Zombies

A couple tweaks to Robots gives us Zombies. Instead of manipulating the bad guys to collide with one another, now you manipulate the bad guys to collide with pits. There are two styles of gameplay, one with deep (bottomless) pits, and one with shallow pits which disappear when a zombie falls into it.

Still fun, but I like Robots better.

As other reviews mention, this is not really interactive fiction -- it's a recreation of an old game from the days when "computer graphics" was completely synonymous with "ASCII art."

The game does seem to be implemented well and was probably something of a pain to write. I didn't particularly enjoy the gameplay, so I'd normally rate it 2 stars, but I was struck by the way this piece is framed -- it made me think about the possibilities of throwing a mini-game like this into the midst of a standard IF work. (As if writing something of substance isn't hard enough!)

The only attempt at that sort of thing that I'm aware of is Infocom's Border Zone, which was somewhat controversial due to the real-time nature of the mini-game's action. In this case, the game is turn-based, which might work with the "stop-and-think" nature of IF instead of against it.