ISSUE #14 - May 17, 1998
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The |___/ociety for the |_|romotion of |_|_|dventure \___|ames.
ISSUE # 14
Edited by Magnus Olsson (zebulon SP@G pobox.com)
May 17, 1998.
SPAG Website: http://www.afn.org/~afn55673/spag.html
SPAG #14 is copyright (c) 1998 by Magnus Olsson.
Authors of reviews retain the rights to their contributions.
All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine
with the traditional 'at' sign.
REVIEWS IN THIS ISSUE -----------------------------------------------------
Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur
Beyond Zork
Change in the Weather
Delusions
Down
Dungeons of Dunjin
E-Mailbox
Good Breakfast
Leaves
Lesson of the Tortoise
Losing Your Grip
Madame L'Estrange and the Troubled Spirit
Magnetic Scrolls Collection
Matter of Time
Richard Basehart Adventure
Spider and Web
Tapestry
Town Dragon
Travels in the Land of Erden
Unholy Grail
Unnkulia Zero: The Search for Amanda
VirtuaTech
Zork Undiscovered Underground
Zork Zero
Zork: A Troll's Eye View (An Interactive Tedium)
Zuni Doll
EDITORIAL------------------------------------------------------------------
Finally - SPAG #14 is out, unfortunately about a month late. I hope it
will prove worth the wait!
This issue features an impressive collection of reviews, for a change
divided into three sections. The first section comprises a mini-essay
and three reviews by Bonnie Montgomery, the second contains reviews of
old classics as well as exciting new games. The indomitable Duncan
Stevens (aka Second April) has reviewed nine more of the '97
competition games; these make up the third section.
Observant readers may notice that the "New Games" section has been
renamed simply "News", and has changed its scope a little: Things are
happening so fast in the IF world right now that I find it hard to
keep up with all new releases, so instead of simply listing all games
published since the last issue, this section will contain a selection
of news items that managed to catch my eyes. (There are much more
comprehensive "news services" on the Web; see for example Stephen
Granade's page at http://interactfiction.miningco.com.)
Last, but certainly not least, I've finally conquered the huge backlog
of game ratings and given new life to the Reader's Scoreboard (this
is, incidentally, one of the reasons this issue is late). A promising
fact is that an increasing number of games seem to have received
sufficiently many votes that their scores have begun to stabilize:
when only one or two people have rated each game, scores fluctuate
wildly and are very arbitrary (since each person has his or her own
standards of rating); but now many games have reached a point where
each new rating only causes a small change in the mean score. For the
first time, a non-Infocom game heads the list; it's - no, wait, you'll
have to see that for yourself - better keep suspense up until the very
end!
LETTERS--------------------------------------------------------------------
From: L. Ross Raszewski
Howdy. Just thought I'd mention something that occured to me today
while on ifMud. you can either laugh at it yoourself, or note it in the
next Spag if there's rom and you think it interesting enough...
Version 3 of the Z-machine is called "Standard"
Version 4 of the Z-machine is called "Plus"
Version 5 of the Z-machine is called "Advanced"
Version 6 of the Z-machine is called "Graphical"
Of course, these four formats make up the acronym "SPAG", tying the name
doubly to interactive Fiction.
Just thought you'd be interested.
L. Ross Raszewski
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
SPAG replies:
Interesting. Inspired by your letter, I of course had to check out
what the numerical values of the letters SPAG (A = 1, B = 2, etc) add
up to. It turns out that the answer is
(drum roll)
43
"43?" I hear you say. What's up? How come we're just one tiny, lousy
step away from the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe and
Everything?
Well, I have no idea. But maybe you readers have? If you can find up a
"creative" interpretation of this numerological fact, please email it
to me (zebulon SP@G pobox.com): I'll publish the most entertaining replies.
NEWS ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Perhaps the most exciting news on the IF front was the release of HTML
TADS - a new, extended version of TADS that uses HTML to format the
game output. Not only does it support graphics and sound, but the use
of HTML as a markup language gives the author unprecedented freedom of
layout. For more information, see http://www.tela.bc.ca/tela/html-tads/.
Two new, ambitious, full-size games have been released since the last
issue: Andrew Plotkin's "Spider and Web" (reviewed below), and
"Anchorhead", a Lovecraftian horror story by Michael Gentry
(ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/anchor.z8).
And then there was the mysterious TextFire 12-pack: despite the name,
a package of 16 demos for new games, released all at once, and all by
totally unknown and previously unheard-of authors. The demos proved to
be, well, unusual. The whole business prompted a lot of comments and
speculation; to add to the confusion, the 12-pack was released on
April 1st... For the full story, see
http://wcic.cioe.com/~starkey/textfire.html.
It's official: the Annual IF Competition will take place this year as
well. The official Web page is at http://www.ifcompetition.org.
The May Issue of the British CU Amgiga Magazine includes 23 MB of text
adventure games on its cover CD, plus another 20 MB of interpreters
and tools (all from the IF-archive), and an article about the current
state of the IF scene by rec.arts.i-f regular Jason Compton. While
most of the stuff on the CD is Amiga specific, the IF games are mostly
Inform and TADS (and Hugo and Alan) game files, and the CD is in a
standard format that can be read at least from Windows 95 and Linux
(reportedly from Macs as well).
SUBMISSION POLICY ----------------------------------------------------------
SPAG is a non-paying fanzine specializing in reviews of text adventure
games, a.k.a. Interactive Fiction. This includes the classic Infocom
games and similar games, but also some graphic adventures where the
primary player-game communication is text based.
Authors retain the rights to use their reviews in other contexts. We
accept submissions that have been previously published elsewhere,
although original reviews are preferred. At the moment, we are
reluctant to accept any more reviews of Infocom games (though
exceptions happen).
KEY TO SCORES AND REVIEWS----------------------------------------------------
Consider the following review header:
NAME: Cutthroats
AUTHOR: Infocom
EMAIL: ???
DATE: September 1984
PARSER: Infocom Standard
SUPPORTS: Infocom ports
AVAILABILITY: LTOI 2
URL: Not available.
When submitting reviews: Try to fill in as much of this info as you can.
Also, scores are still desired along with the reviews, so send those along.
The scores will be used in the ratings section. Authors may not rate or
review their own games.
More elaborate descriptions of the rating and scoring systems may be found
in the FAQ and in issue #9 of SPAG, which should be available at:
ftp://ftp.gmd.de:/if-archive/magazines/SPAG/
REVIEWS 1: THREE SHORT GAMES ------------------------------------------------
Short, Shorter, Shortest: Snack-Size IF
By Bonnie Montgomery
Around the new year, Gerry Kevin Wilson released two small TADS games,
Sea of Night and The Lesson of the Tortoise. On the announcement of The
Lesson of the Tortoise in January, Andrew Plotkin posted this comment:
"You know, I really like this category of short-short games. Something
which can be written in a couple of weeks. Good for programming
exercise; but *not* so big that you work for months, wrap your soul in
it, and possibly burn out and flee from IF forever. Especially if it
gets a bad review. Someone else do some."
During the first three months of 1998, the IF community responded by
hauling out a load of small games, some suitable for a 5-minute work
break, others completable on a lunch hour. Some are meant as jokes, some
as coding exercises, others as examples of an author's early works.
As Andrew Plotkin suggests, there is much value in writing a small game.
By setting limited goals for a piece, there is a greater chance for
success than in the scope of a large game, in which overweening ambition
sometimes invites failure.
The following three reviews represent recent games of modest aspirations
and small file size that succeed totally within their own boundaries:
Gerry Kevin Wilson's The Lesson of the Tortoise, Matthew Garrett's
Richard Basehart Adventure, and Dylan O'Donnell's Zork: A Troll's Eye
View.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: Bonnie Montgomery
NAME: The Lesson of the Tortoise
AUTHOR: Gerry Kevin Wilson (aka Whizzard)
EMAIL: gkw SP@G pobox.com
DATE: December 1997
PARSER: TADS
SUPPORTS: TADS ports
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/tortoise.gam
VERSION: Release 1
You're an unlikely IF hero: Wang Lo, a small but persevering and
prosperous Chinese farmer. Your adversaries: a serpent, your faithless
wife, and a disloyal farm hand. Your allies: a tortoise, your strapping
son, a trusting servant girl, and a ghostly ancestral apparition. Quite
a story ahead of you, wouldn't you think? Would you believe that the
game can be won in only 30 turns and contains only 9 locations? With the
economical prose characteristic of a folk tale, Whizzard drops you into
the Chinese folkloric past, sketches out characters and plot, and
delivers a moral, all in a very satisfying 30 minutes or so of play.
Whizzard has streamlined his game in several ways: One is to simplify
interactions with NPCs; verbal interactions are limited to "talk to NPC"
and giving them commands. Carryable objects are few, and ones that have
served their purpose are tidily moved out of the player's reach.
Even with these simplifications, the game does not feel sparsely
inhabited. The game understands most nouns that appear in room
descriptions. Default responses have been nicely handled, often changed
to reflect a more Confucian approach ("That action seems unlikely to
save you, wise one.") than the epistemologically challenged standard
TADS parser responses ("I don't know how to X the Y.").
The puzzles are sometimes a challenge, but Whizzard provides a
progressively more explicit hint system. The game therefore appeals to
puzzle fans and story fans. Puzzle fans can tough it out without the
hints. Story fans can breeze through the puzzles using hints, which is a
nice way to allow the story to flow easily, a great pleasure in this
game.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: Bonnie Montgomery
NAME: Richard Basehart Adventure
AUTHOR: Matthew Garrett
EMAIL: cavan SP@G enterprise.net
DATE: January 1997
PARSER: Inform
SUPPORTS: Inform ports
AVAILABILITY: Freeware
URL: http://homepages.enterprise.net/cavan/rba/rba.z5.bin
VERSION: Release 1
When I contacted Matthew Garrett for his input on this review, his
reactions were roughly shock, surprise, and worry. He wrote, "I'm
probably guilty of wasting several people's time with a fairly simple
joke."
The joke of Richard Basehart Adventure is "steal whatever original
creative content exists in an IF game that is itself derivative of a
another game." The game whose creative content is being ransacked is
Detective: An Interactive MiSTing by C. E. Forman, in which the
characters of "Mystery Science Theater 3000" heckle their way through
Matthew Barringer's Detective.
To find a walkthrough of Richard Basehart Adventure, read Forman's
introduction to his MiSTing. MST3K character Gypsy creates a simple game
about her idol, which Garrett brings to life, capturing every nuance.
However, since there are only about three nuances total, actual playing
of Richard Basehart Adventure is, in my opinion, optional.
Is Matthew Garrett guilty of wasting my time? I think not. He pointed me
back to Forman's MiSTing of Detective, a game I had not played since the
1995 competition. A year later Forman released a Silver Screen Edition,
which included an interview with Matthew Barringer (15 years old and
"much cooler" than the 12-year-old self that had written Detective) and
snippets from an abandoned but hilarious second MiSTing, The Caverns of
Chaos.
The worst crime for which Garrett can be accused is not properly using
his Web site as a vehicle for self-promotion. (He might have learned a
trick or two from Forman, who, by his own admission, shamelessly
promotes The Path to Fortune throughout the Silver Screen Edition.) The
page from which Richard Basehart Adventure is available does not offer
any links back to Garrett's home page. If it did, Garrett could have
drawn attention to his other projects, including his "proper" IF work in
progress, which he is offering for download in return for feedback.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: Bonnie Montgomery
NAME: Zork: A Troll's Eye View (An Interactive Tedium)
AUTHOR: Dylan O'Donnell
EMAIL: dylanw SP@G demon.net
DATE: January 1997
PARSER: Inform
SUPPORTS: Inform ports
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/inform/troll.z5
VERSION: Release 2
I must say I had my doubts about this game during the first few turns.
The player character is a workaday troll toiling in the underground
world of Zork, unable to leave his post and with only his bloody axe for
company. I worried that perhaps the tedium aspect was the only comment
Dylan wished to make about a troll's work. When the first adventurer
appeared in the room but then retreated, I really thought there might
not be anything more to the game. Then out of nowhere, another
adventurer appeared and unsportingly killed me! I had to have revenge! I
stuck around for the next 100 turns until I killed and was killed at
least a dozen times. Sated, I quit.
If I had stuck to my post for a couple dozen more turns, my shift would
have ended, reported Dylan. I played the game again and was gratified to
receive my paycheck. The game rewards you with extra commands to use in
a replay, including how to cut down on the tedium and maximize the
combat.
This game is a good example of how an author can set clear limits for a
small game and satisfy the player within those boundaries. Just about
every possible action is rewarded with a response in this one-location
game. Several classic Zork commands are supported. Responses vary
depending on whether you are on guard or in combat. While the combat
text is not original (it is taken from the Dungeon source), it
highlights the spurting blood aspects of Zork's sword and axe play.
Shameful confession: I wrote to Dylan praising his text in the combat
scenes and received his reply that the text was not his own. I have
never gotten very far playing Zork or its progenitors. Dylan explained
the retreating adventurer I had first encountered: "The adventurers that
don't stop are the ones that didn't get the sword from the Living Room,
spot a big nasty monster and think, 'Oops. Maybe I'd better try a
different route'; they're back as soon as they find the chimney up and
come back round with the sword." I was the kind of adventurer who fooled
around a bit, got bored, and quit before ever meeting a troll in
battle. Maybe it's time to go back and try again.
Zork: A Troll's Eye View is billed as a coding exercise by its author,
but I think it serves another useful purpose. Give it to your friends
who might like IF, but who might also find the full-scale Zork daunting.
Whet their appetites with this game, and you may have a new convert to
interactive fiction.
REVIEWS 2: FROM ARTHURIAN LEGEND TO ZUNI DOLLS --------------------------
From: Joe Mason
NAME: Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur
AUTHOR: Infocom (Bob Bates)
EMAIL: ???
DATE: 1989
PARSER: Infocom Standard
SUPPORTS: Infocom ports
AVAILABILITY: Masterpieces of Infocom
URL: Not available.
PLOT: Standard
ATMOSPHERE: Evocative but inconsistent
WRITING: Fair GAMEPLAY: Good
CHARACTERS: Some memorable, some stereotyped PUZZLES: Fair
MISC: Graphics - atmospheric
OVERALL: A fun diversion
Arthur is one of Infocom's last games, and like Zork Zero it combines
text and graphics. The graphics are completely unnecessary to the
story - in fact it is possible to turn them off completely - but they
are pleasant to look at and add to the game's atmosphere. The
medieval banner styling of the background window is especially well
done.
The interface does have a few flaws, however. There are several
possible screen modes, with the lower half of the screen devoted to
command entry and the upper half to graphics or description. One mode
shows a picture of the area, one shows the textual description (which
duplicates details of the pictures), one shows the player's inventory,
one the current score, and one a Beyond-Zork style on-screen map. A
sixth mode is the traditional full-screen text mode. The modes
themselves are nice (the map is especially handy) but switching between
them is done using function keys, making it hard to remember what key to
hit for which mode. Also, the function key support is broken for some
interpreters - it works under Frotz 2.32, but not WinFrotz, for example.
The game itself is of typical Infocom stature. Despite being produced
in their twilight years, it shows no decrease in quality - quite the
opposite, in fact. The plot begins promisingly, with Merlin giving
young Arthur a mission to demonstrate that he has all the qualities
required for a good King. However, it soon becomes a typical treasure
hunt, with the player (as Arthur) required to defeat several evil
enemies in order to gather trophies to present to the Red Knight. Once
he has done this, the Red Knight will let him past in order to get the
item he needs to defeat the usurper King Lot and claim Excalibur.
Slightly more depth is given by the fact that the treasures, while
arbitrary, do have a common thread: they all show proof that Arthur has
defeated a threat to the land. As Merlin explains, "His [the Red
Knight's] life's mission is to rid the land of evil," so there is a
reason for the treasure-hunt quest to be occuring. Still, it feels out
of place in a game which, at the beginning, seems to place emphasis on
story and character.
In fact, the entire game has a disjointed quality to it. The built-in
hint file includes a section of notes giving historical background to
King Arthur's time, and explaining several of the references used. The
section titled "Reality vs. Romance" begins, "There is inherent conflict
built into writing a game about King Arthur. It is the conflict between
history and legend - the way things were, versus the way we wish they
were." This game unfortunately does not deal with this conflict as well
as it could. Some locations and characters - such as King Lot's castle,
the poor peasant's hut, or the village idiot - are quite well-drawn and
lifelike. These characters tend to evoke the atmosphere of the "real"
Arthur, the medieval warlord whose court was a fortress providing his
serfs with protection from barbarian invaders. However, mixed in with
this atmospheric setting is the "romance" Arthur, with its archetypal
coloured Knights who quest against generic "evil". The characters
involved in this aspect of the game are much less responsive and seem
stereotypical or comical. The two halves of the plot sit uneasily
together, resulting in a game that almost succeeds at telling a good
story but ends up feeling more like a string of puzzles linked by
narrative.
The puzzles are mostly good, but some display the same split. Some are
character- and plot-driven, but others involve word problems and other
artificial constructs and seem quite out of place. There is one maze,
which is easy to map once the trick is discovered but still annoying.
One nice touch is Merlin's gift to Arthur: the ability to turn into
various animals. Some puzzles require using the special abilities of
these animals, which is a nice touch. The puzzles are not especially
hard, and the presence of well-written Invisiclues style online hints
makes the game easy to solve.
Arthur, while not an exceptional game, is still fun to play and well
worth a look. By the time of its writing, Infocom had become adept at
integrating puzzles and story, with the result that it mostly flows very
well. Its deficiencies are mostly due to confusion over how to present
the Arthurian legend, rather than a failure as interactive fiction.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: Second April
NAME: Beyond Zork
AUTHOR: Brian Moriarty
PARSER: Infocom Standard
SUPPORTS: Infocom ports
AVAILABILITY: Masterpieces of Infocom
Brian Moriarty's Beyond Zork is in several ways unique in the Infocom
library--not only for its use of the Z6 format to do on-screen
mapping, but for its use of a role-playing-game-like plot. Just as
importantly, it gives the player a sense of place in the land of
Quendor that the Zork and Enchanter series had lacked. Though the
role-playing element needs work, Beyond Zork succeeds admirably as a
puzzle-solving game in its own right.
Beyond Zork's title suggests that it continues the Zork series, but it
actually has little in common with the originals--the heavy reliance
on magic suggests the Enchanter series, and the sense of exploring a
populated land rather than a series of caverns gives the game a
different feel. Most obvious of the innovations in the gameplay is the
role-playing game element, an element that produced decidedly mixed
results for Infocom on each try (Quarterstaff, not that this reviewer
would know, and Journey), and while Beyond Zork succeeds, the combat
element is far from the highlight of the game. It's a bit hard to
explain why this is so--like most RPGs, the player can choose between
swordplay and magic to fight the battles, and acquire increasingly
sophisticated weaponry (okay, okay, a sword over a battleaxe over a
shillelagh, maybe not all that sophisticated) to dispose of the
enemies.
The difference may lie in that opportunities to increase skill
levels--strength and dexterity and such--are rather haphazard in
Beyond Zork, whereas many RPGs increase character qualities with each
level attained, meaning that one can improve one's character without
necessarily getting anywhere in the game. In Beyond Zork, though the
character qualities are occasionally relevant, there are few instances
where the player increases his or her intelligence or strength merely
in order to be smarter or stronger; usually, the increases are
directly linked to solving puzzles. Though that approach seems
preferable, it made the few times when a puzzle's solution was
unavailable because the requisite character attribute was too low a
bit irritating. (In other words, there may be times when the player
needs more of a certain attribute to solve a puzzle, and goes out
hunting for a way to increase that attribute. This sort of thing
strains the idea that the attributes are supposed to measure your
development, since increasing them is an end in itself.) More
fundamentally, though, Beyond Zork is far more plot- and
puzzle-oriented than the bulk of RPGs, and the combat scenes feel like
the game stops while the player tries to get rid of the obstacle.
Another factor separating Beyond Zork from Zorks 1-3 is the NPC
element--there are as many of them here as in the first three games
combined (perhaps more, depending on whom one includes on each count),
and most of them are well developed and coded. (The minx may still be
my favorite Infocom NPC, even though her usefulness in the game is
limited.) Encounters with the cook, the sailor, the cardinal, and
others help reinforce the feel that the territory is populated, rather
than a deserted maze, and while this lends a schizophrenic feel at
times--does no one care that you pick up everything that isn't nailed
down?--it makes for an intriguing game environment.
The plot--retrieve the Coconut of Quendor to safeguard the existence
of magic, or, I should say, Magick--is nothing particularly special;
it suffers from the usual disease of a big game, specifically that one
muddles along solving puzzles with very little sense that they have
anything to do with the larger objectives, besides that the game
designers surely wouldn't bother throwing in irrelevant puzzles
(unless they included Steve Meretzky, which they don't here). I can't
say that this bothers me much anymore, but it seems particularly
obvious here--one does not learn anything about the whereabouts of the
coconut until well into the game, and finding it at the end amounts to
stumbling over it. What plot Beyond Zork has is often entertaining,
but it hardly makes a coherent whole. The game takes place
concurrently with Spellbreaker, and it occurred to me that it might
have been interesting to dovetail the plot with that game a bit
more--magic, except for when you find Orkan of Thriff's journal,
doesn't appear to be failing. Certainly, what plot Beyond Zork has is
well beyond collect-the-treasures, but I still wanted something more.
The puzzles are original and entertaining, though somewhat maddening
in a few cases (mild spoilers ahead)...I figured out one of the
solutions to the bridge problem early on, but assumed that I was
solving it "wrong," that the resource I was using needed to be used
elsewhere. (It also seemed like that particular puzzle ignored a
perfectly good solution--the use of the dispel staff.) The time-travel
puzzle is an original variant on a much-used convention, though, and
the butterfly puzzle employs magic in a novel way, and both are among
the Infocom's best--and the multiple solutions to several puzzles are
a refreshing touch. (Though there are some apparently logical
solutions that aren't implemented, frustratingly.)
Most of the puzzles aren't particularly hard, though a few require
semi-suicidal actions for motivations that aren't particularly
obvious--and the final puzzle is so obvious that it hardly deserves
the name. (Tangent: many of Infocom's fantasy games seem to either
have an absurdly easy or an absurdly difficult puzzle at the
end--Enchanter, Sorcerer and Wishbringer (even for an introductory
game) are easy in that respect, and Zorks 2 and 3 are difficult to the
point of unfairness. Spellbreaker, I think, is just right, and Zork 1
and Zork Zero don't really have ending puzzles as such.) Several of
the puzzles revolve around the combat situations; a few aren't really
combat situations at all, but rather puzzles in disguise, enemies to
be dispatched by ruse rather than by brute force. Those moments
highlight the tension between conventional IF and RPG that's going on
here--and, naturally, the IF element usually seems more compelling.
The writing is, as usual, first-rate--the room descriptions show why
no self-respecting game author should be allowed to get away with "You
are in a forest...you are in a forest...you are in a forest" for a
series of similar rooms. Consider:
Twilight
An ancient oak tree turns the day to twilight beneath the
impressive sprawl of its branches.
Pine Grove
A carpet of amber softens your footsteps between the rows of tall,
sweet-smelling pines.
Eerie Copse
A nameless blight has twisted the surrounding elms into sinister forms
that creak and groan in the dry breeze.
These and other well-written sequences (an amusing riff on The Wizard
of Oz, for instance--did this have anything to do with the plan
kicking around Infocom to write a full-length Wizard of Oz
parody?--and the visions of other Infocom games in a crystal ball of
sorts) make Beyond Zork much more than wandering between puzzles, even
if the story is a bit weak. The humor vital to so many Infocom works
is plentiful here--playing as a woman and asking the shopkeeper about
the Potion of Might is one of the best Easter eggs in any Infocom
game--and there are lots of entertaining moments: one of the enemies
you encounter is a "cruel puppet" whose form of combat hinges on
creative insults: it twists its appearance into a caricature of yours,
or "accuses your mother of shocking improprieties." This is all the
funnier because it feels like a dig at RPG combat, which usully
requires either impressive weapons or an elaborate system of magic;
battling via insult (it would be even better if you could answer)
comes as a sly "sticks and stones" sort of jab at those conventions.
Experienced Infocom players will recognize many little responses or
objects, from Wishbringer ("A concealed bell tinkles merrily" and the
vapor) to Hitchhiker's (being teased for a typo) to the Zork series
(the sailor, of course), and a sequence involving the Implementors
adds the obligatory element of self-reference. But perhaps the best
moment in Beyond Zork is the archway puzzle and the point of view of
the game's setting that it provides--it puts the game into a
perspective that I found sobering. (Very few fantasy games are endowed
with as much pseudo-historical background as the Zork series, and
Beyond Zork, much more than the original series, puts the history to
good use.)
On the whole, Beyond Zork is well worth the playing; truly difficult
puzzles are few, the game atmosphere is effective, and the
ending--even if it points to a sequel that never happened--is
thoroughly rewarding. Even if RPGs aren't your style, there is plenty
more in Beyond Zork than hack-and-slash; it deserves consideration
among Infocom's best.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: Second April
NAME: Change in the Weather
AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin
E-MAIL: erkyrath SP@G netcom.com
DATE: 1995
PARSER: Inform
SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/weather.z5
VERSION: Release 6
PLOT: Small, tightly woven (1.6) ATMOSPHERE: Remarkable (1.8)
WRITING: Excellent (1.6) GAMEPLAY: "Cruel" (1.3)
PUZZLES: Very difficult (1.3) CHARACTERS: One, intriguing (1.2)
MISC: Interlocking parts fit together well (1.6)
OVERALL: 7.9
Andrew Plotkin's first serious game, as he terms it, is an intriguing
effort: it introduced the IF community to many key Zarfian elements,
notably the "cruelty" of making nearly every move vital and closing
off the game without warning, and the magic realism that dominated
So Far, though it's present here in a much subtler form. Beyond that,
though, Change in the Weather offers a remarkably vivid setting, and
effectively uses small changes in the landscape to advance the plot.
The story, at first glance, is not overly complicated: you wander away
from your companions in a park and get stuck out in the rain on a
steep hillside, and must use what comes to hand to keep a bridge from
washing out. Watching all the while is a fox who seems to understand
the action better than you do; the fox is only relevant on two
occasions, but having it around gives you a sense of collaboration in
your efforts to save the bridge. At any rate, the story is essentially
divided into two; there is a languid opening section that affords a
chance to explore the hill, and a breathless second half where you
have, by my count, precisely one move to waste (out of perhaps 45 in
all). The landscape changes to reflect the onset of the darkness and
the rain, but various events--lightning striking a tree, for
example--also cause important changes. Virtually every detail is
vital; the player is advised to take time in the beginning to observe
everything available.
Change in the Weather is a veritable textbook for authors who want to
know how to create and then change a mood, or infuse a scene with
tension. The changes in the landscape, while important to the plot,
are perhaps even more important for the atmosphere they create. In the
first part, for example, we get this:
You're standing on a ledge, on a rather steep, overgrown hillface.
Greenery hides the stream below and the hilltop above, and the
meadows and sky beyond sweep away into the incandescent west.
Whereas, after nightfall:
You're standing on a ledge, on a rather steep, overgrown
hillface. Rain hides the stream below and the hilltop above, and to
the west is only dark.
The changes in the setting to induce a change in mood recall
Wishbringer, and while Change in the Weather owes less to fantasy than
Wishbringer, the details evoke a similar sense of unease, reinforced
by voices in the distance which seem to be calling your name, and
which become louder as you dash around the hillside. Plotkin is
particularly skillful in using timed events and small details to
heighten the tension: once the protagonist awakens amid the storm,
everything appears to be happening at once--runoff starts flowing,
lightning strikes a tree and a branch falls, the stream rises, and the
voices in the distance persist at the edge of the player's
consciousness. The various events are all separated by line breaks, so
they have the feeling of independent events that are following their
own paths.
Plotkin uses sound as well as visual details to build the tension: a
bush gives way with a "small snap," the tree falls with a "splintering
crash" after the "Crack!" of thunder--and the dizzy rush of detail
among all the concurrent events produces a whirling, desperate
confusion. Though we get little of the protagonist's thoughts, it
seems plausible to support that he or she is somewhat less than calm,
and the author does his utmost to transfer the growing sense of panic
to the player. When lightning dazzles you and leaves you in the dark
again, you "blink furiously, trying to sort out the shadows from
what's really there." That connotes both the sensory struggle--night
vision shattered in a flash of light--but also the urgency; your task
is sufficiently pressing that you try to blink away the afterimages
and keep moving, lest you waste valuable time. For the most part,
Plotkin is content to show the details rather than telling the player
how to feel, and the few exceptions--digging a trench, you "claw
desperately" at the earth--are well placed.
The author notes that this is a "cruel" game, and he doesn't
exaggerate: it is virtually impossible to solve it on the first try,
or even on the first ten tries. Making every move count is one form of
cruelty, and the writing is good enough (and the mood sufficiently
pervasive) that the game doesn't get dull even after many
repetitions. Another form of cruelty--a required action in the first
half of the game which is much less than obvious, and which is clued
rather subtly--is less successful, to my mind, because it weakens the
game's logic: it's one thing to have to make sense of a wide variety
of concurrent events, it's another to make an intuivie leap that a key
object is hidden in a strange place. The sense in the second half,
even when I failed to think of something vital on the proper move, was
that, well, if I'd been really thinking, I would have known that. And
other elements, the "magic realism" feel--the fox's remarkable
prescience, a certain change that the rain couldn't logically
cause--don't break the logic, somehow, because they seem only just
outside the realm of usual possibilities; they seem like the sort of
things we feel could happen easily enough, given a minor incursion of
the supernatural. It's hardly less logical that the interlocking parts
of the game come together in the way they do, after all, but the
player isn't about to question that; likewise, the magical bits
require only the sorts of suspension of disbelief that a player is
happy to make anyway. Moreover, certain bits of the game that can't
quite be put down to magic remain speculative at the end, perhaps
intentionally so; a Zarf game wouldn't be a Zarf game if everything
were fully explained (or even explainable).
The charm of Change in the Weather, for me at least, lies in the way
it infuses a relatively ordinary setting with such a range of
feelings: from pleasant sunset to violent, ominous night storm to
placid dawn, the same locations are rewritten to instill different
moods. Like all good writers, Plotkin is sparing with the adjectives
and more often uses verbs to produce the desired effect:
You are high on the hill; it rolls downward and off to the
west. Beyond the trees and brush, meadows glow in the thickening
sunlight. Behind you stands the last stony lump of hill. A narrow
trail curves away to the northwest.
The various elements of the scene are given personality by "rolling"
and "glowing" and such, and the impression of a peaceful sunlit scene
is clear enough that more description isn't necessary. Likewise, after
sundown:
A wide angular tongue juts out from the hillside. A black expanse
stretches to the north and west, impenetrable with rain. Every few
moments, a directionless flicker of lightning tries to pull detail
from the darkness; but there is only mist.
Again, elements of the scenery get active verbs rather than simply
being described, and the adjectives are placed to convey something
essential rather than simply piling on the description: the
"directionless" lightning illustrates how the flash comes from and
leads nowhere in particular, the "impenetrable" darkness limits the
immediate range of vision. The best atmospheric effects are those that
aren't obviously trying to be, and in that respect, Change in the
Weather succeeds--and, as in Wishbringer, only minor changes are
necessary to convey the developments in the landscape.
Though its scope is more limited than that of So Far, Change in the
Weather is accomplished in its own right. Even if "cruel", it's
successful both as a puzzle-solving challenge and as an evocative
setting.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: Second April
NAME: Delusions
AUTHOR: C.E. Forman
E-MAIL: ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net
DATE: 1996
PARSER: Inform standard
SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/delusns.z5
VERSION: Release 3
PLOT: Complicated but well done (1.6) ATMOSPHERE: Effective (1.5)
WRITING: Very strong (1.5) GAMEPLAY: Solid (1.5)
CHARACTERS: A tad hackneyed (1.3) PUZZLES: Clever (1.6)
MISC: A bit too much story, but thought-provoking (1.6)
OVERALL: 7.7
One thing about C.E. Forman's Delusions that can't possibly be denied
is that it's got plot. Boy, has it got plot--several stories' worth,
at least. If your head isn't spinning by the end of it (for that
matter, by the time the first few twists come long), you missed a lot
and you should go back and replay it. Moreover, the plot takes on a
variety of guises along the way--part science experiment, part
techno-thriller, part mystery (well, sort of), part, um,
metaphysical-technological thesis, etc. If there's one thing Delusions
isn't, it's predictable.
It's arguable, of course, whether cramming a game full of story
enhances its enjoyability; at bottom, it's a matter of taste, and
depends in large part on whether the player is interested in the story
at hand. It also depends, of course, on how well integrated into the
game the story is, and in this respect in particular, Delusions
shines: the puzzles serve the purposes of the plot, and the challenges
are hurdles that reflect crucial discoveries or roadblocks in the
story. They are, to be sure, far from easy; I doubt I ever would have
guessed a few of them without the aid of the hint menu--but they are
distinctly not puzzles thrown into an unrelated story. The charm of
this is that puzzle-solving and figuring out the plot are usually one
and the same task, so there isn't a sense of "gee, I've got to figure
out how to do this to move the story along"--usually, at least.
To say much about the story beyond the initial premise would spoil it,
so...you are part of a research team doing VR simulations, and as the
game begins, you are busy trying to debug one of them, a scenario in
which you play a fish dodging hungry predators. The opening few
puzzles within the simulation are an appealing introduction and help
draw the player into the game, though I was hoping that the fish scene
would play more of a role in the game than it does. At any rate, the
plot thickens appropriately once you've done what you need to do as a
fish, in a variety of unexpected ways.
In one key respect, Delusions has an odd split personality: there are
sections of the game where the plot is more or less told to you via
several screens of text, and there are other sections where the game
gives you virtually no guidance and you're left to piece things
together from some fairly obscure clues. Both parts, to be sure, make
some sense within the plot of the game, but the gameplay is a bit
disorienting as a result (not, of course, inconsistently with the tone
of the story). Early discoveries, furthermore, encourage the player to
view what he's told with skepticism, and yet the plot elements you're
told later are essentially true. In some respects, this can't be
avoided--there's too much story here for the player to discover it all
by himself, without resort to diary entries or some other such tired
device, and certain points simply have to come out via screens of
text. But given that one of the most intriguing plot elements comes
out through discovery, there's still a bit of tension there.
That element bears mention because Babel, a 1997 competition entry,
did something similar, though the author has since said that he hadn't
played Delusions and came up with the idea by himself. Though both use
it effectively, Delusions tries something more ambitious that ends up
slowing things down: the required set of actions has a sequence in
mind (with some, but only some, variation allowed), meaning that, once
the player gets the idea, the process boils down to walking around and
manipulating objects rather than discovering as the plot presumably
intended. It would work better if there were more obvious logic to the
sequence, but there wasn't any that I could guess, and the eventual
conclusion was apparent long before the chain was
over. (Whereas--perhaps I'm just dense--I didn't guess the
corresponding revelation in Babel.) The post hoc explanations for why
you don't tumble to this discovery before seem just a little thin,
moreover.
This is nitpicking, though, because the plot does work very well
indeed. Particularly effective, even though frustrating, is the
middle section of the game, which repeats ad infinitum until you find
a way to break out of the loop. The puzzles associated with this are
difficult but fair: everything is put together logically, and the
tension, when it seems like your plan might get foiled, is real. The
nightmarish aspect of this section of the game derives mostly from the
presence of a certain NPC, and it's to the author's credit that the
NPC, though he provides virtually no interaction--he talks to you, you
can't say much back--is an intimidating presence. His dialogue is
well-written and doesn't feel too heavily borrowed from standard
science fiction, though then again I wouldn't know. Also very
good--and thoroughly coded; I didn't find much that broke the
spell--is a certain change in your environment that you cause in order
to get through the scene. Arguably, the NPC might have figured out
what you're up to, but it's still a memorable moment. The only real
flaw in the middlegame is a repeated message that you really want to
get out of this--it loses its effectiveness after the first time or
so, I found. The endgame, unfortunately, doesn't quite live up to what
comes before--the dramatic confrontation could come from any thriller,
and the final resolution just didn't feel climactic to me. There are
some clever puzzles--though one depends on finding a hidden object at
a time when you weren't aware that you needed it--and the ending does
tie up most of the plot questions, but, as far as the story goes, the
middle part works best.
Technically, Delusions is impressive. I found very few bugs, most
actions have synonyms, and there are several code tricks involving
subtle changes in the game environment, or in the game's responses,
that work well. The writing is error-free and effective throughout, in
a way that moves the plot along without drawing attention to itself.
A computer is thoroughly done, though it's a bit tedious to use--then
again, seeing as it's running a "Windows 2000" system, perhaps that's
design on the author's part. There are very few obvious
illogicalities, even accepting the game's various plot twists; the
game is well-designed, well-crafted.
At bottom, though, Delusions seems to aspire to be more than simply a
well-crafted collection of puzzles, and that's where the difficulty
comes in. There are Bigger Issues at stake in the puzzles you solve,
and while the game does offer some food for thought, my problem with
it is that those issues don't really affect what you do. Delusions is
in many respects a better game than Tapestry, another 1996 competition
entry that dealt with questions metaphysical, but Tapestry did force
the player to weigh the problems and make decisions; here, except for
one moment at the end of the game, you solve puzzles, largely. To be
sure, this is a different sort of game than Tapestry, and it succeeds
on an entirely different level--but in that there certainly are
intriguing questions being raised throughout, and periodically
mentioned in passing by this NPC or that, I wanted them to have more
to do with your actions and decisions. Put another way, the player
can more or less opt out of the thought-provoking bits of Delusions by
breezing through the text and moving on to the next puzzle.
Theoretical objections aside, Delusions is an outstanding game in
several respects, and if you missed the 1996 competition, this is
without a doubt one of the entries you should check out now. Even if
it gets a few things wrong, it does a whole lot of interesting stuff
right.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: "Matthew Garrett"
NAME: Delusions (Release 4)
AUTHOR: C. E. Forman
EMAIL: ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net
DATE: November 1997
PARSER: Inform
SUPPORTS: Infocom
AVAILABILITY: GMD, freeware
"Right. Check. Quote from Neuromancer?"
"Check."
"Main character trapped inside computer simulation and must discover
their true identity?"
"Check."
"Sinisterly titled 'Project'?"
"Check."
"Cast of generic cyperpunky NPCs, one of whom will rebel against
said 'Project'?"
"Check."
"OK boys. Looks like she's finished. Let's roll her out!"
Yes, folks, Delusions is that oft-maligned example of the IF community
- a, for want of a better word (Though, no doubt, I'll be inundated
with mails giving me one), cyberpunk game. And yes, the initial
section of the game doesn't seem awfully original. And yes, the rest
of the game seems to follow much the same pattern. And yes, I am
building up to a completely expected shock-bluff role reversal.
Because, despite this, Delusions is a Good Game.
But first, so that we can build up to an exciting climax, we'll start
with the bad points. Good game though it is, Delusions seems flawed in
many ways. Take the opening. Yes, it may well just be me, but I can't
help laughing every time I read "Reality is so... unreal.". And it
goes on. I'll happily admit to not being a fan of (What I'd tend to
see as) "waffly" writing, but even so Delusions goes further than
most. This seems surprising, considering that the rest of the writing
seems to be of such a high standard. It's obvious that effort has been
put into making the world of Delusions believable. Everything you'd
expect to find in a cramped laboratory/living quarters is there. But
still. Back to that later.
The worst thing about the writing is that, at times, there is so much
of it. Several times when you confront your (apparent) arch-nemesis,
you're left sitting for several turns unable to do anything except hit
z and wait while the conversation progresses. Pages of it, sometimes.
Somehow, it seems wrong to apparently give you a choice of things to
do (It's split up, so you get a prompt. Except that, whatever you do,
you've got little choice except to carry on reading.), and then watch
as your character says things that you don't expect him to. Again. And
again.
Perhaps this is the main problem. The player character ends up in a
situation which would be impossible to end up in in real life, and as
a result it's next to impossible to empathise. Of course, I felt sorry
for him and angry at the way he'd been treated. But in the third
person, rather than the first. (Does that make any sort of sense at
all?)
But even so. Sometimes, you are given a choice to influence the future
direction of the game, or so it seems. Because, whenever you get to
this sort of situation, it's obvious that the author wants you to make
one particular choice rather than another. Which leads to my major
problem with the game.
Yes, the big hammer o' morality has been dragged out again in order to
demonstrate that, in the end, we should forgive and forget. When your
character agonizes over whether or not to kill his tormentors, you've
got a choice.
A) Kill them, die instantly and lose all your points.
B) Don't kill them, carry on with the game and gain a point.
Now, which one seems like the "Proper" path?
Choices which influence a game's outcome generally make the game more
interesting, since the player feels that they're having more of an
affect. But the ones in Delusions feel more like "instant-death"
puzzles than anything else. The outcome is based on what the author
thinks, rather than what the player does. If anything, it makes the
game feel more restrictive than if you hadn't been offered the choice
in the first place.
So, then. Why did I say that Delusions was good? To some extent, it's
the attention to detail. The TV in one of the rooms shows Jeopardy.
There's a huge mass of documentation to go along with the VR system.
Everything you'd expect to find, you find. The characters all seem to
have clearly defined personalities, backed up by their personal
effects.
And the plot. To begin with, it didn't sound promising. None of the
initial ideas are terribly ground breaking. Come to that, neither are
any of the later ones. But, somehow, there's a fairly engaging plot.
Even if you're not empathising with the main character, you're
interested in finding out what's going on. What motivates the main NPC
becomes clear as the game progresses, and it all holds together
nicely.
So. Overall then. If you're willing to overlook the basic lack of
originality, the tedious (to my mind) morality bits and the fact that
the bad guy talks far too much, it's a well written and competently
programmed game. The "Big revelation" doesn't come as too much of a
surprise if you've been paying attention to what's going on, but
that's a good thing rather than a bad one.
Out of ten? Seven. Not ground breaking, makes you want to hit people
in places, but still enjoyable.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: Second April
NAME: Dungeons of Dunjin
AUTHOR: Magnus Olsson
E-MAIL: zebulon SP@G pobox.com
DATE: 1992
PARSER: Considering it was built from scratch, not bad
SUPPORTS: MS-DOS (version reviewed), Macintosh
AVAILABILITY: Shareware (GMD)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/pc/dunjin43.zip
ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/mac/Dunjin44.cpt.hqx
VERSION: Release 4.3
The documentation for Magnus Olsson's Dungeons of Dunjin candidly
admits it isn't up to the Infocom standard of quality, and it's right,
as far as that goes--it's not. But, to judge it fairly, it was written
at a time--1992--before any free-or shareware games had come close to
that standard; moreover, it was written in Pascal, and the parser was
put together from the ground up, as it were. And when judged in its
proper context, it's quite a solid game, with some clever puzzles and
some humor to help the proceedings along.
The plot, oddly, is perhaps the weakest part; authorship system
limitations don't limit a game's story as such, and yet Dunjin feels
like it doesn't know what it wants to be. You're set down outside a
cave and sent off to explore without much of a sense of what you're
doing--the documentation doesn't provide much guidance--other than a
sign nearby advising that you're to bring treasures to the Adventure
Office. Shades, naturally, of Colossal Cave, but that game was content
to be a treasure hunt. This one tries to throw in another plot;
trouble is, you don't really know what it is (though you get a few
hints) until more than two-thirds of the way through, and it hardly
makes sense of what's come before.
For example, one key object is hidden in a place where no one could
get to it without some fairly drastic measures--who put it there?
where was it before? Similarly, you accumulate clues about a certain
crystal you have to use long before you have any idea what the crystal
is, or why you would need it; that comes at the end of the game. The
scoring system makes the extra plot central and the treasures
extraneous--the treasures are bonus points at the end of the game,
essentially--but it's hard to say that you pursue any particular goal
through the bulk of the game.
Disregarding that flaw, though--and it's hardly unique to this
game--Dunjin does manage to be quite entertaining. There are several
very clever puzzles that involve magic, and others that involve
defeating magic in novel ways. One distract-the-guardian puzzle
recalls Trinity, and the premise is much funnier (and appropriate for
the author's Swedish origins). There and at other times, the author
sends up the adventure-quest genre in entertaining ways--notably, in
your interactions with a genie, in figuring out a certain "magic
word," and in your discovery of old beer cans in an unlikely place.
The conflation of locales that was occasionally distracting in
Colossal Cave works better here because it's in the interests of
humor: that a crucial bit of information is written on a candy
wrapper, and that a key clue involves a Beatles song, provides an
element of silliness that feels just right, somehow. In that the plot,
when you discover it, is fairly standard save-the-princess and
get-the-fabled-object stuff, Dunjin feels more like a conventional
treasure-hunt than a parody as a whole, but there are more than enough
funny or offbeat moments to keep the player involved. (My personal
favorite--when you've disposed of a guard dog, the game chimes in to
let you know that the dog didn't actually suffer a nasty fate. A sort
of "no animals were harmed" touch.)
It would take some remarkable writing to make Dunjin feel like a truly
coherent game environment, with computer labs and dragons and
conventional houses and dwarves' mines virtually side by side, and
accordingly Dunjin's writing is best described as competent; virtually
all locations have a few compact sentences conveying the scene. (The
computer lab, with a full screen of text, is the exception--one
wonders whether it was modeled on something in the author's own
experience, given the excess of detail.) There are mini-settings that
are well done--a coal mine in particular, and some scenes, such as
your view of a valley, are arrestingly described--though others, such
as a series of tunnels, could stand some more detail. A big sprawling
treasure-hunt like this should convey the relevant details as clearly
as possible, though, rather than striving for atmosphere at every
turn, and Dunjin does that quite well at virtually every turn.
Getting through Dunjin is a project. There are many distinct areas of
the game to discover, each with at least 15 rooms to discover and make
sense of, and often solutions involve objects found in obscure places,
far away from the relevant puzzle. The end in particular requires
either lots of foresight about the proper objects or some major
traipsing around--there are some shortcuts provided, but one of them
closes off at a certain moment. None of the puzzles are
extraordinarily hard, and none that I recall require knowledge
obtained by death, but the sheer size and scope of the game make
everything feel a little daunting. Dunjin does strike a nice balance
between linearity and breadth--the various sections of the game that
you discover give you enough of a choice that you have several
different puzzles to work on, but they're not quite big enough to make
the whole thing feel aimless. But there are a few slightly unfair
moments as well where the game closes off with little warning; saving
often is vital. (And, of course, there are mazes--four, by my count,
none huge but three big enough to require mapping with objects.) All
of the puzzles are logical, though; none bend the rules of the
universe, even the fantasy universe, too much, and the small
illogicalities here and there (a gate that you can close and then walk
through, a key hidden in a somewhat absurd place) don't detract much
from the game.
As noted, the game was written in Pascal, and the system performs
admirably. There are a few disambiguation problems--the game has a few
too many books and pieces of paper, and getting them all in one place
is occasionally not a good idea--but very few and none fatal to
interacting with an object. The 1998 player may miss "undo" and such,
and there was no "script" command that I could find, but the parser
does handle a fairly wide variety of verbs and recognize pronouns as
well. (Wow.) There are some complicated code tasks--timed and
landscape-changing events--that go off without a hitch, and the few
moments that require exact syntax weren't sufficiently clumsy to slow
me down for long. Though it's nothing special, I appreciated the game
not kicking me right out to the DOS prompt when I died or otherwise
ended the game--it's the sort of user-friendly thing (especially in
Windows) that can make a difference in overall enjoyment. The only
real problem I encountered is that the rooms don't have names as such,
and traveling through them a second time yields "You're in corridor"
and such, often not sufficiently descriptive to remind me of where I
was (particularly in a game this size); I had to switch the thing into
VERBOSE to make sense of the game environment. But that's hardly a
major drawback, and when compared to its AGT contemporaries, the
gameplay in Dunjin holds up quite well.
On the whole, then, this is a diverting (and lengthy) romp through a
rather diverse dungeon; it deals a bit too heavily in fantasy
conventions, particularly toward the end, to appeal to the player who
genuinely dislikes fantasy, but for those who enjoy the genre and like
seeing it sent up in some fairly clever ways, Dunjin is worth checking
out.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: Second April
NAME: Losing Your Grip
AUTHOR: Stephen Granade
E-MAIL: sgranade SP@G phy.duke.edu
DATE: 1998
PARSER: TADS
SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Shareware (GMD)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/grip.gam
VERSION: Release 3
PLOT: Intricate (1.7) ATMOSPHERE: Complex, well done (1.6)
WRITING: Solid (1.5) GAMEPLAY: Mostly good (1.3)
CHARACTERS: A little sketchy (1.0) PUZZLES: Some excellent (1.3)
MISC: Very rich in symbolism, thought-provoking (1.7)
OVERALL: 7.8
Stephen Granade's Losing Your Grip is an ambitious effort: the plot
draws heavily on symbolism and attempts to sustain it over the course
of a full-length game. The result, though the symbolic elements are
often a bit obscure, is consistently entertaining and
thought-provoking. Merely figuring out what's going on is, truth to
tell, challenge enough.
You play Terry, in rehab for nicotine addiction, and the game switches
back and forth between Terry's conscious mind in the rehab ward
and--well, it's hard to say, really. You move through a series of five
"fits" that deal with one aspect or another of Terry's mind or
experiences, both discovering and setting right (in some cases) the
neuroses and repressions of his life. This duality sometimes makes
things rather complicated: when the fits delve into Terry's past, the
game wants to present (in heavily symbolic terms) the events that have
stunted or altered Terry's development, but also provide you, the
player, a means of undoing those events (also in symbolic terms),
leading to some fairly tortured plot sequences. One fit depicts your
run-in with some "faeries," a reasonably obvious stand-in for your
imaginative/creative side (at least, I thought so), and, in rapid
succession, the maturation of that imaginative self, its
disruption/negation by an outside force that threatens Terry's
freedom, and the overcoming of that outside force and reliberation of
the imagination. Whew. Bring a scorecard if you want to keep track of
the plot, because there's lots of it and it happens on several levels.
As a game, Deeper Meanings aside, Losing Your Grip is reasonably
successful--there are many challenging puzzles, and they make sense,
for the most part, in terms of the plot. There are, however, many and
varied ways to close off the game, including some "planning ahead"
measures that require considerable foresight. Notably, the way you
transport objects between fits, though clever and even logical on the
game's terms, requires that the player anticipate what the game is
trying to do--not at all likely within the first fit, when the
structure of the game still hasn't become clear. On two occasions,
choices you make send the game down one of two entirely separate paths
(which rejoin later), which enhances the game's replayability --and at
other times, there are multiple independent solutions to problems or
reactions to stimuli that shape what you make of your
character. Generally, these choices aren't between right and wrong as
such, though some have certain moral dimensions; they don't decide
whether the plot will continue, merely the nature of what
ensues. There is one section that devolves into sheer mathematical
puzzle-fest, not inconsistently with the plot but frustrating
nonetheless.
Perhaps the most successful part of Grip is the first fit, in which
Terry explores his own mind, thinly veiled as a majestic marble
building. Terry confronts his memories, allegorized into a pile of
spheres that a fellow named Frankie--Terry's powers of introspection,
perhaps--is engaged in counting and categorizing; the parallel to the
process that Terry is undergoing is clear and intriguing. Terry then
reactivates, reopens for examination, various areas of his life that
he had neglected, and deals with the resulting tide of guilt and anger
(in a way that violates the allegory a bit, but let's not get
picky)--and also manages to avert the complete breakdown (or death,
perhaps?) that had been expected. But the author is not so concerned
with hurling symbolism at us that he neglects to make sense of the
ostensible action, fortunately, and the individual scenes in Grip are
enjoyable simply for their playability and writing. But the depth of
the insight that Terry achieves--in realizing how the negative
emotions have tainted and darkened his memories, and how he needs to
open up long-closed areas of his mind--give the first fit remarkable
power. In that light, the limitedness of its effects on the remainder
of the plot--whether you succeed or fail at a certain task, most
importantly--feels analytically wrong; it seems like failing to get
Terry's emotional house in order should preclude further
introspection. (As in, the plot continues on the same course and you
reach the same ending, which doesn't feel right.)
The ending of Grip, while logical enough, brings up a certain point,
not confined to this particular game but certainly relevant:
increasingly, rather than giving the player the magic McGuffin or
letting him ride into the sunset, authors end games on an ambiguous
note: there's a conclusion of sorts, but it's not an unmitigated
triumph, and there's no satisfying "You have won." The Zarfian ending,
for want of a better term, is a welcome innovation, certainly--it
makes us think about what we've done--but please, all you Zarfians,
signify somehow that the player's _finished_ the thing, done all he or
she is supposed to do.(An "afterword" from the author, or an "amusing"
section, or something like that.) Particularly in games like Grip,
where it's not at all hard to finish the game without earning all the
points, reading an ambiguous ending just convinced me that I'd missed
something and sent me back to solve puzzles that weren't meant to be
solve. Enhancing replay value is one thing, but confusing the player
about when enough is enough is another. (I should note, of course,
that Grip does have substantial replay value, in the separate paths
and in the intrigue of figuring out what everything means. I just
wanted to know when I was done.)
Where was I? Oh, right. One of the nicest things about Grip is simply
that it hangs together well: the reappearances of the dark side that
you struggle with, the veiled conflict with Terry's father, and the
ways you drift back and forth between reality and memory/introspection
make a remarkably coherent whole, or so I found it. Once the player
picks up on the structure of the game (which takes a while) and the
significance of the recurring parts, the seemingly unrelated sequences
start to come together. Once I understood that the point of revisiting
past periods of Terry's life was to overcome the negative associations
he had attached to them, figuring out how to do it felt more
rewarding, though it's certainly possible to finish the scene without
thinking in those terms. Perhaps it was just that I appreciated and
agreed with the underlying message (or at least the philosophy behind
it), that Terry's anger at his father is misplaced and ultimately
destructive, but I found that, certain blips aside, the plot both made
sense and rewarded careful analysis--a rare combination. To that end,
though, I was a bit puzzled that an apparent choice between giving up
that anger and acting on it didn't affect the overall course of the
game--again, you end up in the same place with the same text.
I certainly don't claim to understand everything that the author was
driving at in Grip; there are many parts of the game whose
significance isn't clear to me, and may well remain that way. But I
enjoyed the parts of it that I thought I understood, and it kept me
interested enough to play through and think about in order to make
sense of the rest, no small feat for a full-length game. As both game
and story by symbolism, Losing Your Grip deserves praise.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: The Magnificent Linnard
NAME: The Magnetic Scrolls Collection
AUTHOR: Magnetic Scrolls/Virgin
EMAIL: ???
DATE: Rerelease 1991
PARSER: Magnetic Scrolls standard
AVALIABILITY: Rare
URL: None available
I managed to stumble across this boxed set in a clearance bin about 2
years ago, and for $10, I've never been disapointed. This is a
collection of the three 'best sellers' (I assume) from the now defunct
Magnetic Scrolls--Fish!, The Guild Of Thieves, and Corruption, all for
the PC (which contradicts what I've read before about there being only
Amiga and C64 versions).
All three make Infocom look pretty blase by comparision. The
interface is rather like a Macintosh, with mouse support, backgrounds,
resizeable and moveable windows, automapping, an inventory listing
using some alright icons, and a builtin compass. Each also features
some degree of graphics for some scenes. Although most are low
quality, and the animation isn't impressive in the least, it does add
atmosphere when it's on. Variable fonts also help the text, allowing
you to bold certain types (such as descriptions or game responses),
italicize, or just use different font sizes. Very well put together.
The help menus are about the same as late Infocom, using levels of
hints for various events in each game. At times, the details are a
little -too- much, giving away whole solutions step by step.
Unfortunetly, this seems to be necessary. Certain sequences, such as
Corruption's escape from the hospital, make absolutely no sense unless
you have the help file--there's nothing to tell you what you need to
do or what you did wrong, but if you -did- do something wrong, you're
loading up that last save game. The save/load is well done at least,
using a listed window like most Windows applications do.
The games themselves vary quite widely, and they're all every bit as
good as Infocom's best in MOST departments. Fish! sits you in the
role of a secret agent, transplanted into the body of a fish in order
to stop The Seven Deadly Fins from whatever evil deed they have in
mind. Three different mini-missions place you in other bodies (of
humans, at least) in order to get the parts so that you can head into
the Fish City. Before I give away too much of the plot, I'll just say
that I was subtely annoyed to finally make it to the end, just to find
a TIME LIMIT on the last sections. I managed to make it to the very
end sequence, just to find that I didn't have enough time (each move
costs you a few minutes) to do what was required of me. Painful.
Corruption comes from a different angle. You've just been named
partner in a law firm, but someone's out to eliminate your presence in
some not-so-moral ways. The idea is to, before the day is over, pin
the blame where it goes without getting snagged yourself. It's harder
than it sounds. The game is timed right to the clock, and if you
aren't in EXACT right places at EXACT right times, events go right
past you. If that happens, you're starting over--you won't have
enough evidence. The casette in the box helps some too, but it's not
totally necessary. This game features possibly the most devious
puzzle in the game, and the cheesiest one I've ever had to deal
with--The Hospital. I have yet to see how you're supposed to figure
this out without the help window wide open. Basically, you're in a
hospital, and if you don't get out unnoticed, you'll be given a lethal
injection (boy, those guys are just -everywhere-!). It's rough, since
a wrong turn will put a nurse right next to you.
Guild Of Thieves is my personal favorite. The story works like this:
you're an apprentice thief, trying to get into the guild. You're told
that to get in, you have to rob this country blind. That night, a
master thief drops you off on a dock and lets you do your thing. This
is actually loads of fun, trying to cop the many treasures of
whereever you find them. It's a gas, really, until the end. Just too
many timing-based puzzles for anyone's good.
All in all, a tres fun set to play around with, if you're lucky enough
to actually -find- the box.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: Francis Irving
NAME: A Matter of Time
AUTHOR: Michael Zerbo
EMAIL: Unknown
DATE: Jun 4, 1997 (according to www.download.com)
PARSER: ALAN version 2.5
SUPPORTS: DOS, Amiga, and possibly Alan ports (but without sound/graphics)
AVAILABILITY: Shareware ($10)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/pc/time1.zip (the version reviewed)
ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/amiga/time[123].lha
(the original Amiga version)
VERSION: 1.0 (according to www.download.com)
Time to try out the most heavily downloaded game in the IF archive...
"A Matter of Time" is another story about saving your Professor from a
land of dinosaurs, where his experimental time machine has gone
slightly awry. The plot twist? The Professor is also accused of
murdering a colleague over a funding war.
It's apparently written using ALAN, with calls to external programs to
add graphics and sound. Unfortunately this means that you have to
wait for each picture to appear and disappear, and for each sound to
finish, before you can get on with the game. And it happens every
time you do "look".
So, anyone making a multimedia piece of IF, make sure the sound and
graphics are concurrent with the text. And that you can turn them
off. (You can in time1 - by deleting or renaming viewer.exe and
sbplay.exe...)
Similarly annoying was that every time you die and restart you have to
sit through the whole of the intro (including pictures) before you can
even restore again... Whatever happened to "Would you like to RESTART,
RESTORE or QUIT?".
The writing is readable in its simplicity, but needs more imagination.
The puzzles are straightforward item manipulation games which I
couldn't work out; the games unresponsiveness and shaky parser didn't
encourage me to do so. More synonyms are required; you can do "climb
tree" but not "climb vines".
Graphics are varied and made with fractal and ray-tracing programs.
This gives them a certain lack of liveliness and inconsistency of
style. The sounds didn't add anything much to the game, although they
served well to identify where I was. Good sound in the background
could make each area of a landscape feel more distinct.
I didn't finish Time, but I did read through the text from the data
file. I didn't miss much. It really is only a short work. I don't
know what you get if you register, but from this demo I don't feel
that it would be worth doing so.
With over 17,000 downloads of Time from the IF-archive via
www.download.com, Michael Zerbo is clearly an excellent publicist, or
there is more interest in IF than we imagine. Perhaps people like the
idea that it has sound/graphics in it, and are put off downloading
plain text adventures.
When the first quality piece of graphical IF, with an Inform/TADS
standard parser, comes out, it will be interesting to see if it fares
better in the download world.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: Second April
NAME: Spider and Web
AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin
E-MAIL: erkyrath SP@G netcom.com
DATE: 1997-8
PARSER: Inform standard
SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/Tangle.z5
VERSION: Release 4
PLOT: Multilayered, intriguing (1.6) ATMOSPHERE: Effective (1.5)
WRITING: Strong (1.6) GAMEPLAY: Solid (1.5)
PUZZLES: Logical, some difficult (1.6) CHARACTERS: One, very thorough
(1.5)
MISC: Ambitious idea, carried off with skill (1.8)
OVERALL: 8.0
Andrew Plotkin posted on rec.arts.int-fiction a few years ago a list
of implicit assumptions common to most IF, suggesting that
experimental IF works might set about subverting those
assumptions. Plotkin's Space Under the Window pushed the limits of IF,
to be sure, but in a rather straightforward way; there, the author
forced the player to give up the usual mode of interacting with the
game environment. Spider and Web, though no less subversive in its
way, is altogether more subtle--and Plotkin overturns the tropes of
standard IF to great effect.
As it would be altogether too hard to discuss otherwise, I'll describe
the essential structure--the outer layer, as it were--of the game: as
a spy sent to investigate an enemy laboratory, you have been caught
and are recounting your actions to your interrogator. But you recount
them not verbally, but as scenes replayed in your memory and picked up
by a mind probe--and therefore you play out the recreations as
conventional IF narrative, or so it seems at first. Moreover, your
interrogator interrupts you constantly to inform you that you have
gotten the scene "wrong," or to interject comments when you do get it
right, and there's therefore a sense that you're discovering what
you've already done. The confusion of narratives that arises is done
with remarkable skill: after all, the effect of the scene is that the
interrogator is asking you, for the most part, to confirm what he
already knows, and therefore the point of most of the exercise, as far
as he's concerned, is less to learn anything than to have you submit
to his coercion, repeat what he's telling you. (The interrogator
describes it that way: "It comes down to telling stories. You spin me
a story, and I listen....This verse isn't yet right.") Critical theory
meets IF, in other words: the controlling ideology enforces its rule
by forcing the controlled to repeat--and play out, over and over
again--the narrative. The idea, at least for critical theorists, came
down from Marx, but it has a life of its own by now. If Foucault wrote
in this medium, he'd more than likely write something like
this. ("Discipline and Punish" in IF form? Internalized panopticons?
Could happen.) The experience of playing it is unique and vaguely
reminiscent of "1984"--it forces the player not only to accept someone
else's account of a certain truth, in this case his own memories, but
to replay them in conformity with what he's told--and the feeling is
often unnerving.
At any rate, Plotkin uses this premise skillfully, often in ways that
can't be revealed here lest they spoil the fun. Among the more amusing
moments is the opening scene in the city streets, which, like
everything else, you're replaying for the interrogator's benefit--and
you therefore throw in some ingratiating sentiment laced with sarcasm:
"And however much of the capital city is crusted with squat brick and
faceless concrete hulks, there are still flashes of its historic
charm." Later, a subtle dig at the police state: "The alley is quite
empty, bare even of trash. (Your guidebook warned you: the police are
as efficient about litter laws as about everything else they do.)"
Later repetitions of the scene cut out most of the rhapsodizing about
the city's charms, as if in acknowledgment that the interrogator
doesn't want to hear it. The temporal confusions abound: this is one
work of IF where much of the action has already happened at the
beginning of the game, and the story technique works far better than
many "flashback" sequences common in film. The slow-developing plot is
frustrating at times--the player is often reduced to thinking "_why_
would I have done that?", and not all the questions get resolved. But
there is method to Plotkin's madness, as always, and the twists are
calculated for maximum effect.
Spider and Web owes its setting and plot to Cold War spy movies and
novels, in a sense. It gradually becomes apparent that you're after a
mysterious device, a weapon of sorts: they have it, you want it or
alternately don't want them to have it, it's essential to the balance
of power, etc. (And a certain less-than-credible scene toward the end
recalls one of the silliest features of action movies.) There is also
a certain debt to science fiction, though, in the wealth of gadgetry
that you carry around--you bring a toolcase with you--and in the
endgame, which requires that you figure out a whole host of devices at
high speed in a way reminiscent of lots of SF. Particularly since so
much of the plot turns on understanding the properties of gadgets,
it's tempting to make them the real point of the story--and yet good
science fiction, despite appearances, is often less about neat
technology than about the human conflicts that it brings about, and
Spider and Web is no different. At one point, your interrogator--oddly
candid, but I suppose he has to be for the story to go anywhere--
acknowledges that the new weapon, rather than enabling a supposed
"clean war", would actually make the ongoing war even more chaotic and
enable dangerous abuses of power, but then acknowledges that he still
participates in building and developing the weapon. (The tension, in
critical theory terms: the figure who wields the power admits his
doubts about the validity or appeal of the dominant ideology, thereby
deconstructing that ideology's claim to exclusive truth and
legitimating dissent. Well, maybe.) Implicitly, technology becomes an
end in itself, divorced from its desired ends--or, alternately,
avoiding a certain technological advance is more risky than pursuing
it, lest one's side lose the destructive advantage. The latter echoes
Cold War deterrence theory, while the former is an element in most
dystopian visions (Fahrenheit 451, for example). At any rate, the
endgame underscores the importance of the backstory; players should
probably go back to old save positions once they near the end simply
to make sense of some of the earlier speeches.
As a game, Spider and Web works well. The interrogator's comments act
as a sort of hint system for much of the game, since your various
mistakes draw out comments that indicate what he's looking for and
narrow down the scope of your actions through repeated tries. As such,
the game is fairly short and most of it isn't all that hard; it's only
toward the end that the Zarfian side comes out and the player needs
real intuition to keep up. (As with other Zarf works, furthermore, the
hardest points are the most satisfying to solve--they're rewarded in
one way or another.) There are a few points where the interrogator's
responses don't quite seem to match your actions, and it isn't quite
clear at those points whether he just doesn't care about the
discrepancies or whether there are bugs afoot. The ultimate ending is
something of a letdown, at least in terms of spy-novel victory-for-
your-side expectations, though it certainly fits the Zarf ethos. On
the whole, the puzzles are unique and well crafted; there is nothing
arbitrarily thrown in to require puzzle-solving, and the obtacles feel
logical enough. There's even some humor, unlikely as it sounds: the
interrogator is equipped with plenty of sarcastic jabs. (At one point,
if you claim that the guards lied about something: "Ah. They'll be
hurt to hear so.") The atmosphere is likewise effective: the halls are
cold but not obtrusively so. As seems to happen in many Plotkin games,
a key shift in mood is marked by the lights going out and the player's
having to stumble around in "dimness" (the word, in particular,
reminded me of Space Under the Window); though the dimming doesn't
accompany changes in the landscape, as happened in Change in the
Weather, it does serve to heighten tension and set the final events of
the game in motion. Technically proficient, with a well-developed
story, Spider and Web is a solid game.
But Plotkin is not, precisely, known in the IF community for
conventional solid games, and Spider and Web doesn't really fit many
categories. The spy-adventure aspect is subverted by the moral
ambiguities: it isn't clear that arranging for your side to have the
weapon would be an altogether good thing, and it becomes obvious that
the interrogator is driven to develop it more by political necessity--
the regime demands it--than by personal fascination with the
possibilities. Indeed, one event toward the end suggests that the
power game is what really matters, that the technology is expendable;
the real value of the thing lies in simply having it while the other
side doesn't. A development parallel to the story of the weapon,
moreover--call it one of the plot layers--suggests that technology
still can't keep up with human ingenuity, in that a large part of the
game turns on outsmarting a device that your captors rely on. While
there are science fiction elements, the game turns on the
interrogation and the conflict it masks rather than the technological/
speculative bits; the specter of the omniscient questioner who
manipulates his captives into saying what he wants recalls, among
other things, Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Most importantly, unlike
the bulk of IF, the player cannot identify a clear goal for the
protagonist, or necessarily even assume that he understands what the
protagonist is thinking at any given time; the feeling of discovering
rather than creating a story recurs on several levels. Put another
way, the game sharply limits how much innovation you can give the set
script, sometimes because you have to match the interrogator's account
and sometimes because every move is vital, as in Change in the
Weather. Throughout the story, discovering what you're "meant" to be
doing means discovering what your own character is up to, sometimes in
surprising ways, and the effect is occasionally similar to coming
gradually out of a total loss of memory.
There is much that's worth pondering over the course of Spider and
Web: the various competing narratives keep the player guessing (some
of the techniques reminded me of Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger
Ackroyd, though I'm sure they're not unique), and the game is well-
crafted on every level. Anyone who has enjoyed Plotkin's previous
efforts should without a doubt check this one out.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: Adam Thornton
NAME: Spider and Web
AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin
E-MAIL: erkyrath SP@G netcom.com
DATE: 1997-8
PARSER: Inform standard
SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/Tangle.z5
VERSION: Release 4
This review necessarily contains spoilers for _Spider And Web_. If
you haven't played it, I recommend you stop reading here, go out and
get a copy (ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/Tangle.z5), and
play it. It is certainly worth your time. After you've played it,
continue.
It's an excellent game. If I have to give it a rating, uhhhh, let's
see. 9.0 out of 10.
Now go play it.
_Spider And Web_ is the latest IF effort by Andrew Plotkin. It
represents a radical departure from his earlier works in that it is
neither an impossibly unfair series of timing puzzles (e.g. "A Change
In the Weather"), nor is it a lyrical allegorical journey (e.g. "So
Far"), nor is it an arcade favorite reborn (e.g. "Freefall"), nor is
it an Interactive Unbelievably Painful Breakup (e.g. "The Space Under
The Window"), nor is it even a Computer Science homework set
(e.g. "Lists and Lists").
Instead, it's a Cold War spy story, and a fairly straightforward one
at that. When stripped to its essentials, the plot is: break into a
research center, elude the guards, steal the Secret Plans, and escape.
Nothing we haven't seen a hundred times before, right?
Well, no. This is, after all, a Zarf game.
For starters, the game begins with the player outside a closed door in
a grimy alley, with no means of opening the door. It's only after
giving up and walking away that we find the real setting of the game:
the player has been captured and is being interrogated.
The player, it turns out, was a spy breaking into this facility. He,
or possibly she--Zarf doesn't specify, and it's made quite clear that
at least the captors' forces include both men and women; I'm going to
refer to the protagonist as "he," since that's how I imagined the
game--was captured. His captors have a memory-extraction McGuffin
that allows them to see the scene through his eyes. The challenge of
the first part of the game is to replay each scene in such a way that
it matches the evidence found by your captors. It's an awful lot like
the movie _Groundhog Day_ in that you do everything over and over
until you get it right.
Except that, after you're comfortable with that paradigm, about two
thirds of the way through the game, there's a huge shift. You escape
and are suddenly playing for real. And that's when you find out that
there were certain things you lied to your interrogator about, and
figuring out what you told him vs. what you really did becomes the
major challenge of the game.
The escaping puzzle has to be one of the best ever seen in IF. It's
incredibly subtle, incredibly elegant, and extremely satisfying. But
aside from that, finding out that you were an unwitting Unreliable
Narrator is an amazing rhetorical gimmick, and works beautifully. It
completely subverts what you thought you were doing; the first part of
the game becomes _Groundhog Day_ except that you're repeating
everything until you get it convincingly and consistently *wrong*.
The remainder of the game, alas, falls a little short. Most of it
concerns figuring out what you really *were* doing in the earlier
part, and realizing how to use it to get into the Lab. Once there
it's pretty obvious what you need to do to get enough time to operate,
and what to do. However, at this point, it *is* pretty much a Cold
War spy story, albeit an exciting one. The metaphysically neat parts
of the game are behind you.
One object, which you have to use twice, is the hardest part of the
game, because it appears in no room descriptions, and unless you
examine the walls or listen very carefully, there's no indication that
such things exist. This is, in fact, precisely the point. They're
ubiquitous and never noticed. Annoying, but it can hardly be said to
be unfair.
The mechanics and prose are, as in every Zarf game, excellent. The
one fleshed-out NPC is convincingly drawn, and Zarf's choice to limit
conversation with him to "yes" or "no" works well both in the context
of the game and as a tool so that the amount of coding is kept to a
minimum. The spy gadgets work intuitively and the interface seems
very believable. And they're fun to play with.
It's interesting and very refreshing to have an exciting spy story as
the basic premise, and have no one get killed or even seriously hurt
in the game's main action. The total body count is seven, plus or
minus, unconscious guards, most of them simply stun-gunned, one
poisoned with a temporary neurotoxin, and one interrogator with a bad
headache. Plus whatever happens to the player's character.
There are some nice incidental touches: words like "night-clumps," the
twin moons seen in the sketch in the interrogator's office, the
marvellously evocative phrase "dawn-tales." All of these give a
feeling of a fleshed-out background world with a charmingly minimalist
sketch. They also make the game feel like a sequel of sorts to "So
Far"; if the world of "So Far" was late Victorian (well, the beginning
world, where _Rito and Imita_ is playing), then this is near-future,
maybe a century and a half down the road.
The "web" of the title also plays a nice recurring role. "Scan-web"
is apparently a metal-detecting metallic woven fiber. Indeed, maybe
that's all it is: metal passing through it would set up an inductive
current, which could then trigger an alarm somewhere. It's also used
as some sort of conductive field-generating device in the lab, and, of
course, the whole issue of the game is "Who's the spider, and who's
the fly?"
The interrogator is an interesting character. He's a thinking man
with a hell of a job. Zarf says that he tried to create an NPC and
ended up once again writing himself, but with a dirty job. That's
possible. But I found he rang very true to the one intellectual
career military man I know, who once described himself to me as "your
basic liberal arts colonel." He's someone with an artistic side, and
his art reveals a great deal about his personality. So do his
bookshelves. I, alas, don't believe Zarf's explanations that I can
see the contents of his shelves from the door--more on this later.
The political setting of the game is interesting. This would have
been an amazingly affecting game in 1986, the year of Trinity's
release. It is set in a nasty Cold War, and the Device in the Lab is,
as the interrogator points out, at least the equivalent of the Bomb in
terms of destructive potential. These days, it's a nice spy thriller.
Back when Balance of Power and Detente actually *meant* something, it
would have been much more relevant.
Half the fun of the game is figuring out what really happened. The
basic plot (not the one you tell the interrogator) goes something like
this:
{ Editor's comment: The final part of Adam's review contains an
analysis of the game that goes to such detail that I felt I couldn't
publish it here - it would simply give away too much for people who
haven't completed the game. This was a difficult decision to make,
since this analysis is in a way the most important part of the
review. As a compromise solution (approved by the author, of course),
I felt that publishing the first part of the review, while making the
complete text available elsewhere, would still be worthwhile; the
complete and uncensored review is available from
http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon/if/spider_review.txt. Readers without
WWW access may email me for a copy. }
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: Second April
NAME: Tapestry
AUTHOR: Daniel Ravipinto
E-MAIL: rd70 SP@G lafibm.lafayette.edu
DATE: 1996
PARSER: Inform standard
SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition96/tapestry/tapestry.z5
VERSION: Release 1
PLOT: Simple but effective (1.3) ATMOSPHERE: Not much (1.3)
WRITING: Quite good (1.5) GAMEPLAY: A bit clunky (1.1)
CHARACTERS: Sketchy (1.1) PUZZLES: Few (0.8)
MISC: Ambitious, not wholly successful but interesting (1.8)
OVERALL: 7.0
Daniel Ravipinto's Tapestry is the sort of game that can really only
be done once: any imitation would lose the impact that the original
had. It tries to do something, moreover, that very little IF tries to
do--defend a position--and if the overall experience isn't entirely
successful, the player should at least recognize the novelty of the
ground it's breaking. Though less a game than a philosophical
position, Tapestry does what it sets out to do reasonably well; it
didn't, however, make a persuasive argument as far as I was concerned.
The basic idea is relatively simple: you play a man named Timothy
Hunter who has died, who meets one certain personage offering a choice
and then three others who offer two more choices, distinctly
contrasting, and who is given the option to replay key scenes from his
life and reconsider certain moments. The choices--you discover this
immediately, so I don't feel that I'm giving much away--include your
decision to attend a key meeting to help a client when your mother was
dying, your decision to kill your wife when she was suffering from a
painful disease, and your failure--it's hard to construe it as a
decision--to avoid a pedestrian in the car accident that ended your
life. You are given three choices; I won't spell them out, but they
hinge on changing the events as opposed to changing what you make of
them.
It may fairly be said that the game element of Tapestry isn't
extensive; there aren't really any puzzles, and what there are, I'm
afraid, mostly derive from choosing syntax or figuring out fairly
specific responses that the game demands. There's one moment in the
second scene where I knew perfectly well what I wanted to do but
couldn't figure out the precise wording, and the hint menu didn't
help. In that respect, Tapestry might work better as straight fiction
than as IF: giving the story its own pace, rather than tying its
advancement to figuring out actions, might have made it more
powerful. (Though the game is technically proficient in several
respects--the hint menu adapts to your situation quite skillfully, for
one thing, and the situation changes to block off certain paths in
subtle but effective ways.) At any rate, the game element is good
enough to tell the story/make the argument, which is all that's really
needed.
The nature of the paths you're given and of the way the game treats
them makes it reasonably clear that there's a "right" way, and two
"wrong" ways, to go about this; the game locks you into your path once
the choice is made, and the eventual consequences and the terms in
which the games sums up your decisions at the end leaves little doubt
about that. While I don't dispute the logic or philosophical force of
locking you onto your trajectory, on the game's terms, it does limit
the realism element somewhat; in theory, you might have learned from
one experience and want to take a different sort of path at the next
decision point. At the very least, having to play through the thing
when your decisions are foreordained--when the game is simply waiting
for you to input the correct things, not giving you choices as
such--is a bit frustrating; I'm not really sure whether it would have
been better to let it all scroll by than to provide the illusion of
interactivity. It also limits the realism of it all somewhat to
suppose that, if certain key life decisions were changed (and these
are about as key as they get), everything that follows would have
turned out the same, or sufficiently so that your decisions aren't
changed. Even if the game is more an argument than a real-life
depiction, these things affect the persuasiveness of the argument;
when the author is both setting a somewhat contrived scene and staking
out a position that depends on it, it feels like he's stacking the
deck.
I bring all this up because, on the terms that the game presents them,
one can't really argue with the "right" choice; the others are laden
with awful consequences and negative adjectives. But it's not clear at
all to me that this is a fair depiction of the choices; at the very
least, I think I could rewrite key moments of the game without
changing the basic plot or structure to make either of the other two
plots the preferable one. The game didn't, in short, convince me that
my choice was actually justifiable or correct, merely that the author
wanted me to know that he believed it was. That's interesting, in its
way, but not very persuasive.
My main problem with Tapestry, in short is one that I can't really
blame the author for, as such, but it impeded my enjoyment of it
regardless: there was no path that actually reflected what I, speaking
for myself, wanted to do. I should probably say that I'm a
moderate-to-conservative Christian with very definite ideas about what
would or wouldn't imperil the state of one's soul, and it's not at all
the author's fault if the game's outlook leaves me a little cold. That
said, though, I found a certain incoherence in Tapestry; the ending
struck me as so nihilistic that nothing that came before really seemed
to matter much. I can't really explain without spoilers, but suffice
it to say that all the endings seem agnostic--if not outright
atheist--about the protagonist's ultimate fate, which made all of the
foregoing feel a little hollow. Put another way, the game stacks the
deck again, by making it seem as if everything depends on your
decisions but not actually giving you much difference in the
resolution. The author is, of course, free to say all this, but
implicit in the nature of the argument is that the player has to
swallow the author's entire worldview, not simply look at the validity
of what he's saying. And as I resisted accepting the author's
assumptions, the story didn't work very well for me.
Tapestry did, I must admit, make me think about the situation it
presented; it was hard for me to give a clear answer regarding what
I'd do (besides "not do the things in the first place") because it's
such a bizarre situation and because the terms aren't spelled out very
clearly. Am I actually reliving my life? If not (as noted above) how
could it be that I can change parts of it and not change the whole
thing? There are Christian arguments for all of the positions, but I
found that the weakest ones were for the path that the author clearly
preferred, which struck me as interesting. It could fairly be argued
that I should have seen where things were going from the beginning and
qualified my objections, and I did have a sense from the first quote
and from the identity (which I did get, along with the Trinity
reference) of the first NPC. But I still think there's an incoherence
in setting the one figure against the other three, since they come out
of specific traditions that presuppose specific things, and putting
them together just never feels like it makes a lot of sense. More
accurately, I don't think the first character really belongs in the
game, at least not in the role he inhabits; the author is free to
rethink the real nature of that person, of course, but the rethinking
isn't well enough developed for me to buy it. I don't, in other words,
think that the presence of that specific character makes any sense
outside a certain context; it may be a product of my biases, but those
specific biases are not uncommon in the world.
Despite my differences with it, though, I must grant that Tapestry is
a well-written and, mostly, well-crafted work, with plenty of thought
behind it. Whether or not I agree with the views expressed in
Tapestry, I look forward to future works by Mr. Ravipinto.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: "Lars Jodal"
NAME: Unnkulia Zero: The Search for Amanda
AUTHOR: D. A. Leary, for ADVENTIONS
EMAIL: dleary SP@G umabnet.ab.umd.edu
DATE: 1993
PARSER: TADS with many synonyms
SUPPORTS: TADS Ports
AVAILABILITY: Freeware, GMD
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/adventions/adventions.zip
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/adventions/adventions.tar.gz
VERSION: Version 1.2 (1.0G)
From time to time a review in SPAG has been followed by another review
of the same game because the second reviewer disagreed with the first
reviewer or felt that some aspects needed more comments. This time
not only the review is about the same game, also the reviewer is the
same person (although I am sending this from another email address).
The first review (in SPAG #12) was done a bit hastily in the middle of
the night after I had finally finished Unnkulia Zero. The deadline for
SPAG was passed, but I hoped to get it through to tell the IF world
about the game, specifically that it had been released as
freeware. The review did get through, but it was less thorough than
the game deserved. So, I'll use the possibilites of IF and do a ...
>RESTART
Background: The unnkulian universe was created along with the first UU
game, "Unnkulian Underworld: The Unknown Unventure" (UU1), by D.
A. Leary. This was a game with tongue firmly planted in cheek, at the
same time writing in the good-old-style of games like "Colossal Cave"
and making fun of most of the traditional conventions. Leary's
excellent writing abilities ensured that the game was not just a
simple parody but instead a very funny game taking place in a universe
of its own.
UU1 was followed by David M. Baggett's "Unnkulian Underworld II: The
Secret of Acme" (UU2), Leary's "Unnkulia Onehalf: The Salesman
Triumphant" (Onehalf), and then Leary's "Unnkulia Zero: The Search for
Amanda" (Zero). Finally Baggett wrote "The Legend Lives"
(Legend). Originally UU1 and UU2 was released as shareware titles,
Onehalf as freeware, Zero as a commercial game, and Legend as
freeware. But few people bothered register the shareware games and
even fewer people would spend money on actually _buying_ a game. Now
Baggett & Leary (together known as Adventions) have done us all a
favour we don't really deserve: They have given all their games out
for free. The URL above points to a file containing the .gam files for
_all_ games released by Adventions. This includes the above-mentioned
games as well as Leary's "Horror of Rylvania" and Baggett's remake of
the original Adventure: "Colossal Caves Revisited". The games are full
versions, patched only to remove any mention of payment. What more
could we ask for? Beware that the file is rather large, about 1.1 MB.
This review is based on the commercial version 1.2 of Zero, which
seems to be the same as the free version 1.0G contained in the file.
The story: The Valley King is furious and desperate. The Unnkulians
have kidnapped his beloved Amanda! He sends you, his most trusted
warrior, out to find her. This won't be an easy task ... During your
search you will have to face a giant snake, the Valley Patrol, a
salesman from Acme, and your fear of heights. To complete your task
you will also have to travel in time, shut down a nuclear reactor, and
possibly learn more about the ways of Duhda. Last but not least you
must match wits with Wowsa Willy, the great magician of the old days!
The game is rich in many ways. The writing is very good and
imaginative. Spelling errors and typos are nonexistent. Each location
has a description of typically 5-10 lines of text that gives a vivid
impression of the place (in my mind I still have detailed pictures of
very large parts of the Unnkulian world). Much attention has been paid
to details. You can examine almost everything mentioned in the text,
and the descriptions are not just run-of-the-mill "this looks like an
ordinary
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