JIGSAW
An Interactive History
Copyright (c) 1995 by
Graham Nelson
Release 3 / Serial number 951129 /
Inform v1600
Library 6/1
Standard interpreter 0.2
Century Park
At one side of the great Park, on a gravel path which runs west to northeast beside poplar trees. Crowds of celebrants are enjoying themselves to the north, having abandoned the canvas marquee east.
>_
Jigsaw has a few interesting features. For one, it has an extensive system of footnotes on each of the historical periods and events in the game. It's worth playing just to read the notes. Second, it never uses a gender-specific pronoun to apply to White (you) or Black (your opponent). It pulls this trick off with such style and grace that most players don't notice until is pointed out to them. The idea is that, rather than telling you ``you are male'' or ``you are female'', Jigsaw leaves the choice up to you (or your subconscious, anyway).
Jigsaw is my favourite piece of puzzley (non-puzzleless? puzzled?) interactive fiction. If you like Jigsaw, you might also want to try some of Graham Nelson's other games: Curses, Balances, and The Meteor, the Stone and a Long Glass of Sherbet (the last released under a pseudonym for the '96 IF competition). All of these games are available for the Z-machine platform---the same virtual machine used by the Infocom text adventures. Jigsaw and friends were developed with Inform, the IF development system written by---Graham Nelson.
That Graham's one busy man.