Here are the results from the Spring Thing 2009 Competition:
1 A Flustered Duck by Jim Aikin… Avg: 7.28, Std Dev: 2.56, Votes: 18
2 Vague Richard by Richard Otter… Avg: 6.06, Std Dev: 1.98, Votes: 18
3 Realm of Obsidian by Amy Kerns… Avg: 4.25, Std Dev: 2.52, Votes: 16
4 The Milk of Paradise by Josh Graboff… Avg: 4.00, Std Dev: 1.28, Votes: 18
I take a little solace in some of the numbers here. Notice that I have two votes missing. That must be due to Realm of Obsidian being a Windows-only game. Though there are a few Windows emulators out there for the Mac and Linux, there were two people who weren’t able (or weren’t willing) to play my game, thus the missing votes. My score might have been higher otherwise. Anyway, congratulations to Jim Aiken on his win. I’ll have to give Flustered Duck a run.
I will be able to post more about my game now, so expect some Realm of Obsidian-specific posts in the near future. I’m working on another release that will feature the removal of a few bugs, then it’s time to expand out to the town of Abattoir!
Amethyst Games 
One thing to take to heart is that in competitions like these, only the relative rankings really say anything. I’ve never been able to see a clear correlation between the average score in a competition and the average quality of the games. (And I know for a fact that there are people who scale their votes to cover almost the entire spectrum between 1 and 10.) So I would read the result here as “people liked Realm of Obsidian more than The Milk of Paradise but less than Vague”, not as “people gave Realm of Obsidian a 4.25 so they must have hated it”.
Also–Blue Lacuna got some really bad votes because it was unfinished, and Blue Lacuna is one of the best IF games ever… so I think the fact that Realm of Obsidian was unfinished may have influenced the score quite a bit.
You have probably already read my review; let me just reiterate that I enjoyed playing your game (except for the places where I died a lot 😉 ), and hope to see more of your work! 🙂
Thank you, Victor! I really appreciate that. 🙂
Hi Amy,
just wanted to say I enjoyed your game and ranked it second-best among the Spring Thing games (behind A Flustered Duck).
I don’t know if you follow the rec.games.int-fiction newsgroup – if you are interested in another review, I wrote one a few days ago and posted it there. You can see it via the Google Groups interface at
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.int-fiction/browse_thread/thread/7fd21f69b14eb196#
Hello Michael!
Thank you for your long and informative review on Realm of Obsidian. I have made some posts in reply to the topic. I plan on posting all reviews here on my blog, and yours would be a great addition. By the way, I normally don’t follow rgif, but I do read raif daily. 🙂
You’re welcome, and thank you for the game! Feel free to post my review, no problem.
It can be worthwhile to look into rgif from time to time, because sometimes new games are announced there between competitions, and it’s not cross-posted to raif (e.g. recently Andy Phillips’ “Inside Woman”, May 08th). It’s fairly low-volume, too, so no stress in catching up every day :-).