Hi Richard.
The arborell site is indeed very much an ongoing project, but it's a long
way from being abandoned. Right at the moment the gamebook murder of crows
(sequal to Shards of moonlight), is being stuck up in installments, and the
2010 ameter gamebook writing comp has just finished.
The author has also recently added some more background material to the site
such as the full lexican as well.
To start the html gamebooks if you'd downloaded one, just open the index
file which leads to the title page, or the index1 file which leads directly
to the table of contents.
Alternatively, you can play them on the site as well.
Thus far there are two conventional gamebooks finished, the very long (800
section), windhammer, and shards of moonlight which is the first in the
Jotton of the west series. The second, Murder of crows is as I said, being
stuck up in installments (you can play to roughly half way through at the
moment).
There is also the torchlight game, which is ort of a cross betwene a
gamebook and a randomly generating adventure game where you crawl around in
a dungeon finding treasure etc.
This is a particularly clever idea sinse it works on the basis of randomized
maps, but is consequently a bit more unconventional to setup and playthan
your standard gamebook (you have to for instance write a map in microsoft
xl), though it's certainly streight forward enough once your clear how the
system works, and sinse it is randomized it has huge amounts of replay
value (I also beta tested it as well).
The chronicles of arborell also hosts the books submitted to the thus far
three anual windhammer ameter gamebook writing competitions. These are rtf
documents so you have to use the find command to go to different sections,
but other than that play in a completely standard way.
there are then a few sites I've listed on audiogames.net which provide
various gamebooks, such as the very symple online adventure game age of
fable (which is far more a gamebook than a brouser game ala sryth), the
single html gamebook mantion of malifiscence, and a site called shadow vault
which also hosts several gamebooks as ms word documents.
Also, whie we are talking gamebooks, there are th mystery games from 7-128
software, which (after playing), I decided are far more similar to gamebooks
than if, sinse they are based around wandering in various areas talking to
witnesses and gathering clues detective style. Sinse they now work with ms
sapi, there is also no problem about voice. The only bad news is they're
commercial, but the good news is they have ambient sfx and music pluss some
rather fun litle video comments from the detective inspector Cindy. Sadly
they don't have demo versions at the moment sinse they had to rejigger the
programm, but they plan to have demos up soon.
these are all the ones I know of thus far, though I'm on the lookout for
more. If you have an Iphone, it'd probably also be worth checking for
gamebooks on Itunes, sinse both ameter authors and professional companies
are producing ones for that platform (including the original fighting
fantasy series and the newly released updated lone wolf novels), I'm not
sure if these work with voice over sinse I don't have an iphone though I
would be interested to know if they did. and yes, I've contacted said
company about accessible pc versions, but they literally ignored me (I got
no reply at all to three E-mails).
Hope this explains things a lot more.
Beware the Grue!
Dark.
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