NEWSBRIEFS
GobblerNet is Newest Text Adventure BBS It's tough to beat the camaraderie of a bulletin board system as a meeting place and library resource for special interests. But there have been few BBSes for text adventure fans to hang out at, and fewer still with last November's closing of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, an enormous text game BBS. Bob Newell hopes to change that with his new text adventure BBS, GobblerNet, operated from Bismarck, North Dakota).
Newell hopes to establish on GobblerNet the largest collection of text games to be found on any BBS, although by his own admission it still has a long way to go. GobblerNet will also feature character graphics games, such as the ZZT games and the Kroz series, among others. According to Newell, one of the prides of GobblerNet is its Spectrum Sinclair section, with emulators and hundreds and hundreds of classic Speccy games, including a large number of Speccy text adventures.
GobblerNet will also host special online games since, as a Linux BBS, some really large games can be played online. Currently offered is the multiplayer game Imperium as well as, in the text game tradition, an honest-to-goodness MOO (which is currently very small due to lack of programmers). Also on-line is Graham Nelson's "Curses," 12 of the Scott Adams text adventures, and the multiplayer game "Empire."
GobblerNet also echoes the rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction newsgroups, which may be read on-line or downloaded for offline reading.
Best of all, in the tradition of the Internet, accessing GobblerNet is totally free; the only cost is your phone call. GobblerNet neither requests nor accepts membership fees, donations, or payments of any kind. There are no upload requirements or ratio limits, either.
GobblerNet can be reached at nearly all times at 701-222-0429, at speeds up to 14.4 kbps, 8-N-1.
New Feature: Top 10 Picks for Interactive Fiction on the WWW
Beginning with this issue, XYZZYnews will include a "top 10" listing of URLs for useful or less-than-useful-but-possibly-entertaining IF Web pages that we've run across and want to pass along to you. These include online interactive games, resources for IF games programming, home pages for related MUDs and MOOs, among other topics. The HTML version of this 'zine is already set up to let you link to these URLs; very convenient, n'est-ce pas? And so without further ado, in no particular order, the March/April IF Web page picks: CMU School of Computer Science Oz Project Home Page
http://www.cs.cmu.edu:8001/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/oz/web/oz.html
Inform Programming Page
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/gdr11/inform/
The TADS Programming Page
http://yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au/~s9406702/tads/
The TechMOOseum
http://www.thetech.com/techmooseum.html
LegendMud Home Page
http://www.cs.cmu.edu:8001/Web/People/johnmil/legend/legend.html
The Interactive Fiction Home Page
http://www.cs.cmu.edu:8001/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/wsr/Web/IF/homepage.html
MuseNet WWW Server
http://www.musenet.org/
Spork I: The Great Underground Kitchenware Outlet
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~twoflowr/spork.html
Drool
http://www.mit.edu:8001/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/j/b/jbreiden/game/entry.html
Praser Maze 5
http://orac.andrew.cmu.edu:5823/pra5
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