A while back I wrote about my experience with Amazon’s Kindle 3, and I had this to say:
I’m not sure how often I’ll have crazy urges to browse the web on the Kindle, but it was a nice surprise to find that I’ll be able to if I want to.
Now here is something that makes me want to! I grew up on ancient 1980s-era video games, including text adventures (what the kids these days are calling “interactive fiction”) like the classic Zork series.
This type of gaming lives on today with interpreters like Frotz, that let you play the games on virtually any platform imaginable. It’s imminently fitting that a solution has come around to let you play them on a Kindle.
That solution is http://portablequest.com, a web site specifically optimized for playing interactive fiction on Amazon’s latest-generation device. You register on the site for an account, set a password, and you can log in. You can save your progress within the games (it supports 4 at the moment, all from the Zork series,) and it uses Amazon Whispernet to keep your saves up to date.
A Kindle isn’t actually required to use the site. The screencap above is one I took of Google Chrome rendering the site. But it does present a pretty decent method of getting interactive fiction onto a device intended for very static fiction.
There are some issues with it; the Kindle 3’s web browser is listed under an Experimental menu, and with good cause. It’s very slow, and I found while trying to play that I often had to reload pages to get them to show up. There were also issues predicting whether the text cursor would be on the input box or the browser’s address bar.
It’s fun though, and a perfect display for games like this. It can only get better from here. If you’ve got a Kindle 3 and check it out, let us know in the comments!
Just don’t play in the dark. You’re likely to be eaten by a grue.
(via Ars Technica)
Plugh.