Last week I wrote about the homebrew emulators available for the Nintendo Wii, and in particular the version of ScummVM that lets you play classic point-and-click adventure games on the console. Admirers of dewy-eyed nostalgia will no doubt mourn the passing of games like The Secret Of Monkey Island and Simon The Sorcerer; titles that were cruelly killed off by the arrival of the 3D adventures of the PlayStation generation. But the point-and-click genre itself was hardly an innocent party, having stamped on the face of the text adventure in the late 1980s.

Text adventures were tied very much to the technology of the time. For computers without high-res graphics, epic quests such as William Crowther and Don Woods' original 'Adventure' (aka Colossal Adventure) began with a few lines of text and a flashing cursor. Later on, graphics were used to illustrate location descriptions, but the main advances were made to the size and complexity of the adventures and the sophistication of the text parser (which, in many cases, were developed to understand full sentences rather than just one or two word commands). Some of the best-loved adventures of the period included The Hobbit (Melbourne House), Lords Of Time (Level 9), The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (Infocom) and The Pawn (Magnetic Scrolls). But as the host hardware improved, graphic adventures became more and more popular and the arcane text adventure crept off back to the dungeon from whence it came.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the text adventure was dead and buried. Well, you'd be correct from a commercial standpoint, but the genre is alive and well and championed by an online community of enthusiasts. These days the genre is better known as interactive fiction, which is more fitting, as many of the modern-era adventures are story-driven rather than puzzle-based. Some of the games even subvert the genre by setting up multiple narratives or toying with the conventions (an excellent example is Aisle by Sam Barlow in which the player is asked to make a single decision in a young man's life). This activity is mainly down to the various game creation toolkits which enable non-programmers to easily bring their own interactive fiction to life.

Many new adventures are released each year thanks to these tools. There are even competitions to judge the best works, the most popular of which is the IFComp (www.ifcomp.org) which is now in its 14th year. Authors must enter their games before the end of September, then a six-week judging period begins in which anyone can download all of the entries for free. If you want to judge the games there are two main rules. First, you have to play and rate at least five games, and second, you must play each game for a total of two hours before you give a mark out of ten. Based on the high standard of entries from previous years, neither of these stipulations are a hardship (far from it) and you'll discover that there's more to modern interactive fiction than crawling dungeons and singing about gold.

A quick note for fans of less cerebral gaming. Two new homebrew titles were playable at the Retro Fusion event which took place in Leamington last month. Co-Axis 2189 is a frantic side-scrolling shooter for the C64 written by Jason Kelk, while Fusion is a fun new Spectrum game by Jonathan Cauldwell which is best described as a cross between Moon Buggy and Kikstart. Both games are not yet finished products, but you can download the version of Fusion playable at the event from Jonathan's website (jonathan6.fortunecity.com/egghead).