| ___. .___ _ ___. | |
| / _| | \ / \ / ._| | |
| \ \ | o_/ | | | |_. | |
| .\ \ | | | o | | | | | |
| The |___/ociety for the |_|romotion of |_|_|dventure \___|ames. | |
| ISSUE #49 | |
| Edited by Jimmy Maher (maher SP@G grandecom.net) | |
| August 18, 2007 | |
| SPAG Website: http://www.sparkynet.com/spag | |
| SPAG #49 is copyright (c) 2007 by Jimmy Maher. | |
| Authors of reviews and articles retain the rights to their contributions. | |
| All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine | |
| with the traditional 'at' sign. | |
| ARTICLES IN THIS ISSUE ---------------------------------------------------- | |
| Editorial | |
| IF News | |
| A History of Spanish IF | |
| INTERVIEWS IN THIS ISSUE -------------------------------------------------- | |
| Sebastian Arga�araz ("Sarganar") | |
| Juan Sebasti�n Armas ("Incanus") | |
| Javier Carrascosa ("Grendel Khan") | |
| Javier San Jos� ("JSJ") | |
| "Lenko" | |
| Andr�s Viedma Pel�ez ("Akbarr") | |
| Luis David Arranz P�rez ("Jarel") | |
| Kent Tessman | |
| REVIEWS IN THIS ISSUE ----------------------------------------------------- | |
| Amnesia | |
| La Cara Oculta de la Luna | |
| Fate | |
| Final Selection | |
| Getfeldt's Treasure | |
| Goteras | |
| It's Easter, Peeps | |
| Suprematism | |
| When in Rome 1: Accounting for Taste | |
| When in Rome 2: Far from Home | |
| SPECIFICS | |
| ========= | |
| Floatpoint | |
| EDITORIAL------------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| As I too often do, I have to begin this issue with an apology for its tardiness. | |
| Lots of people have contributed lots of great content this time around, and I | |
| have sat on it far too long. I could give a rundown of the personal | |
| circumstances that led to that, but I will spare you the excuses and just offer | |
| my apologies. I do think this is a pretty good issue, one that is hopefully | |
| worth the wait. | |
| As most SPAG readers are probably aware, longtime community stalwart David | |
| Cornelson recently launched a new company called Textfyre with the intention of | |
| publishing commercial IF titles. Commercial IF has not been a completely dead | |
| idea during the 2000s, of course, as both Peter Nepstad and Kent Tessman have | |
| had at least modest successful in selling their respective games 1893 and Future | |
| Boy! (In fact, see this this very issue for a thoughtful interview with Mr. | |
| Tessman which was conducted on behalf of SPAG by Greg Boettcher.) Mr. | |
| Cornelson, though, proposes to take things to an entirely different level in | |
| publishing a steady stream of new IF titles produced by creative teams that do | |
| not necessarily include Mr. Cornelson himself. He certainly appears, at least | |
| from this uninformed observer's standpoint, to be doing everything right, and | |
| while I'm not sure I would invest my last dollar in Textfyre at this point, I | |
| would give him the best odds for success of any commercial IF venture since, oh, | |
| the founding of Legend Entertainment. | |
| It's worth asking, though, what a fullblown revival of commercial IF via | |
| Textfyre would really mean to those of us who have stuck with the form through | |
| all these years. The first instinct for me, and perhaps most of you, is to | |
| envision a return to glory and get stars in the eyes. Who among those of us who | |
| remember doesn't pine for the days when one could walk into one's local | |
| bookstore or game store and see IF from Infocom and others on the shelf? For | |
| many of us the glory days of commercial IF carry a huge dollop of nostalgia, of | |
| lost childhood and the magic of discovery and all the rest. (The Golden Age of | |
| IF is twelve?) That at least is the way that I suspect most of the | |
| 30-somethings among us feel. I don't have a clue about the rest of you lot, | |
| except to believe that we all also feel that IF IS a valid, exciting, even | |
| important form of expression that we have hardly begun to explore, and that it | |
| deserves the critical standing that, for better or for worse, is generally | |
| reserved in our culture for things that are packaged and sold. And yes, we'd | |
| really just like to hold shiny boxes with Mike Gentry or Jon Ingold's name on | |
| them in our hands too. | |
| And yet many of us believe that the end of the commercial era was not entirely a | |
| negative for the long-term artistic development of the form. The fact that our | |
| games are free has allowed us to innovate and to take risks that the companies | |
| of the 1980s would never have dared. We don't have to suffer through reams of | |
| bad puzzles thrown in just so their host games could be padded out enough to | |
| seem to justify their $30 price tags anymore, and I'm certainly thankful for it. | |
| And honestly, would anyone, even those of us inside the community, pay money for | |
| some of the admittedly fascinating experiments with the form of the last ten | |
| years? | |
| Understandably then, Mr. Cornelson seems to plan to stick to fairly traditional | |
| text adventure tropes, at least initially. I'm thankful, though, to see that he | |
| is not explictedly targeting the nostalgia market. Anyone who has watched VH-1 | |
| in the last ten years knows, of course, that nostalgia is a powerful commercial | |
| force, but using it to sell IF only reinforces a lot of painful stereotypes | |
| about the form that I think most of us would really like to get away from. | |
| Textfyre will try to sell IF to a new generation of younger readers, the | |
| burgeoning Young Adult bookseller market at which Harry Potter was targeted. | |
| While one might wish to see Textfyre release more adult-oriented games at some | |
| point in its hopefully long existence, it isn't hard to get excited by the idea | |
| of a whole new generation of wide-eyed youngsters discovering the magic of IF. | |
| The upshot of all this, though, is that a venture such as Textfyre -- and, if it | |
| is successful, the others that will inevitably follow -- NEEDS this community to | |
| experiment and probe the margins. Mr. Cornelson obviously understands this, and | |
| intends to create a symbiotic relationship between this community and his | |
| company. And commercial IF written under Cornelson's model will be produced by | |
| teams, which opens up the possibility for more IF novels to complement the short | |
| stories this community generally produces. | |
| Textfyre is exciting stuff, my friends, as exciting in its way as were TADS 3 | |
| and Inform 7 last year. IF is in a great position right now, with next | |
| generation development platforms that make the previously difficult or | |
| impossible almost trivial; a surprising number of new faces to complement the | |
| old guard; a steady stream of new games; and now the possibility for a | |
| commercial face for the form to augment our community's free efforts. It's | |
| quite a change from the somewhat moribund community that existed when I took the | |
| reins of SPAG a couple of years ago. (Don't worry, I claim no causal connection | |
| whatsoever here.) | |
| It's all going to be great fun to cover. I hope to explore the potentials and | |
| pitfalls of commercial IF in more depth in the next issue to complement this | |
| editorial and the Kent Tessman interview you'll find below. You'll also find in | |
| this issue the next installment of our ongoing series on the non-English IF | |
| communities, this time covering Spanish IF in considerable depth; a lot of | |
| thoughful reviews from regulars and newcomers, including a couple addressing | |
| prominent Spanish games of the last few years as a complement to the feature | |
| article and interviews; and a great SPAG Specifics piece from Jim Aikin on | |
| Floatpoint. | |
| And one more commercial IF factoid before I leave you: 1893 is currently sitting | |
| at number 5 on the independent game portal Manifesto Games | |
| (http://www.manifestogames.com) list of top sellers. Wow! | |
| IF NEWS ------------------------------------------------------------------- | |
| IF ART SHOW 2007 | |
| After a hiatus of several years, Marnie Parker ran the IF Art Show -- a gallery | |
| of experimental, puzzleless works of IF which has in the past produced such | |
| significant works as Galatea -- again this year. There were three entrants. To | |
| wit: | |
| Symbolic Engine by Evan Schull | |
| Varronis Museum by David Garcia | |
| Rendition by nespresso | |
| http://members.aol.com/iffyart | |
| IntroComp 2007 | |
| Jacqueline Lott is running the IntroComp again this year, a competition for | |
| introductions to proposed longer games. The voting deadline is August 24, so | |
| you still have time to play the intros and vote on which ones you would most | |
| like to see fleshed out into full-fledged games. There are just 7 entrants, and | |
| they are all presumably fairly short, so go for it! | |
| http://www.xyzzynews.com/introcomp | |
| One Room Game Competition 2007 | |
| Francisco Cordella is running a competition for games that, you guessed it, take | |
| place entirely in one room. Games must be submitted by November 18. | |
| http://www.avventuretestuali.com/orgc/orgc-2007-eng | |
| The Lovecraft Commonplace Book Project | |
| Peter Nepstad recently hosted a gallery of both textual IF and graphical | |
| adventure games based upon story ideas collected by H.P. Lovecraft in his | |
| Commonplace Book. Seven games were included, written in three different | |
| (human) languages. Jon Ingold's Inform 7 entry Dead Cities was selected as Best | |
| of Show. Peter now hopes to turn the project into a physical exhibition | |
| playable at several galleries around the world. | |
| http://www.illuminatedlantern.com/if/games/lovecraft | |
| Digital Archaeology on the Original Adventure | |
| IF scholar Dennis C. Jerz has just published a major paper on the original work | |
| of IF, Crowther and Woods' Adventure. He has located from a backup of Don | |
| Woods' student account at Stanford University Will Crowther's original Fortran | |
| source code for the game from before Woods began to modify it. This version was | |
| previously believed lost, and this can only be described as a major historical | |
| find. Jerz also traveled to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky to explore the scenery | |
| that formed the basis for Adventure. Graham Nelson has already described this | |
| as the most important single paper ever published on the history of IF, and I am | |
| not inclined to argue. | |
| http://brain.lis.uiuc.edu:2323/opencms/export/sites/default/dhq/vol/001/2/000009 | |
| .html | |
| Filfre 0.97 | |
| I've released a new version of my Windows Z-Machine interpreter. The big news | |
| for this release is that it now supports Glulx -- including full multimedia | |
| support -- and is thus no longer just a Z-Machine interpreter. Hey, surely your | |
| editor is entitled to the occasional bit of self-promotion! Right? Right? I | |
| didn't even mention my IntroComp entry! Isn't that worth a little slack? | |
| http://home.grandecom.net/~maher/filfre | |
| Flashonate | |
| Peter Rogers has created a Z-Code interpreter that runs in... Flash! It's a bit | |
| slow at the moment, but consider it a proof of concept. | |
| http://home.cogeco.ca/~peter_rogers | |
| Gamasutra on Zork | |
| The well-known professional game development website Gamesutra recently | |
| published a nice, if hardly groundbreaking, article on the history of Zork, | |
| including new interviews with some figures we all know pretty well. | |
| http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1499/the_history_of_zork.php?print=1 | |
| SPAG NEEDS YOU! | |
| The good news: I received a lot more reviews from you folks for this issue, and | |
| the review count is reasonable again. The also good news that could be | |
| construed as bad by the sick and twisted: A LOT of games have appeared in the | |
| last few months, and that means the Most Wanted list continues to be packed | |
| full to bursting. | |
| SPAG 10 MOST WANTED LIST | |
| ======================== | |
| 1. IF Art Show 2007 games (any, some, or all) | |
| 2. Adventurer's Consumer Guide | |
| 3. 1893: A World's Fair Mystery | |
| 4. IntroComp 2007 games (any, some, or all) | |
| 5. Lovecraft Commonplace Book Project games (any, some, or all) | |
| 6. Blighted Isle | |
| 7. Ghost Town: The Lost Treasure | |
| 8. Lydia's Heart | |
| 9. Crystal and Stone and Beetle and Bone | |
| 10. Remaining Spring Thing 2007 games (any, some, or all) | |
| A HISTORY OF SPANISH IF ----------------------------------------------------- | |
| The following article was written by Pablo Martinez Merino "(Depresiv"), | |
| originally published in Spanish on the Spanish Wikipedia, and then translated | |
| into English for the IF Wiki. I have cleaned up the translation a bit and am | |
| republishing it here to provide some context for the interviews and reviews of | |
| Spanish IF that appear later in this issue. | |
| Background (1984-1988) | |
| While in England and the United States interactive fiction started to appear in | |
| the late 1970s, in Spain we had to wait until 1984 to see the first text | |
| adventures. Dinamic, a software publisher that was destined to become one of | |
| the most important in Spain, premiered at that time with two programs: Artist, a | |
| drawing application; and Yenght, the first Spanish IF work, written in compiled | |
| BASIC and assembler for the Spectrum 48K. It featured very brief descriptions | |
| along with several major bugs and sudden, unfair deaths, but nevertheless | |
| managed to amuse quite a few players. | |
| Some opine, however, that the most important influence on early Spanish IF was | |
| Melbourne House's hugely successful adaptation of The Hobbit. Certainly many | |
| Spanish IF writers make special mention of this title. Perhaps Yenght was no | |
| more than another obstacle in the development of Spanish IF, for it was not | |
| until 1986 that another stand-alone commercial text adventure appeared. (A game | |
| called Alicia en el Pa�s de las Maravillas was distributed by the magazine | |
| Microhobby in 1985). | |
| We have now mentioned two of the greatest supports to the genre in its | |
| beginnings: the software publisher Dinamic and the magazine publisher Hobby | |
| Press with its magazines MicroHobby and MicroMania. Dinamic founded a specific | |
| label (the AD label, "Adventures Dinamic") for publishing interactive fiction, | |
| releasing games created by small homegrown companies as well as those created | |
| by Adventures AD, a company from Valencia that soon would stand out over the | |
| rest. The games published at that time had a wide variety of genres and styles. | |
| There were adaptations of classic literature like Don Quijote de la Mancha; | |
| contemporary literary adaptations like Los p�jaros de Bangkok ("The Birds from | |
| Bangkok"), featuring Manuel Vazquez Montalban's popular detective Pepe Carvolho; | |
| comedies such as the Star Wars parody La guerra de las vajillas ("The Crockery | |
| Wars"); and science fiction games like Megacorp. Interestingly, the other big | |
| Spanish game publisher of this era, Topo Soft, never published a single text | |
| adventure in its whole existence. | |
| Adventures AD and the First Golden Age (1988-1992) | |
| Things really took off in 1988 with the publication of La Aventura Original | |
| ("The Original Adventure"), the first release from a new company called | |
| Adventures AD. As its name suggests, La Adventura Original was a loose | |
| adaptation of Crowther and Woods' game. It was a sales success, and its massive | |
| distribution led to a much higher profile for IF in Spain. | |
| Another important development at this time was the release of the IF-authoring | |
| tool PAWS (Professional Adventure Writing System). Quill, PAWS' direct | |
| ancestor, was never translated from English, but Adventures AD partnered with | |
| PAWS authors Tim Gilberts and Graeme Yeandle to make the successor system | |
| available to would-be authors of Spanish IF. | |
| IF in Spain reached it commercial peak during 1988 and 1989. The most popular | |
| Spectrum magazine in Spain, MicroHobby, conducted a national text adventure | |
| writing contest at this time, and included two permanent sections in every issue | |
| dedicated to text adventures and written by Andr�s Samudio, the founder of | |
| Adventures AD. | |
| Adventures AD might be seen, at least in some some ways, as the Spanish Infocom. | |
| Between 1988 and 1992, Adventures AD sold six different titles, each one of them | |
| a sale success, until the decline of the 8 bit market and the rising populatiry | |
| of graphic adventures brought with them harder times for textual IF. These | |
| works were as follows: | |
| La Aventura Original ("The Original Adventure," 1988). An adaptation of | |
| Adventure by Crowther and Woods. It showed pictures in almost every location, | |
| and was also unlike the original in that it started outside the cave and forced | |
| the player to find a way to open a grate to gain access to the underground | |
| areas. These were contained on the B side of the tape on which the game was | |
| distributed. Instead of starting with everyday elements and introducing the | |
| supernatural little by little, this version had an elf and a dwarf in the first | |
| section of the game. | |
| Jabato (1989). Based upon a character from a comic book, this game was set | |
| during the heyday of the Roman Empire. Its main novelty was that it allowed the | |
| player to simutaneously guide several travelers through Europe and Africa. | |
| Cozumel (1990). The first title of the Ci-u-Than trilogy, which is set in the | |
| Caribbean during the first half of the 20th century, and Adventures AD's best | |
| game in the opinion of many. The explorer Doc Monro gets marooned on the coast | |
| of Cozumel, where he experiences great adventures. | |
| La Aventura Espacial ("Space Adventure," 1990). Written during a hiatus in the | |
| production of the Ci-u-Than trilogy. Features a science fiction setting and some | |
| experimental touches. It also allows its player to control more than one | |
| character. | |
| Los Templos Sagrados ("The Sacred Temples," 1991). The second part of the | |
| Ci-u-Than trilogy is a puzzlefest also set in the Caribbean rainforest. | |
| Chich�n Itz� (1992). The third part of the Ci-u-Than trilogy is Adventures AD's | |
| most ambitious game, featuring lots of NPC and settings. | |
| All Adventures AD games had very similar attributes. They were written as two | |
| separate parts. At the beginning of the second part it was necessary to enter a | |
| password obtained upon finishing the first part. Pictures were present in | |
| almost every location. Adventures AD's equivalent to the the Z-Machine was | |
| called DAAD. It allowed the company to makes its games available on virtually | |
| all viable 8 and 16 bit platforms of the era. The 16 bit versions were usually | |
| longer and had some additional or more complex puzzles. | |
| For some time it was said that Adventures AD would move to writing graphic | |
| adventures, but it never happened. The company faded away quietly, and Spanish | |
| IF activity from then on would be centered around amateurs. | |
| However, all games published by Adventures AD contained an advertisement | |
| promoting an amateur club, which which was a great help in launching the scene. | |
| The two most important of these clubs were CAAD, founded in Valencia in 1988, | |
| and Year Zero Club, founded in Vigo in 1991. These clubs each had almost one | |
| thousand members, and published lots of interesting articles in their fanzines. | |
| As many as 300 amateur and professional works of Spanish IF may have been | |
| released between 1986 and 1992. After 1992, however, hobbyist activity slowed | |
| dramatically, and soon the paper fanzines also faded away. | |
| The Internet and the Second Golden Age (1997-) | |
| Some years later, the arrival of Internet gave birth to a second golden age. IF | |
| aficionados could now discuss their interest through mailing lists, reference | |
| web pages such as CAAD, and an IRC channel. The CAAD web page was born in 1997, | |
| its initial purpose being the collection and archiving of both the old paper IF | |
| fanzines and the text adventures they discussed. A Usenet newsgroup was | |
| created, but it was soon invaded by spam and questions about graphic adventures. | |
| A Yahoo! Groups list was eventually settled on in its stead. | |
| In 1997, the two existing clubs organized a text adventure competition, in which | |
| less than a dozen adventures were entered. In this first competition a severe | |
| limit of just one location and three objects was enforced. In 1998, CAAD | |
| repeated the competition with less severe restrictions on game size. Just nine | |
| authors participated. Spanish IF was obviously still in crisis. The winner of | |
| the 1998 competition was not even selected until three years later. | |
| At the end of 1999 the second golden age began in earnest with the first | |
| competition for fully fleshedout, albeit brief, IF works. This was very | |
| successful, and in May of 2000 the event was conducted again. The organisation | |
| of several other competitions like these helped to reignite the interest of old | |
| aficionados. The IRC channel and the mailing list were also of course a great | |
| help here. Modern Spanish IF competitions have just as many permutations and | |
| themese as do those for Enligh IF. There have been comps for comedy games, | |
| experimental games (called "nanos"), Tolkien-themed games, etc. Since 2001 there | |
| has also been a major annual competition like that of the English IF community, | |
| known as the Premios Hispanos ("Hispanic Prizes"). | |
| Authoring Systems | |
| In addition to writing new IF games, the Spanish community has also built some | |
| authoring systems just for IF in Spanish. | |
| Halfway through 1992, the first Spanish IF development system for PC-compatibles | |
| was published. SINTAC was based upon PAWS, and written by Javier San Jos� | |
| ("JSJ"). Initially distributed with a shareware license, and becoming freeware | |
| some time later, it had quite a large user base for a time, but was abandoned in | |
| 2000. | |
| During the next few years, many other authoring systems, more or less related to | |
| PAWS, appeared for PC or for some of the other common computers of that time. | |
| NMP, another "PAWS-like", was also very well known. | |
| At the end of 1992 the first completely native Spanish authoring system for the | |
| PC, CAECHO?, was released by Juan Antonio Paz Salgado ("Mel Hython") and some | |
| other contributors. CAECHO? marked a major advance over PAWS and its | |
| derivatives, being a complete structured programming language rather than being | |
| built around the "condition lists" of PAWS. | |
| In October of 1998 Jos� Luis D�az ("Zak McKraken") released InformATE ("Inform | |
| Ahora Totalmente en Espa�ol" - "Inform Now Completely in Spanish"), a Spanish | |
| library for Inform based upon the English Inform 6.30. InformATE has seen huge | |
| acceptance in the Spanish community, generating a healthy amount of | |
| documentation, utilities, and of course games. | |
| Some months later, in June of 1999, the author of SINTAC released the first | |
| version of a new system called Visual SINTAC. While only available for Windows | |
| machines, it was the first Spanish parser to provide a complete GUI as a help to | |
| the programmer. However, the project is abandoned today. | |
| In January of 2005, Uto, Yokiyoki and Baltasar released the first usable version | |
| of Superglus, a system based upon NMP which generates games for the Glulx VM. | |
| It has already seen wide acceptance in the community. | |
| Present Time: CAAD, SPAC Fanzine, and Forums | |
| In June of 2000 the people in charge of CAAD decide to resume publication of the | |
| fanzine, this time in PDF format for web distribution. Just seven monthly | |
| issues in total were publushed, but in October of the same year another ezine | |
| called SPAC appeared, inspired by SPAG. It continues to be published monthly | |
| today and is in very good health, thanks to a more and more active community. | |
| In 2004, forums were created as part of a remodelling of the CAAD webpage. They | |
| have allowed for better classification of IF-related discussions and have made | |
| the community much more accessible. The older mailing lists still exist, but are | |
| no longer as active as they once were. | |
| WikiCAAD, the Spanish IF wiki, was rolled out just this year and is quickly | |
| becoming a major documentation source on current events, history, works, and | |
| resources. | |
| Another interesting initiative of recent years is a classic text adventures | |
| retrieval project called Proyecto Base which has managed to obtain more than a | |
| hundred classic ZX Spectrum Spanish adventures in very little time. Also, | |
| Almac�n de la Aventura ("The Adventure Warehouse") has an increasing collection | |
| of newer interactive fiction -- from the year 2000 on -- each archived with an | |
| individual Windows installer for maximum ease of use. | |
| At this moment, more and more Spanish-speaking people all over the world -- in | |
| Chile, Argentina, Spain, Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, and other places -- are | |
| becoming interested in the form. | |
| Some Outstanding Works of Modern Spanish IF | |
| La Sombra de la Luna Negra ("The Black Moon's Shadow") by Depresiv. | |
| http://www.caad.es/brevecomp2/aventuras/luna.zip | |
| Misterio en el �ltimo Hogar ("The Last Home's Mystery") by Kano&Kambre. | |
| http://www.aliensuavito.com/detalles/elultimohogar.php | |
| Resaca ("Hangover") by Voet Cranf. | |
| http://www.caad.es/modulos.php?modulo=descarga&id=1287 | |
| Ocaso mortal ("Deadly Sunset") by Dhan. | |
| http://www.geocities.com/lashojascaidas/juegos/ocaso.htm | |
| Olvido Mortal ("Dead Reckoning") by Andr�s Viedma (Akbarr). | |
| http://www.terra.es/personal/a_viedma/olvido.htm | |
| English Translation by Nick Montfort: | |
| http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Dead_Reckoning | |
| El Extra�o Caso de Randolph Dwight ("The Strange Case of Randolph Dwight") by | |
| Urbatain. | |
| http://www.caad.es/php/detalle_fichero.php?descarga_id=1058 | |
| El Archipi�lago ("The Archipelago") by Depresiv. | |
| http://www.caad.es/modulos.php?modulo=descarga&id=1177 | |
| El libro que se aburr�a ("The Book that Became Bored") by Jenesis. | |
| http://if.jenesis.presi.org | |
| La Sentencia ("The Sentence") by Jos� Luis D�az (Zak). | |
| http://www.caad.es/modulos.php?modulo=descarga&id=642 | |
| Spanish IF Links | |
| Wikipedia - Spanish IF Community history and works. | |
| http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aventura_conversacional | |
| CAAD - Club de Aventuras AD: spanish IF Community webpage. | |
| http://www.caad.es | |
| SPAC - Sociedad para la Preservaci�n de las Aventuras Conversacionales. SPAC is | |
| similar to and inspired by SPAG. | |
| http://usuarios.lycos.es/SPAC | |
| InformATE - InformATE is a spanish Inform Library, to create and code Inform | |
| games in spanish. | |
| http://www.caad.es/informate | |
| WikiCAAD - The Spanish IFWiki. | |
| http://www.wikicaad.net | |
| THE SPAG INTERVIEW (DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH STUDIES)------------------------- | |
| The following interviews were conducted and translated by the prominent Spanish | |
| IF author Pablo Martinez Merino, AKA Depresiv. I can't thank him enough for the | |
| huge amount of time and work that must have gone into preparing all this for us. | |
| If you appreciate his efforts, feel free to drop him a line at pablote2es SP@G | |
| yahoo.es and tell him so. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- | |
| Javier Carrascosa ("Grendel Khan") | |
| Javier San Jos� ("JSJ") | |
| "Lenko" | |
| Andr�s Viedma Pel�ez ("Akbarr") | |
| Luis David Arranz P�rez ("Jarel") | |
| -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| (Translator Note: This is the result of an interview that took place in the | |
| Spanish IF IRC channel, with some well-known members of the Spanish community. | |
| I've tried to preserve the general "mood" of the interview, so all of the | |
| important things that were said in that moment --and many of the unimportant | |
| things also-- are here.) | |
| <Depresiv> Someone has to record this thing, I don�t know how to do it... | |
| <jarel_^> So, who were supposed to come here today? (recording) | |
| <Depresiv> JSJ, Dhan, Uto, Mel, Lenko, Baltasar, Grendel, Al-Khwa, Jarel, | |
| Mapache, Akbarr. | |
| <Akbarr> Lenky, Jary and... | |
| <Depresiv> Et moi. | |
| <Akbarr> Depresy?... Depresivy... | |
| <Depresiv> Depry. | |
| <Akbarr> Oh, that�s true. Depry. | |
| <Lenko> I said to my wife I was going to the computer for an interview, | |
| and she asked me: "So who�s going to make this interview?" "Depresiv" | |
| <Depresiv> Come on, lie to her, man, lie to her... | |
| <Lenko> "That sounds awful", she said... and that was all about it. | |
| <Akbarr> This thing about the names is so good. Every time I go to a | |
| meeting and then tell my girlfriend about it, she splits her sides laughing. I | |
| always tell her a quick list of the names and she always ends up saying "How | |
| freaky you are!" | |
| <Depresiv> Do you remember, Jarel, when I introduced you guys to a female | |
| friend of mine? "This is JSJ, this is Dhan, this is Yokiyoki, this is Jarel..." | |
| <Akbarr> Haha. | |
| <jarel_^> Hmmm, the day of the vegetarian restaurant? | |
| <Depresiv> That one, that one. | |
| <Akbarr> I remember the times when a girl came to the meetings. Yoki�s | |
| girlfriend, Krac�s one, Dhan�s one... The most amazing girl was Urbatain�s wife. | |
| She knows more of interactive fiction than us. LOL | |
| <Lenko> In another forum I use to write, they organize meetings from | |
| time to time, and more than once they met in a square and they were all looking | |
| at each other not daring to ask: Are you "octopus"? | |
| <jarel_^> Looking at each other? hahahaha | |
| <Akbarr> "Octopus"? What�s the forum about? Seafood? Or flirting? LOL | |
| <jarel_^> It was just like the first time I met Akbarr. The guy was | |
| standing in front of a corner... and although he suspected I could be... | |
| <Akbarr> How long ago was that... Snifff... | |
| * Depresiv looks at his watch | |
| <Depresiv> Man... These people take their time. :) | |
| <Akbarr> I will have to leave at 11. So the interview is going to be very | |
| quick, it seems... | |
| <jarel_^> Come on, start the interview with Akbarr. | |
| <Depresiv> Ok, let�s go then. | |
| <Akbarr> That�s true, let�s start with those who are already here. | |
| ---------------------------------------------------- | |
| <Depresiv> I�ll divide the interview in two parts. I�ll dedicate the first | |
| part to introduce ourselves a bit. I will name each one of you, and you�ll tell | |
| me all the things you�ve done and are currently doing related to Interactive | |
| Fiction. AND PLEASE DON�T BE HUMBLE, I�ll just say when I notice something | |
| missing. :P Ready? | |
| <Lenko> Ok. | |
| <Akbarr> Go. | |
| <Depresiv> In alphabetical order, it�s your turn, Akbarr. :) | |
| <Akbarr> Ok, my name�s Akbarr (in Alcoholics Anonymous� meetings we | |
| always begin this way!), my first contact with adventures was, just like many | |
| people around here, with the ZX Spectrum, with Don Quijote, and later I played | |
| every Spanish text adventure released (and fled from the English ones, just | |
| because I was lazy). Later, when PAWS was released, I bought it and wrote an | |
| adventure with my name in it, this is, "Akbarr" (in fact it was the opposite | |
| way, but that�s not the point). Then I was disconnected with the community for | |
| some years and, during the "second golden age", I took up again the hobby. So I | |
| wrote a remake of Akbarr for the PC along with my brother, who made the | |
| graphics, which are by the way the most remarkable thing in the game (modesty | |
| aside I think this is the most "good-looking" adventure I�ve ever seen). I also | |
| wrote another one with Inform, Olvido Mortal, which was translated twice into | |
| English. The first translation, Shattered Memory, was written by me and some | |
| other Spanish people, and the second one, Dead Reckoning, by Nick Montfort. I | |
| also have another project in mind called Akbarr 2, which is in eternal vaporware | |
| state. | |
| (T.N. PAWS stands for "Professional Adventure Writing System", an authoring | |
| system for the ZX Spectrum. It was quite popular in Spain in the 80s-90s) | |
| <Depresiv> Listen, I�ve always been curious about this. :) How did Nick | |
| contact you? | |
| <Akbarr> Who? | |
| <Depresiv> Nick Monfort. | |
| <Akbarr> I entered with Shattered Memory in the IFComp. It was | |
| disqualified, something I didn�t really care about, but the reviews also weren�t | |
| very good. The reviewers gave me the impression that most of the time that they | |
| didn�t go straight to the "real problem". I mean, they didn�t like it, but they | |
| didn�t really know why. (At least that was my impression.) For example, it�s | |
| just like placing a bad actor in a movie. Suddenly everything�s not working, the | |
| script is not being convincing and it�s hard to realize that the problem�s just | |
| the appearance of that actor. So I registered my game in an English webpage for | |
| people looking for translators. I mean, translators in one side and adventures | |
| wanting to be translated in the other side. Nick though the adventure was | |
| interesting and so he contacted me (or maybe it was the reverse, I don�t | |
| remember it very well). I think I was right thinking the way I did, because the | |
| only review of the second translation I�ve seen, written by Emily Short, pointed | |
| much better at the real faults of the adventure. | |
| <jarel_^> Is Nick Monfort bilingual? | |
| <Akbarr> I wouldn�t say as much as bilingual. But he deals really really | |
| well with Spanish. And exceptionally well with English. (Better than the | |
| average, I mean) | |
| <Depresiv> He seems quite a nice guy. Well, at least the last time I wrote | |
| him | |
| <Akbarr> Yes, he�s a really nice guy. He spent almost a year without | |
| starting the translation, and later he sent me an apology. (And I said nothing | |
| about that) | |
| <Depresiv> Yes, well, he answered me "no" from the beginning. But he did it | |
| in a very polite way. :D | |
| <Lenko> I once read an article he wrote about how he did that | |
| translation, and I really liked it, but I can�t find it anymore. | |
| ---------------------------------------------------- | |
| <Depresiv> Grendel, introduce yourself. The things you�ve done for the | |
| community. The things you�ve done and are still doing around Interactive | |
| Fiction. | |
| <grendelkhan> Well, I am Grendel Khan and I have been active in CAAD since | |
| 2003, although I was a regular reader of the CAAD mail list before that. | |
| Previously I started playing adventures with the ZX Spectrum, but I never was a | |
| good player. I discovered text adventures quite late, and couldn�t enjoy them | |
| completely until I discovered CAAD in 1997, through a PCMan�a magazine. It had a | |
| CD with several parsers (T.N.: IF authoring systems), one of them was NMP by | |
| Carlos S�nchez. I wrote an adventure with it that went almost completely | |
| unnoticed, called Orfeo en los Infiernos ("Orpheus in Hell"), which entered in | |
| the Concurso Nacional de Aventuras ("National Adventures Competition"). After | |
| this, in 2003, I re-entered the community, and wrote some other adventures with | |
| very different themes. (Must I mention them?) | |
| (T.N.: CAAD was one of the most popular paper fanzines in the 80s-90s about text | |
| adventures. Later, when Internet was popular, the CAAD webpage became the | |
| central hub of the Spanish IF community. That�s why many people refer to the | |
| Spanish IF Community simply as CAAD.) | |
| <Depresiv> Well, at least mention the ones you want to emphasize. :) | |
| <grendelkhan> Ok. When I decided to participate actively in CAAD, I realized | |
| the best way to introduce myself was to write a new adventure. I re-appeared in | |
| CAAD with La casa del Olvido ("The House of Forgiveness"), which included | |
| graphics as the main novelty. Some time later I wrote La aventura rural ("The | |
| Rural Adventure") which earned the best NPCs prize in the Premios Hispanos 2004. | |
| From my IF production, I would emphasize La Musa ("The Muse") and Wiz Lair as my | |
| most accomplished projects, although the late one didn�t have a tremendous | |
| popularity. | |
| ---------------------------------------------------- | |
| <Depresiv> Jarel, your turn. | |
| <jarel_^> I started getting in touch with text adventures in the early | |
| 90s, when I had an Amstrad CPC. I played AD adventures and some (one) English, | |
| but they were just some games between other games. In 1997 I made contact with | |
| the community through the advertisement in the magazine PcMan�a about the | |
| adventures competition in CAAD, and I realized with this advertisement that | |
| there was a webpage and some new adventures to download. Also in the CD from the | |
| PCman�a I found several parsers, one of them was SINTAC. But I found it too | |
| complicated for me, so I decided to write my own parser from scratch (and also | |
| to have fun writing it). C�rdenas was the first person I contacted, and he | |
| persuaded me to go to a meeting where I didn�t know anyone nor did anyone know | |
| me. Once I went through that, when I already had an Internet connection at home, | |
| I became part of the community through the mail list and IRC, and I realized how | |
| many messages appeared in the mail list, and how much involvement in the many | |
| competitions there was. (I mean, considering the amount of active people.) I | |
| wrote several adventures with my own parser (DISAC) with whom I was able to | |
| program really fast, since the commands were only one character long. And | |
| finally I started programming in Inform. And... well, I think these are all the | |
| historical facts. | |
| (T.N.: Aventuras AD was the most popular Spanish IF company in the commercial | |
| era.) | |
| <Depresiv> You still have to mention that you wrote 19 adventures with | |
| DISAC. :P Which is not a mere trifle. | |
| <Akbarr> You have skipped that small detail, yeah. | |
| <jarel_^> I�m going to count them while you ask the next question LOL | |
| <Akbarr> If the title of each adventure is also one character long, you | |
| can enumerate them. | |
| ---------------------------------------------------- | |
| <Depresiv> Lenko. There you go! :D | |
| <Lenko> hahaha. | |
| <Lenko> Well, when I was a kid I purchased a ZX Spectrum +3, and I was | |
| completely hooked with the Microhobby magazine and the Viejo Archivero. By | |
| chance, one of the very few programs I had on disk (it loaded 100.000 times | |
| quicker than the ones on tape) was Don Quijote, a text adventure that was | |
| completely embittering to me, but it also hardened me, so to say. So when | |
| Aventuras AD released the PAWS I bought it immediately and then programmed a lot | |
| with it. The problem was that I was quite young at that time, and although | |
| Microhobby mentioned the CAAD fanzine, I never dared to enter. | |
| (T.N.: Microhobby was the most popular ZX Spectrum magazine in Spain in the | |
| 80s-90s. El Viejo Archivero ("The Old Archivist") was an IF-related section in | |
| that magazine. It was written by Andres Samudio, the owner of Aventuras AD.) | |
| <Lenko> So finally my adventures were lost amongst old tapes. Some years | |
| ago I was looking for information about MUDs, because I wanted to write a new | |
| one, although not the typical "kill everything that moves" one. And I ended up | |
| discovering CAADs webpage (the old one). I started to read the FAQs and I | |
| realized what I had been missing all of these years. I played Cacahuetes, Sal y | |
| Aceite online ("Peanuts, Salt and Oil") and I ended up being convinced that that | |
| was "my thing." Programming and writing, my two greatest passions, together. | |
| Genius. | |
| <Depresiv> :) | |
| <Lenko> Then I joined the mail list, then the forum, and then I decided | |
| to write my only adventure so far (Una peque�a historia de Navidad, "A Small | |
| Christmas Story"), with which I was quite happy with the reception. Some time | |
| later I was completely amazed when I discovered the IfWiki. I thought that we | |
| needed something like that, but more oriented towards the promotion of | |
| adventures. I installed everything in my local computer and started making the | |
| basic work, but everything was stopped because of some personal problems, until | |
| a few months ago, when I mustered up, not wanting the idea to stay forever as | |
| vaporware. And that�s more or less all. | |
| ---------------------------------------------------- | |
| * JSJ has entered #interviewcaad | |
| <Depresiv> And now, skipping the alphabetical order, the turn is for JSJ. | |
| :P | |
| <jarel_^> The turn for the "J" has finished, this thing goes in | |
| alphabetical order. | |
| <JSJ> What�s my turn for?... Ah! Right! I Call!! | |
| <Depresiv> JSJ, you have to tell us a brief introduction of who you are, | |
| what things have you done around Interactive Fiction, from your beginnings until | |
| now. | |
| <JSJ> Let�s see... Who am I... Well. I�m this guy who joined this | |
| thing as a matter of pure coincidence, when another guy gave him a tape with | |
| something called The Hobbit recorded on the B side. And soon after getting tired | |
| of killing those aliens from the A side, decided to give an opportunity to the B | |
| side. | |
| <Akbarr> Hey, guys, this is not to interrupt JSJ (well, maybe a bit also | |
| because of that), but I must go. | |
| <Depresiv> Ummmm, Akbarr, I�ll finish your interview later in Madrid. Ok? | |
| <Akbarr> I won�t be able to meet you on Saturday night, sorry. :/ I | |
| have to go to the theatre. | |
| <Depresiv> Sigh. By mail then. | |
| <Akbarr> By mail. Ok. I promise to answer fast. | |
| <jarel_^> Bye, Akbarr. | |
| <Akbarr> Ok, enjoy yourselves. And don�t believe a word from JSJ. Bye! | |
| <Depresiv> See you. | |
| <JSJ> Now that he�s leaving, I can say bad things about him. | |
| * Akbarr has left. | |
| <Depresiv> You were talking about the B side. :) | |
| <JSJ> I�ll continue then. ;) After spending some time with the B side, | |
| I started enjoying those strange games where you had to type a lot. Anyway, most | |
| of them were in English at that time. So I think I had that metacarpian syndrome | |
| before it was even known, as I had to play with one hand on the keyboard and the | |
| other one... | |
| <JSJ> ... (don�t be sick minded) ... | |
| <JSJ> ...and the other one occupied consulting a Spanish-English | |
| dictionary. :D And, man, did it weigh. Some time after that the Microhobby | |
| competition started... I already had the English version of PAWS. (The eMule of | |
| those years... I had some contacts that sent me some tapes full of strange | |
| things.) I decided to participate, and you already know the story: We were seven | |
| finalists and the prize was just a copy of the DAAD for each of us. | |
| (T.N.: The first IF competition in Spain was organized by Aventuras AD and the | |
| magazine Microhobby. When the time came for them to choose a winner, Aventuras | |
| AD was having such great financial problems, that they couldn�t afford paying | |
| the promised prize. So they choose seven winners instead of one, and gave them a | |
| copy of DAAD, the in-house version of PAWS for Aventuras AD. It turned to be | |
| quite a disappointing prize, as it was more or less PAWS with a few add-ons) | |
| <Depresiv> Wow, learning PAWS without instructions... | |
| <JSJ> Yeah, well... at that time I used to make freaky things like | |
| hand-made disassembling of games and so on... so learning PAWS was a child�s | |
| play for me. If only I had half of the freakism of those times... oh well... In | |
| any case I also started being an active member of the CAAD fanzine. Active means | |
| that I wrote articles regularly: PAWS programming articles, some gamebook or | |
| other (by the way... I want to find a copy of that gamebook, even a scanned one, | |
| to keep it in my memory chest) :D | |
| <Depresiv> I have it all at my parent�s house. | |
| <grendelkhan> (Gamebook? Where, where?) | |
| <JSJ> I wrote one. Nothing too unusual. By chapters, in the CAAD | |
| fanzines. I don�t remember the number of the issues. I still keep a lot of | |
| gamebooks from my period of fondness, though. | |
| <grendelkhan> Upload it to CAAD. | |
| <Lenko> And to WikiCAAD. (T.N. Spanish version of IfWiki) | |
| <Depresiv> C�mon, let JSJ talk :) | |
| <JSJ> The thing is I decided to write a parser... I woke up one day | |
| and said: I�m going to write SINTAC! (Well, it was not exactly like that, but | |
| the mental process could be summed up to that.) | |
| <jarel_^> It�s obvious he�s a momio, since the roll of the speech goes | |
| down to the floor. (T.N.: "Momio" is untranslatable slang. It�s used to refer to | |
| really old members of the community. It could be translated as something like | |
| "male mummy.") | |
| <JSJ> Basically SINTAC was born from my disenchantment with DAAD. (My | |
| "prize" as a finalist in Microhobby�s competition). It was one of those things | |
| you see and say: I can do that myself. No sooner said than done. My big surprise | |
| was after writing to JAPS (That was Mel�s old name :)) to tell him that I | |
| already had the first version of a parser called SINTAC T1 (the T meant that it | |
| only supported text, and not graphics). In any case, JAPS� answer surprised me: | |
| I am also working in a new parser! And I said: YOU DID WHAT? | |
| (N.T.: Untranslatable pun. Mel Hython -- previously known as JAPS -- was the | |
| author of CAECHO?, a procedural IF authoring system in the early 90s. CAECHO | |
| QUE?�, JSJ�s exclamation, could also be translated as "YOU DID WHAT?") | |
| <jarel_^> How did you meet Mel? | |
| <JSJ> How did I meet him? The reality is... I don�t remember. What�s | |
| the use of lying. :D (Or else later Akbarr will throw it in my face.) Most | |
| probably we started mailing each other when we were two of the seven finalists. | |
| I don�t have the feeling that we knew each other before that, but I do have it | |
| after that. Maybe he�s not as affected by Alzheimer as me and can answer this | |
| question much better. LOL | |
| <Depresiv> Ok, we were in YOU DID WHAT? | |
| <JSJ> Well yes... There we go. That was, for me, the "Golden Age". | |
| Parsers were written, people used them. Lots of homegrown adventures were | |
| released. People even played them! And paid for them! Anyway... I kept | |
| collaborating with CAAD, updating SINTAC (and selling it) some more time, until | |
| my disconnection. I left the community coinciding with the disappearance of | |
| Microhobby and the decline of CAAD, this is, when issues started spacing out 3 | |
| or 4 months. It was at that time when Juanjo Mu�oz (T.N.: the first editor of | |
| the CAAD fanzine) was a little bit burnt-out. (Digression: with Internet, people | |
| are getting used to have everything free and in tons.) | |
| <Depresiv> (Digression: I remember how scared I was during the times JSJ | |
| has told about. "This is the End!") | |
| <JSJ> I just disappeared "... I was absent 2 or 3 years. That was the | |
| "Dark Age". :D Then I started getting involved in a different kind of games: | |
| role playing games. I remember I played every RPG released at that time. | |
| <jarel_^> What years were they? 199... | |
| <JSJ> 1997-1999 or something like that. | |
| <jarel_^> Hmmm... No, you came to the meeting in 1999. | |
| <JSJ> You�re right... | |
| <Depresiv> Just a second, I�ll take a look in Wikipedia, and we will finish | |
| sooner. | |
| <jarel_^> And then the mail list began... | |
| <Depresiv> 1992 | |
| <JSJ> In 1998 I started to write Visual SINTAC, so my absence could | |
| have been somewhere in between 1995 and 1998 or so. That was the next milestone | |
| I wanted to talk about. I don�t know why, between 1997 and 1998 I decided to | |
| write another parser. At that time I had a permanent Internet connection at | |
| home, so I contacted Juanjo again, and he directed me towards the #caad IRC | |
| channel and the mail list. I didn�t show up in the chat at the beginning as I | |
| thought at that time that the chat was something for kids. I just thought that | |
| chat channels where places where teens spent their time doing teeny things. But | |
| I did enroll to the mail list. The fact is that I enrolled just to announce I | |
| was developing Visual SINTAC! | |
| * jarel_^ looks at his watch. | |
| * Depresiv puts aside the watch. | |
| <Depresiv> Hang on, this is getting interesting. :P | |
| <JSJ> In 14/10/1998 it was my first presentation message in CAAD�s | |
| mail list. The following day I announced I had half-developed Visual SINTAC. I | |
| just asked, basically, for help, and then published the source code, as it was | |
| one of those projects I had started but had no intention of finishing. In any | |
| case, since no one decided to help, I resumed the project. In 12/06/1999 the | |
| first alpha of VS was out, and the first beta soon after that. And a bit later a | |
| final version. | |
| <grendelkhan> (In 30/02/2046 Visual Sintac reached consciousness and dominated | |
| CAAD) | |
| <JSJ> Hehe. | |
| <JSJ> The reception was quite different. Some people liked it, some | |
| people didn�t. It happened that Zak had already released InformATE, and many | |
| people were concentrating on it. That doesn�t mean that some users didn�t find | |
| something in VS and even wrote some things with it. Anyway, I was completely | |
| disappointed on one side, and unable to compete with Inform on the other, so I | |
| decided to cancel the project. I thought there was no use in keeping up with it | |
| when there was another system which was destined to be the standard. So I have | |
| done very little (or nothing) in this community since then. | |
| <jarel_^> That sounds awful. Inform finished you!!!! | |
| <Depresiv> In my opinion, the only thing that VS lacks is a multiplatform | |
| interpreter. | |
| <jarel_^> Most probably. | |
| <Depresiv> On the other hand I don�t think it�s true that everything ended | |
| after that. :) You�ve done many things for the community since then. E.g. CAAD�s | |
| webpage, the Premios Hispanos webpage... | |
| <JSJ> My next contributions to the community were more on the | |
| organizational side, yes. | |
| <Lenko> The webpage has been essential. | |
| <JSJ> The webpage, the Hispanos, going to meetings... :D | |
| ---------------------------------------------------- | |
| <Depresiv> Now the second part of the interview. I�m going to ask some | |
| questions, though they will necessarily be very few and a bit generic, so you�ll | |
| have to add some debate. :) It would be great to see all your different points | |
| of view. I think this will allow seeing the different trends in the community. | |
| Are you in? | |
| <JSJ> ok :D | |
| <Lenko> ok | |
| <Depresiv> First of all... What kind of things you look after in | |
| adventures? What makes them different from conventional literature? What do you | |
| think is there still to be told and experimented as a medium? | |
| <JSJ> Buf... That�s a trick question. I�ve never seen this medium as | |
| something comparable with conventional literature. They have always been games | |
| for me. | |
| <jarel_^> From my point of view, literature is one thing and adventure is | |
| another, and I don�t like adventures mimetizing with literature. | |
| <Lenko> Adventure doesn�t have much to do with traditional literature, | |
| but maybe things like hypertext have more to do with it. | |
| <grendelkhan> I see two trends here: the literary one and the recreational | |
| one. | |
| <jarel_^> There, we both agree with that. | |
| <JSJ> But yeah, recently (recently for me means the last 5 or 6 years) | |
| the literary trend has appeared, just like Grendel says, though I still prefer | |
| adventures as games, instead of adventures as literature. | |
| <Lenko> The fact is that adventures improve a lot with an attractive | |
| literature. Though with the basis of a game, different types of structures must | |
| be developed, to retain the interest not only because of the story, but also | |
| because of the game, since literature is based on the fact that the story always | |
| continues; while in an adventure we spend most of the time blocked. | |
| <grendelkhan> I think that the medium has the potential to produce good | |
| interactive literary works, but the potential readers still cling to the | |
| traditional retro-gaming principles. | |
| <jarel_^> I think that the paragraph that could look interesting in a | |
| book, can be counter-productive in an adventure, since you have to read several | |
| times the same texts. Because of that, I think that a more agile kind of | |
| narration would be much better, similar to tales but different from the one in | |
| novels. | |
| <grendelkhan> Well, I think nowadays texts are much more well-cared for than | |
| in the old days, where hardware limitations imposed an austere style. | |
| <Depresiv> Would you say that the type and form of the adventure�s pause is | |
| different from the one in literature just because of that, Lenko? | |
| <Lenko> That�s right, here you have to dedicate most of your effort | |
| looking after those pauses, more than just with the continuity of the story. | |
| There are adventures with enormous texts when you succeed and tiny messages when | |
| you fail. | |
| <jarel_^> The continuity is determined more through interaction than with | |
| texts, I think. | |
| <JSJ> See? That�s exactly what I don�t like in adventures nowadays. | |
| People care much more about the literary side than the recreational side, and | |
| you never obtain a thing or the other. | |
| <Depresiv> In what sense, JSJ? | |
| <JSJ> In the sense that it�s neither a decent literary work (and I | |
| don�t want to generalize) nor a fun game. | |
| <Lenko> On the other hand I like variety and I enjoyed Photopia a lot, | |
| along with some of the works entered in the XComp. (T.N.: XComp is a Spanish | |
| competition for experimental and/or "weird" works.) | |
| <jarel_^> Photopia would be the exception to the rule. | |
| <JSJ> I would like to feel again the things I felt back when I played | |
| the old text adventures, but I don�t think that�s something that will ever | |
| happen for me again, for two main reasons: | |
| <jarel_^> Maybe you would feel the same things playing any recent | |
| adventure back then. I mean it�s not just the adventures the ones who have | |
| changed -- it�s us. And our patience above all. | |
| <Depresiv> Two main reasons, JSJ | |
| <JSJ> They have already been said. :D | |
| <JSJ> - I don�t like the same things I did before... | |
| <JSJ> - And people doesn�t make the same things than before. | |
| <Lenko> Yes, patience is a factor that has changed greatly. Back then, | |
| when we had to wait 5 minutes to load a program, we could also dedicate hours to | |
| solve an enigma. | |
| <jarel_^> Last day, rescuing an old arcade game... I realized how much it | |
| pissed me off to restart every time from the beginning... Just like the 8 bit | |
| games did. We are all used now to recording positions or obtaining passwords for | |
| levels. | |
| <Lenko> Let�s admit that we were a bit masochist. | |
| <JSJ> Well, yes. | |
| <jarel_^> Yes. | |
| <Depresiv> :D Yes. Let�s go to the next question? | |
| (Akbarr later added some comments by e-mail -- Taking advantage of the open | |
| nature of this question, I will make a quick change of subject: I believe that | |
| one of the most important things in adventures is how easy it is to write them. | |
| You can more or less program an adventure with no serious knowledge of | |
| programming or without wonderful graphics, or even without being a good writer! | |
| You can make a somewhat good game just with some imagination, some knowledge of | |
| the medium and some dedication to test the adventure correctly. | |
| However, there�s another thing that hurts adventure a lot these days. I think | |
| games have divided recently in two trends: the living-room games, those who are | |
| thought to spend lots of hours in them, and the bus games, those thought to be | |
| played in spare moments. | |
| Adventures aren�t able to compete with the living-room games at this moment, as | |
| adventures are written by people with very little spare time, while the others | |
| are developed by companies who spend millions of dollars or yens to make them | |
| really spectacular, and to give them a studied playability in order to avoid | |
| blockages. | |
| They could maybe compete with the bus games, since they don�t need as much | |
| dedication, and a small blockage is not very important in them. But if I call | |
| them this way it�s because they are games who can be played very well with | |
| portable consoles, PDAs or mobile phones and the truth is that playing | |
| adventures with these machines is, at least for me, a pain in the neck. It�s | |
| complicated for me to think about playing comfortably an adventure with a | |
| classical interface but without a good keyboard. Anyway, I also get the | |
| impression that books already have found a good space for people in subways, on | |
| the beach or in a bed right before going to sleep, just to give some examples | |
| where playing adventures could also fit very well. | |
| As a resume, from my very personal point of view, these things make it really | |
| difficult to find a suitable place to play adventures, and that�s what makes the | |
| people play adventures less and less these days.) | |
| ---------------------------------------------------- | |
| <Depresiv> One question specifically written for the momios around here :) | |
| What changes have you noticed in the community in these times and in yourselves? | |
| What meant the text adventures for you from the times of the cheese sandwiches | |
| and the Microhobby, passing through the paper fanzines, to the current Hispanic | |
| World nowadays? | |
| <Depresiv> Ummm... | |
| <Depresiv> I think this one is more or less answered. | |
| <Depresiv> We skip this one, right? | |
| <JSJ> I think so. | |
| <jarel_^> It can be inferred from the other questions. | |
| ---------------------------------------------------- | |
| <Depresiv> This one�s for everyone: I�m going to ask for a little effort of | |
| imagination. :) Do you believe there�s a Hispanic feel that distinguishes | |
| adventures made in Spain and South America from the ones produced in | |
| English-spoken countries? If that�s so... Why? | |
| <JSJ> Of course! Here we are more imaginative, more creative and | |
| warmer, less tidy, less methodical... | |
| * jarel_^ agrees with JSJ although he has no objective details to | |
| corroborate him. | |
| <JSJ> It has to do with the weather, Jarel... It has been studied. :D | |
| But... since they are more methodical, they tend also to be more innovative. | |
| Someone said this some time ago: we are somewhat trailed behind by them. | |
| <jarel_^> Trailed behind??? Explain yourself. | |
| <JSJ> They were the first ones to give the literary approach to common | |
| text adventures. In fact, they have a whole trend around that, and even changed | |
| the terminology, from "text adventure" to "interactive-fiction". | |
| <Lenko> Yeah, but the approach is not needed if it�s not made right. El | |
| Archipielago ("The Archipelago") is a good example of mixing both aspects. | |
| <jarel_^> So, do you think the future goes in that direction? To end up | |
| writing "interactive novels"? | |
| <JSJ> Nooooooooo. That�s exactly the way I don�t like it to be | |
| (personal and minority opinion, as Grendel would have said ;)) | |
| <grendelkhan> I like both trends, the classical one and the literary one. | |
| <jarel_^> But then... When you say we are trailed behind by them... Does | |
| it mean that the Hispanic scene will end up following the foreigner scene? | |
| <JSJ> When I say we are trailed behind by them I mean, exactly, that | |
| we are going towards them. Bear in mind that, nevertheless, I don�t follow the | |
| current production closely... I�m talking out of "impressions" when I read the | |
| forums and the things you guys mention about them. :D | |
| <Lenko> I think we don�t have too much influence from them, as most of | |
| us aren�t regulars of RAIF nor play their adventures. | |
| <jarel_^>I don�t see it that way. | |
| (Akbarr�I think this is just a matter of numbers, there are more people writing | |
| adventures in the English-spoken community than in the Hispanic one, and that | |
| makes it much more easier for innovative or revolutionary works to appear there, | |
| those who make the medium evolve. What makes me sad is that those influences | |
| arrive late here, because most of us don�t play English adventures. But they do | |
| arrive after all! The thing is that Photopia has already quite a lot of years! | |
| I also believe that here, in general, we don�t mind the adventure going | |
| "straight to the point", and giving less importance to descriptions and details, | |
| just to be centered on "the game". I don�t think that adventures like Van Halen | |
| would have had much success there... and those are the kind of games that JSJ | |
| likes. ;-) Yet they do have their advantages anyway, as they are written in much | |
| less time and still offer a lot of fun.) | |
| (T.N.: Dr. Van Halen is the main character of a series of 5 quite popular recent | |
| Spanish IF works, written for the ZX Spectrum between 2004 and 2006: Los | |
| Extraordinarios Casos del Doctor Van Halen, "The Extraordinary Cases of Doctor | |
| Van Halen") | |
| ---------------------------------------------------- | |
| <Depresiv> How do you think is the current situation of adventure in Spain? | |
| What things would you improve? | |
| <Lenko> I�m not as pessimistic as the recent forum messages seem to | |
| show. I think we are a bit manic-depressive. For example, the problem of SPAC | |
| going wrong may be true, but previously the magazine has had some wonderful | |
| issues. | |
| <JSJ> I�m only saying this: if Mel has returned with that energy we | |
| can have adventure scene for another 20 years! :D | |
| <grendelkhan> I think the scene barely stays and consolidates, and people take | |
| their turns. | |
| <Lenko> But at the same time we should see that new parsers for HTML | |
| (new technologies) are being produced, blogs are being written, there is | |
| WikiCAAD... And I don�t think that all the adventures are being kept back for | |
| the FICOMP this year. (T.N.: FICOMP is an IF competition around science fiction | |
| that takes place this year in the Spanish community.) | |
| <grendelkhan> Yes, but we do those things for ourselves. What we do doesn�t | |
| tempt new people. | |
| <jarel_^> I don�t know what to say. :P Maybe there�s nothing more to talk | |
| about. There has been so much theorizing, that there�s very little to add. | |
| <Lenko> We should be able to sell ourselves much better, that�s obvious. | |
| <JSJ> I think the community is really really really active these days, | |
| and that makes me feel happy, because it means that the "new generation" is | |
| taking over. | |
| <Lenko> I think we should look together for new distribution channels. | |
| Just an example: to make contact as the CAAD community with Sotonic to present | |
| there any new adventure released. To create something like a press agency. | |
| <jarel_^> Hahaha. That�s what I was going to say. But we don�t need to be | |
| that official. We only have to make the most of the downloading portals to place | |
| there the adventures. | |
| <JSJ> There we go with the "I think we should" syndrome... The thing | |
| to say is "tomorrow the latest I will..." :P | |
| (Akbarr-- There, there) | |
| <grendelkhan> Softonic didn�t accept the last adventures I tried to slip. Only | |
| ABCDatos. | |
| <jarel_^> No??? What excuse did they give to you? | |
| <grendelkhan> None. | |
| (Akbarr -- I think JSJ has got a point there (involuntarily, I�m sure. :D). We | |
| won�t grow as a community with theory, but with practice. I miss new things to | |
| appear, something that really revolutionizes text adventures, because I think | |
| there�s still a lot to do. The problem is that writing something that really | |
| "breaks the mold" takes time and talent, and that�s really complicated to find | |
| when we are so little people in this community. But Mel is one of those who | |
| really have the ability to make this thing grow, so I am really happy too to see | |
| him eager to do things.) | |
| ---------------------------------------------------- | |
| <Depresiv> What do you think could be the future of adventure in Spain? | |
| <jarel_^> The desirable or the undesirable? | |
| <Depresiv> Ummm... does "think" gives you any clue? :P | |
| (Akbarr -- No idea, I left my crystal ball in the repair shop LOL) | |
| <grendelkhan> I�d love a future in which adventures were played and downloaded | |
| in mobile phones and PDAs, with SMS, being played by lots of people. | |
| <grendelkhan> But, as far as the things go, I think we�ll stay another 20 | |
| years this way. | |
| <jarel_^> Just because I�m pessimistic... I guess we�ll end up imitating | |
| English IF. Reeeealy easy games, full of hints, and with a walkthrough enclosed | |
| in them. And with lots of novel-like text. | |
| <JSJ> As for me, according to the evolution of things and what it�s | |
| currently happening nowadays, I believe we�ll have another productive crisis | |
| and, after some years, we�ll have some new authors, or even reenlisted authors | |
| wanting to make new productions. Oh! And we�ll continue making annual meetings! | |
| The only thing that has stayed unchanged for the last 8 years! :D | |
| (Akbarr -- Yes, I guess it�s normal to have all these ups and downs in interest, | |
| as the great JSJ said. If Adventure finds its place between game players (I�ll | |
| point to my previous sermon), and I�m optimistic about that, I don�t see any | |
| reason why would it disappear in middle term) | |
| <Lenko> I think the future is in those digital readers where adventures | |
| can be really substantial. | |
| <jarel_^> Authors will force the people to read their novel above all, and | |
| so they�ll serve them on a silver platter. And Urbatain will be one of the | |
| architects and forerunners of the "silver platter" effect. | |
| (Akbarr -- And Jarel, just to piss everyone off, will write more of those | |
| impossible-to-finish games. ^_^) | |
| <Lenko> I think the greatest danger was the apparition of graphic | |
| adventures, which seemed to leave text adventures obsolete. | |
| <grendelkhan> Are you sure??? LOL | |
| <Lenko> Now that this sensation has no longer the need to exist, we only | |
| have the same dangers than any other writers� community. Which is, people not | |
| reading. | |
| <JSJ> What I see is that the medium, which was previously used by game | |
| designers to write games, is currently used by men of letters to write | |
| literature. And game designers have followed the evolution that the market has | |
| followed... In the end, programming a game is a different thing than writing a | |
| novel. | |
| <jarel_^> What I do think is, if people prefer interactive fiction, let | |
| them make it, but it would be a pity for them to make it just because it�s the | |
| cool thing to do. | |
| <Lenko> I�m going to tell you an idea I�ve been thinking about lately. I | |
| would like to give a conference on interactive literature for kids 14-15 years | |
| old. The name of interactive literature is just because it needs to be sold. :-) | |
| I would start with Hypertext, in HTML, and then I would continue with one of our | |
| IF authoring languages and teach them how to program their own games. That would | |
| definitely be a great reserve. | |
| <Depresiv> Sounds great. :) | |
| (Akbarr -- If you do that, I bet there�ll be more people in those conferences | |
| than in the rest of the community. LOL) | |
| <jarel_^> Lenko, and what language are you thinking of? | |
| <Lenko> InformATE | |
| <Depresiv> Buff... Tricky business. But if you manage to do it, then come | |
| back and tell us the secret. :) | |
| <Lenko> It could be sold by saying that the kids would be able to make | |
| small webpages and a bit of basic programming while they have fun at the same | |
| time. I�m sure they would do that (learn and have fun). | |
| <grendelkhan> Sell it as a cross between programming, literature and games. | |
| <Lenko> That�s right. Well, it�s a "super-vaporware" I�ve been thinking | |
| about for some time. | |
| <Depresiv> Do it, man. ;) I really like the idea. | |
| <Depresiv> Guys, I�d rather finish the interview here. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- | |
| Sebastian Arga�araz ("Sarganar") | |
| -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| (Sarganar is from Cordoba, Argentina. Interactive Fiction is one of his many | |
| hobbies -- he also writes tales and poetry, among other things -- but | |
| nonetheless he has managed something thought to be impossible: He has managed to | |
| develop interactive fiction in spanish with Inform 7, labeled at first as | |
| "untranslatable" by its authors.) | |
| D: How did you get to know interactive fiction, and what attracted your | |
| attention on it? How did you find CAAD? | |
| S: Hello! Thanks to the university's Internet service I was in contact with an | |
| article about interactive fiction in spanish. I'm talking about year 1998 more | |
| or less. I remember I said to myself (while I was reading it): "This is amazing! | |
| And this medium exists!" Before that, I never had a computer, no 8 bits, no 16 | |
| bits, no nothing, although I went from my house to a cousin's house to receive | |
| some classes of Basic, and also I used to meet some friends to play some graphic | |
| adventures with them. With my first job, I bought a computer and started to | |
| play, not with games, but with some programming languages. I also got to know | |
| CAAD while in the library of the university, and started to download and play | |
| some adventures. Not having Internet at home (or having limited access after | |
| that, with the phone connection) didn't make me a very constant person in the | |
| CAAD forum. Only these two last years I've managed to be more active. | |
| D: How did you decide to start a translation of something like Inform 7? What | |
| difficulties did you find in the way? | |
| S: Let's see, it was because of a sum of several factors. I was collaborating in | |
| another really interesting project: Rebot (a bot created by Presi, which allowed | |
| to play adventures through IRC), a project that gave me some useful tools in the | |
| generation process of INFSP. Since Rebot was written in Perl, I learnt some | |
| useful things about text processing. | |
| I think it's necessary to clarify that INFSP is the result of the work of | |
| several people, mainly Urbatain. | |
| Inform7 had already been announced, and the Rakontointeraktiva group had opened | |
| a debate around the possibility of using I7 in other languages. The spanish | |
| problem was the absence of updated base libraries to use with I7. | |
| At that time, an article written by Urbatain appears in SPAC about Inform7, plus | |
| some impressions of Urbatain about what he thought a great advance in IF | |
| authoring. Then I said "Ok! Let's make Inform7 talk spanish. We'll use some | |
| important things of InformATE (the most popular spanish Inform translation) and | |
| try to produce first an updated version of Inform6 that speaks spanish and then | |
| go one step further an reach I7." | |
| I spoke with Urbatain about this and he liked the project. First I processed the | |
| whole InformATE! library with a 'translator' to Inform written in Perl, then I | |
| analized the parser, isolated the modifications and sent them to a different | |
| file, away from the "hackings". While Urbatain tested the behavior of this | |
| version of I6 in Spanish, I concentrated on programming an extension for I7 that | |
| accommodated the hispanic grammar and other necessary details. We also got | |
| several very useful ideas for hacking from the rakontointeraktiva newsgroup. | |
| Our workload was lighter because of the fact of having solved from the beginning | |
| the treatment of game entries in spanish, since we were using what had already | |
| been used for InformATE!. We had to cope a bit with some I7 issues, just like | |
| the way to include the spanish language archives, but those are details that we | |
| think will son be 'officially' solved when I7 is completely mature. There are | |
| also some other characteristics of this new way of programming wich are | |
| developed for the english language and still don't have their spanish | |
| equivalence. | |
| Urbatain's error reports did the rest. Then many other people from the community | |
| started to get interested in the project (like Mel Hython or yourself). Today we | |
| have good perspectives for the production of spanish adventures in I7. | |
| D: What kind of things do you think could be "missing" from Interactive | |
| fiction in Spanish? On the other hand, what specific components do you find | |
| more interesting in it? | |
| S: Well, I think this question is "too big" for me. I like very much the | |
| community existing behind interactive fiction in spanish, I mean, all the things | |
| brought together around the material of 'interactive fiction' (and around the | |
| caad.es forum), and the people from different regions you can find there. It | |
| comes to my mind that not everyone of us approach this community for the same | |
| reason or the same necessity (neither with the same definition of 'interactive | |
| fiction' under our arms). But here you can find almost anything for every taste. | |
| And that's very good. | |
| Something missing? To increase the amount of people approaching the community | |
| (this is only a wish). | |
| About the tone of the works being produced, they gather together the sensitivity | |
| of their authors. If the game doesn't fill me, that's why I'm not the public it | |
| was aimed at. | |
| D: How is it that you've started precisely in CAAD with the "hard" side of | |
| programming, instead of just writing stories? :) | |
| S: I think that's because of my character. Look, before having access to | |
| computers, I had fun designing card games for my sisters to play. And since I | |
| had a computer, it always happen the same with every game I install: I go | |
| straight to the editor of missions, characters or maps, or to the mod | |
| programming. I have more fun doing those things than playing the game. It's | |
| weird, isn't it? | |
| D: Do you use to read Interactive Fiction? If so, what works did you find | |
| remarkable? | |
| S: I use to 'start' reading interactive fiction, heh! Then I give up and try | |
| other things. In that sense I'm a bit absent-minded. I found interesting | |
| Romanfredo, by Aryekaix, La Musa ("The Muse"), by Grendel and your El | |
| Archipielago ("The Archipelago"). (By the way, how many endings does it have?) I | |
| also liked "PAEE" (by Presi). | |
| D: Finally... What could be the way to follow for interactive fiction in the | |
| future? | |
| S: I see a struggle nowadays between different spheres: the adventure players, | |
| the authors and the theoreticians. It would be good for the amount of players to | |
| be comparatively infinite, compared with the other two. I think that a movement | |
| from within the community would be necessary in orther to archieve this (what | |
| I'm saying is not new, and it's also generally true for any other community) and | |
| I believe there are already some people currently working on it. But also from | |
| outside, from people in general, with their life routines, their cultural | |
| interests... | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- | |
| Juan Sebasti�n Armas ("Incanus") | |
| -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| (I'm here now with Incanus, probably the most meridional-westener member of the | |
| interactive fiction Spanish community. Incanus was born and lives in Chile and | |
| is currently one of his community's most relevant members. Aside from authoring | |
| three interactive fiction works, he currently coordinates and maintains | |
| InformATE! home page and is among the most active contributors of WikiCAAD, the | |
| Spanish interactive fiction wiki.) | |
| D: Incanus, could you give us some additional information about yourself? | |
| I: I'm a 37 years old male, I'm roughly 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall and my | |
| weight... well, that's none of your business :P. I work as a Project Manager on | |
| the Systems' Architecture area of a well known Chilean bank. I'm married (10 | |
| years and still going) and I have two very lovely kids, aged 3 and 1. | |
| Oh, incidentally, I dabble on interactive fiction in Spanish. | |
| D: How did you get acquainted with interactive fiction, and how it came to be | |
| one of your main hobbies? | |
| I: It all began, back to the very beginning, on an old school's friends project; | |
| it was conceived among friends, never really developed, then abandoned for | |
| university pursuits, and finally brought back on my own first professional years | |
| (computing and such, not quite original, I know). | |
| And so it was that, still way back (July 1998), I coded my first adventure game. | |
| Well... such as it was. I didn't had many resources, back then: no Internet | |
| access, hardly a PC to work on... so (knowing zilch about parser languages) I | |
| dusted off an old 80's game programming theory book (..!..) and made up a little | |
| program on QBasic 1.1 (God, was it all precarious) with the bones of an | |
| interactive fiction: parser, places, objects, vocabulary and a few NPCs | |
| (actually, objects + vocabulary). | |
| The resulting mongrel of a game was played and criticized by a few close friends | |
| and relations... but I never pursued it any further. | |
| Now, 6 years later, on or around 2004, my interest on IF was revived, I met the | |
| CAAD... and, as they say, the rest is history. | |
| D: Comment on your (many and varied) contributions to CAAD, and do please | |
| confess how do you manage to do all that and keep up with your family man | |
| role... :P | |
| I: Well, regarding CAAD, the thing is: I like to write a lot, and people in CAAD | |
| still don't get tired of reading my stuff... Seriously, I'm more proficient in | |
| authoring interactive fiction, especially on InformATE!, so most of my | |
| contributions tend to fall on these categories (not so much on authoring systems | |
| and related technologies: I'm just a user, on that account). Being rather bent | |
| on badgering, sorry, contributing wherever and whenever I possibly can, I tend | |
| to keep a high level of participation in CAAD forums, InformATE! home page (that | |
| job was a very welcomed appointment) and WikiCAAD (that job was personally | |
| assumed and healthily on discussion now, thank God). | |
| Regarding my family: it's no secret at all. Since I have absolutely no free time | |
| whatsoever at home, what with house-keeping, child raising, wife loving, eating, | |
| sleeping -you know, being around and trying to be of use- almost all of my | |
| interactive fiction work is done on the only available time I have remaining: at | |
| work :P. That is: instead of coffee breaks, lunch or co-worker gossip (I'm sure | |
| am I being labeled as an obscure cubicle recluse by now..). | |
| D: Tell us a little about your community experiences. What makes you feel a | |
| part of it? What would you improve? | |
| I: My experiences by an large have been only good and rewarding. I�m a very | |
| opinionated person (bordering on dogmatic, I�m unhappy to report) but I do tend | |
| to respect other people�s opinion and I have been treated thusly. | |
| I do have a strong feeling of belonging, mostly due to the continued input of | |
| the rest of the community on my own participation (yup, there�s more than just | |
| echo :P). | |
| On improvement, I�d only like to have more diffusion among Spanish speaking | |
| people (no offense, dear English reader). I do believe our Spanish community is | |
| rather lacking on the evangelization side. | |
| D:Give us a brief comment on the adventures you have played. Do you usually | |
| play Spanish adventures? | |
| I: I�ll shamefully admit that, with time constraints already noted, I play very | |
| little adventures at all; I do favor Spanish adventures, English ones I almost | |
| never play, so I�m not much of a connoisseur to single out specific games (I do | |
| play them, though). | |
| In lieu of apology, I�m afraid this is not entirely uncommon among Spanish | |
| authors (it�s no excuse). | |
| D: And now, most important of all. Your adventures :D Tell us a little bit | |
| about them. What they have meant to you and their reception. Meeting | |
| expectations or sorely disappointed? | |
| I: All in all, I'd say meeting expectations and very little disappointment. | |
| Chronologically: | |
| (late) 2004: La Mansi�n (The Manor). It was my first interactive fiction work on | |
| InformATE!, being a remake of a MS/DOS QBasic 1.1 work I did back in 90's before | |
| I heard a word of any interactive fiction community whatsoever. "La Mansi�n" was | |
| a learning tour-de-force on the many aspects on interactive fiction authoring, | |
| not the least among them using InformATE! For an opera prima it was reasonably | |
| well received as an amusing game (your classic "mad scientist mystery house") | |
| without further pretensions. No disappointments there. | |
| (mid) 2005:"El Protector (The Guardian) . My second interactive fiction work was | |
| more fiction than interactive oriented (it had many puzzles, mind you) and as | |
| such it had a very good reception: it's literature and short story were highly | |
| praised, though it lacked on the interactive side, specially because of exact | |
| wording issues that are now solved (mea maxima culpa, despite heavy | |
| betatesting). It's (from an author perspective) my favorite interactive fiction | |
| work so far, for creative and, well, personal reasons; mostly, its inspiration | |
| (play the game and you'll know... it's in Spanish, "ya lo s�", but, c'mon, it | |
| even has all the hints needed short of a walkthrough, "un mont�n de pistas", for | |
| God's sakes :P). My only real disappointment came from the fact that, even | |
| though it was profusely nominated for the Premios Hispanos that year, it didn't | |
| win any medals. This was one of those "Salieri Situations", though: the | |
| competition that year was very good, so, what can you do? | |
| (mid) 2006: Goteras (Leaking). My third and so far most successful interactive | |
| fiction work, readers/players wise. It's theme (not so the story itself) was | |
| inspired on a hard sci-fi novel: Allen M. Steele's Orbital Decay; space | |
| blue-collar workers and all that non-romantic view on life in industrialized | |
| space (big corporations, hard labor, appalling work conditions). It had lots of | |
| humor; some said (well, _someone_ said :P) it had too much or too bad humor, but | |
| then again, what can you do? :P It was praised by the whole community at large | |
| as my best interactive fiction work to date, it got many nominations at the | |
| Premios Hispanos and did won on three categories very dear to me: story | |
| ("argumento"), literature ("calidad literaria") and best puzzle ("mejor | |
| puzzle"). It was a very short story (everyone wanted more: that's a good sign, | |
| no?) and with little but very amusing puzzles (everyone wanted more puzzles: a | |
| good sign, also). No disappointments whatsoever, not from the readers, and | |
| certainly not from me ;-) | |
| D: Any future projects? Teasers? | |
| I: Right now (late June, 2007) I am currently betatesting mi fourth interactive | |
| fiction work, a much longer sequel to "Goteras". It will deal with events that | |
| take place after the events on "Goteras" (it�s a sequel... doh! :P), on an | |
| asteroid mining base, and... well, you'll see (if you can play the game in | |
| Spanish, et caetera.) I sincerely hope it'll please those who wanted "more!", | |
| because there certainly is more of everything in this my fourth adventure: | |
| longer story, lots of puzzles, many NPCs, and huge amounts of (be warned) my | |
| brand of hard sci-fi humor. Incidentally, it'll be my first adventure with NPCs; | |
| how I've managed so far to be recognized as a proper interactive fiction author, | |
| with works with no NPCs on them, it's a mystery and a wonder (and not only to | |
| me, I'm sure :P). Some would argue that "La Mansi�n" does have NPCs but they | |
| were more like talking furniture, really: I'm not proud of that ;-). | |
| I also have a (mostly sleeping) project for an (also long) interactive fiction | |
| work based on a Chilean historical colonial character: La Quintrala. The | |
| argument is defined (a string of La Quintrala's troubled life episodes), I've | |
| done my research (a mandatory item: I'd like to be accurate, even though it's | |
| fiction), but, besides the available time issues, I still don�t feel up to the | |
| task, specially so on the proper use of language: believe it or not, my XVII | |
| century colonial Spanish is rather lacking :P. Thing is, I'm not planning to use | |
| colonial Spanish verbs or commands (I mean, c'mon) but I'd want to get the | |
| literature and NPC's right, hence my hesitation ("when in doubt, hesitate") and, | |
| let's face it, fear induced procrastination. | |
| D: Incanus, I'm going to put your imagination to the task here. Can we talk | |
| about an "Spanish" soul or flavor to the Spanish interactive fiction works, | |
| compared and setting them apart from the rest of the interactive fiction | |
| communities? Answering that, to cope, more imagination; can we speak of a | |
| Latin-American soul or flavor? | |
| I: We certainly can talk of a soul or flavor on the Spanish interactive fiction | |
| works and it would be, with no stretch of imagination, on the narrative | |
| elements. Every successful interactive fiction work in Spanish has interesting | |
| puzzles, nice interaction... but a good narrative is always a high impact | |
| factor. And I do mean critical. | |
| Take one of the most lauded (if not the best) works of our late interactive | |
| fiction production, "Archipi�lago" (no title translation needed). Game wise, | |
| it's fantastic, but the story and the literature are simply superb. | |
| As I far as I can tell, almost every game that scored high or won the majority | |
| of the categories in the Premios Hispanos has also won either or both story | |
| (argumento) and literature (calidad literaria) categories (this is not a | |
| Business Intelligence analysis, but, what can you do? :P). | |
| Let me put this way: we do like and award good games (strong on puzzle or | |
| interaction works) but we also place no small importance on the story side | |
| (strong on fiction works), so yes, I'd say that's an important difference in the | |
| Spanish community. | |
| We don't like just to play interactive fiction, we like to also read interactive | |
| fiction. I'm not sure that's always the case elsewhere. | |
| And for the Latin-American soul or flavor... I couldn't tell you. My own works | |
| were written with a "castizo" (ISO Spaniard) public audience in mind. I've never | |
| to date read or wrote a "Latino" interactive fiction work. Beats me: "no tengo | |
| la m�s p*** idea", I've not the slightest inkling (I'm not translating properly, | |
| or am I? "ol�" :P) about something like a Latin-American interactive fiction | |
| "thing"; never seen it to date. | |
| D: To wrap it up, is there anything you feel that was unsaid or left out here? | |
| Speak, man, here's your chance :) | |
| I: I'd like to comment on the sorry state of Santiago ill fated public transit | |
| system, Transantiago: it's the current government�s shame and a mass humiliation | |
| for everybody�s who's forced to use it. Hell hath known no punishment as this | |
| and... | |
| Oh! You meant about interactive fiction, right? | |
| :P | |
| I'd like to, heck, I will take this opportunity to give my regards, gratitude | |
| and fond appreciation to the Spanish interactive fiction community, that so | |
| friendly received and endured (they say "mostly enjoyed", but I know better) my | |
| participation this past three years. Interactive fiction is now a very enjoyable | |
| part of my life and is all because of you: "chicos, sois lo mejor", guys, you | |
| are the best and thanks for all the fish (I just couldn't help it :P). | |
| I'll try to keep up the work. | |
| I�ll stay around for keeps. | |
| You won't get rid of me that easily! | |
| ;-) | |
| D: Thanks for answering these questions, Incanus, my best wishes of success in | |
| any and all your future projects. | |
| THE SPAG INTERVIEW (DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH STUDIES)------------------------- | |
| Greg Boettcher conducted the following interview with Kent Tessman, creator of | |
| the Hugo IF programming language and the 2004 commercial IF game Future Boy!, | |
| along with several earlier freeware games. Greg and Kent discuss Future Boy!'s | |
| development and marketing in considerable depth. Stay tuned to SPAG for future | |
| articles and interviews on this once and future idea of actually, gasp, SELLING | |
| text adventures. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- | |
| Kent Tessman | |
| -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| Back in 2004, Kent Tessman completed his ambitious superhero IF game, Future | |
| Boy. The game distinguished itself with its humorous story, its artwork, its | |
| music, and its inclusion of possibly more animation than any other IF game. When | |
| awards time came, Future Boy was nominated for as many as nine XYZZY Awards. | |
| But more than anything else, Future Boy distinguished itself as a successful | |
| commercial IF release. It garnered lots of press attention, including several | |
| rave reviews. Kent Tessman has shown that, if an author is resourceful and | |
| hard-working, his IF game can get significant attention outside the IF | |
| community, and, yes, can even sell. | |
| In rec.arts.int-fiction over the past several years, there has been a lot of | |
| discussion about the commercial potential of IF. Considering this, I thought it | |
| would be worthwhile to interview Kent Tessman, who is now something of an | |
| authority on the subject. | |
| And, of course, I also thought this interview would be a great chance to hear | |
| about Kent Tessman's game development experiences, his film projects, and other | |
| things of interest. | |
| GB: You originally wrote Future Boy as a screenplay. Please tell us about your | |
| original ideas, the writing process, or whatever else might be interesting | |
| about Future Boy as a film concept. | |
| KT: The original idea for the screenplay was to do a superhero story not | |
| starring a superhero. It was a comedy about a regular someone whose | |
| not-so-great roommate just happened to be a superhero. I think the script was | |
| pretty good -- funny, at least -- but in retrospect not perfect. At the time my | |
| agent sent it out, there were a number of other offbeat superhero comedies, | |
| which often happens when a lot of writers swim in the same pop-culture ocean. | |
| GB: What made you decide to develop Future Boy as an IF game, rather than a | |
| film? | |
| KT: Mainly the fact that it wasn't going to get made into a film, but I thought | |
| it was still a pretty good and funny idea, and one well-suited to IF. By having | |
| an ordinary hero in extraordinary, superhero-ish circumstances, the premise | |
| lends itself well to the puzzle-solving nature of IF. | |
| GB: How long did it take you to write the game Future Boy? | |
| KT: 3 years, start to finish. | |
| GB: What was the hardest part about working on Future Boy? | |
| KT: Really just the enormity of the work. The source code is just under 1.5 | |
| megabytes, so that's just a lot of typing right there. The dialogue script | |
| ended up being greatly expanded from the original screenplay, naturally, because | |
| of the different courses of action the player can take and the great number of | |
| things that the player can talk to the other characters about. And just in | |
| terms of the normal metrics used to measure game size, it's simply a big one. I | |
| would say the game was probably done (in that it was playable) for about a year | |
| as it was being tested and all the multimedia and finishing touches were being | |
| done. | |
| In programming terms there was a lot of development of the in-game subsystems | |
| for handling dialogue, animation, music -- even weather. At the same time there | |
| was some back-and-forth development with Hugo itself, since the game tested the | |
| limits of anything I'd ever planned for before. | |
| It was also important to me that it ran as flawlessly as possible on every | |
| platform, from Palm and Pocket PC to Linux, Mac, and Windows (and a couple | |
| others), regardless of input, display, or multimedia capabilities. So that | |
| meant a lot of development and testing. | |
| GB: I know you did a huge amount of work on Future Boy, but many other people | |
| contributed too. Derek Lo did excellent artwork, a whole bunch of actors did | |
| great voice work, and so on. Did you enjoy the process of working with others? | |
| How did the experience compare with film direction? | |
| KT: Working with others is an interesting and usually very rewarding change from | |
| the writing stage of a project, which is almost always spent toiling alone. | |
| With Derek we went back and forth from screenplay to discussion to concept | |
| sketches to final revised artwork. Some examples of this are in the Art of | |
| Future Boy! PDF book that comes with the game on CD-ROM. | |
| Directing voice work is a lot more relaxed than film directing on-set -- there's | |
| not nearly so much of a sense of a large train about to barrel through the wall | |
| of the set if you don't get things done faster. I was really happy with the | |
| ability of the actors to capture the essence of the characters. I think it adds | |
| a lot to the playing experience to have them come alive and speak their lines. | |
| GB: To judge from your web site, it would appear that you were quite | |
| successful at getting press attention for Future Boy. For the benefit of any | |
| IF authors who'd like to follow your example, could you give us a broad | |
| outline of how to successfully publicize an IF game? | |
| KT: It's not that different from publicizing any other creative work: any | |
| success will depend on having good materials to present, knowing who to best | |
| spend your time and efforts approaching, and just putting in the work (because | |
| it's far from being the fun part of the whole enterprise). | |
| [To see the Future Boy press release, plus a sampling of media contacts who | |
| responded favorably to it, visit | |
| http://www.generalcoffee.com/futureboy/press.html -- GB] | |
| GB: Aside from publicity, what other factors do you think contributed to your | |
| sales, and what advice about them would you give to any prospective commercial | |
| IF authors? | |
| KT: Personally, I think an inherent unwillingness to ever say something is "good | |
| enough" certainly helps. People paying good money for a computer game these | |
| days expect a high degree of polish, and it can only help to really put in the | |
| time and work to get everything as polished as possible. A lot of thought went | |
| into everything from the CD-ROM organization, to the various installers for | |
| multiple platforms, to the documentation. People want to put the game in and | |
| start playing; to pull that off is a little harder than you might think. | |
| If someone really, really wants to sell an IF game, they should be realistic and | |
| do their homework. And they should make a really good game. People doing | |
| something for the first time often make the mistake that just by their doing it, | |
| other people will be interested in it. That isn't the case, and that probably | |
| goes ten or a hundred times for text-based adventure games. | |
| If you end up saying something is good enough too often and too early, you're | |
| probably wrong. | |
| GB: If it's not too bold a question, how many copies of Future Boy have you | |
| sold? (Feel free to be vague, if you like.) | |
| KT: I'll be vague, but I will say this: I haven't retired yet to an estate in | |
| the south of France (really, who has time to pack?), but Future Boy! has been | |
| very popular -- both with what seems to be the regular "adventure game" market | |
| as well as a surprising (to me) number of handheld players. | |
| GB: What's new with Hugo? | |
| KT: A really impressive to-do list. There are some things I would like to look | |
| at, fix up, enhance and improve, etc. It's just a matter of finding the time | |
| right now. | |
| GB: Have you been working on any new games since Future Boy? | |
| KT: There are a couple of ideas that I've been kicking at and talking to other | |
| people about. I'll have to see time- and resource-wise what I'm able to do in | |
| the relatively near future. | |
| GB: I understand you're working on a film, entitled Bull. Feel free to tell us | |
| about this project, or about any other film and television work you're doing. | |
| A: Bull is the feature film that I've been working on for just over two years | |
| now. It's very close to being done. It's a darkly comic murder-mystery about a | |
| hapless stockbroker who gets caught up in a twisty web where no one -- no one at | |
| all -- is telling the truth. It's your basic story about money, murder, | |
| intrigue, deception, and very tall buildings. | |
| It has some really talented people involved with it. We were very fortunate | |
| that such impressive actors were interested in the project and willing to be | |
| involved, and members of the crew have worked on everything from 300 to Superman | |
| Returns to the latest Harry Potter. | |
| Check out more at http://www.bullthemovie.com! | |
| KEY TO SCORES AND REVIEWS-------------------------------------------------- | |
| Consider the following review header: | |
| TITLE: Cutthroats | |
| AUTHOR: Infocom | |
| EMAIL: ??? | |
| DATE: September 1984 | |
| PARSER: Infocom Standard | |
| SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: LTOI 2 | |
| URL: Not available. | |
| VERSION: Release 23 | |
| When submitting reviews: Try to fill in as much of this info as you can. | |
| Authors may not review their own games. | |
| REVIEWS ------------------------------------------------------------------- | |
| From: Jessica Gorzo (galaxycoff SP@G yahoo.com) | |
| TITLE: Amnesia | |
| AUTHOR: Toby White | |
| EMAIL: T.Q.A.White SP@G ncl.ac.uk | |
| DATE: 1995 | |
| PARSER: Custom | |
| SUPPORTS: Windows | |
| AVAILABILITY: was shareware, now presumably abandoned | |
| URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/amnesia.zip | |
| This is a classic surreal text adventure, though it never achieved great fame. | |
| Even after its release, it continued to be overshadowed by the text adventure of | |
| 1986 with the same name. The mysterious settings could intrigue even the most | |
| experienced IF fan as the gamer wonders what on earth is going on in the place | |
| this character woke up in. The character himself can't help you; he wakes up | |
| from an odd outer space dream into an unfamiliar house with no recollection as | |
| to how he got there. He can't remember anything about what one can only presume | |
| is his house, which has many oddities of its own. Custard in the tub, a crash | |
| helmet on the kitchen stove, and rather odd voices on the other end of the | |
| telephone would confuse even those who could remember something about their | |
| past! The dazed character tries desperately to make sense of everything he | |
| encounters, and slowly but surely a few clues unfold. However, on the end of | |
| every clue hangs another mystery. Every new site yields another piece of the | |
| puzzle, and has intriguing characters to interact with along the way. The rich | |
| imagery allows for clear and captivating mental pictures. You can truly immerse | |
| yourself in the beautiful-yet-strange world of the character. This game truly | |
| keeps you intrigued the whole way through! | |
| As for the commands, the author is not rich on synonyms, though the help file | |
| claims otherwise. The most frustrating aspect is trying to figure out the exact | |
| word the author was thinking of. Expected phrase structure is also inflexible. | |
| When it comes to user interaction, the author is clearly concerned with the | |
| "action" instead of the examination. Sometimes the responses don't match up with | |
| the known, game-described scenery. Perhaps he thinks this is just steering the | |
| user in the right direction, but his vehement "I don't know when you're talking | |
| about!" response when you know full well what you typed made perfect sense can | |
| be discouraging. This game could use a better range of user response. Be sure to | |
| be very specific in command wording when playing. | |
| Overall, though, this game is worth playing because of its intriguing plot. | |
| Sci-fiction meets mystery with a hint of comedy makes it more than worthwhile. | |
| Though the interaction can be a bit frustrating, its all the more rewarding when | |
| you finally get the problem right. This game is worth your while! | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Javier Carrascosa ("Grendel Khan"), translated from the Spanish SPAC | |
| review by Pablo Martinez Merino "(Depresiv") and DJ Hastings | |
| TITLE: La Cara Oculta de la Luna ("The Hidden Side of the Moon") | |
| AUTHOR: Aventurero KRAC | |
| DATE: 2004 | |
| PARSER: InformATE | |
| SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: freeware | |
| URL: http://www.geocities.com/aventurero_krac/av_juegos_luna.htm | |
| April 14th, 1935, in any city in Spain. There is great political upheaval and | |
| social instability. The Spanish people don't know it, but there's only one year | |
| left before war will ravage their country. And you have your own problems: | |
| you're a university student who, with your ever declining income, can hardly | |
| finish your studies. The factory where you were recently working has just closed | |
| down, so you have lost your job. Eating a late breakfast for the first time in | |
| many years, you have a | |
| look at a magazine. Almost by accident, your eyes notice a small advertisement: | |
| "Prestigious psychologist professor of the University of Salamanca needs subject | |
| to study. Experiment consists of a series of questions. Every participant will | |
| be paid a thousand pesetas. Details: The Hidden Side of the Moon, Old Way, | |
| Km.6." | |
| A thousand pesetas! That's a lot of money! You don't think twice before going to | |
| the address mentioned in the advertisement. It's an old mansion built many years | |
| ago by some rich guy, and thought to be abandoned by everyone around. It now | |
| belongs to the psychologist, apparently, and you don't care too much where he | |
| does his experiments as long as he pays afterward... | |
| (...) | |
| Thus begins one of the most difficult adventures of the last few years in the | |
| Spanish community. In "La Cara Oculta de la Luna" we play the part of a poor | |
| Spanish guy who, spurred by his debts, decides to become the guinea pig of a | |
| psychologist. But what we imagined to be a boring session of questions and | |
| answers turns suddenly into a hard trial to the death. The protagonist is locked | |
| in an old mansion with only a madman for company. A madman who has promised to | |
| hunt him down and kill him in a few minutes- unless he finds a way to escape. | |
| There are "feelies" included with the game: some annotated images of paintings | |
| by "El Greco," and an article on the film "Leave Her to Heaven" by John M. | |
| Stahl. This information seems to have nothing to do with the game, because as | |
| soon as we play a little we find out that the most important goal is to discover | |
| an exit from the house. So the "El Greco" paintings will soon be forgotten... | |
| until we find them in the game. And that's when we also find one of the best | |
| puzzles I've solved | |
| since I started playing adventures, in the painting "El Caballero de la Mano en | |
| el Pecho" ("The Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest"). | |
| The old mansion is a trap for us. We are unable to escape through any window, as | |
| all of them are barred. We can try to exit through the chimney, but with no | |
| success, and trying to exit through the attic results in death. Exploring the | |
| house can be easier with the help of a map. My advice is to draw one with a | |
| pencil and paper and take down all the rooms and their connections. Although the | |
| hunter will kill us even before we've managed to get to the second floor, | |
| there's a little trick to avoid that: don't follow the hunter in the first scene | |
| and take your time investigating the house before talking to him. | |
| The game would make no sense without the figure of the hunter, one of the best | |
| characters I have ever seen in an adventure. He possesses all the qualities of | |
| the classical psychopath: a well-mannered and educated gentleman who hides a | |
| relentless serial killer inside. All kinds of theories can be outlined about the | |
| hunter... Who is he? Why is he motivated to act this way? The fact is that he | |
| will inevitably manage to kill us when we are first starting to play. Getting | |
| rid of him is a very | |
| complicated task, although there are five different ways to do it. This gives us | |
| the opportunity of replaying the game to find all the possible methods of | |
| defeating the hunter. | |
| The difficulty of the adventure is high, although not as high as some other | |
| Spanish adventures like "La Torre" ("The Tower") or "La Isla de Tokland" ("The | |
| Island of Tokland"). But solving some of the puzzles will amply reward the time | |
| you spent on them. Take some time to examine the objects and to find the exits | |
| through the floors and ceilings of the mansion. Look for all the "El Greco" | |
| paintings. There's a lot to discover. Also, there's a prize: if you manage to | |
| finish the adventure, you can access a secret file the author has hidden on his | |
| website. That file has the name of a certain object you can see at the end of | |
| the adventure. Hurry up before he loses his hosting! | |
| Conclusion: La Cara Oculta de la Luna is an excellent adventure that grips you | |
| from the beginning with its well cared for setting and superb programming. The | |
| hunter is a believable character with whom we can always interact, something to | |
| be grateful for in Spanish adventures. The game can be discouraging at the | |
| beginning, but as soon as we start moving and uncovering the many details this | |
| adventure holds, we find that we can't stop playing. It is inexplicable that | |
| this adventure is one of the most forgotten in the Spanish community. | |
| My theory on the hunter (Warning: don't read this if you haven't finished the | |
| game): | |
| The aristocratic figure of the hunter makes me guess that, although the mansion | |
| is not his home, it could have been the house of a relative or friend who he had | |
| to kill once his secret was discovered. The hunter must have hunted elephants | |
| and lions in Africa, and in that continent he must have known other cultures. | |
| His passion for hunting probably increased while assimilating the beliefs of | |
| some savage African tribe which worshipped a bloodthirsty god to whom they | |
| offered their sacrifices. Our man adopted those beliefs and traveled back to | |
| Spain to hunt a different kind of animal in its habitat: humans! It wasn't hard | |
| for him to find his prey. Famine and misery battered most of Spain and he only | |
| needed the lure of an economic profit to attract his victims. The habitat where | |
| they would move would be the mansion, appropriately prepared by the hunter: bars | |
| on the windows, locked wardrobes, beds without mattresses, tables without | |
| drawers... the prey would have no other option but hiding. No other option? No, | |
| the hunter always gives a means of escape, and that's where another of his | |
| passions comes into play: painting. Our man is a painter; maybe not a very | |
| critically acclaimed one, but a good imitator, and an admirer of the work of "El | |
| Greco." His house contains many different copies of "El Greco's" paintings, made | |
| by himself. His prey need only find one of his most renowned works: "El | |
| Caballero de la Mano en el Pecho" ("The Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest"). | |
| If they are curious, they will be able to discover the key that will lead them | |
| to freedom. | |
| The hunter is a follower of the Fascist movement, judging by the books in his | |
| library, and an initiate in the Dark Arts, judging by the other book we can take | |
| from it. That's where my theory comes from that he makes sacrifices of his | |
| victims in the same way as the tribes he found in Africa. | |
| Even so, the hunter made some mistakes: he didn't consider the possibility of | |
| his prey killing him in his own field, did he? The fact is, if we climb to the | |
| second floor and look at the lounge from above, we can see whenever he's coming | |
| after us. If at that point we are armed with a small table or a stool, we can | |
| throw it at his head and get rid of him. We can also finish the game without | |
| killing him, though, which is a very advisable option to avoid the remorse of | |
| becoming killers ourselves. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Justin Pot (justinpot SP@G gmail.com) | |
| TITLE: Fate | |
| AUTHOR: Victor Gijsber | |
| E-MAIL: victor SP@G lilith.gotdns.org | |
| DATE: April 2, 2007 | |
| PARSER: Inform 7 | |
| SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF-Archive | |
| URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/springthing/2007/Fate.z8 | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| To some, changing fate is a contradiction in terms. Victor Gijsber's Spring | |
| Thing winner Fate disagrees, as can be surmised before the player so much as | |
| presses a key: | |
| "Men at some time are masters of their fates: | |
| The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, | |
| But in ourselves, that we are underlings." | |
| -- Cassius to Brutus in 'Julius Caesar', Act I, Scene 2 | |
| Fate is about one woman trying to change an unhappy future. The protagonist and | |
| player-character, Catherine, is a young queen hours away from giving birth. | |
| Oh, and she also has a crystal ball that's fortelling her son's untimely demise. | |
| The objective here is to prevent said demise -- and Catherine has an arsenal of | |
| spells to do so. Spells are cast by the gathering of components as directed by | |
| the grimoire (spell book) found early in the game. It is by using these spells | |
| in creative ways that Catherine is able to alter fate, and it is the gathering | |
| and using of components that makes up the bulk of the game's puzzles. These | |
| puzzles are very fair while remaining fun; for those who do get stuck, however, | |
| A well implemented context-sensitive hint system is in place. | |
| Despite the lack of a set time limit, a sense of urgency is created by the | |
| impending birth of Catherine's son. The player is periodically reminded that | |
| Catherine is very pregnant, often by painful descriptions. This sense of urgency | |
| blurs some of the moral and personal decisions Catherine must make in order to | |
| change her sons fate. Not wanting to spoil anything, I'll just say that some of | |
| these moral dilemmas are quite effective at disturbing a player who feels | |
| complicit to the wrongdoing. | |
| There are several possible endings to this game, each depending on how far | |
| Catherine is willing to go for her unborn son. When the player is satisfied with | |
| the fate the crystal ball presents she can wait in her den and birth the child. | |
| The game refrains from explicitly pointing out whether an ending is winning or | |
| losing, leaving that to the player to decide and discover which is best. The | |
| result makes for a solid game with a number of endings to discover. | |
| For all the game's strengths this piece has, one weakness that stands out is the | |
| use of a menu-driven conversation system for NPCs. While there are certainly | |
| examples of this system being used successfully (Adam Cadre's Photopia being the | |
| most obvious) such games are typically not puzzle driven. Because certain | |
| puzzles in Fate require eliciting a given response from a character, Fate | |
| occasionally becomes a guess-and-test game of "navigate the conversation menus," | |
| detracting from any realism the conversations may have had. | |
| This aside, the game is easy to love. The judges of Spring Thing 2007 apparently | |
| agree, and gave it First Place amongst the four entrants. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Valentine Kopteltsev (uux SP@G mail.ru) | |
| TITLE: Final Selection | |
| AUTHOR: Sam Gordon | |
| E-MAIL: sam_r_gordon SP@G hotmail.com | |
| DATE: May 14, 2006 | |
| PARSER: Inform 6 | |
| SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF-Archive | |
| URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/games/zcode/selection.z5 | |
| VERSION: Release 3 | |
| Sure enough, there are a lot of ways to classify text adventures in general, | |
| and the puzzle-oriented of them, in particular. One of them is, to subdivide | |
| puzzlefests into games where the puzzles more or less naturally spring from | |
| the setting (one good example is Heist by Andy Phillips), and those where the | |
| puzzles are just forcibly thrown together, without anything in particular | |
| holding them in place (The Magic Toyshop from the first If-Comp, and | |
| Labyrinth from the last one). | |
| Somehow, I tend to like the games of the first sub-category a little bit | |
| more. However, Final Selection represents a lucky exception of this rule: | |
| while its meta-puzzle certainly is constructed artificially (you play here a | |
| candidate for the position of the Director of the Museum and Institute for | |
| Puzzles and Problem Solving, who is only going to get the job if he passes | |
| the test his predecessor has prepared for him), its structure is thought-out | |
| so carefully, and the overall implementation level is so deep that immersion | |
| (or, more precise, the lack of immersion) never was an issue for me during | |
| playing. | |
| To complete the game, one has to hunt for words. I always feel a little | |
| suspicious about that kind of puzzles, because the authors pretty often make | |
| them overcomplicated -- say, by inventing obscure cyphers, and the like. | |
| Final Selection, however, managed to dispel my apprehensions in this respect, | |
| as well. While its puzzles are challenging enough, barely any of them require | |
| tedious trial and error treatment, special knowledge, or confusing | |
| deductions. On the other hand, there are enough red herrings to make the | |
| player occasionally think that's exactly what the game expects of him;). | |
| Thus, Final Selection fooled me into outsmarting myself, so that I tried to | |
| interpret the hints I got in most perverse ways, and even solved one of the | |
| puzzles in a tedious semi-brute force manner. To tell you the truth, I think | |
| this was partly caused by my solving the puzzles "in a wrong order"; it | |
| happened that I found the solution to one of the key problems that gave | |
| away what exactly I had to do only towards the very end of the game; like, I | |
| had all the jigsaw pieces yet had no clue where to put them to form a | |
| picture. | |
| As I mentioned before, the depth of implementation in Final Selection is | |
| amazing. The author had to stuff a lot of objects into the only room of the | |
| game (it was entered in the One Room Comp, after all!), and it must be said | |
| he found a very elegant way to do this without overwhelming the player by | |
| overlong "You see <a list of various things> here" messages. He expanded the | |
| concept of the room somewhat, dividing it in several areas. It doesn't break | |
| the competition rules, because the room description doesn't change when you | |
| move from one area to the other, and *all* objects in the room are reachable | |
| from any part of it. Still, it makes the object managing task much more | |
| convenient for the player. Another enhancement that makes the player's life | |
| easier is a notepad of sorts, where any information you gain while playing | |
| that could potentially be useful is jotted down automatically for later | |
| reference. | |
| The only (and pretty small) issue I encountered were some disambiguation | |
| problems. This is a result of having so many objects in one room; some of | |
| them inevitably have pretty similar names. For example, there was a box with | |
| several buttons labeled from 1 to 15 in the game, and a scale with several | |
| weights, their face values indicated. Somehow, any time I tried to "push 3", | |
| the game would make me push the "weight 3", and "getting 3" resulted in the | |
| attempt of taking the "button 3". Always typing in the whole object | |
| descriptions was a little bit tedious, although I just might have been | |
| unlucky. Anyway, I think this is more a problem on the part of the | |
| interpreter than of the game itself. | |
| But enough nitpicking -- this certainly isn't a game that makes one feel like | |
| looking for faults. It even nourished my self-confidence by being both pretty | |
| challenging and quite completable without hints. To put it short -- a | |
| must-play for any puzzle-lover. | |
| SNATS (Score Not Affecting The Scoreboard): | |
| PLOT: Not what this game was written for (1.0) | |
| ATMOSPHERE: Victorian study (1.4) | |
| WRITING: Solid as a piece of Victorian furniture (1.4) | |
| GAMEPLAY: Exciting word-hunting (1.6) | |
| BONUSES: Deep implementation level, the quality of the puzzles, the approach | |
| to object management (1.6) | |
| TOTAL: 7.0 | |
| CHARACTERS: There are some, but they don't deserve to be rated (-) | |
| PUZZLES: Well though-out and balanced (1.6) | |
| DIFFICULTY: Challenging, but passable (7 out of 10) | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Mike Harris (harriswillys SP@G grandecom.net) | |
| TITLE: Getfeldt's Treasure | |
| AUTHOR: Mike Salisbury | |
| E-MAIL: rationalratio SP@G yahoo.com | |
| DATE: December 17, 2006 | |
| PARSER: Custom | |
| SUPPORTS: MS-DOS | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF-Archive | |
| URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/gfeldt.zip | |
| Under ordinary circumstances I would not write a review of a game that I had not | |
| completed. In the case of Getfeldt's Treasure I'll make an exception for | |
| reasons which will become clear. | |
| In a text file included with the download, Salisbury writes "Getfeldt's Treasure | |
| has been brought back to life from an adventure I wrote for the Tandy Color | |
| Computer." While a Quick Basic IF adventure of this complexity may have been | |
| hot, cutting edge stuff two decades ago, I sure wish that the author had tried | |
| to port it to a more modern and common IF platform. For one thing, he's | |
| restricted his audience to those using PCs with Microsoft operating systems. | |
| Mac and Linux users may ultimately consider themselves lucky. | |
| For those accustomed to standard IF commands, many won't work. Fortunately | |
| there is a complete list available by typing "help" at the command prompt, | |
| otherwise I would not have been able to progress beyond the first two "rooms." | |
| Furthermore, the parser understands only simple two-word phrases. "Give | |
| (object) to (NPC)" or "open (object) with (object)" simply aren't understood. | |
| At one point the PC needs to give an object to a NPC within three turns, else | |
| the game is put in an unwinnable state; the NPC leaves, never to return It's | |
| easy to waste those three turns with "guess the syntax" attempts, with no clear | |
| indication subsequently that you can not proceed further. It's anyone's guess | |
| how many other flaws of this sort I ran into, leaving the PC no other option but | |
| to wander aimlessly until I got tired and gave up. | |
| There is no "save" feature, so if one does happen to miss one of these | |
| opportunities, there's nothing for it but to restart the game and replay from | |
| the beginning. | |
| Few of the objects referenced are actually implemented; the rest seem to be | |
| simply "window dressing." Early on, a room full of interesting and potentially | |
| useful articles was described; only one of these could actually be taken into | |
| the PCs inventory. I might add that the object continued to be listed in the | |
| room's description even after taking it. | |
| Trying to interact with a half dozen objects in each room hoping to find one | |
| that isn't just for "atmosphere" gets tiresome and annoying, when the parser | |
| responds with a default "I don't see that here" immediately after listing the | |
| object in the room's description. | |
| The story itself is cliched and less than compelling, with several logical | |
| flaws. One must break and enter to obtain access to a house - couldn't the | |
| author have simply hidden a key somewhere? The vicious guard dog within becomes | |
| a loyal companion - sorry, dogs simply don't act in that manner. | |
| There were minor spelling, grammar and punctuation errors which normally is | |
| something of a peeve of mine, but in this case these small flaws were eclipsed | |
| by the larger ones. | |
| I did try - honestly - to finish this. But after about three hours, numerous | |
| restarts and a tremendous amount of wandering on the part of the PC character; | |
| I'd had enough. I felt that I'd given the game more than a fair chance but the | |
| story was not interesting enough for me to tolerate any more of the kludgy | |
| homegrown platform nor to avoid any more of the authors' hidden traps. | |
| Out of 10 I give it a 10 for difficulty and a 3 overall. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Baltasar el Arquero, translated from the Spanish SPAC review by Pablo | |
| Martinez Merino "(Depresiv") and DJ Hastings | |
| TITLE: Goteras | |
| AUTHOR: Juan Sebasti�n Armas ("Incanus") | |
| DATE: 2006 | |
| PARSER: InformATE | |
| SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware | |
| URL: http://www.caad.es/incanus/goteras.html | |
| Synopsis: | |
| Now it's your turn to go to the damn "rock," as it's called in your profession. | |
| You left Deimos a couple of days ago in your ship (your OTV wagon, actually- | |
| inertial flight), and woke up from a pleasant cryogenical dream (virtual reality | |
| included) to find that the ship alarms have been triggered. According to the | |
| message panel, the integrity of the hull of the ITV-44 has been compromised. In | |
| other words, there's a hole somewhere. | |
| Since you have been awakened from the cryogenical dream early, which means they | |
| will have to pay you overtime, you can't expect it to be for something good. | |
| It's an emergency, which implies extra-vehicular activity. These things are | |
| never simple. The life of a space worker is one of the worst there is. (Well, | |
| there are the underwater workers- but they never reach retirement.) | |
| While slowly waking up, you contemplate how life in space in the twenty-first | |
| century is similar to life on earth in the nineteenth century, including the | |
| industrialization. Everything is full of filth in an environment (space) | |
| previously completely clean. That's what we, "the men and women of the outer | |
| frontier" as the company likes to call us, do: dirty up everything. Well, ok, we | |
| extract minerals too. But we dirty up a lot. | |
| Now it's time to wear that suit and fill those holes with a bit of glue. | |
| Comments: | |
| This time, Incanus has made a tale based upon the book "Orbital Decay," | |
| according to the introduction of the game. It's all about a special kind of | |
| science fiction, where life is much more like real life (with its ups and downs | |
| and its shades of grey) than it is like life in the films. | |
| It's an unusual work, in that it breaks the mold of what could be called "the | |
| common current" in a couple of ways. First, it's one of the very few sci-fi | |
| tales that have appeared recently in the Spanish community. Second, it's a much | |
| more realistic kind of tale than the average: the main character (the player) | |
| has quite a dirty mouth, and while we may not feel completely identified with | |
| someone living in space, taking care of a space ship that's traveling towards a | |
| mining planet, we can identify with his complaints against the company, and his | |
| miserable daily life contrasted with the wealth that surrounds him. This is the | |
| kind of science fiction that Incanus identifies as "hard." | |
| This perception will be reinforced as we advance through the adventure: although | |
| we may be dealing with hatches, screens and other technologically advanced | |
| tools, we will soon find out that we need to apply very "mundane" solutions to | |
| solve the problems (though with a quite sarcastic style). | |
| The adventure has been well cared for; we can find a lot of detail not only in | |
| the game, but in the webpage that comes with it, along with an introduction | |
| "novella." The feeling of immersion is great, and the setting is quite well | |
| achieved. The biggest fault could be the game's brevity. That is, the story is | |
| less deep than it could have been because of the brief moment of the character's | |
| story which is depicted. In the end, it only comprises a time of crisis in a | |
| journey. | |
| The only weaknesses to complain of are that the included webpage is a bit | |
| confusing (emphasizing too much for inexperienced users, and being a bit too | |
| complex to find the Z5 of the adventure), and without doubt the brevity of the | |
| tale, which leaves us wanting more (getting deeper in the story, getting more | |
| involved, and knowing more, as I said before). | |
| Conclusions: | |
| The work is enjoyable, entertaining, and the rhythm of the narrative is agile | |
| and dynamic. At least from my personal point of view, it's Incanus' best work, | |
| although he only has three interactive tales. (Which is not so bad, now that I | |
| think about it, given that the average is one work per writer.) Incanus unveils | |
| as a mature IF writer, who only has to take the leap of making a long IF work. | |
| Goteras is definitely a good adventure. It may not revolutionize the world of IF | |
| as such, but it doesn't need to. It will offer us a pleasant and enjoyable piece | |
| of fiction, which is what it's all about. So why are you waiting to play it? | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Valentine Kopteltsev (uux SP@G mail.ru) | |
| TITLE: It's Easter, Peeps | |
| AUTHOR: Sara Brookside | |
| E-MAIL: jsh11a SP@G aol.com | |
| DATE: May 14, 2006 | |
| PARSER: ADRIFT / Inform 6 (Inform port by David Welbourn) | |
| SUPPORTS: ADRIFT / Z-Machine interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF-Archive | |
| URL: http://www.avventuretestuali.com/download/easter.zip | |
| (I played the Inform version of Easter, since starting Adrift games on my | |
| computer requires some shamanic activities). | |
| This review is going to be about as short as the game it is about -- you can | |
| easily beat Easter in no longer than fifteen minutes. As expected, this work | |
| features one room. It also features a bunch of puzzles, most of which are | |
| trivial. To solve the only one that I found *not* trivial, you need to | |
| contact the only NPC in the game, who then gives away the pretty obscure move | |
| that leads to success. | |
| The enclosed feelies were nice, though. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Mike Harris (harriswillys SP@G grandecom.net) | |
| TITLE: Suprematism | |
| AUTHOR: Andrey Grankin | |
| DATE: February 3, 2007 | |
| PARSER: TADS 2 | |
| SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF-Archive | |
| URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/suprematism.zip | |
| In the non-IF world, Suprematism is a Russian art movement originated in 1915 by | |
| Kasimir Malevich during a very turbulent time in Russia's history. It consists | |
| of bold geometric shapes such as squares, circles, rectangles and the like. | |
| Malevich's original Suprematist works were Black Square and Black Circle (1915), | |
| both featuring the eponymous shape on a stark white background; the viewer being | |
| meant to appreciate the strong contrast - a bold yet simple black vs white being | |
| allegorical for despair vs hope, confinement vs freedom, structure vs openness | |
| and so forth. | |
| Grankin has brought this artistic concept to IF. The zip file contains two | |
| "games," black.gam and white.gam, the player being meant to contrast the two. | |
| As far as play goes - well, nothing really happens, as of course they aren't | |
| really intended to be games. By intent, they don't respond to the usual typed | |
| control commands (e.g. quit) and must be closed through the interpreter. One | |
| can get a feel for each module with just a few minutes of entering commands. | |
| It can't be easy to translate visual art to IF, but Grankin has done a | |
| creditable job. That said, if one does not "get" Suprematism as an artistic | |
| style or has little appreciation for its cousins in the modern art world, one is | |
| unlikely to appreciate Grankin's IF creation. | |
| Out of 10 I give it a 1 for simplicity and 6 overall. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Paul Lee (bainespal SP@G yahoo.com) | |
| TITLE: When in Rome 1: Accounting for Taste | |
| AUTHOR: Emily Short | |
| E-MAIL: emshort SP@G mindspring.com | |
| DATE: April 30, 2006 | |
| PARSER: Inform 7 | |
| SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware | |
| URL: http://inform-fiction.org/I7Downloads/Examples/wir1 | |
| VERSION: Release 2 | |
| The first episode in a stated five, this little game was designed to be playable | |
| in approximately fifteen minutes. Although it isn't the only very short example | |
| of interactive fiction out there, it has a more complete feel and takes itself | |
| more seriously than the few others of a comparable length that I have played in | |
| my very limited experience. The plot is amazingly detailed for such a short | |
| game, moving the player through the scenes rapidly. The game throws the player | |
| into the first of two puzzles as soon as play begins; following are two brief | |
| scenes where the player can pass the time in conversation before the end-game | |
| puzzle (and then a brief intro to the next episode). This makes the beginning | |
| and ending feel somewhat like bookends even though the plot is left dangling for | |
| part two to pick up. | |
| The puzzles are basically well-implemented; they give the player pause but have | |
| fairly obvious solutions and are satisfying to solve. Few, if any, objects are | |
| implemented that aren't either NPCs or used in a puzzle, and this is a good | |
| thing in the regard that this points the player's attention to the problem at | |
| hand, but not in the regard that it doesn't allow for multiple solutions. This | |
| is partially made up for by the fact that both puzzles differ from play to play | |
| according to randomized elements, and one of them requires different objects | |
| depending on those elements, adding perhaps some replayability. There are no | |
| serious or obvious bugs, but I did run into a few responses that were not | |
| implemented correctly (exceptions to rules and the like). Perhaps surprisingly, | |
| both puzzles can end lethally. | |
| The writing is clever but very condensed. Not many scenery objects can be | |
| examined, but the terse room descriptions don't even mention many. The prose | |
| reveals the setting more than the descriptions alone. Although the plot is | |
| serious in nature, the tone is light and humorous. The writing is probably the | |
| aspect of the game that more than anything else makes it seem so full and | |
| satisfying with so little, though the game would be empty without the puzzles. | |
| On the whole, I found the gameplay experience to be slightly similar to the | |
| experience of reading a prose comedy short story written expertly but | |
| whimsically; both are sparing on their writing, getting to the point quickly and | |
| concluding abruptly (I'm thinking specifically of "The Notorious Jumping Frog of | |
| Calaveras County" by Mark Twain). All this goes to show that works of humorous | |
| interactive fiction can still score on the literature scale, even ones that are | |
| very short in length and have puzzles. | |
| From: Molly G. (rosygirl5657 SP@G yahoo.com) | |
| The When in Rome series, by Emily Short, was written, mostly, to show off the | |
| new programming language Inform 7. If this game (and the other games written to | |
| show off Inform 7, available on the Inform website) is any indication, then | |
| Inform 7 should go far. | |
| Writing/Technical A | |
| The game begins, innocently enough, in Central Park, and only gets better from | |
| there. The writing in the game is truly superb, with crisp dialogue and funny | |
| situations. The NPCs are also superb, with a lot of nuances to make them seem | |
| truly real. My only problem with the technical side as such is that I felt there | |
| were places where it seemed sloppilly coded(example from beginning: saying GIRL, | |
| SEARCH [SPOILER] worked, but not ASK GIRL TO SEARCH [SPOILER]), but these | |
| examples are few and don't detract from the game. | |
| Puzzles B+ | |
| The puzzles in this game can be quite a brain teaser, with a tricky puzzle at | |
| the end that is a kissing cousin to those "logic grid" puzzles you sometimes see | |
| in magazines. Unfortunately, due to the length of the game (but more on that | |
| later), there can be said to be only two (maybe three) puzzles in the entire | |
| game. That said, this is a case of quality over quantity, as the game still | |
| packs a mean punch of puzzly goodness. | |
| Storyline B | |
| Although writing and story may sound the same, there are cases when good writing | |
| gets attached to a simply gad-awful story, and vice versa (I feel The Apocalypse | |
| Clock, from the 2006 IF Comp, proves the former point quite nicely). This is not | |
| the case with this game. I won't spoil the plot for you, but let's just say if | |
| you like detective fiction, or science fiction, you definitely don't want to | |
| miss this game. Doubly so if you like both. Unfortunately, this brings up a | |
| problem I mentioned briefly above, namely: it's short. The author advertises as | |
| a lunchtime game, and boy does she mean it. Fortunately the sequel to this game | |
| has already been released, and hopefully the author will write more. Still, the | |
| "To Be Continued" at the end can be a downer for those who were just getting | |
| into the odd events depicted. | |
| Overall A- | |
| The game, if I may mix my scoring metaphors, loses some points for shortness, | |
| but makes up for it in sheer quality. The game can be completed in about 15 | |
| minutes and is worth every nanosecond of your time. | |
| =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= | |
| From: Paul Lee (bainespal SP@G yahoo.com) | |
| TITLE: When in Rome 2: Far from Home | |
| AUTHOR: Emily Short | |
| E-MAIL: emshort SP@G mindspring.com | |
| DATE: April 30, 2006 | |
| PARSER: Inform 7 | |
| SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware | |
| URL: http://inform-fiction.org/I7Downloads/Examples/wir2 | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| The second "When in Rome" episode, "Far from Home," differs from the previous | |
| installment in that it is basically one puzzle. There is no advancement of the | |
| story line to speak of, and there are few implemented details not pertaining to | |
| the puzzle in the interest of brevity. A brief prologue and a short epilogue | |
| are included before and after this puzzle, but the prologue is little more than | |
| a formality (though it does seem to have an Easter-egg off sorts). The epilogue | |
| sets the stage for the next game and hints at plot development. | |
| This one puzzle, then, is what the game should primarily be judged on. It | |
| occurs all in one room, which makes this episode significantly less terse and | |
| more condensed than the previous game. The puzzle is mostly an analysis sort, | |
| where you must decide which of several possibilities is correct based on | |
| observations of certain characteristics. Those characteristics and the correct | |
| outcome are randomized for each play, making the game playable several times | |
| through before it exhausts itself, if one feels inclined to do so. There are | |
| several layers of complexity one must work through, including all the steps | |
| required to observe, some basic gadget manipulating, and humorous (or annoying) | |
| obstacles thrown in. | |
| I found the puzzle to be rather difficult. Although I usually enjoy a good | |
| puzzle, the categorizing and logical elimination required to solve this one | |
| didn't really suite me. The first time I played through the entire puzzle, I | |
| lost at the end, getting the unsatisfactory outcome. The same thing happened | |
| the second time I tried, and in the end, the only way I was able to finish was | |
| by resorting to UNDO every time I got the bad ending and guessing again. This | |
| caused even more frustration because I thought that I had reduced the | |
| possibilities down to two that might have been right; but it turned out neither | |
| were, and the correct solution didn't make sense to me. | |
| Complaints and frustration aside, the short game was enjoyable even to me. The | |
| kind of player best suited for this work would be the serious puzzler who isn't | |
| afraid to write things down on paper to help crack the puzzle if necessary. | |
| Still, even people preferring plot development to puzzles won't have to rough it | |
| out too long; there are hints, and it doesn't take long to get to the final bad | |
| outcome. And if you get there you can always cheat like I did and guess until | |
| you get it right. | |
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ | |
| !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! | |
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ | |
| ___. .___ _ ___. ___. | |
| / _| | \ / \ / ._| / _| | |
| \ \ | o_/ | | | |_. \ \ | |
| .\ \ | | | o | | | | .\ \ | |
| |___/ |_| |_|_| \___| |___/ PECIFICS | |
| SPAG Specifics is a small section of SPAG dedicated to providing in- | |
| depth critical analysis of IF games, spoilers most emphatically | |
| included. | |
| WARNING! SPOILERS BELOW FOR THE FOLLOWING GAME: | |
| Floatpoint | |
| PROCEED NO FURTHER UNLESS YOU HAVE PLAYED THIS GAME! | |
| THIS IS NOT A TEST! GENUINE SPOILERS TO FOLLOW! | |
| LAST CHANCE TO AVOID SPOILAGE! | |
| From: Jim Aikin (midiguru23 SP@G sbcglobal.net) | |
| TITLE: Floatpoint | |
| AUTHOR: Emily Short | |
| E-MAIL: emshort SP@G mindspring.com | |
| DATE: October 1, 2006 | |
| PARSER: Inform 7 | |
| SUPPORTS: Glulx interpreters | |
| AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF-Archive | |
| URL: http://emshort.wordpress.com/my-work/ | |
| VERSION: Release 1 | |
| Floatpoint wasn't one of the games I played while judging the '06 Comp. Some | |
| months later, curious because Floatpoint had bested my favorites, I finally got | |
| around to downloading and playing it. | |
| It's a short, easy game with some bits of nice scenery and a couple of cute | |
| pieces of future technology. It's completely story-driven: the puzzles are so | |
| simple as hardly to deserve the term. I played it from end to end in about three | |
| hours without touching the walkthrough, and I *always* need to consult a | |
| walkthrough. | |
| What's not quite so easy -- and I'm sure this is by design -- is to figure out | |
| exactly what's going on. The back-story is parcelled out to the player in bits | |
| and pieces, most of them rather cryptic. In the intro, for instance, we learn | |
| that something happened 20 years ago, but we're not told what. Later we hear of | |
| a vote without learning who was voting, or what was being voted on. A vaccine is | |
| mentioned in passing -- what's up with that? So the player's main task is to | |
| gather up information from various sources, not all of them reliable. And it's | |
| possible to miss some of the information entirely (as I did on my first | |
| run-through) without knowing it, thus closing off some of the multiple endings. | |
| The most interesting source of information is a device that can replay short | |
| videos of events that happened before you arrived on the planet where the story | |
| takes place. The raw video footage has evidently been interpreted by an AI and | |
| then resynthesized in the form of a singing comic book that's projected in the | |
| air as a hologram. In one of the video scenes, a character you've met kills | |
| himself -- yet he's still alive after you view the video, so clearly the AI has | |
| granted itself enormous artistic license. | |
| That seems to be the essence of the literary design of Floatpoint -- that we | |
| have to construct a coherent view of past events using sources that are | |
| fragmentary, self-serving, or simply erroneous. This is hardly an original | |
| concept in literature, but it's both profound and interesting to explore, and | |
| the medium of interactive fiction is ideally suited to it. | |
| Having gathered the information, the player has to make a choice. The choice | |
| leads to one of half a dozen endings, each of which has its own winners and | |
| losers, its own mix of joy and pain. Short's generosity in offering the player | |
| so many significant choices is one of Floatpoint's biggest strengths. | |
| That's the good news. Before we get to the bad news, we need to digress briefly | |
| to ask a thorny question: To what extent should works of interactive fiction be | |
| held to the same standard as other works of fiction? To put it another way, how | |
| much slack are we cutting ourselves here? Given that writing IF places somewhat | |
| different demands and constraints on the author than conventional fiction, and | |
| given also that the IF community is tiny and not well supplied with Stephen | |
| Kings or Arthur C. Clarkes, is it reasonable to expect that an IF author will | |
| meet readers' expectations in the realm of conventional story values, or would | |
| that be asking too much? | |
| There are no black-or-white answers; each of us gets to answer this question for | |
| ourselves. And the answer may change from game to game. If you're enjoying a | |
| game for whatever reason, you may be more inclined to forgive the author for a | |
| few lapses. | |
| The answer may also vary depending on the genre of the game. In whimsical | |
| fantasy, pretty much anything goes. If a unicorn is introduced, no well-mannered | |
| person would insist on knowing what its dietary or breeding habits are, or | |
| whether its pure white coat provides effective camouflage against hungry | |
| predators. In contrast, science fiction is a genre in which plausibility makes a | |
| difference. Science fiction purports to describe a world that could actually | |
| exist, so readers are generally less willing to engage in a broadband suspension | |
| of disbelief. The genre allows the use of a few "magical" conventions such as | |
| time machines and faster-than-light travel, but discerning SF readers generally | |
| demand that even these magical technologies operate in ways that are internally | |
| consistent. | |
| Floatpoint is science fiction. Even within that genre, if it were a story whose | |
| main point was well-rounded characters, or fabulous settings, or fiendish | |
| puzzles, then lapses from technical plausibility would arguably be forgivable, | |
| or at least less burdensome. But the point of Floatpoint, as already noted, | |
| seems to be for the player to develop an understanding of what's going on. In | |
| that situation, my brain kicks into gear. | |
| Considered as "hard" SF, which is the genre to which it belongs, Floatpoint | |
| makes no sense whatever. It's a bewildering mishmash of science fiction ideas | |
| with not a speck of logical girderwork to tie them together. | |
| A caveat, before we proceed: Those who have participated with me in face-to-face | |
| SF writers' workshops will tell you I'm a fiend for plausibility. I probably | |
| care too much about it. And it's not only workshopped stories by hobbyists that | |
| suffer from glaring plausibility problems. Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the | |
| Sky" was a train wreck in the plausibility department, and it won a Hugo. | |
| That said, in hard SF, the hard questions have to be asked. If the writer | |
| doesn't ask them of herself, somebody like me is bound to come along afterward | |
| and raise merry hell. | |
| Floatpoint rolls up half a dozen stock SF ideas in a big ball. We've got | |
| faster-than-light interstellar travel and communication, the colonization and | |
| terraforming of an alien world, advanced bioscience that produces new types of | |
| humans, infanticide of babies who are perceived as defective, a plague that has | |
| wiped out much of the infrastructure back on Earth, an impending ice age which | |
| threatens the colony world where the story takes place, plus personal | |
| anti-gravity and probably one or two details I've forgotten. | |
| You play the part of a diplomat from Earth. You've been dispatched to the planet | |
| of Aleheart, which was evidently settled by human colonists at some point in the | |
| past. You have a mission. The mission is ... well, that's going to take some | |
| explaining. | |
| Twenty years or so prior to the events of the game, a terrible plague swept the | |
| Earth. We're told it caused "[b]illions of deaths...; revolutions and crumbling | |
| infrastructure; the regress of technology." How technology can regress is rather | |
| a mystery, if you think about it. Presumably technological knowledge would still | |
| exist. The thing that could plausibly regress would be the resources needed to | |
| put the knowledge to effective use. And the extent of Earth's resources is very | |
| much an issue, as we'll see. In any event, Earth's technology didn't regress so | |
| far that interstellar travel became impractical. And the Earthians were soon | |
| able to produce a vaccine that stopped the plague. In the same paragraph, we're | |
| told this: "The vaccine exists, of course, and is produced in great quantity | |
| still, though it is very expensive to make." | |
| We also learn that some survivors of the plague need to take regular injections. | |
| Possibly they need a second medication that is never mentioned elsewhere in the | |
| game, or possibly "vaccine" is just a poor choice of terminology. | |
| Meanwhile, on Aleheart, there's an impending ice age due to loss of climate | |
| control. (Climate control ... let's see: giant orbiting mirrors might work. But | |
| how would giant orbiting mirrors get out of whack, and if you had built them in | |
| the first place, why wouldn't you be able to repair them? Dunno. Short doesn't | |
| get into how the climate control might have worked.) | |
| We see only one small town in the far north, whose buildings are being gradually | |
| crushed by a marauding glacier. Why the folks there don't just relocate to the | |
| tropics is not explained -- and if the ice age is so far advanced as to threaten | |
| the tropics, wouldn't the town in the north long since have become | |
| uninhabitable? One would think so. But that's the setup for the story. | |
| So the idea is, the diplomat (i.e., you) is supposed to work out a deal with the | |
| Aleheartians in which they will evacuate their freezing planet and relocate to | |
| Africa, which has been conveniently denuded of its population by the plague. On | |
| arrival in Africa, in exchange for having been rescued, they will use their | |
| advanced bio-engineering skills to produce mass quantities of cheap vaccine, | |
| thereby safeguarding Earth against a recurrence of the plague. | |
| Never mind that the plague is not rampaging at the moment, which robs the plot | |
| of any urgency. I'm more concerned about how the Earthians are planning to | |
| evacuate two hundred thirty-seven MILLION Aleheartians across interstellar | |
| space, build new settlements for them in Africa, and feed them during the months | |
| after the emigration, until their first crops are ready to harvest. | |
| I didn't pull that number out of a hat. The census count is given by Short | |
| herself, in the intro to the game. But now I'm going to pull a number out of a | |
| hat. Let's assume that interstellar passenger liners exist, and that the cost of | |
| an interstellar ticket is a mere $50,000 per passenger in today's dollars. | |
| That's probably low, but let's assume it's a little high. We'll balance the | |
| books by allocating no money at all for building new settlements in Africa, | |
| feeding the refugees, or any of that. | |
| So the total cost of the relocation of the Aleheartians will be on the order of | |
| ten trillion dollars, if not more. The first question that needs to be asked is, | |
| how could it possibly be so expensive to produce the vaccine in the conventional | |
| way (whatever that is) that it would be cheaper to spend ten trillion dollars | |
| bringing 237,000,000 Aleheartians to Earth instead? | |
| The second question is, why is the Aleheartians' bio-engineering skill not | |
| exportable? Wouldn't it be cheaper for the Earthians to hire away a couple of | |
| hundred Aleheartian scientists and set them up in a state-of-the-art facility in | |
| Schenectady? Sure it would. | |
| On my first run-through, having missed some essential information entirely, my | |
| third question was this: | |
| What sort of galactic civilization would have ready access to the number of | |
| interstellar liners required to do the evacuation? How many liners would that | |
| be? Maybe an interstellar liner can hold 5,000 passengers in cramped quarters | |
| for however long the voyage takes. (Short gives us only two bits of information | |
| on the interstellar transport system. First, the ships have engine rooms in | |
| which crew are on duty. Second, a one-way trip to Earth from Aleheart takes 26 | |
| days.) So we're going to need about 47,000 round trips in all by these giant | |
| spaceships. How big is the fleet? We don't know. Perhaps it's 1,000 ships. So | |
| each ship will need to make between 45 and 50 round trips. That's a lot of round | |
| trips per ship, but maybe their advanced engineering means less maintenance is | |
| required. Let's not worry about that. But we do need to ask, what sort of | |
| galactic civilization would have ready access to 1,000 passenger liners, each | |
| capable of holding 5,000 passengers, or be able to buil! | |
| d them on short notice? And why would a civilization with that level of | |
| economic resources bother to resort to such a gargantuan resettlement project | |
| when they could simply build a few vaccine factories? | |
| When I used the walk-through, I learned that Earth doesn't currently have a | |
| fleet of ships in which the Aleheartians can be evacuated, but is planning to | |
| build them once the ambassador concludes his negotiations. This bumps up the | |
| price tag for the evacuation rather substantially. In today's dollars, building | |
| a ship that could hold 5,000 passengers during a 26-day interstellar trip would | |
| cost, oh, maybe a hundred billion dollars per ship, give or take. So now we need | |
| not ten trillion dollars to bring the Aleheartians home, but a hundred trillion. | |
| Or we could build only a hundred ships, which would bring the price tag back | |
| down to ten trillion dollars, but now the time required for the evacuation bumps | |
| up from 7 years to 70 years, and the Aleheartians pretty clearly don't have that | |
| long. | |
| But wait -- there's more. | |
| In order to resolve the shortage-of-vaccine crisis, the High Command on Earth | |
| has sent exactly ONE diplomat. (That would be you.) The diplomat does not speak | |
| the local language. He has no entourage. He has no local staff other than a | |
| single uncooperative flunky. He lands not in the largest city on Aleheart, which | |
| is described as being as bright from space as New York -- no, he lands in a | |
| small, isolated town on the northern frontier. He does this for sentimental | |
| reasons (it's the original landing site of the colony, and he has acquired a | |
| poster of it somewhere), but strangely enough, the Aleheartian dignitary with | |
| whom he is to conclude negotiations is right there in town. | |
| This is the "one-horse planet" fallacy. The SF literature is full of planets | |
| that have only one city, simply because the author is waving the word "planet" | |
| around without giving a moment's thought to just how complicated a place, | |
| geographically and politically, an inhabited planet truly is. | |
| But back to Floatpoint. Why was this particular ambassador chosen for the | |
| mission? In a flashback scene, his supervisor says, "We don't send people | |
| off-planet if they have living family." Ooh, that sounds ominous. Evidently | |
| there's some pressing danger in being sent off-planet (a danger that Short never | |
| shows us). Assuming there *is* some danger, the supervisor's speech can only be | |
| decoded as follows: "This vaccine shortage is so lacking in urgency that I'd | |
| rather send an unmarried orphan and have him screw up the assignment than take a | |
| chance on having to apologize personally to a better man's wife and kids for | |
| getting him killed." | |
| This is not the way governments work at any time, and especially not in the | |
| midst of a crisis. In a crisis, the government sends you in with no flak jacket, | |
| and your wife will get a telegram and a bunch of lilies, if she's lucky. | |
| In sum, the story presents us with a crisis that isn't a crisis, which the | |
| player is to resolve in an impossible manner. | |
| At the end, the lead character has to make a choice as to how to handle the | |
| crisis. Depending on what you choose, millions of innocent people may suffer. In | |
| particular, some of the human descendants on Aleheart have been adapted to the | |
| impending cold climate by growing body fur. In one of the optional endings, | |
| Short gives us to understand that these folks obviously won't fare well in | |
| Africa, so they won't be evacuated. They seem to be depressed about this fact. | |
| How about shaving off their body hair? How about depilatories? Or -- hey, here's | |
| a thought -- how about using some of that advanced bio-science to get rid of the | |
| body hair? | |
| This is not an off-the-wall idea, because the hair is clearly artificial. It | |
| isn't the result of evolutionary adaptation, because the impending ice age is a | |
| recent development. It can't even be the result of genetic manipulation of eggs | |
| and sperm in order to give the next generation of human colonists an edge | |
| against the cold weather, because the intro of the story strongly hints that the | |
| impending ice age became a problem less than 20 years ago: "It would have been | |
| more convenient if they had had this crisis twenty years ago, but Earth can | |
| still use it." So the body hair had to have been grown on today's adult | |
| Aleheartians after they were born. What was done using bio-technology could be | |
| undone the same way. | |
| Plus, now that this subset of the Aleheartian population is well adapted to the | |
| cold, why is it a tragedy that they'll have to stay behind? If they're going to | |
| go hungry because of crop failures due to the cold weather, why not genetically | |
| alter some crops so that they'll grow in a frigid climate? We're left to ponder | |
| these questions for ourselves; Short provides no guidance. | |
| Another thing: body hair? Does anybody remember how our own ancestors adapted to | |
| life in cold climates? Right the first time -- they invented clothing. Why | |
| should the Aleheartians need body hair when they could manufacture parkas? Human | |
| body hair has complex social and sexual meanings; it's not the sort of thing an | |
| entire population adopts casually or on short notice. | |
| The game's other faults are minor when set beside these. The NPCs are | |
| monochromatic ciphers, and most of the room descriptions are so sparse that they | |
| read more like sketches than like finished work. When you arrive in your new | |
| office at the embassy, for instance, you're in a room that has neither a desk | |
| nor a chair. It does have two paintings, which are described in fairly odd | |
| terms, but those are just scenery. | |
| Here's what you find when you enter the town square: "At the center of the open | |
| space here is a monument shaped like a tusk or tooth." If you examine this tusk, | |
| you learn, "It has [the] look of force-grown bone, monolithic and taller than a | |
| man." Do you know what force-grown bone looks like? I don't. But that's the | |
| whole description -- no texture or color, no indication of the curvature or | |
| diameter of the tusk, no long sharp shadow, no grass growing around the base. | |
| One of the rooms is called a "museum," whose exhibit presents the culture | |
| (that's right -- culture, singular) of Earth. In the center of the museum -- a | |
| one-room museum -- is a display case. In spite of its eminent place in a nearly | |
| empty room, it has been given as little physical description as the tusk. The | |
| case contains only one object: a pink card. Here is the description of the card: | |
| "The pink card appears to say 'cure/serum fatal-sickness primitive borrowed -- | |
| research center room 58 -- card-that-grants-access.'" | |
| This is odd in several ways. First, what is something as humdrum as an access | |
| card to a local research center doing in a museum devoted to Earth culture? | |
| Second, the instructions the diplomat has received from the High Command (which | |
| is to say, the instructions the player has received from the author) include the | |
| following: "acquire vaccine from the Museum." How the High Command, which is | |
| back on Earth, knew the card would be in the museum is never explained -- but | |
| yet, the HC got it wrong, because the vaccine isn't in the museum. What's in the | |
| museum is only the access card that lets you into the research center (where you | |
| will have no trouble at all procuring a vial of vaccine). Maybe the folks in the | |
| research center have removed the vial of vaccine from the exhibit for some | |
| unknown reason ... but why would they leave an access card in its place, other | |
| than to help the bumbling IF player along? | |
| There's more to the story than this -- linguistic difficulties that force you to | |
| converse with the locals using symbolic social gestures, a departing Earth | |
| ambassador who has had some kind of spat with the local authorities, a meeting | |
| with a local dignitary at which an important symbolic gift is to be presented, | |
| messages from your boss and girlfriend back on Earth that arrive from time to | |
| time in the communications room, a handheld computer and local technologies that | |
| fill in the background information, and so on. | |
| The extent of the lead character's linguistic difficulties is rather difficult | |
| to pin down. Initially you can't converse with the locals. Your native flunky, | |
| Liam, seems to be mouthing memorized phrases at the beginning of the game, and | |
| if you try to ask him anything at all, here's the software's response: "Anything | |
| you might say in English -- or any other language you know, for that matter -- | |
| would be pretty much incomprehensible here. Unless you found a scholar of | |
| ancient languages, but as far as you can tell, they don't go in for that." The | |
| implication is clear: Liam doesn't speak English. Yet later the same afternoon, | |
| he suddenly starts replying to you with complex sentences (presumably in | |
| English, as you haven't had time to learn the local language) that are clearly | |
| not rote productions. | |
| You can meet the local dignitary at the end of the game without changing out of | |
| your bunny slippers, which are all that remains of the personal possessions you | |
| packed in your suitcase before you left Earth. How the suitcase teleported | |
| itself from the shuttle landing site to your bedroom at the embassy -- let's not | |
| ask. The bunny slippers are significant, by the way, but not if you're wearing | |
| them. | |
| I very much like seeing a game in which you can make morally significant choices | |
| (with or without bunny slippers) and then learn how your choices affect other | |
| people. We could use more games like that. I also like the postmodern idea that | |
| you have to assemble a coherent back-story for yourself piecemeal by finding | |
| recordings, memos, and whatnot. But this design works best if there *is* a | |
| coherent back-story that can be assembled. The author needs to play fair with | |
| the reader. Or at least with those 237,000,000 refugees. | |
| 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. Any and all text-based games are eligible for | |
| review, though if a game has been reviewed three times in SPAG, no further | |
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| insightful. SPAG reviews should be free of spoilers, with the exception of | |
| reviews submitted to SPAG Specifics, where spoilers are allowed in the service | |
| of in-depth discussion. In addition, reviewers should play a game to completion | |
| before submitting a review. There are some exceptions to this clause -- | |
| competition games reviewed after 2 hours, unfinishable games, games with | |
| hundreds of endings, etc. -- if in doubt, ask me first. | |
| Authors retain the rights to use their reviews in other contexts. We accept | |
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| reviews are preferred. | |
| For a more detailed version of this policy, see the SPAG FAQ at http://www. | |
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