___. .___ _ ___. / _| | \ / \ / ._| \ \ | o_/ | | | |_. .\ \ | | | o | | | | The |___/ociety for the |_|romotion of |_|_|dventure \___|ames. ISSUE # 23 -- 2000 IF Competition Special Edited by Paul O'Brian (obrian SP@G colorado.edu) December 29, 2000 SPAG Website: http://www.sparkynet.com/spag SPAG #23 is copyright (c) 2000 by Paul O'Brian. Authors of reviews and articles retain the rights to their contributions. All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine with the traditional 'at' sign. REVIEWS IN THIS ISSUE ----------------------------------------------------- Ad Verbum And The Waves Choke The Wind At Wit's End Being Andrew Plotkin The Big Mama Desert Heat Dinner With Andre The Djinni Chronicles The End Means Escape Guess The Verb! Kaged Masquerade Metamorphoses My Angel Nevermore 1-2-3 Planet Of The Infinite Minds Prodly The Puffin Rameses Shade Transfer YAGWAD SPECIFICS ========= Shade EDITORIAL------------------------------------------------------------------ I've been spending a little more time on ifMUD lately, and recently one of the denizens there asked me a question: "Why does SPAG have an annual competition issue?" I'm still turning this question over in my mind. Of course, there's an obvious, easy answer: tradition. SPAG had extremely close ties to the comp in its first few years, because the founder and then-editor of SPAG, Kevin "Whizzard" Wilson, was also the guy who *ran* the competition. It was only natural that the zine celebrate the comp with reviews, author interviews, in-depth analyses (precursor to the modern SPAG Specifics) and such. Since then, SPAG has chronicled the comp each year as a matter of standard practice. Still, tradition alone isn't a satisfactory answer to the question. After all, the zine and the comp are run by different people now. Too, competition reviews are hardly in short supply. In fact, reviewing comp games has become so de rigeur that by the time the comp issue of SPAG comes out, the community has already been treated to opinions from dozens of different comp reviewers, myself included. This is, of course, a great thing (as it would be if non-comp games got the same treatment), but it does tend to call into question the usefulness of an annual SPAG full of comp reviews. However, after giving it some thought, I believe there are several points in favor of an annual comp issue. One, SPAG solicits reviews that go into greater depth than the majority of the treatments that appear on rec.games.int-fiction. Looking through the reviews collected on Stephen Granade's site at http://interactfiction.about.com reveals that many consist of just a few sentences, transcribed notes, fragmentary thoughts, or offhand reactions; many also include spoilers, which make them unfriendly to people who haven't yet played the game. As the number of comp games increases, so too does this tendency toward brevity and skimming. SPAG reviews, on the other hand, try for a bit more cohesion, a bit more depth, and work hard to avoid spoilers. Even the comp reviews reprinted from rgif are selected with these qualities in mind. Including these reprints allows SPAG to feature a selection from some of the best reviews to appear on the newsgroups in the post-comp review glut. Reviews are chosen for their insight into particular points, their humor, or sometimes their sheer enthusiasm for a game that may have been overlooked by the majority of other respondents. It's important to me, though, that the comp issue not be dominated by these reprints -- I've always tried to keep the ratio of new reviews to reprints at least one to one, if not greater. In fact, I believe that original content is another good reason for a SPAG comp issue. The majority of comp reviews come in a massive deluge the day after the comp ends, and I think there's a value to comp reviews that are written after that initial flood, and that perhaps even respond to the points raised by some of those early assessments. Of course, this idea is predicated on people actually *writing* these reviews, and though fewer people seem to be drawn to this type of assignment, the output of those few can be quite valuable. This issue's original reviews were provided by Mark Musante, Duncan Stevens, and Tina Sikorski. Tina's reviews in particular are in a format which differs a bit from the traditional SPAG review -- she assigns and explains letter grades for Writing, Puzzles, Plot, NPCs, Technical skill, and a final factor called "Tilt", which functions similar to the wildcard points in regular SPAG scores. In addition, she provides an overall grade and the score she submitted for the game. Though these reviews aren't SPAG's usual style, I found their postdiluvian perspective intriguing, and have included a healthy sample. One last justification: the SPAG comp issue has always contained more than just reviews. As in previous years, we've interviewed the authors of particularly successful comp games -- this time around we've got interviews with Ian Finley, Emily Short, and J. Robinson Wheeler, authors of the first, second, and third place comp games, respectively. All three of these authors took the time to give long and thoughtful answers to SPAG's questions, and their thoughts are likely to be interesting even to those who are a bit weary of comp game reviews. In the end, I've decided that the annual comp issue of SPAG is a worthwhile endeavour after all, but there are ways to make it even better. For next year's comp issue, I'll be soliciting creative ideas for comp-oriented material to stand alongside the reviews. This could be anything from authors' notes to humor pieces to essays looking at the patterns created by the comp games as a whole. The future of the comp issue, and the future of SPAG in general, is in the hands of its contributors as much as mine. I'm optimistic that the energy and creativity of the IF community will keep that future a bright one. NEWS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- COMPETITION RESULTS There's been a general consensus that the 2000 IF competition was one of the best ever -- not only were a record number of games entered, but an impressive number of those were significant achievements. As usual, we all owe a debt of gratitude to organizer Stephen Granade and vote- counter Mark Musante. This issue is full of reviews that examine the comp games in depth, but for posterity's sake, here are the final results: 1 Kaged Ian Finley 2 Metamorphoses Emily Short 3 Being Andrew Plotkin J. Robinson Wheeler 4 Ad Verbum Nick Montfort 5 Transfer Tod Levi 6 My Angel Jon Ingold 7 Nevermore Nate Cull 8 Masquerade Kathleen M. Fischer 9 YAGWAD John Kean aka Digby McWiggle 10 Shade Andrew Plotkin 11 Guess the Verb! Leonard Richardson 12 Letters from Home Roger Firth 13 Rameses Stephen Bond 14 The Djinni Chronicles J. D. Berry 15 The Best Man Rob Menke 16 And the Waves Choke the Wind Gunther Schmidl 17 At Wit's End Mike J. Sousa 18 Dinner with Andre Liza Daly 19 Planet of the Infinite Minds Alfredo Garcia 20 The Big Mama Brendan Barnwell 21 The End Means Escape Stephen Kodat 22 Punk Points Jim Munroe 23 A Crimson Spring Robb Sherwin Enlisted G. F. Berry 25 Futz Mutz Tim Simmons 26 Return to Zork: Another Story Stefano Canali 27 Unnkulia X Valentine Kopteltsev 28 Desert Heat Papillon 29 Got ID? Marc Valhara 30 Castle Amnos John Evans 31 The Masque of the Last Faeries Ian R Ball 32 The Pickpocket Alex Weldon 33 The Trip Cameron Wilkin 34 Happy Ever After Robert M. Camisa 35 Prodly the Puffin Craig Timpany & Jim Crawford 36 Withdrawal Symptoms Niclas Carlsson 37 Aftermath Graham Somerville 38 The Clock Cleopatra Kozlowski 39 Wrecked Campbell Wild 40 Threading the Labyrinth Kevin F. Doughty 41 VOID: CORPORATION Jonathan Lim 42 1-2-3... Chris Mudd 43 Escape from Crulistan Alan Smithee 44 Stupid Kittens Pollyanna Huffington 45 Marooned Bruce Davis 46 On the Other Side Antonio Márquez Marín 47 Jarod's Journey Tim Emmerich 48 Infil-traitor Chris Charla 49 Comp00ter Game Brendan Barnwell 50 Little Billy Okey Ikeako 51 Asendent Sourdoh Farenheit & Kelvin Flatbred 52 What-IF? David Ledgard 53 Breaking the Code Gunther Schmidl NEW GAMES Even though the competition is over, the flow of new games has not stopped! Among the new arrivals are another fiendish Andy Phillips puzzler, an innovative storytelling experiment from the 6th place author in this year's comp, and the first game (to my knowledge) using the SUDS development environment. * The MONDAY Adventure by Mikel Rice (http://www.geocities.com/mondayadv/mdayndex.html) * Heroine's Mantle by Andy Phillips * Hortulus by Florian Edelbauer (a game in German, available at http://www.textadventures.de/hortulus/hortulus.html) * FailSafe by Jon Ingold * Snow Night by Chuck Smith (http://www.ksu.edu/wwparent/story/nature/) SO FIND A new website by the name of ifFINDER has recently appeared at http://www.corknut.org/ifFinder/. This site catalogs a collection of IF- related pages, sorting them by category and offering a search engine for those more specific requests. There are currently 109 pages indexed there, and the site offers a submission form if you know of a site that should be on there but isn't. INFOCOM POSTMORTEM It's been 11 years since the last Infocom text adventure, and in that time there has been no definitive resource chronicling the rise and fall of the most important company in Interactive Fiction history -- until now. A group of students from MIT, the same university that spawned the original group of Imps, has released a paper entitled "Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc." Their conclusion: "Infocom did not fail simply because it decided to shift its focus to business software... Behind the scenes, the transition created a litany of problems that hurt both the games and the business divisions of the company. Combined with some bad luck, these problems -- not simply the development of Cornerstone -- ultimately led to Infocom’s downfall." The paper is available at http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/infocom/ UPTHUMB AND I Have you ever wanted to endorse a game personally, but not felt up to writing a review? Brendan Barnwell has the solution for you. It's called Upthumb, a web site at http://members.aol.com/brenbarn/upthumb.html. This site allows visitors to register their appreciation for IF games and be added to a list of that game's endorsers. REVIEWERS? ANYONE? ANYONE? BUELLER? SPAG lives or dies by the contributions you provide to it. If you want to review a game, but aren't sure which one to pick, consider choosing a candidate from the following list of my deep desires: SPAG 10 MOST WANTED LIST ======================== 1. The Best Man 2. Dangerous Curves 3. FailSafe 4. Gateway 2: Homeworld 5. Heroine's Mantle 6. Letters From Home 7. The MONDAY Adventure 8. The Mulldoon Legacy 9. Snow Night 10. T-Zero INTERVIEWS----------------------------------------------------------------- In addition to the innumerable hours they poured into their comp entries, the top three authors in this year's IF competition were kind enough to spend some time answering SPAG's questions about their lives, their work, and their opinions. J. Robinson Wheeler even took those questions and changed the whole thing from an interview to... something slightly different. You'll see when we get there. SPAG is proud to present the following interviews with Ian Finley, Emily Short, and J. Robinson Wheeler. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-Ian Finley, author of "Kaged"-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- SPAG: When SPAG last spoke with you, you were a 17-year-old high school student living in Bountiful, Utah. Aside from being three years older, what else has changed in your life between now and then? IF: Certainly not my maturity level ;) I'm currently studying acting at the University of Utah with vague hopes of going on to study directing at Columbia or NYU, and have graduated from a Byronic gay teen to full fledged glamour boy and queer activist. My focus lately has been on performance, including a series of original performance art pieces done as benefit for the Utah Gay and Lesbian Community Center, as well as playing the Logician in a production of Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" that's going to tour California in February. Unfortunately neither acting nor IF quite pays the rent (let alone the tuition) so I've also been teaching at the university's Theatre Conservatory during the summers for the past couple of years, which has been incredibly rewarding. SPAG: Do you do any other kinds of writing besides IF? IF: Most of my writing lately has been for the stage (unsurprising, given the focus of my current studies). In the past three years I've written several plays and other theatrical pieces that have been performed around Salt Lake in different venues as I've slowly crept up the ladder towards competent writing. SPAG: What's your assessment of the current shape of IF? IF: Multifaceted. It's rare to find a "niche market" that has something for everyone. More than ever before, I think IF has broadened its scope and appeal; producing works ranging from comedy to tragedy, puzzle-based to puzzle-less, massive to miniature. Authors are beginning to see just how much this medium can accomplish (and becoming more aware of its weaknesses) and pushing the boundaries of that. This is an exciting time to be involved with the IF community. SPAG: You've been a perennial entrant to the IF competition. Now that you've won, what's next? Do you plan to write any more IF, and if so, do you think you'll submit it to the comp? IF: Good question. The reason I enter games in the competition is for the promise of response: I'm an actor, I need direct response to my craft to really feel it's working. On stage that's easy, (are they laughing? are they crying? are they cringing?) but with IF you have to hope and pray that if someone responds they'll be gracious enough to tell you. The competition greatly increases that chance. At the same time, part of the purpose of the comp is to encourage new authors, not glorify old ones, so I am wary of entering again. SPAG: Last year, you chose to enter anonymously (in fact, to enter twice under two different pseudonyms!) This year, you entered under your own name. What was your rationale for that decision? IF: Last year I didn't want people to see the name Ian Finley and think "Oh, this will be like Babel" and be utterly disappointed or confused by Exhibition. I also wanted Exhibition to stand or fall on its own merit, as opposed to people thinking they SHOULD like it because they enjoyed Babel. On the other hand, I entered Beal St. anonymously for very different reasons: I wasn't at all sure I wanted my name associated with it at all! If Adam Cadre and several others on the MUD hadn't figured me out that game might very well have gone unclaimed by any author to this day! Why then did I enter Kaged under my own name? Because I wanted it to get noticed. ;) People have certain natural feelings going into a work by an author they know: I sit down to open a volume of Camus in a totally different mindset than when I settle in to read Oscar Wilde or Jane Austen. This is neither good nor bad, just different. Repeatedly, I'd seen with "Hunter, In Darkness" in '99 the remark that if players had known it was Zarf they would have rated it higher, not just *because* it was Zarf but because they would then trust the author enough to take certain risks with him. Instead of "I'm in a maze, I'll quit playing now," players said they'd be more inclined to think, "This author wouldn't put this maze here without a reason, I'll keep playing." So, I figured this time around, since part of my overall concept was to appeal to as broad a base of players as possible, I'd submit under my own name. I can promise though that any games I do enter in the future will be under various cryptic pseudonyms. SPAG: What gave you the idea for Kaged? IF: As always happens with me, several different images came together in a sort of stew. The original idea came from reading some very clever, very short horror stories, all with one neat little twist and wondering how many times I could twist a plot, lie to the PC in some way, and still get away with it. Then I saw an amazing production of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" at the Lab Theatre here in Salt Lake. That same week I started studying the German expressionist silent films, most notably the classic "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari." I began wondering how an expressionistic world-view wedded with Kafka's dark, to the point, bureaucratic style might work for IF. The visual style of "Cabinet," filled with monstrously skewed perspectives and slanting, terribly acute angles, was one of its most memorable devices, so I began wondering how I could adapt that to non-visual IF. As a result, the descriptions of almost all the rooms in Kaged mention their odd angles, acute corners, and lack of perpendicular stability. After brewing for a bit, these random images crystallized into the backbone of Kaged. Interestingly enough, though many reviewers have likened the game world to 1984 or Brave New World, I have never actually read anything by Orwell or Huxley (I'm behind, I know, I know) and indeed if I had I may well have been too daunted or swayed by their worlds to attempt to create my own dystopia! SPAG: Some people have noted that Kaged is a more traditional IF game, and wondered if that's why it placed ahead of more experimental works like Rameses and My Angel. Did you set out to give Kaged a broad appeal, or was its form dictated by its content? IF: There's some truth behind both statements, but my return to a more traditional form was largely an intentional move to appeal to a broad audience. After Exhibition, which I felt accomplished the goals I had set out for it, I felt slightly guilty that I had somehow let the IF world down, after the popular success of Babel. Moreover, both download.com and AOL, which have distributed tens of thousands of copies of Babel, both refused to distribute Exhibition, apparently having no category it fit into. Add to that a seeming trend towards more completely puzzle-based games that's started to mirror the recent growth in puzzle-less games and which seems popular among many people on the newsgroup. For all these reasons, I made a little deal with myself, saying: "I'll alternate. For each experimental game I write I'll write a more traditional game with a broader appeal." I figured in this way I could reach audiences at both ends of the spectrum at one point or another, produce "games" which wider distribution mechanisms like download.com might be interested in (thus bringing more people into the IF community), and still have an opportunity to write experimental, story-oriented works, which are my biggest interest in the area of IF today. Sure, it could be said why don't I try to integrate both elements into one game, and I'm working on that (and I hope Kaged has at least a few unique, somewhat experimental elements to it) but I've not quite reached that level of proficiency yet. However, now that I have written a game that seems to have won the popular vote, I do intend on focusing my energies more towards experimental forms, like Exhibition and like this year's very unique and laudable experimental entries like Rameses and My Angel. SPAG: Of all the conversation systems on display in the comp, the one in Kaged was arguably the least interactive: the player simply types "TALK TO " and the game dictates the dialogue from there on. What were the advantages and disadvantages of using this method? IF: This is owed entirely to The Last Express, the finest piece of interactive storytelling I've ever seen. NPC interaction has always baffled me, and one of my primary efforts in writing IF has been finding ways to sidestep the issue. Babel was written to have no NPCs at all the character could interact with; Exhibition was written about themes isolation and the impossibility of communication at least in part to justify the inability to talk with the NPCs in the gallery. Oh, I'd tried other ways. The first season of Vivaldi, a massive IF epic that I started right after Babel and has gone down unforeseen and interesting paths since then, involved a NPC that responded with the usual ask/tell system. After coding responses on some seventy-five topics that varied with the given situation, I realized that writing NPCs in this way wasn't going to work (the fact that Emily Short somehow made it work is why I consider Galatea to be one of the true landmark games of modern IF). So, after tearing my hair out and attempting to program menu-based conversations for Kaged, I played The Last Express and hit upon the most elegant solution. If the PC is a well defined character, as I was hoping Aackmann would be, then in any given situation the plot will dictate what he is going to say if he chooses to talk. Of course, this required some puppeteering from behind the scenes and led to some slightly artificial almost-cut-scenes at some major plot points, but I felt that on the whole it allowed me to keep things under control without overloading my programming skills or utterly breaking mimesis. It was a good compromise for this game and may be something I return to, depending on its suitability, for other works in the future. SPAG: Speaking more generally, what are some of your thoughts on balancing the need for interactivity with the need for telling a story? IF: It's damn hard. ;) As a storyteller, I feel that I have to remain in control a great deal for the story to come through and I think that the best "story" games from this years comp (BAP, Rameses, etc.) were all fairly tightly controlled. Possibly the greatest "story" game of all time, Photopia, was a very controlled game, but I think there are ways of offering interactivity in other ways that don't necessarily relinquish that control. Level of detail is one of these for me. Essentially every object in Kaged is described, including the walls, floor and ceiling of every room, and down to the moss of the tiles in the showers in the bathroom. Several objects, and every single actor, has several different descriptions, based on when you look at them. Of course, there's always room for more detail, but the more you can add, the more time you're willing to put into that step the richer the world becomes and the more apparently interactive. There are scenes in Kaged where you're forced to stand about for several turns, but I felt if I could at least offer lots of different things to look at and poke at the more engaged the player would be. I don't think however there's any "right" balance of interactivity to story, there are just ratios that are more suitable and less suitable for what you're trying to convey and the audience you're trying to convey it to. SPAG: What did you think about this year's competition? Any favorite games? IF: SPLENDID competition. It was terrifying to see so many wonderful games. Shade, Rameses, Ad Verbum, My Angel, Masquerade; these were all fine and memorable games that have definitely earned a place on my hard drive. Above all though, I must say that Being Andrew Plotkin (which I waited for with great excitement since first seeing the title in an e-mail sent to all the authors) and Metamorphoses (which I waited for with even greater excitement since Emily first declined to test Kaged because she was putting together something of her own for the comp) especially charmed me and I'm honored to share the top rankings with them. SPAG: Any advice you'd care to offer for prospective competition entrants? IF: Beta-test! I know this sounds like old hat to everyone by now, but testing really is what makes a game successful. And I'm not just talking about cleaning up bugs here, but also cleaning up text and design errors. Hoooo boy, you should have seen Kaged (or any of my games) on their first drafts. Doubt you'd even recognize them. Get testers. Get LOTS of them (I think I sent inquiries off to about twenty people initially this year). Spend time with them, a period of time at least half as long as the time it took you to write the game, if not an equal period. Kaged took two months of steady work to program and another two months of steady work to test. And be gracious. These people are doing a tremendous job for you, absolutely for free, while trying to juggle lives of their own. These are the people who can really "make" your game and they deserve respect and gratuitous thanks. ;) -=-=-=-=-=-=-Emily Short, author of "Metamorphoses"-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- SPAG: For starters, could you tell us a little about yourself? Who are you, what do you do for a living, and so forth? ES: I'm a PhD student in Classics, which means that I have a teaching assistantship and go to classes. Whether or not this counts as doing something for a living is open to question. I also travel as much as I can, write fiction and nonfiction, teach a course in writing for home-schooled high school students, collect Requiem masses on CD, read the occasional romance, cook the occasional elaborate dinner. I frequently develop passionate fascinations with topics that have nothing to do with Greek, much to the frustration of my advisors: being an undergraduate was more fun. The world is an intensely interesting place and I would like to see as much of it as possible from as many angles as possible. SPAG: How did you first become introduced to IF? ES: My mother has held various computing jobs since the early 80s, and I have dim childhood recollections of watching her play Adventure and Zork, and then a bit later of trying my own hand at Infocom games. I was really fascinated by Deadline despite the fact that I had no idea what was going on or what I was supposed to be doing. Enchanter was another favorite of mine. I don't think I completely solved one on my own until Plundered Hearts, though. I even started (in BASIC, heaven help us, with the most primitive conception of a parser imaginable) a game called 'RingQuest,' about which the less said, the better. I was twelve, so there may be some excuse. Then Infocom went under and I kind of figured that was that. I didn't hear about Inform or the new community or r*if until 1996 or 97, when a college friend of mine who knew about my old fondness for Infocom games introduced me to Curses. At which point it became clear that I had to learn the language and do one of these things myself. SPAG: So far, you've created a game with a very deeply implemented character (Galatea) and a game with very deeply implemented objects (Metamorphoses.) What is it about this kind of depth that interests you? ES: I'm not very interested in the kind of game that consists chiefly of a series of puzzles with single solutions. (Especially if the puzzles are hard. At Wit's End is a perfect example: it's probably quite well done and very appealing to certain people, but it turned me off completely as soon as I realized how it worked. I play IF more for atmosphere and story than for the sake of enjoying the frustration factor.) Better, in my opinion, to set up a system with a set of rules that the player can learn and then manipulate in various ways to achieve various goals. In Galatea, there's not even a set problem -- you decide what you want to try to do. Metamorphoses is a lot closer to being a puzzle game, but the simulationist element means (I hope) that the player will feel as though the solutions are a seamless expression of the possibilities inherent in the world. I think this issue first came into my consciousness when I played Spider and Web. There's a two-stage process: figure out how the stuff you have works, and then come up with ways to use that knowledge. The experience, it seemed to me, was a lot more satisfying than your average get-thing, use-thing puzzle, no matter how trickily disguised. Ultimately I'd like my work to be effective as toy (richly implemented and fun to play with), as game (actions lead to progress towards a goal), and as story (actions fit naturally into the scheme of a plot). SPAG: You've become known as someone whose games are liable to feature a large number of endings. Tell us a bit about why you employ this strategy. ES: I'm not committed to writing only games where there are multiple endings; it just happens that both of the games I've released so far have seemed to demand it. In the case of Galatea, I wanted to keep the player a little off-balance all the time; I wanted to make a character who seemed a bit unpredictable. I particularly did *not* want there to be one "answer" or "explanation" that could be spoiled for people in advance. And I also wanted the process of discovery to be guided by what the player was interested in. It's a game designed to be as responsive as possible to the player's personal approach. With Metamorphoses I had a plot reason rather than a mechanical reason. The development of the PC is from slavery to freedom, from restriction to choice. So I wanted the freedom she gains to be reflected in the game-play. There's been some discussion, but I think this is the right choice: different players have liked different endings for the story. SPAG: What was your process for writing Metamorphoses? I'm wondering things like how long it took, what inspired it, how you went about coding it, and the like. ES: I talk about this a little bit more on my web page (emshort.home.mindspring.com/games.htm), but the basic gist is that I began it as a coding exercise for a materials-simulation library I was writing, and then it developed a life of its own. How long did it take? I spent a lot of time during the summer of 1999 writing stuff that eventually found its way into the game -- room descriptions, objects, most of the puzzles -- as part of a much larger and more ambitious game under the working title "Practical Alchemy." The thematic material was broader -- Hermeticism, Kabbalism, Della Porta's natural magic, some strands of Chinese elemental theory -- a wide range of the stuff that fed into the alchemical tradition, rather than the simplified Neoplatonism of the game as it now stands. It was also going to have an extremely complicated Inquisitor NPC; a demon-possessed cat; divisible liquids and measurement puzzles; a 'copy' machine that would let you replicate any of your inventory... it was a mess. There were some bits for which the coding was cool: I had a mystical book coded up to produce randomized Latin gibberish that would still consistently scan as dactylic hexameter, for instance -- but WHO WAS GOING TO NOTICE? So I threw it out. And I did have the object-copying machine worked out, with a cute little copy room for it to go in. Along with the parse_name code that distinguished formerly identical objects one of which had been modified in size or material. So all that was there, sitting around, as of last November or so, and I shelved it to work on other projects. When it came time for comp registration I signed up without being certain which of several things-in-progress I'd wind up entering. Around the beginning of September, I came to the conclusion that none of my other projects was worthy of notice yet, that I liked the setting for this game better than anything else I had going on, and that I could make something workable out of it if I stripped the design down to basics. From there in it was a month of focused work. I cut extensively, designed the last couple of puzzles, reshaped the plot, and, as They say, raced like the wind to finish on time. The coding is not exotic. Everything difficult -- timed burn routines, divisible liquids, copied objects, breakables that leave behind shards sharp enough to be used to cut other objects -- all that got edited out of this game. I have a class of Changeable objects that have properties representing their materials and shapes and sizes. Verbs are reworked to behave appropriately, so that for instance hitting a glass object with a hard object breaks the glass -- there are some minor complexities involving containers, but mostly this was all just handled with a lot of switch statements. And then the puzzles check for the presence of the right physical characteristics. So instead of coding up a condition as if (noun == persian_rug) { blah blah blah; } I have if (noun.size > 2 && noun.shape == PLANAR && noun.mater == CLOTH) { blah blah blah; } Then I did a lot of tinkering around -- and had my beta testers do a lot of tinkering around -- trying to come up with interactions I hadn't thought of yet. It didn't occur to me that someone might try to hang cloth objects on the hook, obvious though that is, until it showed up in my sister's transcript. This pretty much describes how I seem to write IF in general. First I get some hair-brained idea for a system (conversation, material interactions); in the process of coding it up, an appropriate story and setting suggest themselves; then I play with the game a lot, and have other people play with it, in order to find the places where the implementation needs to be deepened. Of the changes I made between versions of Galatea, a couple stemmed from extra ideas I'd had in the meantime, but the majority came from looking at people's transcripts and listening to their complaints about what they wanted to be able to do. SPAG: Can you talk a bit about the relationship between the PC and her Master in Metamorphoses? ES: It's not quite as monolithically dark as some people seem to believe: he's somewhere between adoptive father, teacher, and slave-driver. He doesn't hate her; he just considers his ultimate goal more important than her comfort or his own, which means that he has to push her harder than is humane. And so far she hasn't done a very good job of standing up for herself -- *and* she's rather intrigued by this strange stuff she's involved in, isolating and difficult and painful though it sometimes is. SPAG: Do you plan to write more IF in the future? ES: I am writing more IF currently. SPAG: What did you think about this year's competition? Any favorite games? ES: Kaged, Shade, Being Andrew Plotkin, and Masquerade. BAP and Shade both earned points for producing a strong personal response: BAP was the funniest game I've played in a long time, and Shade the scariest. And Kaged and Masquerade were both engrossing, Masquerade because I wanted to find out what happened in the plot and Kaged because the atmosphere was so effective. I share the general opinion that the competition was a strong one this year, though there were also some things that I think should've been left in the oven a little longer. That's always the case, though. SPAG: Any advice you'd care to offer for prospective competition entrants? ES: Don't submit a game that's not ready. If you can't tell whether it's half-baked or not, get beta-testers with some experience with IF. (Showing it to three of your closest friends doesn't help if they don't know what the state of the art looks like.) This is obvious advice, but I think it's important. SPAG: Finally, you have a reputation as a passionate advocate of cheese. Is there anything you'd like to tell us about what drives this passion of yours? Are you planning to write the definitive cheese game? ES: Cheese is a glorious thing. All dairy products partake partially of this glory, but cheese stands at the apex. For those who are interested, I have a cheese-centric ratings/review page at emshort.home.mindspring.com/cheese.htm. If you look at that page, though, you'll note that there's a sad dearth of games that explore the pleasure and wonder of cheese in all its varieties. I'd like to write such a game, but I alone cannot be a sufficient advocate. Which is why we need a CheeseComp in the very near future. -=-=-=J. Robinson Wheeler, author of "Being Andrew Plotkin"-=-=-= We sent our SPAG correspondent-at-large, Snappy Von Beakerhead, to meet up with IF Competition winner Celie Paradis -- or rather, J. Robinson Wheeler. His previous IF release was the comedy 1998 Competition entry "Four in One," a game about the Marx Brothers set in the glory days of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. His entry this year, "Being Andrew Plotkin," another movie-related comedy, placed third and garnered positive reviews, including a few raves. Von Beakerhead writes: "I met up with J. Robinson Wheeler, or Rob as he is familiarly known, in the upstairs section of a coffee house in Austin, Texas. He arrived about fifteen minutes late, wearing blue jeans, a blue button-collar shirt covered by a worn flannel overshirt (in a third shade of blue), and a blue fedora. He made polite apologies about traffic, and as we chatted he sipped alternately on a pint glass of coffee with milk and sugar and a pint glass of ice water. "When we started, he seemed moody, as if the world were weighing down on him, and he rarely made eye contact. As we talked, he seemed to brighten. When I asked about his upcoming TADS game, he lit up. I talked with him about 'Being Andrew Plotkin,' about this upcoming full-scale text adventure, and about what he sees for IF's future." SPAG: For starters, could you tell us a little about yourself? Who are you, what do you do for a living, and so forth? Rob: (laughs) These are actually the kinds of questions I have the most trouble with. The normal ones -- "So, what do you do?" "How are you today?" SPAG: Why is it a problem for you? Rob: I think it's that I have to gauge who I'm talking to because there's a number of ways I could answer, from superficially to very personally. SPAG: Well, feel free to answer however you like. Rob: I grew up in Austin, got a bachelor's degree from Stanford, pursued and then dropped out of graduate film studies at USC, where I also studied music. I was a cartoonist for a while, and a screenwriter, then I worked as a sound mixer for independent films, and as a freelance Web designer. I'm currently unemployed. My main activities this year have been directing and editing a movie and writing IF. How's that? SPAG: Fine. How did you first become introduced to IF? Rob: When I was in fifth grade, which was 1980-81, I had a friend named Mike Benedict. One day, Mike started raving to me about this "adventure game" called Zork. Our fathers were both professors in the astronomy department at UT-Austin, and so we'd walk over there after school, log into the VAX computer, and go to the games section. Later they took the games off the university computers because people were abusing the system resources. But before that, they had "Advent" and "Zork," as well as ones that are now lost to the mists of time -- one called "Haunt," another one called "Aardvark." SPAG: I think "Aardvark" is on the gmd archive. Rob: Yeah, I downloaded it recently and sent it to my brother, who was obsessed with that game for a while. So anyway, after that I discovered there was a BBS [bulletin board service] in Austin called the Black Box, and they had Infocom games on-line. You could dial up and play. I remember playing "Starcross" on that, until we abused it so much they took the games off. (laughs) Then we used to get Infocom games for Christmas and birthdays and stuff. And from those earliest times, I tried writing my own text adventures using BASIC. SPAG: Did you finish any of them? Rob: Only one, and it was an end-of-year project for a Latin I class in 7th grade. You wandered around ancient Pompeii and typed Latin vocabulary as commands. The teacher was impressed, since she'd never seen anything like it before. SPAG: So let's cut to the present. You just placed third in the 2000 Comp with "Being Andrew Plotkin." How does that make you feel? Rob: Terrific. SPAG: So you're content, or would you rather have placed even higher than that? Rob: I'm content. Third place actually feels pretty good. "Kaged" and "Metamorphoses" were great entries. I still get to be interviewed by SPAG, so it's all good. SPAG: You've mentioned that you used some specific techniques to simulate the Zarfian mode, and also that you employed a different writing style for each viewpoint character. Can you go into a bit more detail about how you achieved these effects? Rob: I'm a little unclear on what you mean by "the Zarfian mode." SPAG: What I mean is, a Zarfian atmosphere to the game. Rob: Well, that effect was mostly achieved by cribbing bits of Zarf's actual writing and sticking it into the game at selected points. The game starts out in kind of style-neutral mode, with nothing particularly Zarfian going on. The first hint of it is when you start to move the file cabinet, and you get a little wisp of cool air -- an effect borrowed from the beginning of "So Far." I wanted people to think, hmm, obviously we're about to enter a Zarfian world, the same way you are led into the strange other worlds of "So Far" from a fairly mundane starting location. The next thing was to write a very detailed description of the weird tunnel that you enter. I was trying to describe the tunnel that was used in the "Being John Malkovich" movie, but with Zarf's diligence to detail. Evocative adjectives, active verbs. I spent a while writing that one description. I like the reference to sharkskin that it uses -- it's slick and smooth in one direction and resists any movement against the grain. I think that it's a metaphor for the way that the game railroads the player along and doesn't give any rewards for straying off the track. The game doesn't go anywhere but forward. SPAG: Did you really mean it that way when you wrote the tunnel room description, or are you making that up in hindsight? Rob: I think I meant it but I didn't know it until later. I often find that there's a part of my brain that's smarter about making connections than my conscious mind is. SPAG: About the different viewpoint characters -- Rob: Oh right. Well, it's not true that I used a completely different writing style for each character viewpoint. The writing style was basically the same for the Valerie and Peter characters, but being different people, they would see things differently. SPAG: For example? Rob: Oh, for example -- the window in the file room. Peter sees it as a "measly window letting in one tiny square of sunlight," as if it's this pathetic thing that aggravates him. It does so little to help brighten the confines of the room, that it might as well not be there. Valerie thinks the window gives the room -- which she sees in a positive way, because it's so tidy -- a sense of openness. She thinks it's a bonus. SPAG: Okay, but when the player character is Zarf -- Rob: When the player character is Zarf, I decided to have some fun. How would Zarf see the world? And when I say Zarf, I kind of mean the mythological Zarf. SPAG: (interrupting) Who is the mythological Zarf? Rob: Well, I think it mostly comes from "So Far," which was such a surreal journey. You get the idea of a Zarfian landscape from there. And when Zarf writes this game, which is so provocative, and then refuses to explain what it means at all, that enigmatic silence seems Zarfian. So the mythological Zarf stems first from this notion of "Zarfian-ness." We collectively created the mythological Zarf as an attempt to fill in the blanks. I guess. By his silence he leaves it up to our imaginations, and we're an imaginative group. SPAG: The IF community is. Rob: Yeah. So I thought the mythos was a fun idea. How would this mythical Zarf see the world? What would be inside his head? The building blocks that created the real Zarf's creative output. As if to say, he's written this stuff because it's inside his head. And he puts a lot of detailed descriptions into his writing because that's how he sees the world. So that's what my fictional Zarf does. If I hadn't done that, people might have said, "Aw, I was hoping to see what the world looks like through Zarf's eyes." A lot of people noted that the world-through-Zarf's eyes was one of the things that made them laugh out loud in the game. It played directly to the Zarf mythos that we're all carrying around despite ourselves -- those of us who have played his games or have interacted with him on ifMUD, anyway -- and kind of nailed it. It wasn't even exactly in Zarf's style, but the excessive attention to detail and use of adjectives was enough of a nod for people to get the joke immediately. I think it's cool that we have a guy like Zarf in the community, a guy who has this funny reputation, a sort of public image that's a shared, tongue-in-cheek joke. Zarf plays along with it; we all do. SPAG: BAP is full of allusions and tiny homages. Can you mention a few that some players might have missed? Rob: Whew. Let's see. The first ones that come to mind are ones that people probably did catch. The dinner that Zarf is cooking in his kitchen is from his 1998 Xyzzy Awards acceptance speech. He had nothing to say, so he gave a recipe, and at the end he said we'd "better remember all that, because it's the solution to the endgame puzzle in next year's game." I couldn't work it into the endgame of BAP because of the plot structure, but it would have been a double or maybe triple joke if I had. SPAG: I think people probably caught that one. Rob: Well, let me try to get more obscure, then. In the game's opening text, there's a reference to a "bizarre interview with Human Resources" -- which was an allusion to "Human Resource Stories," the infamous game from Comp98, as if you got this file room job by having *that* be your interview. It mentions that the character Peter entered a previous comp and came in 16th -- which is an oblique "Four in One" reference. Melvin's last name, Prufrock, comes from the name of the detective in the first Choose Your Own Adventure book that I read, "Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?" I think it was the ninth one in the series, and you were Inspector Prufrock. I might be wrong about that, but I think that's the memory I summoned when I was trying to think of a funny name. SPAG: Okay, that is definitely obscure. But it's distantly related to IF, so it counts. Rob: People might not know about the Zarf Classified/Declassified jokes. One is that the word "zarf" means a type of cup holder, which is what's in the Classified folder. The other is that there was this government document about something called "Zarf" which was stamped "Declassified" -- meaning only that the existence of some secret government project code-named "Zarf" was allowed to be known about, not the actual project itself. So, the code word "Zarf" was moved to "declassified" status. Zarf had a scan of this on his web page, but lost it in a disk crash, and unfortunately no one had a backup. I always thought that was sad, so I resuscitated it for the game. I could go on, if you want more references. SPAG: Maybe just a couple more. Rob: There are others that don't relate to IF at all. If you try to taste the secret door, it tastes like snozzberries. Which is a "Willy Wonka" reference. Peter's middle name, "Danielson," is the name of the female lead in the movie I'm making. For the name "Zefferelli" I was thinking of the film director who did "Romeo and Juliet" and "Hamlet." In the endgame, Melvin brandishes these razor claws, which is obviously a reference to the superhero Wolverine -- but I was also thinking about Freddy Kreuger from the "Nightmare on Elm Street" movies, who had razor blade fingers and would always end the movie by chasing the heroes through a twisty dream landscape. SPAG: Hard on the heels of the competition ending, you announced that you're in the testing phase of a massive TADS game called "First Things First." Tell us a little about this game. Rob: Aha. Well, this is actually the first real IF project I started writing when I discovered TADS and the IF newsgroups in 1996. All those years, following that Latin Adventure game, I'd had an itch to write IF. I don't know why it was there, because it was a strange impulse. Just this itch I couldn't scratch. "I want to write a text adventure game." Always kind of there, especially if I had an empty Saturday afternoon or something. Not to play IF, but to write one. Then my brother bought TADS -- it was shareware then -- and when I looked at it, I could instantly understand the language. Suddenly, I was free to unlock my imagination, because TADS just made perfect sense to me, unlike the other adventure game languages I'd looked at in those long intervening years. My brother and I both sat down to test out TADS. He wrote a one-room, one-puzzle game in about two days. I wrote a few rooms, then some more rooms, then some more rooms, and then found myself coming up with plot and puzzles. A few weeks later, he wondered when I'd be done. I told him just another week or so, but the thing kept growing. Now, four years later, it's finally almost done. SPAG: Okay, that's good, but what I really meant was: what is the story? What's the game about? Rob: Oops. It's a time travel story. The game is set in basically one location, outside the PC's house. The PC is a time travel buff who's always going to the library to read about it, about time travel. When the story starts, you're coming home one night and discover you've forgotten your keys and are locked out of your own house. How will you get in? In the course of wandering around trying to solve this most basic of IF puzzles, the locked door, the entire plot unfolds, taking you to the same physical location in five different eras -- twenty years ago, ten years ago, the present, ten years ahead, and twenty years ahead. And the future doesn't look as rosy as you might have hoped. Maybe there's something you can do about it. Or maybe not. Am I spoiling it? SPAG: If you stop there, probably not. Rob: Okay, good. Anyway, the people that are testing it seem to be enjoying it for the right reasons. I think it'll justify the work went into it, and I'm really looking forward to having it off my plate. Finally! Done! I'll do a little dance when I finally release it, sometime early in 2001 I guess. SPAG: Are you planning a post-comp update to BAP, and if so, do you foresee any significant changes to the game beyond bugfixes? Rob: Actually, I'm not planning a post-comp update to BAP. It was sort of part of the game that I would take a month to write it, and then I would be done with it. The bugs that are in it, I knew about them before I submitted it to the Comp, but they didn't seem essential to fix. The game kind of works anyway. BAP was never intended to be note-perfect. I think I just want to let the Comp version stand as the one and only official release. SPAG: Each of your newsgroup posts ends with a web address for something called "The Krone Experiment." What is this? Rob: This is the digital video movie I'm producing and directing, one with an interesting pedigree. It's an adaptation of a science thriller novel that my Dad, J. Craig Wheeler, wrote. It came out in 1986 and then in paperback in 1988, and sold fairly well both here and in the UK and Japan. Since my Dad's an astrophysicist, he paid careful attention to the science of the science fiction. We collaborated on the screenplay a few years ago, just after I left the graduate film program at USC. We sold it to a producer, then the rights reverted back to us. I decided that I wanted to make the movie myself rather than keep trying to get it produced by Hollywood. It's coming together well, and everyone involved is kind of excited, kind of confident that we might have a hit independent movie on our hands. We'll see. I don't want to get my hopes up falsely, but there is kind of a vibe. SPAG: Do you plan to write more IF in the future? Rob: Definitely. I kind of have to wait for the good ideas to hit me. There is another work in progress, a collaboration, but it's been top secret. I just learned that another IF author is working on a similar game, which is a bummer -- I had always intended to resume work on it after FTF was released. But there's also a new piece I just started cooking up a week ago. Maybe it'll end up being my Comp entry next year, because I can already tell it's going to be slow to develop. SPAG: Are you going to stick to comedy, or are you planning more serious works? Rob: Well, FTF isn't exactly a comedy. It starts out in a lighthearted mood, that sort of general Infocom style, and then gets darker as the story progresses. I think it might get too dark, though. I guess I'm going to keep searching for just the right balance, because that's the most satisfying for both the author and the player. SPAG: What did you think about this year's competition? Any favorite games? Rob: My three favorites, the ones I voted for Miss Congeniality, were "Dinner With Andre," "Shade," and "Rameses." After I read all the reviews, I played a few more games, and I was definitely impressed with "My Angel." I think it was a great step forward in storytelling IF as opposed to puzzle IF. I liked "Kaged," too, which I hadn't played before the judging was over. It gives me a good idea of what I might have to come up with if I want to place higher than 3rd next time. SPAG: Is that your goal? Rob: I would like to place first in the Comp someday, yes. Not just to have done that, but for the satisfaction of having written an excellent IF game. SPAG: What do you see as the future of the IF medium, and what's your place in it going to be? Rob: I'm intrigued that there's now the ability to integrate multimedia into IF with the standard languages and tools, but that not very much experimenting has been done yet. There were also these teasing developments this year, what with the notion that there might be a market for text games on mobile phones and such. I actually had a dream one night, last year I think, where I foresaw a commercial future for IF. I flipped open a Wired magazine in the dream, and saw this elegant advertisement for an IF company. They were marketing IF the way champagne is marketed, or any luxury item, as this high quality product for discerning tastes. Not as a broad appeal, but as a niche market, one with snob appeal. I think that might be one strategy to use if one were going to try to sell IF on a regular basis. Then again, it was just a dream. Maybe I ate some cold pizza before going to sleep, and that's all it was. But if it did go that way, I would love to work for that company. I'd love for there to be a business model that would work, where IF authors could at least make some good money on the side even if it can't ever be their sole income. I don't think it would work if it were a real company with a corporate headquarters, renting office space, with all of that overhead. I think it should be a virtual company, an organized version of the creative anarchy that we've already got in the community. With elegant advertising in Wired. How we'd pay for the ads, I have no idea. SPAG: Any advice you'd care to offer for prospective competition entrants? Rob: Let me see if I can think of something non-generic to say. Like, besides "Test, test, test your games, give yourselves enough time to finish," blah blah blah. Here's what I did. I wrote a Comp game, submitted it, and saw how it did, which was middling. I determined to do better the next time, so I listened to the reviews my game got. I also listened to the reviews the top games got. I played the top games. I then sat out for a year, and just watched the Comp play out from the sidelines. I read all of the discussions, again looked at how things did, the way that judges approach games, the way they're often short-tempered but will walk a mile with you if you give them what they're hungry for. There's no formula, but you can kind of suss out the rules of the game. This is assuming you're playing to win, but it's not crass to do that. It means you're endeavoring to write something good. By that I mean, there's no way to cheat. You either write something people like or you don't. And I don't think it's pandering to the lowest common denominator to please a large number of the judges with your work, because most of the judges are smart, creative people with good taste. That's what's been attractive to me about the IF community. So anyway, I guess my advice is, play to win. Enter the best you've got in you to enter. Swing for the fences. Oh, and be original. SPAG: Or be Zarf. Rob: Right, if you can't be original, be someone else. It worked for me. KEY TO SCORES AND REVIEWS-------------------------------------------------- Consider the following review header: NAME: Cutthroats AUTHOR: Infocom EMAIL: ??? DATE: September 1984 PARSER: Infocom Standard SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: LTOI 2 URL: Not available. When submitting reviews: Try to fill in as much of this info as you can. If you choose, you may also provide scores for the games you review, as explained in the SPAG FAQ. 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/ and at http://www.sparkynet.com/spag REVIEWS ------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mark J Musante NAME: Ad Verbum AUTHOR: Nick Montfort EMAIL: nickm SP@G nickm.com DATE: October 2000 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters AVAILABILITY: GMD URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/adverbum.z5 VERSION: Release 1 / Serial number 000925 One line summary: Nord and Bert with attitude. This isn't Nick's second game, but it is the second game of his that is fairly widely known. The first one was "Winchester's Nightmare" which took an interesting tack in trying to get the player to be really part of the story. Instead of the usual ">" prompt, the player is presented with "Sarah decides to", and you get to fill in what you would like her to decide to do. This really made you feel part of the action, but it had the drawback of eliminating the standard commands we came to know and love over the past 20+ years of IF. Notably, 'i' for inventory, 'n' for north, and so on. "Sarah decides to sw" doesn't make much sense as a sentence. "Ad Verbum" takes this into account in a thoroughly amusing and clever way. If you use commands like 'up' and 'north', the room descriptions will also use them. If you instead use 'u' and 'n', so do the room descriptions. Some people might find this off-putting. I found it grin-worthy. But enough of that. The game itself presents the player with a seemingly simple stint: acquire all objects from a house and dump them in the Dumpster. The catch is that the house once belonged to the "cantankerous Wizard of Wordplay", so it's not as simple as going through each room and picking up the objects. You have to obey the rules. For example, in one room, you can only use words that begin with the letter 's', however the only way to leave it is to the north, which is a word you can't use. You also have to be able to pick up objects in those rooms, again only using 's'-words. Naturally, when you're in an 'n'-, 'e'- or 'w'-only room, it's hard to save the game, so Nick has you read a warning message before entering those rooms explaining the situation. It's a bit on the defensive side and it definitely breaks the flow of the game, but I'm sure that beginning players would find it useful. I, on the other hand, would have preferred to see that as a puzzle one discovered during the course of play. After all, the game is short enough. Too short, really, because these are the kinds of puzzles I love to see. Reading the text, thinking up possible solutions, a bright flash of discovery, the eagerness to see what's next... that's what IF is all about. The only downside to the game is that it didn't recognize quite as many words as I thought it ought to. It's frustrating to think of a perfectly good word ('scarper' to leave the 's' room, for instance) and then have it not work. I'm sure Nick will be getting plenty of suggestions from others, if he hasn't already. That being said, this was the game that made the whole competition for me. I enjoyed it from intro to quit. Nick, if you're reading this, keep writing more! I'd love to play a full-size game with this sort of wacky wordplay and perplexing puzzles. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Duncan Stevens Infocom, in its heyday, produced some games the likes of which has never been seen since, either because there's no perceived interest in such games (the mysteries in particular) or because amateur IF writers don't have access to the proper technology (the more graphical games). Neither of those objections necessarily applies to Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of it, a wordplay game, but Nick Montfort's Ad Verbum is arguably the first free- or shareware IF game to follow in Nord and Bert's footsteps. (Dennis Cunningham's T-Zero had some points in common, but there was more going on than wordplay--pop culture references and such.) Ad Verbum is a worthy successor: like Nord and Bert, not all of it is particularly inspired, but the moments that work really, really work. The plot, again like Nord and Bert, is simply an excuse for wordplay puzzles--you're looking through the Wizard of Wordplay's mansion and moving through various rooms that are devoted to specific types of wordplay, thereby to collect objects. Many of the puzzles are a bit obscure, and some are only tangentially related to wordplay--or, rather, involve forms of wordplay that aren't necessarily familiar to anyone but the most hardened of GAMES magazine addicts. (One puzzle that involves moving a sofa down a flight of stairs is particularly baffling to those not on the author's wavelength.) Another, involving a little boy who's a dinosaur fan, I found simply misleading--at least, the solution suggested in the hints was something of a surprise to me. The heart of the game, however, lies on the "initial" floor of the house: there are passages lying to the north, east, west, and south, and going north yields this: "LISTEN WELL!" a sonorous voice booms out, in attempted hollowness. "Know ye that passage back through here is difficult for some, impossible for others! Should you wish to transport yourself - without your cherished possessions - out of these constrained confines, utter the magic command: NEW!" Neat Nursery Nice, nondescript nursery, noticeably neat. Normally, nurslings nestle noisily. Now, none. No needful, naive newborns. Nearby: ... nifty nappy. The parser, as you might have guessed, has been rewritten to require that every word of every command begin with N. Violating the rules elicits "No! No! Negative, novice. Nasty notation." or "No! No! Nefarious nomenclature. Narrate nicely, now." The NEW command mentioned above is your only way of getting out of the room: RESTORE, QUIT and everything else has been disabled. Needless to say, in the rooms to the east, west and south, the parser has been similarly reworked for the appropriate letter. You have a goal for each room--extracting some objects and getting out of the room, using only the appropriate letters--but even after the goal is accomplished, it's worth hanging around to experiment with the alliterative parser. The results are more often than not hilarious, as with the following: >nip nappy Naughty, naughty! Nibbling nappies not normal. Or: >examine effigy Enemy effigy. Extreme enormity evident. Execrable evildoer! There's plenty more amusing stuff in each room: the parser-rewriting was done with plenty of intelligence and wit. (WAIL in the appropriate room elicits "Waaaah!", which amuses me no end for some reason.) In short: nicely notated, Nick! Erudite, esoteric effusions entertain endlessly. Winsome, witty wizardry will woo wordsmiths, who will whisper "Wow!" without wearying. Surely, such semantic skill should solicit stratospheric scores. There are some variants on the alliterative parser--another S room with another restriction, and a room with objects whose content suggests that the proper TAKE replacement for each object will involve letter-avoidance of one sort or another. (There was a nasty bug in the competition version of this room that has been squashed--naturally, the game in the updated version reports a literal squashed bug.) The parser is not, however, rewritten for each object, so most of the fun of the alliterative rooms is lost, and only the wordplay puzzle remains. It's a fine puzzle, of course, but it doesn't have the same effect. The other puzzles are likewise not nearly as inspired--there's a "twin bedroom" that requires that all commands be in the form >HAMMER HAMMER, but there isn't nearly as much room for experimenting there. To the extent that Ad Verbum works--and it depends mostly, I think, on the extent to which the player is amused by the alliterative rooms--it works for different reasons than Nord and Bert worked. The latter called for all sorts of cleverness from the player, and getting through it produced a real feeling of accomplishment; some of the puzzles were quite difficult. In particular, certain scenarios required that the player deploy various clichés or idioms, often in amusingly twisted ways, to get through the scene--and not a small amount of creativity was required. Ad Verbum doesn't ask nearly as much of the player--the most difficult feat of wordplay is clearly coming up with the appropriate alliterative words, and in most rooms that's not especially difficult. (Getting out of the N room is a challenge--sufficiently obscure that if you go in there without first encountering the fellow who wanders around dropping hints, you're unlikely to get it--but the others are pretty straightforward.) But the author here has put his own skills on display, much more so than the Nord and Bert authors did, and the result is just as amusing. In other words, the fun is more passive here than it was in Nord and Bert--the interactivity isn't as important--but there's still fun to be had. Ad Verbum is not an unqualified success; without the alliterative parser, I don't think there'd be much interesting about it. But I got enough laughs out of those rooms that I can't give it anything less than a 9. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Alfredo Garcia [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: And The Waves Choke The Wind AUTHOR: Gunther Schmidl E-MAIL: gschmidl SP@G gmx.at DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/atwctw/atwctw.z8 VERSION: Release 1 Here's a story that starts with the meat. It's a classic 'What the...?' moment for our PC, who awakens to find himself on a lifeboat, floating in an empty sea, bound and (it would seem, rather unnecessarily) gagged. The introductory puzzle is good, as it encourages us to examine the PC down to the smallest details, all of which are implemented well. Here's an ambiguity you don't have to clarify too often: >CUT HAIR USING THE KNIFE Which do you mean, your dreadlocks or your pubic hair? And if you think that's going a shade too far, you'll find that even your anus is implemented - a smuggling puzzle later on, perhaps? At first I thought this all a little excessive; in fact it was totally in keeping with the theme of (at least) this preview - self-scrutiny. The generic theme is more immediately obvious - Lovecraftian Horror. The author does well to create a sense of foreboding throughout the piece, and generally it succeeds in maintaining an atmosphere of dread. This was only occasionally deflated by a poorly chosen phrase ('butt naked' and a reference to 'the enemies you've wasted' seem anachronistic) or an unsuitable quotation (Lovecraft and the Necronomicron are fine -- but Nine Inch Nails?) As we progress, the PC is revealed to us through a series of flashbacks. It sounds like this shouldn't work, but it does. Too much pathos is injected, yet it's nice to feel something for your character by the end of the game, and I did. It's a shame the author didn't enter a more interactive section of his work. All there is to do here is explore. The descriptions are well handled, but I found very little for me to *act* on. I really didn't like the proliferation of talk menus towards the end - but then again, I really don't like talk menus generally. (More on this later) So then, as a game this seems a little uneven, but as a preview it really whets the appetite. Rating: 6 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Sean T Barrett [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: At Wit's End AUTHOR: Mike J. Sousa E-MAIL: msousa SP@G efortress.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: TADS standard SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/tads/awe/awe.gam VERSION: 1.00 TITLE: Dinner With Andre AUTHOR: Liza Daly E-MAIL: liza SP@G retina.net DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/dinner/dinner.z5 VERSION: Release 1 >GET OUT OF THE FRYING PAN Take the PC and put him or her in a situation where everything has gone JUST RIGHT. The PC is on top of the world. And then something goes a little wrong. Just a little wrong, not ludicrous or unrealistic. But, hmm, a tad unfortunate. And then the player gets the PC out of the situation and things just go from bad to worse. AWE starts better: the PC is in a tough situation where things could go bad or things could go good. (Heck, it may actually be possible to fail the first puzzle, or it may not, I don't know.) Then by solving a really easy puzzle, *then* the PC is on top of the world. It's a really nice, cheesily happy moment--and then trouble starts. But the player got to participate in hitting that top of the world. You were pretty sure it was going to happen (although it was possible you'd fail and it would instead be a redemption story), but even so, it was a good moment. Oh, and then the accident. It doesn't rob the PC of being at the top of the world--the PC's achievement isn't called into question or offset in any way--the PC just starts having a (largely unrelated) misadventure. DwA does not start quite as strongly--your character is already (almost) at the top of the mountain, and you don't share in the experience of having gotten to the top. As well, DwA turns out to be a farce, but holds off on revealing this until things start going wrong--which makes it all the more crazy, but can get a player invested in the game the wrong way. Still, the waiter comes over, and if the player makes the obvious choice of answer, there's a nice moment of feeling "yes, everything is perfect" that is triggered by player action. Oh, but then things start going wrong. And where none of the problems of AWE relate to the achievement directly (the PC has already climbed back down the mountain he'd climbed), in DwA its the mountain itself being put at risk. A tremor, a threat of a landslide, and then wooosh... I think of these sorts of games as "out of the frying pan and into the fire" games because at every moment, once you resolve the situation, a new peril threatens. (The movie "After Hours" pops into mind as well.) The last half of Kaged was more explicit that way; in some ways it was more effective, since the peril threatened in Kaged was your life; the peril threatened in AWE is, well, your ability to return home; and the peril threatened in DwA is public humiliation. One of the reasons "out of the frying pan and into the fire games" tickle my fancy is because they make the character's motivation explicit. At any moment, I know what I'm supposedly to be accomplishing in the short term (crucial to being able to play the game) and I also know why that action fits in with my end goal (not getting humiliated, or returning home). Far too many games put you in a situation where all you can do is poke around at suspicious-seeming objects and solve the puzzles related to them. To me, this is what storytelling in IF should be about; giving the player a high-level goal (a story to achieve) and then giving the player enough information (e.g. a low-level goal) to be able to carry out tasks *for the purpose of achieving that goal*. Why is this storytelling? When the player of DwA confronts the challenge of the four waiters at once, I can imagine the zany British TV sitcom where this exact sequence of events plays out. Whereas many games, say, The Pickpocket or The Planet of the Infinite Minds or even Transfer, I can't imagine comprehending this go by on a screen; the motivations of the protagonist would be incomprehensible. Or maybe you could imagine it as a mystery where the audience is left in the dark; but when, in IF, the audience is controlling the protagonist, that way of looking at it makes little sense. "Out of the frying pan and into the fire" isn't the only way to achieve such "storytelling"; when I change the color of an object in Kaged it's for a pretty obvious reason, to achieve a pretty obvious goal that has to do with the overall situation; but when I create a library in Planet of the Infinite Minds I'm just doing it 'cause it's there. In fact, "out of the frying pan and into the fire" may not be the most effective way of giving the player lower-level goals; letting the user set her own pace is probably a better experience most of the time. In fact, an "out of the frying pan and into the fire" sequence can end up just feeling like a series of set pieces--the mouse sequence in Transfer is a fairly good example of a set piece, although it does rely on one piece of game-specific knowledge--so a game that integrates its puzzles, rather than leaving them a series of disconnected events, may turn out to be a stronger work. In the case of DwA, though, I thought the pieces meshed together really well; they all tie into the initial scenario, and the pacing is superb: a series of linear puzzles, then the game "goes wide" with a tough multi-element puzzle, then tightens down and is at peace briefly, easy, relaxed, everything is going right... and then BAM, ouch, followed by an easy end game. Perfect. As an added plus, the elements of DwA end up serving as a bit of a parody of some romantic genre cliches, indeed with the ending almost coming off as (unintentionally) mocking Masquerade, which uses those cliches to create its archetypal romance genre story. AWE gets off to a rollicking start with simple, tight, timed puzzles, but then goes much too broad and much too hard, at least for my tastes. While all the puzzles seemed reasonably logical, but the breadth meant a lot of time pursuing irrelevant alternatives, and the difficulty would have required an awful lot of player time to solve without excessively relying on hints/walkthroughs, which I was unwilling to do. Therefore I can't comment on how successful the pacing is beyond that point. But up until it goes broad, it is an amusing alternation of "oh shit" and "ho hum, what now?" which I quite enjoyed, since at each moment (say, walking up to the house), I was tensing up waiting for what would go wrong next. (And the title helped--it was GOOD that I knew I was doomed to be going into the fire.) I'll go out on a limb and make a specific design suggestion of the sort I think is pretty pretentious of me to make, but what the hell: the spine of the story was trying to return (which generally meant escaping each situation); as far as I played, *everything* that happened was on the spine of the story, except having to eat. Having to eat jarred me horrendously because of that. Realistic? Sure. Related to the story? Not at all. I'd cut it. (You can argue that it's on the spine if the central peril of the story is dying, but that was how it felt to me anyway--tangential.) -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Sean T Barrett [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: Being Andrew Plotkin AUTHOR: J. Robinson Wheeler E-MAIL: wheeler SP@G jump.net DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/bap/bap.z5 VERSION: Release 1 TITLE: Prodly The Puffin AUTHOR: Craig Timpany and Jim Crawford E-MAIL: timpany SP@G pingus.cx, pfister_ SP@G mindspring.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/prodly/prodly.z5 VERSION: Release 1 >SAY "PARODLY IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY" I don't like Pokey the Penguin. In fact, Pokey the Penguin ranks right up with jerkcity in terms of massively annoying me, simply because *several* different people have recommended it to me, and each time I go check it out, look at it, and say "I still don't get it". Am I annoyed at other people for thinking it's funny? Am I annoyed at myself for not getting it? I don't know. I'm just annoyed. Like I said in my review of Asendent and Comp00ter Game. Misspelling? Funny once, maybe. For Prodly (PtP), non sequitur? Funny once. Ok, PtP is better than Pokey in this regards. I dutifully avoided asking myself about anything because that led to the stupidity that I fail to see any humor in. The rest of it was mildly amusing and surreal, along the lines of "Stupid Kittens", with a few great touches: the mysterious hovering beak, and the one bit that made me laugh out loud, the "bug in the menu system" bit. PtP is, then, a game which is sort of a parody and sort of an homage to an existing property which is itself (supposedly) humorous, and it managed to make me laugh out loud once. BAP is an homage to an existing property which is itself humorous, and it managed to make me laugh out loud twice. (And no other comp games made me laugh out loud.) Starting off, I was very worried about BAP (although perhaps not as much as I was PtP after seeing its opening quote), fearful that it would slavishly imitate "Being John Malkovich". And, in fact, it did at first. Worse yet, the initial scene's trivial puzzle is underwritten in an implementational sense: not only do you have no particular reason to push the button (indeed, the game will advance at that point simply because it triggers an unrelated event), but you can open the lid of the copier, and there's nothing in it to copy; and you're not carrying anything to copy, either. The game stayed pretty close to the movie for quite a bit longer, which continued to worry me, along with the questionable decision to make "open drawer" and "pull drawer" distinct commands--is there some other way to open a drawer? Still, it was managing to amuse me, and I stuck with it, and it turned out that the author very carefully both stuck to and deviated from the movie, in exactly the right way so that he could work economical fragments of humor by referencing the movie, and yet deliver jokes all his own. For example, Melvin, the character who maps onto the old lecherly guy with a secret in "Malkovich", is both wimpy and lecherly, but he not only has a different secret, but this secret explains those two behavior patterns in a totally different way--and indeed his POV was the first laugh-out-loud moment for me. "Malkovich" is about a puppeteer who gets the once-in-a-lifetime chance to control another human being. Of any funny movie one might choose to adapt into IF, this one gets the obvious thumbs up for the thematic relevance; indeed, I believe in the very old days some people would explain text adventures to newcomers by describing the PC as a 'puppet' under the player's control. (In fact, the first thing I tried to do after my tunnel ride was type something like "ZARF, DRINK"--and I was disappointed when this was misdirected at an object I was carrying.) In the end, I had so much fun with BAP I couldn't deny it second place of all the games I played (and no, I've never been on ifMUD). Of course it was horribly on rails. Why didn't this bother me? I don't know. Scenes I would have like to have seen: * a puzzle that required typing "x yz zy" instead of "x zy" * the player controlling Peter controlling Andrew Plotkin controlling Zarf, if you know what I mean =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Tina Sikorski TITLE: Being Andrew Plotkin AUTHOR: J. Robinson Wheeler E-MAIL: wheeler SP@G jump.net DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/bap/bap.z5 VERSION: Release 1 Walkthrough? Yes Genre: Mixed/Movie tribute/In-Joke/SF +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating B |Submitted Vote 8| |Writing B+|Plot B+| |Puzzles C |NPCs A | |Technical B |Tilt C+| +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts Although I had not ever seen the movie _Being John Malkovich_, I had been fairly certain from the moment I saw the title that it was, in fact, related somehow. Reviewing this from the perspective of someone who doesn't know a -thing- about the movie may change things a bit; if you -have- seen the movie, you're probably better off with someone else's review. You'll notice I had a hard time classifying this into a specific genre. I'm open to other suggestions... *** Writing (B+) Throughout, the writing was consistently good. At times, it was actually far better than that. And what's best is that I often felt like the author was just having a plain old great time writing it, which for some reason always appeals to me. For instance, this line: Valerie plummets into the big hedge with an unladylike ka-thump-krickle. ...was the kind of thing that, had I written it, I would've been giggling a bit to myself when I did, not at my own cleverness but rather at the sheer delight of creating a line like that. I hope I'm right about this; people who have fun creating things tend to create more. Too, there were little bits like this: "There are sweat stains on them. Stifling the urge to make a comment, you adjust your grip to touch only the dry spots." Not really necessary, just color -- but what color it is! I read this and I think "Okay: So, Marvin is a loser, and you really don't care for him; he has COOOOOTIES." [Okay, well, maybe the author wasn't thinking of cooties, but hey, -I- was.] No need to spell it out explicitly; it's all about the feel. I also enjoyed the way things changed a bit when there was a perspective shift, but I'll get into that more under NPCs... *** Plot (B+) To be honest, this would probably have been different if I knew anything about the movie beyond the very, very basic premise. I found the execution of the idea hilarious (and I'm beginning to think I may have to go rent the movie if it's -anything- like this) and particularly with the bits and pieces that let you see the world in different ways (again, more under "NPCs"). To be perfectly honest, I didn't get the optimal ending, and I was in too much of a hurry to try replaying and fixing this, but for some reason that didn't faze me; perhaps just because what I'd experienced up to that point was... cool. The thing is, I can't actually narrow down what about it was cool -- which is a major fault in a reviewer, I admit, but alas, remains the case. Maybe it was just the entire idea of being in ZARF'S head (a scary idea to me). Maybe it was just the whole concept of your boss (I swear I've worked for this "man"). I wish I could explain. Suffice it to say: it was worth doing. *** Puzzles (C) Hmm. My notes don't go into a lot of details on this, which pretty much supports the mid-range rating. Taking a quick look through, the only time I seem to have gotten outright stuck (other than, I'm ashamed to admit, the recursion problem) was because it just didn't occur to me to type "look at mud" -- for some reason I wanted to "look at computer" (which didn't give me any more detail) or "type" (which just didn't work). For some reason, specifically thinking of the MUD as an object just didn't occur to me. *** NPCs (A) This was really, really the big strength of the game. Not only did we have several NPCs, we actually got to -be- some of them. And every time we did, something changed a bit about the perception of the world we were in. I thought -all- the characters were interesting. While they were a bit limited in conversational style, they still feel fully developed, and even better, when they look at -each other-, they see the people they interact with differently. This, to me, is primo stuff. I know that people like saying "Ho, hum, just character switching again, everyone does it", but... folks, not everyone does it WELL. In fact, it's quite rare. Again, as with the writing in general, the little touches are what makes this category absolutely superb, for instance, both Valerie and Peter dislike Melvin, but they still see him differently, and the rooms have some minor differences depending on who you are. *** Technical (B) Actually, in retrospect, I'm not sure I know why I gave this a B. Maybe just the sheer impressiveness of writing x number of different descriptions of each area based on who would visit it and keeping correct track of something on that scale. Too, I found no bugs, which is generally a good thing. So, er... (*fumbles*) Okay! Nothing to see here, move along. Oh wait. One -bad- thing: >go through secret door You can't, since the secret door is in the way. *** Tilt (C+) and Final Thoughts In retrospect, I think this deserved a higher 'tilt' from me. I suspect I was a bit frustrated with not finding the recursion puzzle answer when I handed out the 'tilt' score (which is always my initial score), and not seeing the last bits of the game. And some of it was just that while I enjoyed the game, it really was a one-time sort of joke. Here's a few other things that I have in my notes, for amusement value: You give the stuck cabinet drawer the old heave-ho, and instead of merely opening, it yanks loose from the wall, revealing a strange, small door in the wall! >of course it does That's not a verb I recognize. [I frequently talk to the games. This is probably not something you needed to know.] **** that code (Melvin) for some reason reminds me of COBOL, which is scary. **** No Ikea! Ikea bad! **** I don't WANT To be Zarf! It scares me! -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Adam Cadre [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: The Big Mama AUTHOR: Brendan Barnwell E-MAIL: BrenBarn SP@G aol.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard, with conversation menus SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/bigmama/bigmama.z5 VERSION: Release 8 I don't think the author was trying hard enough. If you're going to put the phrase "the big mama" into pretty much every response, why stop there? Why, it could've appeared in every paragraph or, indeed, every sentence. (The big mama.) I mean, if it's good ten thousand times, why not a hundred thousand? Why not write in the style of Henrietta Pussycat, only swapping in "the big mama" for "meow"? What a missed opportunity. Also, the big mama. So, let's see. I do like the idea of a sort of multi-turn AISLE. But the thing about AISLE was that most of the endings were really well-written and interesting in and of themselves, not to mention diverse. The same cannot be said of THE BIG MAMA. There are a lot of games in the comp for which I scribbled down notes like "rocky prose" or "semi-literate," but this game proves that you can have an excellent command of the language and still provoke winces. (The big mama.) Let's see, there was the bit where a sign warns you about how the next 1.5 miles of beach are private: "'Stupid imperial measurement,' you mutter." Urgh. Why not just give the player-character a renaissance flute while you're at it? Oh, and the little boy. "Almost every day I billa cassel." Throw this kid into the nearest wood chipper, please. I mean it. Stop him before he soliloquizes again. Also, the big mama. Even the less egregious paths all seem to lead to inane conversations and fairly ham-handed passages desperately trying to hammer home the theme that the ocean is pretty. Sometimes the inane conversations result in relationships, but none of these sequences is really even remotely convincing -- I'm sure every day there are beach encounters that lead to hookups, but I doubt that any of them have resembled even one of the paths set forth in this game. Also, the big mama. There are also some quirks with the way the various characters are programmed: the surfer alternates between sunbathing and surfing about every eight seconds, and the teenage girl seems to have no memory whatsoever -- you can scare her off with some creepy line, watch her wander off, and two turns later she's back and seems to have no idea who you are. This is the sort of thing that makes characters look like chunks of code rather than representations of people. Also, the big mama. More bugs of note: jumping the rail takes you to the beach, but once you get there, the game tells you that "You're not up for that kind of leap." Sounds like some routine is neglecting to return true somewhere in there. Oh, and while the game notes that "everyone in town speaks Spanish," I have to wonder -- "las" is a plural article. The only way that works with "Lorena" is if "Lorena" is a last name and the name of the town is a reference to a all-female family: "The Lorena Sisters", or some such. Which I could buy as a novelty musical act from the early 70s, but not as the name of a city. Also, the big mama. Perhaps my favorite bit: | 0: Say nothing. | 1: "Yeah, let's watch a movie." | 2: "A walk sounds great." | 3: "Let's play a game." | 4: "" Me, I thought it was a bit early in the evening to propose illegal object number 357, but hey, turned out she was into it. Kinky! Score: a low THREE. Also, the big mama. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Tina Sikorski Walkthrough? No Genre: CYOA/Mixed/Romance +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating C |Submitted Vote 6| |Writing B |Plot C-| |Puzzles n/a|NPCs C+| |Technical C |Tilt C | +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts As a few other people have mentioned, I would have expected the sea to play a larger part in this work, which is basically a choose-your-own- adventure with no particular focus on the sea. I called it a "romance" genre game in part because a LOT of the routes seem concerned with romance, but there are a few other routes that don't contain it. *** Writing (B) I can't help but take a moment to compare this to last year's entry by this author (Lomalow, which I, quite frankly, did not like). Although the styles are different, there's an element to both of them that is similar: the attempt to evoke some specific emotions. This year's entry does a much better job with the writing; it doesn't feel as forced, as heavy-handed. It's still got some flaws, but overall I feel much less preached at than I did last year and there were times when there were hints of excellence. I don't know if you can attribute this to the different format, practice, or even the different topic matter, but whichever it is, I'm actually quite glad to see something I like from Brendan. If I had any complaint it was that at times it was too long, a hazard, I think, of the CYOA format choice. I do enjoy longer text breaks than some people will accept gracefully, but there were a few times when too much happened on a trigger. What I enjoyed the most, I think, were occasional clever or cute turns of phrase, such as these portions of some room descriptions: "These little establishments sell everything from shrink-wrapped, dessicated muffins to decent hot dogs." "The breeze is straight out of some beach-blanket B-movie: salty, soft, and refreshing." But even the more serious writing is honest, and while there isn't a LOT of substance to this as a game, (see "plot", below), I enjoyed reading it. *** Plot (C-) As with many CYOA games, it's so hard to rate plot. First off, there are multiple "plots" here... although as I mentioned above, many of them seem to have the same basic tilt, which is: romance. But what I saw was a bit... thin. Not quite Calista Flockhart, but definitely thin. Still, they weren't bad little plots. Just not a lot of substance, much more the Twinkie of IF than the dinner at Ruth's Chris. [If you haven't ever encountered Ruth's Chris, they are the most incredible steakhouse ever.] *** Puzzles (n/a) Due to the CYOA format, I did not rate on puzzles, breaking my "formula" but, ultimately, I think, being more fair. *** NPCs (C+) This game is basically NPC driven, in that it's almost entirely conversationally driven. So you would hope that the NPCs would have some depth to them -- and, actually, they do in spots. But you don't really get a good glimpse about what they're -really- like, mostly because your interactions with them are so short. Whether this is a shortcoming of the format or whether they were simply undeveloped is hard to judge; they DO have personality, but it's pretty focused. *** Technical (C) There was certainly nothing in particular that was outstanding technically here, and only one bug of note, so I gave it an average rating. *** Tilt (C) and Final Thoughts I found 4 or 5 different endings before I stopped playing, so there may be more depths here I have not plumbed. Those of you with more patience than I (and a CYOA roto-rooter) may discover more. It was an amusing diversion. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Tina Sikorski TITLE: Desert Heat AUTHOR: Papillon E-MAIL: amethystphoenix SP@G yahoo.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: None (CYOA) SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/ VERSION: 1 Walkthrough? No Genre: CYOA/Romance/Bodice-Ripper +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating B-|Submitted Vote 7| |Writing B+|Plot B | |Puzzles D |NPCs B | |Technical C |Tilt C+| +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts A lot of people don't like choose-your-owns, so to them, this will not appeal. In truth, they don't always appeal to me. In this particular case, however, I actually thought it worked fairly well. I didn't explore all the possible choices (although I did double up on a couple paths) so I don't know how flexible the game ultimately was, but it looked to have at least some degree of freedom in it. *** Writing (B+) Despite some perhaps overly-lengthy prose in spots, the writing in this was rather well-done. I found many of the descriptions quite enchanting, bringing to mind a definite feel and genre that itself is quite magical, and one in which it is easy to get drawn in and lost within when it is (as it was) done correctly. Take, for instance, this bit from the opening: "The sound of windblown sand smoothing the dunes and scouring the city walls is the only song nature produces in Hajima." With the very first sentence, mood and setting are already firmly in place, a setting which is only enhanced (and never contradicted) by further room and event descriptions. And best yet, although the game does tell you "this is who you are, this is what you can do", it never seems to do it in a way that felt limiting (to me), though ultimately, of course, it was rather narrow in scope. *** Plot (B) As with all CYOAs (and how many times have I used that phrase, anyhow?), there is not a LOT of flexibility in plot, but as is more rare, there is a rich plot here. It is true that it is quite stereotypical. It is also true that sometimes that's a good thing. (See also NPCs, below.) Stereotypical stories are sometimes, instead, more -archetypal-; they use settings, people, and situations that we all are familiar with, and merely attempt to display the story in a manner in which will appeal. I believe that this was the author's intent (although don't know for sure), and if so, it worked quite well for me. Others, looking for something new and original, will probably prefer to give this a pass, although I might add that there is not much in the way of either new or original left in the world. It is merely the skill with which stories are displayed that, ultimately, determines how people react to it. *** Puzzles (D) As a CYOA adventure, it should perhaps not really be rated on puzzles, but as there are several critical decision points that can make a large difference, in this case I elected to do so. And that is where things fall short. Could it have been done differently and retained the format? Yes. There could have been more decision points; they could have been presented in a way that combined both more internal world knowledge with more difficult choices. When it came to a point where I had to make a choice, often I felt as if I were presented with choices that the -character- would understand the implication of but I would not. That, alas, was the big flaw in an otherwise enjoyable experience. *** NPCs (B) Adam Cadre, whose opinion I quite respect but with whom I frequently disagree, felt offended by the stereotypes in this game. Others saw his point. I disagreed, because I felt there was no intent to hold up and portray negative and shallow characters. I felt they were meant to be archetypes (see also Plot, above). So, be warned: there are no terribly deep characters in the game. You see only glimpses of their true personality, and even those show something fairly basic and, yes, cliche. But... it WORKS. This is not the real world. This is the storyworld, where everyone has a defined role, and everyone has a part to play. And it is the success in -that- upon which I rated the NPCs highly. Realism in NPCs is a prized thing, difficult to obtain, but the clever and careful use of caricature and archetype can result in some lovely story building. Desert Heat accomplishes this with flair. *** Technical (C) CYOA games are not difficult to produce. I found no bugs. *** Tilt (C+) and Final Thoughts This is definitely not a game for everyone. Simply the genre alone would ensure that; I myself have a love-hate relationship with romances, if you will pardon the potential pun. The format and style as well are both potentially off-putting. Still, if you have any interest in a richly told tale, I would suggest giving the game a chance. It was one of the more enjoyable -- if not one of the longest lived -- moments of the comp. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Duncan Stevens TITLE: The Djinni Chronicles AUTHOR: J.D. Berry E-MAIL: berryx SP@G earthlink.net DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/djinni.z5 VERSION: Release 2 J.D. Berry's Djinni Chronicles is one of the shortest games of the comp, but it's also one of the densest--there's not much room for exploration or experimentation without save-restore. There are some game-specific rules, moreover, that make it likely that you'll have to do some save-restoring. Still, there are some ideas worth exploring that come across in those few moves. You are a djinni, discovered and summoned by various masters, whose wishes you strive to grant in one way or another--but you also have your own purposes that are only somewhat compatible with those of your masters. The nature of your existence is such that you can't stray far from your "container," the vessel where you reside when you're not about your business; indeed, the beginning of the game functions mostly as an introduction to the rules of your world. You learn, for example, that the tendency of wishes to come with unfortunate side effects isn't simply djinni contrariness; rather, it's because they don't (generally) have the power to accomplish the change by their own will, and have to harness the power of another "undercurrent" with somewhat different effects. You also learn that some djinni derive power from sources other than their summoners, and seek to gain enough power to act independently. The defining measure is known as "Purpose," here expressed as a number, and maintaining Purpose, one way or another, becomes your overriding goal. What emerges is an imaginative portrait of djinni ethics, as it were: the djinni that you play aren't bound by any particular ethical norms as such other than the desire to gain and maintain purpose. Arguably, those djinni that aren't bent on destruction serve their masters' wishes not out of any sense of loyalty, but simply because they derive no advantage from acting independently. (The anterior question, why some djinni are one way and some are another, isn't addressed, but the game is complex enough; there's no need to introduce another layer of cosmology.) In a sense, the path of the game is fairly well defined simply because the character's powers are limited; the player can't really expect to be able to wander away, since that causes the game to end promptly. The wishes of your masters also define your goals most of the time, and when they don't, the game spells out your personal objective. And yet figuring out your motivations at any given point can be complicated, particularly if you assume that you feel some inherent responsibility to your master--and it's not until about halfway through the game that you learn what you're really doing, so to speak. Once you understand the larger plot, it's intriguing; the only problem is that you don't have much part in influencing where it'll go, other than figuring out the command that will move things along. The linearity factor actually serves the purposes of the story--the whole point is that your powers are limited, and your ability to influence events doesn't go much beyond your master's interests--but it might also be a bit more satisfying to be able to affect how the plot turns out, not just whether the one possible plotline progresses. The end of the game suggests that the point isn't simply to devise an inventive mythology of djinni and how they work and what motivates them; rather, the behavior of the djinni suggests something about human nature and the ways that these particular spirits (with their own motivations) choose to manipulate their masters. In that respect, portraying the details of djinni existence serves some of the same function that C.S. Lewis's elaborate bureaucracy of hell did in Screwtape Letters: to describe the spirit world in order to provide a context for the way those spirits tempt and manipulate humans. Obviously, this is a little different, since the relationship isn't entirely adversarial--you need your masters to accomplish your purposes, which doesn't exactly describe Screwtape--but the message is related: suitable manipulation of our baser instincts can turn them into enormously destructive forces, and the game suggests that the less noble impulses are considerably more powerful than altruistic ones (since the djinni that serves a master with relatively unselfish goals doesn't seem to accumulate much Purpose). As a game, apart from the theory and theology that might underlie it, Djinni Chronicles works reasonably well. As noted, picking up on the rules takes a while, and the limitations on the character are initially frustrating when you're used to a great deal of freedom--but it doesn't take long to adjust and to appreciate your new powers. (For instance, walls are no hindrance.) The game is quite linear, true, but to some extent that's inevitable if the author wants to tell a particular story about the spirit world and human nature: if the player has the power to put a different spin on the relationship between the PC and its masters, the result is no longer what the author set out to tell. This sort of thing might not have gone over well just a few years ago, but linearity, I think, has come to be viewed as the inevitable price of more story-oriented IF, and when the story is as intriguing as this one, it's a price worth paying. There's another advantage to the linearity: the puzzles are well integrated into the plot, rather than artificial constructs that distract from the story. That's a feature not directly related to the breadth of the game, of course, but it's inevitable that a game with a large field of options doesn't really sustain much of a story, since the author can't exercise much control over how the game progresses--and by restricting the options, Djinni Chronicles ensures that the task at hand is always part of the story. Moreover, the linearity factor restricts the amount of things that can go wrong; this is a technically solid game, in part, perhaps, because the nature of the game prevents players from doing outlandish things that could violate the game's expectations. The only real fly in the ointment is a lengthy section that's written in not especially inspired verse; it doesn't serve an obvious purpose in the game, and it distracts the player from what was otherwise highly competent writing. The main flaw in Djinni Chronicles, at the end, is that it leaves the player wanting more--more plot, more character development--but there are worse sins, I suppose. It's an imaginatively told story--intelligent enough to earn a 9 from me. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Adam Cadre [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: The End Means Escape AUTHOR: Stephen Kodat E-MAIL: skodat SP@G blazenet.net DATE: 2000 PARSER: TADS standard SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/tads/endmeans/endmeans.gam VERSION: Release 1 I really liked the first segment of this game. Not only were the animate objects cool and funny, but the way the player is meant to go about resolving the situation -- asking everyone about everyone else -- appealed to me much more than if the solution had been to perform some clever engineering trick. I wasn't quite sure how the stuff I was doing was getting me any closer to opening the door, but I went along with it and entered the book... ...and then splat. I didn't get part two at all. I understood how to manipulate the words -- the hint system told me that much -- but I didn't have the slightest clue what my goal was, and the hints crapped out at that point. So I put the game away, figuring I'd give it about a five. Then I read a solution to part two on the newsgroup -- and I *still* didn't get it. It was like getting stuck on a puzzle where you're trying to open a safe and finding out that the combination is 43-49-25... and why? Because it just sort of is. "You turn hard"? Say what? And then the third segment... goal, please? I think this says it all: >HINT There's just some people standing around. Right. And I was one of them. Maybe there are some people who, presented with a bunch of playing pieces in a game they don't recognize, would start messing around with the pieces for hours on end until something happened; me, I'm more inclined to just leave them alone until I have some *reason* to play with them, some *objective* I'm using them to try to accomplish. And "escape" is insufficient. Yes, you do escape, but how are you supposed to know that X will achieve Y? Doing what the hints tell you to do with the segments' various playing pieces, and consequently "escaping," is like the bit in A GOOD BREAKFAST from Comp97 where you're looking for a spoon, happen across a robot, play Lights-Out with it, and then when you win, the robot randomly hands you a spoon as a reward. Or, to use an invented example for the sake of clarity: You're in a cell. You want to get out. The door won't budge, and there's a guard posted outside. You have a gold coin. GOOD DESIGN: Get the guard to open the door and let you go free in exchange for the coin. BAD DESIGN: Swallow the coin. This randomly causes the door to fall off its hinges onto the guard, allowing you to make a break for it. THE END MEANS ESCAPE is full of examples of the latter type of design. Open up a guy's surgical incision? Why? Just because you can (with difficulty)? Apparently so -- that's how you advance to the next stage, though there's no particular reason why that's so. The end justifies the means? In this game, they rarely seem remotely connected. Score: a low THREE, and only because I did get some fun out of the first bit. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Tina Sikorski Walkthrough? No (in-game hints) Genre: Surrealism +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating B+|Submitted Vote 8| |Writing A-|Plot C+| |Puzzles B |NPCs B | |Technical B |Tilt A+| +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts A lot of people really disliked everything but the first section of this game. I, on the other hand, got more into it the more I played it; I won't say I enjoyed the first section the least, but neither did I find it the best of the sections. I believe this will be a narrow appeal game, which in a way is a pity and in a way is just how things work. I will note that this was the game that got me to dub this "Surreal Comp"; between it, Shade, and (to a lesser extent) Planet of the Infinite Minds, not to mention the Rybread parody, this was probably the most surreal of the comps ever... *** Writing (A-) First off: bonus points for the correct use of "its", something a lot of authors don't seem to understand. Any game in which there are word puzzles is probably going to garner either a rather low or a rather high score in writing. In this case, you will see it's "rather high". But this was not only because of the (somewhat difficult, but entertaining) word puzzle in the second section, but the sheer amount of work that must have gone into crafting the initial section's NPCs, giving them character and consistency. Many of the descriptions were simple and unadorned, but knowing when to do this is as important to writing as elaborate, full, and intense descriptions of one's environment. Others (mostly later in the game) are detailed and interesting, but oddly those seem to occur when they are least important. I don't know if this was a deliberate stylistic choice, but for me it added to the surreal factor -- and I so enjoy the surreal factor, so this is a good thing. Possibly the best use of words was not in the writing itself, but one of the puzzles (see below). Indeed, until that section, I was actually somewhat out-of-sorts with the style presented; as I put it in my notes "This is the kind of HIGH-FALUTIN' High Art thing I dislike, isn't it?" However, it grows on one... *** Plot (C+) Now, those of you who played this game will be saying "Plot? Was there a PLOT?" Well, yes and no. There was certainly no coherent plot I could identify, but it seems as if each section contained a bit of one, and they were internally consistent. On this basis -- rather than that of understanding and being able to articulate the plot -- I rated it just above average, consistency being one of the building blocks of a good plot. So if you're looking for a full-blown story, I'm afraid you are out of luck; this game does not, so far as I could tell, have one. There are basically four (five?) little tableaus that are, at least as far as I could tell, separate, yet each has as its basis understanding or at least discovering the nature of something. This, I think, is what ties the game together. I may be the only person getting this out of the game (other comments certainly suggest such) but... for me it works. *** Puzzles (B) Oh GOD, the PUZZLES. They are fiendish! They are evil! They required me to use the hints regularly... ...and yet... I'm fascinated by word puzzles. I was particularly fascinated by the one in part two of this game, where your inventory contains a certain number of words, the room contains a certain number of words, and you have to manipulate them in various ways to make certain phrases. In the interest of leaving -some- surprises to the reader, I shall not reproduce the entire puzzle, but I will say that: a) There is more than one (somewhat) sensical "solution", but only one actually -works- b) Yes, it did mean something to ME (though not, I gather, to others). Then there was the puzzle with the basically inanimate people. That one, I did not like. No. But it wasn't because I felt it was unfair or even that it was difficult to figure out (aside from being very limited in solvability). It was just that it was... icky. I suspect it was meant to be metaphorical, but some metaphors I'd rather not, er, explore. Still... frustrating at times, but the hints do work well, and... if you like symbolism and wordplay, you should enjoy this aspect of the game. *** NPCs (B) Well, some of the NPCs were a bit wooden and stiff... (that's a joke only those who have played the game will get). Many of the Others you interact with in this game are not, strictly speaking, people. They have personalities, they speak, they react, but... they're objects. Animate objects. It's quite bizarre. Surreal, even. And I loved the way it was done. Each object had a personality that fit with what it was. Each object had something to say about its surroundings and fellow objects. Sure, it was simple, a closed environment, but that's something you can't say about some games: the NPCs knew about each other and would comment on each other. In fact... it was vital to the game. *** Technical (B) A few little neat tricks gave me reason to up the technical score a bit, despite a couple really nasty disambiguation problems in one section. Specifically, I liked the fact that changing state (due to actions taken) resulted in changing responses (descriptions and reactions), something that takes some time and care and effort to do, and I enjoyed the word-inventory puzzle as a purely interesting technical feat as well as just as a puzzle. It's nice to see a little extra like this. *** Tilt (A+) and Final Thoughts Many people started this game, liked it, and then slowly grew to dislike it. I started out not enjoying the philosophical High Art but grew to appreciate it once I began to see the full shape of things, and aside from an "ick" factor at one point, enjoyed the entire experience. This may say more about me than the game. If you can deal with fiendish (if well-hinted) puzzles, surreal situations, and the sense that you are in an alien landscape -- or if those things outright appeal to you -- this game is worth checking out. Even if that is not your usual bag, the first section is possibly worth taking a look at. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Tina Sikorski TITLE: Guess The Verb! AUTHOR: Leonard Richardson E-MAIL: leonardr SP@G segfault.org DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/guess.z5 VERSION: Release 1 Walkthrough? Yes (in-game) Genre: SpecFic (but see below) +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating B |Submitted Vote 7| |Writing B+|Plot B | |Puzzles C |NPCs C | |Technical C-|Tilt B | +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts When I saw the name of the game, I said, "Oh, no. NOT a joke game!" No. It's not. Well, at times it is (it certainly doesn't take itself too seriously), but it's not the -obvious- joke game. I put this under the category 'Speculative Fiction' (otherwise known as "sf/fantasy") because it contained elements that were (including the initial premise), but I think perhaps it might also fall into the category of "comedy". *** Writing (B+) Any game in which I can read the description of a corn dog and be entertained really has something going for it: >l at corn dog The corn dog is a curious creature. Its life cycle begins when the larval corn dog is cooked and put on a stick. The corn dog is dipped in batter to form a cocoon and fried. Inside the batter cocoon, the baby corn dog metamorphoses into an adult phase which is then purchased, slathered with mustard, and eaten. The rumbling of your stomach tells you that the end is near for this particular corn dog. We will miss you, corn dog. Much of the game's description, even when more serious than this, contains elements of this style. It's clever, it's cute (in the good way), and it is, above all, interesting. I did not bestow an A rating on the writing simply because while it is true that the writing meets my criteria for "good", it never thoroughly immersed me in the experience. This may be a result of the game's style, not a reflection on the author's ability; I don't think we were really -meant- to be immersed. *** Plot (B) Really, this should be "plots", plural; these are several stories tied together solely by method of entry. Perhaps if you complete all the scenarios there is a larger plot revealed, but if so, I did not find it. Certain sections were better than others, but all contained a sort of "Now rejoining your regularly scheduled program in progress" sort of feel at insertion point, which is another interesting way to tie things together. Whether or not this was deliberate is something only the author could answer. Some sections might be more interesting to people than others, as there is quite a range covered by this. *** Puzzles (C) Puzzles were definitely a weak point, not because they were bad but merely because they were tough and at times very difficult to understand the context of. Whether this was a function of the fragmented nature of the plot or the function of poor puzzle design is not something I feel I can judge. I could not solve several of the puzzles, however, and as a result never saw the -complete- version of several of the scenarios, despite the availability of a walkthrough. I think an adaptive hint system would have been a BIG help in this game; I didn't really want to ruin other sections by walkthrough-consulting that forced me to read all of it. *** NPCs (C) We never really seem to see enough of any given NPC for it to feel particularly deep, and there is definitely a problem with non-responsiveness even in the required interactions. *** Technical (C-) There were at least two points in which directions were not bi-directional (which is to say, going east does not result in west returning you to your original point). If this was deliberate, so be it, but if not, I would suggest correcting this. (One occurs getting to and from the area behind the booth, one occurs in the college scenario.) Aside from that, I found no particular bugs and no particular tricks. *** Tilt (B) and Final Thoughts Despite the problems I had with the puzzles and the walkthrough, I did find this an interesting diversion. I think it might be interesting to see some expansion on this game, some more involved scenarios, in a post-comp release that didn't have to fit a 2-hour limit, but even as is the game is worth a look; if nothing else, if you don't get a scenario you like, restoring to right before you choose is easy enough. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Suzanne Britton [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: Kaged AUTHOR: Ian Finley E-MAIL: domokov SP@G aol.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: TADS standard SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/tads/kaged/kaged.gam VERSION: 1 I hope Ian leads a happier life than his protagonists. His games get grimmer every year. "Kaged" is a dystopian tale strongly reminiscent of 1984 (but not derivative). Like just about everything its author has produced, it is strikingly original, evocative, well-written, and suicidally depressing :-) I quite liked it, though it is, in my opinion, not as successful as "Exhibition" or "Babel". It is more ambitious than either of those works, which leads me to be somewhat forgiving of its failures. As a mood piece, "Kaged" is excellent. Every bleak, oppressive nuance of the world you live in comes to life in the vivid writing, enhanced by graphics and sound (the opening picture is especially evocative), and your own character is well-drawn. As a story, it is ambitious, but less excellent. I felt that what began as tightly woven threads unraveled near the end--and not just because of the protagonist's dissolving sanity. I came out of the experience with no real understanding of what had happened and why. Many hints, many seeming contradictions, no certainties. Normally, I like it when a game leaves the player with a mystery, but this was just unsatisfying. It's hard to pinpoint why...perhaps partly because I felt I was expected to understand much more than I did. Certainly, my protagonist seemed to be way ahead of me, and as a result, I felt less connection with him. (Postscript: I've since spoken with Ian, and to some extent "it's intentional". Apparently, his playtesters kept pushing him for more ambiguity. Ah, well.) The programming was also not quite as polished as I've come to expect of this author. Again, it was trying to accomplish more than in earlier works, I think. The world was very fleshed-out, but flawed. I encountered a number of guess-the-verb problems. Perhaps the most egregious was the matchbook. It was lazily (and unintuitively) implemented as a single object, leading me to fumble for awhile before I simply typed "strike match": >get match You already have the book of matches! >get match from matchbook The book of matches isn't in the book of matches. >look in matchbook There's nothing in the book of matches. Rating: 8 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Suzanne Britton [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: Masquerade AUTHOR: Kathleen M. Fischer E-MAIL: mfischer5 SP@G aol.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/mask/mask.z5 VERSION: Release 3 "Masquerade" is an excellent work of story-based IF in a little-used genre (romance, specifically, Civil-War era romance). It is perhaps the most immersive game I've played yet this year. When I started playing, my mind was still spinning with outside thoughts and residual stress. Soon, I became utterly engrossed in the well-sketched gameworld and all else faded to black. The setting is impeccable: no anachronisms or oversights. I truly felt like I was in the 1800's. The protagonist (a feminist before her time) also came across quite strongly, and I enjoyed stepping into the shoes of someone so like and yet unlike me. Though the plot of "Masquerade" is fairly linear, for most of the way, there are several forks in the later parts of the game which lead to different endings based on your decisions. This was a big part of my enjoyment: of the 12 endings, I've found about a third, and am eager to go back and find more after the comp. I was especially pleased that choosing to strike out on your own (sans deed, sans husband) was a valid option, and though the author didn't quite sanction it as a "winning" ending (an odd word to use with story-based IF anyway), the outcome was positive and rewarding (it's my favorite ending of those I found). In that respect, Masquerade is hardly a "genre" romance. In spite of this praise, "Masquerade" didn't quite make my 9-10 bracket. There are several reasons for this. The first is something the author couldn't have done much about: the genre is not my usual cup of tea. I prefer stories with fantastical or SF elements (the story-in-a-story in "Photopia" counts) to straight fiction. The second is implementation: there were enough guess-the-verb and guess-the-action problems to be annoying. This is an especial show-stopper in such a linear game, which often halts your progress entirely, locking you in your current location, until you deal with the matter at hand. Example: "dance with Jonathan". It sounds embarrassingly obvious now, but at the time, I assumed that we would go into the ballroom together, then dance. But "west" returned the stock failure message about Mrs. Stanford being at the door, and this stymied me for a while. Sometimes the problem is syntax, other times it's more a problem of being expected to read the author's mind. I'm not referring to puzzles (of which there are a few), rather cases where what I want to do is obvious, but how to tell the game that is not-so-obvious. Another example: the only way I've found to get Ethan's attention in the train is to "get tickets". Until I've done that, I can't talk to him, touch him, sit with him, or otherwise interact with him. The reason given is fairly lame ("You wouldn't want to be that forward") and doesn't do much to point me in the right direction. Worse, if I flounder around like that for more than a few turns, I'm ejected from the train and it takes off! When the game mechanics worked--and make no mistake, they often did--they worked splendidly. I wended my way through the story in mimetic bliss, barely conscious of the fact that I was typing rather than living out my actions. The tight boundaries of the gameworld remained invisible. But when the mechanics failed, they failed with a loud crunching halt. (One extra positive note on implementation: I was impressed by and appreciative of the many stock message replacements [in fact, I've been impressed that way by several games this year]. E.g., when you type an invalid command: "You mutter something incomprehensible". Or for disambiguation, "You pause to think, or ?") Third: the game sometimes went overboard in limiting my actions. Some of this is acceptable--there are things a 19th-century woman simply does not do--but some of it came across as programming laziness. Whatever the reason, I was disappointed at not being allowed to give Jonathan a good slap! Rating: 8 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Tina Sikorski Walkthrough? No (in-game hints) Genre: Historical Romance +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating B |Submitted Vote 8| |Writing A |Plot B | |Puzzles C |NPCs B | |Technical B |Tilt A+| +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts It's interesting. I'm not a big romance story fan, but I am a fan of historical romance... perhaps because I'm a big fan of historical -anything-. And this story is set in a period that I find fascinating. So right from the start, I was interested. But it wouldn't have held if the game wasn't so extremely well constructed.... *** Writing (A) Simply put, the writing in this story is first-rate. It was descriptive, it was evocative, it was thorough without being wordy, it was fun to read, and best of all, it fit the period the game was set in. If there -were- any errors, they escaped my notice. The example I have in my notes -- which I feel is representative -- is from the interior of a coach: "The coach is richly appointed, with two leather cushioned benches facing each other and a nice clean smell that marks it as either privately owned or an expensive rental. Heavy black drapes have been drawn across the windows, casting the interior in a gloom that precludes close scrutiny of the conveyance or its passenger." As someone who is a big fan of (mostly horror) stories written in the late 1800s, I can say that this actually is the type of writing one encounters in that period, which, not coincidentally, is when this story is set. *** Plot (B) Although I was disappointed with the particular ending I got and once or twice felt that things were a bit forced, the overall story in this is good. It's not simply a boy-meets-girl style romance by any means; the actual initial thrust of the plot (and, in fact, potentially the majority of it) has nothing to do with romance. I think perhaps the complaint some people have of heavily story-driven IF -- notably, if you've been not reading reviews regularly, that maybe they would do better as static IF -- would probably apply here, but as usual, I am not one of those people. There is flexibility here you could not incorporate into a static work, and while the plot advances are an unstoppable force, you can change things a bit by your reactions. *** Puzzles (C) There were a few. They weren't bad. If that seems a bit short, let me a note that I was so captivated by the story I didn't really notice them. I certainly didn't get hung up on them, so that's all that really mattered to me in the end. *** NPCs (B) The NPCs were, for the most part, quite well developed, although at times the interactions with them were a bit too predestined for my taste, hence the "mere" B rating. *** Technical (B) I have to say that this rating is predicated on two particular biases of mine: rich, full, detailed story worlds, and alternate conversational styles (the ask/tell routine is not exactly my favorite, and IMO doesn't work very well in stories like this). The fact that I could >smell stranger ...and get a valid response was worth a lot. Too, the fact that standard library messages were altered to fit the mood and setting was nice. None of this is necessarily -difficult-, but it does take the type of forethought and planning that many people do -not- bring to their games. *** Tilt (A+) and Final Thoughts I found this game so enticing and so thoroughly enjoyable that I intend on playing it again to see what alternate endings I get, and expect that even the parts that repeat will still seem wonderful and fresh. If not for the fact that I like surreal better than I like romance, this would have easily been my favorite of the games I played. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Duncan Stevens TITLE: Metamorphoses AUTHOR: Emily Short E-MAIL: emshort SP@G mindspring.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard (mostly) SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/metamorp.z5 VERSION: Release 2 As has often been noted, there are many difficulties inherent in telling a story through the IF medium, and one of the most-remarked-upon is the difficulty of keeping the player/reader involved (by giving him/her something to do) while still telling the story that the author wants to tell. The solutions usually boil down to relinquishing control of the pace of the story (typically through giving the player puzzles to solve), or avoiding/minimizing the puzzle aspect of IF and sending the player through the story with little opportunity to affect it. Emily Short's Metamorphoses doesn't, exactly, transcend this usual duality in IF design, but it does do some interesting things that help bring the poles together, and it's a wonderfully immersive playing experience. What's going on is hard to pin down, but the heart of it is that you're a slave/servant girl sent on a quest/errand of sorts by your master, with whom you have an uneasy and complicated relationship. The literal content of the quest (to the extent that there is any) disappears as the setting changes: the game is set in a fantasy world of sorts, though it's not quite accurate to call it fantasy. The action, so to speak, lies mostly in the realm of the figurative: you're encouraged (well, I felt encouraged) to view your quest as important more in what it suggests than in what it literally depicts. By the same token, when you encounter puzzles, they have symbolic significance that goes beyond the "acquire the object" goal. (All the more so since it's not immediately obvious why you're acquiring the objects.) Since the plot goes on beneath the surface of the literal action, the game can safely permit the player to do whatever he or she wants with the pace and order of the story, since there isn't really a narrative thread as such that can be broken. For example: one puzzle requires that you give up something familiar to you to advance the story, an act which clearly has its own resonances, and another requires that you transform another familiar object and put it to a novel use. The game comments directly on some of these points but not all--very little is spelled out. The world where all this takes place is only indirectly related to the ordinary physical world, and the relationship parallels other elements in the plot. Idealized forms play an important part: two statues of a man and a woman are described in ways that suggest Greek sculpture, and perfect solids are central to the story. Essences are important as well: virtually every object is made of a single elemental substance (wood, glass, metal, etc.), and you have the power to alter those substances in certain ways. Symmetry is everywhere (in the game's map, and elsewhere as well), and the multiplicity of mirrors suggests the reflection and introspection that are central to the plot. (Likewise, the idealized forms suggest the absolutes that make up the plot.) At the same time, the game's world is sterile, arid: there's nothing particularly warm or welcoming about it, and there's no suggestion that you find it pleasant or comfortable. (Left ambiguous is whether the dryness reflects the protagonist's life as it has been, or represents some hostile reality external to her that she's trying to overcome.) The setting itself tells a story, in other words, in a way not often found in IF. Not only does the setting play a part in the plot, however, but it's also beautifully described, with plenty of arresting imagery--some descriptive, others suggestive. For instance: Dome of Broken Light A straight white light comes through the hole in the ceiling, but it is soon after twisted and bent: mirrors cast it from angle to angle; crystal divides it; glass stains it. The picture is indeterminate: the reader is encouraged to imagine a riot of reflections and refractions. The only perfection here is that of perfect confusion. Here, by contrast: Glass Grove An orchard of glass trees: trunks slender and orderly as the columns of the Alhambra, foliage iridescent and frail. No wind stirs, and yet, from time to time, a leaf casts free of its branch and drifts to the ground. The whole floor of the cavern is deep with them. The image is more concrete: "iridescent and frail" conveys both the beauty and the sterility of the game's world. The writing also underscores the contrasts between the two locations: the (relative) activity of the first is reflected by the active verbs ("mirrors cast," "crystal divides," "glass stains"), whereas the aridity of the second is suggested by the intransitive verbs ("casts free," "drifts", "is deep"--and the first sentence has no verbs at all). Most of the writing is spare, like the game itself--you eventually learn some things about yourself, your past, and how you came to be in your present position, but the snippets are small indeed. What's there, however, is well worth reading. Metamorphoses does an impressively nuanced job of worldbuilding, in short, but what's noteworthy is that the gameplay is nearly as good. The puzzles feel reasonably novel, due mostly to the transmutation/magnification machines you're given and which figure in all the puzzles. The technical aspect is impressive--the objects by and large do what they're supposed to do when transmuted or enlarged or shrunk, and they interact with each other in plausible ways, nothing to sneeze at considering the complexity involved. Moreover, there are plenty of multiple solutions that draw on the various qualities of the objects whose size and essence you can alter, which makes the puzzles flow by fairly quickly. (This is not, in other words, a "guess what the author's thinking" sort of game, at least not when it comes to puzzle solutions.) Not every object in every state and size gets a customized description, of course, but everything behaves sensibly enough. Metamorphoses is not a flawless effort--some of its design choices risk leaving the player cold in certain respects. In particular, the game leaves so much about the protagonist ambiguous for so long that it's difficult to connect to her emotionally. Some of the most emotional experiences for the protagonist come early enough in the story that the player is unlikely to be as strongly affected as he or she might be with some more setup and explanation. As always, the tradeoff between story and puzzle raises the possibility that the player will forget about the story amid all the mechanical fiddling (particularly here, where there's so much fiddling to do)--the puzzles are reasonably well integrated into the story, for the most part, but most of the plot is sufficiently abstract that it's easy to lose sight of what's supposed to be going on. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there are a lot of endings to Metamorphoses, and many of them don't provide much resolution in any obvious way; finding an end to the story that adequately brings the various threads together may take a while for some players. In a way, that works here; it reflects the general bleakness of the game's world that the end of the story doesn't tie up all the loose ends or furnish an especially satisfying conclusion. The game aspect, however, demands some sort of conclusion, whether optimal or not, and only a few of the endings offer real conclusions as such. These drawbacks are to some extent inherent in what Metamorphoses appears to be trying to do, though; tastes on what constitutes a satisfying game experience differ--and the latitude for experimentation provided by the machines helps make up for any other problems. For my part, the setting itself was enough to make this the only 10 of this year's competition (and the only one I've given since 1997)--as worldbuilding, this is a triumph. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Duncan Stevens TITLE: My Angel AUTHOR: Jon Ingold E-MAIL: ji207 SP@G cam.ac.uk DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard (mostly) SUPPORTS: Most z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/my_angel/my_angel.z5 VERSION: Release 1 The unusual approach to formatting that Jon Ingold's My Angel adopts is the most obvious of its innovations, but in some ways it's the least interesting. What works about this story works whether or not the text is formatted in the conventional way or not. The game calls the innovation NOVEL mode, and it's a nov--er, it's a creative idea: your input is moved up to a status line and most of the program's output occupies the main part of the screen. Parser messages ("there's no such object here" and such) are also on the status line. The paragraphing on the main part of the screen is handled fairly well--most of the breaks are logical--so the output does, in most respects, actually resemble a story written in the first person. It seems, however, that the main effect would be on the appearance of the transcript, rather than on the player's experience: the player is still getting the parser messages, and if they're illogical or indicate bad programming (failing to recognize a seemingly important object or failing to understand a logical action), the effect on the player is still to wrench him or her out of the flow of the story. Put another way, it appears that another well-done game that strives to accommodate all logical approaches would work just as well if given a similar treatment--the point is to minimize those parser messages. (I've certainly never heard anyone complain that having the input lines right there in the middle of the output breaks the feel of the story, but maybe I haven't been listening.) There's also a distraction factor--whenever you do get a parser message and no output appears at the bottom of the main screen, you need to look back up at the status line, which takes some adjustment. (To be fair, the game also gives the option of NORMAL mode, in which the output is standard alternating-input-and-output, so if the looking back and forth drives you nuts, you're not required to put up with it.) I suspect that, eventually, it wouldn't feel any less unnatural than having the input lines and parser messages right in the middle of everything, but it's fairly jarring at first. The point isn't that NOVEL mode is a bad idea--it's clever in its way. I'm just not convinced that it advances the state of the art much, if at all. There's more to My Angel than the formatting, fortunately, and the reason it works as a story has very little to do with the appearance of the transcript. The story flips back and forth between the main thread and some flashback sequences in a reasonably seamless way, and you can actually interact with the characters and objects in the flashback sequences. Technically, of course, that has the potential to make no sense, but the game manages to limit your options to assure that it controls what actually happens in the flashback sequences while still providing more interactivity than a simple cut scene. Moreover, since you only get a few moves in each flashback sequence, and there's more than a few moves' worth of exploration in each one, there's some replay potential here. The one aspect of the story that suffers, however, is that it's easy to get confused about what exactly happened in the flashbacks--the game throws several names and relationships at you and essentially expects you to keep them straight (if you want to understand what really happened at the end). The flashback approach can, in fact, work well in IF, but there's also an inherent disadvantage that static fiction doesn't pose--it's harder to flip back to an earlier moment to check on details that you missed the first time around. Simplicity is key, and the flashbacks in My Angel are complex enough to push the envelope. (Babel, by way of contrast, solves this problem by allowing the player to access the flashbacks repeatedly and at will.) The relationship at the core of the story is also nicely done with an interesting innovation: you and your companion are telepaths, it seems, and THINK ABOUT object lets you know her take on that object and often triggers a series of brief communications about the object or associated ideas. The effect is sometimes akin to having two PCs rather than one, all the more so because the character of the main PC isn't especially well developed--you don't get much of his personality, just his experiences. The PC's thoughts tend to be bound up with his companion's thoughts, in other words, so the player rarely sees either person thinking or acting independently. As a result, most of the game unfolds as if there were one mind in two bodies, and when the two are apart--as they are for roughly the last half of the story--the PC and, consequently, the player feel bereft, incomplete. The telepathic interactions don't only come when invited by THINK ABOUT, of course--they're interjected at all sorts of moments, and the two characters comment back and forth on the other's thoughts. It's a trick that works particularly well in IF, since the player isn't necessarily expecting to find a PC with a persona that's distinct from the player's. The indistinctness is here, but it's on another front. The game aspect isn't a total success, however. Some of the puzzles reflect the story well--your telepathy plays into them in more or less logical ways--but others just feel like puzzles. The game refers to them as "optional," but I'm not sure why--it appears to me that the story won't progress to its ending if the puzzles aren't solved. They're not fiendishly difficult, but they're not blindingly obvious either, and one in particular seems rather improbable (or turns on a object property that's inadequately described). More importantly, they make the flow of the story feel uneven, since large chunks of the story go by independent of your input. For instance, there are several sequences of moves where you're traveling, and while you can interact with the scenery as you go by, you can't stop the movement. This actually works fairly well--it's a good balance between keeping the story moving and letting you poke and prod things--but when you get to the points where the story stops until you solve the puzzle, the story loses some of its pace. Usually, it's not so bad--since the first several puzzles aren't all that hard--but the more difficult puzzles break the mood by bringing everything to a halt. The writing, for its part, is solid, good enough not to get in the way, though it does occasionally lurch into total abstraction at times when the player simply wants to know what's going on. I suppose that fits the telepathy theme--thoughts don't lend themselves to description, and experiences whose most important features are the shared thoughts between you and your companion will inevitably be a little abstract--but it's also frustrating. A sample: The centre of the stone twists around, and it flares with a pulsing light - or does it, maybe I see this only in my head, my eyes seem nothing to do with it. It is talking to me, gibbering, squawking. No - the speech goes beyond me, beyond her, it is talking to the distance, to the air. There is a shriek that tells us "HEAR-SPEAK" and then my eyes cease to function totally and all I am aware of is the black, and Angela there in my mind like an aura. Unbidden, shapes loom up from the blackness; things I have blotted and forgotten pull at me, whispering. This is called synesthesia--using sensory language, but associated with the "wrong" sense--and while it's a good attention-getting device, only the most determined readers will actually manage to feel like they're still in the character's shoes; the rest are relegated to observer status. After a brief flashback, you get this: Then slowly, fades light back in. The clearing still, we inside are - my mind still spins - the clearing. By the stone, as though a fruit dangling from the elm-tree's bent branch, is a darkness. Darkness is made an object. Darkness is present, as a - gap - in what is. A rift, as though the wind itself were riven. Light falls into it and will not return. Angela pictures a passage, passage itself. This is nicely poetic writing, but it comes at an unfortunate point; Something Has Happened, and the player (this player, at least) doesn't want to hear about how the darkness is like a fruit dangling from an elm-tree. The effect is murkiness to no real purpose--at least, no purpose that I could discern, because what's there is very much there; it's not as if the abstract language refers to something that only exists in the abstract. Much of the game avoids this sort of thing--the shared thoughts are usually exchanged in terms of images that the player can grapple with--but there are some unfortunate moments at the end when the game loses some of its grip, so to speak. Still, in a competition well-populated by games with flaws much more significant than insufficiently concrete writing, it's not exactly fair to criticize My Angel too harshly on those terms. It's a well-told story that manages to keep the player involved, mostly, and I gave it an 8. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Duncan Stevens TITLE: Nevermore AUTHOR: Nate Cull E-MAIL: culln SP@G xtra.co.nz DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/never/never.z5 VERSION: Release 10 Literary adaptation is an underpopulated IF genre, and Nate Cull's Nevermore is a thoughtful and well-intentioned attempt at bringing Poe's "The Raven" to the world of IF. While what emerges isn't a bad game, it's less the poem than a series of events in a similar setting with a somewhat similar mood, In other words, if you're a particular fan of the poem, you might not well not be a fan of this game. As it happens, I committed "The Raven" to memory when I was in seventh grade or so, and I still like the poem even though I've somewhat belatedly realized that it's not a very good poem. (It's been said that the popularity of Poe's poems varies inversely with their quality, and while that's not strictly true--he wrote some lousy poems that remain thoroughly obscure--the three Poe poems that are probably the best known, "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and "The Bells", are far from his best.) That is, I like it despite its repetitiveness and its tendency to use 20 words when two or three would do, simply because I like the drama of it. No one would ever call "The Highwayman" a great poem, but it's definitely a good ghost story in verse form that's well suited for being read aloud; ditto, I think, for "The Raven," and I still enjoy being able to recite it--and "The Highwayman" and others--from memory. So when I saw the initial premise of Nevermore, my first reaction was something between "Cool!" and disappointment that I hadn't gotten there first, because it was an idea I'd been kicking around (very casually). And when I saw that the game was using snippets from the poem but not binding the player to the text, I said, aha, perfect--use the poem's story, its strong point, but don't bind us to the text, which isn't its strong point. Just use the text for echo effect. It was about five moves into the game that the author's vision of the poem diverged from mine, however, and it continued to diverge more and more over the course of the game. This, in a sense, is good: had the author felt constrained not to offend fellow fans of the poem and slavishly followed the text, the result wouldn't have been much different from reading the text itself. But I had such a hard time squaring the author's vision with mine that before long I simply forgot the origin of the game and no longer associated it with my mental images of the setting as portrayed in the poem; it was just, in other words, another comp entry. This is partly because the plot of Nevermore involves elements like alchemy, pagan rituals, and lots of drugs, and it would have been an odd coincidence if both the author and I had imagined those things as part of a more fleshed-out story--but it's more that the mood differed from the mood as I imagined it. To take one among many examples, the protagonist of Nevermore takes cocaine approximately every 20 moves; if you don't, you're told that "a dull, dark weariness drifts over you," which leads to death in a few moves if not corrected with cocaine (at which point "a sense of raw alertness rushes through your nerves, setting them all on edge"). It's certainly not implausible to view the mood of the poem's subject as more generally consistent with "a dull, dark weariness" than a cocaine-fueled "raw alertness," though--I mean, it's a pretty melancholy poem--and I simply couldn't fit the protagonist of Nevermore into my preconceived image. (Well, okay, the poem's subject summons up some energy toward the end, but there's an obvious cause that isn't cocaine.) In short, the author has his own rather distinctive vision of who the protagonist is and what the poem's about, and Your Mileage May Vary. All that aside, the game works reasonably well, though it's not flawless. The cocaine habit mentioned about doesn't add much to the game, and it recurs frequently enough to be irritating after a while. The puzzles also depend on a set of books that you're required to read, while is fine except that (a) the snippets in the books are randomized, so it's possible to miss one even if you've seen all the other snippets twice or more, and (b) the snippets are written in a sort of pseudo-medieval English that takes an awful lot of work to make sense of. (Impenetrable poetry I can deal with; impenetrable puzzle-solving instructions are more of a problem.) It's also easy to push the game into unwinnable states, and though there's a WINNABLE command (which informs you whether the game is presently in such a state), I would have preferred game design that simply makes it a little harder to screw up (or, better, is more forgiving when you do screw up). The opacity of the instructions also had me stumped for a while toward the end--it turned out that I'd left out a key step in the puzzle-solving and hadn't realized it (and there aren't really contextual hints that could suggest what you might have done wrong). This is sounding more negative than I mean to be, because there were parts of Nevermore that I genuinely enjoyed. The ending, for one thing, is terrific--dark and dripping with irony. (In that respect, quite faithful to Poe himself.) Some of the action turns on flashbacks, which also struck me as genuinely Poeish--a protagonist for whom the past is more real than the present absolutely belongs in this game. The writing is strong--economical and atmospheric--and the box quotes from Edgar are nicely placed (though, curiously, the last and most dramatic part of the poem is largely absent). The personality of the protagonist even felt right--an odd mix of sentimentality and obsessiveness. Nevermore does a lot of things right, and you could argue that it did as well as any work of IF could do in adapting this particular poem; it's certainly a worthy attempt. Through no fault of the game, however, it didn't really connect with me, and I gave it a 7 in the competition. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Tina Sikorski TITLE: 1-2-3... AUTHOR: Chris Mudd E-MAIL: muddchris SP@G netscape.net DATE: 2000 PARSER: TADS standard SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/123/1-2-3.z5 VERSION: Release 1 Walkthrough? Yes Genre: Psychological Drama +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating C |Submitted Vote 6| |Writing C |Plot C+| |Puzzles D+|NPCs D+| |Technical C |Tilt B-| +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts Okay, I know that some people thought this was terrible, that some were completely turned off by the very idea, that there were definitely problems (yes, even I agree) with implementation, and that it may qualify as the most controversial entry in the comp. But damn it, I liked the idea, and I gave it a 6 because despite the flaws I want to encourage people to continue to work in this genre. *** Writing (C) Yes, there were some really bad spots in the writing. I will agree fully with anyone who says that. In particular, the conversational style was really irritating (but that's really more a technical flaw). But the game did do a good job on several occasions of evoking the inner mind of the psychopath, and that's something that I enjoyed. One of my favorite bits is early on: >l at me What you see disturbs you, but there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- you can do about it. Something has clicked within you. Your time is now. With two short lines, the game lets you know that something very odd is going on, and that the person you are playing feels helpless to stop it. It, along with the first room description in the game, though both very short, give you chilling atmosphere, a hint to plot, and a bit of mystery and intrigue all at once. -That- is part of why I rated the game more highly than many other reviewers did, and why I thought it showed such potential. Alas, I will be the first to admit that some of this potential went to waste, but I do think the game showed promise. If only the conversational style had lived up to these initial descriptions, I would have rated it far more highly in this category at least. I would like to encourage the author, however, to continue developing and honing that skill, learning to apply it to other portions of the writing. I think that with some practice, some damn fine games could result. *** Plot (C+) Understand that this score is predicated more on what I felt the author was -trying- to do than on the actual execution. Had it been executed properly... well, I suspect had it been executed properly, fewer people would have been quite so down on the game. After all, movies like _Seven_ and _Silence of the Lambs_ and _Kiss the Girls_ are -very- popular. More than that, I would have probably been in love with the game; serial killer stories, particularly ones that attempt to delve into the mind of the killer, fascinate me. The two biggest plot-related flaws were both predicated on timing: the actual flow of the game (chock full of nose-leading) and the conversational style, the latter of which I will expand on under NPCs. No doubt about it, the execution of the pieces of the story left something to be desired. While I truly enjoyed the perspective shifts, the method of revealing the storyline was haphazard, seemed unconnected to the player actions to a great degree, and was, in a word, 'choppy'. I found myself unable to determine 'what to do next' until I realized that basically the answer was 'talk to people and wait for scene changes'. This works for some games, and it probably even could have worked for this one, but the attempt to drive the player this way really -did- feel like an attempt to 'drive' the player. I would hesitate to do more than speculate, but I wonder if perhaps the author has written static fiction and was trying to convert it to an IF format; it has that feel to it. In summary: Good idea that I'd like to see better developed. *** Puzzles (D+) Really, there weren't any to speak of, except for conversational choice puzzles. I found to be 'take woman' fairly obvious given the inner monologue before then, and of course, every veteran IF player knows to always check the fridge. That's about it... *** NPCs (D+) The conversational style was, in a word, painful. We are not talking about "I dropped a brick on my toe" painful or even "I just gave birth to a 10 lb child" painful (unless you are a male, in which case we may be). We are talking about "I just had every inch of my skin scoured by sandpaper" painful. So, as you can see, I did in fact have a bad opinion of a portion of this game. So, by now, almost everyone who has played this game or read a review has commented on "Don't you want to ask me about her breasts?" Therefore, I see no need to revisit that line. What I -would- like to focus on is the following exchange, which I think fully illustrates my problem (and most other folks') with the conversation system: > ask him about woman He smiles an empathetic smile. "Don't you want to ask me about the victim, Riessa?" he asks. Yes. that's why I said 'woman'. She was a woman. Yes? Synonyms are very, very much your friend. They are quite useful. I will grant that the higher the synonym count, the higher the chance of a disambiguation problem, but in this case I don't believe it applies -- or even if it does, I think it could have been handled far more gracefully than it was. Forcing the player to word questions a very, very precise way (such as the worst example, "ASK HIM ABOUT WHEN HE THINKS THE MURDERER WILL STRIKE AGAIN") with very little in the way of a good feedback system (hint: telling me precisely how to phrase it really isn't a good feedback system, honest) is a very, very annoying choice, and should be discarded and replaced with something else, even if that 'something else' is a menu of questions, something that would not be my -first- choice for this particular type of game but which would have been a serious improvement under the circumstances. Since the game is driven by completing conversations, this presents even more of a problem than it looks like on the first glance; you simply can't go somewhere else and do something (that choice isn't available) and then come back when you have a new idea. I suspect this lay at the heart of many folks' frustration with this entry. *** Technical (C) I found no bugs; the only real flaw was conversation-style related. Character and location switching is not a terribly impressive trick but it at least took a bit of forethought. *** Tilt (B-) and Final Thoughts As I mentioned above, I really do enjoy serial killer stories, and really think that this game has potential. With some reworking of the conversational style, a bit more depth to the world and the people, and perhaps a slightly longer path to the solution, I think it could have been a solid game. Perhaps not to everyone's taste, but then, what is? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Matthew Clemson [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: Planet Of The Infinite Minds AUTHOR: Alfredo Garcia E-MAIL: Five-0 SP@G oceanfree.net DATE: 2000 PARSER: TADS standard SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/tads/planmind/planmind.gam VERSION: 1 Er. Um. It's... odd, there's no denying that. It's generally bug-and-typo free, but it's resoundingly... odd. It's what I'd imagine a Rybread Celsius game to be like if it was done, well, right. Some great puzzles, although there's rather a lot of guess-the-author's-mind - I had to use hints several times - we're back to the oddness again; indeed, parts of it kept reminding me of Nord and Bert. Indeed, like N&B, it's at times laugh-out-loud funny - the problems relating to the end of the universe spring to mind. Some puzzles, OTOH, are really ingenious, although they are, again, sometimes let down by the guess-the-author's-thoughts aspects; I particularly (gasp) *enjoyed the maze*; it was a different approach to any I'd known, and worked well. Mind you, most people would argue that it's not a maze :-). There was one puzzle towards the end which was a little out-of-sorts, though; and the author admits it in the walkthrough. All-in-all, I didn't dock a point for it, since I enjoyed the rest of the game so much; other people might be tempted to, and I'd understand it if they did. In retrospect, looking at the walkthrough, it's at least nice that they allowed a cleaner verb than the one I actually used, which probably says more about my mind than that of the author :-) It's a little too enthusiastic with 'last lousy points', but they do seem at least vaguely logical; OTOH, the entire response to Xyzzy is a whole new and intelligent approach that I've not encountered before. I didn't enjoy the game from the challenge and puzzle aspect - but from the entertainment aspect, I was enthralled. Rating: 7 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Tina Sikorski Walkthrough? Yes Genre: Speculative Fiction +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating A-|Submitted Vote 9| |Writing A |Plot B+| |Puzzles B |NPCs B | |Technical B |Tilt A-| +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts I'm definitely not the only person who liked this game, but I may be the only person who did not find the library puzzle baffling.... *** Writing (A) The thing is, the writing was really funny. It wasn't actually as perfectly technically executed as my letter grade might imply; there were awkward turns of phrase here and there and the occasional misuse of punctuation. But it was very, very funny. One of my favorite bits (quite far into the game): "All at once you enter the chimney with a sound that can only be described as a Floop. All around is darkness. Then, with a Binco-diddy-diddy you career downwards through metal ledges and wire meshes. There is a resonating Ting as your body crashes against a curve in the pipe. You slide downward at this angle towards light. The light becomes brighter and brighter until it finally engulfs you, as you shoot out of a large fireplace and into a tasteful room." The subtitle of this game is "an interactive farce", and the author is not kidding. It doesn't take itself seriously. It doesn't take you seriously. It certainly doesn't take the protagonist or the NPCs seriously. Funny. *** Plot (B+) It's surreal, but it's cohesive... and that's a neat trick. Sort of a cross between 1950s sf, a physics major's worst nightmares (I'm betting the author is or was a physics major), and a comedy (well, it DID say 'farce'), the basic plot is... nearly incomprehensible, yet, strangely appealing, much like the sideshow freaks at a circus. Watching it unfold is somewhat akin to watching that guy in the sideshow who does terrible things to his own body: you wince, but you watch anyhow because it's fascinating, and you wonder how it's done. Whether or not the ultimate conclusion makes any sense isn't the point. The point is, it's fun to watch the progress. *** Puzzles (B) Some people found the puzzles baffling, inaccessible, incomprehensible on several levels. I used the walkthrough a lot myself. But they do make sense, and they contain an element of originality... ...and this game has, hands down, my favorite puzzle of the comp. It may not actually have been terribly original, but I don't recall having seen a puzzle quite like it before. Without giving away too much, there is a point at which you have a certain set of objects, and you must manipulate your environment such to match those objects. I found one of the things necessary to do this nearly impossible to figure out, but the rest was definitely a fun exercise. There was a puzzle at the end I found mildly objectionable, but it was obnoxious in a way some people might find funny. It involved a toilet. *** NPCs (B) You don't actually have a lot of control over your interaction with the NPCs, but for some reason this did not bother me. I actually found the characters (or, perhaps, caricatures) rather interesting, particularly one repeating encounter... poor man. I think most important is that they provided color that went well with the rest of the game. *** Technical (B) The aforementioned favorite puzzle, something I thought was a pretty good coding trick, was worth an extra point or two in technical score. I found no noticeable bugs. *** Tilt (A-) and Final Thoughts It's possible I enjoyed this game as much as I did because I used to make a career out of baiting my physics-major ex-boyfriend. (I used to tell him that physicists were just guessing anyhow, for instance.) Or maybe it's just that I have a soft place in my heart for 1950s bad science movies. But I think even without those biases, I would probably have found the game very amusing. Given the existence of the walkthrough for people stuck on the admittedly not always straightforward puzzles, I think I would recommend this to nearly everyone with a sense of humor. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Duncan Stevens TITLE: Rameses AUTHOR: Stephen Bond E-MAIL: stephenbond SP@G ireland.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/rameses.z5 VERSION: Release 2 If you'd asked me before this year's competition began to envision a game whose lack of interactivity was among its primary virtues, I'd have had trouble coming up with an example. My imagination is clearly lacking, however, because Stephen Bond's Rameses is just such a game, one that uses the player's inability to interact (in part) to tell its story. It's an interesting concept that's well implemented here. Rameses is a tale of adolescence, which, for those who remember last year's A Moment of Hope, isn't necessarily a good sign; making the trials of adolescence compelling to those of us who are no longer in that stage is not easy. But Rameses manages to find the balance between turning the trials in question into melodrama (by exaggerating them) and making them too trivial to be compelling. Specifically, you're a teenager at a boarding school, enduring your two unpleasant roommates and your own homesickness, or something akin to it--and the roommates aren't monsters, they're just obnoxious. Nor is your character a misunderstood saint--he's flawed in many respects. The protagonist manages to elicit the player's sympathy despite (or perhaps because of) the game's refusal to demand such sympathy. How? Several ways. First, much of Rameses consists of conversation (in a menu format)--and for long stretches of the conversation, your character's head is bursting with things to say (as evidenced by the menu), and yet he never says any of the things. There are always explanations, of course, some of them plausible--nasty insults are withdrawn with something akin to "You'd rather not start a fight right now"--but what emerges is a striking portrait of frustration, of a bottled-up character. It's not, exactly, that he's bottled up by circumstances, by the Awful Consequences Of His Oppressive Life; that would push it into melodrama, and this isn't melodramatic. It's more a picture of a highly inarticulate character whose fear of expressing himself borders on the neurotic, and drawing out that inarticulateness by trying a range of conversational options (from the polite to the highly antisocial), only to have the character reject all of them, is a nicely done depiction of the character. (It's not exactly inarticulateness--what's in your head is often quite well put--it's more a fear of expressing oneself, for which there's no concise term that I know. So I'm calling it inarticulateness.) There's more to the character than unwillingness to talk, though--there's also a healthy dollop of insecurity. A date of sorts is imminent, and your character is terrified and would like nothing more than to get out of it--he simply doesn't feel ready for that particular aspect of adolescence. Most of that particular hangup is captured in a monologue, but the date itself brings it alive as well: you're with two girls, and you're at a loss, for turn after turn, for anything to say to them. The few things you do manage to come up with only highlight the general futility of the exercise. If there's a better way to make an IF player feel frustrated and inarticulate than giving him TALK TO as a conversation option and consistently giving him no menu options, I can't imagine what it would be. In those respects, then, preventing the player from interacting is one of the story's greatest accomplishments. Equally effective for different reasons is the portrayal of the protagonist's relationship with a boyhood friend named Daniel, a relationship left behind in the trip to boarding school. The friendship seems to represent for the protagonist a more secure and less intimidating world. In particular, the protagonist appears to have been able to communicate with Daniel easily, naturally, and the interactions depicted (in the PC's memory) stand in contrast to the rest of his interactions, most of which amount to awkward mumbling. Naturally, however, one of the PC's main frustrations is that he's received a letter from Daniel, and he can't seem to put the words together to respond: God, I tried so often to write that letter. Practically every night I would stare at a page that was blank except for the words "Dear Daniel" at the top. I just couldn't think of anything to say. "Just be yourself," I kept thinking, "And write down whatever comes into your head." But nothing came into my head. A few weeks passed, and I still hadn't written a reply. And then I couldn't think of any excuses for my lateness. The longer it went on, the more ashamed I became about the delay, and the harder it was to write. I must have read and re- read Daniel's letter fifty times, looking for inspiration. I still have that letter. I still haven't replied. The writing, here and elsewhere, is unspectacular but effective--too elegant or too creative turns of phrase would cast the PC's professed inability to express himself in a strange light. One particularly well done passage conveys the PC's sudden mood swing: Quay Everything here is so peaceful, so beautiful - why have I never noticed it before? Raindrops dance on the river bay beneath my feet. Seagulls play in the air above me. Old fishing boats sway gently with the lapping of the water. And the air - I always thought the salt air was foul before, but now it seems so fresh, so clean, so pure! Quay The quay must be the most miserable place in the whole town, especially when the rain is pissing down like it is now. Beneath my feet, the rain-pelted river flows like sludge, which probably has something to do with all the raw effluent that's pumped into it. The smell, needless to say, is truly nauseating. A handful of rusty old boats lie abandoned against the quay wall, and seagulls scream overhead. The first passage might seem saccharine out of context, but it works as a contrast with the PC's generally gloomy outlook, and the second passage likewise works as a return to the status quo. The game is well-written enough that painful moments for the PC aren't painful to read, hardly a given. To add to the feeling of impotence, there's a scene in which two of his three roommates are picking on the third, and the PC (despite the player's urgings, of course) fails to step in, lamely explaining (internally) that "it's no use." Here, there's a variant on the nonconversational theme--your character will speak up, but only to say things that make things even worse (joining in the mockery of the third roommate, in other words)--and after the scene is over the PC addresses the player directly, explaining that the roommate's gratitude would have been too great a burden to bear. The scene brings out the ramifications of the PC's repressed nature--by not saying anything he hurts others as well as himself--and prevents the player from feeling too much sympathy for the PC. Nor does the player feel particularly complicit in the PC's cowardice, since the player can try all he or she wants to help out the hapless third roommate; the game trades complicity for imprisonment in the PC's neuroses. Whether it's a good trade is, of course, a matter of taste. Most of the action, such as it is, in Rameses is internal to the character, and even then very little of it actually constitutes action--in a sense, the player spends most of the game getting to know the PC, and the only significant thing that happens, as far as the PC is concerned, comes at the very end. Moreover, there's virtually no deviation possible in the course of the game; replays can provide more information, in the form of conversation (or non-conversation) options that weren't exercised before or people that weren't EXAMINEd, but not a tremendous amount, and the course of the story won't change at all. As mentioned, that usually indicates to me that the story would work better as static fiction--but the tension between player and PC sets up its own kind of interaction that makes this a surprisingly successful game. Rameses is certainly not to everyone's tastes; there are no puzzles, and the experience of playing it is more frustrating than fulfilling. But it's a sufficiently clever experiment that I gave it a 9 in this year's competition. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Tina Sikorski Walkthrough? No Genre: Slice-of-life +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating B |Submitted Vote 7| |Writing B |Plot B | |Puzzles n/a|NPCs B | |Technical C+|Tilt B-| +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts Puzzleless IF seems to be gaining in popularity at least insofar as the comp goes; CYOA and almost entirely conversational-driven works account for a fairly significant percentage of this year's crop. Alternate view styles (from the traditional 2nd person) are also gaining in popularity, although perhaps not to the same degree. Games with these styles tend to see a fairly wide range of scores, and often some hot debate. This game goes a step further: the protagonist is not only presented with a different viewpoint (first-person) in a puzzleless environment, but sometimes outright refuses to do what the player tells him to. This ended up producing some fairly interesting and diverse commentary amongst other reviewers and players. How well did it work? Well, applying the same standards to it I apply to other games, it rated a solid B from me, so perhaps well. But let's move on to some categorical comments... *** Writing (B) The writing is solid and has a lot of character -- in some places, possibly a wee bit too much character. Still, as in several other offerings this year, the style fit perfectly the mood and environs. It reads, to my mind, something like those TV shows where a character chooses to narrate the goings-on would were they in a written format, a trick that works with the right characters and situations... which this game has. The opening -- perhaps not in retrospect surprising -- reminds me highly of Trainspotting, a movie which I admit to having enjoyed a great deal. I say 'perhaps not surprising' because it has a similar regional feel throughout; not precisely the same, but certainly reminiscent. Much of the description contains interesting little editorials, a definite plus in a game written in first-person. "Here I see a blah" is a temptation that would probably be easy to succumb to in such a case; this game does not suffer from it. Instead, we have this lovely opener: "With horror I realise that I'll have to spend another day in St. Enda's college. A familiar fact I have to face each morning - but four years here have not made it any easier to face. St. Enda's - how I have come to despise this place. A decrepit old red-brick shagpile which has become the focal point of this filthy little town in the arse-end of nowhere. The cheapest boarding school in the country, probably, but also surely the most pompous and inflated. A haven for the worst kind of social climbers, parvenus, thick, ignorant farmers' sons..." And this is not the only room in which this happens. Descriptions are definitely colored throughout with commentary (although not always), and indeed, that's just how a first-person game should be done. *** Plot (B) On the surface, this is just another school game. In reality, it's a meandering through the mind of someone who does not like his life, his surroundings, the people he deals with, and, most especially, himself. It is something many works are not: it's realistic. Teens are like this. Not all teens, sure, and certainly not always to this extreme, but it is likewise certainly not unheard of. I don't end up with much sympathy for the schmoe in the game. He is, as he admits himself, an asshole, and a bit of a whiner to boot. Yet, it feels right for him to be this way. There is a holy-grail aspect to the game as well: The missing friend, Daniel. Was everything better when our protagonist was younger? Or does he just think that anything would be better than now? And, of course, there's a girl -- wouldn't there have to be? The ultimate ending (or, as someone hinted at, endingS) is not much of a resolution, when you come right down to it, but then, isn't that true of everyone's life? Not everyone lives happily ever after. *** Puzzles (n/a) Although I believe there are a few choices one can make that subtly or otherwise alter the game, there are no puzzles to speak of; I chose, therefore, to not rate what did not exist. *** NPCs (B) The conversational style is juvenile, which is not surprising in a game about, well, juveniles. If it were adult, it would be entirely too Dawson's Creek for me (a show I watched precisely once). But it never seems to be juvenile simply for the sake of being juvenile; rather, it is juvenile simply because it is. Are the characters believable? Yes, and no. I -have- seen such stereotypes wandering the landscape, particularly in that stage of life, but they do seem to acquire the level of 'caricature' at times. But perhaps this is simply because they're seen through the eyes of someone who is inclined to emphasize faults as one more away of painting his own life as shitty. Perhaps the only reason I did not end up giving this an even higher rating is simply because your interaction with them is so limited in many ways. *** Technical (C+) I enjoy alternate conversational styles, as I mention elsewhere in my reviews. Aside from that, there is nothing special to speak of. *** Tilt (B-) and Final Thoughts I think this stands on its own merits as a good game -- or at least, a good work of IF, if not a 'game' per se -- but let me revisit the complaint some people had about the refusal of the protagonist to perform certain actions. I do not feel that this is unique. I think this work is just more obvious about it. For instance, in most games there are dozens of actions closed off to the player by what the designer did and did not implement. Some of these are simply shortcuts to saying "that won't work". Some of them are deliberate choices to only implement a single solution to a puzzle (and some are less deliberate). If an author decides to say "this action won't work", how is that terribly different from the -protagonist- saying the same thing? I think it is not. I submit that particularly given the premise of this game, it makes perfect sense for these actions to be closed off not by author fiat but by the protagonist's own inability. If anything, I conclude that this is an additional bit of stylistic brilliance. I will admit to having in my notes the following: -Hah. "I can't believe I said that. Why did you make me say that?" -Well, because everything else I was trying to say you turned down the -chance to say? But that was, in the end, part of the game's appeal. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Tina Sikorski TITLE: Shade AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin E-MAIL: erkyrath SP@G eblong.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/shade.z5 VERSION: Release 2 Walkthrough? No (hints) Genre: Surreal +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating A |Submitted Vote 9| |Writing A |Plot B+| |Puzzles C+|NPCs n/a| |Technical C+|Tilt A+| +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts Mmm. Games that aren't what they seem at first. Except that this one, I already had a feeling wasn't going to be what it was presented at first, simply from the quality. I have to say, with all due respect to Zarf, that I was a bit surprised to discover he was the author; I generally don't enjoy his games this much simply because his puzzles are usually beyond me. That is just not a problem in this game. It will be very difficult for me to discuss this game without revealing spoilers, I'm afraid; I'll try to keep it to a minimum. *** Writing (A) First-rate, and from the opening paragraphs I was nearly certain that the pseudonymous author was someone with prior experience. I never formed a solid opinion about the potential author -- I'm actually not very good at such things in any event -- but I was sure it would turn out to be someone whose name I recognized. Consider, if you will, this bit of description: "Odd, how the light just makes your apartment gloomier. Pre-dawn darkness pools in the corners and around the tops of walls. Your desk lamp glares yellow, but the shadows only draw your eyes and deepen." This is something well-crafted. Without getting terribly verbose, it reveals information, sets mood, and (though you don't yet know it) also firmly sets the plot in motion. Light and darkness are important in this game (or at least certainly in my view of the game), and they definitely are properly introduced in the first paragraph. Beyond that, I could continue to quote, but why ruin your chance to see the writing develop? The writing is excellent, details abound even where strictly speaking unnecessary, and responses to your actions are superb. *** Plot (B+) This is the thing that is so hard to discuss without giving anything away, because it is on the one hand so terribly simple, but on the other, there are some twists. Perhaps one of the most interesting parts is that there comes a time when you know precisely what will happen (at least for a while) and yet... there is still this sort of frantic "what happens next" reaction. It's eerie, it's creepy, it's just plain fun. *** Puzzles (C+) This would be the one area the game is a little weak in. Oh, sure, the puzzles are fairly straight-forward and oftentimes even sensical. There is an in-game hint of sorts. But... it would be fair to say that the puzzles pretty much exist to give you something to do while you're waiting for the next, er, cascade of story, and unfortunately, because of a few timing problems, it -feels- that way. *** NPCs (n/a) Except for possibly once, there are no NPC encounters. *** Technical (C+) The way the apartment was implemented was interesting. There wasn't much else in the way of neat trickage (fairly surprising in retrospect). There were a couple disambiguation problems, and maybe one bug (but it may have been on purpose) with the in-game hint provision, but overall it was fairly bug-free. *** Tilt (A+) and Final Thoughts I cannot, without revealing entirely too much about this game, explain to you just what it was that had me raving about this game for two days afterwards, including randomly piping up with a particular rant that would, again, spoil things. Let me just assure you that this is the case: for two days, I was so haunted by this game that it was constantly in my head, teasing me... waiting for me in the darkness. In the shadows. In the Shade. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Duncan Stevens TITLE: Transfer AUTHOR: Tod Levi E-MAIL: jessical SP@G ix.netcom.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/transfer/transfer.z5 VERSION: Release 9 Tod Levi's Transfer is straight-up science fiction with few real surprises--the setting (research lab) and plot (experiment goes awry) are well-used, and the execution incorporates most of conventional science fiction's strong points and drawbacks. Still, it's entertaining enough, and there are a few creative twists among all the familiarity. You and the rest of your research team are trying to perfect transfer of consciousness between entities, including across species--but the head of the team seems to be dying. Mayhem ensues when the transferring technology gets used and it appears that someone on the premises, naturally, is up to no good. Most of the mayhem, actually, is your doing--the other characters in Transfer are largely bumps on logs. Not only is there minimal interaction with them, but they don't appear to notice much of the havoc you wreak; evading their notice could have been a puzzle in itself in several cases, but the game doesn't take that opportunity. (Which makes the one instance when you're told not to wander around in plain sight a little confusing--it's not necessarily apparent why the characters who were blind and deaf a moment before would be so alert now.) Worse still, the few things that they know about don't appear to change much, if at all, over the course of the game--they don't comment on the latest development, no matter how bizarre or noteworthy, or even take notice of something fairly obvious that' s going on right at that moment. To be sure, the characters are important in the plot, and the plot is quite complex--but interacting with them is rarely rewarding. The main strength of Transfer is the gadget itself, and the variety of ways you put it to use; the game could plausibly be considered an extended riff on the central idea of identity-switching, in that the idea gets used in unexpected (and occasionally hilarious) ways. The element of the story that revolves around the machine is sufficiently convoluted that one question in the hints late in the game is, essentially, "Huh?"--but the story is sufficiently well crafted that the complexity doesn't feel gratuitous. In this respect, Transfer is classic science fiction: the gadgetry is intricate and fun to play with and it leads the story in all sorts of unexpected places, often steamrolling right over the characters, who end up (naturally) pretty flat. The presumption, in other words, is that the player is more interested in playing with the gadget than in plausible character interactions. The puzzles are entertaining, if sometimes difficult--at various points, the game leaves you wandering around the research complex with no clear cues as to what you're supposed to be trying to do next. The most egregious such example involves one point when you're apparently supposed to intuit that because two separate documents mentioned the same date, you're supposed to find out more about that date, thereby to advance the plot. Fortunately, there's a comprehensive hint system that helps bridge the gaps, and on the whole the puzzles make sense once the necessary inferences are supplied. (Meaning that the inferences aren't illogical, they're just obscure.) Also, the game doesn't become unwinnable without warning, according to the author' s notes, and as far as I can tell it never becomes unwinnable at all (aside from death, which doesn't happen all that often)--there are virtually no meaningful time limits, and no resources that you can waste. At times this strains realism, of course--even when you're somewhere that you shouldn't be, you don't need to rush to get your business done because no one's going to interrupt you--and it takes the edge off any tension that might have been produced. But for fairness and ease of play, it certainly works. The writing, for its part, is competent, though it tends toward the laconic: not only are there no exclamation points, but the game never, as far as I remember, imputes any sort of emotion to you, even when the emotion (e.g., fear when you're apparently about to die) seems pretty obvious. The emphasis is more on conveying what's going on than dazzling you with picturesque or evocative settings, though, and from that perspective, things work fine, writing-wise--there are no errors that I noticed, and the relevant information is always there. Likewise, the technical aspect is strong: the various transfers are handled well, and your interactions with the world in your various incarnations all made sense, as far as I remember. The only real game design problem I encountered was that something could be done in one move that I assumed would take two, meaning that a puzzle solution was a total surprise to me when I gave up and looked at the hints. That's a product of my expectations more than a design flaw, though, and it certainly wasn't a glaring weakness. Transfer isn't particularly revolutionary, but it's one of the better examples of its genre (a very crowded genre)--it brings more creativity to the table than many of its fellows. While unabashed puzzlefests usually aren't my thing, I enjoyed this one enough to give it a 9. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Suzanne Britton [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: YAGWAD (Yes, Another Game With A Dragon) AUTHOR: "Digby McWiggle" aka John Kean E-MAIL: digby_mcwiggle SP@G hotmail.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/yagwad.z5 VERSION: Release 1 An utterly conventional and thoroughly delightful adventure game. I was in a lousy mood when I started playing--I left the computer with a big smile on my face. That is the highest praise I can give. Let's back up. YAGWAD is, as advertised, a game about a dragon. You're an unlikely hero hoping to rescue the princess from the nefarious beast and win the king's favor. So why did I love it, when so many games of this sort merit only a yawn and a shrug? There are quite a few reasons. First and foremost, YAGWAD is the funniest game I've played this year. From the rousing prologue (and responses to "score" and "fullscore" therein), to the delightful ascii art animation in the title, to the encyclopedia salesman (insert Monty Python clip), to the friendly teeth, the troll, the answering machine, the monks....well, I could go on all day. Suffice to say, YAGWAD kept me grinning ear to ear from beginning to end. The humor is dead on, comparable to Steve Meretzky's and often better. Programming is very solid. I ran into a few relatively harmless bugs, and that's it (notable: I can read the diary without picking it up). The writing is not the lush, purple prose of much story-based IF (don't get me wrong--I like well-done purple prose!), but it is comfortable to read, grammatical, and often funny. The room descriptions, in particular, have an economy of expression reminiscent of Infocom. Few of them span more than five lines, yet they lay out scenery and evoke a mood with ease: The forest stops short of this slope of mountainside, where a crumbling monastery stands with forlorn dignity overlooking the tangled remnants of an overgrown garden. A cracked stone walk winds from the forest opening north, through lank beds of herbs and wildflowers, and up to the wide stairs and darkened doorway leading west. The plot ties together neatly. In fact, figuring out exactly what happened years ago to leave things in their current state is part of the fun. It's impossible to put the game in an unwinnable state (a feat which clearly required some extra programming), and there are no sudden deaths. Puzzles are relatively simple, but fun to solve, and a few of them are clever enough to yield that nifty "aha!" feeling when you think of the answer. I especially liked the hilt-password puzzle, and when I realized the solution to the final puzzle, I laughed aloud. It was just perfect. Bottom line: YAGWAD is a polished gem. It was written by an author who clearly knew what he was doing and took the time to do it right. "Digby McWiggle": Thank you for reminding this world-weary judge why she fell in love with IF in the first place. Rating: 10 READERS' SCOREBOARD ------------------------------------------------------- The Readers' Scoreboard is an ongoing feature of SPAG. It charts the scores that SPAG readers and reviewers have given to various IF games since SPAG started up. The codes in the Notes column give information as to a game's availability and the platforms on which it runs. For a translation of these codes and for more detailed information on the scoreboard's format, see the SPAG FAQ. This FAQ is available at the ftp.gmd.de IF-archive or on the SPAG web page at http://www.sparkynet.com/spag. Name Avg Sc Chr Puz # Sc Issue Notes: ==== ====== === === ==== ===== ====== 9:05 6.2 0.5 0.5 6 20 F_INF_GMD Aayela 7.4 1.2 1.5 5 10 F_TAD_GMD Abbey 6.8 0.6 1.4 1 S10_I_GMD Above and Beyond 7.3 1.5 1.6 5 F_TAD_GMD Acid Whiplash 5.3 0.6 0.2 3 17 F_INF_GMD Acorn Court 6.1 0.5 1.5 2 12 F_INF_GMD Adv. of Elizabeth Hig 3.1 0.5 0.3 2 5 F_AGT_GMD Adventure (all varian 6.2 0.5 1.1 12 8,22 F_INF_TAD_ETC_GMD Adventureland 4.5 0.5 1.1 5 F_INF_GMD Adventures of Helpful 7.0 1.3 0.9 2 F_TAD_GMD Afternoon Visit 4.1 1.0 0.8 1 F_AGT Aisle 6.6 1.4 0.2 7 18 F_INF_GMD Alien Abduction? 7.5 1.3 1.4 5 10 F_TAD_GMD All Quiet...Library 5.0 0.9 0.9 6 7 F_INF_GMD Amnesia 6.9 1.5 1.3 4 9 C_AP_I_64 Anchorhead 8.7 1.7 1.5 23 18 F_INF_GMD Another...No Beer 2.4 0.2 0.8 2 4 S10_I_GMD Arrival 7.9 1.3 1.4 5 17 F_TAD_GMD Arthur: Excalibur 8.0 1.3 1.6 44,14,22 C_INF Augmented Fourth 7.7 1.5 1.5 4 22 F_INF_GMD Aunt Nancy's House 1.3 0.1 0.0 2 F_INF_GMD Awakened 7.7 1.7 1.6 1 Awakening 5.6 0.9 1.1 2 15,18 F_INF_GMD Awe-Chasm 3.0 0.7 0.7 2 8 S_I_ST_GMD Babel 8.4 1.7 1.3 9 13 F_INF_GMD Balances 6.6 0.7 1.2 8 6 F_INF_GMD Ballyhoo 7.3 1.5 1.5 6 4 C_INF Bear's Night Out 7.3 1.2 1.4 6 13 F_INF_GMD Beat The Devil 5.5 1.2 1.1 4 19 F_INF_GMD Beyond the Tesseract 3.7 0.1 0.6 1 6 F_I_GMD Beyond Zork 8.0 1.5 1.8 9 5, 14 C_INF BJ Drifter 7.0 1.2 1.2 4 15 F_INF_GMD Bliss 6.3 1.1 0.8 4 20 F_TAD_GMD Bloodline 7.7 1.4 1.1 2 15 F_INF_GMD Border Zone 7.2 1.4 1.4 7 4 C_INF Break-In 6.1 1.1 1.4 3 21 F_INF_GMD Broken String 3.9 0.7 0.4 4 F_TADS_GMD BSE 5.7 0.9 1.0 3 F_INF_GMD Bureaucracy 6.9 1.5 1.3 11 5 C_INF Busted 5.2 1.0 1.1 1 F_INF_GMD Calliope 4.7 0.9 0.8 3 F_INF_GMD Cask 1.5 0.0 0.5 2 F_INF_GMD Castaway 1.1 0.0 0.4 1 5 F_I_GMD Castle Elsinore 4.3 0.7 1.0 2 I_GMD CC 4.2 0.4 1.0 1 F_ALAN_GMD Change in the Weather 7.6 1.0 1.4 11 7,8,14 F_INF_GMD Chaos 5.6 1.3 1.1 2 F_TAD_GMD Chicken under Window 6.9 0.6 0.0 3 F_INF_GMD Chicks Dig Jerks 5.2 1.1 0.7 9 19 F_INF_GMD Chico and I Ran 7.2 1.7 1.1 1 F_INF_GMD Christminster 8.2 1.6 1.6 16 20 F_INF_GMD City 6.1 0.6 1.3 2 17 F_INF_GMD Coke Is It! 6.2 1.0 1.0 2 F_INF_GMD Coming Home 0.6 0.1 0.1 1 F_INF_GMD Common Ground 7.2 1.6 0.4 2 20 F_TAD_GMD Commute 1.3 0.2 0.1 1 F_I_GMD Congratulations! 2.6 0.7 0.3 1 F_INF_GMD Corruption 7.2 1.6 1.0 4 14, 21 C_MAG Cosmoserve 7.8 1.4 1.4 5 5 F_AGT_GMD Cove 7.4 1.1 0.8 2 22 F_INF_GMD Crypt v2.0 5.0 1.0 1.5 1 3 S12_IBM_GMD Curses 8.0 1.2 1.7 19 2, 22 F_INF_GMD Cutthroats 5.7 1.3 1.1 9 1 C_INF Dampcamp 5.0 0.8 1.1 3 F_TAD_GMD Danger! Adventurer... 3.2 0.3 0.7 1 F_INF_GMD Dangerous Curves 8.6 1.5 1.6 1 F_INF_GMD Day For Soft Food 6.8 1.0 1.3 5 19 F_INF_GMD Deadline 6.8 1.3 1.3 8 20 C_INF Death To My Enemies 4.4 0.9 0.7 4 F_INF_GMD Deep Space Drifter 5.6 0.4 1.1 3 3 S15_TAD_GMD Deephome 4.0 0.5 0.9 2 21 F_INF_GMD Delusions 7.9 1.5 1.5 5 14F_INF_GMD Demon's Tomb 7.4 1.2 1.1 2 9 C_I Detective 1.0 0.0 0.0 9 4,5,18 F_AGT_INF_GMD Detective-MST3K 5.8 1.1 0.1 9 7,8,18 F_INF_GMD Ditch Day Drifter 6.7 0.9 1.7 4 2 F_TAD_GMD Down 6.0 1.0 1.2 1 14 F_HUG_GMD Downtown Tokyo 5.7 0.8 0.9 5 17 F_INF_GMD Dungeon 7.1 1.0 1.7 2 F_GMD Dungeon Adventure 6.8 1.3 1.6 1 4 F_ETC Dungeon of Dunjin 6.0 0.7 1.5 5 3, 14 S20_IBM_MAC_GMD Edifice 8.2 1.5 1.8 8 13 F_INF_GMD Electrabot 0.7 0.0 0.0 1 5 F_AGT_GMD E-Mailbox 3.1 0.1 0.2 2 F_AGT_GMD Emy Discovers Life 5.0 1.1 0.8 3 F_AGT Enchanter 7.3 1.0 1.4 9 2,15 C_INF Enhanced 5.0 1.0 1.3 2 2 S10_TAD_GMD Enlightenment 7.1 1.3 1.6 2 17 F_INF_GMD Erehwon 6.2 1.2 1.5 4 19 F_TAD_GMD Eric the Unready 7.8 1.5 1.6 4 C_I Everybody Loves a Par 7.0 1.2 1.2 3 12 F_TAD_GMD Exhibition 6.2 1.4 0.3 6 19 F_TAD_GMD Fable 2.0 0.1 0.1 3 6 F_AGT_GMD Fable-MST3K 4.1 0.7 0.1 2 F_AGT_INF_GMD Fear 6.3 1.2 1.3 3 10 F_INF_GMD Fifteen 1.5 0.5 0.4 1 17 F_INF_GMD Firebird 7.1 1.5 1.3 4 15 F_TAD_GMD Fish 7.5 1.3 1.7 4 12, 14 C_MAG Foggywood Hijinx 6.2 1.2 1.3 3 21 F_TAD_GMD Foom 6.6 1.0 1.0 1 F_TAD_GMD For A Change 8.0 0.9 1.3 6 19, 22 F_INF_GMD Forbidden Castle 4.8 0.6 0.5 1 C_AP Four In One 4.4 1.2 0.5 2 F_TAD_GMD Four Seconds 6.0 1.2 1.1 2 F_TAD_GMD Frenetic Five 5.3 1.4 0.5 3 13 F_TAD_GMD Frenetic Five 2 6.6 1.5 1.0 3 21, 22 F_TAD_GMD Friday Afternoon 6.3 1.4 1.2 1 13 F_INF_GMD Frobozz Magic Support 7.2 1.2 1.5 3 F_TAD_GMD Frozen 5.5 0.7 1.3 1 F_INF_GMD Frustration 5.7 1.1 0.9 1 21 F_TAD_GMD Galatea 7.8 1.9 0.7 3 22 F_INF_GMD Gateway 8.6 1.4 1.8 6 11 C_I Gateway 2: Homeworld 9.0 1.8 1.9 5 C_I Gerbil Riot of '67 6.3 0.7 1.1 1 F_TAD_GMD Glowgrass 6.9 1.4 1.4 4 13 F_INF_GMD Gnome Ranger 5.8 1.2 1.6 1 C_I Golden Fleece 6.0 1.0 1.1 1 21 F_TAD_GMD Golden Wombat of Dest 6.3 0.7 1.1 1 18 F_I_GMD Good Breakfast 4.9 0.9 1.2 2 14 F_INF_GMD Great Archeolog. Race 6.5 1.0 1.5 1 3 S20_TAD_GMD Guardians of Infinity 8.5 1.3 1 9 C_I Guild of Thieves 6.9 1.2 1.5 4 14 C_MAG Guilty Bastards 6.9 1.4 1.2 5 22 F_HUG_GMD Guitar...Immortal Bar 3.0 0.0 0.0 1 F_INF_GMD Gumshoe 6.2 1.0 1.1 7 9 F_INF_GMD Halothane 6.6 1.3 1.2 4 19 F_INF_GMD HeBGB Horror 5.7 0.9 1.1 2 F_ALAN_GMD Heist 6.7 1.4 1.5 2 F_INF_GMD Hero, Inc. 6.8 1.0 1.5 2 F_TAD_GMD Hitchhiker's Guide 7.4 1.4 1.5 14 5 C_INF Hollywood Hijinx 6.5 0.9 1.6 11 C_INF Holy Grail 6.2 0.9 1.2 1 21 F_TAD_GMD Horror of Rylvania 7.2 1.4 1.4 5 1 F_TAD_GMD Horror30.zip 3.7 0.3 0.7 2 3 S20_I_GMD Human Resources Stori 0.9 0.0 0.1 2 17 F_INF_GMD Humbug 7.4 1.6 1.3 4 11 F_I_GMD Hunter, In Darkness 7.6 0.9 1.5 5 19 F_INF_GMD I didn't know...yodel 4.0 0.7 1.0 5 17 F_I_GMD I-0: Jailbait on Inte 7.7 1.5 1.2 17 20 F_INF_GMD Ice Princess 7.5 1.4 1.6 2 A_INF_GMD In The End 4.9 0.6 0.0 2 10 F_INF_GMD In The Spotlight 3.2 0.2 1.0 2 17 F_INF_GMD Infidel 6.9 0.3 1.4 14 1 C_INF Informatory 5.5 0.5 1.3 1 17 F_INF_GMD Ingrid's Back 7.0 1.6 1.6 2 C_I Inheritance 5.0 0.3 1.0 3 20 F_TAD_GMD Inhumane 4.4 0.4 1.0 3 9, 20 F_INF_GMD Intruder 6.7 1.3 1.1 4 20 F_INF_GMD Jacaranda Jim 7.5 1.0 0.9 3 F_GMD Jacks...Aces To Win 7.1 1.3 1.2 3 19 F_INF_GMD Jewel of Knowledge 6.3 1.2 1.1 3 18 F_INF_GMD Jeweled Arena 7.0 1.4 1.3 2 AGT_GMD Jigsaw 8.1 1.5 1.6 17 8,9 F_INF_GMD Jinxter 6.1 0.9 1.3 3 C_MAG John's Fire Witch 6.5 1.0 1.5 9 4, 12 S6_TADS_GMD Jouney Into Xanth 5.0 1.3 1.2 1 8 F_AGT_GMD Journey 7.2 1.5 1.3 5 5 C_INF King Arthur's Night O 5.9 0.9 1.0 4 19 F_ALAN_GMD Kissing the Buddha's 8.0 1.8 1.4 5 10 F_TAD_GMD Klaustrophobia 6.4 1.1 1.3 6 1 S15_AGT_GMD Knight Orc 7.2 1.4 1.1 2 15 C_I L.U.D.I.T.E. 2.7 0.2 0.1 4 F_INF_GMD Lancelot 6.9 1.4 1.2 1 C_I Land Beyond Picket Fe 4.8 1.2 1.2 1 10 F_I_GMD LASH 8.5 1.4 1.0 2 21 F_INF_GMD Leather Goddesses 7.1 1.3 1.5 11 4 C_INF Leaves 3.4 0.2 0.8 1 14 F_ALAN_GMD Legend Lives! 8.2 1.2 1.4 4 5 F_TAD_GMD Lesson of the Tortois 7.1 1.4 1.4 4 14 F_TAD_GMD Lethe Flow Phoenix 6.9 1.4 1.5 5 9 F_TAD_GMD Life on Beal Street 4.7 1.2 0.0 2 F_TAD_GMD Light: Shelby's Adden 7.5 1.5 1.3 6 9 S_TAD_GMD Lightiania 1.9 0.2 0.4 1 F_INF_GMD Lists and Lists 6.3 1.3 1.1 3 10 F_INF_GMD Little Blue Men 8.2 1.4 1.5 10 17 F_INF_GMD Lomalow 4.6 1.0 0.6 3 19 F_INF_GMD Losing Your Grip 8.5 1.4 1.4 6 14S20_TAD_GMD Lost New York 7.9 1.4 1.4 4 20 S12_TAD_GMD Lost Spellmaker 6.1 1.3 1.1 4 13 F_INF_GMD Lunatix: Insanity Cir 5.6 1.2 1.0 3 F_I_GMD Lurking Horror 7.2 1.3 1.3 15 1,3 C_INF MacWesleyan / PC Univ 5.1 0.7 1.2 3 F_TAD_GMD Madame L'Estrange... 5.1 1.2 0.7 1 13 F_INF_GMD Magic Toyshop 5.2 1.1 1.1 5 7 F_INF_GMD Magic.zip 4.5 0.5 0.5 1 3 S20_IBM_GMD Maiden of the Moonlig 6.4 1.3 1.5 2 10 F_TAD_GMD Matter of Time 1.4 0.3 1.4 1 14F_ALAN_GMD Mercy 7.3 1.4 1.2 6 12 F_INF_GMD Meteor...Sherbet 7.8 1.4 1.5 7 10, 12 F_INF_GMD Mind Electric 5.2 0.6 0.9 4 7,8 F_INF_GMD Mind Forever Voyaging 8.2 1.3 0.9 12 5,15 C_INF Mindwheel 8.5 1.6 1.5 1 C_I Mission 6.0 1.2 1.4 1 21 F_TAD_GMD Moist 6.8 1.4 1.2 4 F_TAD_GMD Moment of Hope 5.0 1.3 0.3 3 19 F_TAD_GMD Moonmist 5.9 1.2 1.0 14 1 C_INF Mop & Murder 5.0 0.9 1.0 2 5 F_AGT_GMD Mother Loose 7.0 1.5 1.3 2 17 F_INF_GMD Mulldoon Legacy 7.4 1.2 1.8 1 F_INF_GMD Multidimen. Thief 5.6 0.5 1.3 6 2,9 S15_AGT_GMD Muse 7.9 1.5 1.2 4 17 F_INF_GMD Music Education 3.7 1.0 0.7 3 F_INF_GMD Myopia 6.1 1.3 0.6 2 F_AGT_GMD Mystery House 4.1 0.3 0.7 1 F_AP_GMD New Day 6.6 1.4 1.1 4 13 F_INF_GMD Night At Computer Cen 5.2 1.0 1.0 2 F_INF_GMD Night at Museum Forev 4.2 0.3 1.0 4 7,8 F_TAD_GMD Night of... Bunnies 6.6 1.0 1.4 1 I_INF_GMD Nord and Bert 5.9 0.6 1.1 8 4 C_INF Not Just A Game 6.9 1.0 1.3 1 20 F_INF_GMD Not Just... Ballerina 5.3 0.8 0.9 3 20 F_INF_GMD Obscene...Aardvarkbar 3.2 0.6 0.6 1 F_TAD_GMD Odieus...Flingshot 3.3 0.4 0.7 2 5 F_INF_GMD Of Forms Unknown 4.5 0.7 0.5 1 10 F_INF_GMD Offensive Probing 4.2 0.6 0.9 1 F_INF_GMD On The Farm 6.5 1.6 1.2 2 19 F_TAD_GMD Once and Future 6.9 1.6 1.5 2 16 C30_TAD_CMP One That Got Away 6.4 1.4 1.1 7 7,8 F_TAD_GMD Only After Dark 4.6 0.8 0.6 4 F_INF_GMD Oo-Topos 5.7 0.2 1.0 1 9 C_AP_I_64 Outsided 2.5 0.7 0.2 2 F_INF_GMD Pass the Banana 2.9 0.8 0.5 3 19 F_INF_GMD Path to Fortune 6.6 1.5 0.9 3 9 S_INF_GMD Pawn 6.3 1.1 1.3 2 12 C_MAG Perilous Magic 4.9 0.9 1.1 1 21 F_INF_GMD Perseus & Andromeda 3.4 0.3 1.0 1 64_INF_GMD Persistence of Memory 6.2 1.2 1.1 1 17 F_HUG_GMD Phlegm 5.2 1.2 1.0 2 10 F_INF_GMD Photopia 7.6 1.5 0.7 20 17 F_INF_GMD Phred Phontious...Piz 5.2 0.9 1.3 2 13 F_INF_GMD Piece of Mind 6.3 1.3 1.4 1 10 F_INF_GMD Pintown 1.3 0.3 0.2 1 F_INF_GMD Pirate's Cove 4.8 0.6 0.6 1 F_INF_GMD Planetfall 7.3 1.6 1.4 13 4 C_INF Plant 7.3 1.2 1.5 4 17 F_TAD_GMD Plundered Hearts 7.0 1.4 1.2 9 4 C_INF Poor Zefron's Almanac 5.6 1.0 1.3 3 13 F_TAD_GMD Portal 8.0 1.7 0.2 3 C_I_A_AP_64 Purple 5.6 0.9 1.0 1 17 F_INF_GMD Pyramids of Mars 5.8 1.2 1.1 2 AGT_GMD Quarterstaff 6.1 1.3 0.6 1 9 C_M Ralph 7.1 1.6 1.2 3 10 F_INF_GMD Rematch 7.9 1.5 1.6 1 22 F_TAD_GMD Remembrance 2.7 0.8 0.2 3 F_GMD Reruns 5.2 1.2 1.2 1 AGT_GMD Research Dig 4.8 1.1 0.8 2 17 F_INF_GMD Reverberations 5.6 1.3 1.1 1 10 F_INF_GMD Ritual of Purificatio 7.0 1.6 1.1 4 17 F_GMD Sanity Claus 7.5 0.3 0.6 2 1 S10_AGT_GMD Save Princeton 5.6 1.0 1.3 5 8 S10_TAD_GMD Scapeghost 8.1 1.7 1.5 1 6 C_I Sea Of Night 5.7 1.3 1.1 2 F_TAD_GMD Seastalker 5.1 1.1 0.8 10 4 C_INF Shades of Grey 7.8 1.3 1.3 6 2, 8 F_AGT_GMD Sherlock 7.0 1.3 1.4 5 4 C_INF She's Got a Thing...S 7.0 1.7 1.6 3 13 F_INF_GMD Shogun 7.0 1.2 0.6 2 4 C_INF Shrapnel 6.8 1.3 0.5 5 20 F_INF_GMD Simple Theft 5.8 1.3 0.8 1 20 F_TAD_GMD Sins against Mimesis 5.5 1.0 1.2 3 13 F_INF_GMD Sir Ramic... Gorilla 6.0 1.2 1.2 2 6 F_AGT_GMD Six Stories 6.3 1.0 1.2 4 19 F_TAD_GMD Skyranch 2.8 0.5 0.7 1 20 F_I_GMD Small World 6.2 1.3 1.1 3 10 F_TAD_GMD So Far 8.0 1.2 1.5 11 12 F_INF_GMD Sorcerer 7.2 0.6 1.6 7 2,15 C_INF Sound of... Clapping 7.0 1.2 1.3 7 5 F_ADVSYS_GMD South American Trek 0.9 0.2 0.5 1 5 F_IBM_GMD Space Aliens...Cardig 1.5 0.4 0.3 6 3, 4 S60_AGT_GMD Space under Window 7.2 0.8 0.4 5 12 F_INF_GMD Spacestation 5.6 0.7 1.1 1 F_INF_GMD Spellbreaker 8.5 1.2 1.8 8 2,15 C_INF Spellcasting 101 6.7 1.0 1.3 2 C_I Spellcasting 201 7.8 1.6 1.7 2 C_I Spellcasting 301 6.0 1.2 1.2 2 C_I Spider and Web 8.4 1.6 1.7 15 14F_INF_GMD SpiritWrak 6.7 1.2 1.3 6 22 F_INF_GMD Spodgeville...Wossnam 4.3 0.7 1.2 2 F_INF_GMD Spur 7.1 1.3 1.1 2 9 F_HUG_GMD Spyder and Jeb 6.2 1.1 1.4 1 F_TAD_GMD Starcross 6.6 1.0 1.2 7 1 C_INF Stargazer 5.4 1.1 1.1 1 F_INF_GMD Stationfall 7.7 1.6 1.5 7 5 C_INF Statuette 3.7 0.0 0.1 1 F_INF_GMD Stiffy 0.6 0.0 0.0 1 F_INF_GMD Stiffy - MiSTing 4.7 1.1 0.4 5 F_INF_GMD Stone Cell 6.0 1.1 1.0 3 19 F_TAD_GMD Strangers In The Nigh 3.2 0.7 0.6 2 F_TAD_GMD Sunset Over Savannah 8.7 1.7 1.4 6 13 F_TAD_GMD Suspect 6.0 1.2 1.1 7 4 C_INF Suspended 7.5 1.5 1.4 7 8 C_INF Sylenius Mysterium 4.7 1.2 1.1 1 13 F_INF_GMD Symetry 1.1 0.1 0.1 2 F_INF_GMD Tapestry 7.1 1.4 0.9 5 10, 14 F_INF_GMD Tempest 5.3 1.4 0.6 3 13 F_INF_GMD Temple of the Orc Mag 4.5 0.1 0.8 2 F_TAD_GMD Theatre 6.9 1.1 1.4 12 6 F_INF_GMD Thorfinn's Realm 3.5 0.5 0.7 2 F_INF_GMD Time: All Things... 3.9 1.2 0.9 2 11, 12 F_INF_GMD TimeQuest 8.0 1.2 1.6 4 C_I TimeSquared 4.3 1.1 1.1 1 F_AGT_GMD Toonesia 5.8 1.1 1.1 6 7, 21 F_TAD_GMD Tossed into Space 3.9 0.2 0.6 1 4 F_AGT_GMD Town Dragon 3.9 0.8 0.3 2 14, 22 F_INF_GMD Trapped...Dilly 5.1 0.1 1.1 2 17 F_INF_GMD Travels in Land of Er 6.1 1.2 1.5 2 14 F_INF_GMD Trinity 8.7 1.4 1.7 16 1,2 C_INF Tryst of Fate 7.1 1.4 1.3 1 11 F_INF_GMD Tube Trouble 4.2 0.8 0.7 2 8 F_INF_GMD Tyler's Great Cube Ga 5.8 0.0 1.7 1 S_TAD_GMD Uncle Zebulon's Will 7.3 1.0 1.5 12 8 F_TAD_GMD Underoos That Ate NY 4.5 0.6 0.8 2 F_TAD_INF_GMD Undertow 5.4 1.3 0.9 3 8 F_TAD_GMD Undo 2.9 0.5 0.7 4 7 F_TAD_GMD Unholy Grail 6.0 1.2 1.2 1 13 F_I_GMD Unnkulian One-Half 6.7 1.2 1.5 9 1 F_TAD_GMD Unnkulian Unventure 1 6.9 1.2 1.5 8 1,2 F_TAD_GMD Unnkulian Unventure 2 7.2 1.2 1.5 5 1 F_TAD_GMD Unnkulian Zero 8.4 0.7 0.8 21,12,14 F_TAD_GMD Varicella 8.2 1.6 1.5 9 18 F_INF_GMD Veritas 6.6 1.3 1.4 4 S10_TAD_GMD Vindaloo 2.9 0.0 0.4 1 F_INF_GMD VirtuaTech 6.1 0.0 1.2 1 F_INF_GMD Water Bird 5.0 1.1 0.8 1 F_TAD_GMD Waystation 5.5 0.7 1.0 4 9 F_TAD_GMD Wearing the Claw 6.6 1.2 1.2 5 10, 18 F_INF_GMD Wedding 7.4 1.6 1.3 3 12 F_INF_GMD Where Evil Dwells 5.1 0.8 1.1 1 F_INF_GMD Winchester's Nightmar 6.9 1.5 0.5 1 22 F_INF_GMD Winter Wonderland 7.6 1.3 1.2 7 19 F_INF_GMD Wishbringer 7.4 1.3 1.3 13 5,6 C_INF Witness 6.5 1.5 1.1 9 1,3,9 C_INF Wonderland 5.4 1.3 0.9 2 C_MAG World 6.5 0.6 1.3 2 4 F_I_ETC_GMD Worlds Apart 7.6 1.7 1.4 8 21 F_TAD_GMD Your Choice 5.5 0.0 1.1 1 F_TAD_GMD Zanfar 2.6 0.2 0.4 1 8 F_AGT_GMD Zero Sum Game 7.2 1.5 1.5 3 13 F_INF_GMD Zombie! 5.2 1.2 1.1 2 13 F_TAD_GMD Zork 0 6.3 1.0 1.5 10 14C_INF Zork 1 6.1 0.8 1.4 21 1, 12 C_INF Zork 2 6.5 1.0 1.5 12 1, 12 C_INF Zork 3 6.5 0.9 1.4 8 1, 12 C_INF Zork Undisc. Undergr. 6.0 0.9 1.1 2 14F_INF_GMD Zork: A Troll's Eye V 4.4 0.6 0.1 3 14 F_INF_GMD Zuni Doll 4.0 0.6 0.9 2 14 F_INF_GMD -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- The Top Ten: A game is not eligible for the Top Ten unless it has received at least three ratings from different readers. This is to ensure a more democratic and accurate depiction of the best games. We've had a paltry 33 contributions to the SPAG scoreboard since the last issue. I'm willing to give people the benefit of the doubt -- maybe all of you were dedicating your time to the competition. Well the competition's over now, folks. Submit those scores! I encourage any and all SPAG readers to learn the scoring system from the FAQ and then submit scores for any piece of IF they play. The more contributions there are, the more useful the scoreboard is for everybody. This time around, as you might expect, the top ten list has remained almost unchanged from last issue. The only small differences are a narrowing of the gap between first and second place, and Babel's drop from 5th place to 9th. 1. Gateway 2: Homeworld 9.0 5 votes 2. Sunset over Savannah 8.7 6 votes 3. Trinity 8.7 16 votes 4. Anchorhead 8.7 23 votes 5. Gateway 8.6 6 votes 6. Losing Your Grip 8.5 6 votes 7. Spellbreaker 8.5 8 votes 8. Spider and Web 8.4 15 votes 9. Babel 8.7 9 votes 10. Christminster 8.2 16 votes As always, please remember that the scoreboard is only as good as the contributions it receives. To make your mark on this vast morass of statistics, rate some games on our website (http://www.sparkynet.com/spag). You can also, if you like, send ratings directly to me at obrian SP@G colorado.edu. Instructions for how the rating system works are in the SPAG FAQ, available from GMD and our website. Please read the FAQ before submitting scores, so that you understand how the scoring system works. After that, submit away! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ___. .___ _ ___. ___. / _| | \ / \ / ._| / _| \ \ | o_/ | | | |_. \ \ .\ \ | | | o | | | | .\ \ |___/ |_| |_|_| \___| |___/ PECIFICS SPAG Specifics is a small section of SPAG dedicated to providing in- depth critical analysis of IF games, spoilers most emphatically included. WARNING! SPOILERS BELOW FOR THE FOLLOWING GAME: Shade PROCEED NO FURTHER UNLESS YOU HAVE PLAYED THIS GAME! THIS IS NOT A TEST! GENUINE SPOILERS TO FOLLOW! LAST CHANCE TO AVOID SPOILAGE! From: Duncan Stevens TITLE: Shade AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin E-MAIL: erkyrath SP@G eblong.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/shade.z5 VERSION: Release 3 Andrew Plotkin's Shade is a thoroughly creepy game, as you no doubt already know if you're reading this, but it's also an unusual one--and part of the reason it's so creepy is that it does things decidedly contrary to IF players' expectations. For one thing, there's the changing-details-without-drawing-attention-to-the-change factor, namely the hyacinth/spider/cactus. It's a particularly interesting choice because the plant changes come amid a whole lot of other changes that you are aware of--so it adds an air of uncertainty to the confusion, to the extent that that makes sense. My initial impression, in fact, was that there were more changes going on below my sight line; as it happens, I was wrong, but the detail of the changing plant is enough to give the player that feeling (i.e., that not only are things acting funny, they're doing so behind your back as well as in front of your nose). The book also gives you slightly different readings at different times. There's also that favorite of IF theorists (this one, anyway), the player-PC relationship, which takes a few odd turns here. For the first few items that crumble into sand, the player and the PC appear to be in the same position--something like "huh?" As the apartment disintegrates, there's an inevitable shift for the player--he/she sees the trend and says, okay, to get the story's conclusion I'm going to have to seek out more things to turn into sand, so bring it on. (I actually didn't realize that the list adapted when I first played the game, so I was reduced to wandering around the apartment poking and prodding things in hopes that they'd turn into sand, which obviously heightened the effect a bit.) What's interesting is that the PC's approach also changes to follow suit--the PC appears to welcome the disintegration after a while, find a certain perverse pleasure in watching everything crumble. To wit: The toilet? Yes, it's the toilet's turn! You press the handle, grinning maniacally. And indeed, the sand rushes down the sides of the bowl. Carefully? You shove a paper-stack off the desk; it's a shower of sand before it hits the ground. Ha! You push another, and another, and then sweep the whole mass over the edge. White sand cascades everywhere. Laughing, you feel the desk itself give way. The cabinet and counter start to groan as soon as you touch them. You slam the cabinet for good measure; and the stained pressboard crackles white, shivers, and explodes into sand. All right! There's more than one way to look at this, of course; you could take it as a sign that the PC is beginning to lose it, or simply doesn't care. But it's also one of many meta-IF moments--where the game breaks the fourth wall, addresses the player directly, rather than observing the usual player/PC distinction. The computer is one example--"right now, however, there's a game on the screen -- one of the text adventures, or interactive fictions, or whatever they are this month"--but there are plenty of others. One of the things you hear on the radio is "Sharp words between the superpowers," which is the first line of Trinity. (Naturally, you comment to yourself "there are still superpowers?" An unremarkable line in 1986, somewhat out of place now.) There's also this: "The far side of the mirror is just as shadowy as this one. It's probably meant as commentary; not more space, just more of the same." "Shadowy" sounds like a So Far reference, but the "commentary" line yanks the player out of the story altogether by drawing attention to the author. There are also odd bits of humor here and there--if you read the list during the move when the kitchen ceiling is about to cave in, the list will say "stay out of kitchen!" At another point: "Another month of this and you'll indistinguishable from this apartment -- beige, featureless, and up for cheap rent." And the songs on the radio, of course, are mostly comic relief. Myself, I didn't guess the game's author (though I didn't think about it much either), but I should have--partly because of the random song generator (reminiscent of the cave generator in Hunter), but even more so because of the taxi scene, in which the player opens the door and is suddenly overcome with a fear of what's outside. No explanation for the fear, no rationalization of why you'd prefer to stay inside, just--no. Try to open the door, once you've already opened it and looked outside, and you get "You do not want that." The parallels to Change in the Weather seem obvious, in retrospect--nameless horror that the PC won't deign to put his finger on, inexplicable dread of something you eventually end up confronting anyway. (Well, sort of, in this case--there's nothing there to confront other than your own consciousness, though that's plenty scary in its own way.) Shade is also classically Zarfian in its opacity--what exactly is going on when the apartment flashes back to its original state is anyone's guess, and while it 's easy to simply chalk it up to the general hallucination (which is fading at that point--you can no longer interact with the illusory scene), it's also tempting to try to read more into it. Ditto, of course, for the last scene with the tiny figure. Certain key points in Change in the Weather and Spider and Web were likewise open to multiple interpretations, and the author naturally has never resolved those ambiguities. I don't really have any good guesses about the ambiguities, myself. My first guess was that the figure was your subconscious, and the "my turn again" meant that your mind is yielding to hallucination again--but why "you win", and why is the figure "dead"? Other ideas have been bruited about, most of them more plausible than that one. I do suspect, though, that Shade was written for effect, written to weird the player out, and that dissection and deconstruction on this level--symbolism and such--probably weren't the main things Zarf had in mind. It's possible that the significance of the figure lies somewhere between nothing (more hallucination), and mere weirdness and perversity (a way of injecting a memorable/chilling last line). The heart of the game for me, though, remains the moment when I opened the jar of peanut butter, since that was a turning point of sorts, when I stopped trying to impute rational explanations. It was one of the most unsettling IF experiences I can remember. Had I realized that there was a less cumbersome way to move things along than prodding everything in the apartment, I might have considered giving Shade a 10, as it was, it got an enthusiastic 9 and a special place in my IF library. SUBMISSION POLICY --------------------------------------------------------- SPAG is a non-paying fanzine specializing in reviews of text adventure games, a.k.a. Interactive Fiction. This includes the classic Infocom games and similar games, but also some graphic adventures where the primary player-game communication is text based. Any and all text-based games are eligible for review, though if a game has been reviewed three times in SPAG, no further reviews of it will be accepted unless they are extraordinarily original and/or insightful. SPAG reviews should be free of spoilers. 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. For a more detailed version of this policy, see the SPAG FAQ at http://www.sparkynet.com/spag/spag.faq. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thank you for helping to keep text adventures alive!