As "Curses" opens, you're hunting about in the attic of your family home, looking for a tatty old map of Paris (you're going on holiday tomorrow) and generally trying to avoid all the packing. Aunt Jemima is potting daisies and sulking; the attics are full of endless distractions and secrets; Greek myths, horoscopes, sixth-century politics, a less than altogether helpful demon, a mysterious bomb plot, photography, ritual, poetry and a dream or two all get in your way; and somehow you keep being reminded of your family through the ages, and all its Curses... ...could it be that even you are Cursed? Curses, Release 16 ================== Release 16 fixes a few minor bugs and one major one (which made the gothic key invisible). Nothing within it is new. "Curses", for those who will otherwise email me to ask, is a game designed to run on any Infocom-standard interpreter. The game is a single file, if-archive/games/inform/curses.z5 at the FTP site ftp.gmd.de. (This file must be downloaded in _binary_, not the default (text) mode.) However, to play it you do need an interpreter. General (very portable) ANSI C source for these can be found in if-archive/infocom/interpreters, as can executables for some machines. It is not difficult to get an interpreter going, and once you have you can also play the story files from the "Lost Treasures of Infocom" games, so it isn't a total waste of time even if you hate "Curses". If you can get it for your machine, the best interpreter is one called "Zip", by Mark Howell. The next best is that of the "InfoTaskForce", or "ITF". "Curses" is not shareware, it's free: I wrote it for fun. It may be freely distributed provided you aren't making a profit on the deal; I have allowed several magazines to put it on cover discs, so feel free to get in touch if you have that in mind. But it _is_ copyright, and the source code is _not_ public. Moreover, the secret debugging commands may only be divulged to a druid of good standing. Graham Nelson Oxford University, UK 24 October 1995