow you keep being reminded of your family through the ages, and
all its Curses...

...could it be that even you are Cursed?


"Curses" is not shareware, it's free: I wrote it for fun and to
write a game "as games should be written".  (But it is copyright, and its
source code is not available.)  The only slight moral obligation I put on
players is to ask them to write to me with any bugs or potential
improvements they can.  The game is coming up for its first birthday,
and is now reasonably robust, but it's notoriously hard to get the "last"
bug out of an Adventure game... one of those corrected in this edition was
roughly

  Garden Stream...
  > drink
  (the coal bunker)
  It tastes unpleasant.

which I think says all there is to say about debugging Adventure games.

For more details, see the corresponding post on rec.arts.int-fiction.


Graham Nelson
Oxford University, UK
January 20th, 1994
