| ___. .___ _ ___. | |
| / _| | \ / \ / ._| | |
| \ \ | o_/ | | | |_. | |
| .\ \ | | | o | | | | | |
| The |___/ociety for the |_|romotion of |_|_|dventure \___|ames. | |
| ISSUE # 14 | |
| Edited by Magnus Olsson (zebulon SP@G pobox.com) | |
| May 17, 1998. | |
| SPAG Website: http://www.afn.org/~afn55673/spag.html | |
| SPAG #14 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. | |
| REVIEWS IN THIS ISSUE ----------------------------------------------------- | |
| Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur | |
| Beyond Zork | |
| Change in the Weather | |
| Delusions | |
| Down | |
| Dungeons of Dunjin | |
| E-Mailbox | |
| Good Breakfast | |
| Leaves | |
| Lesson of the Tortoise | |
| Losing Your Grip | |
| Madame L'Estrange and the Troubled Spirit | |
| Magnetic Scrolls Collection | |
| Matter of Time | |
| Richard Basehart Adventure | |
| Spider and Web | |
| Tapestry | |
| Town Dragon | |
| Travels in the Land of Erden | |
| Unholy Grail | |
| Unnkulia Zero: The Search for Amanda | |
| VirtuaTech | |
| Zork Undiscovered Underground | |
| Zork Zero | |
| Zork: A Troll's Eye View (An Interactive Tedium) | |
| Zuni Doll | |
| EDITORIAL------------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| Finally - SPAG #14 is out, unfortunately about a month late. I hope it | |
| will prove worth the wait! | |
| This issue features an impressive collection of reviews, for a change | |
| divided into three sections. The first section comprises a mini-essay | |
| and three reviews by Bonnie Montgomery, the second contains reviews of | |
| old classics as well as exciting new games. The indomitable Duncan | |
| Stevens (aka Second April) has reviewed nine more of the '97 | |
| competition games; these make up the third section. | |
| Observant readers may notice that the "New Games" section has been | |
| renamed simply "News", and has changed its scope a little: Things are | |
| happening so fast in the IF world right now that I find it hard to | |
| keep up with all new releases, so instead of simply listing all games | |
| published since the last issue, this section will contain a selection | |
| of news items that managed to catch my eyes. (There are much more | |
| comprehensive "news services" on the Web; see for example Stephen | |
| Granade's page at http://interactfiction.miningco.com.) | |
| Last, but certainly not least, I've finally conquered the huge backlog | |
| of game ratings and given new life to the Reader's Scoreboard (this | |
| is, incidentally, one of the reasons this issue is late). A promising | |
| fact is that an increasing number of games seem to have received | |
| sufficiently many votes that their scores have begun to stabilize: | |
| when only one or two people have rated each game, scores fluctuate | |
| wildly and are very arbitrary (since each person has his or her own | |
| standards of rating); but now many games have reached a point where | |
| each new rating only causes a small change in the mean score. For the | |
| first time, a non-Infocom game heads the list; it's - no, wait, you'll | |
| have to see that for yourself - better keep suspense up until the very | |
| end! | |
| LETTERS-------------------------------------------------------------------- | |
| From: L. Ross Raszewski <rraszews SP@G hotmail.com> | |
| Howdy. Just thought I'd mention something that occured to me today | |
| while on ifMud. you can either laugh at it yoourself, or note it in the | |
| next Spag if there's rom and you think it interesting enough... | |
| Version 3 of the Z-machine is called "Standard" | |
| Version 4 of the Z-machine is called "Plus" | |
| Version 5 of the Z-machine is called "Advanced" | |
| Version 6 of the Z-machine is called "Graphical" | |
| Of course, these four formats make up the acronym "SPAG", tying the name | |
| doubly to interactive Fiction. | |
| Just thought you'd be interested. | |
| L. Ross Raszewski | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| SPAG replies: | |
| Interesting. Inspired by your letter, I of course had to check out | |
| what the numerical values of the letters SPAG (A = 1, B = 2, etc) add | |
| up to. It turns out that the answer is | |
| (drum roll) | |
| 43 | |
| "43?" I hear you say. What's up? How come we're just one tiny, lousy | |
| step away from the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe and | |
| Everything? | |
| Well, I have no idea. But maybe you readers have? If you can find up a | |
| "creative" interpretation of this numerological fact, please email it | |
| to me (zebulon SP@G pobox.com): I'll publish the most entertaining replies. | |
| NEWS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- | |
| Perhaps the most exciting news on the IF front was the release of HTML | |
| TADS - a new, extended version of TADS that uses HTML to format the | |
| game output. Not only does it support graphics and sound, but the use | |
| of HTML as a markup language gives the author unprecedented freedom of | |
| layout. For more information, see http://www.tela.bc.ca/tela/html-tads/. | |
| Two new, ambitious, full-size games have been released since the last | |
| issue: Andrew Plotkin's "Spider and Web" (reviewed below), and | |
| "Anchorhead", a Lovecraftian horror story by Michael Gentry | |
| (ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/anchor.z8). | |
| And then there was the mysterious TextFire 12-pack: despite the name, | |
| a package of 16 demos for new games, released all at once, and all by | |
| totally unknown and previously unheard-of authors. The demos proved to | |
| be, well, unusual. The whole business prompted a lot of comments and | |
| speculation; to add to the confusion, the 12-pack was released on | |
| April 1st... For the full story, see | |
| http://wcic.cioe.com/~starkey/textfire.html. | |
| It's official: the Annual IF Competition will take place this year as | |
| well. The official Web page is at http://www.ifcompetition.org. | |
| The May Issue of the British CU Amgiga Magazine includes 23 MB of text | |
| adventure games on its cover CD, plus another 20 MB of interpreters | |
| and tools (all from the IF-archive), and an article about the current | |
| state of the IF scene by rec.arts.i-f regular Jason Compton. While | |
| most of the stuff on the CD is Amiga specific, the IF games are mostly | |
| Inform and TADS (and Hugo and Alan) game files, and the CD is in a | |
| standard format that can be read at least from Windows 95 and Linux | |
| (reportedly from Macs as well). | |
| 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). | |
| 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 1: THREE SHORT GAMES ------------------------------------------------ | |
| Short, Shorter, Shortest: Snack-Size IF | |
| By Bonnie Montgomery <bkm SP@G pobox.com> | |
| Around the new year, Gerry Kevin Wilson released two small TADS games, | |
| Sea of Night and The Lesson of the Tortoise. On the announcement of The | |
| Lesson of the Tortoise in January, Andrew Plotkin posted this comment: | |
| "You know, I really like this category of short-short games. Something | |
| which can be written in a couple of weeks. Good for programming | |
| exercise; but *not* so big that you work for months, wrap your soul in | |
| it, and possibly burn out and flee from IF forever. Especially if it | |
| gets a bad review. Someone else do some." | |
| During the first three months of 1998, the IF community responded by | |
| hauling out a load of small games, some suitable for a 5-minute work | |
| break, others completable on a lunch hour. Some are meant as jokes, some | |
| as coding exercises, others as examples of an author's early works. | |
| As Andrew Plotkin suggests, there is much value in writing a small game. | |
| By setting limited goals for a piece, there is a greater chance for | |
| success than in the scope of a large game, in which overweening ambition | |
| sometimes invites failure. | |
| The following three reviews represent recent games of modest aspirations | |
| and small file size that succeed totally within their own boundaries: | |
| Gerry Kevin Wilson's The Lesson of the Tortoise, Matthew Garrett's | |
| Richard Basehart Adventure, and Dylan O'Donnell's Zork: A Troll's Eye | |
| View. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Bonnie Montgomery <bkm SP@G pobox.com> | |
| NAME: The Lesson of the Tortoise | |
| AUTHOR: Gerry Kevin Wilson (aka Whizzard) | |
| EMAIL: gkw SP@G pobox.com | |
| DATE: December 1997 | |
| PARSER: TADS | |
| SUPPORTS: TADS ports | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/tortoise.gam | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| You're an unlikely IF hero: Wang Lo, a small but persevering and | |
| prosperous Chinese farmer. Your adversaries: a serpent, your faithless | |
| wife, and a disloyal farm hand. Your allies: a tortoise, your strapping | |
| son, a trusting servant girl, and a ghostly ancestral apparition. Quite | |
| a story ahead of you, wouldn't you think? Would you believe that the | |
| game can be won in only 30 turns and contains only 9 locations? With the | |
| economical prose characteristic of a folk tale, Whizzard drops you into | |
| the Chinese folkloric past, sketches out characters and plot, and | |
| delivers a moral, all in a very satisfying 30 minutes or so of play. | |
| Whizzard has streamlined his game in several ways: One is to simplify | |
| interactions with NPCs; verbal interactions are limited to "talk to NPC" | |
| and giving them commands. Carryable objects are few, and ones that have | |
| served their purpose are tidily moved out of the player's reach. | |
| Even with these simplifications, the game does not feel sparsely | |
| inhabited. The game understands most nouns that appear in room | |
| descriptions. Default responses have been nicely handled, often changed | |
| to reflect a more Confucian approach ("That action seems unlikely to | |
| save you, wise one.") than the epistemologically challenged standard | |
| TADS parser responses ("I don't know how to X the Y."). | |
| The puzzles are sometimes a challenge, but Whizzard provides a | |
| progressively more explicit hint system. The game therefore appeals to | |
| puzzle fans and story fans. Puzzle fans can tough it out without the | |
| hints. Story fans can breeze through the puzzles using hints, which is a | |
| nice way to allow the story to flow easily, a great pleasure in this | |
| game. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Bonnie Montgomery <bkm SP@G pobox.com> | |
| NAME: Richard Basehart Adventure | |
| AUTHOR: Matthew Garrett | |
| EMAIL: cavan SP@G enterprise.net | |
| DATE: January 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform ports | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware | |
| URL: http://homepages.enterprise.net/cavan/rba/rba.z5.bin | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| When I contacted Matthew Garrett for his input on this review, his | |
| reactions were roughly shock, surprise, and worry. He wrote, "I'm | |
| probably guilty of wasting several people's time with a fairly simple | |
| joke." | |
| The joke of Richard Basehart Adventure is "steal whatever original | |
| creative content exists in an IF game that is itself derivative of a | |
| another game." The game whose creative content is being ransacked is | |
| Detective: An Interactive MiSTing by C. E. Forman, in which the | |
| characters of "Mystery Science Theater 3000" heckle their way through | |
| Matthew Barringer's Detective. | |
| To find a walkthrough of Richard Basehart Adventure, read Forman's | |
| introduction to his MiSTing. MST3K character Gypsy creates a simple game | |
| about her idol, which Garrett brings to life, capturing every nuance. | |
| However, since there are only about three nuances total, actual playing | |
| of Richard Basehart Adventure is, in my opinion, optional. | |
| Is Matthew Garrett guilty of wasting my time? I think not. He pointed me | |
| back to Forman's MiSTing of Detective, a game I had not played since the | |
| 1995 competition. A year later Forman released a Silver Screen Edition, | |
| which included an interview with Matthew Barringer (15 years old and | |
| "much cooler" than the 12-year-old self that had written Detective) and | |
| snippets from an abandoned but hilarious second MiSTing, The Caverns of | |
| Chaos. | |
| The worst crime for which Garrett can be accused is not properly using | |
| his Web site as a vehicle for self-promotion. (He might have learned a | |
| trick or two from Forman, who, by his own admission, shamelessly | |
| promotes The Path to Fortune throughout the Silver Screen Edition.) The | |
| page from which Richard Basehart Adventure is available does not offer | |
| any links back to Garrett's home page. If it did, Garrett could have | |
| drawn attention to his other projects, including his "proper" IF work in | |
| progress, which he is offering for download in return for feedback. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Bonnie Montgomery <bkm SP@G pobox.com> | |
| NAME: Zork: A Troll's Eye View (An Interactive Tedium) | |
| AUTHOR: Dylan O'Donnell | |
| EMAIL: dylanw SP@G demon.net | |
| DATE: January 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform ports | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/inform/troll.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 2 | |
| I must say I had my doubts about this game during the first few turns. | |
| The player character is a workaday troll toiling in the underground | |
| world of Zork, unable to leave his post and with only his bloody axe for | |
| company. I worried that perhaps the tedium aspect was the only comment | |
| Dylan wished to make about a troll's work. When the first adventurer | |
| appeared in the room but then retreated, I really thought there might | |
| not be anything more to the game. Then out of nowhere, another | |
| adventurer appeared and unsportingly killed me! I had to have revenge! I | |
| stuck around for the next 100 turns until I killed and was killed at | |
| least a dozen times. Sated, I quit. | |
| If I had stuck to my post for a couple dozen more turns, my shift would | |
| have ended, reported Dylan. I played the game again and was gratified to | |
| receive my paycheck. The game rewards you with extra commands to use in | |
| a replay, including how to cut down on the tedium and maximize the | |
| combat. | |
| This game is a good example of how an author can set clear limits for a | |
| small game and satisfy the player within those boundaries. Just about | |
| every possible action is rewarded with a response in this one-location | |
| game. Several classic Zork commands are supported. Responses vary | |
| depending on whether you are on guard or in combat. While the combat | |
| text is not original (it is taken from the Dungeon source), it | |
| highlights the spurting blood aspects of Zork's sword and axe play. | |
| Shameful confession: I wrote to Dylan praising his text in the combat | |
| scenes and received his reply that the text was not his own. I have | |
| never gotten very far playing Zork or its progenitors. Dylan explained | |
| the retreating adventurer I had first encountered: "The adventurers that | |
| don't stop are the ones that didn't get the sword from the Living Room, | |
| spot a big nasty monster and think, 'Oops. Maybe I'd better try a | |
| different route'; they're back as soon as they find the chimney up and | |
| come back round with the sword." I was the kind of adventurer who fooled | |
| around a bit, got bored, and quit before ever meeting a troll in | |
| battle. Maybe it's time to go back and try again. | |
| Zork: A Troll's Eye View is billed as a coding exercise by its author, | |
| but I think it serves another useful purpose. Give it to your friends | |
| who might like IF, but who might also find the full-scale Zork daunting. | |
| Whet their appetites with this game, and you may have a new convert to | |
| interactive fiction. | |
| REVIEWS 2: FROM ARTHURIAN LEGEND TO ZUNI DOLLS -------------------------- | |
| From: Joe Mason <jcmason SP@G uwaterloo.ca> | |
| NAME: Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur | |
| AUTHOR: Infocom (Bob Bates) | |
| EMAIL: ??? | |
| DATE: 1989 | |
| PARSER: Infocom Standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Infocom ports | |
| AVAILABILITY: Masterpieces of Infocom | |
| URL: Not available. | |
| PLOT: Standard | |
| ATMOSPHERE: Evocative but inconsistent | |
| WRITING: Fair GAMEPLAY: Good | |
| CHARACTERS: Some memorable, some stereotyped PUZZLES: Fair | |
| MISC: Graphics - atmospheric | |
| OVERALL: A fun diversion | |
| Arthur is one of Infocom's last games, and like Zork Zero it combines | |
| text and graphics. The graphics are completely unnecessary to the | |
| story - in fact it is possible to turn them off completely - but they | |
| are pleasant to look at and add to the game's atmosphere. The | |
| medieval banner styling of the background window is especially well | |
| done. | |
| The interface does have a few flaws, however. There are several | |
| possible screen modes, with the lower half of the screen devoted to | |
| command entry and the upper half to graphics or description. One mode | |
| shows a picture of the area, one shows the textual description (which | |
| duplicates details of the pictures), one shows the player's inventory, | |
| one the current score, and one a Beyond-Zork style on-screen map. A | |
| sixth mode is the traditional full-screen text mode. The modes | |
| themselves are nice (the map is especially handy) but switching between | |
| them is done using function keys, making it hard to remember what key to | |
| hit for which mode. Also, the function key support is broken for some | |
| interpreters - it works under Frotz 2.32, but not WinFrotz, for example. | |
| The game itself is of typical Infocom stature. Despite being produced | |
| in their twilight years, it shows no decrease in quality - quite the | |
| opposite, in fact. The plot begins promisingly, with Merlin giving | |
| young Arthur a mission to demonstrate that he has all the qualities | |
| required for a good King. However, it soon becomes a typical treasure | |
| hunt, with the player (as Arthur) required to defeat several evil | |
| enemies in order to gather trophies to present to the Red Knight. Once | |
| he has done this, the Red Knight will let him past in order to get the | |
| item he needs to defeat the usurper King Lot and claim Excalibur. | |
| Slightly more depth is given by the fact that the treasures, while | |
| arbitrary, do have a common thread: they all show proof that Arthur has | |
| defeated a threat to the land. As Merlin explains, "His [the Red | |
| Knight's] life's mission is to rid the land of evil," so there is a | |
| reason for the treasure-hunt quest to be occuring. Still, it feels out | |
| of place in a game which, at the beginning, seems to place emphasis on | |
| story and character. | |
| In fact, the entire game has a disjointed quality to it. The built-in | |
| hint file includes a section of notes giving historical background to | |
| King Arthur's time, and explaining several of the references used. The | |
| section titled "Reality vs. Romance" begins, "There is inherent conflict | |
| built into writing a game about King Arthur. It is the conflict between | |
| history and legend - the way things were, versus the way we wish they | |
| were." This game unfortunately does not deal with this conflict as well | |
| as it could. Some locations and characters - such as King Lot's castle, | |
| the poor peasant's hut, or the village idiot - are quite well-drawn and | |
| lifelike. These characters tend to evoke the atmosphere of the "real" | |
| Arthur, the medieval warlord whose court was a fortress providing his | |
| serfs with protection from barbarian invaders. However, mixed in with | |
| this atmospheric setting is the "romance" Arthur, with its archetypal | |
| coloured Knights who quest against generic "evil". The characters | |
| involved in this aspect of the game are much less responsive and seem | |
| stereotypical or comical. The two halves of the plot sit uneasily | |
| together, resulting in a game that almost succeeds at telling a good | |
| story but ends up feeling more like a string of puzzles linked by | |
| narrative. | |
| The puzzles are mostly good, but some display the same split. Some are | |
| character- and plot-driven, but others involve word problems and other | |
| artificial constructs and seem quite out of place. There is one maze, | |
| which is easy to map once the trick is discovered but still annoying. | |
| One nice touch is Merlin's gift to Arthur: the ability to turn into | |
| various animals. Some puzzles require using the special abilities of | |
| these animals, which is a nice touch. The puzzles are not especially | |
| hard, and the presence of well-written Invisiclues style online hints | |
| makes the game easy to solve. | |
| Arthur, while not an exceptional game, is still fun to play and well | |
| worth a look. By the time of its writing, Infocom had become adept at | |
| integrating puzzles and story, with the result that it mostly flows very | |
| well. Its deficiencies are mostly due to confusion over how to present | |
| the Arthurian legend, rather than a failure as interactive fiction. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Beyond Zork | |
| AUTHOR: Brian Moriarty | |
| PARSER: Infocom Standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Infocom ports | |
| AVAILABILITY: Masterpieces of Infocom | |
| Brian Moriarty's Beyond Zork is in several ways unique in the Infocom | |
| library--not only for its use of the Z6 format to do on-screen | |
| mapping, but for its use of a role-playing-game-like plot. Just as | |
| importantly, it gives the player a sense of place in the land of | |
| Quendor that the Zork and Enchanter series had lacked. Though the | |
| role-playing element needs work, Beyond Zork succeeds admirably as a | |
| puzzle-solving game in its own right. | |
| Beyond Zork's title suggests that it continues the Zork series, but it | |
| actually has little in common with the originals--the heavy reliance | |
| on magic suggests the Enchanter series, and the sense of exploring a | |
| populated land rather than a series of caverns gives the game a | |
| different feel. Most obvious of the innovations in the gameplay is the | |
| role-playing game element, an element that produced decidedly mixed | |
| results for Infocom on each try (Quarterstaff, not that this reviewer | |
| would know, and Journey), and while Beyond Zork succeeds, the combat | |
| element is far from the highlight of the game. It's a bit hard to | |
| explain why this is so--like most RPGs, the player can choose between | |
| swordplay and magic to fight the battles, and acquire increasingly | |
| sophisticated weaponry (okay, okay, a sword over a battleaxe over a | |
| shillelagh, maybe not all that sophisticated) to dispose of the | |
| enemies. | |
| The difference may lie in that opportunities to increase skill | |
| levels--strength and dexterity and such--are rather haphazard in | |
| Beyond Zork, whereas many RPGs increase character qualities with each | |
| level attained, meaning that one can improve one's character without | |
| necessarily getting anywhere in the game. In Beyond Zork, though the | |
| character qualities are occasionally relevant, there are few instances | |
| where the player increases his or her intelligence or strength merely | |
| in order to be smarter or stronger; usually, the increases are | |
| directly linked to solving puzzles. Though that approach seems | |
| preferable, it made the few times when a puzzle's solution was | |
| unavailable because the requisite character attribute was too low a | |
| bit irritating. (In other words, there may be times when the player | |
| needs more of a certain attribute to solve a puzzle, and goes out | |
| hunting for a way to increase that attribute. This sort of thing | |
| strains the idea that the attributes are supposed to measure your | |
| development, since increasing them is an end in itself.) More | |
| fundamentally, though, Beyond Zork is far more plot- and | |
| puzzle-oriented than the bulk of RPGs, and the combat scenes feel like | |
| the game stops while the player tries to get rid of the obstacle. | |
| Another factor separating Beyond Zork from Zorks 1-3 is the NPC | |
| element--there are as many of them here as in the first three games | |
| combined (perhaps more, depending on whom one includes on each count), | |
| and most of them are well developed and coded. (The minx may still be | |
| my favorite Infocom NPC, even though her usefulness in the game is | |
| limited.) Encounters with the cook, the sailor, the cardinal, and | |
| others help reinforce the feel that the territory is populated, rather | |
| than a deserted maze, and while this lends a schizophrenic feel at | |
| times--does no one care that you pick up everything that isn't nailed | |
| down?--it makes for an intriguing game environment. | |
| The plot--retrieve the Coconut of Quendor to safeguard the existence | |
| of magic, or, I should say, Magick--is nothing particularly special; | |
| it suffers from the usual disease of a big game, specifically that one | |
| muddles along solving puzzles with very little sense that they have | |
| anything to do with the larger objectives, besides that the game | |
| designers surely wouldn't bother throwing in irrelevant puzzles | |
| (unless they included Steve Meretzky, which they don't here). I can't | |
| say that this bothers me much anymore, but it seems particularly | |
| obvious here--one does not learn anything about the whereabouts of the | |
| coconut until well into the game, and finding it at the end amounts to | |
| stumbling over it. What plot Beyond Zork has is often entertaining, | |
| but it hardly makes a coherent whole. The game takes place | |
| concurrently with Spellbreaker, and it occurred to me that it might | |
| have been interesting to dovetail the plot with that game a bit | |
| more--magic, except for when you find Orkan of Thriff's journal, | |
| doesn't appear to be failing. Certainly, what plot Beyond Zork has is | |
| well beyond collect-the-treasures, but I still wanted something more. | |
| The puzzles are original and entertaining, though somewhat maddening | |
| in a few cases (mild spoilers ahead)...I figured out one of the | |
| solutions to the bridge problem early on, but assumed that I was | |
| solving it "wrong," that the resource I was using needed to be used | |
| elsewhere. (It also seemed like that particular puzzle ignored a | |
| perfectly good solution--the use of the dispel staff.) The time-travel | |
| puzzle is an original variant on a much-used convention, though, and | |
| the butterfly puzzle employs magic in a novel way, and both are among | |
| the Infocom's best--and the multiple solutions to several puzzles are | |
| a refreshing touch. (Though there are some apparently logical | |
| solutions that aren't implemented, frustratingly.) | |
| Most of the puzzles aren't particularly hard, though a few require | |
| semi-suicidal actions for motivations that aren't particularly | |
| obvious--and the final puzzle is so obvious that it hardly deserves | |
| the name. (Tangent: many of Infocom's fantasy games seem to either | |
| have an absurdly easy or an absurdly difficult puzzle at the | |
| end--Enchanter, Sorcerer and Wishbringer (even for an introductory | |
| game) are easy in that respect, and Zorks 2 and 3 are difficult to the | |
| point of unfairness. Spellbreaker, I think, is just right, and Zork 1 | |
| and Zork Zero don't really have ending puzzles as such.) Several of | |
| the puzzles revolve around the combat situations; a few aren't really | |
| combat situations at all, but rather puzzles in disguise, enemies to | |
| be dispatched by ruse rather than by brute force. Those moments | |
| highlight the tension between conventional IF and RPG that's going on | |
| here--and, naturally, the IF element usually seems more compelling. | |
| The writing is, as usual, first-rate--the room descriptions show why | |
| no self-respecting game author should be allowed to get away with "You | |
| are in a forest...you are in a forest...you are in a forest" for a | |
| series of similar rooms. Consider: | |
| Twilight | |
| An ancient oak tree turns the day to twilight beneath the | |
| impressive sprawl of its branches. | |
| Pine Grove | |
| A carpet of amber softens your footsteps between the rows of tall, | |
| sweet-smelling pines. | |
| Eerie Copse | |
| A nameless blight has twisted the surrounding elms into sinister forms | |
| that creak and groan in the dry breeze. | |
| These and other well-written sequences (an amusing riff on The Wizard | |
| of Oz, for instance--did this have anything to do with the plan | |
| kicking around Infocom to write a full-length Wizard of Oz | |
| parody?--and the visions of other Infocom games in a crystal ball of | |
| sorts) make Beyond Zork much more than wandering between puzzles, even | |
| if the story is a bit weak. The humor vital to so many Infocom works | |
| is plentiful here--playing as a woman and asking the shopkeeper about | |
| the Potion of Might is one of the best Easter eggs in any Infocom | |
| game--and there are lots of entertaining moments: one of the enemies | |
| you encounter is a "cruel puppet" whose form of combat hinges on | |
| creative insults: it twists its appearance into a caricature of yours, | |
| or "accuses your mother of shocking improprieties." This is all the | |
| funnier because it feels like a dig at RPG combat, which usully | |
| requires either impressive weapons or an elaborate system of magic; | |
| battling via insult (it would be even better if you could answer) | |
| comes as a sly "sticks and stones" sort of jab at those conventions. | |
| Experienced Infocom players will recognize many little responses or | |
| objects, from Wishbringer ("A concealed bell tinkles merrily" and the | |
| vapor) to Hitchhiker's (being teased for a typo) to the Zork series | |
| (the sailor, of course), and a sequence involving the Implementors | |
| adds the obligatory element of self-reference. But perhaps the best | |
| moment in Beyond Zork is the archway puzzle and the point of view of | |
| the game's setting that it provides--it puts the game into a | |
| perspective that I found sobering. (Very few fantasy games are endowed | |
| with as much pseudo-historical background as the Zork series, and | |
| Beyond Zork, much more than the original series, puts the history to | |
| good use.) | |
| On the whole, Beyond Zork is well worth the playing; truly difficult | |
| puzzles are few, the game atmosphere is effective, and the | |
| ending--even if it points to a sequel that never happened--is | |
| thoroughly rewarding. Even if RPGs aren't your style, there is plenty | |
| more in Beyond Zork than hack-and-slash; it deserves consideration | |
| among Infocom's best. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Change in the Weather | |
| AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin | |
| E-MAIL: erkyrath SP@G netcom.com | |
| DATE: 1995 | |
| PARSER: Inform | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/weather.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 6 | |
| PLOT: Small, tightly woven (1.6) ATMOSPHERE: Remarkable (1.8) | |
| WRITING: Excellent (1.6) GAMEPLAY: "Cruel" (1.3) | |
| PUZZLES: Very difficult (1.3) CHARACTERS: One, intriguing (1.2) | |
| MISC: Interlocking parts fit together well (1.6) | |
| OVERALL: 7.9 | |
| Andrew Plotkin's first serious game, as he terms it, is an intriguing | |
| effort: it introduced the IF community to many key Zarfian elements, | |
| notably the "cruelty" of making nearly every move vital and closing | |
| off the game without warning, and the magic realism that dominated | |
| So Far, though it's present here in a much subtler form. Beyond that, | |
| though, Change in the Weather offers a remarkably vivid setting, and | |
| effectively uses small changes in the landscape to advance the plot. | |
| The story, at first glance, is not overly complicated: you wander away | |
| from your companions in a park and get stuck out in the rain on a | |
| steep hillside, and must use what comes to hand to keep a bridge from | |
| washing out. Watching all the while is a fox who seems to understand | |
| the action better than you do; the fox is only relevant on two | |
| occasions, but having it around gives you a sense of collaboration in | |
| your efforts to save the bridge. At any rate, the story is essentially | |
| divided into two; there is a languid opening section that affords a | |
| chance to explore the hill, and a breathless second half where you | |
| have, by my count, precisely one move to waste (out of perhaps 45 in | |
| all). The landscape changes to reflect the onset of the darkness and | |
| the rain, but various events--lightning striking a tree, for | |
| example--also cause important changes. Virtually every detail is | |
| vital; the player is advised to take time in the beginning to observe | |
| everything available. | |
| Change in the Weather is a veritable textbook for authors who want to | |
| know how to create and then change a mood, or infuse a scene with | |
| tension. The changes in the landscape, while important to the plot, | |
| are perhaps even more important for the atmosphere they create. In the | |
| first part, for example, we get this: | |
| You're standing on a ledge, on a rather steep, overgrown hillface. | |
| Greenery hides the stream below and the hilltop above, and the | |
| meadows and sky beyond sweep away into the incandescent west. | |
| Whereas, after nightfall: | |
| You're standing on a ledge, on a rather steep, overgrown | |
| hillface. Rain hides the stream below and the hilltop above, and to | |
| the west is only dark. | |
| The changes in the setting to induce a change in mood recall | |
| Wishbringer, and while Change in the Weather owes less to fantasy than | |
| Wishbringer, the details evoke a similar sense of unease, reinforced | |
| by voices in the distance which seem to be calling your name, and | |
| which become louder as you dash around the hillside. Plotkin is | |
| particularly skillful in using timed events and small details to | |
| heighten the tension: once the protagonist awakens amid the storm, | |
| everything appears to be happening at once--runoff starts flowing, | |
| lightning strikes a tree and a branch falls, the stream rises, and the | |
| voices in the distance persist at the edge of the player's | |
| consciousness. The various events are all separated by line breaks, so | |
| they have the feeling of independent events that are following their | |
| own paths. | |
| Plotkin uses sound as well as visual details to build the tension: a | |
| bush gives way with a "small snap," the tree falls with a "splintering | |
| crash" after the "Crack!" of thunder--and the dizzy rush of detail | |
| among all the concurrent events produces a whirling, desperate | |
| confusion. Though we get little of the protagonist's thoughts, it | |
| seems plausible to support that he or she is somewhat less than calm, | |
| and the author does his utmost to transfer the growing sense of panic | |
| to the player. When lightning dazzles you and leaves you in the dark | |
| again, you "blink furiously, trying to sort out the shadows from | |
| what's really there." That connotes both the sensory struggle--night | |
| vision shattered in a flash of light--but also the urgency; your task | |
| is sufficiently pressing that you try to blink away the afterimages | |
| and keep moving, lest you waste valuable time. For the most part, | |
| Plotkin is content to show the details rather than telling the player | |
| how to feel, and the few exceptions--digging a trench, you "claw | |
| desperately" at the earth--are well placed. | |
| The author notes that this is a "cruel" game, and he doesn't | |
| exaggerate: it is virtually impossible to solve it on the first try, | |
| or even on the first ten tries. Making every move count is one form of | |
| cruelty, and the writing is good enough (and the mood sufficiently | |
| pervasive) that the game doesn't get dull even after many | |
| repetitions. Another form of cruelty--a required action in the first | |
| half of the game which is much less than obvious, and which is clued | |
| rather subtly--is less successful, to my mind, because it weakens the | |
| game's logic: it's one thing to have to make sense of a wide variety | |
| of concurrent events, it's another to make an intuivie leap that a key | |
| object is hidden in a strange place. The sense in the second half, | |
| even when I failed to think of something vital on the proper move, was | |
| that, well, if I'd been really thinking, I would have known that. And | |
| other elements, the "magic realism" feel--the fox's remarkable | |
| prescience, a certain change that the rain couldn't logically | |
| cause--don't break the logic, somehow, because they seem only just | |
| outside the realm of usual possibilities; they seem like the sort of | |
| things we feel could happen easily enough, given a minor incursion of | |
| the supernatural. It's hardly less logical that the interlocking parts | |
| of the game come together in the way they do, after all, but the | |
| player isn't about to question that; likewise, the magical bits | |
| require only the sorts of suspension of disbelief that a player is | |
| happy to make anyway. Moreover, certain bits of the game that can't | |
| quite be put down to magic remain speculative at the end, perhaps | |
| intentionally so; a Zarf game wouldn't be a Zarf game if everything | |
| were fully explained (or even explainable). | |
| The charm of Change in the Weather, for me at least, lies in the way | |
| it infuses a relatively ordinary setting with such a range of | |
| feelings: from pleasant sunset to violent, ominous night storm to | |
| placid dawn, the same locations are rewritten to instill different | |
| moods. Like all good writers, Plotkin is sparing with the adjectives | |
| and more often uses verbs to produce the desired effect: | |
| You are high on the hill; it rolls downward and off to the | |
| west. Beyond the trees and brush, meadows glow in the thickening | |
| sunlight. Behind you stands the last stony lump of hill. A narrow | |
| trail curves away to the northwest. | |
| The various elements of the scene are given personality by "rolling" | |
| and "glowing" and such, and the impression of a peaceful sunlit scene | |
| is clear enough that more description isn't necessary. Likewise, after | |
| sundown: | |
| A wide angular tongue juts out from the hillside. A black expanse | |
| stretches to the north and west, impenetrable with rain. Every few | |
| moments, a directionless flicker of lightning tries to pull detail | |
| from the darkness; but there is only mist. | |
| Again, elements of the scenery get active verbs rather than simply | |
| being described, and the adjectives are placed to convey something | |
| essential rather than simply piling on the description: the | |
| "directionless" lightning illustrates how the flash comes from and | |
| leads nowhere in particular, the "impenetrable" darkness limits the | |
| immediate range of vision. The best atmospheric effects are those that | |
| aren't obviously trying to be, and in that respect, Change in the | |
| Weather succeeds--and, as in Wishbringer, only minor changes are | |
| necessary to convey the developments in the landscape. | |
| Though its scope is more limited than that of So Far, Change in the | |
| Weather is accomplished in its own right. Even if "cruel", it's | |
| successful both as a puzzle-solving challenge and as an evocative | |
| setting. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Delusions | |
| AUTHOR: C.E. Forman | |
| E-MAIL: ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net | |
| DATE: 1996 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/delusns.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 3 | |
| PLOT: Complicated but well done (1.6) ATMOSPHERE: Effective (1.5) | |
| WRITING: Very strong (1.5) GAMEPLAY: Solid (1.5) | |
| CHARACTERS: A tad hackneyed (1.3) PUZZLES: Clever (1.6) | |
| MISC: A bit too much story, but thought-provoking (1.6) | |
| OVERALL: 7.7 | |
| One thing about C.E. Forman's Delusions that can't possibly be denied | |
| is that it's got plot. Boy, has it got plot--several stories' worth, | |
| at least. If your head isn't spinning by the end of it (for that | |
| matter, by the time the first few twists come long), you missed a lot | |
| and you should go back and replay it. Moreover, the plot takes on a | |
| variety of guises along the way--part science experiment, part | |
| techno-thriller, part mystery (well, sort of), part, um, | |
| metaphysical-technological thesis, etc. If there's one thing Delusions | |
| isn't, it's predictable. | |
| It's arguable, of course, whether cramming a game full of story | |
| enhances its enjoyability; at bottom, it's a matter of taste, and | |
| depends in large part on whether the player is interested in the story | |
| at hand. It also depends, of course, on how well integrated into the | |
| game the story is, and in this respect in particular, Delusions | |
| shines: the puzzles serve the purposes of the plot, and the challenges | |
| are hurdles that reflect crucial discoveries or roadblocks in the | |
| story. They are, to be sure, far from easy; I doubt I ever would have | |
| guessed a few of them without the aid of the hint menu--but they are | |
| distinctly not puzzles thrown into an unrelated story. The charm of | |
| this is that puzzle-solving and figuring out the plot are usually one | |
| and the same task, so there isn't a sense of "gee, I've got to figure | |
| out how to do this to move the story along"--usually, at least. | |
| To say much about the story beyond the initial premise would spoil it, | |
| so...you are part of a research team doing VR simulations, and as the | |
| game begins, you are busy trying to debug one of them, a scenario in | |
| which you play a fish dodging hungry predators. The opening few | |
| puzzles within the simulation are an appealing introduction and help | |
| draw the player into the game, though I was hoping that the fish scene | |
| would play more of a role in the game than it does. At any rate, the | |
| plot thickens appropriately once you've done what you need to do as a | |
| fish, in a variety of unexpected ways. | |
| In one key respect, Delusions has an odd split personality: there are | |
| sections of the game where the plot is more or less told to you via | |
| several screens of text, and there are other sections where the game | |
| gives you virtually no guidance and you're left to piece things | |
| together from some fairly obscure clues. Both parts, to be sure, make | |
| some sense within the plot of the game, but the gameplay is a bit | |
| disorienting as a result (not, of course, inconsistently with the tone | |
| of the story). Early discoveries, furthermore, encourage the player to | |
| view what he's told with skepticism, and yet the plot elements you're | |
| told later are essentially true. In some respects, this can't be | |
| avoided--there's too much story here for the player to discover it all | |
| by himself, without resort to diary entries or some other such tired | |
| device, and certain points simply have to come out via screens of | |
| text. But given that one of the most intriguing plot elements comes | |
| out through discovery, there's still a bit of tension there. | |
| That element bears mention because Babel, a 1997 competition entry, | |
| did something similar, though the author has since said that he hadn't | |
| played Delusions and came up with the idea by himself. Though both use | |
| it effectively, Delusions tries something more ambitious that ends up | |
| slowing things down: the required set of actions has a sequence in | |
| mind (with some, but only some, variation allowed), meaning that, once | |
| the player gets the idea, the process boils down to walking around and | |
| manipulating objects rather than discovering as the plot presumably | |
| intended. It would work better if there were more obvious logic to the | |
| sequence, but there wasn't any that I could guess, and the eventual | |
| conclusion was apparent long before the chain was | |
| over. (Whereas--perhaps I'm just dense--I didn't guess the | |
| corresponding revelation in Babel.) The post hoc explanations for why | |
| you don't tumble to this discovery before seem just a little thin, | |
| moreover. | |
| This is nitpicking, though, because the plot does work very well | |
| indeed. Particularly effective, even though frustrating, is the | |
| middle section of the game, which repeats ad infinitum until you find | |
| a way to break out of the loop. The puzzles associated with this are | |
| difficult but fair: everything is put together logically, and the | |
| tension, when it seems like your plan might get foiled, is real. The | |
| nightmarish aspect of this section of the game derives mostly from the | |
| presence of a certain NPC, and it's to the author's credit that the | |
| NPC, though he provides virtually no interaction--he talks to you, you | |
| can't say much back--is an intimidating presence. His dialogue is | |
| well-written and doesn't feel too heavily borrowed from standard | |
| science fiction, though then again I wouldn't know. Also very | |
| good--and thoroughly coded; I didn't find much that broke the | |
| spell--is a certain change in your environment that you cause in order | |
| to get through the scene. Arguably, the NPC might have figured out | |
| what you're up to, but it's still a memorable moment. The only real | |
| flaw in the middlegame is a repeated message that you really want to | |
| get out of this--it loses its effectiveness after the first time or | |
| so, I found. The endgame, unfortunately, doesn't quite live up to what | |
| comes before--the dramatic confrontation could come from any thriller, | |
| and the final resolution just didn't feel climactic to me. There are | |
| some clever puzzles--though one depends on finding a hidden object at | |
| a time when you weren't aware that you needed it--and the ending does | |
| tie up most of the plot questions, but, as far as the story goes, the | |
| middle part works best. | |
| Technically, Delusions is impressive. I found very few bugs, most | |
| actions have synonyms, and there are several code tricks involving | |
| subtle changes in the game environment, or in the game's responses, | |
| that work well. The writing is error-free and effective throughout, in | |
| a way that moves the plot along without drawing attention to itself. | |
| A computer is thoroughly done, though it's a bit tedious to use--then | |
| again, seeing as it's running a "Windows 2000" system, perhaps that's | |
| design on the author's part. There are very few obvious | |
| illogicalities, even accepting the game's various plot twists; the | |
| game is well-designed, well-crafted. | |
| At bottom, though, Delusions seems to aspire to be more than simply a | |
| well-crafted collection of puzzles, and that's where the difficulty | |
| comes in. There are Bigger Issues at stake in the puzzles you solve, | |
| and while the game does offer some food for thought, my problem with | |
| it is that those issues don't really affect what you do. Delusions is | |
| in many respects a better game than Tapestry, another 1996 competition | |
| entry that dealt with questions metaphysical, but Tapestry did force | |
| the player to weigh the problems and make decisions; here, except for | |
| one moment at the end of the game, you solve puzzles, largely. To be | |
| sure, this is a different sort of game than Tapestry, and it succeeds | |
| on an entirely different level--but in that there certainly are | |
| intriguing questions being raised throughout, and periodically | |
| mentioned in passing by this NPC or that, I wanted them to have more | |
| to do with your actions and decisions. Put another way, the player | |
| can more or less opt out of the thought-provoking bits of Delusions by | |
| breezing through the text and moving on to the next puzzle. | |
| Theoretical objections aside, Delusions is an outstanding game in | |
| several respects, and if you missed the 1996 competition, this is | |
| without a doubt one of the entries you should check out now. Even if | |
| it gets a few things wrong, it does a whole lot of interesting stuff | |
| right. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: "Matthew Garrett" <cavan SP@G enterprise.net> | |
| NAME: Delusions (Release 4) | |
| AUTHOR: C. E. Forman | |
| EMAIL: ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net | |
| DATE: November 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform | |
| SUPPORTS: Infocom | |
| AVAILABILITY: GMD, freeware | |
| "Right. Check. Quote from Neuromancer?" | |
| "Check." | |
| "Main character trapped inside computer simulation and must discover | |
| their true identity?" | |
| "Check." | |
| "Sinisterly titled 'Project'?" | |
| "Check." | |
| "Cast of generic cyperpunky NPCs, one of whom will rebel against | |
| said 'Project'?" | |
| "Check." | |
| "OK boys. Looks like she's finished. Let's roll her out!" | |
| Yes, folks, Delusions is that oft-maligned example of the IF community | |
| - a, for want of a better word (Though, no doubt, I'll be inundated | |
| with mails giving me one), cyberpunk game. And yes, the initial | |
| section of the game doesn't seem awfully original. And yes, the rest | |
| of the game seems to follow much the same pattern. And yes, I am | |
| building up to a completely expected shock-bluff role reversal. | |
| Because, despite this, Delusions is a Good Game. | |
| But first, so that we can build up to an exciting climax, we'll start | |
| with the bad points. Good game though it is, Delusions seems flawed in | |
| many ways. Take the opening. Yes, it may well just be me, but I can't | |
| help laughing every time I read "Reality is so... unreal.". And it | |
| goes on. I'll happily admit to not being a fan of (What I'd tend to | |
| see as) "waffly" writing, but even so Delusions goes further than | |
| most. This seems surprising, considering that the rest of the writing | |
| seems to be of such a high standard. It's obvious that effort has been | |
| put into making the world of Delusions believable. Everything you'd | |
| expect to find in a cramped laboratory/living quarters is there. But | |
| still. Back to that later. | |
| The worst thing about the writing is that, at times, there is so much | |
| of it. Several times when you confront your (apparent) arch-nemesis, | |
| you're left sitting for several turns unable to do anything except hit | |
| z and wait while the conversation progresses. Pages of it, sometimes. | |
| Somehow, it seems wrong to apparently give you a choice of things to | |
| do (It's split up, so you get a prompt. Except that, whatever you do, | |
| you've got little choice except to carry on reading.), and then watch | |
| as your character says things that you don't expect him to. Again. And | |
| again. | |
| Perhaps this is the main problem. The player character ends up in a | |
| situation which would be impossible to end up in in real life, and as | |
| a result it's next to impossible to empathise. Of course, I felt sorry | |
| for him and angry at the way he'd been treated. But in the third | |
| person, rather than the first. (Does that make any sort of sense at | |
| all?) | |
| But even so. Sometimes, you are given a choice to influence the future | |
| direction of the game, or so it seems. Because, whenever you get to | |
| this sort of situation, it's obvious that the author wants you to make | |
| one particular choice rather than another. Which leads to my major | |
| problem with the game. | |
| Yes, the big hammer o' morality has been dragged out again in order to | |
| demonstrate that, in the end, we should forgive and forget. When your | |
| character agonizes over whether or not to kill his tormentors, you've | |
| got a choice. | |
| A) Kill them, die instantly and lose all your points. | |
| B) Don't kill them, carry on with the game and gain a point. | |
| Now, which one seems like the "Proper" path? | |
| Choices which influence a game's outcome generally make the game more | |
| interesting, since the player feels that they're having more of an | |
| affect. But the ones in Delusions feel more like "instant-death" | |
| puzzles than anything else. The outcome is based on what the author | |
| thinks, rather than what the player does. If anything, it makes the | |
| game feel more restrictive than if you hadn't been offered the choice | |
| in the first place. | |
| So, then. Why did I say that Delusions was good? To some extent, it's | |
| the attention to detail. The TV in one of the rooms shows Jeopardy. | |
| There's a huge mass of documentation to go along with the VR system. | |
| Everything you'd expect to find, you find. The characters all seem to | |
| have clearly defined personalities, backed up by their personal | |
| effects. | |
| And the plot. To begin with, it didn't sound promising. None of the | |
| initial ideas are terribly ground breaking. Come to that, neither are | |
| any of the later ones. But, somehow, there's a fairly engaging plot. | |
| Even if you're not empathising with the main character, you're | |
| interested in finding out what's going on. What motivates the main NPC | |
| becomes clear as the game progresses, and it all holds together | |
| nicely. | |
| So. Overall then. If you're willing to overlook the basic lack of | |
| originality, the tedious (to my mind) morality bits and the fact that | |
| the bad guy talks far too much, it's a well written and competently | |
| programmed game. The "Big revelation" doesn't come as too much of a | |
| surprise if you've been paying attention to what's going on, but | |
| that's a good thing rather than a bad one. | |
| Out of ten? Seven. Not ground breaking, makes you want to hit people | |
| in places, but still enjoyable. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Dungeons of Dunjin | |
| AUTHOR: Magnus Olsson | |
| E-MAIL: zebulon SP@G pobox.com | |
| DATE: 1992 | |
| PARSER: Considering it was built from scratch, not bad | |
| SUPPORTS: MS-DOS (version reviewed), Macintosh | |
| AVAILABILITY: Shareware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/pc/dunjin43.zip | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/mac/Dunjin44.cpt.hqx | |
| VERSION: Release 4.3 | |
| The documentation for Magnus Olsson's Dungeons of Dunjin candidly | |
| admits it isn't up to the Infocom standard of quality, and it's right, | |
| as far as that goes--it's not. But, to judge it fairly, it was written | |
| at a time--1992--before any free-or shareware games had come close to | |
| that standard; moreover, it was written in Pascal, and the parser was | |
| put together from the ground up, as it were. And when judged in its | |
| proper context, it's quite a solid game, with some clever puzzles and | |
| some humor to help the proceedings along. | |
| The plot, oddly, is perhaps the weakest part; authorship system | |
| limitations don't limit a game's story as such, and yet Dunjin feels | |
| like it doesn't know what it wants to be. You're set down outside a | |
| cave and sent off to explore without much of a sense of what you're | |
| doing--the documentation doesn't provide much guidance--other than a | |
| sign nearby advising that you're to bring treasures to the Adventure | |
| Office. Shades, naturally, of Colossal Cave, but that game was content | |
| to be a treasure hunt. This one tries to throw in another plot; | |
| trouble is, you don't really know what it is (though you get a few | |
| hints) until more than two-thirds of the way through, and it hardly | |
| makes sense of what's come before. | |
| For example, one key object is hidden in a place where no one could | |
| get to it without some fairly drastic measures--who put it there? | |
| where was it before? Similarly, you accumulate clues about a certain | |
| crystal you have to use long before you have any idea what the crystal | |
| is, or why you would need it; that comes at the end of the game. The | |
| scoring system makes the extra plot central and the treasures | |
| extraneous--the treasures are bonus points at the end of the game, | |
| essentially--but it's hard to say that you pursue any particular goal | |
| through the bulk of the game. | |
| Disregarding that flaw, though--and it's hardly unique to this | |
| game--Dunjin does manage to be quite entertaining. There are several | |
| very clever puzzles that involve magic, and others that involve | |
| defeating magic in novel ways. One distract-the-guardian puzzle | |
| recalls Trinity, and the premise is much funnier (and appropriate for | |
| the author's Swedish origins). There and at other times, the author | |
| sends up the adventure-quest genre in entertaining ways--notably, in | |
| your interactions with a genie, in figuring out a certain "magic | |
| word," and in your discovery of old beer cans in an unlikely place. | |
| The conflation of locales that was occasionally distracting in | |
| Colossal Cave works better here because it's in the interests of | |
| humor: that a crucial bit of information is written on a candy | |
| wrapper, and that a key clue involves a Beatles song, provides an | |
| element of silliness that feels just right, somehow. In that the plot, | |
| when you discover it, is fairly standard save-the-princess and | |
| get-the-fabled-object stuff, Dunjin feels more like a conventional | |
| treasure-hunt than a parody as a whole, but there are more than enough | |
| funny or offbeat moments to keep the player involved. (My personal | |
| favorite--when you've disposed of a guard dog, the game chimes in to | |
| let you know that the dog didn't actually suffer a nasty fate. A sort | |
| of "no animals were harmed" touch.) | |
| It would take some remarkable writing to make Dunjin feel like a truly | |
| coherent game environment, with computer labs and dragons and | |
| conventional houses and dwarves' mines virtually side by side, and | |
| accordingly Dunjin's writing is best described as competent; virtually | |
| all locations have a few compact sentences conveying the scene. (The | |
| computer lab, with a full screen of text, is the exception--one | |
| wonders whether it was modeled on something in the author's own | |
| experience, given the excess of detail.) There are mini-settings that | |
| are well done--a coal mine in particular, and some scenes, such as | |
| your view of a valley, are arrestingly described--though others, such | |
| as a series of tunnels, could stand some more detail. A big sprawling | |
| treasure-hunt like this should convey the relevant details as clearly | |
| as possible, though, rather than striving for atmosphere at every | |
| turn, and Dunjin does that quite well at virtually every turn. | |
| Getting through Dunjin is a project. There are many distinct areas of | |
| the game to discover, each with at least 15 rooms to discover and make | |
| sense of, and often solutions involve objects found in obscure places, | |
| far away from the relevant puzzle. The end in particular requires | |
| either lots of foresight about the proper objects or some major | |
| traipsing around--there are some shortcuts provided, but one of them | |
| closes off at a certain moment. None of the puzzles are | |
| extraordinarily hard, and none that I recall require knowledge | |
| obtained by death, but the sheer size and scope of the game make | |
| everything feel a little daunting. Dunjin does strike a nice balance | |
| between linearity and breadth--the various sections of the game that | |
| you discover give you enough of a choice that you have several | |
| different puzzles to work on, but they're not quite big enough to make | |
| the whole thing feel aimless. But there are a few slightly unfair | |
| moments as well where the game closes off with little warning; saving | |
| often is vital. (And, of course, there are mazes--four, by my count, | |
| none huge but three big enough to require mapping with objects.) All | |
| of the puzzles are logical, though; none bend the rules of the | |
| universe, even the fantasy universe, too much, and the small | |
| illogicalities here and there (a gate that you can close and then walk | |
| through, a key hidden in a somewhat absurd place) don't detract much | |
| from the game. | |
| As noted, the game was written in Pascal, and the system performs | |
| admirably. There are a few disambiguation problems--the game has a few | |
| too many books and pieces of paper, and getting them all in one place | |
| is occasionally not a good idea--but very few and none fatal to | |
| interacting with an object. The 1998 player may miss "undo" and such, | |
| and there was no "script" command that I could find, but the parser | |
| does handle a fairly wide variety of verbs and recognize pronouns as | |
| well. (Wow.) There are some complicated code tasks--timed and | |
| landscape-changing events--that go off without a hitch, and the few | |
| moments that require exact syntax weren't sufficiently clumsy to slow | |
| me down for long. Though it's nothing special, I appreciated the game | |
| not kicking me right out to the DOS prompt when I died or otherwise | |
| ended the game--it's the sort of user-friendly thing (especially in | |
| Windows) that can make a difference in overall enjoyment. The only | |
| real problem I encountered is that the rooms don't have names as such, | |
| and traveling through them a second time yields "You're in corridor" | |
| and such, often not sufficiently descriptive to remind me of where I | |
| was (particularly in a game this size); I had to switch the thing into | |
| VERBOSE to make sense of the game environment. But that's hardly a | |
| major drawback, and when compared to its AGT contemporaries, the | |
| gameplay in Dunjin holds up quite well. | |
| On the whole, then, this is a diverting (and lengthy) romp through a | |
| rather diverse dungeon; it deals a bit too heavily in fantasy | |
| conventions, particularly toward the end, to appeal to the player who | |
| genuinely dislikes fantasy, but for those who enjoy the genre and like | |
| seeing it sent up in some fairly clever ways, Dunjin is worth checking | |
| out. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Losing Your Grip | |
| AUTHOR: Stephen Granade | |
| E-MAIL: sgranade SP@G phy.duke.edu | |
| DATE: 1998 | |
| PARSER: TADS | |
| SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Shareware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/grip.gam | |
| VERSION: Release 3 | |
| PLOT: Intricate (1.7) ATMOSPHERE: Complex, well done (1.6) | |
| WRITING: Solid (1.5) GAMEPLAY: Mostly good (1.3) | |
| CHARACTERS: A little sketchy (1.0) PUZZLES: Some excellent (1.3) | |
| MISC: Very rich in symbolism, thought-provoking (1.7) | |
| OVERALL: 7.8 | |
| Stephen Granade's Losing Your Grip is an ambitious effort: the plot | |
| draws heavily on symbolism and attempts to sustain it over the course | |
| of a full-length game. The result, though the symbolic elements are | |
| often a bit obscure, is consistently entertaining and | |
| thought-provoking. Merely figuring out what's going on is, truth to | |
| tell, challenge enough. | |
| You play Terry, in rehab for nicotine addiction, and the game switches | |
| back and forth between Terry's conscious mind in the rehab ward | |
| and--well, it's hard to say, really. You move through a series of five | |
| "fits" that deal with one aspect or another of Terry's mind or | |
| experiences, both discovering and setting right (in some cases) the | |
| neuroses and repressions of his life. This duality sometimes makes | |
| things rather complicated: when the fits delve into Terry's past, the | |
| game wants to present (in heavily symbolic terms) the events that have | |
| stunted or altered Terry's development, but also provide you, the | |
| player, a means of undoing those events (also in symbolic terms), | |
| leading to some fairly tortured plot sequences. One fit depicts your | |
| run-in with some "faeries," a reasonably obvious stand-in for your | |
| imaginative/creative side (at least, I thought so), and, in rapid | |
| succession, the maturation of that imaginative self, its | |
| disruption/negation by an outside force that threatens Terry's | |
| freedom, and the overcoming of that outside force and reliberation of | |
| the imagination. Whew. Bring a scorecard if you want to keep track of | |
| the plot, because there's lots of it and it happens on several levels. | |
| As a game, Deeper Meanings aside, Losing Your Grip is reasonably | |
| successful--there are many challenging puzzles, and they make sense, | |
| for the most part, in terms of the plot. There are, however, many and | |
| varied ways to close off the game, including some "planning ahead" | |
| measures that require considerable foresight. Notably, the way you | |
| transport objects between fits, though clever and even logical on the | |
| game's terms, requires that the player anticipate what the game is | |
| trying to do--not at all likely within the first fit, when the | |
| structure of the game still hasn't become clear. On two occasions, | |
| choices you make send the game down one of two entirely separate paths | |
| (which rejoin later), which enhances the game's replayability --and at | |
| other times, there are multiple independent solutions to problems or | |
| reactions to stimuli that shape what you make of your | |
| character. Generally, these choices aren't between right and wrong as | |
| such, though some have certain moral dimensions; they don't decide | |
| whether the plot will continue, merely the nature of what | |
| ensues. There is one section that devolves into sheer mathematical | |
| puzzle-fest, not inconsistently with the plot but frustrating | |
| nonetheless. | |
| Perhaps the most successful part of Grip is the first fit, in which | |
| Terry explores his own mind, thinly veiled as a majestic marble | |
| building. Terry confronts his memories, allegorized into a pile of | |
| spheres that a fellow named Frankie--Terry's powers of introspection, | |
| perhaps--is engaged in counting and categorizing; the parallel to the | |
| process that Terry is undergoing is clear and intriguing. Terry then | |
| reactivates, reopens for examination, various areas of his life that | |
| he had neglected, and deals with the resulting tide of guilt and anger | |
| (in a way that violates the allegory a bit, but let's not get | |
| picky)--and also manages to avert the complete breakdown (or death, | |
| perhaps?) that had been expected. But the author is not so concerned | |
| with hurling symbolism at us that he neglects to make sense of the | |
| ostensible action, fortunately, and the individual scenes in Grip are | |
| enjoyable simply for their playability and writing. But the depth of | |
| the insight that Terry achieves--in realizing how the negative | |
| emotions have tainted and darkened his memories, and how he needs to | |
| open up long-closed areas of his mind--give the first fit remarkable | |
| power. In that light, the limitedness of its effects on the remainder | |
| of the plot--whether you succeed or fail at a certain task, most | |
| importantly--feels analytically wrong; it seems like failing to get | |
| Terry's emotional house in order should preclude further | |
| introspection. (As in, the plot continues on the same course and you | |
| reach the same ending, which doesn't feel right.) | |
| The ending of Grip, while logical enough, brings up a certain point, | |
| not confined to this particular game but certainly relevant: | |
| increasingly, rather than giving the player the magic McGuffin or | |
| letting him ride into the sunset, authors end games on an ambiguous | |
| note: there's a conclusion of sorts, but it's not an unmitigated | |
| triumph, and there's no satisfying "You have won." The Zarfian ending, | |
| for want of a better term, is a welcome innovation, certainly--it | |
| makes us think about what we've done--but please, all you Zarfians, | |
| signify somehow that the player's _finished_ the thing, done all he or | |
| she is supposed to do.(An "afterword" from the author, or an "amusing" | |
| section, or something like that.) Particularly in games like Grip, | |
| where it's not at all hard to finish the game without earning all the | |
| points, reading an ambiguous ending just convinced me that I'd missed | |
| something and sent me back to solve puzzles that weren't meant to be | |
| solve. Enhancing replay value is one thing, but confusing the player | |
| about when enough is enough is another. (I should note, of course, | |
| that Grip does have substantial replay value, in the separate paths | |
| and in the intrigue of figuring out what everything means. I just | |
| wanted to know when I was done.) | |
| Where was I? Oh, right. One of the nicest things about Grip is simply | |
| that it hangs together well: the reappearances of the dark side that | |
| you struggle with, the veiled conflict with Terry's father, and the | |
| ways you drift back and forth between reality and memory/introspection | |
| make a remarkably coherent whole, or so I found it. Once the player | |
| picks up on the structure of the game (which takes a while) and the | |
| significance of the recurring parts, the seemingly unrelated sequences | |
| start to come together. Once I understood that the point of revisiting | |
| past periods of Terry's life was to overcome the negative associations | |
| he had attached to them, figuring out how to do it felt more | |
| rewarding, though it's certainly possible to finish the scene without | |
| thinking in those terms. Perhaps it was just that I appreciated and | |
| agreed with the underlying message (or at least the philosophy behind | |
| it), that Terry's anger at his father is misplaced and ultimately | |
| destructive, but I found that, certain blips aside, the plot both made | |
| sense and rewarded careful analysis--a rare combination. To that end, | |
| though, I was a bit puzzled that an apparent choice between giving up | |
| that anger and acting on it didn't affect the overall course of the | |
| game--again, you end up in the same place with the same text. | |
| I certainly don't claim to understand everything that the author was | |
| driving at in Grip; there are many parts of the game whose | |
| significance isn't clear to me, and may well remain that way. But I | |
| enjoyed the parts of it that I thought I understood, and it kept me | |
| interested enough to play through and think about in order to make | |
| sense of the rest, no small feat for a full-length game. As both game | |
| and story by symbolism, Losing Your Grip deserves praise. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: The Magnificent Linnard <mithee SP@G internetland.net> | |
| NAME: The Magnetic Scrolls Collection | |
| AUTHOR: Magnetic Scrolls/Virgin | |
| EMAIL: ??? | |
| DATE: Rerelease 1991 | |
| PARSER: Magnetic Scrolls standard | |
| AVALIABILITY: Rare | |
| URL: None available | |
| I managed to stumble across this boxed set in a clearance bin about 2 | |
| years ago, and for $10, I've never been disapointed. This is a | |
| collection of the three 'best sellers' (I assume) from the now defunct | |
| Magnetic Scrolls--Fish!, The Guild Of Thieves, and Corruption, all for | |
| the PC (which contradicts what I've read before about there being only | |
| Amiga and C64 versions). | |
| All three make Infocom look pretty blase by comparision. The | |
| interface is rather like a Macintosh, with mouse support, backgrounds, | |
| resizeable and moveable windows, automapping, an inventory listing | |
| using some alright icons, and a builtin compass. Each also features | |
| some degree of graphics for some scenes. Although most are low | |
| quality, and the animation isn't impressive in the least, it does add | |
| atmosphere when it's on. Variable fonts also help the text, allowing | |
| you to bold certain types (such as descriptions or game responses), | |
| italicize, or just use different font sizes. Very well put together. | |
| The help menus are about the same as late Infocom, using levels of | |
| hints for various events in each game. At times, the details are a | |
| little -too- much, giving away whole solutions step by step. | |
| Unfortunetly, this seems to be necessary. Certain sequences, such as | |
| Corruption's escape from the hospital, make absolutely no sense unless | |
| you have the help file--there's nothing to tell you what you need to | |
| do or what you did wrong, but if you -did- do something wrong, you're | |
| loading up that last save game. The save/load is well done at least, | |
| using a listed window like most Windows applications do. | |
| The games themselves vary quite widely, and they're all every bit as | |
| good as Infocom's best in MOST departments. Fish! sits you in the | |
| role of a secret agent, transplanted into the body of a fish in order | |
| to stop The Seven Deadly Fins from whatever evil deed they have in | |
| mind. Three different mini-missions place you in other bodies (of | |
| humans, at least) in order to get the parts so that you can head into | |
| the Fish City. Before I give away too much of the plot, I'll just say | |
| that I was subtely annoyed to finally make it to the end, just to find | |
| a TIME LIMIT on the last sections. I managed to make it to the very | |
| end sequence, just to find that I didn't have enough time (each move | |
| costs you a few minutes) to do what was required of me. Painful. | |
| Corruption comes from a different angle. You've just been named | |
| partner in a law firm, but someone's out to eliminate your presence in | |
| some not-so-moral ways. The idea is to, before the day is over, pin | |
| the blame where it goes without getting snagged yourself. It's harder | |
| than it sounds. The game is timed right to the clock, and if you | |
| aren't in EXACT right places at EXACT right times, events go right | |
| past you. If that happens, you're starting over--you won't have | |
| enough evidence. The casette in the box helps some too, but it's not | |
| totally necessary. This game features possibly the most devious | |
| puzzle in the game, and the cheesiest one I've ever had to deal | |
| with--The Hospital. I have yet to see how you're supposed to figure | |
| this out without the help window wide open. Basically, you're in a | |
| hospital, and if you don't get out unnoticed, you'll be given a lethal | |
| injection (boy, those guys are just -everywhere-!). It's rough, since | |
| a wrong turn will put a nurse right next to you. | |
| Guild Of Thieves is my personal favorite. The story works like this: | |
| you're an apprentice thief, trying to get into the guild. You're told | |
| that to get in, you have to rob this country blind. That night, a | |
| master thief drops you off on a dock and lets you do your thing. This | |
| is actually loads of fun, trying to cop the many treasures of | |
| whereever you find them. It's a gas, really, until the end. Just too | |
| many timing-based puzzles for anyone's good. | |
| All in all, a tres fun set to play around with, if you're lucky enough | |
| to actually -find- the box. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Francis Irving <francis SP@G pobox.co.uk> | |
| NAME: A Matter of Time | |
| AUTHOR: Michael Zerbo | |
| EMAIL: Unknown | |
| DATE: Jun 4, 1997 (according to www.download.com) | |
| PARSER: ALAN version 2.5 | |
| SUPPORTS: DOS, Amiga, and possibly Alan ports (but without sound/graphics) | |
| AVAILABILITY: Shareware ($10) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/pc/time1.zip (the version reviewed) | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/amiga/time[123].lha | |
| (the original Amiga version) | |
| VERSION: 1.0 (according to www.download.com) | |
| Time to try out the most heavily downloaded game in the IF archive... | |
| "A Matter of Time" is another story about saving your Professor from a | |
| land of dinosaurs, where his experimental time machine has gone | |
| slightly awry. The plot twist? The Professor is also accused of | |
| murdering a colleague over a funding war. | |
| It's apparently written using ALAN, with calls to external programs to | |
| add graphics and sound. Unfortunately this means that you have to | |
| wait for each picture to appear and disappear, and for each sound to | |
| finish, before you can get on with the game. And it happens every | |
| time you do "look". | |
| So, anyone making a multimedia piece of IF, make sure the sound and | |
| graphics are concurrent with the text. And that you can turn them | |
| off. (You can in time1 - by deleting or renaming viewer.exe and | |
| sbplay.exe...) | |
| Similarly annoying was that every time you die and restart you have to | |
| sit through the whole of the intro (including pictures) before you can | |
| even restore again... Whatever happened to "Would you like to RESTART, | |
| RESTORE or QUIT?". | |
| The writing is readable in its simplicity, but needs more imagination. | |
| The puzzles are straightforward item manipulation games which I | |
| couldn't work out; the games unresponsiveness and shaky parser didn't | |
| encourage me to do so. More synonyms are required; you can do "climb | |
| tree" but not "climb vines". | |
| Graphics are varied and made with fractal and ray-tracing programs. | |
| This gives them a certain lack of liveliness and inconsistency of | |
| style. The sounds didn't add anything much to the game, although they | |
| served well to identify where I was. Good sound in the background | |
| could make each area of a landscape feel more distinct. | |
| I didn't finish Time, but I did read through the text from the data | |
| file. I didn't miss much. It really is only a short work. I don't | |
| know what you get if you register, but from this demo I don't feel | |
| that it would be worth doing so. | |
| With over 17,000 downloads of Time from the IF-archive via | |
| www.download.com, Michael Zerbo is clearly an excellent publicist, or | |
| there is more interest in IF than we imagine. Perhaps people like the | |
| idea that it has sound/graphics in it, and are put off downloading | |
| plain text adventures. | |
| When the first quality piece of graphical IF, with an Inform/TADS | |
| standard parser, comes out, it will be interesting to see if it fares | |
| better in the download world. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Spider and Web | |
| AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin | |
| E-MAIL: erkyrath SP@G netcom.com | |
| DATE: 1997-8 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/Tangle.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 4 | |
| PLOT: Multilayered, intriguing (1.6) ATMOSPHERE: Effective (1.5) | |
| WRITING: Strong (1.6) GAMEPLAY: Solid (1.5) | |
| PUZZLES: Logical, some difficult (1.6) CHARACTERS: One, very thorough | |
| (1.5) | |
| MISC: Ambitious idea, carried off with skill (1.8) | |
| OVERALL: 8.0 | |
| Andrew Plotkin posted on rec.arts.int-fiction a few years ago a list | |
| of implicit assumptions common to most IF, suggesting that | |
| experimental IF works might set about subverting those | |
| assumptions. Plotkin's Space Under the Window pushed the limits of IF, | |
| to be sure, but in a rather straightforward way; there, the author | |
| forced the player to give up the usual mode of interacting with the | |
| game environment. Spider and Web, though no less subversive in its | |
| way, is altogether more subtle--and Plotkin overturns the tropes of | |
| standard IF to great effect. | |
| As it would be altogether too hard to discuss otherwise, I'll describe | |
| the essential structure--the outer layer, as it were--of the game: as | |
| a spy sent to investigate an enemy laboratory, you have been caught | |
| and are recounting your actions to your interrogator. But you recount | |
| them not verbally, but as scenes replayed in your memory and picked up | |
| by a mind probe--and therefore you play out the recreations as | |
| conventional IF narrative, or so it seems at first. Moreover, your | |
| interrogator interrupts you constantly to inform you that you have | |
| gotten the scene "wrong," or to interject comments when you do get it | |
| right, and there's therefore a sense that you're discovering what | |
| you've already done. The confusion of narratives that arises is done | |
| with remarkable skill: after all, the effect of the scene is that the | |
| interrogator is asking you, for the most part, to confirm what he | |
| already knows, and therefore the point of most of the exercise, as far | |
| as he's concerned, is less to learn anything than to have you submit | |
| to his coercion, repeat what he's telling you. (The interrogator | |
| describes it that way: "It comes down to telling stories. You spin me | |
| a story, and I listen....This verse isn't yet right.") Critical theory | |
| meets IF, in other words: the controlling ideology enforces its rule | |
| by forcing the controlled to repeat--and play out, over and over | |
| again--the narrative. The idea, at least for critical theorists, came | |
| down from Marx, but it has a life of its own by now. If Foucault wrote | |
| in this medium, he'd more than likely write something like | |
| this. ("Discipline and Punish" in IF form? Internalized panopticons? | |
| Could happen.) The experience of playing it is unique and vaguely | |
| reminiscent of "1984"--it forces the player not only to accept someone | |
| else's account of a certain truth, in this case his own memories, but | |
| to replay them in conformity with what he's told--and the feeling is | |
| often unnerving. | |
| At any rate, Plotkin uses this premise skillfully, often in ways that | |
| can't be revealed here lest they spoil the fun. Among the more amusing | |
| moments is the opening scene in the city streets, which, like | |
| everything else, you're replaying for the interrogator's benefit--and | |
| you therefore throw in some ingratiating sentiment laced with sarcasm: | |
| "And however much of the capital city is crusted with squat brick and | |
| faceless concrete hulks, there are still flashes of its historic | |
| charm." Later, a subtle dig at the police state: "The alley is quite | |
| empty, bare even of trash. (Your guidebook warned you: the police are | |
| as efficient about litter laws as about everything else they do.)" | |
| Later repetitions of the scene cut out most of the rhapsodizing about | |
| the city's charms, as if in acknowledgment that the interrogator | |
| doesn't want to hear it. The temporal confusions abound: this is one | |
| work of IF where much of the action has already happened at the | |
| beginning of the game, and the story technique works far better than | |
| many "flashback" sequences common in film. The slow-developing plot is | |
| frustrating at times--the player is often reduced to thinking "_why_ | |
| would I have done that?", and not all the questions get resolved. But | |
| there is method to Plotkin's madness, as always, and the twists are | |
| calculated for maximum effect. | |
| Spider and Web owes its setting and plot to Cold War spy movies and | |
| novels, in a sense. It gradually becomes apparent that you're after a | |
| mysterious device, a weapon of sorts: they have it, you want it or | |
| alternately don't want them to have it, it's essential to the balance | |
| of power, etc. (And a certain less-than-credible scene toward the end | |
| recalls one of the silliest features of action movies.) There is also | |
| a certain debt to science fiction, though, in the wealth of gadgetry | |
| that you carry around--you bring a toolcase with you--and in the | |
| endgame, which requires that you figure out a whole host of devices at | |
| high speed in a way reminiscent of lots of SF. Particularly since so | |
| much of the plot turns on understanding the properties of gadgets, | |
| it's tempting to make them the real point of the story--and yet good | |
| science fiction, despite appearances, is often less about neat | |
| technology than about the human conflicts that it brings about, and | |
| Spider and Web is no different. At one point, your interrogator--oddly | |
| candid, but I suppose he has to be for the story to go anywhere-- | |
| acknowledges that the new weapon, rather than enabling a supposed | |
| "clean war", would actually make the ongoing war even more chaotic and | |
| enable dangerous abuses of power, but then acknowledges that he still | |
| participates in building and developing the weapon. (The tension, in | |
| critical theory terms: the figure who wields the power admits his | |
| doubts about the validity or appeal of the dominant ideology, thereby | |
| deconstructing that ideology's claim to exclusive truth and | |
| legitimating dissent. Well, maybe.) Implicitly, technology becomes an | |
| end in itself, divorced from its desired ends--or, alternately, | |
| avoiding a certain technological advance is more risky than pursuing | |
| it, lest one's side lose the destructive advantage. The latter echoes | |
| Cold War deterrence theory, while the former is an element in most | |
| dystopian visions (Fahrenheit 451, for example). At any rate, the | |
| endgame underscores the importance of the backstory; players should | |
| probably go back to old save positions once they near the end simply | |
| to make sense of some of the earlier speeches. | |
| As a game, Spider and Web works well. The interrogator's comments act | |
| as a sort of hint system for much of the game, since your various | |
| mistakes draw out comments that indicate what he's looking for and | |
| narrow down the scope of your actions through repeated tries. As such, | |
| the game is fairly short and most of it isn't all that hard; it's only | |
| toward the end that the Zarfian side comes out and the player needs | |
| real intuition to keep up. (As with other Zarf works, furthermore, the | |
| hardest points are the most satisfying to solve--they're rewarded in | |
| one way or another.) There are a few points where the interrogator's | |
| responses don't quite seem to match your actions, and it isn't quite | |
| clear at those points whether he just doesn't care about the | |
| discrepancies or whether there are bugs afoot. The ultimate ending is | |
| something of a letdown, at least in terms of spy-novel victory-for- | |
| your-side expectations, though it certainly fits the Zarf ethos. On | |
| the whole, the puzzles are unique and well crafted; there is nothing | |
| arbitrarily thrown in to require puzzle-solving, and the obtacles feel | |
| logical enough. There's even some humor, unlikely as it sounds: the | |
| interrogator is equipped with plenty of sarcastic jabs. (At one point, | |
| if you claim that the guards lied about something: "Ah. They'll be | |
| hurt to hear so.") The atmosphere is likewise effective: the halls are | |
| cold but not obtrusively so. As seems to happen in many Plotkin games, | |
| a key shift in mood is marked by the lights going out and the player's | |
| having to stumble around in "dimness" (the word, in particular, | |
| reminded me of Space Under the Window); though the dimming doesn't | |
| accompany changes in the landscape, as happened in Change in the | |
| Weather, it does serve to heighten tension and set the final events of | |
| the game in motion. Technically proficient, with a well-developed | |
| story, Spider and Web is a solid game. | |
| But Plotkin is not, precisely, known in the IF community for | |
| conventional solid games, and Spider and Web doesn't really fit many | |
| categories. The spy-adventure aspect is subverted by the moral | |
| ambiguities: it isn't clear that arranging for your side to have the | |
| weapon would be an altogether good thing, and it becomes obvious that | |
| the interrogator is driven to develop it more by political necessity-- | |
| the regime demands it--than by personal fascination with the | |
| possibilities. Indeed, one event toward the end suggests that the | |
| power game is what really matters, that the technology is expendable; | |
| the real value of the thing lies in simply having it while the other | |
| side doesn't. A development parallel to the story of the weapon, | |
| moreover--call it one of the plot layers--suggests that technology | |
| still can't keep up with human ingenuity, in that a large part of the | |
| game turns on outsmarting a device that your captors rely on. While | |
| there are science fiction elements, the game turns on the | |
| interrogation and the conflict it masks rather than the technological/ | |
| speculative bits; the specter of the omniscient questioner who | |
| manipulates his captives into saying what he wants recalls, among | |
| other things, Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Most importantly, unlike | |
| the bulk of IF, the player cannot identify a clear goal for the | |
| protagonist, or necessarily even assume that he understands what the | |
| protagonist is thinking at any given time; the feeling of discovering | |
| rather than creating a story recurs on several levels. Put another | |
| way, the game sharply limits how much innovation you can give the set | |
| script, sometimes because you have to match the interrogator's account | |
| and sometimes because every move is vital, as in Change in the | |
| Weather. Throughout the story, discovering what you're "meant" to be | |
| doing means discovering what your own character is up to, sometimes in | |
| surprising ways, and the effect is occasionally similar to coming | |
| gradually out of a total loss of memory. | |
| There is much that's worth pondering over the course of Spider and | |
| Web: the various competing narratives keep the player guessing (some | |
| of the techniques reminded me of Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger | |
| Ackroyd, though I'm sure they're not unique), and the game is well- | |
| crafted on every level. Anyone who has enjoyed Plotkin's previous | |
| efforts should without a doubt check this one out. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Adam Thornton <adam SP@G adam.remote.princeton.edu> | |
| NAME: Spider and Web | |
| AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin | |
| E-MAIL: erkyrath SP@G netcom.com | |
| DATE: 1997-8 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/Tangle.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 4 | |
| This review necessarily contains spoilers for _Spider And Web_. If | |
| you haven't played it, I recommend you stop reading here, go out and | |
| get a copy (ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/Tangle.z5), and | |
| play it. It is certainly worth your time. After you've played it, | |
| continue. | |
| It's an excellent game. If I have to give it a rating, uhhhh, let's | |
| see. 9.0 out of 10. | |
| Now go play it. | |
| _Spider And Web_ is the latest IF effort by Andrew Plotkin. It | |
| represents a radical departure from his earlier works in that it is | |
| neither an impossibly unfair series of timing puzzles (e.g. "A Change | |
| In the Weather"), nor is it a lyrical allegorical journey (e.g. "So | |
| Far"), nor is it an arcade favorite reborn (e.g. "Freefall"), nor is | |
| it an Interactive Unbelievably Painful Breakup (e.g. "The Space Under | |
| The Window"), nor is it even a Computer Science homework set | |
| (e.g. "Lists and Lists"). | |
| Instead, it's a Cold War spy story, and a fairly straightforward one | |
| at that. When stripped to its essentials, the plot is: break into a | |
| research center, elude the guards, steal the Secret Plans, and escape. | |
| Nothing we haven't seen a hundred times before, right? | |
| Well, no. This is, after all, a Zarf game. | |
| For starters, the game begins with the player outside a closed door in | |
| a grimy alley, with no means of opening the door. It's only after | |
| giving up and walking away that we find the real setting of the game: | |
| the player has been captured and is being interrogated. | |
| The player, it turns out, was a spy breaking into this facility. He, | |
| or possibly she--Zarf doesn't specify, and it's made quite clear that | |
| at least the captors' forces include both men and women; I'm going to | |
| refer to the protagonist as "he," since that's how I imagined the | |
| game--was captured. His captors have a memory-extraction McGuffin | |
| that allows them to see the scene through his eyes. The challenge of | |
| the first part of the game is to replay each scene in such a way that | |
| it matches the evidence found by your captors. It's an awful lot like | |
| the movie _Groundhog Day_ in that you do everything over and over | |
| until you get it right. | |
| Except that, after you're comfortable with that paradigm, about two | |
| thirds of the way through the game, there's a huge shift. You escape | |
| and are suddenly playing for real. And that's when you find out that | |
| there were certain things you lied to your interrogator about, and | |
| figuring out what you told him vs. what you really did becomes the | |
| major challenge of the game. | |
| The escaping puzzle has to be one of the best ever seen in IF. It's | |
| incredibly subtle, incredibly elegant, and extremely satisfying. But | |
| aside from that, finding out that you were an unwitting Unreliable | |
| Narrator is an amazing rhetorical gimmick, and works beautifully. It | |
| completely subverts what you thought you were doing; the first part of | |
| the game becomes _Groundhog Day_ except that you're repeating | |
| everything until you get it convincingly and consistently *wrong*. | |
| The remainder of the game, alas, falls a little short. Most of it | |
| concerns figuring out what you really *were* doing in the earlier | |
| part, and realizing how to use it to get into the Lab. Once there | |
| it's pretty obvious what you need to do to get enough time to operate, | |
| and what to do. However, at this point, it *is* pretty much a Cold | |
| War spy story, albeit an exciting one. The metaphysically neat parts | |
| of the game are behind you. | |
| One object, which you have to use twice, is the hardest part of the | |
| game, because it appears in no room descriptions, and unless you | |
| examine the walls or listen very carefully, there's no indication that | |
| such things exist. This is, in fact, precisely the point. They're | |
| ubiquitous and never noticed. Annoying, but it can hardly be said to | |
| be unfair. | |
| The mechanics and prose are, as in every Zarf game, excellent. The | |
| one fleshed-out NPC is convincingly drawn, and Zarf's choice to limit | |
| conversation with him to "yes" or "no" works well both in the context | |
| of the game and as a tool so that the amount of coding is kept to a | |
| minimum. The spy gadgets work intuitively and the interface seems | |
| very believable. And they're fun to play with. | |
| It's interesting and very refreshing to have an exciting spy story as | |
| the basic premise, and have no one get killed or even seriously hurt | |
| in the game's main action. The total body count is seven, plus or | |
| minus, unconscious guards, most of them simply stun-gunned, one | |
| poisoned with a temporary neurotoxin, and one interrogator with a bad | |
| headache. Plus whatever happens to the player's character. | |
| There are some nice incidental touches: words like "night-clumps," the | |
| twin moons seen in the sketch in the interrogator's office, the | |
| marvellously evocative phrase "dawn-tales." All of these give a | |
| feeling of a fleshed-out background world with a charmingly minimalist | |
| sketch. They also make the game feel like a sequel of sorts to "So | |
| Far"; if the world of "So Far" was late Victorian (well, the beginning | |
| world, where _Rito and Imita_ is playing), then this is near-future, | |
| maybe a century and a half down the road. | |
| The "web" of the title also plays a nice recurring role. "Scan-web" | |
| is apparently a metal-detecting metallic woven fiber. Indeed, maybe | |
| that's all it is: metal passing through it would set up an inductive | |
| current, which could then trigger an alarm somewhere. It's also used | |
| as some sort of conductive field-generating device in the lab, and, of | |
| course, the whole issue of the game is "Who's the spider, and who's | |
| the fly?" | |
| The interrogator is an interesting character. He's a thinking man | |
| with a hell of a job. Zarf says that he tried to create an NPC and | |
| ended up once again writing himself, but with a dirty job. That's | |
| possible. But I found he rang very true to the one intellectual | |
| career military man I know, who once described himself to me as "your | |
| basic liberal arts colonel." He's someone with an artistic side, and | |
| his art reveals a great deal about his personality. So do his | |
| bookshelves. I, alas, don't believe Zarf's explanations that I can | |
| see the contents of his shelves from the door--more on this later. | |
| The political setting of the game is interesting. This would have | |
| been an amazingly affecting game in 1986, the year of Trinity's | |
| release. It is set in a nasty Cold War, and the Device in the Lab is, | |
| as the interrogator points out, at least the equivalent of the Bomb in | |
| terms of destructive potential. These days, it's a nice spy thriller. | |
| Back when Balance of Power and Detente actually *meant* something, it | |
| would have been much more relevant. | |
| Half the fun of the game is figuring out what really happened. The | |
| basic plot (not the one you tell the interrogator) goes something like | |
| this: | |
| { Editor's comment: The final part of Adam's review contains an | |
| analysis of the game that goes to such detail that I felt I couldn't | |
| publish it here - it would simply give away too much for people who | |
| haven't completed the game. This was a difficult decision to make, | |
| since this analysis is in a way the most important part of the | |
| review. As a compromise solution (approved by the author, of course), | |
| I felt that publishing the first part of the review, while making the | |
| complete text available elsewhere, would still be worthwhile; the | |
| complete and uncensored review is available from | |
| http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon/if/spider_review.txt. Readers without | |
| WWW access may email me for a copy. } | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Tapestry | |
| AUTHOR: Daniel Ravipinto | |
| E-MAIL: rd70 SP@G lafibm.lafayette.edu | |
| DATE: 1996 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition96/tapestry/tapestry.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| PLOT: Simple but effective (1.3) ATMOSPHERE: Not much (1.3) | |
| WRITING: Quite good (1.5) GAMEPLAY: A bit clunky (1.1) | |
| CHARACTERS: Sketchy (1.1) PUZZLES: Few (0.8) | |
| MISC: Ambitious, not wholly successful but interesting (1.8) | |
| OVERALL: 7.0 | |
| Daniel Ravipinto's Tapestry is the sort of game that can really only | |
| be done once: any imitation would lose the impact that the original | |
| had. It tries to do something, moreover, that very little IF tries to | |
| do--defend a position--and if the overall experience isn't entirely | |
| successful, the player should at least recognize the novelty of the | |
| ground it's breaking. Though less a game than a philosophical | |
| position, Tapestry does what it sets out to do reasonably well; it | |
| didn't, however, make a persuasive argument as far as I was concerned. | |
| The basic idea is relatively simple: you play a man named Timothy | |
| Hunter who has died, who meets one certain personage offering a choice | |
| and then three others who offer two more choices, distinctly | |
| contrasting, and who is given the option to replay key scenes from his | |
| life and reconsider certain moments. The choices--you discover this | |
| immediately, so I don't feel that I'm giving much away--include your | |
| decision to attend a key meeting to help a client when your mother was | |
| dying, your decision to kill your wife when she was suffering from a | |
| painful disease, and your failure--it's hard to construe it as a | |
| decision--to avoid a pedestrian in the car accident that ended your | |
| life. You are given three choices; I won't spell them out, but they | |
| hinge on changing the events as opposed to changing what you make of | |
| them. | |
| It may fairly be said that the game element of Tapestry isn't | |
| extensive; there aren't really any puzzles, and what there are, I'm | |
| afraid, mostly derive from choosing syntax or figuring out fairly | |
| specific responses that the game demands. There's one moment in the | |
| second scene where I knew perfectly well what I wanted to do but | |
| couldn't figure out the precise wording, and the hint menu didn't | |
| help. In that respect, Tapestry might work better as straight fiction | |
| than as IF: giving the story its own pace, rather than tying its | |
| advancement to figuring out actions, might have made it more | |
| powerful. (Though the game is technically proficient in several | |
| respects--the hint menu adapts to your situation quite skillfully, for | |
| one thing, and the situation changes to block off certain paths in | |
| subtle but effective ways.) At any rate, the game element is good | |
| enough to tell the story/make the argument, which is all that's really | |
| needed. | |
| The nature of the paths you're given and of the way the game treats | |
| them makes it reasonably clear that there's a "right" way, and two | |
| "wrong" ways, to go about this; the game locks you into your path once | |
| the choice is made, and the eventual consequences and the terms in | |
| which the games sums up your decisions at the end leaves little doubt | |
| about that. While I don't dispute the logic or philosophical force of | |
| locking you onto your trajectory, on the game's terms, it does limit | |
| the realism element somewhat; in theory, you might have learned from | |
| one experience and want to take a different sort of path at the next | |
| decision point. At the very least, having to play through the thing | |
| when your decisions are foreordained--when the game is simply waiting | |
| for you to input the correct things, not giving you choices as | |
| such--is a bit frustrating; I'm not really sure whether it would have | |
| been better to let it all scroll by than to provide the illusion of | |
| interactivity. It also limits the realism of it all somewhat to | |
| suppose that, if certain key life decisions were changed (and these | |
| are about as key as they get), everything that follows would have | |
| turned out the same, or sufficiently so that your decisions aren't | |
| changed. Even if the game is more an argument than a real-life | |
| depiction, these things affect the persuasiveness of the argument; | |
| when the author is both setting a somewhat contrived scene and staking | |
| out a position that depends on it, it feels like he's stacking the | |
| deck. | |
| I bring all this up because, on the terms that the game presents them, | |
| one can't really argue with the "right" choice; the others are laden | |
| with awful consequences and negative adjectives. But it's not clear at | |
| all to me that this is a fair depiction of the choices; at the very | |
| least, I think I could rewrite key moments of the game without | |
| changing the basic plot or structure to make either of the other two | |
| plots the preferable one. The game didn't, in short, convince me that | |
| my choice was actually justifiable or correct, merely that the author | |
| wanted me to know that he believed it was. That's interesting, in its | |
| way, but not very persuasive. | |
| My main problem with Tapestry, in short is one that I can't really | |
| blame the author for, as such, but it impeded my enjoyment of it | |
| regardless: there was no path that actually reflected what I, speaking | |
| for myself, wanted to do. I should probably say that I'm a | |
| moderate-to-conservative Christian with very definite ideas about what | |
| would or wouldn't imperil the state of one's soul, and it's not at all | |
| the author's fault if the game's outlook leaves me a little cold. That | |
| said, though, I found a certain incoherence in Tapestry; the ending | |
| struck me as so nihilistic that nothing that came before really seemed | |
| to matter much. I can't really explain without spoilers, but suffice | |
| it to say that all the endings seem agnostic--if not outright | |
| atheist--about the protagonist's ultimate fate, which made all of the | |
| foregoing feel a little hollow. Put another way, the game stacks the | |
| deck again, by making it seem as if everything depends on your | |
| decisions but not actually giving you much difference in the | |
| resolution. The author is, of course, free to say all this, but | |
| implicit in the nature of the argument is that the player has to | |
| swallow the author's entire worldview, not simply look at the validity | |
| of what he's saying. And as I resisted accepting the author's | |
| assumptions, the story didn't work very well for me. | |
| Tapestry did, I must admit, make me think about the situation it | |
| presented; it was hard for me to give a clear answer regarding what | |
| I'd do (besides "not do the things in the first place") because it's | |
| such a bizarre situation and because the terms aren't spelled out very | |
| clearly. Am I actually reliving my life? If not (as noted above) how | |
| could it be that I can change parts of it and not change the whole | |
| thing? There are Christian arguments for all of the positions, but I | |
| found that the weakest ones were for the path that the author clearly | |
| preferred, which struck me as interesting. It could fairly be argued | |
| that I should have seen where things were going from the beginning and | |
| qualified my objections, and I did have a sense from the first quote | |
| and from the identity (which I did get, along with the Trinity | |
| reference) of the first NPC. But I still think there's an incoherence | |
| in setting the one figure against the other three, since they come out | |
| of specific traditions that presuppose specific things, and putting | |
| them together just never feels like it makes a lot of sense. More | |
| accurately, I don't think the first character really belongs in the | |
| game, at least not in the role he inhabits; the author is free to | |
| rethink the real nature of that person, of course, but the rethinking | |
| isn't well enough developed for me to buy it. I don't, in other words, | |
| think that the presence of that specific character makes any sense | |
| outside a certain context; it may be a product of my biases, but those | |
| specific biases are not uncommon in the world. | |
| Despite my differences with it, though, I must grant that Tapestry is | |
| a well-written and, mostly, well-crafted work, with plenty of thought | |
| behind it. Whether or not I agree with the views expressed in | |
| Tapestry, I look forward to future works by Mr. Ravipinto. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: "Lars Jodal" <LJ SP@G fjerritslev-gym.dk> | |
| NAME: Unnkulia Zero: The Search for Amanda | |
| AUTHOR: D. A. Leary, for ADVENTIONS | |
| EMAIL: dleary SP@G umabnet.ab.umd.edu | |
| DATE: 1993 | |
| PARSER: TADS with many synonyms | |
| SUPPORTS: TADS Ports | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware, GMD | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/adventions/adventions.zip | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/adventions/adventions.tar.gz | |
| VERSION: Version 1.2 (1.0G) | |
| From time to time a review in SPAG has been followed by another review | |
| of the same game because the second reviewer disagreed with the first | |
| reviewer or felt that some aspects needed more comments. This time | |
| not only the review is about the same game, also the reviewer is the | |
| same person (although I am sending this from another email address). | |
| The first review (in SPAG #12) was done a bit hastily in the middle of | |
| the night after I had finally finished Unnkulia Zero. The deadline for | |
| SPAG was passed, but I hoped to get it through to tell the IF world | |
| about the game, specifically that it had been released as | |
| freeware. The review did get through, but it was less thorough than | |
| the game deserved. So, I'll use the possibilites of IF and do a ... | |
| >RESTART | |
| Background: The unnkulian universe was created along with the first UU | |
| game, "Unnkulian Underworld: The Unknown Unventure" (UU1), by D. | |
| A. Leary. This was a game with tongue firmly planted in cheek, at the | |
| same time writing in the good-old-style of games like "Colossal Cave" | |
| and making fun of most of the traditional conventions. Leary's | |
| excellent writing abilities ensured that the game was not just a | |
| simple parody but instead a very funny game taking place in a universe | |
| of its own. | |
| UU1 was followed by David M. Baggett's "Unnkulian Underworld II: The | |
| Secret of Acme" (UU2), Leary's "Unnkulia Onehalf: The Salesman | |
| Triumphant" (Onehalf), and then Leary's "Unnkulia Zero: The Search for | |
| Amanda" (Zero). Finally Baggett wrote "The Legend Lives" | |
| (Legend). Originally UU1 and UU2 was released as shareware titles, | |
| Onehalf as freeware, Zero as a commercial game, and Legend as | |
| freeware. But few people bothered register the shareware games and | |
| even fewer people would spend money on actually _buying_ a game. Now | |
| Baggett & Leary (together known as Adventions) have done us all a | |
| favour we don't really deserve: They have given all their games out | |
| for free. The URL above points to a file containing the .gam files for | |
| _all_ games released by Adventions. This includes the above-mentioned | |
| games as well as Leary's "Horror of Rylvania" and Baggett's remake of | |
| the original Adventure: "Colossal Caves Revisited". The games are full | |
| versions, patched only to remove any mention of payment. What more | |
| could we ask for? Beware that the file is rather large, about 1.1 MB. | |
| This review is based on the commercial version 1.2 of Zero, which | |
| seems to be the same as the free version 1.0G contained in the file. | |
| The story: The Valley King is furious and desperate. The Unnkulians | |
| have kidnapped his beloved Amanda! He sends you, his most trusted | |
| warrior, out to find her. This won't be an easy task ... During your | |
| search you will have to face a giant snake, the Valley Patrol, a | |
| salesman from Acme, and your fear of heights. To complete your task | |
| you will also have to travel in time, shut down a nuclear reactor, and | |
| possibly learn more about the ways of Duhda. Last but not least you | |
| must match wits with Wowsa Willy, the great magician of the old days! | |
| The game is rich in many ways. The writing is very good and | |
| imaginative. Spelling errors and typos are nonexistent. Each location | |
| has a description of typically 5-10 lines of text that gives a vivid | |
| impression of the place (in my mind I still have detailed pictures of | |
| very large parts of the Unnkulian world). Much attention has been paid | |
| to details. You can examine almost everything mentioned in the text, | |
| and the descriptions are not just run-of-the-mill "this looks like an | |
| ordinary <object> to me". | |
| Unnkulia Zero adds immensely to the world established in UU1 and UU2. | |
| UU1 and UU2 took place in different locations but with Zero these | |
| locations are linked together. The opening of Zero takes place in the | |
| same locations as UU1 (and Onehalf), and later the player may see a | |
| bit of the landscape from UU2. I am impressed at Leary's ability to | |
| use the same locations as starting point for several games and then | |
| let the stories evolve in different ways that makes it natural that | |
| some locations of one game cannot be accessed from another. Had I only | |
| played one of these games I probably wouldn't even notice that I was | |
| being restricted from some areas - every game has its boundaries and | |
| most of the boundaries in these games feel natural. | |
| But the landscape is far from the only thing that links the games | |
| together. Right from the beginning (i.e., UU1) hints of a greater | |
| scheme showed up from time to time, and Zero adds immensely to this | |
| game world. Taking place in the days of lore, when the Valley King | |
| ruled, it lets us know about the time that was the past in UU1 and | |
| UU2. Old myths are expanded on, ambiguities are resolved, and new | |
| myths are presented. Even the Amanda mentioned in the game's title is | |
| no newcomer: Her name was found on an old table in UU1 and in the bark | |
| of an oak tree in UU2. | |
| With a game world given such consideration it should come as no | |
| surprise that Leary has chosen to let the player's character be a | |
| fixed one. In the game's own words: | |
| You're a hulking Valley Warrior, one of the fittest of the Valley | |
| King's soldiers. | |
| This may annoy people who want to think themself directly into the | |
| story but it allows for more details in the description of the player | |
| character. For instance, the player character of Zero suffers from | |
| vertigo, a weakness the person playing the game may not share. In | |
| fact, Leary makes a vitue of necessity and lets the text comment on | |
| the player character from time to time: | |
| You're standing outside the Valley King's forest retreat. It's a | |
| simple hut where His Regalness sheds the trappings of modern | |
| civilization and gets back to nature. You don't entirely | |
| understand his thinking; you're a warrior, not a philosopher. But | |
| he is, after all, the king. Paths wind through the woods to the | |
| north, west, and northeast. The hut is to the south. Through the | |
| trees to the west, you can see sunlight glinting off the waters of | |
| Lake Draounheer. | |
| The game has several NPCs. Some are simply obstacles (e.g., the | |
| snake), others take active part in the fate of our hero (e.g., the | |
| nymph). None of the NPCs are pure cardboard, but they generally have | |
| their own things to do and aren't up to long talks or developed | |
| interaction. In a way the most interesting NPC is someone who strictly | |
| speaking is not a character in the game: Wowsa Willy. You never gets | |
| to meet or see Wowsa Willy, but you will visit Willy's tower, find a | |
| book written by Willy, and possibly hear from Willy himself. An | |
| example: | |
| You're deep in the heart of the swamp now, in a dismal clearing of | |
| quicksand and mire. A gentle old willow tree hangs over the | |
| clearing, vine-covered branches dipping low. The only safe path | |
| is back to the east. | |
| Without warning, your feet sink into the muck. You try to move, | |
| but can't. You're sinking in the quicksand - and you don't have | |
| much time left! | |
| >examine wand | |
| The wand is a thin piece of wood, quite light and flexible. You | |
| can barely make out tiny letters down the side that read 'Wowsa | |
| Willy's Wishing Wand - Works When Waved.' | |
| >wave wand | |
| "Cretin!" a voice booms. "Bother me not with such petty wishes! | |
| Escape from the sand yourself!" | |
| How our hero escapes the bog is another story... | |
| This brings us to the puzzles. From a puzzle-solving point the game is | |
| hard, in its own words "dam tuff (7 out of 10)". [*] I am not very | |
| good at solving adventure game puzzles myself and got stuck several | |
| times. The puzzles are generally logical and interesting. They are | |
| integrated in the plot and not just added as an afterthought. Players | |
| that explore their surroundings are in many cases rewarded by small | |
| hints to the puzzles, especially if they can read between the | |
| lines. The puzzles range from find-the-key (although to find the key | |
| you will have to solve another, more interesting, puzzle) to | |
| complicated and original puzzles. In between are some variations over | |
| old puzzles, like how to deal with the monk (also met in UU1 and UU2) | |
| or how to cross the Stoll Bridge. Most of the variations include new | |
| twists, and none are direct lift-offs. | |
| [*] The spelling reflects the way Acme describes its products in the | |
| UU games. People who played UU1 and UU2 and grew tired of the "cheez" | |
| jokes can relax: Zero is almost cheez-free. | |
| In a few cases "logical" is not the right word for the puzzles. I | |
| cannot decide if this is to be considered bad or not. The world of the | |
| UU games has always had its own rules, and although not logical the | |
| puzzles are consistent with the game setting. The most "nonlogical" | |
| puzzle is related to the burial mound, and since I solved that puzzle | |
| without any help we see that nonlogical doesn't have to mean | |
| impossible or unfair. | |
| Unfair puzzles or not, the game is not without problems: Even the | |
| careful player may end up in a no-win situation without knowing it. | |
| Very few puzzles can be screwed up without giving the player proper | |
| notice, but some objects can be overlooked or lost. The most likely | |
| object to be overlooked is the jade figurine, which is to be found | |
| rather early in the game (and I ain't gonna tell you more!). Other | |
| objects are too easily lost. At one place in the game the player will | |
| have to give up some objects. There are lots of objects to spare in | |
| the game, but as an apparently useless object can turn out to be very | |
| handy it is impossible to be 100% sure _which_ objects can be spared. | |
| This is quite serious, especially since some objects can be lost a | |
| long time before the player realizes they were essential. | |
| The plot of the game is well developed, and the story unfolds without | |
| forcing itself on the player. Some puzzles have to be solved in a | |
| particular order, but that is only natural if we are to expect a | |
| coherent plot. In most parts of the story several independent puzzles | |
| can be considered at a time. Although non-linear on the way the | |
| adventure has one ending. One might think that the games title gives | |
| the ending away right from the start, but one is in for a surprise. | |
| The ending is satisfying but not in the way that is expected. | |
| To sum up, I consider Unnkulia Zero an ought-to-be classic. The game | |
| does have its faults but they are few and heavily outweighed by the | |
| positive things to be said. Getting hints may be a problem, because so | |
| few people have played it (yet!) and Adventions are not going to give | |
| hints any more. My advice to players in need of a hint: Try | |
| rec.games.int-fiction. There are quite a few people out there, and | |
| maybe one of them can help you. If that fails, mail me. I am not very | |
| good at giving subtle hints, but I do know the game well. In any case, | |
| don't rush for hints right away. The game is rich enough to reward | |
| those who take the time on it. | |
| The bottom line can be copied from my original review: All in all | |
| Unnkulia Zero is a remarkable game that was fully worth the money when | |
| it was commercial and which is a must now that is is free! | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Zork Undiscovered Underground | |
| AUTHORS: Marc Blank, Mike Berlyn, G. Kevin Wilson | |
| E-MAIL: Dunno, dunno, gkw SP@G pobox.com | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform | |
| SUPPORTS: Available either as .z5 file or as executable for DOS | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware from Activision | |
| URL: http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Download/ | |
| VERSION: Release 16 | |
| PLOT: Not much (1.0) ATMOSPHERE: Effective (1.4) | |
| WRITING: Solid (1.3) GAMEPLAY: Quite good (1.5) | |
| PUZZLES: Not too hard (1.3) CHARACTERS: Few (1.2) | |
| MISC: Effective, though not really much as teaser (1.3) | |
| OVERALL: 6.5 | |
| Short but entertaining, Zork: The Undiscovered Underground is the | |
| first Zork text adventure to be produced under the auspices of Infocom | |
| since 1987's Zork Zero. Changes in the entertainment world since then | |
| mean that the text game that couldn't exist as a marketable product in | |
| its own right (or so believes Activision) was produced for the sake of | |
| the graphic game Zork: Grand Inquisitor, as a teaser/prequel. While I | |
| can't comment on the worth of ZGI, I do think there's more than enough | |
| in ZTUU to make it an enjoyable game, with or without the larger game, | |
| and the whole thing feels appropriately Zorklike. | |
| That it should, as it happens, because the writing comes courtesy of | |
| original Implementors Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn, while our own (the | |
| IF community's, that is) G. Kevin Wilson did the programming, in | |
| Inform. The mechanics of the collaboration aren't clear--to me, | |
| anyway--but it's skillfully done: there are very few slips that I can | |
| see 'twixt writing and programming (a room description beginning "As | |
| you step through the door...", for example). The game is awash in | |
| references to Zorks of old--there are 69,105 seats in a theater, you | |
| carry an "ersatz-Elvish sword of no antiquity whatsoever"--and there | |
| are several responses that mimic the original trilogy (notably, ZORK | |
| still yields "At your service"), though I missed the variety of snappy | |
| retorts to JUMP. (YELL, unaccountably, yielded nothing at all. I | |
| thought that was in one of the Inform libraries.) At any rate, ZTUU | |
| also reproduces the atmosphere of the earlier games: the setting is an | |
| abandoned "cultural complex" with plenty of details about the Flathead | |
| influence (there is a backstage scrim for Uncle Flathead's Cabin), and | |
| plenty of funny self-reference. The game is set after the fall of the | |
| Empire and the end of the Age of Magic (the Age of Science is now | |
| underway)--the year is 1066--and the sense of rediscovering the | |
| crumbling underground world is just as strong as in the originals: the | |
| game strives more for Zork II-style silliness than Zork III-style | |
| desolation, but there is some of both, for example in the "fifty-story | |
| triumphal arch" leading into the ruined theater. | |
| The puzzles are few and not particularly hard, with the exception of | |
| one toward the end that requires some intuition (though there's an odd | |
| parallel with one of this past year's competition entries.) The main | |
| problem is that the whole thing is a little directionless--your | |
| initial instruction is to "explore, enjoy yourself, and bring back | |
| news," though the objective soon becomes getting out. But you don't | |
| plan your escape so much as solve a series of puzzles, the last of | |
| which happens to give you a rather unlikely escape route (clued, but | |
| not in a way that most would guess). This isn't a huge setback--after | |
| all, it's consistent with the "go-wander-around" feel of Zorks I and | |
| II--but given that the game never really goes anywhere, plot-wise, | |
| it's a little odd to consider this a "teaser." It certainly didn't | |
| tease me into buying ZGI (though that was probably inevitable, since | |
| it would require that I buy a new computer as well), nor could it, | |
| really, since there are no cliffhangers, nothing intriguing that won't | |
| be resolved until the later game. (I was expecting ZTUU to leave me in | |
| some perilous place, or afford me a glimpse of something tantalizing.) | |
| The most interesting element of ZTUU, to my mind, was what it | |
| indicated about Activision's view on the continuing IF community. The | |
| amount and variety of references to the older text games--and the | |
| simple fact that it was produced in Inform by a member of that | |
| community--suggested to me that any promotional effect this might have | |
| for the graphic-adventure crowd was incidental: the point was to hype | |
| ZGI to the die-hard text fans (though, again, I'm afraid it didn't do | |
| that well). After all, those most comfortable with point-and-click | |
| wouldn't be likely to catch on to the parser quickly enough to make | |
| the game worthwhile. (Reinforcing that, when the Implementors make | |
| their obligatory appearance: one of them recalls the "virtues of ZIL, | |
| but offers the opinion that a faster compiler would have been nice." | |
| Cute, and obviously directed to the latter-day programming | |
| crowd. Blank and Berlyn have their fun with the project: the room | |
| where you find the busts of the Implementors goes on at some length | |
| about the "Golden Age of Text Adventures," and then notes that "it is | |
| clear that an attempt was made to commercialize what remains, for now, | |
| above the busts, is a sign reading, 'Consult the Oracles - 10 | |
| Zorkmids.'") | |
| It is worth wondering, though: if the attention of the latter-day | |
| text-IF community is important enough for Activision to produce | |
| freeware as promotion, even short freeware, might the company secure | |
| the services of Blank and Berlyn for a full-length commercial text | |
| game again? (I know I'd buy it.) Alas, probably not, for a few | |
| reasons. For one thing, piracy would be too easy--data files for text | |
| games are small enough to transfer here and there quickly, and copy | |
| protection in the old Infocom style could be easily duplicated. (As | |
| far as I can tell, the existing community has been reasonably honest | |
| about not giving away copy-protection secrets even for the | |
| Masterpieces games, but that's not exactly something that Activision | |
| can bank on.) More importantly, it's not clear that the market is big | |
| enough to make such a project worthwhile--spending some extra money on | |
| a game likely to make plenty from the graphics crowd is one thing, | |
| relying on text-gamers to make a game profitable on their own is | |
| another. Finally, the sheer size of the free- and shareware IF market | |
| would probably discourage anyone from trying to market a new | |
| commercial game, since text fans don't really need any one new game | |
| for a fix (and those who have exhausted the resources of the GMD | |
| archive are probably few). It'd be nice if there were a way to | |
| convince Activision that enough of us would buy a new text Zork entry | |
| to make it profitable, but I'm afraid it probably ain't so. (And | |
| yet...if there were another freeware teaser that actually worked as a | |
| teaser, except leading to a larger _text_ game...well, one wonders.) | |
| At any rate, though there isn't a lot there, ZTUU is a charming return | |
| to the Zork universe in text form: those who appreciated the humor | |
| then are sure to enjoy it even more now. With more to do and more of a | |
| plot, further text offerings from Activision might even be | |
| commercially viable. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Zork Zero | |
| AUTHOR: Steve Meretzky | |
| E-MAIL: Beats me | |
| DATE: 1988 | |
| PARSER: Infocom, advanced | |
| SUPPORTS: Multiple platforms | |
| AVAILABILITY: Commercial (Masterpieces) | |
| URL: N/A | |
| VERSION: Release 393 | |
| PLOT: Not much (1.0) ATMOSPHERE: Uneven (1.1) | |
| WRITING: Amusing, mostly (1.4) GAMEPLAY: Remarkable (1.9) | |
| CHARACTERS: One major one, a bit annoying (1.0) | |
| PUZZLES: Many derivative, some good (1.2) | |
| MISC: Hard to sustain tone over full-length game (1.3) | |
| OVERALL: 6.7 | |
| The original Zork series was probably best described as treasure hunt | |
| with a satirical touch: there was humor here and there, but most of | |
| the plot was straightforward adventure/fantasy, and elements of the | |
| ridiculous were added only sparingly. Not so in Steve Meretzky's | |
| followup, Zork Zero, a "prequel" that subordinated the adventure | |
| aspect to over-the-top camp--and while it works in many ways, fans of | |
| the austere feel of the original series may find it a bit jarring. | |
| As a game that purports to explain some of the confusing backstory | |
| that had swirled around the various Zork entries, Zork Zero is | |
| admirable. The documentation--"Lives of the Twelve Flatheads"--is | |
| extensive and very funny, and the game is awash in amusing details | |
| about Dimwit's excessive tastes. (For example: "This is a small | |
| closet. Well, it's small by the standards of this castle; in a pinch, | |
| it could probably sleep a few regiments.") Though I would have liked a | |
| few more nuggets about how and why various elements of the trilogy | |
| came to be, there are more than enough--including the origin of the | |
| white house--to keep the Zork fan entertained for a while on that | |
| score. The various Flathead siblings and their professions--Ralph | |
| Waldo Flathead, J. Pierpont Flathead, etc.--are also well rendered, | |
| though I was a bit disappointed that there was only one woman among | |
| them, Lucrezia Flathead. C'mon, Steve. Couldn't you come up with any | |
| other notable women in history to parody? (My pick would have been | |
| Joan of Flathead, though I guess the history would have been hard to | |
| rewrite.) Typically of later Infocom works, additionally, the copy | |
| protection is woven into the documentation, which provides several | |
| unguessable actions. (A few of them, though--such as the 400-floor | |
| building with an item on a certain floor mentioned in the | |
| materials--feel a little gratuitous.) | |
| The plot, though ostensibly serious, is largely a romp. The game | |
| tosses you into the fall of the Great Underground Empire, as the | |
| descendant of a witness of Dimwit Flathead's death at the hands of the | |
| wizard Megaboz and Megaboz's curse on the empire, and the heir to a | |
| fragment of parchment that might provide a clue to averting the | |
| curse. 94 years have passed since the curse was imposed and the day | |
| has arrived, and it is now up to you to break the curse by finding two | |
| items belonging to each Flathead and adding them to the wizard's | |
| cauldron. The items have now been scattered to the winds, many in | |
| rather improbable places, though there is some logic to the location | |
| of virtually all of them. You might think that saving the empire is a | |
| grave responsibility, but this is a Steve Meretzky game, and virtually | |
| everything in it is there for laughs. Items you acquire include a | |
| "ring of ineptitude" and an "anti-pit bomb", obstacles come in the | |
| form of whimsical word or logic games, and a central piece of the | |
| geography is a giant brogmoid. Indeed, the player may justifiably | |
| wonder why he or she is bothering to save the empire anyway, since | |
| everyone else has cleared out. | |
| The setting is relentlessly silly: Zork Zero is set less in a fantasy | |
| universe than in a Meretzky world. The bits of swords and sorcery that | |
| pervaded the original trilogy give way to absurdism (occasionally a | |
| tad adolescent; earwax and toe fungus are pivotal in one puzzle). In | |
| one scene, you stumble into an "Inquisition" in which you outwit the | |
| executioner with wordplay; in another, you deal with a massive, | |
| obnoxious talking toad. Centering the action on a castle full of | |
| absurdities is the perfect game idea for Meretzky, but the result is | |
| less fantasy than mock-fantasy--whereas the original trilogy used | |
| fantasy conventions while mocking them, Zork Zero uses only a few of | |
| them and mocks them in such ridiculous ways that it's easy to forget | |
| that it's mockery at all. The result is that the humor is less | |
| effective than that of many of Infocom's earlier games, oddly, since | |
| it's more or less trying to be funny start to finish, while the humor | |
| in Zork I, say, came from an occasional fourth-wall one-liner. | |
| Perhaps the most peculiar element of Zork Zero is the puzzles. There | |
| are some clever and original ones, certainly--particularly one | |
| involving a certain chessboard--but most are classic logic puzzles | |
| cribbed directly into the game. There is, for example, a Towers of | |
| Hanoi puzzle--thoroughly frustrating to wade through for those of us | |
| who already know the idea--and a "lady or the tiger" problem, and a | |
| Hi-Q game, and even a measure-out-the-fluid-with-two-different- | |
| size-vessels puzzle. Suffice it to say that, when you encounter a fox | |
| and a rooster in close proximity, it's fairly obvious that a certain | |
| crossing-the-river puzzle lurks somewhere in the game. The problem | |
| with this isn't that they're poorly done, because most of them succeed | |
| brilliantly (and many are adapted to the context); several games are | |
| represented in full-color VGA graphics, even. It's just that a set of | |
| minds as creative as those of Infocom shouldn't need to copy so many | |
| puzzles from the canon. Still, in that this is a long game with lots | |
| of puzzles--virtually every object of significance, and there are | |
| many, requires some sort of puzzle-solving to obtain--the derivative | |
| aspect isn't as troubling as it might be. Most of the puzzles are | |
| relatively straightforward, though a few require rather exact timing, | |
| and it is sometimes possible to lock yourself out of victory merely by | |
| lack of foresight regarding transportation. (Zork Zero does employ one | |
| of the niftiest transportation devices in all of Infocom, though, and | |
| though the game area is fairly vast, proper use of the device can keep | |
| the player moving around it at a rapid rate.) | |
| Technically, Zork Zero is spectacular. The graphics are not | |
| extensive--pillars framing the screen, most of the time--but there are | |
| more elaborate displays here and there, and the details of the pillars | |
| change with the setting. The games you play require changing graphical | |
| displays, an edition of the Encyclopedia Frobozzica has illustrated | |
| entries, and a mysterious rebus (with a bizarre twist) is a crucial | |
| part of one puzzle--and the graphics are more than adequate for | |
| figuring it out. The parser is up to the standard of Infocom's later | |
| games, with the inclusion of function keys that can stand in for | |
| common commands. (Since this is a Steve Meretzky game, one of the | |
| defaults is "give magic locket to moose.") There is an internal hint | |
| system (non-adaptive) which takes care to preserve the copy protection | |
| and even makes fun of you if you resort to it too often. As if to | |
| showcase the parser's disambiguation abilities, in fact, the game | |
| includes two sets of scaled objects--for example, there is a large | |
| fly, a larger fly, an even larger fly, and the largest fly. Liquids | |
| are skillfully coded several times over, and the transportation system | |
| mentioned above, which offers seemingly infinite bug possibilities, | |
| works flawlessly. | |
| But technical wizardry isn't enough to overcome the game's basic | |
| incoherence: though the finale is impressive and suitably surprising, | |
| the game meanders considerably before that because it doesn't really | |
| have anywhere to go. When your plot simply requires that you pick up | |
| 24 random objects, it's hard to develop the plot along the way, and | |
| the one significant opening up of new territory isn't enough to really | |
| draw the player into the game. There isn't, in other words, enough | |
| payoff for most of your accomplishments; usually, you simply get | |
| another item to toss into the cauldron. Zorks I and II, though | |
| treasure hunts as well, restricted the initial area available far more | |
| than Zork Zero does, and conditioned more discovery on solving | |
| significant puzzles. Here, solving three puzzles, all of them easy, | |
| will allow access to virtually every room in the game. In moving away | |
| from the Zork trilogy's conventional-fantasy roots, therefore, Zork | |
| Zero loses something of what makes conventional fantasy compelling: | |
| danger, discovery, the intrigue of what might be next. Here, there's | |
| never really any question about what you'll find, merely where you'll | |
| find it, and the fun therefore turns to the puzzles--which deliver in | |
| some cases but not all. | |
| Certainly, Meretzky's writing is witty and helps to counteract the | |
| traipsing-to-and-fro aspect; there are plenty of silly things to try | |
| (documented by a "have you tried" section) and funny discoveries. But | |
| over the course of 1500 turns, which is what the average player could | |
| easily end up spending to solve this, even the best writing begins to | |
| pall--and the comic relief in the form of the jester becomes tiresome | |
| long before the end. (The jester has an irritatingly small stable of | |
| jokes, and many of them have annoying side effects--for instance, he | |
| occasionally turns you into an alligator for several turns, meaning | |
| that you drop everything and you have to pick it all up and put on the | |
| items you were wearing. Alternately, a bat might come along and whisk | |
| you to somewhere distant. The appeal of all this wanes considerably | |
| after a while, and the spectacular payoff can't overcome the tedium of | |
| getting there. Given the amount of story underlying Zork Zero, it's | |
| strange how little of it comes out in the game (until the finale, | |
| anyway); it doesn't seem that it would have been impossible to | |
| discover interesting things about the Flatheads or about Megaboz that | |
| shape your quest and draw the player into finding out more. As it is, | |
| until the last few moves, what you see is largely what you get. | |
| There are entertaining moments in Zork Zero, to be sure. It's | |
| questionable whether there are enough to keep the average player | |
| interested throughout, though, and to whatever extent it succeeds, it | |
| does so in a very different way from any of the other Zork entries. | |
| Though it has its moments, I found Zork Zero the weakest of all | |
| Infocom's text Zork games. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Zuni Doll | |
| AUTHOR: Jesse Burneko | |
| E-MAIL: burnekoj SP@G cs.lafayette.edu | |
| DATE: 1998 | |
| PARSER: Inform | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/doll.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| PLOT: Conventional horror-film (1.1) ATMOSPHERE: Uneven (1.1) | |
| WRITING: Sometimes good (1.0) GAMEPLAY: Weak (0.8) | |
| PUZZLES: Illogical in places (0.9) CHARACTERS: Entertaining (1.2) | |
| MISC: Promising beginning, not sustained (1.0) | |
| OVERALL: 5.0 | |
| Zuni Doll bills itself as an "interactive horror story," and its setup | |
| faithfully recalls horror movies: you, the unsuspecting schlump, have | |
| bought a doll associated with a strange legend involving homicidal | |
| tendencies held at bay by magic, and the setup ends with an indication | |
| that the magic has been disabled. What follows is predictable but | |
| entertaining, to a point: you are attacked by the bloodthirsty | |
| foot-high doll and devise various clever means of saving your skin. If | |
| you haven't seen "Child's Play," no need to rent it: Zuni Doll has | |
| roughly the same idea. | |
| Zuni Doll benefits, to some extent, from appearing at a time when | |
| horror movies are in scant supply (well, they're still in video | |
| stores, but they don't get released much)--and to the extent they | |
| appear, they have to make fun of the genre, as in Scream. (Admittedly, | |
| this isn't a horror buff writing, but I'm gonna generalize anyway.) If | |
| it were the mid-'80s, Zuni Doll wouldn't feel remarkable, since the | |
| player could get the same idea far more vividly on screen--but in | |
| 1998, there's a nostalgia to playing a game that tries to reproduce | |
| that feel. And Zuni Doll is successful to some measure: the setup is | |
| appropriately ominous, the contrived circumstances that loose the doll | |
| on you just plausible enough to feel real, and several of the | |
| confrontations (particularly when the doll is hacking its way through | |
| a door) genuinely suspenseful even if improbable. | |
| Unfortunately, implementation problems weigh the game down | |
| considerably. A certain device that you throw together to thwart the | |
| doll defies both logic and reasonable syntax--I was forced to resort | |
| to the walkthrough. (Actions that aren't on the author's mind get | |
| "This dangerous act would achieve little," as if danger were a primary | |
| consideration with a homicidal doll on the loose.) At several points, | |
| hitting the doll elicits "That would be less than courteous," | |
| hilarious enough (Graham probably didn't have this sort of thing in | |
| mind when he wrote Inform's default responses) but not helpful for the | |
| overall feel of the game, shall we say. And after a certain point in | |
| the game, the suspense more or less disappears, and you can take as | |
| long as you like to dispose of the doll. That, unfortunately, | |
| subverts the desperate feel of the earlier scenes--you're out of | |
| danger, and you needn't make every move count--and thereby loses the | |
| aura of the horror movie. Grammar problems and some improbable | |
| coincidences don't help. And, if I may say so, the author humanizes | |
| the doll just a bit too much, in that it seems to acknowledge pain and | |
| takes time to lick its wounds, so to speak--wouldn't a villain intent | |
| only on killing be a little more scary ("it's STILL COMING!")? | |
| There are, to be sure, many things that Zuni Doll does well, and the | |
| author seems to be familiar enough with the conventions of horror that | |
| another attempt might be quite successful. Notably, the MacGyver-esque | |
| feel of turning ordinary household objects into weapons or shields is | |
| well rendered and often very funny, and the ultimate resolution is | |
| satisfying. The game builds tension well, in the prologue and when | |
| the doll is hacking through the door, though the game might have | |
| benefited by even more of it (after all, the scariest bits in movies | |
| of this ilk are always when the bad guy is lurking somewhere, not when | |
| he's on screen)--perhaps an extended buildup, with ominous noises and | |
| such? Also, there are some fairly clever puzzles, though making time | |
| to figure them out slows the game down--my feeling is that the author | |
| should either keep the puzzles or the horror-movie feel, but not try | |
| to do both. | |
| This is a nice effort that needs some work, in short. If it breaks new | |
| ground in IF--I can't think of any slasher games as such--it should be | |
| noted as such; perhaps it might lead to more polished efforts. As it | |
| stands, it recaptures the feel of horror movies only in fits and | |
| starts. | |
| REVIEWS 3: COMPETITION '97 REVISITED ---------------------------------------- | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Down | |
| AUTHOR: Kent Tessman | |
| E-MAIL: | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Hugo, very strong | |
| SUPPORTS: Hugo executables, available in GMD | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/hugo/down/down.hex | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| Kent Tessman's Down deserves credit for one of the most original | |
| settings of the competition, and for a plot that's quite | |
| compelling. The implementation of Down doesn't live up to the premise, | |
| unfortunately, but the idea--setting IF in the midst of a disaster | |
| without veering into camp or action-movie yarn--merits another look. | |
| The story of Down--mild spoilers here, since it isn't really possible | |
| to review this without giving some stuff away--puts you, the | |
| protagonist, on a hill near a plane crash with a broken leg and, | |
| apparently, amnesia, since presumably you were in the plane at some | |
| point and you have no memory of it. Or do you, and the game just | |
| doesn't say as much? At any rate, you first see to your leg and then | |
| to the crash. Admittedly, several of your actions are not entirely | |
| logical, but the game is reasonably enjoyable with disbelief | |
| suspended: the writing conveys a degree of urgency, and the plot | |
| devices, even if not wildly original, work the way they're supposed | |
| to. | |
| There are some problems as well, though. While, as noted, you have a | |
| sense of limited time, it isn't quite limited enough--there is way | |
| more than enough time to do everything needed, and nothing of | |
| consequence happens before time runs out to show that you need to | |
| hurry things along. The plot is a little murky in parts, most | |
| importantly in explaining how you got into this mess, though arguably | |
| having to wade through backstory would just slow things down for the | |
| player. Similarly, the scene is a tad underdescribed--you're told | |
| there are survivors around, but not how many, how badly hurt they are, | |
| etc.--and, likewise, while piling on description would have weakened | |
| the tension (since a rescuer typically doesn't bother to examine every | |
| blade of grass), some more would have been nice to make the setting | |
| more vivid. And though most of the illogicalities aren't fatal, the | |
| final action seemed unlikely enough that I needed the walkthrough, and | |
| another key object was described in a somewhat misleading way. Hugo, | |
| for its part, comes off reasonably well, though some of the | |
| disambiguation queries were a tad bizarre. | |
| The appeal of Down, though, lies less in its technical success than in | |
| its good intentions, since it does try hard to do something relatively | |
| new for IF. The puzzles are sufficiently integrated into the story | |
| that they don't disrupt the plot; there is very little sense that the | |
| author decided to slow the story down by throwing in puzzles here and | |
| there. There are several nice touches that reinforce the story, | |
| moreover, for example the couple you find near the plane--some might | |
| see the inclusion as pointless, but it gave the proceedings an element | |
| of realism. Your cracked watch at the beginning presages the rest of | |
| the game effectively. And despite certain improbabilities in the | |
| nature of the ending, it did avoid an easy everything's-fine approach, | |
| certainly a welcome detail, and the general suspense level show that a | |
| little danger and a time limit go a long way. | |
| Even though, as with many suspense-type stories, much of Down is | |
| better experiened than thought about, it's a reasonably solid entry | |
| that does most of what it sets out to do. As with most of the | |
| competition entries, it needs some work--but it's not a bad effort. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: E-Mailbox | |
| AUTHOR: Jay Goemmer | |
| E-MAIL: ifauthor SP@G micron.net | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: AGT--game too short to judge parser | |
| SUPPORTS: AGiliTy executables, available at GMD | |
| AVAILABIILTY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/agt/emailbox/emailbox.agx | |
| VERSION: Release 0.3 (beta?!?) | |
| E-Mailbox is without a doubt the shortest entry in the 1997 | |
| competition; it's almost impossible to spend more than 15 minutes on | |
| it, even if you try everything there is to try. The plot: you sign on | |
| with an ISP, you send a message, you get mailbombed, you get the | |
| account resurrected, and you get mail. There's a cute real-virtual | |
| sense, in that you get your mail from a "mailbox", but there's not a | |
| lot there. If you do the obvious thing at every juncture, you'll be | |
| just fine with E-Mailbox. There are some mechanical problems, but not | |
| enough to slow progress significantly; most actions that aren't what | |
| the author had in mind elicit "You're wasting your time!" or something | |
| similar. | |
| The problem here is not the concept--okay, maybe it is exciting the | |
| first time--so much as the audience. The players of the 1997 | |
| interactive fiction competition are, by definition, those people with | |
| the connections, software, and wherewithal to connect to an archive in | |
| Germany, download a series of games, set them up on their own | |
| computers, and play them. In that playing E-Mailbox required locating | |
| and downloading the AGiliTy interpreter, there was another degree of | |
| complication in there. Now, I don't actually think all of that is | |
| extremely complicated, but I do think that those who happen to | |
| play--meaning the IF community, which exists solely by virtue of the | |
| Internet--are not likely to be those still gasping over the wonders of | |
| e-mail. (We may recall the inane AOL commercial wherein a woman says | |
| "Every time I get e-mail, it's like opening a present." Very likely, | |
| for the first few times or so, but most IFers, I fear, are a bit | |
| hardened.) I'm not, of course, saying that Jay Goemmer is one. Very | |
| likely he isn't. But it's a bit of a stretch to ask the player for | |
| whom the Internet is simply a fact of life to exclaim loudly over its | |
| wonders. | |
| There's another possibility that I'm neglecting, namely that | |
| Mr. Goemmer is poking a little fun at newbies and their "how do I send | |
| e-mail?" ways and inviting us to join in the humor. It's possible, and | |
| sentences like "Smack the Return key--*really* good" do bring up the | |
| image of a frustrated newbie taking out his anger on his unsuspecting | |
| keyboard. Somehow, though, this doesn't have the air of an insider | |
| chuckling at an outside, if for no other reason than that an account | |
| that actually gets mailbombed has problems that simply reinstalling | |
| the software ain't gonna fix, no how, no way. It's possible that | |
| Mr. Goemmer is mistaking a software bug or some such thing for a | |
| mailbomb; we can't know for sure. (Though an address that's only just | |
| been created isn't likely to get bombed.) Somehow, though, the tone | |
| doesn't say "parody" to me--the whole things is taken a bit too | |
| seriously--and while I appreciate the enthusiasm, I didn't go into | |
| vicarious paroxysms of joy. | |
| For the record, AGT comes off fine--impressive speed, though then | |
| again it should be, running such a small game file. But apart from | |
| reliving the thrill of getting e-mail for the first time, there isn't | |
| enough here to justify the download time, I'm afraid. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: A Good Breakfast | |
| AUTHOR: Stuart Adair | |
| E-MAIL: stu042 SP@G bigfoot.com | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/agb/agb.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 2 | |
| As far as I'm concerned, A Good Breakfast took on something of a | |
| weighty challenge by its very premise--you wake up in your house after | |
| extended drunken revelry and try to find something to eat. An | |
| unappealing and unexciting situation, in short, and it would take some | |
| skill to make such a game compelling--and though there's some wit | |
| here, this entry is only mildly interesting. | |
| The plot is established immediately, and the bulk of the game is spent | |
| at that central task--eating something--since you have to gather the | |
| requisite objects from rather unlikely locales. I foudn that the | |
| actions in many cases were either unlikely or needlessly complicated: | |
| one requires playing a math game of sorts with your friendly robot | |
| Suzy, and the game is absent of explanations why you have only one | |
| said object in the house, or why Suzy would have it. Others are | |
| similarly tortured or unlikely, and too often feel like the author is | |
| throwing in puzzles for their own sake to slow the game down. It's | |
| true, of course, that the plot of the game revolves around a simple | |
| task, and the author has to complicate that task to keep it from being | |
| over in two minutes--but I didn't really feel like the means he chose | |
| worked very well. One object, for instance, is found in a logical | |
| spot, but you can't perform a logical action on it; you have to do | |
| what's required in a fairly ridiculous way, and another is in the | |
| proper room, but in a place that requires absurd lengths to reach. | |
| Moreover--I dunno--I have a problem, realism-wise, with discovering | |
| through a long slow trial-and-error process something about your | |
| personal life or home, something that you're not actually likely to | |
| have forgotten. Yes, bouts of amnesia would get old as a plot | |
| element. This is really an argument against the whole "you're in your | |
| house" genre of games, which have darn near exhausted their interest | |
| for me. Some of the puzzles are quite clever, though, and all are well | |
| coded (and some represented some fairly complicated coding tricks, | |
| notably the math game); I just didn't like the role they played in the | |
| game. Finally, the game ends with a rather, um, distasteful | |
| development that took the whole thing down another notch or two in the | |
| fun department--basic bodily functions as a puzzle premise were not | |
| compelling in My First Stupid Game, and they're not a whole lot better | |
| here. | |
| The frustrating thing about A Good Breakfast, as noted, is that it's | |
| really very funny in places; the author is clearly a witty fellow who | |
| spent a while injecting some wit into the game. Some of the "amusing" | |
| suggestions aren't, really, like sitting on the washing | |
| machine--perhaps I'm missing something there--but many are. There's | |
| even a game-within-a-game for the last lousy point, welcome because | |
| it's explicitly extraneous to the plot, not dragged in improbably, and | |
| also for its dig at fantasy IF. The multiplicity of references to | |
| British pop music--well, I dunno if this was the idea, but I found | |
| them funny just because they look so absurd written in a pop-up | |
| box. This isn't an indictment of British pop in particular; it's just | |
| that very little pop music actually passes the profundity test when | |
| written down and quoted out of context, and "Karma Police,/ Arrest | |
| this man,/ He talks in math,/ And buzzes like a fridge..." seemed so | |
| inane it was amusing. (Plus, for a non-follower of such things, the | |
| name "Chumbawumba" has a humor value all its own.) | |
| The robot's patter feels vaguely Teddy-Ruxpin-esque ("Mmmm, I love | |
| you!"), though with the benefit of absurdity, and there's one somewhat | |
| funny puzzle involving a next-door neighbor. (It doesn't make a lot of | |
| sense, but it's funny anyway.) And there's a generally wry view of | |
| your messy home that makes the game a little less tiresome than it | |
| might be, I guess--stepping out into your garden, or trying to, was | |
| particularly good. The writing is solid throughout--grammar is | |
| impeccable, rooms are well-described, many responses have the air of a | |
| hung-over person mumbling whatever rolls through his mind. It seems, | |
| in short, like all this good writing should have gone into a better | |
| game. | |
| One might quite fairly defend A Good Breakfast by saying it sends up | |
| the class of games where you save the world, or at least several cute | |
| tearful orphans, by replacing it with a plot where you feed yourself | |
| and then--well, I certainly wouldn't want to spoil the ending. Sure, | |
| true, but lots of folks--in this competition, even--have already | |
| gotten there, and even those who appreciate this postmodern element in | |
| IF want _some_ sort of story. (We're not as thoroughgoing as we might | |
| be about our postmodernism, I guess.) Lots of games subvert this | |
| expectation or that, and some manage to be quite compelling. Here, | |
| though I recognize the author's skills, I must say I didn't enjoy the | |
| whole enterprise much. There's plenty of humor here, and the author | |
| clearly has plenty of skill in both writing and programming; I look | |
| forward to his next effort. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Leaves | |
| AUTHOR: Mikko Vuorinen | |
| E-MAIL: mvuorine SP@G cc.helsinki.fi | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: ALAN, not great but good enough | |
| SUPPORTS: ALAN executables, available at GMD | |
| AVAILABIILTY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/alan/leaves/leaves.acd | |
| VERSION: Release 3 | |
| I must say that there were plenty of things about Leaves that I did | |
| like, or at least didn't mind. The puzzles weren't extraordinarily | |
| clever, but they weren't dreadful either, the prose was largely | |
| competent, and the story reasonably compelling though | |
| minimalist. There were some plot holes, naturally, but they weren't | |
| too outrageous, and generally this was on course for perhaps a 4, | |
| perhaps a 5. And then, well, a certain moment happened, and I revised | |
| everything downward several notches. | |
| First, though: ALAN came off reasonably well here. One important | |
| object was hidden effectively--the game didn't recognize the noun | |
| until you'd actually found the object--and though some logical | |
| commands weren't coded and some verbs were a bit clumsy, I doubt that | |
| actually had much to do with ALAN. The most glaring flaw was the lack | |
| of a scripting command--there was no way, as far as I could tell, to | |
| keep a transcript, and no documentation either within or outside the | |
| game that provided advice about such things. (Meaning that all those | |
| ALAN advocates shouldn't bombard me with angry messages saying that, | |
| yes, there's a command, it's "transcriptify." I'm sure there is. No | |
| one actually mentioned it to me, though.) That aside, everything | |
| seemed fairly solid, though there weren't a lot of complicated things | |
| going on either. | |
| The author is a native of Finland, and I'm not sure what his | |
| familiarity with English is, but this is, by and large, well-written; | |
| there are some ungrammatical moments here and there (a tree is "no | |
| more different" from other trees, pointless actions are sometimes | |
| rewarded with "Now that would be the trick"), but on the whole the | |
| writing is competent, and sometimes even wryly funny. (If you try to | |
| chop up a tree with the wrong tool: "Cut a tree with a knife? | |
| Marvellous idea." And kicking most objects elicits "This is not a | |
| football game." ) Though plenty of familiar verbs weren't implemented, | |
| notably "touch" and "climb" and "move", the writing here is adequate | |
| for the purposes--the game isn't long enough, nor are actions complex | |
| enough, for it to feel deficient. | |
| The plot is sorta rudimentary. You're escaping from, er, something--a | |
| prison, a concentration camp? Dunno. But you get out--hence the | |
| "leave" aspect, which actually makes this one of the cleverest titles | |
| of the competition--and just keep going. Incongruities along the way | |
| include a _very_ dense guard, one rather bizarre character, and more | |
| cutting tools and puzzles in which to apply them than you can shake a | |
| proverbial stick at. Still, if you can live with a little absurdity, | |
| the story of Leaves isn't bad; in its own minimalist way, it works | |
| reasonably well. The puzzles are uneven--one conditions your finding | |
| an object on a completely unrelated (and fairly stupid) action, and | |
| one, a maze, is sheer guess-what-the-author's-thinking, but they don't | |
| make the game unplayable; they fit with the absurdist plot. Truth to | |
| tell, I had accepted the game's absurdities early on and wasn't | |
| particularly troubled when I hit on illogical solutions; one thing one | |
| doesn't do with Leaves is take it seriously. (One of the odder bits, | |
| actually, is that certain directions are given but the game prevents | |
| you from using them, sometimes for no obvious reason--e.g., "You | |
| really don't want to go there." It did give the game a certain | |
| tension--what's more frightening than the unknown and | |
| unmentionable?--but it was a strange touch. | |
| And then...for the uninitiated, there's a puzzle toward the end of the | |
| game that is possibly the most blatant instance on record of an author | |
| assuming that the player is a straight male. (Well, okay, I suspect | |
| that things like "Softporn Adventure" do more in that respect, but at | |
| least there the title is a warning.) Now, Mr. Vuorinen was 14 when he | |
| wrote that puzzle, or so he suggests in the notes, and 14-year-old | |
| boys are not known for their maturity regarding matters of sexuality, | |
| and though I doubt I'd look kindly on the 14-year-old Mr. Vuorinen | |
| submitting that puzzle, I might be less annoyed. But 10 years have | |
| passed since then, it seems, and including it in its current form goes | |
| well beyond bad taste. Quite apart from the sheer perversity of the | |
| concept--those are ROCKS you're so excited about--the author insists | |
| on putting everything in schoolboy language and on giving the player a | |
| sort of juvenile fascination about it all. (Plus, well, solving the | |
| puzzle in the first place requires entering the mind of a 14-year-old | |
| boy, since the solution doesn't really jump out at the rest of us.) | |
| This is not the place for a discussion of sex in IF, but I _know_ it | |
| can be done better than this. (The author's preoccupations don't only | |
| come out in this, actually; reading through the data file for this is | |
| not particularly edifying.) As I indicated, this little sequence | |
| brought down the game several notches in my estimation. Sex is one | |
| thing; sex handled in juvenile fashion is another. | |
| Most of Leaves is competently put together, I found, though not always | |
| with much of an ear for logic; there are few glaring flaws. If Mr. | |
| Vuorinen can refrain from severe lapses of judgment, he might help | |
| make ALAN a presence in the IF community; this effort, though, gets a | |
| 3 from me. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Madame L'Estrange and the Troubled Spirit | |
| AUTHORS: Ian Ball, Marcus Young | |
| E-MAIL: iball SP@G maths.adelaide.au.edu | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform, though below average for Inform | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/lest/lest.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| One of the more puzzling entries in this year's competition, Madame | |
| L'Estrange and the Troubled Spirit is an entry that would probably | |
| work better as straight fiction than as IF. If, as some as speculated, | |
| one of the two authors wrote the story and the other adapted it to an | |
| interactive medium, the adapter needs a lot of work--and yet this is | |
| far from all bad; there's an interesting story here beneath all the | |
| glitches. | |
| As the title character, you are sent off to investigate, by means of | |
| your psychic powers, two separate mysteries, which before long merge | |
| into one, naturally. And investigate you do; your actions are almost | |
| entirely wandering around and learning things, rather than solving | |
| puzzles. With the help of a well-implemented device for tracking your | |
| investigation--a notebook in which you record people or locations that | |
| you should visit, and which you can visit by means of TRAVEL TO | |
| [place]--you are saved from having to think all that much, even; a few | |
| commands and a minimum of thought will carry you through most of the | |
| story. Moreover, the story is rather intriguing in its way, if a bit | |
| conventional--ruthless scientists overreaching themselves and | |
| such--and the surprising or suspenseful moments are, more often than | |
| not, exactly that. | |
| As noted, though, the strength of the story can only partly counteract | |
| the weaknesses of the implementation. For one thing, the prose swings | |
| wildly back and forth between present and past tense, and between | |
| third person and second person; it seems likely that the writer wrote | |
| the story in third person, past tense, and the programmer didn't | |
| bother to adapt things much. Moreover, the relationship between what | |
| happens in the long text chunks and the actual game is often tenuous, | |
| as in the following... | |
| during all of this Madame L'Estrange has been taking occasional | |
| notes on her pad. Then Mr Jones stood up and thanked Madame | |
| L'Estrange in advance before heading back out into the wet | |
| Darlinghurst streets. | |
| >look | |
| Madame L'Estrange's Living Room | |
| Mr Jones is sitting in a comfy chair | |
| Obviously, grammar problems abound; though the prose isn't awful, it | |
| needs to be proofread in the worst way. (Actually, perhaps that | |
| already happened.) One of the authors brags that he has "never | |
| willingly played a text adventure," which seems an odd claim to fame; | |
| it does, however, explain some of the problems with how this game is | |
| put together. For example, in one location, you carry on a | |
| conversation with someone who, the game repeatedly tells you, is on | |
| the phone with someone; a randomized message outputs the "talking on | |
| the phone" response fairly often, whether it makes sense or not. There | |
| are other problems, including some fatal bugs associated with SAVE. | |
| Whoever did the writing here did a LOT of it; there are several | |
| situations where many full screens of text go by between | |
| inputs. Often, those scenes include fairly complicated dialogue by | |
| your character, handy in a way--since this game certainly isn't up to | |
| much in the way of parsing input--but also a bit destructive of the | |
| interactive element. Most of the characters have a two- or | |
| three-screen spiel to tell you, and once you've found that, you're | |
| generally safe moving on to the next character; the authors did not | |
| conceal the relevant information under a variety of topics. That | |
| speeds things along, I guess, though it does make the whole thing feel | |
| mechanical. Often, you can "tune in" to the spirit world to | |
| communicate with departed souls, a technique that provides an | |
| interesting sidelight but also some rough spots in the writing, as in | |
| this encounter with a fellow who'd passed on: | |
| "I then realised that it was my body down there and I'd just died, | |
| but, funny enough, I didn't seem to care. Then I found I could | |
| just fly about the place and I tried that for a bit. Then finally | |
| the police came and they looked around and then carted my body | |
| away. I thought I should see where they were taking it, just in | |
| case it was important, so I followed them and here I am. But I | |
| don't think I'll stick around much longer- there must be plenty of | |
| much better places I can go now I'm dead, though it's funny saying | |
| that." | |
| If that's all the dead have to say, those of us who don't contact | |
| them aren't missing much. The story is also cluttered somewhat by | |
| irrelevant details and locations or leads that don't offer anything, | |
| certainly welcome in the realism department--but with the amount of | |
| text this game has, more of it for no reason is not a real treat. And, | |
| naturally, there is very little development of your own character; she | |
| has a mind of her own, in that she carries on conversations without | |
| your help, but not much of it actually says anything about her. In | |
| fact, none of the characters in the game feels particularly real, | |
| oddly considering how much space there is for them to develop, and how | |
| freely the author gives several screens of text over to the characters | |
| to let them say whatever they want. There is so much text, in fact, | |
| that it's easy to miss the odd funny moment, such as, after you've | |
| been wandering around in a drainpipe: "If only the sodden and | |
| bedraggled look was in this year!" This all leads to an exceedingly | |
| strange endgame, very time-sensitive and hard to picture in what it | |
| does and doesn't allow you to do. However, it does add another puzzle, | |
| and it does manage to be somewhat suspenseful. | |
| It should be said, though, that the scenes that are well done are very | |
| good indeed, particularly one toward the end when you discover the | |
| fate of a certain villain; from about the three-quarter mark on, the | |
| game sets a pace of sorts and engages the reader very | |
| effectively. That pace is slowed a bit by the puzzles in the endgame, | |
| unfortunately, but as pure thriller, the end of Madame L'Estrange is | |
| quite good; the player can simply follow along rather than having to | |
| do much interacting. An earlier sequence involving the mysterious | |
| beast also brings some excitement, and on the whole the story is more | |
| than convincing enough, as pure story, to outweigh the minimal | |
| interactive possibilities. To that end, the streamlining device of the | |
| notebook works well; it allows the plot to move along without the | |
| player having to worry about irritating things like | |
| transportation. With similar attention to the mechanics of the game, | |
| this might work quite well. | |
| Madame L'Estrange is not a particularly successful effort, but its | |
| enjoyability depends on the standards of the player; for those who | |
| regard a story as an excuse to string puzzles together, this will be a | |
| waste of time, but those who appreciate a reasonably well-crafted | |
| story and don't mind minimal interactivity might find it reasonably | |
| diverting. If anything, this illustrates the difficulties inherent in | |
| detective-story IF- -of which Infocom's are still the best | |
| examples--and in collaborative efforts; I gave it a 6 on the | |
| competition scale. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Town Dragon | |
| AUTHOR: David Cornelson | |
| E-MAIL: dcornelson SP@G placet.com | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: | |
| ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/tdragon/tdragon.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 2 | |
| A fantasy quest with a reasonably innovative spirit, Town Dragon is | |
| well-intentioned but plagued by gameplay problems. Several of the | |
| puzzles are painfully obscure, and others rely on examining things | |
| that the game doesn't do much to bring to your attention--and others | |
| require learning by death. A "story" file that the author provides is | |
| virtually essential to understanding what's going on--not a bad idea, | |
| and the story is nice, but it would be good to have it integrated into | |
| the game a bit better. The writing is competent, but overly terse at | |
| points when it would be nice to have some thorough desrciption (for | |
| example, in a dragon's cave). | |
| Despite the technical problems, the underlying story is fairly | |
| effective, as IF fantasy stories go. There is a damsel in distress, | |
| but rather than striding to her rescue, you let others volunteer while | |
| you collect treasure--an amusing send-up of the brave selfless | |
| hero. (Moreover, those that do volunteer are comically stupid, and get | |
| carried off by the dragon in amusing ways.) Even then, the plot isn't | |
| quite what it seems, and though the central motif feels lifted from | |
| the Chronicles of Narnia, it works well enough here to keep the player | |
| involved. The best thing about Town Dragon is that, particularly in | |
| light of its fantasy setting, it doesn't reliably go where the | |
| player's expecting; some of the subversions work better than others (a | |
| maid who speaks Valley-Girl style--"ya know?"), there are signs of | |
| originality here that belie "another fantasy game" complaints. And | |
| some of the writing is quite good--there's a transformation scene | |
| that's drawn out over about 20 moves and works very well. | |
| This, in short, is a good effort that needed some testing. There isn't | |
| enough in Town Dragon as it stands to overcome the technical problems, | |
| but the author shows some promise; some more Inform experience might | |
| yield a solid game. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Travels in the Land of Erden | |
| AUTHOR: Laura Knauth | |
| E-MAIL: Laura.Knauth SP@G asu.edu | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: Inform standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/erden/erden.z8 | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| Travels in the Land of Erden is situated firmly within the tradition | |
| of expansive heroic fantasy quests--and, to give it credit, it | |
| inhabits that genre much more consistently than any other game in this | |
| year's competition. (Yes, I do consider that a compliment. I like | |
| heroic expansive fantasy quests. Done well, they have a certain | |
| charm.) Though the gameplay has some problems, Erden is an enjoyable | |
| old-style fantasy quest, too long for the competition but enjoyable in | |
| its own right. | |
| The plot is notable because it changes abruptly midstream--you start | |
| out pursuing a dragon, but are told that the dragon has taken a coffee | |
| break or some such thing and that your new brief is to track down a | |
| lost jewel. You don't seem to mind this--dragons are irritating | |
| things anyway--and, truth to tell, it doesn't exactly affect the way | |
| you go about the game, since you were only nominally pursuing the | |
| dragon and you only nominally pursue the jewel. (I should note, | |
| though, that there are several sources of information scattered | |
| around, some in the form of characters and one an Encyclopedia | |
| Frobozzica-type book, which do help make sense of things.) What | |
| _does_ happen is that you confront a whole bunch of puzzles, which | |
| eventually lead to the goal, and whether it's a dragon or a jewel | |
| makes little difference. Truth to tell, having a plot that is actually | |
| sustained over the course of the game here would be difficult, because | |
| this is a fairly long game, far longer than the average competition | |
| entry. The game design is somewhat wide: much of the territory is | |
| available at the outset, and figuring out exactly where to start is | |
| something of a challenge, since there's lots of area to explore and | |
| lots of objects to pick up. Even so, the exploration is well-done and | |
| feels convincing, particularly a series of caves in the endgame; | |
| disparage fantasy quests if you like, but this author put plenty of | |
| thought and effort into making the scenery come alive. (At some key | |
| moments, the author rewards solved puzzles with more territory to | |
| explore; I wanted that to happen more often, but when it does happen, | |
| it works.) With a clearer hook, something to push the player into the | |
| plot, this would be a very effective story. | |
| There are some clunky moments, gameplay-wise, though many have been | |
| cleaned up since the first release. Most of the problems are | |
| mechanical, though--the game is well-designed and avoids closing off | |
| in unguessable ways, for the most part. In fact, it's virtually | |
| impossible, unless you do something very stupid indeed, to render the | |
| game unwinnable--most resources can be replaced, and there are no time | |
| limits. There is one notable exception, a problem that still needs to | |
| be cleaned up--one alternate solution to a puzzle that the walkthrough | |
| suggests does not work (at least, not as far as I can tell), and if | |
| you make that solution necessary, as it stands, you're in | |
| trouble. That aside, though (and I'm sure it'll get fixed), Erden is a | |
| reasonably player-friendly game. (Moreover, there are some nice code | |
| tricks--the author seems to have added a "windy" attribute for rooms, | |
| for one thing, and a landscape transformation is thoroughly done.) | |
| There are many nice things about Erden--the gypsy who looks into a | |
| crystal ball to determine whether you've attacked or hurt anyone is a | |
| hackneyed but nice touch. The writing is quite skillful, and there's | |
| plenty of it--most rooms are thoroughly described, there are very few | |
| grammar problems, and there's even a modicum of atmosphere, | |
| particularly in the pirate-ship sequence. (Erden is proof positive | |
| that well-written fantasy can still be absorbing.) I enjoyed the | |
| setting on the island, and locations I might ordinarily consider | |
| gratuitous were well-written enough that I didn't, in fact, think | |
| that. And even though it gave rise to one of the more frustratingly | |
| coded puzzles, the spell you cast is genuinely breathtaking, and the | |
| author should get due credit for the idea. (And for the subtle effect | |
| after the spell has worn off. Very few games follow logical effects | |
| that way.) I enjoyed the puzzle in the dragon's cave--though figuring | |
| out the proper syntax was, as usual, a challenge, and the required | |
| action for getting there was a bit obscure. Finally, the on-screen | |
| mapping works _very_ well indeed, and often helps considerably. | |
| Given the level of antipathy to fantasy quests of this nature in the | |
| IF community, I suppose Erden isn't for everyone; though there is much | |
| to enjoy about it, it doesn't push the fantasy-game envelope | |
| appreciably. But nor does it simply invoke fantasy cliches, and | |
| there's nothing lazy about the setting (whereas laziness characterizes | |
| the bulk of inferior fantasy games)--and while the plot could stand to | |
| be better integrated into the story, there are enough clever puzzles | |
| to keep this entertaining. Those that skip Erden because of its genre | |
| might be missing something--and, if nothing else, the author shows | |
| some promise. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: Unholy Grail | |
| AUTHOR: Stuart Allen | |
| E-MAIL: | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: JACL, adequate | |
| SUPPORTS: DOS, Linux and Acorn | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/jacl/grail/grail | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| I was unable to play Stuart Allen's Unholy Grail during the | |
| competition, because it wouldn't run on my computer and I didn't have | |
| game-playing access to another one until after the deadline. Such are | |
| the problems, I guess, with building a language and runtime from the | |
| ground up. At any rate, though I wasn't able to cast an official vote, | |
| I did find Unholy Grail, once I managed to play it, a reasonably solid | |
| entry. | |
| The JACL engine, for its part, was fairly good; I had read that it was | |
| slow in its past incarnations, but I had no problems with it. The | |
| major problem, to my mind, was that the game only allowed one save | |
| position, meaning that I had to consider my moves extra-carefully | |
| before saving the game. This is one feature which, I hope, will change | |
| in the future. The gameplay was otherwise solid, as far as I can tell; | |
| there were no crashes and no gameplay-complicating bugs. There was a | |
| disambiguation problem with the liquids and the slides--I don't recall | |
| the exact words right now--but TADS is just as vulnerable to those. | |
| The game itself is intriguing. You play a scientist who has been | |
| investigating disproportionate deaths of marine life, and your time is | |
| nearly up with no solution at hand. Your mission is to find out the | |
| truth before the military commanders at the nearby base send you | |
| home--and if you don't think the presence of the military is | |
| important, you clearly haven't been watching enough movies. It isn't | |
| clear why you haven't gotten around beforehand to doing what you | |
| do--your actions seem more common sense than a daring discovery--but | |
| once you get off the ground, as it were, the plot moves along | |
| nicely. It does take a while for that to happen, though, as the game | |
| is crammed with red herrings and it isn't initially apparent just | |
| where to start. | |
| There are a few problems with the playing quality of Unholy Grail. At | |
| one point, you must spend about 80 turns traveling to and from a | |
| place, which seems rather excessive; there must be a way to allow the | |
| player to travel there instantaneously while still requiring that the | |
| player have the requisite knowledge for the puzzle. It is even | |
| possible that the player will get to the right spot and realize he's | |
| forgotten an item, though that does require some stupidity on the | |
| player's part. The nature of the plot requires some suspensions of | |
| disbelief, and the ending fits oddly with the rest of the story. On | |
| the other hand, though, there are some nicely done touches, notably a | |
| chemistry experiment of sorts that you undertake: it's done with few | |
| needless complications and the actions are well coded. One stray | |
| detail you run across in the course of figuring out the mystery is | |
| particularly well done, and in general the game built the tension | |
| well. | |
| Though there are some glitches, they're blips on a generally sound | |
| story. Even though it invokes lots of science-thriller cliches-- | |
| isolated research team, a traitor trying to sabotage things, dramatic | |
| showdowns, hubristic villains--Unholy Grail remains consistently | |
| likeable. The puzzles are a large part of it; those in the endgame are | |
| particularly good, I think, and the microscope problem was rewarding | |
| to figure out. Most of the puzzles weren't so hard that they slowed | |
| the story down, which was certainly welcome. And I didn't notice any | |
| problems with the writing--no grammar problems--and it built the story | |
| up reasonably well. | |
| The real problem with Unholy Grail in its current form is that it | |
| lacks a hook--the player can spend a long time wandering around | |
| picking up objects before he realizes what to do. Future releases | |
| might eliminate some of the useless objects and work in an | |
| interesting/mysterious/suspicious development early on that might lead | |
| the player in, rather than forcing him to make the first--somewhat | |
| obscure--discovery on his own. Further development on this game might | |
| also develop the character of your lab partner a bit more--as it is, | |
| we don't see much of her initially, and the nature of the player's | |
| relationship with her is unclear. (No, no, not that kind of | |
| relationship. Just how the partnership has worked, or not worked.) On | |
| the whole, then, Unholy Grail is reasonably diverting, and certainly | |
| worth the download and playing time. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> | |
| NAME: VirtuaTech | |
| AUTHOR: David Glasser | |
| E-MAIL: virtuatech SP@G ifcompetition.org | |
| DATE: 1997 | |
| PARSER: TADS standard | |
| SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) | |
| URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/tads/vtech/vtech.gam | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| Captivating visions of the future are fairly old hat in science | |
| fiction, though, like most things, they're not quite as overdone in | |
| IF. The challenge in such stories is usually to introduce the player | |
| to some new technology and make it both impressive--full of exciting | |
| possibilities and dangers--and easily accessible. David Glasser's | |
| VirtuaTech doesn't quite meet that challenge; though it's simple and | |
| reasonably fun, the equipment that the player has to use is not as | |
| accessible as it might be, and the whole thing just doesn't feel all | |
| that enthralling. | |
| You are a college student who must get to class with a copy of your | |
| report in some limited amount of time--though it doesn't seem the game | |
| actually limits the time, unfortunately; it might give the task some | |
| urgency. Your goal, actually, is one of the best features of the | |
| game--it drives all your actions, it gives the puzzles meaning, and | |
| you are never allowed (at least, there isn't much room) to go check | |
| out the sights. Many games simply thrust the player into an | |
| environment--far too often a fairly humdrum one--with a goal only | |
| vaguely defined and not obviously connected to any of the initial | |
| things he or she does. There is much to be said for a small, tightly | |
| plotted game environment. Anyway, you find that the power is | |
| out--though some rather power-heavy equipment seem to work just | |
| fine--and then that your computer has bugs, and you must use the | |
| virtual-reality technology available to solve the problems. There is | |
| an additional puzzle afterwards that I found hilarious, at least in | |
| terms of the images it produced; I wished the author had made more of | |
| it in the writing. (I also wished that the author had explained why | |
| "the world for miles in each direction is cursed with blight and | |
| chill"; that sounds a little overwritten to be talking about winter, | |
| but if not, what is it talking about?) | |
| Among the main problems here is that the technology is such a pain to | |
| use that it hardly seems labor-saving at all. For example, you have a | |
| "scanner" that must be plugged into the phone for the latter to work; | |
| the phone dials whatever number is on the scanner. The number on the | |
| scanner, though, is whatever you last scanned into it, and there is no | |
| apparent way to "save" a number on it and come back to it later, after | |
| dialing other numbers. Worse, you have to pick up the scanner to scan | |
| anything into it, and to do that, you have to disconnect it from the | |
| phone and then reconnect it afterwards--and why those complications | |
| are necessary is beyond me. Actually, I have a guess--the existing | |
| setup prevents the player from going to a virtual site (via the phone) | |
| while still holding the scanner, which would admittedly cause | |
| problems. But it doesn't seem so impossible to either prevent the | |
| player from disappearing into VR while still holding the scanner or | |
| have it fall to the floor when he does. It feels, in short, like the | |
| author should have made it easier by skipping the scanner and allowing | |
| the player to CALL whoever once he knows the number. I mean, there are | |
| programmable phones _now_. Did progress go backwards? The author | |
| can't, however, be accused of laziness, in that the places you access | |
| to finish the game have a wide range of irrelevant options to simulate | |
| the feel of actual tech support; that element, at least, feels real. | |
| Which brings up the other main problem. Tech support? This is a good | |
| way to make your innovation thoroughly unappealing. Mightn't it be | |
| possible to go somewhere else, somewhere fun? It might be in the | |
| course of the given plot--you have to visit your cool friend to get | |
| some sort of information for your report, or go to Bermuda to | |
| investigate something. I dunno. But this is not a vision of the future | |
| that gets me all that excited--I mean, it's barely different from | |
| existing technology, and getting transported to drab little rooms | |
| doesn't feel like much progress. (After all, what happens in any of | |
| the virtual scenarios that couldn't have been done just as easily with | |
| an ordinary phone and computer? And how is the experience any more | |
| interesting?) The interior of the computer is all right (though, like | |
| with A New Day, I wanted to do more with it, like chop down a | |
| directory tree or sift through the trash or explore a dark and spooky | |
| sector), though compass directions break the spell a bit, and the | |
| translation from solid objects in real life to virtual objects-- and | |
| back--is plausible and well done. (And the daemon is cute, I must | |
| admit, even if you can't do much with him.) But you can't really do | |
| enough in the computer for me to get into the idea. | |
| Oddly, it was the last part of VirtuaTech (well, it doesn't have to be | |
| last, but that's how it worked for me and I suspect that most players | |
| had the same experience) that I enjoyed the most, though it required | |
| major suspensions of disbelief about several things. It was just--I | |
| dunno--a funny way to solve the puzzle, though it seemed like there | |
| was another, more obvious way to do substantially the same thing. It | |
| was also something that the player can actually visualize--the other | |
| parts of the game are written so sparsely that they don't exactly come | |
| alive. And, to be frank, it was more interesting than calling tech | |
| support. | |
| VirtuaTech isn't bad; structurally, there isn't much wrong with it. I | |
| just felt like it needed some things--perhaps more things along the | |
| lines of the last puzzle--to spice it up and make it fun to play; had | |
| I read about such a game in the GMD archive, I doubt I would have been | |
| inspired to play it. Though mostly solid, there isn't a lot here to | |
| keep the player's interest. | |
| READER'S SCOREBOARD --------------------------------------------------------- | |
| As mentioned before, the scoreboard is now up to date! More ratings | |
| are welcome, especially for the games with a small number in the | |
| "#Sc." column. | |
| Notes: | |
| A - Runs on Amigas. | |
| AP - Runs on Apple IIs. | |
| GS - Runs on Apple IIGS. | |
| AR - Runs on Acorn Archimedes. | |
| C - Commercial, no fixed price. | |
| C30 - Commercial, with a fixed price of $30. | |
| F - Freeware. | |
| GMD - Available on ftp.gmd.de | |
| I - Runs on IBM compatibles. | |
| M - Runs on Macs. | |
| S20 - Shareware, registration costs $20. | |
| 64 - Runs on Commodore 64s. | |
| ST - Runs on Atari STs. | |
| TAD - Written with TADS. This means it can run on: | |
| AmigaDOS, NeXT and PC, Atari ST/TT/Falcon, DECstation | |
| (MIPS) Unix Patchlevel 1 and 2, IBM, IBM RT, Linux, Apple | |
| Macintosh, SGI Iris/Indigo running Irix, Sun 4 (Sparc) | |
| running SunOS or Solaris 2, Sun 3, OS/2, and even a 386+ | |
| protected mode version. | |
| AGT - Available for IBM, Mac, Amiga, and Atari ST. This does not | |
| include games made with the Master's edition. | |
| ADVSYS - Available for PC and Macintosh only, or so my sources tell | |
| me. (Source code available as well. So it can be ported | |
| to other computers.) | |
| HUG - Written with Hugo. Runs on MS-DOS, Linux, and Amigas. | |
| INF - Infocom or Inform game. These games will run on: | |
| Atari ST, Amiga, Apple Macintosh, IBM, Unix, VMS, Apple II, | |
| Apple IIGS, C64, TSR-80, and Acorn Archimedes. There may be | |
| other computers on which it runs as well. | |
| Name Avg Sc Chr Puz # Sc Issue Notes | |
| ==== ====== === === ==== ===== ===== | |
| Adventure (all variants) 6.8 0.8 1.1 6 8 F_INF_TAD_ETC_GMD | |
| Adventureland 4.0 0.5 1.5 1 F_GMD | |
| Adv. of Elizabeth Hig 3.1 0.5 0.3 2 5 F_AGT | |
| All Quiet...Library 4.7 0.8 0.7 4 7 F_INF_GMD | |
| Amnesia 7.8 1.5 1.7 2 9 C_AP_I_64 | |
| Another...No Beer 2.4 0.2 0.8 2 4 S10_IBM_GMD | |
| Arthur: Excalibur 8.0 1.3 1.6 4 4, 14 C_INF | |
| Awe-Chasm 2.4 0.3 0.6 1 8 S?_IBM_ST | |
| Balances 6.5 1.0 1.4 3 6 F_INF_GMD | |
| Ballyhoo 7.7 1.8 1.5 4 4 C_INF | |
| Beyond Tesseract 3.7 0.1 0.6 1 6 F_I_GMD | |
| Beyond Zork 8.1 1.5 2.0 3 5 C_INF | |
| Border Zone 7.3 1.4 1.4 6 4 C_INF | |
| Broken String 3.1 0.5 0.6 1 x F_TADS_GMD | |
| Bureaucracy 7.6 1.7 1.3 5 5 C_INF | |
| Busted 5.2 1.0 1.1 1 F_INF_GMD | |
| Castaway 1.1 0.0 0.4 1 5 F_IBM_GMD | |
| Change in the Weather 7.3 1.0 1.4 5 7, 14 F_INF_GMD | |
| Christminster 8.8 1.8 1.7 4 F_INF_GMD | |
| Corruption 7.8 1.6 1.1 3 x C_I | |
| Cosmoserve 8.7 1.3 1.4 2 5 F_AGT_GMD | |
| Crypt v2.0 5.0 1.0 1.5 1 3 S12_IBM_GMD | |
| Curses 8.4 1.3 1.7 9 2 F_INF_GMD | |
| Cutthroats 6.4 1.4 1.2 5 1 C_INF | |
| Deadline 6.9 1.3 1.4 5 x C_INF | |
| Deep Space Drifter 5.5 1.4 1 3 S15_TAD_GMD | |
| Delusions 7.4 1.3 1.5 2 14 F_INF_GMD | |
| Demon's Tomb 7.4 1.2 1.1 2 9 C_I | |
| Detective 1.1 0.0 0.0 4 4, 5 F_AGT_GMD | |
| Detective-MST3K 6.0 0.6 0.1 3 7, 8 F_INF_GMD | |
| Ditch Day Drifter 7.1 1.2 1.6 1 2 F_TAD_GMD | |
| Dungeon 7.4 1.5 1.6 1 F_GMD | |
| Dungeon Adventure 6.8 1.3 1.6 1 4 F_GMD | |
| Dungeon of Dunjin 5.8 0.7 1.4 3 3, 14 S20_IBM_MAC_GMD | |
| Electrabot 0.7 0.0 0.0 1 5 F_AGT_GMD | |
| Enchanter 7.1 0.9 1.4 6 2 C_INF | |
| Enhanced 5.0 1.3 1.3 1 2 S10_TAD_GMD | |
| Eric the Unready 6.9 1.5 1.5 2 x C_I | |
| Fable 2.0 0.2 0.1 1 6 F_AGT_GMD | |
| Fish 7.6 1.2 1.7 3 x C_I | |
| Forbidden Castle 4.8 0.6 0.5 1 x C_AP | |
| Friday Afternoon 6.3 1.4 1.2 1 13 F_INF_GMD | |
| Gateway 7.5 1.6 1.5 1 x C_I | |
| Glowgrass 6.7 1.3 1.4 1 13 F_INF_GMD | |
| Great Archaelog. Race 6.5 1.0 1.5 1 3 S20_TAD_GMD | |
| Guardians of Infinity 8.5 1.3 1 9 C_I | |
| Guild of Thieves 7.3 1.2 1.6 3 x C_I | |
| Gumshoe 6.3 1.3 1.1 2 9 F_INF_GMD | |
| Hitchhiker's Guide 8.0 1.6 1.6 6 5 C_INF | |
| Hollywood Hijinx 6.4 0.9 1.6 7 x C_INF | |
| Horror30.zip 3.7 0.3 0.7 2 3 S20_IBM_GMD | |
| Horror of Rylvania 7.7 1 1 C20_TAD_GMD (Demo) | |
| Humbug 7.4 1 x S10_GMD | |
| Infidel 6.9 0.0 1.4 9 1, 2 C_INF | |
| Inhumane 3.6 0.2 0.7 1 9 F_INF_GMD | |
| I-0: Jailbait on Inte 8.0 1.7 1.3 4 F_INF_GMD | |
| Jacaranda Jim 7.0 1 x S10_GMD | |
| Jeweled Arena 8.0 1.5 1.5 1 x ? | |
| Jigsaw 7.9 1.3 1.4 5 8, 9 F_INF_GMD | |
| Jinxter 6.4 1.1 1.3 2 x C_I | |
| John's Fire Witch 7.2 1.1 1.6 5 4 S6_TADS_GMD | |
| Journey 7.8 1.6 1.3 3 5 C_INF | |
| Jouney Into Xanth 5.0 1.3 1.2 1 8 F_AGT_GMD | |
| Klaustrophobia 6.7 1.2 1.3 5 1 S15_AGT_GMD | |
| Leather Goddesses 7.3 1.4 1.6 6 4 C_INF | |
| Legend Lives! 8.9 0.9 1.6 2 5 F_TADS_GMD | |
| Lethe Flow Phoenix 7.5 1.7 1.5 1 9 F_TADS_GMD | |
| Light: Shelby's Adden 8.3 1.8 0.9 2 9 S?_TADS_GMD | |
| Losing Your Grip 8.2 1.3 1.4 2 14 S_TADS_GMD | |
| Lurking Horror 7.4 1.4 1.3 8 1, 3 C_INF | |
| MacWesleyan / PC Univ 5.6 0.7 1.0 1 x F_TADS_GMD | |
| Magic.zip 4.5 0.5 0.5 1 3 S20_IBM_GMD | |
| Magic Toyshop 4.3 0.7 1.1 2 F_INF_GMD | |
| Matter of Time 1.4 0.3 1.4 1 14 F_ALAN_GMD | |
| Meteor...Sherbet 8.5 1.6 1.9 1 F_INF_GMD | |
| Mind Electric 5.1 0.6 0.8 3 7, 8 F_INF_GMD | |
| Mind Forever Voyaging 8.5 1.4 0.8 5 5 C_INF | |
| Moonmist 5.7 1.3 1.1 8 1 C_INF | |
| Mop & Murder 5.0 0.9 1.0 2 4, 5 F_AGT_GMD | |
| Multidimen. Thief 5.6 0.4 1.0 3 2, 9 S15_AGT_GMD | |
| Mystery House 4.1 0.3 0.7 1 x F_AP_GMD | |
| New Day 5.5 1.3 0.9 1 13 F_INF_GMD | |
| Night at Museum Forev 4.2 0.3 1.0 4 7, 8 F_TAD_GMD | |
| Nord and Bert 5.4 0.8 1.1 3 4 C_INF | |
| Odieus...Flingshot 3.3 0.4 0.7 2 5 F_INF_GMD | |
| One Hand Clapping 7.1 1.1 1.3 2 5 F_ADVSYS_GMD | |
| One That Got Away 6.4 1.2 0.9 2 7,8 F_TAD_GMD | |
| Oo-Topos 5.7 0.2 1.0 1 x C_AP_I_64 | |
| Path to Fortune 6.8 1.4 0.8 1 9 S_INF_GMD | |
| Pawn 6.5 1.0 1.2 1 x C_I_AP_64 | |
| PC University: See MacWesleyan | |
| Perseus & Andromeda 3.4 0.3 1.0 1 x ? | |
| Phred Phontious...Pizza 5.2 0.8 1.3 1 19 F_INF_GMD | |
| Planetfall 7.4 1.7 1.5 7 4 C_INF | |
| Plundered Hearts 7.3 1.4 1.2 4 4 C_INF | |
| Pyramids of Mars 6.0 1.2 1.2 1 | |
| Quarterstaff 6.1 1.3 0.6 1 9 C_M | |
| Reruns 5.2 1.2 1.2 1 | |
| Sanity Claus 9.0 1 1 S10_AGT_GMD | |
| Save Princeton 5.8 1.2 1.3 2 8 S10_TAD_GMD | |
| Seastalker 5.5 1.2 0.9 6 4 C_INF | |
| Shades of Grey 8.0 1.3 1.4 4 1, 2 F_AGT_GMD | |
| Sherlock 7.3 1.4 1.4 3 4 C_INF | |
| She's Got a Thing... 7.6 2.0 1.8 1 13 F_INF | |
| Shogun 7.1 1.5 0.5 1 4 C_INF | |
| Sir Ramic Hobbs 5.0 1.0 1.5 1 6 F_AGT_GMD | |
| So Far 9.3 1.5 1.9 1 F_INF_GMD | |
| Sorceror 7.3 0.6 1.6 5 2 C_INF | |
| South American Trek 0.9 0.2 0.5 1 5 ?_IBM_GMD | |
| Space Aliens...Cardig 1.6 0.4 0.3 5 3 S60_AGT_GMD | |
| Spellbreaker 8.3 1.2 1.8 5 2 C_INF | |
| Spellcasting 101 7.0 1.0 1.2 1 x C_I | |
| Spellcasting 201 7.8 1.5 1.6 1 x C_I | |
| Spellcasting 301 7.5 1.4 1.5 1 x C_I | |
| Spider and Web 8.0 1.5 1.6 1 14 F_INF_GMD | |
| SpiritWrak 6.6 1.0 0.6 1 9 F_INF_GMD | |
| Spur 7.2 1.4 1.2 1 9 F_HUG_GMD | |
| Starcross 7.0 1.1 1.3 5 1 C_INF | |
| Stationfall 7.6 1.6 1.6 5 5 C_INF | |
| Sunset Over Savannah 8.3 1.3 1.5 1 13 F_INF_GMD | |
| Suspect 5.8 1.2 1.0 3 4 C_INF | |
| Suspended 7.2 1.3 1.3 5 8 C_INF | |
| Tapestry 6.9 1.2 0.7 2 14F_INF_GMD | |
| Tempest 5.6 1.0 0.6 1 13 F_INF_GMD | |
| Theatre 6.7 1.0 1.2 4 6 F_INF_GMD | |
| TimeQuest 8.6 1.5 1.8 1 x C_I | |
| TimeSquared 4.3 1.1 1.1 1 x F_AGT_GMD | |
| Toonesia 6.4 1.2 1.2 3 7 F_TAD_GMD | |
| Tossed into Space 3.9 0.2 0.6 1 4 F_AGT_GMD | |
| Trinity 8.6 1.4 1.7 10 1,2 C_INF | |
| Tryst of Fate 7.1 1.4 1.3 1 | |
| Tube Trouble 3.3 0.5 0.4 1 F_INF_GMD | |
| Uncle Zebulon's Will 7.2 0.8 1.4 5 7 F_TAD_GMD | |
| Undertow 5.2 1.0 0.8 1 F_TAD_GMD | |
| Undo 1.9 0.1 0.4 2 7 F_TAD_GMD | |
| Unnkulian One-Half 7.0 1.2 1.6 6 1 F_TAD_GMD | |
| Unnkulian Unventure 1 7.1 1.2 1.6 6 1, 2 S10_TAD_GMD | |
| Unnkulian Unventure 2 7.2 1.4 1.5 4 1 S10_TAD_GMD | |
| Unnkulian Zero 9.0 1 1 C25_TAD_GMD (Demo) | |
| Waystation 5.7 0.7 0.9 2 9 F_TAD_GMD | |
| Wishbringer 7.5 1.4 1.3 6 5, 6 C_INF | |
| Witness 7.2 1.7 1.2 5 1,3,9 C_INF | |
| Wonderland 7.5 1.3 1.4 1 x C_I | |
| World 6.5 0.6 1.3 2 4 F_GMD | |
| Zanfar 2.6 0.2 0.4 1 8 F_AGT_GMD | |
| Zero Sum Game 7.5 1.7 1.2 1 13 F_INF_GMD | |
| Zork 0 6.7 1.2 1.6 4 14 C_INF | |
| Zork 1 6.0 0.7 1.5 11 1, 2 C_INF | |
| Zork 2 6.5 0.8 1.5 8 1, 2 C_INF | |
| Zork 3 6.1 0.7 1.4 6 1, 2 C_INF | |
| Zork Undisc. Undergr. 6.5 1.0 1.2 1 14 F_INF | |
| -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- | |
| The Top Five: | |
| A game is not eligible for the Top Five unless it has received at | |
| least three ratings from different readers. This is to ensure a more | |
| democratic and accurate depiction of the best games. | |
| For the first time since the "at least three ratings" rule was | |
| enforced (in SPAG #4), a non-Infocom game heads the list: | |
| 1. Christminster 8.8 4 votes | |
| 2. Trinity 8.6 10 votes | |
| 3. Mind Fvr Voyaging 8.5 5 votes | |
| 4-5. Curses 8.4 9 votes | |
| Spellbreaker 8.3 5 votes | |
| Three cheers for the author of Christminster: Gareth Rees! | |
| CLOSING REMARKS ------------------------------------------------------------- | |
| That's all for this time. See you again in a couple of months' time; | |
| if the current pace of new releases keeps up, there'll be plenty of | |
| interesting reviews to write. Keep 'em coming! | |
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | |
| Thank you for helping to keep text adventures alive! | |
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