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 In the House of Professor Evil: The HAM HOUSE
 An Utterly Epic Text Adventure from Cumberland Games
 Copyright © 2006-2008 by S. John Ross. All rights reserved. 
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The little Ham_House.z8 file included in this archive is a text adventure game ... a very brief, reasonably silly text adventure game exhibiting (according to my adorable wife) a "very sick sense of humor." She said it with a smile, though.

If you're familiar with these games ("Interactive Fiction" is the usual term preferred by the masters at old Infocom and their modern disciples and descendants), then you already know how to play ... open the mailbox, read the leaflet, and so on. Only with more ham.

You'll need a Z-Machine interpreter, a free program that lets you play this kind of game. Frotz is the one I use; Google it up and you'll be all set. Pages that know of Frotz usually link to other interpreters as well; there are several choices for just about any platform (even for portable devices or chat-clients). Macintosh gamers usually use an interpreter called Zoom. You can also play games like this on many phones and other portable devices.

This game was my very first baby-step venture into this medium as a writer ... but while it's small and simple, it does its humble best to amuse. What's more, this game is a real testament to the power of Inform 7 (the system used to program it). I had a working version less than 4 hours after opening Inform 7 for the first time, and the game was complete in its Release 4 "Solid Gold" incarnation within just one week of fiddling with it. Bear in mind also that I have no programming experience beyond a 5th-grade exposure to BASIC sometime in the early 1980s.

So ... just fire up the interpreter, point it at Ham_House.z8, and play. It won't take long (5-15 minutes, depending on how much time you spend just exploring and smelling things). But this is just the pebble, with an avalanche (I sincerely hope) to follow.

Can YOU get ham? I know you can.

S. John Ross
www.cumberlandgames.com

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Special Help for users of GBA Frotz
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Enter the command DIC (or, if you're a whiz with the virtual keyboard, DICTIONARY or DICTIONARIES) for special Gameboy Advance Frotz help (a listing of default dictionary bindings). Use the command GGG to bring up a "harvest pool" of terms for screen-grabbing.