| ___. .___ _ ___. | |
| / _| | \ / \ / ._| | |
| \ \ | o_/ | | | |_. | |
| .\ \ | | | o | | | | | |
| The |___/ociety for the |_|romotion of |_|_|dventure \___|ames. | |
| ISSUE # 13 - COMPETITION SPECIAL | |
| Edited by Magnus Olsson (zebulon SP@G pobox.com) | |
| February 5, 1998. | |
| SPAG Website: http://www.afn.org/~afn55673/spag.html | |
| Contest Website: http://www.afn.org/~afn55673/contest/ | |
| SPAG #13 is copyright (c) 1998 by Magnus Olsson. | |
| Authors of reviews retain the rights to their contributions. | |
| All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine | |
| with the traditional 'at' sign. | |
| IN THIS ISSUE ------------------------------------------------------------- | |
| The results of the 1997 IF Competition | |
| Interviews with Lucian P. Smith, Ian Finley and Nate Cull. | |
| Reviews of: Babel, A Bear's Night Out, The Edifice, The Frenetic Five | |
| vs. Sturm Und Drang, Friday Afternoon, Glowgrass, The Lost Spellmaker, | |
| Madame L'Estrange and the Troubled Spirit, A New Day, Phred Phontious | |
| and the Quest for Pizza, She's Got a Thing for a Spring, Sins Against | |
| Mimesis, Sunset Over Savannah, Sylenius Mysterium, The Tempest, Unholy | |
| Grail, Poor Zefron's Almanac, Zero Sum Game, and Zombie! | |
| EDITORIAL------------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| Well, what can I say? If the first IF Competition was a good start, | |
| and the second was a resounding success, then the third Competition | |
| was overwhelming. Not only in the number of entries (though I | |
| certainly have to admire the energy of the judges who played | |
| every single game), but in the quality of most entries. | |
| I could go on for some length praising the entries, but I think I'll | |
| leave that to the reviewers. Let me just give my heartfelt | |
| congratulations to all the authors, and thanks to all the judges, and | |
| to the organizers. You've done a great job, all of you! | |
| COMPETITION RESULTS ------------------------------------------------------- | |
| 1 - The Edifice, by Lucian P. Smith | |
| 2 - Babel, by Ian Finley | |
| 3 - Glowgrass, by Nate Cull | |
| 4 - She's got a Thing for a Spring, by Brent VanFossen | |
| 5 - A Bear's Night Out, by David Dyte | |
| 6 - Sunset Over Savannah, by Ivan Cockrum | |
| 7 - Poor Zefron's Almanac, by Carl Klutzke | |
| 8 - The Lost Spellmaker, by Neil Brown | |
| 9 - Sins Against Mimesis, by Adam Thornton | |
| 10 - A New Day, by Jonathan Fry | |
| 11 - Zero Sum Game, by Cody Sandifier | |
| 12 - Zombie!, by Scott W. Starkey | |
| 13 - The Frenetic Five vs Sturm und Drang, by Neil deMause | |
| 14 - Travels in the Land of Erden, by Laura A. Knauth | |
| 15 - Unholy Grail, by Stuart Allen | |
| 16 - Friday Afternoon, by Mischa Schweitzer | |
| 17 - Madame L'estrange and the Troubled Spirit, by Ian Ball and | |
| Marcus Young | |
| 18 - Sylenius Mysterium, by C.E. Forman | |
| 19 - Phred Phontious, the Quest for Pizza, by Michael Zey | |
| 20 - Down, by Kent Tessman | |
| 21 - VirtuaTech, by David Glasser | |
| 22 - The Obscene Quest of Dr Aardvarkbarf, by Gary Roggin | |
| 23 - A Good Breakfast, by Stuart Adair | |
| 24 - The Town Dragon, by David A. Cornelson | |
| INTERVIEWS -------------------------------------------------------------- | |
| Since the first competiton in 1995, SPAG has made it a tradition to | |
| publish e-mail interviews with the authors. The number of entries this | |
| year makes it somewhat impractical to interview all the entrants; | |
| instead, we've settled for somewhat more in-depth interviews with the | |
| three top places. First the winner of the first prize: Lucian | |
| P. Smith, auhor of "The Edifice". | |
| Q: To start with, could you tell as a few things about yourself? Who | |
| are you, what do you do for a living, and so on? | |
| A: Well, in no particular order: I'm a graduate student in | |
| Biochemistry at Rice University. I'm in an improv comedy troupe | |
| called ComedySportz. I'm married. I grew up in Seattle and went to | |
| college at Wheaton College in Illinois. That enough? | |
| Q: How and when did you first get into contact with IF? And what made | |
| you decide to write your own game? | |
| A: I remember playing 'Deadline' (and getting nowhere, incidentally) | |
| on my friend's Apple II ages ago, and getting Zork hints from a friend | |
| in High School. I always loved the concept, even though I wasn't able | |
| to play them that often. I got back into IF by searching the web in | |
| early '95 for 'XYZZY' and stumbling upon XYZZYnews. From there, I got | |
| to the newsgroups, eventually figured out the concept of an | |
| 'interpreter' so I could *play* the games everyone was talking about, | |
| and it's just snowballed from there. | |
| I don't remember precisely what motivated me to try to write my own | |
| games in general, but the driving force behind 'Edifice' was | |
| definitely the contest. I was trying to come up with a good idea for | |
| a short game for the contest when I thought of the basic plot for it. | |
| Q: What made you choose Inform, rather than TADS or some language, for | |
| writing "Edifice"? | |
| A: Inform games were the first games I figured out how to download and | |
| play back when I started, so I guess there was an affinity there to | |
| begin with. Also, when I first downloaded the files, TADS was still | |
| shareware. After that, it's been mostly inertia ;-) Inform is a very | |
| nice language, and was easy for me to understand and assimilate. | |
| Q: Would you say that your entry is primarily a game or a piece of | |
| literature? Or perhaps both? Or neither? | |
| A: Ooog. Perhaps both, I guess. I'd say maybe that it's a story that | |
| depends on its game aspects to be fully effective (however effective | |
| it may be). The story, even as literature, depends on the interaction | |
| with the reader/player. The language puzzle would be boring to read | |
| about, but (apparantly) was quite fun to experience. | |
| Q: "Edifice" has been described as an allegory about the evolution of | |
| man. Was it intended as such, or is it "just" a story without deeper | |
| meaning? | |
| A: Well, I *did* subtitle it 'An Interactive Allegory'. But I think | |
| of it as an allegory in the sense that the things you found tended | |
| toward the archetypal--Others, Enemies, Rock, and so on. The allegory | |
| is right there on the surface. I was kind of thinking of Bunyan's | |
| "Pilgrim's Progress" in the back of my mind--"Oh, here's Frugality, I | |
| wonder what he thinks about cash flow?" | |
| So yes, I suppose there's a 'deeper meaning'--but you don't exactly | |
| need a shovel to find it ;-) Actually, if there's any sort of deeper | |
| meaning, it would be in your 'contentment' score--but the whole score | |
| thing was horribly, horribly broken in the competition release, so it | |
| was virtually impossible to get this. | |
| Q: How much is the Edifice inspired by the Monolith in "2001"? Did you | |
| have other sources of inspiration? | |
| A: *Laugh* Actually, it's been rather amusing to read all the posts | |
| assuming I was inspired by 2001. I was, indeed, inspired by | |
| something, but it wasn't that. There was a film I saw at least a | |
| couple times in grade school (once in fourth, again in fifth, and | |
| maybe even again in sixth), which was a collection of short snippets, | |
| designed, I suppose, to stimulate creativity. There was a bit about a | |
| ping-pong ball rejected from a factory because it bounced too high, an | |
| interview between two people that degenerated into just numbers | |
| ("2-0-5-7-9-9-2?" "4-4-2-4-6-6-9." "2-6-1-1-2-8-4?" | |
| "6-3-9-0-1-2-9."),...and "The Edifice." It was a cartoon in which the | |
| camera panned up a big tower, and you got to look in through the | |
| windows and see history unfold. The only specifics I remember are | |
| someone in the dark ages discovering the '0', and in the end, a guy | |
| standing on the top of the tower, his head in a radioactive cloud, | |
| shouting "Help!" as the camera backed away and showed the whole tower | |
| he was standing on. | |
| In my mind, at least, the Monolith is a different sort of beast than | |
| my Edifice. I actually hadn't seen 2001 until last month, but I had | |
| read the book. The Monolith is active, causing change in the apes. | |
| My Edifice is passive, presenting opportunity, but nothing more. | |
| But who knows? Maybe the film short was inspired by 2001 ;-) | |
| Q: What do you think of the other contest entries this year? Any | |
| favourites? | |
| A: I have to say that as I was playing through the introductions to | |
| all the games, just to get a feel for them, there were two games that | |
| hooked me and made me play the whole thing--Babel and Glowgrass. I | |
| particularly liked the way Glowgrass worked on two levels, as the | |
| protagonist discovered more and more about the land he was searching, | |
| and as the player discovered more and more about the protagonist. | |
| Other games that stood out were "A Bear's Night Out" and "The Frenetic | |
| Five". I haven't played all of them yet, but most all were at least | |
| good efforts, and many were outstanding. | |
| Q: What do you think of the future of IF? | |
| A: I have no idea, except that it'll be fun to watch unfold. My guess | |
| is that the field will spread, as new avenues are explored, and old | |
| motifs are re-exploited. It'll probably stay a hobbyist's pursuit, | |
| for the most part, but it'll be interesting to see what all it touches | |
| as it expands. | |
| Q: And, finally, speaking of the future: do you have any plans for | |
| writing more IF? | |
| A: Oh, of course! Great grandiose plans, no less. I do actually have | |
| a basic idea for a larger work of IF, but it hasn't really gelled yet, | |
| and I've been busy with other things. No plans yet for another | |
| competition game (or, for that matter, an Edifice sequel, which has | |
| been inquired about by a few), but if inspiration hits, who am I to | |
| stand in its way? | |
| Thanks again to Whizzard for hosting the competition! | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| Then, the second-prize winner, Ian Finley, author of "Babel": | |
| Q: To start with, could you tell as a few things about yourself? Who | |
| are you, what do you do for a living, and so on? | |
| A: Ok, my name is Ian Finley, I'm 17 years old and a senior at | |
| Bountiful High School in Bountiful, Utah; one of the more conservative | |
| communities this side of Communist China. My "living" as it were | |
| consists of writing essays for college and/or scholarship applications | |
| in a desperate attempt to further my education. | |
| Q: How and when did you first get into contact with IF? And what made | |
| you decide to write your own game? | |
| A: My first experience with IF was in fifth grade when my fantastic | |
| teacher Joyce Martinez (who I still claim to be one of the primary | |
| factors in who I am today) took me and a group of my friends aside | |
| during recess and showed us Zork, Enchanter, and Deadline. We never | |
| got more than 10 points into any of them, but it was something new and | |
| amazing, and the day after she showed us I was already imagining what | |
| I could do if I could write a game. Years past, and nothing occurred, | |
| though my interest was sparked again off and on by The Lost Treasures | |
| of Infocom, etc. Then I found the IF archive and the authoring | |
| systems. After a nightmarish attempt with AGT, and tremors of horror | |
| just looking at the Inform manual, I settled on TADS (which I truly | |
| adore) and started writing. "Babel" was meant to be quite small, and | |
| by the time I realized it's necessary size, I was ready to quit, were | |
| it not for the Competition and the carrot it dangled. Mr. Wilson, you | |
| have my undying thanks for pushing me through. | |
| Q: What made you choose TADS, rather than Inform or some other | |
| language, for writing "Babel"? | |
| A: Ease of use. I haven't programmed a thing in my life and TADS was | |
| the easiest tool. I found it much easier than even AGT, as well as | |
| much more powerful. I started with a very small game requiring very | |
| little programming knowledge and gradually added more and more complex | |
| stuff as I went. The HTML documentation is also wonderful and really | |
| quite accessible. | |
| Q: Would you say that your entry is primarily a game or a piece of | |
| literature? Or perhaps both? Or neither? | |
| A: LITERATURE. I get frustrated easily with puzzles and end up | |
| looking up hints, so those aren't usually motivating factors when I | |
| play other people's games. In fact, the only puzzles I can recall | |
| actually enjoying were some from Riven, when I got that real "Aha!" | |
| sense. But the reason I play a game isn't to work out my brain, it's | |
| to be part of a story, in a different way than you can experience with | |
| a movie or a book. This was my mindset in writing "Babel." | |
| Q: A very important element in "Babel" is the protagonist's way of | |
| recalling events, in a form of flashbacks. What gave you the idea for | |
| that? | |
| A: Everything I write is character driven. Interaction with people is | |
| the core of any story I think. But, due to my lack of coding ability, | |
| I knew I couldn't write decent characters that you could interact | |
| with. Also, I knew that the game should be cold and empty. The | |
| flashbacks seemed the perfect solution. | |
| Q: Do you see a conflict between the non-interactive "flashbacks" and | |
| the essentially interactive nature of the medium? Is there a need to | |
| overcome this conflict, and, in that case, do you have any ideas how | |
| this could be done? | |
| A: Naturally this is a problem; people have complained since the | |
| beginning of IF about screenfuls of text scrolling past them. The | |
| solution to this, as I see it is to cut things down to a manageable | |
| size. Brevity is the soul of wit and all. The scenes in Babel all | |
| went through extensive revision (and even MORE extensive revision is | |
| occurring as we speak for the second release) though many scenes | |
| (Brett's bedroom, Jonas' bedroom) are still more ungainly that I'd | |
| like them to be. | |
| Q: What do you think of the other contest entries this year? Any | |
| favourites? | |
| A: There are some AMAZING games this year. "Sunset Over Savanna" (or | |
| however you spell it) is on my list of all time favorite games, and | |
| one of the greatest gaming experiences I've had. Also, my hat off to | |
| Lucian; Edifice is a masterwork, combing the broad with close detail. | |
| In fact, I take back what I said about puzzles. Edifice used them | |
| brilliantly; the moment I figured out what was written on the Edifice | |
| I nearly crowed with joy. I was honored to follow this game in the | |
| rankings. | |
| Q: What do you think of the future of IF? | |
| A: Ok, I'm a 17 year old who still writes and plays IF, so I can at | |
| least say from personal experience that the art form has a long life | |
| in front of it. I also see, with the increase of the internet that, | |
| with a little more support, the field will have experience renewed | |
| growth in the years to come. Look at the increasing size of the | |
| Competition! | |
| Q: And, finally, speaking of the future: do you have any plans for | |
| writing more IF? | |
| A: Maybe too many! I'm currently at work on two projects, both small | |
| to play but huge to program: "8:00 at Andie's Bar and Grill," an | |
| entirely menu based game focusing on interpersonal relationships (no | |
| more stereotypes for me!) and (tentative title) "The Lips of | |
| Iscariot," a more straightforward game, also heavily focused on NPC | |
| interaction, set in the jungles and revolutionary camps of Mexico. | |
| Beta-testers always welcome! | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| And finally the word goes to Nate Cull, author of "Glowgrass": | |
| Q: To start with, could you tell as a few things about yourself? Who | |
| are you, what do you do for a living, and so on? | |
| A: I'm 26. I live in New Zealand (that's the little country in the | |
| South Pacific which isn't a state of Australia). I'm a computer | |
| support slash network technician at Christchurch Polytechnic (a small | |
| university). At the moment I'm living alone, which is great for | |
| writing, but not much else. | |
| Despite what you may have heard, the majority of the inhabitants of | |
| New Zealand don't wear flax skirts and jump up and down waving spears. | |
| Well, we do, but only when our rugby team wins the World Cup. We're a | |
| fairly technically literate country; we've had EFTPOS here in the late | |
| '80s, though we still don't have cable television. | |
| Q: How and when did you first get into contact with IF? And what made | |
| you decide to write your own game? | |
| A: Hmmm. Let's see. The very first IF game I remember was called | |
| "Miser", and it ran on a 16k Commodore PET. It was a ripoff of Scott | |
| Adams, where you had to pick up treasures around a house. I was | |
| majorly impressed. Then I found Colossal Cave and got incredibly | |
| frustrated because I couldn't solve the dragon puzzle - even now, I | |
| *still* think that's one of the all-time classics of bad IF design, | |
| because it relies on a completely unexpected parser trick. | |
| I pretty much started writing adventures as soon as I could program. | |
| _Island Adventure_ was I think my original masterpiece. It was | |
| written in MBASIC, had nine rooms (two of which would kill you | |
| instantly) and a two word parser. My second attempt was a bit better, | |
| it had multiline room descriptions and a vending machine (that gave | |
| you bullets, for some reason. Don't ask me why.) | |
| I was intrigued by Scott Adams, but only solved one (Pirate Adventure) | |
| without cheats. But when I played my first Infocom (no, not Zork - | |
| _Seastalker_) I fell in love. The rest of my teenage years were | |
| mainly spent trying to design a parser that could accept multiword | |
| sentences, but I never got it to work. I had lots of plots for | |
| Infocom-style games, and was very annoyed that I couldn't ever | |
| implement them properly. | |
| Oh, yeah, I never solved an Infocom without cheats, either. | |
| Q: What made you choose TADS, rather than Inform or some other | |
| language, for writing "Glowgrass"? | |
| A: Mainly because TADS was the first "real" IF development package I | |
| found. I had been tinkering with AGT, and even wrote one experimental | |
| game in it just to test its boundaries, but it was an incredibly | |
| painful experience. Writing in AGT, at least the version I had, was | |
| like writing raw assembler code. | |
| Then I came across an obscure little gmd.de game, _Peshach Adventure_, | |
| which found its way onto a shareware CD. It was written in TADS, and | |
| I liked what I saw, so from there I tracked down the gmd archive and | |
| Michael Roberts. (IF Authors note: put *lots* of contact details in | |
| your "help" screens. You never know where your game might end up.) | |
| When I saw TADS, it was another "wow!" experience. I was heavily | |
| blown away - and still am - by its simplicity, and its late-binding | |
| object-oriented focus. The fact that you can redefine a property to | |
| be either a value or a method on the fly makes the implementing of a | |
| game pretty much trivial, so you can focus on the story. And its | |
| syntax is nearly pure C, which made it simple to learn. Heck, there's | |
| hardly *any* syntax. Just object definitions and assignments and a | |
| few functions. The rest is the ADV.T library (which I've hacked) and | |
| your own code. | |
| I haven't yet tried Inform, but from what I've seen of the manual, its | |
| syntax seems a lot stranger and more needlessly complicated than TADS. | |
| And I'd seriously miss the "adjective" property - TADS disambiguation | |
| is so easy it hurts. However, I am being tempted by the Nelson Side. | |
| In particular, I'd consider trading my soul for the quote box, online | |
| help, real-time control and the ability to parse arbitary sentence | |
| structures (you can do arbitary parsing in TADS, but you'd have to | |
| reinvent the parser to do it). | |
| Q: Would you say that your entry is primarily a game or a piece of | |
| literature? Or perhaps both? Or neither? | |
| A: Given the choice, definitely literature. I was trying to write an | |
| interactive short story, not set up a conflict of wits between author | |
| and player. | |
| I don't mind the term "game", because it's a word that has come to | |
| mean a lot of good things - exploring, having a fun time, and playing | |
| with things - but IF, for me, is not about strategy and tactics and | |
| conflict and all the other things that make up good gameplay. It's | |
| about storytelling, creating an interesting world and letting the | |
| player free to discover it. Conflict may well enter into that as a | |
| mechanism, but it's not the primary motivator. | |
| I guess it's no surprise that my all-time favourite Infocom is _A Mind | |
| Forever Voyaging_. :) | |
| Q: What are your feelings about IF in science fiction settings? Is | |
| that genre in any danger of becoming overused, in the way that many | |
| people say that fantasy IF is? Why do you think so much IF belongs to | |
| the fantasy and science fiction genres? | |
| A: For a start, I think IF attracts a more technologically minded kind | |
| of author. You don't even think about writing stories that interact, | |
| that are very mechanical, unless you're in love with the machine. The | |
| tools we use to write with - even Inform and TADS - are still fairly | |
| primitive, and require a lot of technical ability to use. And because | |
| it's a very young, offbeat, cultish medium, you're likely to get | |
| creatively minded people - people who look at the world and see not | |
| what is, but what might be. The sort of people who like speculative | |
| fiction. So you're already selecting for a certain type of writer | |
| right there. | |
| Speculative fiction is also a lot easier for amateurs like me to write | |
| (not write _well_, just to write), and since most IF writers are | |
| amateurs not professionals, we pick the easy choice. SF and F worlds | |
| are easier because they're a lot more flexible than reality, so if you | |
| need the Golden Widget of Truth to be carryable by the half-gnome | |
| player, then it is. IF engines aren't forgiving; science-fiction and | |
| fantasy worlds are. | |
| Personally, I am a science fiction fan, and I write what I want to | |
| read. SF and fantasy (_good_ fantasy, the really weird stuff, not | |
| just a warmed over Tolkien clone) is like adrenalin for the brain. It | |
| stimulates you, makes you think in new directions. Politics and | |
| romance haven't changed much for centuries; science has. Now we're | |
| living in a generation of massive cultural change. We didn't have the | |
| World Wide Web last Thursday, what will we have Friday week? SF | |
| writes to that gap, which is why I think it's the most interesting | |
| form of fictional literature on the market today. | |
| But yes, it can tend to make for easy, cheap writing. (I don't think | |
| _Glowgrass_ is much of an exception; I cut a lot of corners I couldn't | |
| have in a "realistic" setting.) SF and fantasy do get overused and | |
| abused. I'd love to see more "reality" IF - good solid spy thrillers, | |
| murder mysteries, romances, period dramas. I liked _Border Zone_ and | |
| I wished the historical part of _Trinity_ had been a game on its own, | |
| without the fantasy segment. | |
| IF does need to break away from the "it's just spaceships and dragons" | |
| stereotype that it's evolved. I'm not sure if that's likely to | |
| happen, though, until we get tools that give a wider spectrum of | |
| writers, people who don't necessarily like computers, access to | |
| painless IF development. But until then, I'll just keep hoping that | |
| the science fiction and fantasy we produce will get more serious, with | |
| as much depth and character as "mainstream" fiction. Whatever that | |
| is. | |
| Q: "Glowgrass" isn't really an example of "puzzle-less" IF, but I | |
| noticed that you take care to make the puzzles simple, sometimes | |
| almost giving away the solution (I'm thinking about how to open the | |
| garage door, for example). What's your view on puzzles in IF? Are they | |
| a necessary evil? | |
| A: They're evil. No doubt about that. :) | |
| Seriously, I'm not a puzzle hater, but a puzzle has to be _impossible_ | |
| to not get or it's got no business being in IF at all. That's my | |
| view, and it's mainly because I have incredibly dark and icky memories | |
| of playing IF as a kid and literally screaming in frustration because | |
| I wanted to finish the _story_ and couldn't because some stupid | |
| _puzzle_ kept getting in the way. | |
| I like _good_ puzzles -- which means, ones I can get. But they're | |
| nasty creatures to control. They're like jokes, only much, much worse. | |
| In a comedy, say a Terry Pratchett _Discworld_, you can sling off | |
| thousands of one-liners and several dozen elaborately sprung and | |
| weighted fall-off-the-couch-and-die-laughing set pieces, and you can | |
| be reasonably certain that 90% of the readers won't get more than half | |
| of them. But that's okay, because they can still read all the way to | |
| the end of the book. | |
| But in IF, if a player misses _one_ puzzle, just one, she fails to | |
| read the author's mind or have gone to the same school or watched the | |
| same movie once, she's gone. Snap. End of game. No more story. Can | |
| you imagine watching _Seinfield_ and have the screen black out and go | |
| to static each time you didn't get a joke? | |
| Yeah, in IF you can cheat with a walkthru. That's a bit like printing | |
| explanations of all a show's jokes in the TV Guide so you can look | |
| them up, laugh in the right place and have the TV signal cut in again | |
| for another 30 seconds. | |
| There's a reason IF isn't popular, folks. | |
| When puzzles work, they're brilliant. I played _Myst_ all the way | |
| through without hints, and it was wonderful. One of my favourite | |
| Infocoms is _Suspended_, and that was one big puzzle. I like the | |
| thrill of challenge and the joy of solving something you thought | |
| impossible, but all to often, when you meet an impossible problem in | |
| IF, it stays impossible. (At least it does to me. Very, very rarely | |
| do I read a solution and go "Oh! I could have thought of that." | |
| Usually I go "Huh?" or "But, *nobody* could have known that." Maybe | |
| I'm bad at problem-solving, but heck, I play IF for entertainment, not | |
| work.) | |
| In _Glowgrass_ I was mainly using puzzles just as placeholders for | |
| putting interaction into the story. They weren't seriously meant to | |
| slow anyone down, or even necessarily make them think. In hindsight, | |
| I think I did make them a bit too obvious; I might fix that in release 2. | |
| Q: What do you think of the other contest entries this year? Any | |
| favourites? | |
| A: Yes. Outstandingly, _Babel_. It had everything I love most in a | |
| game. It created mood brilliantly, it seamlessly blended story and | |
| puzzles, and it had the most professional writing I've ever seen on | |
| gmd.de. | |
| _Savannah_ and _Edifice_ were pretty good, too. Savannah because it | |
| had an original setting and there was just so much detail in the | |
| environment. Edifice had puzzles that were a joy to solve - the | |
| language translation in Level 2 was possibly _the_ single best puzzle | |
| I've ever seen. I've always wondered what it must be like to learn a | |
| foreign language - now I know! | |
| _Thing for a Spring_ with its wilderness environment was another | |
| real-world setting that worked for me, though I flicked straight to | |
| the online help for most of the puzzles. I liked _A Good Breakfast_ | |
| very much - it was like the best of Infocom humour on a good day, and | |
| I was very unhappy that a bug made it unfinishable. And _Zombie!_ and | |
| _Zero Sum Game_ both looked very nice ideed, but I haven't got around | |
| to finishing them yet. | |
| Q: What do you think of the future of IF? | |
| A: Text-based IF? Bleak, but hopeful. | |
| Bleak because text is almost a vanishing dialect today - in two | |
| hundred years, we'll probably all be speaking with icons like in Greg | |
| Bear's _Eon_. And because we're working with tools that the rest of | |
| the computer world pretty much sees as Stone Age - "What? People are | |
| still writing text games? Wow, man, heavy retro trip." Despite our | |
| best efforts, there's really no way _So Far_ or _Jigsaw_ can compete | |
| with the likes of _Wing Commander 4_ or _Riven_ in the popular gaming | |
| market. | |
| But I'm hopeful because the rebirth of text IF is above all a return | |
| to the _hobbyist_ roots of computer gaming. It's an underground | |
| movement that gives power to the individual, instead of large | |
| centralised studios, so it's got the potential, if we network | |
| together, to make large advances in a short time. We are literally | |
| pushing the frontiers of storytelling (well, walking up to them and | |
| waving, anyway). Because we're small, there's all sorts of | |
| experimental stuff we can do, both in terms of usable AI and in | |
| defining the nature of story itself. Look at what id and Apogee did | |
| with the Wolfenstein texture mapping engine - did that come from a big | |
| company? Heck no. Do I think hobbyists can do something similar with | |
| AI? Heck yes. | |
| But hey, even if we don't accomplish anything of lasting significance, | |
| we can still have a really fun time reliving the '80s. | |
| As to the wider future of IF in general, the large-studio stuff: well, | |
| I think it can only grow. Probably not as fast as the movies did or | |
| as science fiction stories might make you think, but the seeds are | |
| there. | |
| I hesitate to say it, because it's already such a cliche, but it's the | |
| Web that's going to really make IF a public commodity, I think. The | |
| Web is going to replace television, we can all see that, and in about | |
| 2015 when it's finally seeped into the popular culture that our | |
| fundamental data grid, the thing that links our planet, is not | |
| broadcaster-listener-based and linear but open and _interactive_, | |
| stories are going to naturally be seen in interactive terms. It will | |
| probably take that long for the groundwork to get put in place; even | |
| the big flashy games out now are still dealing with a very small set | |
| of rudimentary actions and plots, and we're still having to reinvent | |
| stuff like graphic engines every time a product is released. | |
| IF's going to get networked. Ultimately we'll be looking at something | |
| like Star Trek's Holodeck, that's the high end. A kind of immersive | |
| chat room with computers running AI NPCs, simulating the world | |
| environment, and making dramatic interventions to keep a plot running. | |
| All rendered in sexy realtime VR with voice recognition and gesture | |
| analysis. | |
| In the near future, I'd expect to see all sorts of cute stuff like IF | |
| servers popping up on the Web. Bot servers that do nothing but run | |
| NPCs, world servers that act like MOOs for live players and bots to | |
| mingle, and maybe interesting things like dramatic rulebases that can | |
| analyse players' behaviours and write customised story scripts for | |
| their worlds or the bots who accompany them. But no matter how good | |
| the tech gets, human Game Masters, like IRC moderators or RPGs GMs are | |
| likely to take a controlling role. Interactive pay-per-play soap | |
| operas are a possibility... maybe with semi-famous guest stars | |
| dropping in every few episodes. | |
| And at the low end, you'll still have the good old pick-a-choice HTML | |
| page as your base unit of literacy. _Everything_'s going to be | |
| interactive eventually. | |
| Q: And, finally, speaking of the future: do you have any plans for | |
| writing more IF? | |
| You bet. | |
| I'm definitely entering the next Contest. And there's at least one | |
| reasonably full-length game I've been wanting to write for about seven | |
| years. Maybe some experimental pieces too. | |
| I expect I'll be writing IF of some kind for quite a while. :) | |
| NEW GAMES-------------------------------------------------------------------- | |
| It seems as if the relase of the TADS sources as freeware has | |
| re-kindled interest in this language. Ten of the competition entries | |
| were written in TADS, and since the end of the competition three new | |
| TADS games have been released. | |
| Firstly, there's Stephen Granade's "Losing your Grip". This is a | |
| full-lenght game in the same league as "So Far", "The Legend Lives" | |
| and "Jigsaw": story-oriented without sacrificing the puzzle aspect, | |
| literary but also enjoyable as a game, dealing with deep questions | |
| without being pretentious or obscure. | |
| We also have two new short games by Kevin "Whizzard" Wilson, the | |
| founder of SPAG: "The Sea of Night" and "The Lesson of the | |
| Tortoise". According to the author, the first game is an SF story | |
| involving a spaceship and a cargo of bananas, while the second one | |
| builds on elements of Chinese folklore. | |
| All three games are avaialable from the IF-archive, in the directory | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/. | |
| KEY TO SCORES AND REVIEWS---------------------------------------------------- | |
| Consider the following review header: | |
| NAME: Cutthroats | |
| AUTHOR: Infocom | |
| EMAIL: ??? | |
| DATE: September 1984 | |
| PARSER: Infocom Standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Infocom ports | |
| AVAILABILITY: LTOI 2 | |
| URL: Not available. | |
| When submitting reviews: Try to fill in as much of this info as you can. | |
| Also, scores are still desired along with the reviews, so send those along. | |
| The scores will be used in the ratings section. Authors may not rate or | |
| review their own games. | |
| More elaborate descriptions of the rating and scoring systems may be found | |
| in the FAQ and in issue #9 of SPAG, which should be available at: | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de:/if-archive/magazines/SPAG/ | |
| REVIEWS---------------------------------------------------------------------- | |
| From: "Laurel Halbany" <mythago SP@G twisty-little-maze.com> | |
| NAME: Babel | |
| AUTHOR: Ian Finley | |
| EMAIL: mordacai SP@G ix.netcom.com | |
| DATE: Competition '97 | |
| PARSER: TADS | |
| SUPPORTS: TADS ports | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (competition game) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/comp97/tads/babel.gam | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| Too many I-F games have the irritating habit of being firmly set in a | |
| single genre, with clich�d rather than inventive trappings (space | |
| games have their talking computers, fantasy games have their | |
| dragons). Babel combines science fiction and horror imaginatively, so | |
| that the separate elements of each genre support and enhance rather | |
| than fight each other. | |
| The game begins on an apparently abandoned and nonfunctional space | |
| station; you don't know who you are, or how you got there, you're | |
| freezing cold, and the lights are off. The mood of vaguely unsettling | |
| horror and the tension of the character's investigation are very well | |
| presented. The author has done an excellent job of making the | |
| descriptions of rooms different when they are lit and unlit; rather | |
| than "It is pitch black," a dark room is described in sinister, vague | |
| terms, turning from threatening to clinical when the lights come | |
| on. The layout of the space station is straightforward without being | |
| simplistic, and solving the first problem (getting the lights on) | |
| doesn't take much wandering. Most items have been described or dealt | |
| with, rather than allowed to fall under the heading of "I don't | |
| understand that." | |
| The character learns most of the plot through various set-pieces; you | |
| find blue glowing fixtures in different areas, and when they are | |
| touched, there is a flashback (not necessarily in chronological order) | |
| to something that happened on this station, when it was inhabited. | |
| These are well-written, and though there are plenty of them, at one | |
| point you can obtain an item that will automatically "catalog" them | |
| for you. The set-pieces cleverly manage to add the humanizing element | |
| of interaction with NPCs, without detracting from the gloomy emptiness | |
| of Babel station. | |
| The problem with these set-pieces is that the characters, and | |
| therefore the story, is a bit hackneyed. There is the Bright Young Man | |
| (clearly headed for trouble); the deeply religious researcher who | |
| fears human hubris; the older, father-figure head of the team with his | |
| own agenda; and the brillant, beautiful female scientist who | |
| unsurprisingly ends up having a romance with the Bright Young Man | |
| despite the team leader's severe disapproval. (Out of jealousy? | |
| Concern for unprofessionalism? A little too much paternal concern? We | |
| don't know.) This also tends to ruin the central mystery of the game; | |
| by the time you finally solve the puzzle that reveals in fact who the | |
| character is, you-the-player have probably long since figured it out; | |
| there's not much shock in the revelation. The memory of what happened | |
| to the team of scientists is similarly predictable. | |
| Most of the puzzles are not mind-wracking, but do take some | |
| thought. There are often clues given in how the station reacts to you, | |
| or in the set- pieces. Most involve finding an item and applying it, | |
| although this is not mechanical. There are a number of locked-door | |
| puzzles involving an ID-card slot. It's nice that this is easy to | |
| solve, but I found it unrealistic: there were only four scientists on | |
| Babel, all of whom had access to the entire station, so why did they | |
| need ID cards to open the doors? The final important puzzle of the | |
| game, involving synthesis of liquids and manipulating machinery, is | |
| forgiving of mistakes but tedious to do. It seems as though the author | |
| wanted a difficult final hurdle, but it is mechanical rather than | |
| exciting, and not particularly difficult. The last set-piece is, | |
| sadly, not as original as it might have been. | |
| Overall, I found Babel to be a well-crafted, atmospheric horror game | |
| that, while not a classic, is certainly enjoyable and absorbing. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Babel | |
| AUTHOR: Ian Finley | |
| E-MAIL: mordacai SP@G ix.netcom.com | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: TADS standards | |
| SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp//ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/tads/babel/babel.gam | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| PLOT: Outstanding (1. ATMOSPHERE: Very effective (1.7) | |
| WRITING: Consistently absorbing (1.8) GAMEPLAY: Fairly good (1.2) | |
| CHARACTERS: Quite good (1.5) PUZZLES: Few, nothing special (0.9) | |
| MISC: Outstanding storytelling, even if the plot's derivative (1.6) | |
| OVERALL: 8.1 | |
| In the realm of science fiction, very trodden ground indeed, Ian | |
| Finley's Babel does not seem profoundly original; you have an | |
| experiment in an isolated lab that goes wrong, an unscrupulous | |
| scientist, dramatic confrontations, even a countdown of sorts. But the | |
| whole is often greater than the sum of its parts, and there is more to | |
| Babel than might appear from a thumbnail sketch. The puzzles are few | |
| and not particularly remarkable, but for simple storytelling power, | |
| this one ranks among the best in the competition. | |
| That, unfortunately, means that it's difficult to review effectively | |
| without breaking the spell for future players, so this may be somewhat | |
| unrevealing. The initial premise is set out before the first room | |
| description: | |
| One by one, your senses speak to you. There is one absolute: | |
| cold. The hard surface you're lying on is cold, the thin gown | |
| thrown over your body is cold, the disinfectant-tinged air is | |
| cold, the darkness around you is cold. Even your mind is cold | |
| and empty. Where are you? Who are you? You feel the warm | |
| edge of a memory, but it fades as you approach. Slowly, your | |
| joints bulging with ache, you get to your feet and look | |
| around. | |
| Where you are and who you are become clear through a series of | |
| discoveries that begin as cryptic vignettes and only gradually begin | |
| to make sense; though the game exercises only limited control over the | |
| sequence of your discoveries, the control is sufficient to make your | |
| reconstruction of the storyline reasonably predictable. Moreover, the | |
| manner of those discoveries amplifies the uneasy feel: relevant facts | |
| come out first as offhand references and are only explained much | |
| later. A computer that you discover early on supplies some background | |
| information, but no more than that; you learn about the course of | |
| events that led to your awakening alone on the floor through other | |
| means. Helpful in that respect (and for keeping things straight) is a | |
| calendar that you find, and in which you note the sequence of events; | |
| even if it feels like a device to keep the player from being confused, | |
| it's a welcome one. | |
| One of the best parts of Babel's story is the believability of the | |
| characters it depicts: though you never interact with them over the | |
| course of the game, your discoveries about them make them as real as | |
| NPCs that are actually present. Mr. Finley's writing deserves the | |
| credit for that; the dialogue is good enough to supplement rather than | |
| drag down the story (not at all a given these days), and what you see | |
| of the way the characters interact both fills out the plot and gives | |
| them some life. Admittedly, the scenes you encounter are heavily | |
| steeped in science fiction conventions, and perhaps those who read | |
| more science fiction than I do will find the whole thing too old to be | |
| interesting. But for my part, I found a genuine interest in the | |
| characters, as opposed to nifty gadgetry or wondrous discovery, that | |
| made the story much more compelling than much of the science fiction | |
| I've read. If anything, I was hoping for more development, more plot | |
| to discover, though I recognize that Mr. Finley was limited by the | |
| two-hour format. The strength and complexity of the story line makes | |
| Babel feel more like fiction than puzzle-based IF. | |
| As noted, Babel's puzzles are secondary to the story, and what we do | |
| get is not especially memorable (though neither are they very | |
| hard). One puzzle involving a cabinet strains belief a bit, as does | |
| another involving security mechanisms that you defeat, and the | |
| beginning presents a bottleneck of sorts that requires both close | |
| reading and something of an intuitive leap -- but once a certain barrier | |
| is passed, most of the game will come easily to the experienced IF | |
| player. But that factor works well here: more difficult or | |
| time-consuming would slow down the plot and take away the realism of | |
| the premise. As it is, there is almost no need to save and restore: | |
| there is a time limit, but it is loose enough to afford plenty of room | |
| for wandering around and making mistakes, and all of the ways to die | |
| or make the game unwinnable can easily be foreseen. But there is a | |
| nice puzzle involving a locked door, and many of the puzzles draw on | |
| the development of the plot -- you need knowledge that you discover | |
| along the way, for example -- in a way that is all too rare even in good | |
| IF. | |
| Particularly notable about Babel is that it tells its story in a way | |
| that conventional fiction could not -- at least, not as well or as | |
| powerfully. Though a short story or novel could in theory be written | |
| in the second person, it couldn't put the reader in command of events, | |
| and leave the unveiling of the plot to the reader's discretion. A | |
| storyline in which discovering your own identity is central works well | |
| in a medium where your persona is rarely fixed; in conventional | |
| fiction, where using the second person is uncommon, the device just | |
| wouldn't work. In an odd way, the usual limits of IF work to the | |
| advantage of this game, as the player's expectation of a series of | |
| puzzles rather than an identity problem makes the resolution to the | |
| problem genuinely surprising; the twists in the plot are effective | |
| precisely because of the questions the player doesn't ask of the | |
| game. The strength of the writing also helps; to quote much of it | |
| would give the plot away, but room descriptions like the following | |
| convey the frigidity of the setting: | |
| Grey light drips in from an octagonal skylight in the ceiling of | |
| this room, making the room look as cold as it feels. To the | |
| north, east, and south, doorways lead into unlit halls. The metal | |
| door frame of the east hall glows faintly with an eerie blue | |
| light. | |
| The dominating element of this small cube is the color white. The | |
| walls are white, the stiff bed by the east wall is covered in | |
| white sheets, the counter sticking out of the wall in the corner | |
| looks as though it were carved from snow. Set into the counter is | |
| a pale, porcelain sink. Even the air smells as if it has been | |
| scoured bare. | |
| The atmosphere is effective throughout; the countdown messages, when | |
| they come, heighten the tension, and stray details -- shattered mirrors, | |
| dead mice -- work to the same effect. | |
| There are some gameplay problems that complicate matters now and | |
| again. "Search" is never useful, as far as I can tell, and "examine" | |
| does what might be expected of "search" in more than one case. One | |
| sequence involving a radiation chamber, though put together with | |
| admirable realism, feels rather tedious to work out -- and some related | |
| actions require rather exact wording. At one point, the game asked me | |
| if I wanted to open the east door when it meant the west door, and | |
| there are some events and feelings embedded in room descriptions that | |
| accordingly recur a bit too often. These are minor glitches, though; | |
| bugs are relatively few (and the author has promised that those that | |
| do exist will be cleaned up in future releases). | |
| There are similarities between Babel and C.E. Forman's Delusions -- in | |
| the premise and in some of the plot devices, notably. But Babel works | |
| on a much different level; the story is more central to the game here, | |
| and is hence better developed and more compelling -- and, naturally, the | |
| puzzles are far fewer and less involving. (For my part, I found that | |
| the plot of Babel made more sense than that of Delusions, but perhaps | |
| that's just me.) There is no reason why playing Delusions should | |
| spoil the experience of playing Babel (nor vice versa). I enjoyed | |
| Babel, in short -- I gave it a rating of 9 -- and I consider the | |
| storytelling equal to that of any recent work of IF. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: "Paul O'Brian" <obrian SP@G ucsu.Colorado.EDU> | |
| NAME: Babel | |
| AUTHOR: Ian Finley | |
| E-MAIL: mordacai SP@G ix.netcom.com | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: TADS advanced | |
| SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/babel/babel.gam | |
| VERSION: 1997 competition release | |
| Babel is not only one of the best competition games I've ever played, | |
| it's one of the best pieces of interactive fiction I've ever seen, | |
| period. | |
| The game starts from a well-worn IF trope: you awaken alone, with no | |
| memory of your identity. Then, Babel unfolds into a breathtaking, | |
| emotional story. The work of exposition and plot development is | |
| performed through the protagonist's enhanced powers of tellurgy, which | |
| the game defines as "the ability to experience past events by touching | |
| objects present when the event occurred." The clarity of these visions | |
| varies according to the emotional intensity of the event being | |
| witnessed. This device, reminiscent of that in Stephen King's The Dead | |
| Zone, is the central convention of the game, and it allows a degree of | |
| character development very rare in interactive fiction. Certainly | |
| other games (most notably Zork:Nemesis) have used this device in the | |
| past, but none have brought it about so convincingly and so | |
| effectively as does Babel. The tellurgic episodes gradually bring an | |
| awareness of the character's identity, and how he came to be in his | |
| amnesiac state, as well as tell a chilling story of scientific | |
| arrogance and attendant disasters. | |
| Another interesting aspect of Babel is the moral ambiguity of its main | |
| character. Typical IF heroes (or heroines) have few ethical shades: | |
| they are either unambiguously on the side of good, working to save the | |
| universe or some version thereof, or basically self- interested | |
| seekers of wealth or fame. The hero of Babel falls into neither of | |
| these convenient categories. Instead, he appears first as a victim, | |
| then eludes that simple assignation as well, becoming a character of | |
| depth and complexity very rarely realized in IF. The experience of | |
| playing such a character was a powerful one, especially as the story | |
| gradually revealed just how willing a participant he was in his own | |
| undoing. | |
| Finally, I think it's worth noting that two games in this year's IF | |
| competition (Unholy Grail and Babel) deal with a metallic research | |
| station where the player discovers the frightening results of | |
| unbridled scientific inquiry run amok. What is meaning of this | |
| thematic fascination in a community devoted to a form of gaming which | |
| has been bypassed in the marketplace by games which grasp to exploit | |
| the newest, flashiest technology? It's a speculation for another | |
| essay, but I feel safe enough asserting this: Babel is an outstanding | |
| treatment of the theme, the best I have ever seen in IF, and one of | |
| the best I've ever seen in any medium anywhere. | |
| Prose: Babel's prose was nothing short of outstanding. It unerringly | |
| conveyed the experience of being stranded in a deserted Arctic | |
| outpost, addressing all the senses and the emotions as well. Powerful | |
| turns of phrase abounded, and extreme experiences (such as being out | |
| in the Arctic winter wearing only a hospital gown) were very vividly | |
| rendered. The characterization and dialogue in the cut-scenes of the | |
| tellurgic visions were sharp and effective, outlining strongly defined | |
| and complex characters. Small touches like tiptoeing across the cold | |
| floor in bare feet, or the equation of the cold-hearted scientist's | |
| eyes with the Arctic ice (notice the pun), combined with broader | |
| strokes for an astonishingly realistic and well-written whole. | |
| Plot: The game's plot unfolds masterfully, revealed in dribs and drabs | |
| by the tellurgic episodes. The author provides a chronology for all | |
| these events with the (rather forced) device of giving the character a | |
| calendar on which he "instinctively" jots down the date of each | |
| occurrence. As the story develops, the tension becomes greater and | |
| greater: the unfolding mystery of the character's origin serves to | |
| heighten the power of the story's eventual climax. Some of the | |
| Biblical imagery is just a tiny bit heavy-handed, but the whole is | |
| strong enough to overpower any objection of didacticism or triteness. | |
| Puzzles: The puzzles almost effortlessly achieved the ideal of | |
| blending seamlessly into the narrative. There were no arbitrary | |
| puzzles, and the artfully gradual revelation of the plot was served | |
| elegantly by simple but logical obstacles. There were no puzzles that | |
| were particularly ingenious or unique, but that wasn't the point of | |
| this game. The puzzles were there to provide some control over the | |
| narrative flow, and in this they served their purpose just right. | |
| Technical: | |
| writing -- The prose mechanics were excellent. I only noticed a couple | |
| of proofing errors in this very word-heavy game. | |
| coding -- Coding was equally strong. I found a couple of very minor | |
| bugs, but there were many, many touches that made it clear that a | |
| great deal of thought, foresight, and effort went into the coding of | |
| this game. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: A Bear's Night Out | |
| AUTHOR: David Dyte | |
| E-MAIL: ddyte SP@G cricket.org | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/competition97/inform/bear/bear.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 2 | |
| PLOT: Not always consistent, but amusing (1.4) ATMOSPHERE: Not bad (1.4) | |
| WRITING: Very good (1.5) GAMEPLAY: Excellent (1.7) | |
| CHARACTERS: Few (1.2) PUZZLES: Reasonably clever (1.5) | |
| MISC: Central gimmick well done (1.7) | |
| OVERALL: 7.7 | |
| If 1996's Ralph was a game that managed to be consistently doggy in | |
| its outlook -- in that it effectively took on the perspective of a | |
| house mutt -- 1997's Bear's Night Out is quite consistently, well, | |
| beary; the player is put in the position of a teddy bear that | |
| mysteriously comes to life one night and pads merrily about its | |
| owner's house. (Actually, given how comfortable this particular bear | |
| seems to be with exploring on its own, perhaps this isn't the first | |
| time -- the game isn't clear on this point.) It's a genuinely charming | |
| premise that author David Dyte carries off with humor, and as with | |
| Ralph, that premise shapes both the plot and the puzzles in a way that | |
| makes Bear's Night Out feel fresh. | |
| Your goal, which you discover on the course of your explorations, is | |
| to prepare for the annual Teddy Bears' Picnic, slated to happen the | |
| next day, by finding out what you need to bring and assembling | |
| it. (The author sprinkles quotes in pop-up format throughout the game, | |
| but "If you go down in the woods today..." is not one of them, | |
| curiously.) Why you need to do all this yourself rather than leaving | |
| it to your owner is not wholly clear, but it hardly matters: the story | |
| holds together adequately in setting out a series of problems. The | |
| best of them hinge on the problems associated with inhabiting a teddy | |
| bear's body -- unlike Ralph, the identity of the central character is | |
| in several instances an obstacle to overcome. | |
| The writing is quite good, even though spare; most of the settings are | |
| relentlessly ordinary, and Mr. Dyte does not try to load them down | |
| with special characteristics when they are, in truth, generic rooms in | |
| a house. This is not to say he shirks his writing duty, of course, | |
| merely that the descriptions of rooms and events are not what makes | |
| the game compelling. That said, though, the "bear's eye" view of the | |
| house is fairly consistent and well done -- take this example, for | |
| instance, part of a room description: | |
| Along one wall stands a high bench, featuring a sink full of | |
| dirty dishes, next to which you can see a telephone and an | |
| answering machine, if you step back and crane your neck a | |
| little. | |
| The player is virtually never allowed to forget he is inhabiting a | |
| teddy bear's body, one of the best things about this game: Mr. Dyte | |
| evidently didn't simply have some puzzles that he threw together in a | |
| game and grafted a funny plot on, and he clearly took some time making | |
| the game environment and gameplay appropriate to the game. As a | |
| result, the cute and funny factors is considerable, which makes the | |
| game appealing in its own right even without good puzzles. When you | |
| climb down from something, for example, you get "You tumble down, but | |
| being a soft bear, that's ok." Better still, in response to JUMP: | |
| "Full marks for cute and furry, but none for achievement." Though not | |
| everything in the game really fits the mode -- how does this teddy | |
| bear manage to carry so many items -- the sacrifices are generally in | |
| the name of facilitating gameplay and as such are wise choices. (For | |
| example. a teddy bear's paws aren't probably up for much in the way of | |
| manipulation -- but Mr. Dyte fortunately didn't confine the player's | |
| actions to things like pushing or pulling. That would go beyond | |
| realism into annoyance.) | |
| The puzzles themselves are well constructed and not too hard, on the | |
| whole, and some of them even offer multiple solutions -- though one of | |
| them, in the bathroom, requires rather exact syntax (and some luck in | |
| stumbling on the puzzle in the first place, unless I missed | |
| something). There is a hint system included, Invisiclue-style, which | |
| provides help for any problem, so difficulty certainly isn't a | |
| problem, and most of the puzzles are logical. The one event that isn't | |
| particularly logical is funny enough to make it worthwhile (and is | |
| also a veiled reference to Sorcerer, better still). | |
| The only problem is that the first real puzzle to be solved requires | |
| some real exploration, so things can bog down a bit while you try to | |
| figure that out -- though, after that, things move along more quickly. | |
| This problem might be alleviated with perhaps a hint or two as to the | |
| location of a certain object required to solve the first puzzle -- as | |
| it is, you discover it, but not because you were looking for it as | |
| such. The other main problem is that there is a side plot that | |
| separates out from the main plot after a certain point -- and though | |
| it is fairly obvious that you need to solve the relevant puzzles, it | |
| isn't clear why until the very end of the game (and the reasons are | |
| rather thin, I think, as justification for having the side plot). I | |
| did enjoy the second plot, of course, quite a bit, but it might have | |
| helped to have the reasoning for pursuing the puzzles better | |
| incorporated into the story. | |
| One of the perks for the seasoned IF player is the wealth of IF | |
| references; this one rivals Sins Against Mimesis for sheer IF | |
| knowledge. The author claims 32 references to other games, and while | |
| I certainly didn't find that many, I can believe that they're in | |
| there. (One puzzle even involves finding a "z-chip" that allows you to | |
| play interactive fiction.) Excursions into Dungeon, Curses and | |
| Adventureland are among the game's highlights -- my favorite moment in | |
| the entire game was luring Holly into Adventureland -- and the IF-full | |
| environment and barrage of self-reference (the author is present, | |
| though asleep in bed the entire time) increase the enjoyability and | |
| replayability factors. Along with finding the IF references, there are | |
| many funny things to do, quite a few deriving from the limits of your | |
| character; the "fun stuff" section is ample, much larger than that of | |
| most games, and affords a wealth of alternatives. | |
| Bear's Night Out doesn't do much wrong, in short, and what it does do | |
| wrong is easily balanced by what it does right. With consistently | |
| funny writing, this is one of the best of this year's competition, | |
| earning a 9 from me: it's a good idea, well implemented. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: The Edifice | |
| AUTHOR: Lucian Smith | |
| E-MAIL: | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/competition97/inform/edifice/edifice.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| PLOT: Involving (1.5) ATMOSPHERE: Simple but well done (1.3) | |
| WRITING: Strong (1.4) GAMEPLAY: Mostly good (1.3) | |
| CHARACTERS: Few but strong (1.4) PUZZLES: One outstanding (1.6) | |
| MISC: Innovative and well-thought-out (1.7) | |
| OVERALL: 7.2 | |
| Lucian Smith's "The Edifice" is one of the simplest games in the | |
| competition -- head games involving puzzling out what's going on are | |
| few -- but it also tells one of the most effective stories. (Well, | |
| okay, some of the entries don't have much of a story at all to tell, | |
| but that's different.) Edifice is an example of IF where desultory | |
| puzzles don't matter: it's the story, and the concept driving it, that | |
| counts, and this is one of the best game ideas this year's competition | |
| produced. | |
| This is an allegory: you represent primitive man, moving through the | |
| various stages of evolution as represented by levels in a strange | |
| stone edifice that appears before you suddenly. The puzzles represent | |
| problems along the way of evolution, problems whose mastery defined | |
| certain levels of development -- they're mostly straightforward | |
| (though one is a bit confusing), but there is a real sense of | |
| accomplishment in solving them, somehow. Certain stages are by | |
| definition mind-numbingly tedious, which reflects the subject | |
| accurately -- these are problems that involve tedium -- but also raise | |
| the question of whether there might have been a better way to design | |
| those particular puzzles. (For a similar problem, see The Meteor, the | |
| Stone, and a Long Glass of Sherbet.) It should be added that the | |
| author isn't trying to convey every single aspect of every phase of | |
| evolution; rather, you represent an important breakthrough at each | |
| stage, and when you're done, you move on and reenter the scene much | |
| later, when Homo sapiens has incorporated your discovery and built on | |
| it. | |
| That raises the question that I, at least, found most intriguing about | |
| this: does this really have anything to do with evolution? It's kind | |
| of a silly approximation, after all, since it's apparent quite soon in | |
| each stage what the sought-for breakthrough is, and it's just a | |
| question of putting together the needed materials or figuring out the | |
| key steps. But it could be argued that Smith has designed this with | |
| the feeling of discovery in mind: particularly in the last two scenes, | |
| you have the sense of a specific need that drives the breakthrough, | |
| not a sudden resolve out of the blue to carve hand tools or | |
| domesticate animals. The sense of logical connection is less strong in | |
| the first one; there is very little sense that you tumble to your | |
| discovery because of circumstances, rather than having a | |
| twentieth-century computer user push him around to accomplish a | |
| certain goal. Perhaps that's inevitable, given the problem at hand, | |
| but I would have liked to have seen at least some sort of conjecture | |
| as to what sort of circumstances lit up that particular connection for | |
| Stone Age man. The game does capture the brutality of this particular | |
| discovery well, in that you have no particular reason other than your | |
| own satisfaction for doing what you do, and perhaps the apparent | |
| purposeless of your solution to the problem reflects the arbitrary | |
| kill-or-be- killed nature of the environment -- but it still felt a | |
| little unsatisfying. | |
| On the whole, I found the second stage most plausible and interesting; | |
| it's the only one where you deal with other characters, and though | |
| your interactions are limited, the characters have a certain charm. (I | |
| found a certain whimsical appeal in their names -- Wife, Son, | |
| Grandmother.) The central puzzle took real thought and felt genuinely | |
| rewarding to solve -- and, even as a microcosm, it felt more than any | |
| of the problems like what really might have happened. The first stage, | |
| as suggested, is a little too illogical to really feel like an account | |
| of the breakthrough, and the third just doesn't quite make enough | |
| sense; you have the sense of the original motivation for your | |
| character, but not what inspired him to try this particular | |
| approach. (And the realism/tedium element that worked reasonably well | |
| in the first part is simply annoying here, because it doesn't feel | |
| particularly logical.) Still, all three are worthy concepts, mostly | |
| well thought out. | |
| The writing is nothing special, though arguably that makes sense here | |
| -- too much attention to the scenery or aesthetics would distract from | |
| the goals at hand; you're not in the situations in question to check | |
| out the sights. Certainly, the writing is adequate for the purposes; | |
| it sets the scene and makes clear what you need to do. My main problem | |
| with the mechanics of Edifice is that it's possible in the first part | |
| to screw up and require a fairly laborious process of restarting (it's | |
| probably quicker just to RESTART), which, quite apart from its | |
| problems for the IF player, doesn't really make much sense in the plot | |
| of the game. (The nature of the problems was such that the solutions | |
| developed over time, after all; it took many failures to make the | |
| discoveries required in each scene.) In several key respects, the | |
| first scene requires resources that can be easily wasted -- and though | |
| the urgency of the situation lends a certain logic to the picture (if | |
| you don't solve the problem, you'll die), it still doesn't really make | |
| much sense as an evolutionary tableau. | |
| Another clunky element is the hint system, which rests in a mural in | |
| the edifice -- clever enough, but the problem is that the mural only | |
| gives you the hint once you've gone out and actually done each step | |
| and come back and checked the mural, which I found time-consuming and | |
| annoying. You can't, in short, play to where you get stuck, then come | |
| back and check the mural, because the mural won't keep up with | |
| you. Among problems to be fixed for future versions, this one may | |
| be #1. | |
| The end is a bit confusing. There is a cataclysmic event at the end | |
| that doesn't seem to fit into the evolutionary frame, as far as I can | |
| tell, and my guess was that it's the author's device for ending the | |
| story. If so, it's intriguing -- but the final sentence, even when | |
| you've finished the game "right" (in accordance with the walkthrough, | |
| anyway), is a bit of a puzzler. I couldn't decide whether it was a | |
| comment on the nature of evolution or simply a bug; if it was supposed | |
| to be the former, it could perhaps have been more skillfully done. (At | |
| least, it might have a sentence somehow distinguishing it from less | |
| satisfactory endings.) And while I enjoyed the ending -- it had plenty | |
| of drama -- it did weaken the allegory a bit; certainly, the | |
| evolutionary process didn't end where it does in this game, but the | |
| conclusion of the game suggests some sort of ending. | |
| Quibbles aside, though, The Edifice is one of the most intriguing | |
| games in the competition, in that it tries something completely new -- | |
| a first-person account of the highlights of a scientific process. In a | |
| sense, your actions are vital to the continuation of that process -- | |
| if you choose not to go on, progress stops with you -- and one way to | |
| see your role in the game is that of a guiding force at crucial | |
| moments in history, an intervention to ensure that the development of | |
| man stays on track. That, at least, would explain some of the knottier | |
| problems involving questionable motivations or the difficulty of | |
| anticipating a particular result without the player's advance | |
| knowledge. Part of the charm of Edifice is that the story it tells is | |
| sufficiently ambiguous that it can justify a variety of perspectives, | |
| including those who don't care for evolution as a self-perpetuating | |
| force at all. (The game, whether deliberately or not, provides some | |
| grist for the mill of the argument that mere chance could not been | |
| sufficient to turn ape into man.) | |
| Though elements of the gameplay are lacking somewhat, anything that | |
| Edifice lacks in playability is easily made up in sheer concept; the | |
| idea and the charm of its implementation earn this one an 8 on the | |
| competition scale. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: "Paul O'Brian" <obrian SP@G ucsu.Colorado.EDU> | |
| NAME: The Edifice | |
| AUTHOR: Lucian Smith | |
| E-MAIL: lpsmith SP@G rice.edu | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard, significantly extended | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/edifice/edifice.z5 | |
| VERSION: 1997 competition Release 1 | |
| You're an ape, spending your days hunting for Food and fleeing from | |
| Enemies. You have these little thumbs, too, that set you apart from | |
| the Others. Suddenly one day, a huge black Edifice appears before you, | |
| arousing your wonder and suspicion. I can almost hear "Also Sprach | |
| Zarathustra" in the background: Daaaaaaaa, Daaaaaaaaa, | |
| Daaaaaaaaaa..... Da-Dummmmmmm! However, from this highly derivative | |
| beginning, the Edifice ventures quickly into much more original | |
| territory. It seems that once you enter the monolith, you find | |
| yourself able to enter various stages of human development, from the | |
| discovery of fire to protecting your village against plundering | |
| marauders. The idea works very nicely, putting the player into | |
| puzzle-solving situations which blend very naturally into the game's | |
| environment and using the edifice itself as a sort of frame around the | |
| smaller narratives as well as a hinting device. | |
| One section of the game in particular I found really remarkable. On | |
| the second level of the edifice, you find yourself as a very early | |
| human, living in a family unit in the woods. Your son has a fever, and | |
| to cure him you must find the Feverleaf, which can be made into a | |
| healing tea. However, no Feverleaf seems to be available anywhere, | |
| until you stumble across a Stranger. Unsurprisingly, however, the | |
| Stranger does not speak your language, and so you are faced with a | |
| problem of communication. The game does an incredible job with | |
| simulating this situation. I was astonished at the level of realism | |
| which this character was able to achieve, and at the care that must | |
| clearly have gone into fashioning this interaction. I've rarely seen | |
| such a thorough and effective establishment of the illusion of | |
| interactivity. The Stranger did not of course respond to English words | |
| in understandable ways. However, you could point to objects, or speak | |
| words in the Stranger's language, and gradually the two of you could | |
| arrive at an understanding. It was an amazing feeling to be | |
| experiencing this kind of exchange in IF... I really felt like I *was* | |
| learning the Stranger's language. It will always remain one of the | |
| most memorable moments of this 1997 competition for me. | |
| I spent a lot of time on this one encounter, but I spent more time on | |
| the first level of the edifice, where you learn basic skills like how | |
| to hunt and build a fire. All of the puzzles in this section were | |
| logical, and the implementation was characteristically thorough and | |
| rich. However, this level is also where I ran into the game's one | |
| major flaw: its scoring system. Upon typing "score", you are told | |
| something along the lines of "You have visited two levels of the | |
| Edifice and solved none of them. You are amazingly discontent." | |
| However, sometimes "amazingly discontent" changes to "very content." | |
| for reasons that aren't at all clear. Moreover, I did everything that | |
| the hints indicate on that level, but the game still insisted I had | |
| not solved it. I worked on this until I got so frustrated with it that | |
| I just went up to the next level. I'm not sure whether these | |
| irregularities in the scoring system were intentional or not, but I | |
| found that they were the only significant detractions from an | |
| otherwise excellent game. | |
| Prose: The author did a superb job with the prose. Objects and rooms | |
| were described carefully and concisely, and in fact their descriptions | |
| often changed to reflect the character's expanding knowledge. In the | |
| beginning, words are simple and their meanings often archetypal: Rock, | |
| Enemies, Others, etc. As the game progresses and the character | |
| continues to evolve, the diction becomes more complex and the meanings | |
| more specific. This is the type of prose effect that a graphical game | |
| could never achieve, since it arises from the nature of the prose | |
| itself. That the game can achieve this effect shows that it is very | |
| well written indeed. | |
| Plot: The game's plot is a clever device to put the player into | |
| various moments in the history of human development. Its central | |
| device is rather clearly lifted from 2001:A Space Odyssey, but other | |
| than that it's an excellent frame story around fascinating vignettes. | |
| Puzzles: I think the language puzzle was the best one I've seen in | |
| interactive fiction this year. Certainly it was the best in the | |
| competition -- it advanced the narrative, developed the character, | |
| achieved a new kind of IF character interaction, and packed a powerful | |
| Sense of Wonder. The other puzzles I encountered were also very good, | |
| arising quite intuitively out of the game's situation and objects. My | |
| only frustration was with the elements of the game which suggested I | |
| had more to solve but never seemed to indicate what those things were. | |
| Technical: | |
| writing -- The Edifice's prose was quite error-free. | |
| coding -- Aside from the problems with the scoring system, the coding | |
| was outstanding. Synonyms abounded, and almost all logical or | |
| intuitively available actions were accounted for. I have no doubt that | |
| the problems with the scoring system arose from the complexity of the | |
| game, and that they will be resolved in the next release. When that | |
| happens, Edifice will have eradicated its one significant flaw. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: "Paul O'Brian" <obrian SP@G ucsu.Colorado.EDU> | |
| NAME: The Frenetic Five vs. Sturm Und Drang | |
| AUTHOR: Neil deMause | |
| E-MAIL: neild SP@G echonyc.com | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: TADS standard | |
| SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/tads/frenfive/frenfive.gam | |
| VERSION: Release 2 (1997 competition release) | |
| Here's my confession: I love superheroes. Ever since my first Marvel | |
| comic at age six, I've always been a fan. Even now, well into my | |
| twenties and possessing a Master's degree in English Lit, I still make | |
| sure I get my monthly superhero fix. Yes, I know that violent revenge | |
| power-fantasies do not great works of literature make. Yes, I love | |
| comics and I know that the comics market is overcrowded, to the | |
| exclusion of other quality works, with bulging musclemen in tight | |
| spandex. Yes, I know that the constant deaths and resurrections of the | |
| superhero set strain plausibility to the breaking point. (Though | |
| really, who cares about plausibility? We're talking superheroes, | |
| here!) And yes, I'm disturbed by the almost grotesquely idealized | |
| bodies (especially women's bodies) relentlessly depicted in superhero | |
| comics. But what can I say? No matter how guilty it gets, it's still a | |
| pleasure. | |
| Consequently, I was anxious to start playing The Frenetic Five, and | |
| gave a small cheer when Comp97's magic shuffler put it towards the | |
| front of the line. I've always thought that the whole superhero genre | |
| would make a great one for IF -- if it's a great power fantasy to | |
| watch some comicbook character shoot fire out of his hands, how much | |
| greater to actually play the character that does it! I quickly learned | |
| that FF is in fact a superhero spoof (seems that very few people who | |
| think of themselves as sophisticated can enter the superhero genre | |
| without wearing the bulletproof bracelets of satire and ridicule), and | |
| a very funny one too, in the tradition of Superguy. You play Improv, | |
| whose power is the ingenious use of household objects, and other | |
| members of your team include a boy who can see tomorrow's headlines, | |
| and a woman who can find lost objects by clapping her hands (named, of | |
| course, The Clapper). The prose maintains a consistently high quality, | |
| from the characters' dialogue with one another to the snappy responses | |
| provided for some unlikely actions (">GET HOUSE" brings "You can count | |
| the number of superheroes you know who can lift an entire house on one | |
| finger: Forklift Man. (Come to think of it, Forklift Man could lift an | |
| entire house with one finger.)") It's hilarious. | |
| Sadly, there are some problems as well. First of all, I was disappointed | |
| that my supposed super-power was not implemented, as it would have been | |
| one of the most natural (and coolest) hint systems ever devised. Anytime I | |
| needed help with a puzzle, I could have just drawn on my "super Improv | |
| power" to help me make the intuitive connections between those ordinary | |
| household objects. Instead, the game left me to hope that I (as a player) | |
| developed those MacGyver talents on my own. Not likely, I'm afraid. In | |
| addition, the game does not meet the challenge of allowing me to use even | |
| this setup, because it does not allow alternate solutions to puzzles by | |
| using objects in unconventional ways. Very few alternate solutions were | |
| implemented, and few are even anticipated with a snarky response. For | |
| example, when tied up, I tried many unconventional ways to escape my bonds | |
| (cut them with my shard of glass, put eyeglasses into sunlight to focus | |
| the light into enough heat to burn the ropes, blow on the eyeglasses to | |
| put them in the right place, bite the ropes, wrap duct tape on my fingers | |
| to get more than one object at a time, etc.) Each attempt was met with one | |
| of two (equally lame) responses: either very clumsy non-recognition of the | |
| verb ("You can't see any bite here.") or "That's not really possible in | |
| your current state." The game doesn't really account for all the clever | |
| things that could be done with the inventory objects provided, just the | |
| *one* clever thing that will solve each puzzle. | |
| Finally, there are a number of just plain bugs in the game, which | |
| always decreases the fun factor. The Frenetic Five has an excellent | |
| premise and, on the level of prose, an excellent execution. However, | |
| interface design and implementation are too important to be treated | |
| the way this game treats them, and it suffers for it. I'm still | |
| waiting for the game that does superheroes just right. | |
| Prose: As mentioned above, the prose is excellent throughout the | |
| game. The dialogue and characterization for each member of the team is | |
| sharp and funny, and room descriptions (which adapted somewhat to the | |
| character's mental state) are both concise and vivid. Even some of the | |
| most everyday IF responses are considerably enlivened by the superhero | |
| treatment -- for example, saying "Down" in a locale where that | |
| direction is not available evokes the response "Sadly, you're not | |
| equipped with the ability to tunnel through solid ground." | |
| Plot: The plot is basically pretty middle-of-the-road superhero | |
| cliche. Since this is a spoof, of course, cliches are a good thing, | |
| and many of the touches (like having to take the bus to the | |
| supervillains' hideout) are quite funny. The landscape, the premise | |
| (SuperTemps, whose logo is a muscled forearm holding a timesheet), and | |
| the spoofing of venerable superhero tropes (a mission interrupts | |
| relaxation, the villains explain their nefarious scheme to the bound | |
| heroes, etc.) are all very cleverly done. There were some coincidences | |
| which strained even the generous boundaries of satire, but I'll | |
| discuss those below. | |
| Puzzles: In fact, I'll just discuss them right here. The puzzles are a | |
| weaker part of this game. I found basically two types of puzzles in | |
| the game. One group is the puzzle based on extremely contrived | |
| circumstances -- for example, the door to the villains' hideout uses a | |
| "guess-the-big-word" lock, and what do you know, I happen to have | |
| someone on my team whose superpower is guessing big words! Lucky me! | |
| The other type of puzzle is supposed to have drawn on my character's | |
| superpower, the ingenious use of household objects. However, since | |
| this power wasn't implemented (as a hint system) within the game, I | |
| was left to think of these ingenious uses by myself, the problems of | |
| which have already been discussed above. | |
| Technical: | |
| writing -- I found no errors in grammar or spelling in this game. | |
| coding -- I think the main failure of the coding was the one I've | |
| already discussed: the lack of depth in coding alternative uses for | |
| inventory items. When a game's main character is someone whose primary | |
| trait is the ingenious use of objects, it is incumbent on that game to | |
| provide specific code for as many of those ingenious uses as possible. | |
| Frenetic Five falls well short in this regard. The game also had a few | |
| regular bugs, which I assume will be fixed in the post-competition | |
| version. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Friday Afternoon | |
| AUTHOR: Mischa Schweitzer | |
| E-MAIL: M.A.M.Schweitzer SP@G inter.nl.net | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILIITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/competition97/inform/friday/friday.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| PLOT: Simple (1.2) ATMOSPHERE: Office, but well-done (1.3) | |
| WRITING: Quite good (1.4) GAMEPLAY: Mostly good (1.2) | |
| CHARACTERS: Quite funny (1.4) PUZZLES: Nothing special (1.2) | |
| MISC: Solid, but some unfortunate elements (1.2) | |
| OVERALL: 6.3 | |
| Among all the wander-around-an-ordinary-place-doing-ordinary-things | |
| entries in the 1997 competition, perhaps the most enjoyable is Friday | |
| Afternoon, a short tour of the author's office. Though the puzzles | |
| aren't really anything special, they have few obvious flaws, and most | |
| impart an air of whimsy that makes this feel reasonably fresh. | |
| Perhaps the most notable thing in Friday Afternoon is a development | |
| right at the beginning of the game -- your glasses break, and you have | |
| to find a means of fixing them despite your limited vision. The | |
| solution itself is not particularly hard or innovative, true, but | |
| Mr. Schweitzer shows admirable thoroughness in concealing the office | |
| behind a blur until the problem is solved. The problem is vaguely | |
| reminiscent of one from Wishbringer, though that was an absolute bar | |
| on vision rather than a reduction -- but it did draw me into the game | |
| effectively enough, much more than the average conventional-task game | |
| tends to. My only problem with that part of the game, really, was that | |
| the solution came too easily; I wanted to have to rely on other | |
| senses, follow a complicated pattern, something, but the payoff was a | |
| bit mundane. | |
| After that, Friday Afternoon becomes fairly conventional, though | |
| enlivened by a good deal of wit; one of your co-workers has responses | |
| that echo those of the hacker in Lurking Horror, for one thing, and | |
| the solution to the problem of looking up a phone number is | |
| entertainingly zany. (At least, zany in a bored-and- | |
| trapped-in-an-office way.) The only puzzle that really breaks IF rules | |
| is one involving repeated actions without the first few failures being | |
| clued -- i.e., the player might give up after a try or two, since the | |
| responses don't indicate that you're getting any closer. With some | |
| tinkering on that -- feedback that changes, some reason to believe | |
| that pursuing that course will lead you to the goal -- the puzzles | |
| would be fine. | |
| A secondary but just as significant problem in Friday Afternoon | |
| involves a certain calendar and what it assumes about you, the player | |
| -- namely, that you're a straight male who enjoys having pictures of | |
| women in tight clothes in your office. While this certainly doesn't do | |
| anything for the game, in my eyes, the sexism involved isn't so | |
| painfully blatant that it's offensive; I found it a bit annoying, I | |
| suppose. (When I played this one, I had already encountered "Leaves" | |
| and its much more juvenile example of the same problem.) I don't think | |
| that the existence of the calendar in the game is itself wrong, but | |
| there are a few lines that could be better put -- namely, in a | |
| description, you're told that it's from August 1997, "but that isn't | |
| what you're looking at, is it?" And elsewhere, when you find a note | |
| indicating that the company's female employees are offended, you smile | |
| and note that the management won't see the calendar in its current | |
| location. No, not outrageous, but still a little obnoxious on both | |
| counts. Imputing thoughts or feelings to a player can be very | |
| effective when well done, but these aren't thoughts or feelings that | |
| are really worth imputing, given the assumptions involved. My feeling | |
| is that the calendar should still serve its purpose in the game -- but | |
| that the suggestion that it, er, does whatever it does for you should | |
| be removed. (And, I must say, the answer to "read calendar" is quite | |
| amusing.) | |
| Some have objected on similar grounds to the central premise of the | |
| game -- you need to get out of your office bi 6:00 lest you miss your | |
| date with Tanya, and your date with Tanya is particularly important | |
| because you want to prove to yourself and to the world that you're not | |
| a nerd. Not a particularly noble reason for going on a date with her, | |
| true, but the game doesn't say that it's the sole reason or that you | |
| have no actual feelings for Tanya, merely that you feel like a nerd | |
| and are tired of that feeling. My feeling was that this is simple | |
| tell-it-like-it-is; for many people, going on a date -- either the | |
| first one ever or the first one in a long time -- serves as ego | |
| reinforcement, a sign that you're attractive, interesting, etc. It | |
| isn't particularly fair to the other party involved if that's the only | |
| reason, but the interests of comedy here; it's not as funny, somehow, | |
| if you're anxious about missing your date because you're desperately | |
| in love, and this is supposed to be comic, not tragic. | |
| All that said, there are plenty of things to enjoy here, notably an | |
| "Easter Egg Hunt" in the hint menu that gives the player interesting | |
| things to try -- with a prize in the form of the original release of | |
| the game. I didn't find many of the Easter Eggs involved -- though I | |
| wouldn't mind getting a push, particularly for "re-creating a scene | |
| from The Graduate". There is plenty of deadpan humor in the writing, | |
| for example when you try to move a stack of boxes and get this: "You'd | |
| rather not do anything with it: you might hurt yourself if it all fell | |
| on top of you, and you don't want to go on a date with Tanya with | |
| band-aids all over your face." Or a reference to a desk as "taking up | |
| space," to which the author adds "(Much like Marc's job description, | |
| from all you've seen him do." The view of your co-workers is | |
| consistently amusing, even if they're a bit stereotyped; the sugarcube | |
| is a very funny take on office boredom. | |
| Though there isn't a lot about Friday Afternoon that will stay with | |
| the player, the author should get credit for not doing much | |
| wrong. Using the phone, admittedly, requires fairly specific syntax, | |
| and the scoring system -- where you get ten points for significant | |
| tasks, but one routine action gets one point -- is a bit odd. But the | |
| game is entirely free of grammar problems (the author is Dutch, though | |
| it's not clear what his familiarity with English is). There's a time | |
| limit, though it's sufficiently loose that you really have to be lost | |
| to run afoul of it -- but it does provide some measure of tension, the | |
| puzzles work the way they're supposed to, and the whole thing's done | |
| with a measure of humor. I gave this one an 8 on the competition | |
| scale. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Glowgrass | |
| AUTHOR: Nate Cull | |
| E-MAIL: culln SP@G xtra.co.nz | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: TADS standard | |
| SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/tads/glow/glow.gam | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| PLOT: Intriguing but incomplete (1.4) ATMOSPHERE: Not bad (1.4) | |
| WRITING: Mostly good (1.4) GAMEPLAY: Uneven (1.2) | |
| CHARACTERS: One, sort of intriguing (1.3) PUZZLES: Fairly good (1.4) | |
| MISC: Interesting idea, not fully developed (1.3) | |
| OVERALL: 6.7 | |
| Post-apocalyptic IF? There hasn't been any, in my memory -- A Mind | |
| Forever Voyaging is the only thing that comes close -- but there's no | |
| reason why there couldn't be, and Nate Cull's Glowgrass, small but | |
| well-conceived, is certainly an interesting attempt. Though the game | |
| itself has some flaws, the story is intriguing enough to make it | |
| enjoyable. | |
| You, it seems, are an alien researcher whose ship has crashed on an | |
| Earth now empty of humans -- 'twasn't nuclear war, though, 'twas a | |
| Green Plague (not much development on the specifics there) that wiped | |
| everyone out. As an expert on Homo sapiens (or, to you, "the | |
| Ancients"), stranded on the planet you're supposed to understand, your | |
| mission is to apply your knowledge to get yourself out of your plight | |
| one way or another, though exactly how isn't clear at the | |
| outset. (Nor, arguably, is it at the end, though you have a better | |
| idea.) You explore a small suburban home in an anthropologist's | |
| mindset -- in the bathroom: "From your knowledge of Ancient social | |
| mores, this was likely to have been a personal cleansing area." The | |
| effect is occasionally like that of a short story I once read called | |
| something like "Daily Rituals of the Nacirema" -- I don't remember the | |
| author -- which similarly describes common daily suburban life as an | |
| anthropologist might. But the intent there was to parody, and | |
| Glowgrass is more science fiction than sociology -- and, moreover, the | |
| Earth you're witnessing is several technological notches up on us | |
| currently, so most things are only indirectly familiar. It's something | |
| of a strange way to go about it, but the story does, for the most | |
| part, hold up, more because it's well written than because of striking | |
| originality. | |
| The main problem with the plot, though, is that there's just not | |
| enough there. You get snippets about yourself, but not enough to | |
| really figure out who you are, what you were doing coming to Earth in | |
| the first place, what you really think of "the Ancients" or of the | |
| things you find. Nor, as noted, is the fate of the Earth made clear -- | |
| you find a printout that hints at a plague, but why did it happen? | |
| What sort of plague was it, how was it spread, how did it start, did | |
| anyone survive or get off the planet? It might be unfair to expect all | |
| this from a competition entry, but a story as complex as this one | |
| should get at least some development, and there really isn't much to | |
| go on here. There are offhand references at the end that seem entirely | |
| cryptic -- which gives the impression that the author either has a | |
| sequel planned or meant to develop the plot more in this one and never | |
| got around to it. If there is more to come, I look forward to it -- | |
| but this snippet is so truncated that it's a bit frustrating. | |
| The gameplay is mostly adequate, though the required syntax is often | |
| rather specific, and steps for piecing together one mechanical puzzle | |
| aren't entirely logical (you have to be holding certain objects that | |
| you hook together but not others). At one point, a certain NPC says to | |
| you "I didn't think of that!", even if you've already mentioned it to | |
| her. And there is a vehicle that is a location unto itself, so "get | |
| out of" it doesn't work, and objects that appear to be in plain sight | |
| require "examine" to find. More irritatingly, crashes are frequent -- | |
| and I'm running the latest DOS TADS runtime, so I don't think it's the | |
| interpreter. In a small game, of course, it's not a huge issue -- but | |
| one hopes that a future release will clean things up. | |
| Glowgrass is not particularly difficult -- there are only three | |
| puzzles, really, though some searching of scenery is necessary to | |
| solve those puzzles, and they're all fairly straightforward mechanical | |
| assemble-and-apply-the-objects puzzles. (Though there is one moment | |
| that requires simply waiting around for four or five turns, not | |
| initially obvious to me.) But the writing is good enough to keep you | |
| involved; you have the sense of inhabiting the mind of a character who | |
| is genuinely intrigued and surprised by what he finds. At times, the | |
| writing takes on the overwritten character of mediocre science | |
| fiction, and you get this: | |
| A gasp wells in your throat, as vividly you relive how it | |
| must have been; to suffer such agony, so young. For the | |
| first time you regret the empathic talent which led you to | |
| xenohistory. A moment later, the mood passes, leaving you | |
| still somehow chilled. | |
| For one thing, tears well in eyes; gasps don't generally well in | |
| throats. For another, you're not reliving anything, you're trying to | |
| imagine, and your capacity to do that is fairly limited considering | |
| who you are. More importantly, imputing emotions is difficult to do | |
| well -- see this year's Sunset Over Savannah for an exceptionally good | |
| attempt -- and in a scene like this, where the player can infer | |
| perfectly well what he or she is supposed to be feeling (your | |
| "empathic talent" is a little weird; why it would lead you to | |
| researching Earth is too hard to infer), there's no need to inform the | |
| player that he or she feels sad or empathetic or anything | |
| else. Similarly, you're told at another point that a room "still | |
| retains the awe and innocence of the Ancient age," which feels like | |
| overkill, unless the author wants to tell us exactly why it seems that | |
| way. But there are also good moments that recall, well, good science | |
| fiction, such as the following from the intro: | |
| A minute later, you get to your feet, pain gnawing your body. | |
| Scratch one dropship; nobody could have survived that crash. | |
| Scratch your equipment. Now it's just you, your wits - and | |
| the Ancients. Hope you're as good a xenohistorian as you | |
| claimed at the Institute. Because unless you find some kind | |
| of way out of here, it could be months before a recovery team | |
| locates you. | |
| Not profound, but concise and even witty in a rueful sort of | |
| way. There are several of the shakier moments, in terms of writing, in | |
| Glowgrass, but the game is short enough that it's not a major problem; | |
| if this were followed up or expanded into a full-length game, the | |
| imputing-emotions bit might get wearisome. At any rate, Mr. Cull keeps | |
| us involved throughout, and even manages to pass off one | |
| quasi-metaphysical moment (in that it's somewhere between spiritual | |
| and technological) with a minimum of conscious suspension of | |
| disbelief. (At least, that's how it felt to me.) Though that moment | |
| doesn't really feel as transcendent as it should, it's convincing and | |
| gives the story a jolt. | |
| Glowgrass, in short, is a competent and reasonably interesting little | |
| entry, though it feels more like a teaser than a game in its current | |
| state. I hope the cryptic references will be elucidated in a later | |
| game; for now, I give this one a 7 on the competition scale. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Lost Spellmaker | |
| AUTHOR: Neil Brown | |
| E-MAIL: neil SP@G highmount.demon.co.uk | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if- | |
| archive/games/competition97/inform/lost/lost.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 2 | |
| PLOT: Reasonably amusing (1.2) ATMOSPHERE: Not much (0.9) | |
| WRITING: Mostly strong (1.3) GAMEPLAY: Weak in spots (0.8) | |
| CHARACTERS: One very funny one (1.2) PUZZLES: Not great (0.8) | |
| MISC: Some good ideas, didn't do enough with them (1.2) | |
| OVERALL: 5.4 | |
| Uneven but reasonably enjoyable nonetheless, Neil Brown's Lost | |
| Spellmaker pushes the boundaries of the genre somewhat. The setting is | |
| ostensibly fantasy -- your mission is to rescue a wizard of sorts, | |
| after all -- but Spellmaker is more comedy than fantasy; the game | |
| spends more time subverting or mocking fantasy conventions than | |
| abiding by them -- and to the extent that it succeeds, it does so | |
| mostly because of the comedic factor. | |
| You are a dwarf (an element almost entirely neglected by the story; it | |
| isn't clear whether you're in a land of dwarves or are unique in that | |
| respect) assigned by the Secret Service to hunt down a Magic Weaver | |
| who has disappeared. (Some hint of the tone of the game comes in the | |
| prologue, when you're instructed to retrieve the missing magician "so | |
| that he may entertain us further with his joyful sparkly spells.") You | |
| have no hint of his whereabouts until you stumble across him; the | |
| plot, typically, requires that you go out and solve puzzles, not | |
| actually track the guy down. Still, there is more than enough whimsy | |
| to keep the player entertained; among the better elements is a | |
| sarcastic talking cow and a reverend who speaks entirely in | |
| malapropisms. ("I never did heard such inscruciating nonsenseness in | |
| my whole lovely liveliness!") There is also some unintentional humor | |
| -- one character's ability to parse input is limited enough to produce | |
| this exchange: | |
| >mrs wisher, hello | |
| "Oh I'm sorry, dear," apologises Mrs Wisher. "I can't do | |
| that. The Reverend wouldn't approve." | |
| At least, I assume it was unintentional. The predominance of | |
| silliness, as opposed to coherent plot, is occasionally irritating, | |
| though -- one character must be given an object simply because it's | |
| nonsensical, and your final action is more than a bit contrived. | |
| The gameplay is slightly uneven; there are some actions whose syntax | |
| might defeat the less persistent, notably the problem of a certain | |
| well. At another point, in a dangerous situation, an escape route | |
| opens up for a turn or so -- but the game gives you no hints to that | |
| effect. More generally, you steal a jar from a sweet shop (well, you | |
| take it in plain sight of a dimwitted salesman), and, as noted, | |
| several actions are more than a bit illogical. There are several | |
| well-coded features, though, notably characters who manage to move | |
| around without obvious bugs (at least, not very many), a series of | |
| candies that can be regenerated, and a hint system in the form of a | |
| magical door that leads you back to the central office. Though the | |
| game revolves around magic, your contact with it is limited -- one | |
| instance -- and the story depends more on the silly characters in the | |
| village than on the ostensible plot. | |
| The central distinguishing feature of Lost Spellmaker is that you play | |
| a lesbian; you are attracted to the cute librarian Tilly, and the game | |
| tries -- not very successfully -- to resolve that along with the | |
| finding-the-lost-magician bit. The author has said that the game was | |
| underway before the argument this fall on gay characters in IF -- in | |
| which his position was that a gay or lesbian main character, even if | |
| made obvious, did not have to be a political statement. As far as that | |
| goes, Lost Spellmaker demonstrates the truth of it; unless your biases | |
| are such that you see the inclusion itself as political, this game | |
| does not come across as trying to Make An Important Point or any such | |
| thing. But nor does it do much with the relationship; your | |
| interactions with Tilly are so limited that it would be hard to call | |
| this a lesbian romance, somewhat improbable ending aside. | |
| It is worth wondering whether such a game would feel like a political | |
| statement if the game encouraged you to act in a way expressing your | |
| attraction -- along the lines of, say, Plundered Hearts. As it is, | |
| it's easy enough to forget that you're a lesbian -- for that matter, | |
| to forget that you're female -- for most of the game. This is | |
| certainly an interesting foray, but I'm not sure it answers many of | |
| the questions that the argument brought up -- not that it was required | |
| to, of course. With more development in the romance area, this might | |
| be genuinely groundbreaking. | |
| Lost Spellmaker is very short -- six puzzles, by my count -- and not | |
| all that remarkable, but it does manage to entertain (me, anyway, | |
| which is more than I can say for many humor games). As a demonstration | |
| of the viability of having a gay or lesbian main character, it's not | |
| particularly successful; it sends up the convention that the hero or | |
| heroine must be a strapping young thing, but that's a different | |
| problem. But it works well enough as a whimsical romp that I rated it | |
| a 7 on the competition scale. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: "Paul O'Brian" <obrian SP@G ucsu.Colorado.EDU> | |
| NAME: The Lost Spellmaker | |
| AUTHOR: Neil James Brown | |
| E-MAIL: neil SP@G highmount.demon.co.uk | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/lost/lost.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 2 (1997 competition release) | |
| It's not often that you see a thread from one of the newsgroups | |
| translate so directly into an actual piece of IF, but that's what's | |
| happened with The Lost Spellmaker. This summer, the discussion raged | |
| (and I do think that's a fair characterization) in rgif about "Gay | |
| characters in IF." Some people held that if a piece of IF were to | |
| feature a gay character, that piece would need to have homosexuality | |
| as its primary concern. Others, including Neil James Brown, contended | |
| that a character's sexual orientation can function simply as a vector | |
| to deepen characterization, of no more central concern to the game's | |
| theme than her gender, her height, or what food she likes to eat. The | |
| Lost Spellmaker proves Brown's point quite handily. | |
| The game's protagonist is Mattie, a dwarf Secret Service agent | |
| dispatched to discover the whereabouts of Drew Tungshinach, last in a | |
| long line of local spellmakers who have disappeared mysteriously. The | |
| fact that Mattie is both a dwarf and a Secret Service agent is an | |
| indication of the clever world that Brown has created, which consists | |
| of equal parts Ian Fleming and Brothers Grimm. The fact that Mattie | |
| loves candy comes in handy in a couple of puzzles, and helps explain | |
| why she lives in the town Sweet Shop. And finally, the fact that | |
| Mattie is a lesbian has a bearing on the love- interest subplot with | |
| the local librarian. Yet none of these incidental facts impinge on the | |
| game's central concern, the rescue of its eponymous Lost | |
| Spellmaker. Instead, they enrich our understanding of the characters, | |
| for which purpose Mattie's status as a lesbian is no more or less | |
| important than, for example, her status as a dwarf. | |
| After the competition ended, Brown posted to RGIF that he didn't write | |
| The Lost Spellmaker to prove his point -- the game was half-finished | |
| when the debate began, and in fact he wrote "It was unfortunate in | |
| some ways that Lost was a competition entry, as I was unable to use it | |
| as an example during the debate." No matter: The Lost Spellmaker | |
| stands as an example now, proving Brown's point handily. It's also a | |
| fun piece of IF apart from any political or identity | |
| considerations. The quest for Drew brings Mattie in contact with a | |
| number of amusing characters, and the milieu is small enough to make | |
| most of the puzzles fairly easy. Of course, I can't deny that I | |
| personally find it quite refreshing to play a game where | |
| heterosexuality isn't the implied norm, but The Lost Spellmaker has | |
| more than that to recommend it. It's a snappy quest in a creatively | |
| conceived world, a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. | |
| Prose: The prose in The Lost Spellmaker never jarred me out of the | |
| story, and I often quite enjoyed reading it. The village wasn't | |
| particularly vividly rendered, but the characters often were, and some | |
| of the game's lighter touches were hilarious. Dialogue was, as a rule, | |
| quite well-written, especially the Reverend's constant malapropisms, | |
| which made me laugh out loud over and over, even when seeing them for | |
| the second and third times. | |
| Plot: Considering the weird, mutant setting Brown has achieved by | |
| breeding traditional fantasy elements (magic, dwarves, talking | |
| animals) with James Bond derivations (the Secret Service, a one-letter | |
| superior, his secretary "Mr. Cashpound"), the plot walks a fine line, | |
| and does it well. The plot is not simply a fantasy, though it does | |
| involve using magic to halt the decline of magic, and manipulating | |
| fantasy characters to solve puzzles. Nor was it simply espionage, | |
| though it did involve a heroic spy facing off against the obligatory | |
| Femme Fatale. Instead, it swerved back and forth between the two, | |
| making for a merry ride. | |
| Puzzles: I only had to consult the walkthrough one time, for a puzzle | |
| which was logical, but could have used an alternate solution. The | |
| puzzles weren't the focus of the story, so they served the basic | |
| purpose of small goals to help advance the plot. In this role, they | |
| worked admirably well. There were no particularly witty or clever | |
| puzzles, but by the same token there were no unfair or | |
| "guess-the-verb" puzzles either. | |
| Technical: | |
| writing -- I only noticed one proofing error in the game. The vast | |
| majority of the prose was competently and correctly written. | |
| coding -- There were a few bugs in the game, one of which may be more | |
| of a library issue than a lack of attention on the part of the author. | |
| Also, there were a few places where a response beyond the default | |
| would have been appreciated. Overall, the code was relatively bug | |
| free. Kudos must go here to the title page, which employed a really | |
| nifty z-machine special effect. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: "Paul O'Brian" <obrian SP@G ucsu.Colorado.EDU> | |
| NAME: Madame L'Estrange and the Troubled Spirit | |
| AUTHORS: Ian Ball and Marcus Young | |
| E-MAIL: iball SP@G maths.adelaide.edu.au | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/lest/lest.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 1 (1997 competition release) | |
| Madame L'Estrange and the Troubled Spirit (hereafter called MmeLTS) is | |
| a frustrating game, because it builds such a slipshod house upon a | |
| very promising foundation. The game is riddled with what I would guess | |
| are at least a hundred grammar and spelling errors. It flipflops | |
| seemingly at random between past and present tense. It can't seem to | |
| decide whether to address the player in the second or third person. It | |
| consistently causes a fatal crash in at least one interpreter | |
| (WinFrotz). All this would be easy to evaluate as simply the product | |
| of incompetent authors if it didn't take place in a game that starts | |
| with an interesting premise, executes a number of great interface | |
| decisions, and manages to unroll a complicated mystery plot along the | |
| way. As it is, MmeLTS is a great mess that could've been a contender | |
| if only it had been written with more care. | |
| One area in which the game does succeed is that of the innovations | |
| introduced by its authors, especially in the area of navigation: | |
| MmeLTS combines the direction-based locomotion of traditional IF with | |
| the more intuitive "go to location x" type of travel used in games | |
| like Joe Mason's "In The End." The title character (a "spiritualist | |
| detective" who is also the player character) can travel to various | |
| locations around Sydney with the use of the "travel to" or "go to" | |
| verb. However, once she has arrived at a particular location she uses | |
| direction-based navigation to walk from place to place (or room to | |
| room, as the case may be.) Moreover, the authors often write direction | |
| responses as a simple set of actions performed by the title character | |
| rather than implementing entire rooms which serve no purpose. These | |
| methods of navigation combine the best of both worlds, providing a | |
| broad brush for cross-city or cross-country travel but not taking away | |
| the finer granularity available to the direction-based system. A | |
| related innovation concerns Madame L'Estrange's notebook, in which the | |
| game automagically tallies the names of important people and places | |
| which come up in her investigations. This notebook (similar to the | |
| "concept inventory" used in some graphical IF) provides a handy | |
| template for travel and inquiry, and would be welcome inside any game, | |
| especially those involving a detective. | |
| One other point: MmeLTS takes the character all over Sydney, and in | |
| doing so provides an element of education and travel narrative along | |
| with its detective story. The medium's investigations take her from | |
| Centennial Park to the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Taronga Zoo to the | |
| University of New South Wales. Locations are often well-described, and | |
| after playing the game for two hours I felt more knowledgeable about | |
| Sydney than when I started (I hope the game's locations weren't | |
| fictional!) As an American whose knowledge of Australia is mostly | |
| limited to "Mad Max" movies, I can attest that the travel aspect of | |
| the game is a lot of fun. | |
| Prose: It's not that the game's prose was terrible of itself. The game | |
| is quite verbose, outputting screenfuls of text as a matter of course, | |
| and much of this text is effective and worthwhile. As I mentioned, | |
| many of the descriptions worked quite well, and the game does manage | |
| to clearly elucidate its plot as events happen. It's just that the | |
| mechanics of the prose are *so* bad (see Technical/writing). When | |
| technical problems are so pervasive, they can't help but have a | |
| tremendous negative impact on the quality of the prose. | |
| Plot: The game's plot is actually quite interesting. Mme. L'Estrange | |
| is presented with two apparently unrelated mysteries: strange wildlife | |
| deaths ascribed to a mysterious beast loose in Centennial Park, and | |
| the apparent suicide of a marine biology worker. As one might expect, | |
| these two situations eventually turn out to be linked. I wasn't able | |
| to finish the game in the initial two hours of competition judging | |
| time; in fact, I only scored five points out of 65 in that time, which | |
| gives an indication of just how much text there is to read. By the | |
| time I finished, I was really quite impressed with the machinations of | |
| the plot. The game employs several clever ideas and brings the whole | |
| together nicely at the end. | |
| Puzzles: I didn't really find many puzzles as such -- the game is | |
| mainly focused on exploration. Those puzzles which I did find were | |
| quite soluble as long as enough exploring had been done. What took up | |
| most of my time was visiting locations, talking to characters, and | |
| "tuning in" to the spirit world to commune with the spirits of the | |
| dead or learn more about a place's spiritual aura. This kept me busy | |
| enough that I didn't really miss the lack of puzzles. There are a few | |
| rather perfunctory puzzles as the game progresses, but they serve less | |
| as brain-teasers than as adjuncts to the plot (as is appropriate in a | |
| game as plot-driven as MmeLTS). | |
| Technical: | |
| writing -- The mechanics of the writing are just horrible. Sentences | |
| constantly lack periods or initial capital letters. Words are quite | |
| frequently misspelled. Typos are everywhere. The tense shifts back and | |
| forth at random between past and present; either one would have been | |
| workable and interesting, but the game seems unable to make up its | |
| mind. A similar phenomenon occurs with the voice, which vacillates | |
| between second and third person address. This avalanche of mechanical | |
| problems cripples what could have been an excellent game. | |
| coding -- The jury is still out on how well the game is coded. When I | |
| was using WinFrotz to play the game, I encountered Fatal errors | |
| repeatedly, but I'm not sure whether they were the fault of the | |
| designer or of the interpreter. JZIP presented the game with no | |
| problem, but again that could be because the interpreter was ignoring | |
| an illegal condition. Several aspects of the coding, such as Madame | |
| L's notebook, were quite nifty (unless that's what was causing the | |
| problem with WinFrotz crashing), and the implementation was solid | |
| overall. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: A New Day | |
| AUTHOR: Jonathan Fry | |
| E-MAIL: jfry SP@G skidmore.edu | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/newday/newday.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| PLOT: Interesting but uneven (1.2) ATMOSPHERE: Er, not much (1.0) | |
| WRITING: Fairly good (1.2) GAMEPLAY: Frustrating in spots (0.8) | |
| CHARACTERS: One very good one (1.3) PUZZLES: Nothing special (0.9) | |
| MISC: Very interesting idea (1.3) | |
| OVERALL: 5.5 | |
| Jonathan Fry's A New Day is another in a fairly long list of games | |
| that were nice in theory but not a real joy to play. Though the | |
| premise is interesting and though the plot is well-designed, mostly, | |
| the challenges of A New Day felt more like annoyances, and I never | |
| really got into the game. | |
| The plot, in all its self-referential glory: you are venturing | |
| into/playing a partially completed text adventure whose author, one | |
| Jonathan Fry, has died mysteriously; you confront a sentient being | |
| named Winston who seems to be running the show inside Jonathan's | |
| computer. The "incomplete" element means that objects are there but | |
| not mentioned, and some room descriptions are entirely absent or very | |
| terse. Even if you understand what you're doing in the game -- not all | |
| that likely -- it's still hard to make any sense of what you, the | |
| player, are supposed to do next, since you don't get much direction; | |
| as is typical, you are tossed into settings and given things to | |
| do. (As has been pointed out, there is a built-in excuse here for | |
| flaws in the game -- "it's an unfinished game, dummy" -- but I assume | |
| that Mr. Fry won't take refuge in that.) | |
| There are some problems that can't be put down to the unfinished-game | |
| element, though, like a location requiring that the player SEARCH | |
| three times -- finding something on the first and third times but not | |
| on the second (and, obviously, no clue that there's something more | |
| when you search the second time). Syntax for getting a cat across a | |
| street is rather unlikely, and the solution to a puzzle involving a | |
| guard assumes considerable stupidity on the guard's part. And try as I | |
| might, I could _not_ visualize the last puzzle, nor figure out why the | |
| solution suggested by the hints was correct. | |
| One of the more interesting decisions that Mr. Fry made was to make | |
| one of the sections of the game simulate a software crash of sorts, so | |
| that the text comes out garbled -- or, I should say, SP@G #$^ s SP@G #$ft SP@G # SP@G e | |
| cr SP@G #!sh s} th8723 the t523xt c&* SP@G es SP@G % SP@G #$t ga^%23482 SP@G (*bled. I | |
| exaggerate only slightly -- a sample sentence: | |
| Spli0LAS99x | |
| Broken gla31s and dsi8 wiring de76f746t the deca##] | |
| wo_)2den49053en walls of this room. | |
| There are very few moments in IF that I have wanted to be over as | |
| quickly as I wanted this one to be over, and, unfortunately, it took a | |
| while to end, since there's a not-all-that-intuitive puzzle to solve | |
| that assumes you have VERY sharp eyes. All this gets points for | |
| verisimilitude, I guess, but giving the player a headache is not the | |
| sort of verisimilitude we're striving for, nor even the k2342nd of | |
| veris27 SP@G #^ SP@G ^ SP@G #de we're str][;,ving for. | |
| A New Day is, for the most part, technically proficient; other than | |
| the unfairnesses mentioned above, there aren't many design problems, | |
| and no bugs at all as far as I could tell. Somehow, though, I didn't | |
| enjoy it; I didn't feel like the plot went anywhere, and the story | |
| felt uninvolving. Well, the plot did go somewhere, true, but it | |
| didn't precisely progress there; you're given a situation at the | |
| beginning, you do a bunch of things that don't relate directly to the | |
| situation, and then the situation changes suddenly at the end. Perhaps | |
| some hints at the final revelation -- perhaps things that you discover | |
| along the way that point to it, rather than having it all dumped on | |
| you without warning -- might help in that respect; for me, that | |
| development was a sort of "oh, really?" bit. I hadn't really been | |
| thinking about it, to be honest, as I'd been busy trying to solve | |
| unrelated puzzles. If the idea is to figure out how Fry died, it might | |
| be good to have some of the puzzles actually concern him or the | |
| setting of his death, lest the whole thing feel disconnected. (I | |
| recognize that the behavior of a certain character may be intended to | |
| point to that, but it didn't really work for me.) | |
| My, I do seem to be complaining, don't I? There are plenty of | |
| well-done things about A New Day as well. The ending feels genuinely | |
| suspenseful -- though a little mysterious, since you have very little | |
| idea of what's going on. There are multiple solutions to several | |
| puzzles, a welcome touch, though I admit I only found a few. At one | |
| point, you get bad advice from an NPC, and though normally it would | |
| feel unfair to do something like this -- when there's no obvious | |
| reason not to trust the NPC -- it works well here, I found. (At least, | |
| I was sufficiently unsure about the NPC not to take the advice.) One | |
| puzzle involving crossing a street breaks IF conventions in a | |
| thoroughly welcome way; it does something that seems like common sense | |
| but is almost never actually implemented, and I was glad that this | |
| game rewarded common sense (though, for those who have been playing IF | |
| for a while, it's actually not common sense anymore). More generally, | |
| the idea is well-thought-out and intriguing, even if I never got into | |
| the plot, and there's potential for a much longer and more- involved | |
| game where the plot might move along better. At least, it seems so to | |
| me; it seems like there's much that can be done with exploring a | |
| computer. (Find a file directory tree and chop it down. Hee hee hee.) | |
| Though this particular effort is a little short (though I shouldn't | |
| fault Mr. Fry for obeying the two-hour limit, I know), it has ideas | |
| that could make a longer game quite intriguing. | |
| Even so, there are difficulties in A New Day that, while not fatal to | |
| its playability, made it less than enjoyable for me; perhaps it's a | |
| matter of taste, but I don't claim to be sufficiently objective to | |
| transcend these things. Though this is a good effort, and Mr. Fry is | |
| clearly a good programmer, I gave this one a 6 on the competition | |
| scale. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Phred Phontious and the Quest for Pizza | |
| AUTHOR: Michael Zey | |
| E-MAIL: zeyguy SP@G aol.com | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/pizza/pizza.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| PLOT: Cliched but sometimes funny (1.2) ATMOSPHERE: Nope (0.8) | |
| WRITING: Not bad, but nothing special (1.1) GAMEPLAY: Uneven (1.0) | |
| CHARACTERS: Cardboard (0.8) PUZZLES: Some very clever (1.3) | |
| MISC: Problems, but still fun (1.1) | |
| OVERALL: 5.2 | |
| And sometimes, well, the game just matches the title perfectly. The | |
| tone of Phred Phontious is relentlessly silly, so much so that several | |
| of the puzzles are quite difficult because they require offbeat | |
| thinking rather than simple logic. Though the premise is far from | |
| original, and though there are plenty of flaws, there is still plenty | |
| to enjoy here -- if you don't mind some dreadful puns. | |
| The setting is fantasy, sort of, but more joke-fantasy than | |
| Tolkien-fantasy; this is the sort of fantasy that allows for things | |
| like photographs and coffee and chainsaws. The plot is typical of | |
| fantasy, though, even though it's a joke here -- you have to hunt down | |
| the ingredients to a pizza, and deliver it safely. Along the way, you | |
| encounter a dragon and a vampire -- along with a gnu and a crazed | |
| dentist, of course. The layout is sufficiently unencumbered by sense | |
| that all sorts of things can sit side by side, such as a spice mine | |
| (why not?), a dragon's lair, a haunted cemetery and a travel | |
| agency. Obviously, Phred Phontious is not trying particularly hard to | |
| convey the scene or draw you into the world it describes; the player | |
| may safely register the given stock situation, figure out the twist, | |
| and never bother to try to visualize anything. The result is, while | |
| enjoyable for a while, oddly forgettable; I found that I could hardly | |
| recall the details of the game just hours after playing it. (The silly | |
| place names -- Thikk Forest, Idubeleevinspukes Cemetery, etc. -- don't | |
| help.) | |
| Implementation-wise, Phred Phontious needs work. One significant | |
| object is hidden in a scenery object that barely gets mentioned, | |
| another important object is never mentioned at all, an enemy notices | |
| your hiding place under one set of circumstances but not another -- | |
| though it would be just as easy to spot you -- and another fellow goes | |
| on addressing you or preventing you from doing things even after he | |
| falls asleep. Other objects act _very_ illogically -- a rope in this | |
| game has some unexpected properties, and another object embedded in | |
| scenery must be dislodged by an action that I never would have | |
| guessed. At another point, you find yourself in a hole and are told | |
| that "it looks uncertain whether you'll ever make it out." Is the | |
| challenge to find some creative means of getting out? No -- just | |
| finding the right syntax. There are other things, illogical bits that | |
| didn't slow down gameplay but still left me wondering -- for instance, | |
| the character brandishing a key next to a locked cage, except that the | |
| key doesn't unlock the cage -- the cage is irrelevant to the game -- | |
| but rather a gate far far away. There is a bottleneck right at the | |
| start of the game -- you have to discover a hidden closet, but the | |
| game gives no hint that it's there. Elsewhere, you have a few turns | |
| to search certain scenery and get an object; if you don't find it | |
| then, the game closes off. | |
| Even amid gameplay problems, though, there are some memorable moments | |
| -- and even if the setting is clumsy more often than not, the author | |
| does manage to send up fantasy conventions in amusing fashion now and | |
| again. Two puzzles hinge on dreadful puns -- I, personally, enjoyed | |
| them, but then again I have a weakness for these things, and I don't | |
| advise that the author do this in the future. The way you get rid of | |
| the dragon is reasonably creative, and the gnu-milk puzzle -- the | |
| first part of it -- is clever, even if distasteful. And the endgame is | |
| quite rewarding, though made more difficult by the requirement of | |
| random scenery searching; I enjoyed the puzzles in the endgame more | |
| than any in the game. Though there are coding problems aplenty | |
| associated with the puzzles, many of them have excellent ideas; with | |
| some more time and attention to programming difficulties, the author | |
| might produce a first-rate -- and very challenging -- game. (One | |
| puzzle I never figured out: a "last lousy point" that's a clue from a | |
| British crossword.) | |
| Phred Phontious is large, hardly finishable within two hours unless | |
| the player relies heavily on the walkthrough, and the game both | |
| encumbers you with a lot of objects and limits your inventory | |
| severely. Perhaps the most welcome thing about the endgame was that | |
| the goal was clear and the territory to explore limited; there was no | |
| question of wandering around looking for the right object only to find | |
| that the solution actually turned on a bad pun. Moreover, the endgame | |
| is the only area where the room descriptions come alive -- and they do | |
| for a very obvious reason then, of course, but it does make things | |
| more vivid. And even though it's predictable, the ultimate ending | |
| does, somehow, feel satisfying -- no "to be continued" messages or any | |
| such thing. | |
| This is a game for the puzzle fan, in short, specifically the puzzle | |
| fan who likes to see fantasy sent up and doesn't mind some incoherence | |
| in the setting. Though the player should save often -- the game closes | |
| off without warning -- Phred Phontious is one of the few competition | |
| entries that I found enjoyable despite serious flaws, and I gave it a | |
| 6 on the competition scale. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: She's Got a Thing for a Spring | |
| AUTHOR: Brent van Fossen | |
| E-MAIL: vanfossen SP@G compuserve.com | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/spring/spring.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| PLOT: Reasonably interesting (1.4) ATMOSPHERE: Effective (1.6) | |
| WRITING: Strong (1.6) GAMEPLAY: Mostly good (1.4) | |
| CHARACTERS: Excellent (1.8) PUZZLES: Not especially notable (1.3) | |
| MISC: Attention to nature is a nice touch (1.6) | |
| OVERALL: 7.6 | |
| Though it's arguable whether She's Got a Thing for a Spring has the | |
| best or most memorable setting in this year's competition, Brent van | |
| Fossen has clearly given the backdrop a wealth of detail: there are | |
| ample descriptions of flora and fauna that play no part in the game | |
| other than scenery, and the player gets a feeling that Mr. van Fossen | |
| lives among and enjoys observing the sights that he describes. The | |
| rest of the game doesn't quite live up to the setting, unfortunately, | |
| but She's Got a Thing... is a solid entry in this year's competition | |
| nonetheless. | |
| The story: you've received a note from your husband asking you to meet | |
| him at a hot spring, and you have to get over there, first, and then | |
| assemble all the little things needed to enhance the | |
| experience. Getting there is fairly straightforward, and gathering | |
| most of the accoutrements isn't difficult, but one puzzle at the end | |
| requires considerable intuition and, even when the gap is bridged, | |
| doesn't make much sense. (It feels like the author is either trying to | |
| make the game harder or trying to come up with an excuse for the | |
| puzzle -- which is, to be fair, a reasonably clever one, though the | |
| game doesn't give you much of a nudge.) Still, the idea is compelling, | |
| and the sensual delights associated with the various features of your | |
| dip in the hot spring are so vividly described that it seemed a safe | |
| bet to me that this is among the author's favorite real-life | |
| experiences. | |
| Among the more intriguing parts of the game is only tangentially | |
| related to the plot: you encounter a fellow named Bob, who resides in | |
| a cabin in the woods and can offer his knowledge on virtually | |
| everything in the game. Bob seems to serve as a stand-in for the | |
| author in providing useful information about the various forms of | |
| wildlife you encounter -- he has a paragraph for all of them, as far | |
| as I can tell -- and he'll go on about the various aspects of his | |
| little cabin and garden. (In fact, he so fits the image of the | |
| benevolent kindly old fellow that his one off-color comment, when you | |
| ask him about the spring, seems slightly out of place; dirty old man, | |
| perhaps, but it doesn't seem to fit his persona.) One gets the feeling | |
| that Bob is so happy to have someone to talk to that interaction isn't | |
| much of a problem for him; he'll often babble on whether or not you | |
| respond. | |
| If there is a side of Bob that is lacking, it is Bob himself -- we get | |
| something about his wife Sally, dead of breast cancer, but virtually | |
| nothing else. (Moreover, you are told repeatedly that you remind Bob | |
| of Sally, certainly effective in painting Bob as a slightly forgetful | |
| old coot, if that was the intention, but it breaks the spell more than | |
| anything else. (Even a forgetful old coot doesn't word it the same way | |
| every time.) If you stay by Bob's side, you can watch him picking | |
| strawberries, fixing a rocking chair, fixing the porch, making lunch, | |
| making a strawberry shortcake, painting the forest (no, silly, on | |
| canvas) -- and though all this takes hundreds of moves, the passage of | |
| time is slowed while you're with Bob (a comment on the stimulating | |
| nature of his company?) so that you don't forfeit the main story by | |
| hanging out around the cabin. The main problem with all this is that, | |
| apart from a few things right at the beginning, you're largely | |
| confined to typing Z endlessly -- there are undoubtedly a wide variety | |
| of things to ask Bob about, but they slow down his various chores, and | |
| even those run out after a while. There doesn't, sadly, seem to be any | |
| way to participate in Bob's actions, and watching Bob put together the | |
| batter for the shortcake, ingredient by ingredient, loses its | |
| fascination after a bit. And if you're an IF player conditioned to | |
| expect that something elaborately coded will be relevant, well, you'll | |
| be wrong, because you only need about five moves' worth of interaction | |
| with Bob to finish the game. | |
| Bob is worth noting because he's the rare example of an NPC who is | |
| much more developed than he needs to be; in fact, he's a relatively | |
| ordinary character with an ordinary life which you can even witness in | |
| all its glory. The failure to really fili out Bob's background is a | |
| weakness, yes, but even so, he does such a remarkable amount of things | |
| and reacts to such a remarkable amount of stimuli that one can only | |
| wonder at the amount of code that went into him. It isn't, of course, | |
| unprecedented to have an NPC who plays encyclopedia for the game, but | |
| to have one who does that but also carries on complicated | |
| time-sensitive tasks of his own (which speed up dramatically when you | |
| walk away from him). And I don't recall ever encountering an NPC who | |
| did such a variety of, well, mundane tasks, described in such detail; | |
| it reinforces the idea that living in the wild and carrying out these | |
| chores is something that Mr. van Fossen enjoys, or at least thinks | |
| more people should know about. Bob is noteworthy, in short, because | |
| he's one of very few NPCs that can't be reduced to an obstacle; more | |
| often than not, characters represent puzzles, locked doors upon which | |
| you need to use the right key to get the needed object or bit of | |
| information. There is much more to this one -- the mundanity of it all | |
| makes him feel more real -- and if for nothing else, She's Got a Thing | |
| deserves recognition for the inclusion of Bob. (He's a close second to | |
| Maurice of Zero Sum Game as best NPC of the competition, I think.) | |
| There are several puzzles, as mentioned, one slightly unfair but most | |
| reasonably straightforward. One requires observation, as it happens, | |
| to figure out a pattern, irritating to the impatient IF player but | |
| consistent with the feel of the game (as in, nature is there to be | |
| observed, not simply co-opted to the player's ends). The gameplay is | |
| likewise strong; most verbs and nouns have several synonyms, and there | |
| are multiple substitute syntaxes for most important actions. One | |
| puzzle is a mite peculiar -- you dodge an adversary simply by moving | |
| away, and the adversary disappears and doesn't return (though the | |
| behavior in question is not atypical in real life) -- and the solution | |
| to another is not obvious to those of us who aren't familiar with hot | |
| springs -- but most of the puzzles are passable. As suggested, though, | |
| the appeal of this one lies less in the puzzles than in the scene as a | |
| whole, and though a few elements of it do break the spell -- two elk | |
| lock antlers and stay that way for the _entire game_, several birds | |
| are largely untroubled by your presence -- the game is well-written | |
| enough to make those minor flaws. The descriptions are effective... | |
| The canyon rim trail descends, clinging tightly to the stone | |
| wall, then disappears entirely as the rocks converge. You have | |
| no choice but to wade, the current swift and | |
| powerful. Overhead, a small slice of the sky is visible between | |
| the two cliff faces, covered with ferns that thrive in the dark | |
| moist environment here. The crevice runs northwest to south. | |
| ...and restrained; Mr. van Fossen has the sense not to go on about how | |
| beautiful the setting is, certainly a welcome touch. Moreover, the | |
| vocabulary employed is considerable and scenery objects get far more | |
| detailed description than standard IF would give; it is virtually | |
| impossible to find a "That's not something you need to refer to in the | |
| course of this game" in She's Got a Thing... (And there's even some | |
| humor: a book that you find includes short stories about "a bored | |
| diplomat who uses underground means to accomplish his goals", with | |
| other references to the 1996 competition.) And even though things get | |
| resolved oddly at the end -- you learn about a few things involving | |
| your own thoughts and motivations for the first time -- the nature of | |
| it fits the game quite well. | |
| On the whole, then, though She's Got a Thing... might not be the entry | |
| whose playing experience stays with you the longest, it's a polished | |
| work that's consistently enjoyable to play. Though sticking with Bob | |
| is only for the extra-patient, there is much to do in the game | |
| environment, and I gave it an 8 in the competition. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G ucsu.Colorado.EDU> | |
| NAME: Sins Against Mimesis | |
| AUTHOR: Adam Thornton | |
| E-MAIL: adam SP@G princeton.edu | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/mimesis/mimesis.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 1 (1997 competition release) | |
| Few things are more unfunny than an in-joke that you're not in on. On | |
| the other hand, an in-joke that you *are* in on can be hysterical, as | |
| it provides not just the pleasure of humor but also the feeling of | |
| community that comes from shared experience. Sins Against Mimesis is | |
| definitely a very in-jokey game, and consequently not for | |
| everyone. However, having been a longtime (since 1994) lurker and | |
| sometime participant in the rec.*.int-fiction newsgroups, I was part | |
| of the audience at which the game was aimed, and I have to admit that | |
| I found a lot of the in-jokes really funny. In fact, one of the most | |
| fun parts of the game was to play name-that-reference -- kind of the | |
| IF equivalent of listening to a World Party album or a Dennis Miller | |
| routine. Of course, the nature of the game (and the fact that it was | |
| written pseudonymously) also invited us to play guess-the-author. My | |
| guess was for Russ Bryan, but as it turns out the game was written by | |
| Adam Thornton, a relatively new author. | |
| If you haven't played much IF, and in fact even if you haven't spent | |
| much time on the IF newsgroups, most of this game is going to mean | |
| very little to you. Even its title is an allusion: to "Crimes Against | |
| Mimesis," a well-crafted series of articles posted to the newsgroups | |
| by Roger Giner-Sorolla (whatever happened to him, anyway?) a year or | |
| so ago. The rest of the game continues in that vein. The opening | |
| paragraph alludes to Jigsaw. The score of the initial part of the game | |
| is kept in IF disks which magically pop into the player's inventory | |
| every time a correct move is made. In some ways, this familiar, almost | |
| conspiratorial approach is a weakness. Certainly in the context of the | |
| competition it won't endear Sins to any judge who stands on the | |
| outside of the privileged circle at which the game aims itself. Even | |
| for an insider, the constant barrage of "if you're one of us, you'll | |
| know what I mean" references can start to feel a little | |
| cloying. However, the game is cleanly coded and competently written, | |
| and on the first time through I found it quite entertaining. | |
| There aren't many games which I would highly recommend to one group of | |
| people and discourage others from playing, but Sins is one of them. If | |
| you're an raif and rgif regular, I think you'll find Sins quite funny | |
| and entertaining. If not, forget it. It's bound to be more baffling | |
| and irritating than anything else. | |
| Prose: The prose is generally somewhere between functionally good and | |
| rather well done, with occasional moments of brilliant hilarity. | |
| Plot: The plot is based around several clever tricks which are quite | |
| funny at the time, but aren't worth repeating. If you've already | |
| played, you know what they are, and if you haven't played yet I won't | |
| give away the jokes. Like the rest of Sins, the plot is funny the | |
| first time through but won't wear well. | |
| Puzzles: Actually, this was the weakest part of the game. Many of the | |
| puzzles can be solved by performing extremely basic actions, which of | |
| course hardly makes them puzzles at all. Others, however, depend | |
| either on extremely specific (and not well-clued) actions or on | |
| deducing something about the surroundings which is not included in | |
| object or room descriptions. For a game so adamantly self-aware, it's | |
| ironic that Sins falls into some of the most basic blunders of puzzle | |
| design. | |
| Technical: | |
| writing -- I found no mechanical errors in Sins' writing. | |
| coding -- I found no bugs either. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Sunset Over Savannah | |
| AUTHOR: Ivan Cockrum | |
| E-MAIL: ivan SP@G cockrumville.com | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: TADS standard | |
| SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/tads/savannah/savannah.gam | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| PLOT: Intriguing (1.7) ATMOSPHERE: Very good (1.5) | |
| WRITING: Mostly strong (1.6) GAMEPLAY: Consistently good (1.6) | |
| CHARACTERS: Not many (1.3) PUZZLES: Some quite original (1.5) | |
| MISC: A genuinely innovative premise (1.9) | |
| OVERALL: 8.3 | |
| This year's competition had a fair crop of "ordinary person doing | |
| ordinary things" games, for want of a better description, but few of | |
| them confronted the central problem associated with such games: how to | |
| make the game interesting, more than a collection of dull tasks. After | |
| all, if the player wants to relive the joys of washing dishes or | |
| finding phone numbers, in theory he or she doesn't need interactive | |
| fiction to describe it for him; a good work of fiction, interactive or | |
| not, manages to transport the player to another world, and one would | |
| hope that the new doesn't look exactly like the old. But Ivan | |
| Cockrum's Sunset Over Savannah is up to the task; the game give the | |
| player an apparently ordinary situation and invests it with unexpected | |
| life. Indeed, the goal of the story lies in the process of discovering | |
| the hidden wonders of your environment -- and the experience for the | |
| player may fairly be called unique. | |
| The initial premise of Sunset is unrevealing: you are on the last day | |
| of vacation from your office job, and you're discontented with your | |
| work and thinking of quitting. With no more direction than that, the | |
| game deposits you in front of the boardwalk in front of your Savannah | |
| hotel -- and it might seem that the background is a way to explain | |
| your presence before the real plot, yet to be discovered, starts. But | |
| if you assume that you'll encounter an adventure game with a little | |
| poking around, you're wrong, because that prologue really did give the | |
| plot: the key developments are all in your mind, involving your | |
| decision on whether to quit your job. Handled poorly, this could be | |
| fairly silly -- "you find a brochure for a job on an ocean liner, so | |
| now you're thinking of doing that" -- but the beauty of Sunse" is that | |
| the developments feel plausible. Mr. Cockrum employs an innovative | |
| device for keeping track of the internal action: a status line with | |
| your state of mind on any given turn. Some actions -- jumping over a | |
| railing and landing with a crash on the beach -- lead to temporary | |
| changes ("stunned"), and other developments are more permanent. And | |
| though many of the pivotal actions are far from ordinary -- some | |
| merely unusual, a few simply fantastical -- very little conscious | |
| suspension of disbelief is required, simply because the setting feels | |
| so real. Mr. Cockrum integrates the ordinary and fantasy elements | |
| skillfully: those parts of the story that go beyond ordinary | |
| experience are few, carefully chosen, and clearly surprise the | |
| player-character as much as the player. Just as importantly, those | |
| elements are out of your control and mostly independent of your | |
| actions, so the feeling of ordinariness juxtaposed with the fantastic | |
| is enhanced. | |
| The idea of tracking your feelings and making them central to the plot | |
| is original to this game, to the best of my knowledge, and Mr. Cockrum | |
| carries it off skillfully. The connections between your experiences | |
| and your corresponding thoughts are sometimes a bit forced; an | |
| experience involving a sand sculpture starts you thinking about the | |
| sculptor and his artistic vision about your job "and how infrequently | |
| it lets you pursue your own visions." And there is no real sequence to | |
| the required actions, though some inevitably come before others; the | |
| plot is not so integrated with the puzzles that certain tasks address | |
| certain moods. But one could argue that realism dictates against such | |
| manipulation -- the idea is supposed to be that you stumble across | |
| experiences that affect your thinking, not seek out those experiences | |
| in order to force a certain decision on yourself -- and the | |
| arbitrariness of the connections mirrors the arbitrariness of | |
| real-life decision-making, to some extent. Moreover, the plot requires | |
| a certain degree of aimlessness to be realistic; no one sets out to | |
| wander around a beach and pavilion with certain goals in mind, and | |
| though several of the things you need to do require more effort (and | |
| some semi-suicidal motivations in a few cases) than might be expected | |
| in real life, exploration and experimentation are what move the story | |
| along. | |
| The puzzles themselves are quite good -- few of them are very hard, | |
| though a few, as noted, require whimsy that borders on suicidal | |
| tendencies, and others require wanton destruction of property that, | |
| while unremarkable for an adventure game, break the feel of the game | |
| somewhat. I must admit that one puzzle, if puzzle it can be called, | |
| eluded me completely when I first played the game -- I didn't see any | |
| reason for doing one particular vital thing -- and the prospective | |
| player should know that logic occasionally yields to simple | |
| impetuousness for this particular player-character. That aside, | |
| though, there is plenty of creativity at work, particularly in the way | |
| you use the objects at hand to get around problems; the way you catch | |
| the crab is one of the more inventive puzzles in this year's | |
| competition. The description-to-puzzle ratio of the writing -- the | |
| amount of text that is there simply to be read -- is unusually high, | |
| as might be expected, but that is hardly a drawback. | |
| The writing, for its part, is strong and descriptive, though | |
| occasionally Mr. Cockrum piles on a few too many adjectives and images | |
| at once. At one point, we are informed that "somehow this amazing | |
| spectacle has cut through your ingrained layers of cynicism to | |
| revitalize your waning belief in a world full of wondrous novelty." | |
| Er, maybe, but there are simpler ways to put it. And the tone wavers | |
| now and again -- at one point, the sun is described as a "fat, ripe, | |
| blood orange," inadvertently deflating (at least, I assume it was | |
| inadvertent) what was otherwise a picturesque description. A few flaws | |
| aside, though, Sunset is compellingly written: most events and | |
| descriptions are portrayed with a wealth of detail, consistently | |
| absorbing and almost never tedious. Some particularly strong examples: | |
| Pavilion | |
| You're standing in the center of a colossal gazebo that | |
| provides shade for sunburned tourists like yourself. The | |
| octagonal floor is made of unbroken grey concrete, bordered | |
| on each face by a waist high railing. Tall beams support a | |
| sloping wooden canopy that rises over three times your | |
| height. A red brick enclosure squats in the southwest | |
| corner and a small snack bar nestles up against the | |
| enclosure to the south. To the east lies the foot of a | |
| seemingly endless pier. A number of wooden benches sit | |
| along the north face of the pavilion. | |
| Damp Sand, North of Pier | |
| The damp, hard packed sand is darkened almost to bronze by | |
| the relentless tide to the east, while to the west it | |
| lightens to a powdery gold before ending in tall dunes. To | |
| the south, you can pass through the pylons supporting the | |
| long pier that stretches east from the pavilion. | |
| Though the writing in Sunset is not always as economical as it might | |
| be, the moments that get described with particular detail warrant the | |
| attention; the game's interest in detail mirrors the | |
| player-character's observations of the surroundings, and the | |
| circumstances justify more attention to the scene than your average | |
| passerby might give. Particularly effective in that regard is a series | |
| of random messages involving your scenery that recur now and again... | |
| A slight gust of wind sends eddies of sand swirling over the | |
| brick path. | |
| ...or... | |
| A young boy wearing a bright blue bathing suit and matching | |
| flip-flops runs by. | |
| ...which, though not precisely relevant to anything in the game, do | |
| plenty to set the scene. An extensive "fun stuff" section available at | |
| the end of the game testifies to the wealth of attention that went | |
| into writing Sunset, and there are many things in the game that reward | |
| curiosity, notably collecting the various shells and chatting with the | |
| old man. Several line-break descriptions amplify the effect, notably | |
| this: "Grains of sand on the concrete floor twinkle as the light of | |
| the setting sun streaks through them at just the right angle." (And, | |
| naturally, there is humor here and there; hitting return without | |
| entering a command elicits one of the following -- "Beg pardon?", | |
| "What?", "Sorry?", and "Mumblemumble?", the latter of which amused me | |
| immensely.) Though there are several moments where text takes up at | |
| least a full screen, it is a tribute to the writing that those are | |
| highlights, invariably clear and vivid. In short, Sunset is | |
| well-written enough that even aimless wandering and experimenting | |
| feels intriguing; there are few games that can say that. | |
| Whether Sunset will appeal to a given player is, I think, largely a | |
| matter of taste; some might simply regard the subjective approach dull | |
| or mechanical, or find the story too aimless to be involving. My own | |
| enjoyment of the game no doubt owes something to my biases. But there | |
| is no denying the skill that Mr. Cockrum brings to bear on this game, | |
| nor how well it achieves its objectives, and given that and the | |
| novelty of the concept, I feel comfortable rating Sunset as my only 10 | |
| in the 1997 competition. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G ucsu.Colorado.EDU> | |
| NAME: Sylenius Mysterium | |
| AUTHOR: C.E. Forman | |
| E-MAIL: ceforman SP@G postoffice.worldnet.att.net | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/sylenius/sylenius.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 1 (1997 competition release) | |
| [Because of the nature of Sylenius Mysterium, any or all of this | |
| review could be considered a spoiler. In addition, spoilers are | |
| present for "Freefall" and "Robots." You have been warned.] | |
| There seems to be this strange impulse in the text adventure community | |
| to recreate the experience of graphical arcade games using the | |
| Z-machine. The first evidence I ever saw of this trend was Andrew | |
| Plotkin's "Freefall", a z-machine Tetris implementation using realtime | |
| opcodes to reproduce the geometrical game with ASCII graphics. Others | |
| have followed, including Torjborn Andersson's "Robots", which | |
| recreates one of the earliest computer games, and a DOOM | |
| implementation which I haven't played. I have to say that this notion | |
| baffles me. When I first saw "Freefall", I thought it was good fun. It | |
| struck me as a typically amazing Plotkin programming exercise which | |
| showcased the versatility of the z-machine. But it didn't become an | |
| arcade staple on my machine. As a text adventure, it was pretty | |
| wild. As Tetris, it was pretty average. I played it once or twice to | |
| see what it could do, then deleted it. "Robots" I kept, but I don't | |
| play it. | |
| Now here's Sylenius Mysterium (hereafter called SM), the bulk of which | |
| is a textual emulation of a horizontally scrolling run-and- jump game, | |
| a la Pitfall or Mario Brothers. This kind of thing used to come up as | |
| a joke on the IF newsgroups from time to time, and now here it is, a | |
| real game. Unfortunately, SM demonstrates the reason why those games | |
| were implemented graphically in the first place. Namely, it's silly to | |
| implement an arcade game in descriptive mode. ("You begin walking | |
| right." "You execute a running jump." "Beneath you is a low wall.") | |
| These types of structures are what graphics are best at doing, and | |
| they were being done 15 years ago. It's both more fun and less | |
| confusing to see an arcade environment in graphics, and if even | |
| ancient computers are capable of doing so, what's the point of making | |
| a text adventure which simply produces an inferior copy of the | |
| original? Playing SM just made me wish that the author had sacrificed | |
| portability and implemented the arcade section in graphics. Hell, | |
| even cheesy ASCII graphics would have made for a more fun experience | |
| than one long room description reading "A panoramic landscape, | |
| parallax layers of empty, ruined buildings, scrolling by with your | |
| movements." It seems to me that text is good at certain things and so | |
| is graphics, and to make a text version of Pitfall makes about as much | |
| sense as a joystick-and-fire-button version of A Mind Forever | |
| Voyaging. It's great to know that the z-machine has realtime | |
| capabilities to produce a text arcade game, but surely those | |
| capabilities can be put to better use. | |
| SM does have a prologue which operates in a traditional text adventure | |
| mode, and this section of the game is quite well-done, with the | |
| exception of a number of problematic bugs. The game does a very nice | |
| job of defining an engaging and convincing setting and characters, as | |
| well as creating a sense of nostalgia for the old gaming consoles. The | |
| Atari system was my first introduction to videogames that could be | |
| played at home, and I have many fond memories of days spent at | |
| friends' houses playing "Missile Command" or "Donkey Kong" or | |
| "Pitfall." In fact, the game evoked nostalgia so well that my | |
| disappointment was all the sharper when I realized that its "arcade" | |
| section was nothing more than realtime text. | |
| Prose: The prose in the IF section of the game was really quite | |
| accomplished, so much so in fact that it sent me to the dictionary a | |
| couple of times to confirm the meaning of unfamiliar words. All the | |
| game's elements, from the sterile quiet of a mall after-hours, to the | |
| almost exaggerated "skate punk" main character, to the loving | |
| descriptions of the old-time game consoles, were written in a style | |
| that I found quite rich and absorbing. | |
| Plot: The plot in SM is mainly a device to whisk the player to the | |
| arcade section. The plot of that section is (intentionally, I think) | |
| extremely pure and simple: find the bad guy and undo his evil deeds. | |
| Puzzles: Again, the puzzles outside the arcade section were few, and | |
| those inside the arcade section can't really be called "puzzles" in | |
| the traditional sense, though I would argue that the game does propose | |
| an interesting juxtaposition between the challenges of a Mario | |
| Brothers-style arcade game and IF puzzles -- the two are closer than | |
| they are sometimes thought to be. Those puzzles within the IF section | |
| were usually quite simple, though from time to time bugs arose that | |
| made the simplest actions seem unintentionally like puzzles | |
| themselves. | |
| Technical: | |
| writing -- The writing was technically excellent. | |
| coding -- Here there were a number of problems. I was keeping a text | |
| file of all the major bugs I found until I realized that the author | |
| had provided no email address (not even an anonymous remailer for | |
| comp97) to which bug reports could be sent. Suffice it to say that | |
| there were a number of situations, both inside and outside the arcade | |
| section, that needed much improvement. That being said, however, I'm | |
| willing to forgive quite a bit from someone who takes on a project as | |
| ambitious (even though I personally don't find it to be very | |
| interesting) as the arcade section of SM. That section suffers from | |
| game-killing bugs of the "FATAL: No such property" variety (or at | |
| least it does under WinFrotz), but the working sections of it seemed | |
| to work quite well, and I salute the serious effort it must have taken | |
| to create them. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: The Tempest | |
| AUTHOR: Graham Nelson | |
| E-MAIL: graham SP@G gnelson.demon.co.uk | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform, sort of | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/tempest/tempest.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 3 | |
| PLOT: Um...borrowed (1.0) ATMOSPHERE: Not bad (1.2) | |
| WRITING: To the extent that Graham wrote it... (1.4) | |
| GAMEPLAY: Clunky (0.7) | |
| CHARACTERS: Fine, but borrowed (1.0) | |
| PUZZLES: Few, not very good (0.6) | |
| MISC: Brilliant idea, execution so-so (1.3) | |
| OVERALL: 5.6 | |
| Of the 1997 competition entries, among the most memorable, and the | |
| most ambitious, is Graham Nelson's "The Tempest" -- but it may also be | |
| the hardest to rate. Certainly, the extensiveness of the Inform | |
| hacking is impressive, and the sheer concept of adapting a drama and | |
| making it interactive is novel -- but the game does not, in truth, | |
| meet all the challenges the task presented. | |
| For the few who don't know: this is an adaptation of Shakespeare's | |
| "The Tempest." Your role is that of Ariel, the fairy servant to | |
| Prospero, the protagonist of the play, and you must complete a series | |
| of missions given you by Prospero to (a) move the plot along and (b) | |
| win your freedom. The text of the play is virtually all there within | |
| the game, and, essentially, when you do something right, the play | |
| moves along; you're given a series of situations within the play where | |
| the action stops, in a sense, and you need to do something to restart | |
| it. After the first scene, you can never make the game unwinnable; you | |
| can take as long as you like to hit upon the right thing to do to move | |
| things along, and no one will complain. The responses to your actions | |
| are written entirely in Elizabethan, perhaps the best part of the | |
| whole thing for me; an unrecognized verb elicits "That instruction, | |
| that verb, doth elude me," and "get violets" brings this response: "I | |
| pluck me nodding violets from this darling bed." Swearing will yield a | |
| rich variety of insults, including this: "Mind thy tongue, thou | |
| paunchy pottle-deep plume- plucked strumpet!" There is, in short, wit | |
| aplenty. | |
| There are also, however, some serious problems. Your required actions | |
| are not always obvious, even with a copy of the play in hand, and | |
| there is no walkthrough or hint system to help you along. Though there | |
| are very few puzzles as such -- though one, requiring that you unlock | |
| a cabinet, is rather confusing and frustrating -- simply figuring out | |
| how to do whatever Prospero has commanded often takes considerable | |
| guesswork. Limiting the difficulty somewhat, though hardly in a | |
| positive way, is the small set of commands that the game recognizes; | |
| once the player figures out the 10 or 15 actions that are helpful, the | |
| experimentation required for any given problem is reduced | |
| somewhat. The problem remains, though; a bottleneck at the very | |
| beginning, in the form of actions that require some intuition even for | |
| those who know the play, makes the difficulty of the whole enterprise | |
| obvious. Other problems abound -- at one point, even though you can | |
| fly, you are required to swim, not an obvious turn of events. The one | |
| significant puzzle requires such trial and error that it breaks the | |
| spell, so to speak, in that the other characters involved never | |
| comment on your presence. And translating some of your tasks into | |
| interactive-fiction actions sometimes results in some strange | |
| creations, notably three homonculi that you carry around. | |
| Nelson takes considerable care to make this a performance of the play, | |
| not an innovation on it. Most obviously, you are prevented from | |
| speaking your own words -- you cannot ASK a character about anything | |
| -- though Ariel will speak lines at the appropriate time, | |
| independently of you. This isn't generally a problem -- it would | |
| confuse things if you tried to interact with most of the characters | |
| anyway -- but given that there are scenes and actions added that | |
| aren't Shakespeare's, it doesn't seem that a few questions to Prospero | |
| (with the responses described rather than recorded -- "he tells you | |
| that...") would break the spell. True, the game does have a note on | |
| each character available when you type the name at the prompt -- but | |
| there are other things that bear explanation. The desire to avoid | |
| dialogue that isn't Shakespeare's is understandable, but it shouldn't | |
| override the necessity that a player understand what's going on. | |
| Also problematic is that some of the action does not actually turn on | |
| anything Ariel does, meaning that, in some cases, _very_ lengthy | |
| stretches of text go by before you get a prompt again -- which isn't a | |
| problem the first time, but might be if you have to replay that | |
| section for some reason -- and in other cases, you set off a scene | |
| merely by walking into a room. And in a few cases, though your action | |
| does trigger the advance in the plot, the connection feels a bit | |
| strained -- and it's those cases where what's required of you is | |
| particularly hard to guess. Ariel changes shape now and again, as the | |
| play dictates, but the way you prompt them -- when you do; sometimes | |
| it just happens -- feels random and impossible to guess. Though these | |
| problems speak to the difficulty of the project, it is undeniable that | |
| Tempest is not, for all its charm, a particularly playable game. | |
| Even so, I enjoyed the experience -- though, I must say, I enjoy | |
| Shakespeare as a whole, and being thrust into the middle of the play | |
| was entertainment enough for me. Simply having a setting to match and | |
| make sense of the action was in many cases helpful and illuminating -- | |
| it made sense of the plot in a way that Shakespeare's stage directions | |
| sometimes do not -- and the cut scenes that happen in response to | |
| certain actions give the player a sense of how the story | |
| progresses. And even though there is a feeling of being distinct from | |
| the play, in that the prompts only come when the action stops and you | |
| have to restart it, that does reinforce the sense that you're | |
| controlling the events on the island and the various characters are, | |
| in a sense, puppets. Of course, your ability to manipulate them is | |
| severely limited by the plot of the play; there isn't much real | |
| freedom to test your power. But the sensation is interesting all the | |
| same. I found the "performance" genuinely involving in a way that | |
| simply reading the text could not reproduce. The sequence of events is | |
| variable, to some extent -- certain scenes can be triggered at | |
| different times -- but never, as far as I can tell, can you delay or | |
| speed up an event in a way that doesn't make sense. And whatever the | |
| other faults of Tempest, it must be conceeded that Nelson's | |
| Elizabethan is outstanding; even the most mundane responses are | |
| written convincingly. | |
| The difficulty remains -- how to rate this? Though the gameplay | |
| limitations of Tempest are considerable, they are there for a valid | |
| reason, not simply inadequate coding -- and, as such, I decided they | |
| shouldn't count too heavily aganist the game. Though it doesn't "work" | |
| especially well, the concept as put into practice works about as well | |
| as it could, and the author should get some credit for a worthy | |
| effort. I gave it a 7 on the competition scale, and think that a few | |
| minor changes -- like the addition of a hint system, ideally in | |
| Elizabethan -- could make this one highly enjoyable. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: "Paul O'Brian" <obrian SP@G ucsu.Colorado.EDU> | |
| NAME: The Tempest | |
| AUTHOR: Graham Nelson | |
| E-MAIL: graham SP@G gnelson.demon.co.uk | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard, significantly adapted | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/tempest/tempest.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 3 (1997 competition release) | |
| "Yet look, how far | |
| The substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow | |
| In underprizing it, so far this shadow | |
| Doth limp behind the substance." | |
| -- William Shakespeare | |
| The Merchant of Venice III.ii.126-129 | |
| The Tempest attempts a great deal, and achieves much of it despite | |
| being somewhat flawed. The work presents itself not as a game, but as | |
| an "interactive performance" which asks the player to perform as the | |
| magical will of Shakespeare's Prospero, guiding the spirit Ariel | |
| (a.k.a. the parser) through the plot of The Tempest (the play), though | |
| not necessarily in the order in which Shakespeare wrote | |
| it. Remarkably, this complicated positioning of subjectivity works | |
| quite well (and opens some unexplored territory for the mixing of | |
| first, second, and third person forms of address in IF). It is blended | |
| with a new approach to dialogue which prevents the player character | |
| from speaking at all but presents many screenfuls of dialogue between | |
| other characters (and sometimes including Ariel himself), the | |
| exchanges broken up by pausing for keystrokes between each character's | |
| lines. In a sense, the player's commands to the parser become | |
| essentially stage directions issued to an onstage persona via a | |
| magical conduit. This idiom also works beautifully, bestowing the game | |
| with a powerful aura of theatrical performance. The Tempest is | |
| entertaining and innovative; it often feels quite magical to inhabit | |
| the Prospero/Ariel connection, and to take part in a groundbreaking | |
| interactive experience. I think that the game also has great potential | |
| as an educational tool, allowing readers to experience Shakespeare's | |
| language in a new and thrilling way. | |
| All this being said, however, the Tempest is not without its problems. | |
| Actually, perhaps the game just has one major problem which manifests | |
| itself in several ways. Although the game does an excellent (sometimes | |
| astonishing) job of rearranging Shakespeare's scenes and lines to fit | |
| the interactive mode, the fit is not perfect. Several times during the | |
| game I felt faced with responses which, if not complete non sequiturs, | |
| were certainly only tenuously connected to the command I had | |
| typed. Tempest wrenches in bits and pieces of dialogue from all over | |
| the play for various purposes, pressing them into service as room | |
| descriptions, parser rejoinders, and other sundry purposes. Sometimes | |
| they are perfectly suited to their purpose and sometimes less so. When | |
| I was on the wrong end of this continuum, my relationship with the | |
| game became strained -- the parser's responses were beautiful, but | |
| didn't make enough sense, and not because of any opacity in the | |
| Elizabethan English. This situation creates a problem with the game's | |
| puzzles: usually interactive fiction prose can be written in such a | |
| way as to suggest subtle hints to the problems facing the | |
| player. However, when control of the prose escapes the author, those | |
| hints become harder and harder for a player to come by. It is to this | |
| difficulty with the prose (and, of course, to the lack of any hint | |
| system or walkthrough) that I ascribe the problems I've seen players | |
| having, often with the very first puzzle of the game. With a typical | |
| piece of IF, the game could simply tailor its responses to help the | |
| player along -- the Tempest often achieves this goal, but all too | |
| often it falls short. | |
| Plot: I predict that a certain contingent of voices will raise the hue | |
| and cry over what they perceive to be the Tempest's lack of | |
| interactivity. I wasn't able to finish the game in two hours (far from | |
| it, in fact -- I got only six points, another example of an excellent | |
| competition game which breaks the two-hour rule), but the parts I saw | |
| made it pretty clear that the game leads you along rather carefully | |
| from one plot point to the next, allowing for very little | |
| branching. My own opinion is that this structure is not a problem -- | |
| after all, the piece bills itself as "more a 'performance' than a | |
| 'game'," and as such it's perfectly appropriate for the Tempest to | |
| enforce a certain degree of rigidity to accommodate the exigencies of | |
| its plot. In fact, what this achieves is the inclusion of a much more | |
| complicated plot than is common in interactive fiction; by limiting | |
| the player's ability to affect the narrative stream, the game allows | |
| the complexity of Shakespeare's plotting to shine through even in this | |
| challenging new form. I'm satisfied with the trade-off. | |
| Prose: I suppose this is where I ought to weigh in on the debate over | |
| the originality of a work like the IF version of the Tempest. It's my | |
| opinion that the IF Tempest is absolutely a different piece of work | |
| from the Tempest, the play. Yes, the author uses almost the entire | |
| script of the play, but I would argue that such usage is not | |
| plagiarism, because whatever Shakespeare's intentions, I think it's | |
| safe to say that the play was not written to be adapted into | |
| interactive form. Consequently, I don't see the IF Tempest as any less | |
| an original work than Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility or, for | |
| that matter, Shakespeare's MacBeth (whose plot was lifted from | |
| Holinshed's histories.) Yes, the seams do sometimes show between the | |
| author's additions and Shakespeare's text -- these are the work's | |
| weaker moments. However, in judging the Tempest's prose, I judge not | |
| the quality of Shakespeare's writing, but the quality of its usage in | |
| its new medium -- on that basis, more often than not, it succeeds. | |
| Puzzles: As noted above, this is where I identify the major weakness | |
| of the Tempest. [SPOILERS AHEAD] I cite as an example the first puzzle | |
| of the game, where Ariel must blow a storm to upset the boat and set | |
| the plot into motion. The reason that players are finding this puzzle | |
| so difficult is that it requires rather close knowledge of the play | |
| (and not just of the play's first scene), which most players, even | |
| very well educated ones, are not likely to have at their | |
| fingertips. No hint is given of Ariel's powers or of his purpose in | |
| regard to the ship. Now, in a typical IF game, there might be a | |
| sentence or two in the introductory paragraph which introduces the | |
| idea and sets players on their way. However, because of the | |
| constraints imposed by using a collage of prewritten text, these hints | |
| are unavailable and thus players flounder in a | |
| "read-the-playwright/designer's-mind" sort of puzzle. It won't be the | |
| last time. | |
| Technical: | |
| writing -- The prose did an excellent job with handling a number of | |
| difficult technical tasks with regard to writing and using Elizabethan | |
| English. | |
| coding -- I found only one bug in Tempest (at least, I think it was a | |
| bug), among a thoroughly reworked library of Inform responses and the | |
| introduction of a number of excellent devices for the presentation of | |
| dialogue and clarification of the plot. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: "Paul O'Brian" <obrian SP@G ucsu.Colorado.EDU> | |
| NAME: Unholy Grail | |
| AUTHOR: Stuart Allen | |
| E-MAIL: sallen SP@G one.net.au | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: JACL standard | |
| SUPPORTS: JACL interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/jacl/grail | |
| VERSION: 1997 competition release | |
| Playing Unholy Grail puts me in mind of the old saw about the glass | |
| being half-full or half-empty. For each positive I can think of, a | |
| counterbalancing negative also comes to mind. While the prose creates | |
| sharp, clear, atmospheric images, it is also burdened with numerous | |
| grammar and spelling errors. While the game had an inventive plot, | |
| this same plot was punctuated with moments of tediousness, | |
| implausibility, and pure frustration. And while Grail is orders of | |
| magnitude better than Allen's 1996 entry "The Curse of Eldor," it | |
| still fails to realize both its own potential and that of its author. | |
| Allen has accomplished a noteworthy programming achievement: he has | |
| written his own IF engine, one which mimics much of the important | |
| functionality of the current front-runners Inform and | |
| TADS. Unfortunately, it still doesn't perform at the levels of either | |
| of these popular "standard" IF engines, and suffers greatly by | |
| comparison. Again, it's a yin and yang situation: a quality engine is | |
| written from scratch, but it's still a poor competitor to the dominant | |
| systems, marred by problems ranging from the complex (tortured | |
| disambiguation) to the amazingly simple (an inexplicably arbitrary | |
| pathname in the CONFIG file.) | |
| Still, Unholy Grail was the first 1997 competition game I played, and | |
| it wasn't an altogether inauspicious start. For one thing, it | |
| represents remarkable progress on the part of the author. Unholy Grail | |
| is not the fulfillment of Stuart Allen's promise, but it marks him as | |
| one to watch. With the improvements he's already made to his JACL | |
| engine it seems entirely plausible that it could one day match the | |
| quality of the current state of the art. Also, this game is one of the | |
| few conceptually complete pieces of IF I've seen in the "thriller" | |
| genre, a field which is in many ways well-suited to IF, but whose only | |
| significant representative has been "Border Zone," a quality game but | |
| one whose gimmick of real-time has often overshadowed discussion of | |
| its generic groundbreaking. Unholy Grail was uneven; some things were | |
| really very good, other things really not very good at all. I hope | |
| it's a marker of better things to come. | |
| Prose: I found the prose in Unholy Grail fairly difficult to read. | |
| Sentences seemed to string endlessly, clause following clause until I | |
| thought perhaps the author had asked Henry James to | |
| ghost-write. However, I also think that the lack of a status line and | |
| room name threw me out of my ingrained IF reading habits, the | |
| disorientation of which probably contributed to my difficulty in | |
| following the author's long narrative strands. Or it could just be my | |
| own denseness -- that's always a possibility. Despite the game's | |
| verbosity, though, strong images floated up to me out of the sea of | |
| words. I have a very distinct picture in my mind of the swivel chair | |
| and radar screen in the control room, of the battered hut whose | |
| floorboards parted to show the ground below, and of the elegant, | |
| elaborate hotel. The author clearly had done his homework, and was | |
| able to create a very convincing picture of the character's | |
| environment. I just had to read some of the sentences a few times | |
| before I felt sure I knew what they were saying. | |
| Plot: The most ringing endorsement of the plot I can give is this: | |
| after the two-hour judging period had expired, and I was only 75% | |
| through with the game, I spent another half-hour on it because I | |
| *needed* to know how it ended. I found the plot difficult to get into | |
| at first (see Puzzles), and needed to refer often to the science | |
| encyclopedia so I could have a basic clue of what the game was talking | |
| about, but once I understood, I was inexorably drawn in by the | |
| skillfully dropped hints and slowly unfolding drama. | |
| On the other hand (and there's always another hand when it comes to | |
| Unholy Grail), I found some things in the plot pretty difficult to | |
| believe. Small points like the layout of the complex were jarring: | |
| would the military really have a female officer share a bathroom with | |
| a male civilian? Certainly the PC's name ("Alex") is gendered | |
| ambiguously, but imagining the character as a male (as I did) drains | |
| the layout of some believability. Also, some larger points (such as | |
| the Rotenone) seemed only to serve as red herrings, but created major | |
| implausibilities in the plot: if I've determined that Rotenone is | |
| causing the fish deaths, how can it be true that they're being caused | |
| by something which in fact behaves entirely differently? For that | |
| matter, if my basic science encyclopedia tells me that Rotenone causes | |
| fish to drown, why do I blame it for cancer? | |
| Puzzles: For the first hour I played the game, I was absolutely | |
| stumped. Finally, I resorted to the hint system and learned that | |
| because an extra-long sentence in the room description of the lab, I | |
| had neglected to examine the lab bench as closely as I ought. Once I | |
| found the global positioner, I was off and running. Consequently, I | |
| struggled with this game a lot more than its puzzles may have | |
| merited. Most of the puzzles were fairly easy, when they didn't | |
| involve guessing the verb (Can't turn the drum. Can't move the | |
| drum. Can't push the drum. Can't pull the drum. Can't look under the | |
| drum. Oh, look *behind* the drum!), and some were quite satisfying | |
| (especially the filing cabinet.) However, one puzzle was amazingly | |
| tedious -- it basically involved typing "n" 20 times and "w" 20 times, | |
| then doing the opposite. Here's where a "swim to" verb would have been | |
| much appreciated! | |
| Technical: | |
| writing -- In addition to the stylistic factors I mentioned in | |
| "Prose", Unholy Grail was also plagued with grammar and spelling | |
| errors. Certainly there was some attention to proofreading, but one | |
| or two more passes were needed. | |
| coding -- Unfortunately this is where Grail stumbles the most. JACL | |
| does a good job of imitating mainstream systems (especially Inform) in | |
| many ways, but in other crucial areas it falls critically short. For | |
| example, the system lacks an "oops" verb. Also, its disambiguation is | |
| weak, a fact which caused a great deal of frustration for me as my | |
| reasonable answers to its reasonable questions kept getting the | |
| response "The sentence you typed was incomplete." The system also | |
| overuses Graham Nelson's famous "You can't see any such thing," | |
| applying it to sentences whose nouns are examinable and manipulable in | |
| other contexts. In addition to these general systemic problems, Grail | |
| itself had a number of particular bugs which I've reported to the | |
| author in a separate email. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: "Paul O'Brian" <obrian SP@G ucsu.Colorado.EDU> | |
| NAME: Poor Zefron's Almanac | |
| AUTHORS: Carl Klutzke | |
| E-MAIL: cklutzke SP@G iquest.net | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: TADS standard | |
| SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/tads/almanac/almanac.gam | |
| VERSION: Version 1.0 (1997 competition release) | |
| Right about the time that Poor Zefron's Almanac (hereafter called PZA) | |
| starts feeling like another humdrum sword-and-sorcery game, it | |
| executes a nice surprising twist. To say too much more would be to | |
| give the game away, but the fact that the author bills PZA as "an | |
| interactive cross-genre romp" is a clue toward its direction. This | |
| twist made the game refreshing and fun again, especially after the | |
| frustration it caused me when I began playing it. More on that | |
| later. PZA does several things very well, one of which is its | |
| eponymous book, a tome owned by your wizardly master Zefron and left | |
| behind after his mysterious disappearance. This almanac contains a | |
| feature unique to all the CONSULTable items in IFdom (as far as I | |
| know): it can be BROWSEd. Browsing the almanac brings forth a random | |
| entry from within its pages; not only is it great fun to read these | |
| random entries, it also gives a sense of how thoroughly the almanac | |
| has been implemented. This device would be most welcome in other | |
| IF... how I'd love to browse the Encyclopedia Frobozzica or the | |
| Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy! Just having the book at hand lent a | |
| sense of scope and excitement to PZA. | |
| Unfortunately, my first 45 minutes or so of playing this game were | |
| extremely frustrating. PZA suffers from a couple of serious design | |
| flaws, the gravest of which is its repeated violation of the Fifth | |
| Right (from Graham Nelson's "Player's Bill of Rights"): not to have | |
| the game closed off without warning. Because of a fairly flexible (but | |
| extremely temporary) magic spell that becomes available at the very | |
| beginning of the game, I found myself repeatedly stranded, unable to | |
| proceed and forced to RESTART. This happened again later on in the | |
| game -- I committed a perfectly logical action and found out hundreds | |
| of turns later that this action had closed off the endgame. This is a | |
| frustrating experience, and one that could easily have been avoided | |
| with a few minor changes to the game's structure, changes which would | |
| not have had any discernible effect on puzzles or plot. In addition, | |
| there are a few areas in which the player character can be killed | |
| without warning, always an unwelcome design choice. PZA is (as far as | |
| I know) Carl Klutzke's first game, so chalk these flaws up to | |
| education. I look forward to playing another Klutzke game as | |
| well-implemented as PZA, but designed more thoughtfully. | |
| One nice element of PZA was its facility with IF homage. The game's | |
| "cluple" spell not only had a name that sounded straight out of | |
| Enchanter, it was virtually identical to that series' "snavig" | |
| spell. The almanac itself (as well as a number of other features) was | |
| a skillful allusion to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Finally, | |
| the XYZZY command response is one of the more clever I've seen in a | |
| while. Clearly PZA's author is a devotee of the old games, and his | |
| devotion shows in his work. I am hopeful that his next piece of IF | |
| will live up to his worthy aspirations. | |
| Prose: The prose in PZA is generally very good. Rooms, objects, and | |
| random events are described concisely but with attention to | |
| detail. Some of the locations are rather sparsely treated (for | |
| example, the town consists of one location), but such skimping is | |
| always done in service of the plot, and more detail would serve to | |
| distract rather than to enrich. | |
| Plot: This is definitely the strongest point of PZA. The game starts | |
| out with an engaging hook, and after the twist I was definitely | |
| enjoying the direction of the story quite a bit. In addition, the | |
| author has manipulated the scoring system in such a way as to give the | |
| feeling of multiple endings. Granted, many of those endings amount to | |
| one version or another of "*** You have died ***", but not all of | |
| them. There are more and less successful solutions to the story, and | |
| they are integrated so naturally into the endgame text that they | |
| almost escape notice. One of the nicest implementations of multiple | |
| endings in the competition. | |
| Puzzles: Here there were problems. What happens to PZA is that its | |
| individual problems are well-considered, and their solutions are | |
| perfectly logical. However, when the actions that comprise those | |
| solutions are attempted in other areas of the game, they all too often | |
| drive the narrative into a blind alley from which there is no | |
| escape. It's one of the hardest balancing acts in interactive fiction: | |
| how to have sensible puzzles logically integrated into the game, | |
| without making the narrative too linear, which in their elements | |
| create no dead ends for the player. PZA doesn't pull it off. | |
| Technical: | |
| writing -- I found no technical errors in the writing. | |
| coding -- Once I played PZA on WinTADS, I had no problems with it. I | |
| started out trying to use it on my old DOS version of TR, and before I | |
| could even get one command out it was giving me TADS "Out of Memory" | |
| errors. Whether this is a bug in the program of the interpreter, I | |
| don't know enough about TADS to say. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| TITLE: Zero Sum Game | |
| AUTHOR: Cody Sandifer | |
| E-MAIL: sandifer SP@G sunstroke.sdsu.edu | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: TADS standards | |
| SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/tads/zero/zero.gam | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| PLOT: Funny, innovative (1.6) ATMOSPHERE: Cartoonish (1.3) | |
| WRITING: Quite good (1.6) GAMEPLAY: Weak in spots (1.3) | |
| CHARACTERS: Very funny (1.7) PUZZLES: Some bad choices (1.2) | |
| MISC: Original concept, well executed (1.7) | |
| OVERALL: 7.5 | |
| In premise and execution, Cody Sandifer's Zero Sum Game is a genuinely | |
| funny send-up of an adventure game (Pork, eat your heart out) and | |
| perhaps the funniest work of IF since C.E. Forman MSTed | |
| Detective. Your mission: you have completed an average hack-and-slash | |
| adventure game, but when you come home, your mother sends you out to | |
| undo everything you've done. The goal is therefore to lose all 75 | |
| points you have at the start of the game, by unslaying a dragon, | |
| giving back treasures, and making good all your dirty deeds. That you | |
| frequently have to do more dirty deeds along the way is, of course, | |
| part of the humor. | |
| Humorous enough as a concept, but there's more: you get a sidekick | |
| named Maurice the Follower (when commanded to do something salacious: | |
| "Maurice can't spring to your aid if he's busy doing that!") who | |
| invariably refers to himself in the third person and provides running | |
| commentary on everything in the game. And I mean everything: | |
| periodically, Maurice exclaims "Oh boy! Look at the size of this [room | |
| name]!", which has quite the effect when it comes along in the | |
| location named Dirt Patch. Though Maurice is only minimally useful, it | |
| is advised that the player keep him around as long as possible to hear | |
| his various contributions. My personal favorite Maurice line, when | |
| accompanied by a nasty character: | |
| Maurice claps. "Hooray for goodness! Down with evil!" | |
| Irritated, Darlene glances sharply in Maurice's direction. | |
| "Um," stumbles Maurice. "Maurice is shutting up now." | |
| The comedy in Zero Sum Game extends well beyond Maurice. (When you try | |
| to give something to a dead character: "I bet you also loan money to | |
| trees.") The antiheroic "hero" character affords some humor in his or | |
| her own right (the gender varies with yours, which you choose at the | |
| beginning), stalking around killing everything in sight in a fashion | |
| reminiscent of many a combat-based role-playing game. (And berating | |
| his or her big toe for its interference.) There's even a sex scene of | |
| sorts (or a series of them), played for laughs rather than thrills, | |
| naturally. As with Mr. Sandifer's most recent work, "Everybody Loves | |
| a Parade," there are numerous particularized lines for ho-hum | |
| commands, notably "kiss", whose generic response is "You're not | |
| attracted to [character] in that secret special way" but which draws a | |
| wide variety of funny lines in certain situations. | |
| The glitches in Zero Sum Game mostly arise from the puzzles. For one | |
| thing, there are many opportunities to make the game unfinishable, | |
| many of them merely from doing things out of sequence; the player is | |
| advised to save often, since many of the key developments are a bit | |
| hard to foresee. One puzzle can even be solved "wrong" -- you'll get | |
| the points, but you won't be able to finish the game -- which is a bit | |
| irritating. Even though the game is short enough that restarting it is | |
| not a major hassle, the gameplay problems detract a bit from the | |
| overall enjoyability. There are also numerous small illogicalities -- | |
| you steal an object and its owner doesn't notice, though he does if | |
| you show up carrying it; you can't take an object from Maurice, even | |
| if he follows you around slavishly; the superstrong hero can't break | |
| an old rusty padlock. Logic is not a major factor in humorous games, | |
| of course, but then again that's one of the drawbacks of humorous | |
| games (witness Bureaucracy, one of the hardest games Infocom ever | |
| produced simply because the puzzles all required Douglas Adams logic), | |
| and Zero Sum Game suffers from that problem. | |
| Small problems aside, this is certainly one of the best of this year's | |
| competition, and without a doubt one of the most consistently | |
| enjoyable; even with the gameplay problems, I still thought it merited | |
| a 9. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: "Paul O'Brian" <obrian SP@G ucsu.Colorado.EDU> | |
| NAME: Zero Sum Game | |
| AUTHOR: Cody Sandifer | |
| E-MAIL: sandifer SP@G crmse.sdsu.edu | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: TADS standard | |
| SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/tads/zero/zero.gam | |
| VERSION: Release 1 (1997 competition release) | |
| Zero Sum Game (hereafter called "ZSG") is like the proverbial apple | |
| which is shiny & enticing on the outside, but inside is rapidly | |
| rotting away. The game starts with a fun premise: You've won. You've | |
| collected treasures and solved puzzles, and now (before the first move | |
| of the game) you're bringing them home to your mother. Unfortunately, | |
| she doesn't approve of theft and killing and other such goings on, and | |
| orders you to go back and put right all the wrongs you've | |
| committed. Thus the game's name: you try to bring your score down to | |
| zero before your moves (5000 of them) run out. This could have been a | |
| fun romp of reverse thinking, or an interesting exploration of the | |
| morality of the traditional stock adventurer character, or even | |
| both. As it turns out, the game doesn't really succeed on either | |
| count. | |
| The main problem that I had with ZSG is that it takes a much more | |
| callous approach to cruelty (no, not Zarfian cruelty. Real | |
| cruelty. [No offense, Andrew -- yours feels pretty real at the time.]) | |
| than I'm comfortable with. SPAG has a no-spoiler policy, so it's | |
| difficult to provide concrete examples of this problematic | |
| tendency. Suffice it to say that in order for the player to reach the | |
| solution, several harmless and friendly creatures within the game must | |
| be killed, sometimes in grotesque ways. These (and other) scenes make | |
| it apparent that the author has not taken a thoughtful, mature | |
| approach to the implications of his theme. That's OK -- not everything | |
| has to be thoughtful and mature. But ZSG reached such a level of | |
| cruelty that it wasn't much fun either. Dead bodies piled up in | |
| proportions comparable to any hack-and-slash MUD, and even though | |
| there's a resurrection spell in the game, you can't use it to revive | |
| any of the dozens of dead elves and villagers, or any of the other | |
| beings killed in the game (with one partial exception). The game's | |
| ending provides the final barb. Without giving away too much, I'll | |
| just say that it inflicts some arbitrary punishment on you, not as | |
| penance for your crimes, but because you're a "mama's boy" (or girl, | |
| as the case may be.) | |
| To give it its due, ZSG does have a clever premise, a promising start, | |
| and some good puzzles. Some of these puzzles have no particular moral | |
| bent, but are cleverly designed. Others in fact do have the particular | |
| ethical direction of reversing wrongs: you give the candy back to the | |
| baby, for example. That's why it left such a bad taste in my mouth to | |
| learn that other puzzles required coldly slaughtering your friends for | |
| the sake of a few points. I learned this from the walkthrough -- I had | |
| already thought of the "killing" solution to one puzzle, but couldn't | |
| believe it was the right thing to do until I heard it from the author | |
| himself. After that point, I detached from the game, using the | |
| walkthrough to see the whole thing and make notes for this review. It | |
| didn't get better. Zero Sum Game's gimmick is one that works best the | |
| first time it is used -- too bad this game did such a poor job of | |
| using it. | |
| Prose: The prose in ZSG is actually pretty good. It's what enabled me | |
| to become a little affectionate about Maurice and Chippy before I had | |
| to slaughter them. Still, much like the rest of the game, the prose is | |
| a good tool used for the wrong purpose. It's like a beginning | |
| carpenter using the best quality wood -- the result may look pretty, | |
| but it falls apart much too easily. | |
| Plot: I think this is a game that doesn't know what it wants to be | |
| about. After the competition ended, the author posted to rgif that in | |
| fact there was a "larger purpose" to the cruelty in ZSG, and that he | |
| was trying to do a number of things, including explore 1st person | |
| morality in IF, and to spoof the traditional treasure hunt in a funny, | |
| absurd, and extreme way. It's interesting to know this, and also to | |
| know that for a number of people, the game worked. Still, maybe I'm | |
| overly sensitive (or taking things too seriously), but it didn't work | |
| for me. The game's arbitrary limits force brutal answers to trivial | |
| problems -- not a very powerful exploration of the concepts the author | |
| claims to have had in mind. The plot is a wandering mess, ending in a | |
| big "piss off" to its player. Unsatisfying and unpleasant. | |
| Puzzles: The puzzles represented both the best and the worst things | |
| about ZSG. On the one hand, the first couple of puzzles I solved (the | |
| baby and the key) were really clever and interesting, and they raised | |
| my expectations from the already high level achieved by the game's | |
| premise. Unfortunately, the excitement of these only intensified the | |
| letdown of consulting the walkthrough and discovering what cold | |
| solutions were required for the other puzzles. It's a pity that the | |
| game didn't keep a consistent tone throughout -- I was much more | |
| disappointed than I would have been had all the puzzles required nasty | |
| measures to solve. | |
| Technical: | |
| writing -- I only found one grammar error in the entire text, a | |
| misplaced modifier. | |
| coding -- The coding was relatively coherent, though there was one | |
| major problem: the warning system was a complete failure. To test it, | |
| I ate the candy, killed the merchant, and killed Maurice in the first | |
| few turns of the game. No response. Other than that, I found no major | |
| bugs. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G ucsu.Colorado.EDU> | |
| NAME: Zombie! | |
| AUTHOR: Scott W. Starkey | |
| E-MAIL: starkey SP@G wcic.org | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: TADS standard | |
| SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/zombie/zombie.gam | |
| VERSION: 1997 competition release | |
| I love the beginning of Zombie!. In it, you play Valerie, a junior at | |
| the local college who is enjoying a relaxing camping trip after having | |
| finally dumped her loser boyfriend Scott. The atmosphere of the | |
| camping trip is very well-done, from the CD player spinning 80s hits | |
| to the various characters squabbling over how to build a | |
| campfire. Equally well- done is the terror of learning that there is | |
| something awful lurking in those woods, and it's coming to get | |
| you. You run, but to no avail: you are overtaken and killed... and | |
| then the prologue is over and you find yourself in your actual role: | |
| that of Scott, the unlucky guy who has just been dumped by his | |
| heartless girlfriend Valerie, ridden his motorcycle out into the | |
| country to get his mind off the breakup, and (wouldn't you know it?) | |
| run out of gas in the remote woods. The viewpoint shift caught me | |
| off-guard, and it worked marvelously. I felt like I had a better | |
| insight into my character after having seen him through the eyes of | |
| another, and vice versa for the character I played in the | |
| prologue. Viewpoint shifts in traditional fiction can make for a | |
| dramatic effect; interactive fiction, with its customary second person | |
| form of address, made the shift all the more dramatic, at least this | |
| time. It also serves perfectly to crank up the tension: one of the | |
| first things you hear with Scott's ears is a scream -- it sounds like | |
| Valerie, but what would she be doing out here in the woods? | |
| Unfortunately, after this promising beginning Zombie! stumbles | |
| badly. For one thing, after taking so much time to develop the | |
| relationship between Valerie and Scott, the game never returns to it! | |
| I fully expected to see Valerie show up again as a zombie, to see | |
| Scott's emotional reaction to encountering her in that state, and to | |
| find out what happens after he rescues her from zombification. A | |
| reunion, perhaps? Well, no. In fact, the prologue is the last we see | |
| of Valerie. Now, I usually like it when a game proves itself less | |
| predictable than I thought it would be, but this time I felt | |
| cheated. I wouldn't have paid so much attention to Valerie or put so | |
| much time into learning about the relationship had I realized that she | |
| was just a throwaway character. Doubly unfortunate is the fact this is | |
| far from Zombie!'s only problem. There are numerous bugs in the code, | |
| hand-in-hand (as they so often are) with an unpleasantly high count of | |
| mechanical errors in the writing. | |
| I kept finding myself feeling frustrated, because every time I really | |
| got into the game, allowed myself to get interested in its tensions, a | |
| bug or a spelling error would come along that would shatter mimesis | |
| and deflate the emotional effect. The thing is, the game does a great | |
| job of building that tension. It's a b-movie all the way, no deep or | |
| serious issues here, but it's definitely got that suspenseful, creepy | |
| feeling that the best b-movies have. (Yes, I'm aware of the irony in | |
| that phrase, so you needn't bother pointing it out.) The sound of | |
| heavy footsteps approaching, or the feeling of driving rain beating | |
| against a worn, gothic mansion, or the sight of horrific creatures | |
| staring dead ahead (literally!), and similar gothic pleasures were all | |
| very well-executed in this game, until you hit the inevitable | |
| technical error. Still, better to have a good game with lots of bugs | |
| than a mediocre game executed flawlessly. Bugs are easy to fix. When | |
| Starkey fixes them, Zombie! will definitely be one to recommend. | |
| Prose: The prose isn't beautiful by any means, and it often shows | |
| signs of awkward construction or phrasing. On the other hand, it does | |
| achieve many suspenseful moments, and quite often has some very nice | |
| pieces of description or atmosphere. I found the rain very convincing, | |
| and the eerie outside of the mansion was also well-portrayed. In | |
| addition, the prologue had some well-done dialogue and atmosphere, and | |
| built the tension just right for entry into the game proper. | |
| Plot: The plot was a good combination of the spooky and the silly, | |
| with the emphasis on the silly. I found it reminiscent of some of the | |
| early LucasArts games, especially the moments with Ed the Head. The | |
| kitschy charm of the mad scientist, his lumbering assistant, the | |
| haunted mansion, the unholy army of the dead, etc. was great. The main | |
| disappointment I had with the plot was the ending. It felt tacked on, | |
| as if there were more story to tell but because the game is a | |
| competition entry the author didn't have time to explore it. Also, as | |
| I mentioned above, the emphasis placed on Valerie was rather odd | |
| considering that she never again showed up in the game. I also felt a | |
| little frustrated by the ending. I don't want to give too much away, | |
| except to say that it managed neither the triumphant feeling of | |
| destroying evil nor the spooky feeling of inevitable defeat. | |
| Puzzles: I actually liked the puzzles in Zombie! quite a bit. Some of | |
| them were a little tacked on (the measuring cups), and the overall | |
| puzzle framework (collect the elements of a recipe) is quite shopworn | |
| by now. However, all the puzzles, cliched as they may have been, fit | |
| very well into the overall story, and that seamless fit makes a lot of | |
| things pretty forgivable. If the game hadn't been plagued by bugs, its | |
| puzzles would have come very close to achieving the goal of aiding the | |
| narrative rather than obstructing it. | |
| Technical: | |
| writing -- There were a significant number of mechanical errors in | |
| Zombie!'s writing. | |
| coding -- The game also had quite a number of bugs. It needs at least | |
| one round of intense playtesting before it's really ready for the | |
| world at large. | |
| SUBMISSION POLICY ---------------------------------------------------------- | |
| SPAG is a non-paying fanzine specializing in reviews of text adventure | |
| games, a.k.a. Interactive Fiction. This includes the classic Infocom | |
| games and similar games, but also some graphic adventures where the | |
| primary player-game communication is text based. | |
| Authors retain the rights to use their reviews in other contexts. We | |
| accept submissions that have been previously published elsewhere, | |
| although original reviews are preferred. At the moment, we are | |
| reluctant to accept any more reviews of Infocom games (though | |
| exceptions happen). | |
| CLOSING REMARKS-------------------------------------------------------------- | |
| In his answer to one of the interview questions, Nate Cull states that | |
| he thinks of the future of IF as "bleak, but hopeful." Well, I don't | |
| really know about the bleak part, but considering the sheer number of | |
| entries in the '97 competition, as well as the outstanding qualities | |
| of at least some of them, there is certainly reason for hope. Keep up | |
| the good work in 1998! | |
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | |
| Thank you for helping to keep text adventures alive! | |
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