Introduction to the Baf's Guide

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Introduction

This site is an index and catalog of the text-based adventure games at the Interactive Fiction Archive at ifarchive.org (formerly housed at GMD). The Archive is the principal place from which new text adventures are disseminated, but it's also a repository for old games, enabling veteran players to take a nostalgic look at what they played on their TRS-80's back in the late 1970's. The result is that, although the if-archive contains many good games, it contains many more bad games. Therefore, this site also contains capsule reviews of some games.

The reviews here are not the most comprehensive, nor are they meant to be. My main aim has been to provide warnings about [mis]features that some players will strongly object to, such as death without warning, puzzles with nonsensical solutions, time-based puzzles, mazes, or being written in GAGS. If I go into great detail about a game, it's probably a sign that it impressed me greatly, for good or for ill.

I have provided links to the actual files, so you can download the games without leaving this site. If you find the downloads to be slow or unreliable, you are advised to try a different mirror site.

The creator of this site is neither the creator nor the maintainer of the Archive it indexes. The creator of the Archive is Volker Blasius, and the current maintainers are David Kinder and Stephen Granade, who cannot be thanked enough. Comments or questions relating to the Archive or the files contained therein should be addressed to them, preferably after reading the Archive's README file. Comments or questions about this site and its reviews should be sent to
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, or to the author of the review in question.

About Platforms

By "platform", I mean, roughly, the type of machine and operating system needed to run a particular game. For example, if a particular game says "Apple II executable", you'll need either an Apple II or an Apple II emulator for your machine. There are links to emulators under the Index by Platform. Please note that, for the purposes of most of these games, Windows 95/98/2000 is equivalent to MS-DOS.

Note that some platforms do not exist as physical machines. It is common for text adventures to be available in "platform-independent" formats that need some special program (usually called an "interpreter") to run them. You can find these under the Index by Platform as well. See playgame.FAQ for details on how to download and play the games.

Deep Linking

"Deep linking" is the practice of linking a web site to pages within another (rather than, say, to a title page). Oddly enough, some disapprove of this practice - largely, it seems, because it lets people bypass whatever tunnel of advertisements they've set up. But from pretty much all points of view other than the advertiser's, deep linking is a Good Thing, and an essential part of what the Web was intended by its creators to be. Feel free to link to any part of this site. The URL's are designed to be stable and (if all goes well) should survive any future technical redesign of the Guide.