___. .___ _ ___. / _| | \ / \ / ._| \ \ | o_/ | | | |_. .\ \ | | | o | | | | The |___/ociety for the |_|romotion of |_|_|dventure \___|ames. ISSUE # 17 - COMPETITION '98 SPECIAL Edited by Magnus Olsson (zebulon SP@G pobox.com) May 10, 1999. SPAG Website: http://welcome.to/spag SPAG #17 is copyright (c) 1999 by Magnus Olsson. Authors of reviews retain the rights to their contributions. All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine with the traditional 'at' sign. REVIEWS IN THIS ISSUE ----------------------------------------------------- Acid Whiplash Arrival, or Attack of the B-Movie Cliches Cattus Atrox The City Downtown Tokyo, Present Day Enlightenment: A One-room Absurdity Fifteen Four in One Human Resources Stories I Didn't Know You Could Yodel Informatory Little Blue Men Mother Loose Muse: An Autumn Romance Persistence of Memory Photopia The Plant Purple Research Dig The Ritual of Purification Trapped in a One Room Dilly + an interview with Adam Cadre EDITORIAL------------------------------------------------------------------ It's been a long time. This issue is more than two months late, and some people have started worrying that something has happened to it, or that it may be defunct. But there's no need to worry - SPAG will continue to appear (if perhaps even more irregularly than before), at least as long as you people continue to submit reviews. I'm only sorry that it took so long this time. SPAG #17 is devoted entirely to the 1998 IF Competition. I hope you'll find it worth the wait. SUBMISSION POLICY --------------------------------------------------------- SPAG is a non-paying fanzine specializing in reviews of text adventure games, a.k.a. Interactive Fiction. This includes the classic Infocom games and similar games, but also some graphic adventures where the primary player-game communication is text based. Authors retain the rights to use their reviews in other contexts. We accept submissions that have been previously published elsewhere, although original reviews are preferred. At the moment, we are reluctant to accept any more reviews of Infocom games (though exceptions happen). COMPETITION RESULTS ------------------------------------------------------- 1: Photopia, by Adam Cadre 2: Muse: An autumn romance, by Christopher Huang 3: The Plant, by Mike Roberts 4: Arrival, by Stephen Granade 5: Enlightenment, by Taro Ogawa 6: Mother Loose, by Irene Callaci 7: Little Blue Men, by Michael Gentry 8: Trapped in a One-Room Dilly, by Laura Knauth 9: Persistence of Memory, by Jason Dyer 10: Downtown Tokyo. Present Day, by John Kean 11: Informatory, by Bill Shlaer 12: The Ritual of Purification, by Jarek Sobolewski 13: The City, by Sam Barlow 14: Where Evil Dwells, by Steve Owens and Paul Johnson 15: Purple, by Stefan Blixt 16: Four in One, by J Robinson Wheeler 17: Research Dig, by Chris Armitage 18: CC, by Mikko Vuorinen 19: Spacestation, by David Ledgard 20: Cattus Atrox, by David Cornelson 21: In the Spotlight, by John Byrd 22: Lightania, by Gustav Bodell 23: Acid Whiplash, by Cody Sandifer and Rybread Celsius 24: I Didn't Know You Could Yodel, by Andrew Indovina and Michael Eisenman 25: Fifteen, by Ricardo Dague 26: The Commute, by Kevin Copeland 27: Human Resources Stories, by Harry Hardjono NEWS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andrew Plotkin had a field day at the 1998 XYZZY awards ceremony (organized by our rival fanzine XYZZYnews, www.xyzzynews.com, and hosted by the IF mud), his "Spider and Web" winning no less than five awards, including the one for "best game". Michael Gentry and Adam Cadre won two each, and SPAG founder G. K. "Whizzard" Wilson grabbed the last award: Best game: Spider and Web, by Andrew Plotkin Best writing: Photopia, by Adam Cadre Best story: Photopia, by Adam Cadre Best setting: Anchorhead, by Michael Gentry Best puzzles: Spider and Web, by Andrew Plotkin Best NPCs: Once and Future, by Gerry Kevin Wilson Best individual puzzle: Getting out of the chair, from Spider and Web (Andrew Plotkin) Best individual NPC: The interrogator in Spider and Web (Andrew Plotkin) Best individual PC: Little Blue Men, by Michael Gentry Best use of medium: Spider and Web, Andrew Plotkin INTERVIEW WITH ADAM CADRE --------------------------------------------- SPAG: First of all, congratulations on winning not only the Competition, but two XYZZY awards (for best writing and best story). And even apart from the awards, people have liberally heaped praise on your game _Photopia_. What are your feelings about this success? AC: It's hard to know how to feel. On the one hand, it's certainly nice to open my inbox and find it full of such effusive praise, but then it's hard to know how to respond -- "Glad you liked it, thanks for writing" seems rather inadequate, you know? So I feel a bit guilty about that aspect of it. I certainly didn't expect Photopia to do as well as it has, since it's so different from conventional IF. I expected that there would be a small group of people who'd think it'd be the greatest piece of IF ever, a somewhat larger group who'd find it unbearably pretentious, and a still larger group in the middle who'd find it to be a mildly interesting experiment. This makes my second IF release in a row whose reception has far exceeded my expectations. I suppose this means that the first time I come up with something I think people will really enjoy, it'll bomb miserably. SPAG: For the benefit of those of our readers who may not have heard of you before, perhaps a short introduction would be in order. Who, what, where and why is Adam Cadre? AC: The border guards asked me that when I was driving home from Canada, and I'm just as stumped by the question now as I was then. So let's see. I'm 25 (but look somewhere between 13 and 17.) I live in Anaheim, California, at least for the time being. I'm straightedge. I'm multiracial. I'm overeducated -- was well into a doctoral program in English until I finally had my fill at the end of '97 and became the slacker I am today. I suppose I can call myself a professional writer now that I've sold my first novel, but it still seems a bit silly to say that, considering that the book isn't out yet and as of this writing I haven't received any actual money for it, though the check is supposedly in the mail. I suppose I can also call myself a professional musician, since I'm in a band which has a CD for sale, but that too seems silly at present since the official members of the band have never played together all at once. I feel equally uncomfortable calling myself a teacher, since even though I work as a substitute teacher and in-home tutor, I don't have a class of my own. In any event, I'm not a capitalist and so I suppose that defining myself in terms of how I make money, as the culture seems to demand, is bound to feel wrong to me. I'm just zis guy, you know? SPAG: What made you interested in writing IF? AC: I wasn't an IF fan in Infocom's heyday -- the only game I ever bought was Trinity, and I ended up playing it for a year without even making it out of the Kensington Gardens. When I finally found a copy of the hint book, I ended up developing every clue. In 1992, I went to the mall to get Star Control II (still my favorite computer game.) It wasn't in yet, so I got Lost Treasures of Infocom II instead. Then, on the way home, I got into a car wreck with a wanted felon, but that's another story. In any event, that was my real introduction to Infocom. Of the games on Lost Treasures, I liked A Mind Forever Voyaging the best by far -- enough so that when I happened upon the Masterpieces CD about four years later, I decided to pick it up expressly so that I could play AMFV again (at this point my Treasures disks were, appropriately enough, lost.) I loaded up the CD, and noticed that there was a game included called "A Change in the Weather" which I didn't remember; I booted it up and was astonished to find that (a) it was written in 1995, and (b) it was clearly not a commercial effort. It'd never occurred to me that the Infocom games had been written by anyone, any more than I stopped to wonder who drew the cartoons I watched when other people in the IF community were playing Zork and such. But "Weather" clearly had an author. And that got me thinking -- hey, if people actually write these things, maybe I can too! In fact, I bet that'd be fun! SPAG: What gave you the idea for _Photopia_? I answered this question in a roundabout way in the Photopia Phaq, which is on my web site, http://adamcadre.ac. Primary sources of inspiration, in no particular order: a poorly-Xeroxed copy of an old magazine called "Photoplay"; the film THE SWEET HEREAFTER by Atom Egoyan (but not the book by Russell Banks); the work of Carl Sagan; Ojars Kratins's seminar on the fantastic in literature; my sister's death. Aren't you glad I didn't say I got it from a mail-order company? SPAG: The boundary between IF as games and IF as literature is a hotly debated topic. What do you think of this - is there such a division? Should there be one? AC: I haven't been answering these questions in order; as I write these words, this is the last one left, and I've been trying and failing to come up with a decent answer for a couple of days now. Um. One of the things that's been throwing me off about this question is that I keep lurching between talking about puzzle-IF vs. story-IF on the one hand, and "low" IF vs. "high" IF on the other. I think it's the word "literature" that's the culprit. We generally hear it used to denote high-quality fiction (or at least high-quality narrative); in the IF world, however, it often signifies nothing more than that the narrative is the most important aspect of a piece, or even simply that it *has* a story. But nearly all IF has a story, in a sense. It's just that some of the stories are kinda lame: "Some guy wanders around grabbing stuff and then uses it later to defeat a monster or something. The End." But some people don't mind that, I guess. Some people have fun spending hours pushing virtual buttons and pulling virtual levers for no reward other than a message like "You have gained a fabulous treasure!" or "*** You have won ***". Then there are the people like me who like the pleasures literature has to offer -- big chewy ideas to think about, narrative twists and turns, funny or beautiful turns of phrase, that sort of thing -- and also like wandering around someone else's world and knocking over vases. So, sure, there's a division there. That said, I'd point out that of course you can't simply map puzzle- driven vs. story-driven onto low vs. high. Story-IF that tries to be "literary" by adopting a mannered, high-falutin' style is bound to fall flat; and some of the most (to me) truly literary IF has been of the more-game-than-story variety. I don't actually play these; I watch other people play them, or feed the game a walkthrough and read the output. Some people say that's missing the point, especially in a puzzle game, but not every story ends up looking like the one above -- after all, when you think about it, an awful lot of literature is about people trying to figure their way out of problems. It just has to be done artfully. SPAG: In the light of the previous question, do you think _Photopia_ should be regarded as a game? And do you think there are any problems with doing so (for example, it has been suggested that viewing it as a game would make people more frustrated that they can't change the ending)? AC: It's not a game, of course, but I find myself calling it one anyway. That's just the standard term for a piece of IF. But, yeah, to the extent that the "goal" is either unattainable or unavoidable, depending on the way you think about it, it's not a game. SPAG: _Photopia_ has been criticized for not being sufficiently interactive. Some people have gone so far as to suggest that it shouldn't be considered "IF", but just "F". What are your views on this? AC: I think I covered this in the Phaq too... let's see... "True, the player has little power to affect the events of the story. But it was crucial to me, was in a sense the whole point of the piece, that the player *inhabit* the places of the game. In the "real life" sections, I wanted to provide the experience of hanging out with this kid, to the extent I could; in the bedtime-story sections, it was absolutely vital that the player be the one wandering around in the various strange locales of the tale. Quite frankly, there's not enough to them to be worth experiencing them secondhand. I came up with these places, and I wanted to plop the player down in them just long enough for her to look around, say "Whoa, neat," and then move on. Rockvil in the third person would have been a fourth-rate dystopia; being there was what made it so chilling. An author can incarnate a place in IF in a way that's not possible in other media. If incarnating places is the point of what the work is trying to achieve -- which, in this case, the colored sections of the story were -- then IF is the way to go." SPAG: Could you comment a little on the use of coloured text in _Photopia_? What gave you the idea? AC: I actually came up with the title and the idea of using color long before I had any idea what the game would be about. For a while I considered having objects retain the color of the places they came from, so your inventory list would end up looking like an ANSI rainbow, but eventually I decided to keep it simple. I just thought it was a nice way to set the mood for each area, and differentiate the 'Hard-boiled' parts from the 'Wonderland' parts (to borrow from Murakami.) SPAG: Which entries were your own favourites in the 1998 Competition? Why? AC: Those would be Little Blue Men and, to a slightly lesser extent, Muse. I've already reviewed them both, and since the reviews can be found on my web site and on Deja News { Editor's note: Adam's review of _Muse_ is included in this issue }, I won't repeat them here. But I will mention that the game I was planning to submit to the comp last spring, and am finishing up right now, is quite similar to both these games in many respects. When I decided to switch to Photopia and enter that instead, I thought it was a risky move -- switching from what I thought all would agree was a well-done, interesting game to an experiment that a lot of people were sure to loathe and which would probably fare about as well as The Tempest. As it turned out, my current project might well have prompted protests of, "Another one of *these*?" and suffered in the comparison to LBM and Muse, so I lucked out. We'll see. SPAG: You're a writer not only of interactive fiction, but also of conventional, non-interactive fiction. Can you compare writing a piece of IF with writing a novel? Which is the most satisfying experience? AC: Well, writing IF is certainly more fun, in that so much of it is coming up with snarky error messages. You might say that writing IF is itself interactive -- it's a conversation with an imaginary player who tries every possible command. But writing IF isn't like storytelling, at least not for me. I write stories and books from start to finish, the same way I read them. But when I write IF, it sort of accretes. Create a location, compile. Add a couple objects, compile again. Add an NPC, compile. Equip the NPC with some actual behavior, compile yet again. And so forth for several weeks. Then, of course, there's the fact that English is my first language, and Inform isn't. When I'm writing a story, I sometimes get stuck trying to figure out how best to phrase the next sentence, but I never find myself needing to learn some grammatical form I've never used before. In IF, I'm always getting stuck wanting to achieve some effect and having no idea how to go about it. So while it may be more fun than straight fiction on a moment-to-moment basis, it also has the potential to be a lot more frustrating. And then there's the fact that no matter how far above average a game may be, no matter how many revolutionary advances it makes, it's still going to seem sort of stiff and awkward to the newbie who tries >GO BACK TO WHERE I WAS A COUPLE MINUTES AGO and gets an error message, who types >BEAUFORD, DO YOU LIKE DOGS? and gets a default response. Even the most robust IF comes off as fragile and inadequate to people who haven't had their expectations adjusted by playing previous games. So while in a static narrative the reader can't participate in the world you've created, she also can't poke around and find that the walls are made of cardboard and the background's just a mural. To that extent, it's sort of like the difference between making an oil painting of a house on the one hand, and on the other, actually building a house-- of cards. SPAG: We've certainly come a long way since the first Competition. What trends do you see in the development of the IF genre? Have there been any developments that have surprised you? Or any developments that you are still missing? What would you like to see in future IF? AC: Okay, since my answers have been on the dull side thus far, I'll give you a deliberately provocative one here. It seems to me that perhaps the primary trend in IF over the last few years is that it's become more and more idiosyncratic. Infocom was in the entertainment software business, and if you look at some of the IF from a while back, you tend to find that same mindset. The early TADS games, Curses and Jigsaw, Lost New York, Once and Future (which may have just come out recently, but which belongs to the pre-comp period)... certainly they reflect the interests of their various authors, but they're still primarily entertainment software. I suspect that if any of the games I've just mentioned been Infocom projects, they'd have had no trouble at all getting greenlighted. Now let's look at some of the more recent successful IF. So Far, Sunset Over Savannah, Muse, Little Blue Men, Photopia... these don't strike me as entertainments. It seems to me that the primary motivation for projects such as these is self-expression. I'm not sure Infocom would've given these the go-ahead. Now, to an extent, this is wonderful. I mean, I'm certainly glad I didn't have to pass Photopia through a marketing department before I could release it. I cringe to think of Michael Gentry being told to tone down the misanthropy because it isn't testing well in key demographics. But the phenomenon of creative works being freed from commercial concerns is not unique to IF. The advent of the World Wide Web has meant that anyone can publish their fiction, just by putting up a web site. Even before the WWW, there were the dot-creative Usenet groups. Has there been a renaissance of freeware fiction? Well, no. Sure, there are fanfic authors who've gained popularity, but really, most anyone who puts up some stories and waits for the hits to come rolling in is due for a disappointment. In my years on the net, I've yet to encounter anyone who really follows web.fiction. Why? Because it's mostly dreck. If you go to your local bookstore and find the shelves where they keep the reputable fiction, you at least have the comfort of knowing that for each book before you, someone who makes a living making these kinds of determinations has declared it to be of publishable quality. Now, you may think you know where I'm going with this, but actually, I'm not really much concerned about an onslaught of games with appalling spelling and takeable feces. These games are already released at a fairly regular rate, and I don't expect that rate to change much in either direction. But I'm reminded of a quote I read a while back by someone in the publishing business that went something like this: "Prospective authors seem to think that the slush pile consists of 10% publishable manuscripts, 20% manuscripts that aren't quite at that level, and 70% abysmal dross. That's not the case. Less than half of what we get is abysmal dross. But maybe one in ten thousand manuscripts is something we'd consider publishing. The majority of the manuscripts we get are presentable, but still, clearly the work of amateurs." I don't much worry about people who release entertainment software that isn't well-received. Nor am I much concerned about the fourteen-year- olds and the AGT masterpieces they throw together in an afternoon. But there is one trend I foresee that does trouble me a bit. IF has a built-in audience of at least a couple hundred people who play most of the games that show up at GMD. That may not sound too impressive, but for someone whose collected works have garnered three hits in the last five years, that's a vast populace. And the word about IF is slowly trickling out. More and more people are coming into the fold. And when they decide to write games of their own, I'm finding that for the most part they're less interested in whipping up solid entertainments than in crafting magna opera to capture their innermost souls. Most of these aren't going to be very good. They won't be laughable, but they'll be mediocre. I'm thinking about the kind of prose I was cranking out in my late teens. I've still got a lot of it squirreled away in one directory or another: the beginnings of novels I didn't plan past chapter two, generous handfuls of short stories... the intentions were good, the grammar is impeccable, but the work nevertheless makes me wince. I was quite pleased with it at the time, though. And if I'd been writing IF in '92, you could wince along with me. But it's not even this that worries me. If there's a cascade of IF that looks like it escaped from the creative writing class at the nearest junior college, so be it. What worries me is what happens when the reception for these idiosyncratic works is less exuberant than that for some of the current big names in IF. What'll happen when people who've poured their heart and soul (and effort and time -- writing IF is hard work) into a piece of interactive fiction release it, and people don't like it much? When their babies go unnoticed at Xyzzy time? It'd be a shame if the IF community were poisoned by bitterness and resentment as new authors publish their cris de coeur, only to garner negative reviews, or to watch them get ignored in the wake of the latest Zarf release. But I'm not sure what the solution is. Certainly pretending that these games are better than they actually are is not the answer. And maybe they won't even materialize -- maybe these trends I think I've spotted are purely illusory. But nevertheless, I foresee thin skins and rancor, charges of elitism, and tears all around. SPAG: And, finally, what part do you plan on playing yourself in the future of IF? AC: Well, I have a bunch of future projects planned. It's just a matter of finding the time to do them. I'd like to release at least one major-ish project per year for the foreseeable future. I'm not sure if that's a realistic goal, but that's what I'm shooting for. Also, if my novel does okay in the marketplace, I'm hoping that it'll prompt people to come visit my web site, which has a section devoted to IF. So maybe some people who like the book and would otherwise have never even heard of IF will discover it that way. 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. Also, scores are still desired along with the reviews, so send those along. The scores will be used in the ratings section. Authors may not rate or review their own games. More elaborate descriptions of the rating and scoring systems may be found in the FAQ and in issue #9 of SPAG, which should be available at: ftp://ftp.gmd.de:/if-archive/magazines/SPAG/ and at http://welcome.to/spag REVIEWS ---------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Paul O'Brian" NAME: Acid Whiplash AUTHOR: Rybread Celsius & Cody Sandifer EMAIL: rybread SP@G anok4u2.org (Celsius), sandifer SP@G crmse.sdsu.edu (Sandifer) DATE: September 1998 PARSER: Inform whacked SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/acid VERSION: Release 1 ACID WHIPLASH by Anonymous (a.k.a. RYBREAD CELSIUS CAN'T FIND A DICTIONARY by Rybread Celsius and Cody Sandifer) "This is terribly, terribly unfair. I'm really sorry. But I just started laughing hysterically, and it's not what the author intended. In the middle of an intense ending sequence, I read the line: 'My blood pumper is wronged!' I just lost it. It's a very 'Eye of Argon' sort of line." -- Andrew Plotkin, reviewing "Symetry", 1/1/98 "It takes guts to do *anything* wearing a silver jumpsuit. My point: I bet Rybread wears *two* silver jumpsuits while he writes IF." -- Brad O'Donnell, 1/6/98 I hope my title line isn't too big a spoiler. I guess I can't feel too guilty about giving away something that's revealed in the first 3 seconds of the game. Anyway, it would be impossible to talk about this game without talking about Rybread Celsius. Yes, Rybread Celsius. The man, the myth, the legend. There are those who have called him "A BONA FIDE CERTIFIED GENIUS" [1]. There are those who have called him "the worst writer in interactive fiction today" [2]. There are even those who have called him "an adaptive-learning AI" [3]. Whatever the truth behind the smokescreen, opinion is clearly divided on the Celsius oeuvre. He appears to have an enthusiastic cult following who look at his works and see the stamp of genius, paralleled by another group who look at those selfsame works and see only barely coherent English and buggy code. I have always counted myself among the latter. Works like Symetry and Punkirita Quest set my English-major teeth on edge. I have never met a Rybread game that I've liked, or even halfway understood. But Acid Whiplash is different. First of all, I need to say that I'm going to call it Acid Whiplash, for several reasons: 1. I'm not sure what the game's real name is supposed to be. 2. The other name, while it may be (is!) perfectly true, is just too long to write out. 3. Acid Whiplash is just such a *perfect* name for this game. I've never dropped acid myself, but I'm guessing that this game is about the closest text game equivalent I will ever play, at least until my next Rybread game. The world spins crazily about, featuring (among other settings) a room shaped like a burning credit card (???), nightmarish recastings of Curses and Jigsaw, and your own transformation into a car dashboard. Scene changes happen with absolutely no warning, and any sense of emerging narrative is dashed and jolted about, hard enough and abruptly enough to, well, to give you a severe case of mental whiplash. Sounds like a typical Celsius game so far, right? But here's the best part: stumbling through these hallucinogenic sequences leads you through a multi-part interview between Cody Sandifer and Celsius himself, an interview which had me laughing out loud over and over. Sandifer is hilarious, striking the pose of the intensely sincere reviewer, taking each deranged Celsius word as gospel, and in the process manages actually to illuminate some of the interesting corners of his subject, and subject matter. And Rybread is... Rybread, no more or less than ever. Perhaps being changed into a dashboard while listening makes the whole thing funnier -- I'm not sure. As usual, my regular categories don't apply. Plot, puzzles, writing -- forget about it. Acid Whiplash has no real interaction or story in any meaningful sense. (There is, however, one very funny scene where we learn that Rybread is in fact the evil twin of a well-known IF author). If you're looking for a plot, or even something vaguely coherent, you ought to know that you're looking in the wrong place. But if you aren't familiar with the Way of the Rybread, or even if you are, I recommend giving Acid Whiplash a look. It might shed some light on what all these crazy people are talking about... but don't expect to understand the *next* Celsius game. [1] Brock Kevin Nambo [2] Me. (Nothing personal.) [3] Adam Thornton Rating: 5.2 (This is by *far* the highest rating I've ever given to Rybread. In fact, I think it beats his past 3 ratings from me put together!) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Second April NAME: Arrival, or Attack of the B-Movie Cliches AUTHOR: Stephen Granade E-MAI: sgranade SP@G phy.duke.edu DATE: 1998 PARSER: TADS SUPPORTS: TADS 2.2.6 and later AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/arrival.zip VERSION: Release 2 I may not be in the best position to review Arrival, the first game of consequence written in HTML-TADS, since I'm working with a Stone Age system that can't deal with HTML-TADS games, and hence all I saw was the text. But I can say this: even if your system has not been graced with a port of an HTML-TADS runtime, check out Arrival anyway. It's easily one of the best games of this year's competition, graphics or not. The story: your life as an eight-year-old is enlivened by, why not, aliens landing in your backyard, except that these aliens clearly have been reading Calvin and Hobbes, since they're invisible to your parents. They commission you to run some errands for them so that they can get on with enslaving the planet, so you carry out some tasks, of varying degrees of silliness, to Thwart the Evil Plan. The author titles Arrival an "attack of the B-movie cliches," but that isn't really fair: Arrival is far wittier than any B-movie, and it's far too self-aware to be cliched. (Your character's reaction upon seeing the spaceship: "Oh man oh man, it must be a spaceship! From outer space! Maybe from Gamma Proxima Epsilon Centauri Five B!") The aliens owe much more to parody than to cliche: they demand Ho-Hos and grumble about the obnoxious way Earth constantly sends banal radio broadcasts into space. On hand is a translator that mutates the aliens' speech into Bill and Ted-speak, with consistently amusing results (the answer to one question changes from "You are quite a nosy child" to "Why don't you, like, go play in traffic"). The fact of the alien-invasion plot should not obscure the amount of wit that went into the writing of Arrival: for instance, when the alien's translator fails, he scowls and yells "Universal translator, my anterior appendage!" Few games can claim the amount of originality that Arrival offers. The fun of the game is largely in the writing and the amusing asides, however, rather than the puzzles: some are clever, but a few are simply obscure or insufficiently clued. There's a hint file to help things along, and Arrival is the rare game where it's better to turn to hints than to insist on unraveling puzzles yourself. The fun of the game diminishes when the player is stuck, and the payoff associated with solving the puzzles isn't so great that resorting to hints takes away a sense of accomplishment. The charm of Arrival lies, in short, more in seeing the aliens' funny responses to different actions than in solving problems, and it is hence more rewarding to move the story along, in order to discover more parts of the game that produce funny responses, than to stand still until you solve a puzzle by your own wits. The puzzles aren't especially bad or unfair, to be sure, but by and large (with one exception, a puzzle that turns on a sly joke about child-proof lids), but they don't match the level of the writing either. If there is a flaw in Arrival, apart from the puzzles, it is that your identity, an eight-year-old, only surfaces intermittently. There's plenty of humor to be mined from the world as viewed by a child--Calvin and Hobbes, for one, produced about ten years' worth. Aside from the occasional response, though (TAKE STICK when no stick is present: "I don't see no--I mean any--stick here"), you can largely forget that you're eight years old--and there are several moments, such as the discovery of a velvet Elvis and a rain stick, that might be enlivened by commentary from an eight-year-old's viewpoint. (On the other hand, your eight-year-old self comes out more clearly in some of the AMUSING responses, suggesting that the author wanted to mine that vein of humor but didn't get around to incorporating it into the story much. Moreover, as I understand it, the graphics appear to have been drawn by an eight-year-old, so perhaps that changes the game experience for those who can actually see the graphics.) It's a minor flaw, though, and testifies to the general solidity of the game and its coding. Arrival is a well-crafted game--at least, the text portions are, and I trust the graphics and sound add to the experience. It's also littered with in-jokes and funny asides that more than make up for the derivative nature of the plot, and it plays up the alien invasion for satiric value, which excuses the cliches (for me at least). Reminiscent in some ways of Carl Klutzke's Poor Zefron's Almanac, but much more consistently funny and playable, Arrival is a worthy effort. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "Paul O'Brian" The Arrival is the first HTML-TADS game I've ever played, certainly the first competition game ever to include pictures and sound. I was quite curious as to how these elements would be handled, and maybe even a little apprehensive. I wasn't sure that a lone hobbyist could create visual and musical elements that wouldn't detract from a game more than they added to it. But Arrival dispelled those fears, handling both pictures and sound brilliantly. The game's ingenious strategy is to cast an 8-year-old as its main character, which makes the fact that most of the graphics are really just crayon drawings not only acceptable, but completely appropriate. Just for good measure, the game chooses "Attack of the B-Movie Cliches" as its theme and subtitle, thereby making the cheese factor of the special effects (which is pretty high) actually enhance the game rather than embarrass it. The pictures are delightful -- the crayon drawings evoke a great sense of childhood and wonder while continuing the humorous feel of the whole game. The spaceship (two pie plates taped together) and the aliens (in the author's words "the finest crayons and modelling clay $2.83 could buy") are a scream -- I laughed out loud every time I saw them. The game also includes a couple of very well-done non-crayon graphics, one an excellent faux movie poster and the other a dead-on parody of a web page, both of which I found very funny. The sounds, though sparse, are equally good -- the sound of the alien spaceship crash-landing startled the heck out of me. I'm not used to my text adventures making noise! But a moment later I was laughing, because the noise was just so fittingly silly. However, all the funny pictures and sounds in the world couldn't make Arrival a good game if it wasn't, at its core, a well-written text adventure. Luckily for us, it is. The game is full of cleverly written, funny moments, and has layers of detail I didn't even recognize until I read the postscript of amusing things to do. The aliens, who bicker like a couple of married retirees touring the U.S. in their motor home, are great characters. Each is given a distinct personality, and in fact a distinct typeface, the green alien speaking in green text while the purple alien has text to match as well. If you hang around the aliens you will hear quite a bit of funny dialogue, and if you manage to switch their universal translator from archaic into modern mode, you can hear all the same dialogue, just as funny, rewritten into valley-speak. The game has lots of detail which doesn't figure in the main plot but creates a wonderfully silly atmosphere and provides lots of jokes. For example, on board the ship is an examination room, where by flipping switches, pulling levers, or turning knobs you can cause all sorts of machinery to pop from the walls and perform its function on the gleaming metal table, everything from laser beams to buzz saws to Saran Wrap. In addition, Arrival is one of the better games I've seen this year at unexpectedly understanding input and giving snarky responses to strange commands, which has been one of my favorite things about text adventures ever since I first played Zork. Even if you can't (or don't want to) run the HTML part of HTML TADS, it would still be well worth your time to seek out The Arrival. However, don't be afraid to rely on hints. I had played for an hour and hadn't scored a single point when I took my first look at them. Now, once I got some hints I determined that the puzzles did in fact make perfect sense -- they weren't of the "read the author's mind" variety and I would probably have come to solve them on my own. Perhaps the presence of pictures, sound, and hyperlinks threw me out of my IF mindset enough that I was struggling more than I should have with the puzzles. That's probably a part of it, but I think another factor was that all the details in the game ended up becoming a big pile of red herrings for me. There are quite a few items and places which have no real use beyond being jokes, and I found it quite easy to get sidetracked into trying to solve puzzles that didn't exist. It's not that I don't think those pieces should be in the game; I actually find it refreshing to play a game where not every item is part of a key or a lock, and even as it caused me to spin my wheels in terms of game progress, it helped me ferret out a lot of the little jokes hidden under the surface of various game items. However, if you're the kind of player who gets easily frustrated when your score doesn't steadily increase, don't be afraid to rely on a hint here and there. Just remember to replay the game after you're done so that you can see what you missed. Besides, that pie-plate spaceship is worth a second look. Rating: 9.6 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Adam Cadre NAME: Cattus Atrox AUTHOR: David Cornelson DATE: 1998 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/atrox PACK UP THE CATS Cattus Atrox by David Cornelson Theodore Dreiser has been called the worst prose stylist ever to qualify as a great writer. Over the course of my college career I had to read his SISTER CARRIE no fewer than four different times, and sure enough, Dreiser's prose is often just laughably bad. Whether he's interrupting a paragraph to mention that "It was in August, 1889" (without specifying what "it" was), or beginning a chapter by introducing "the, to Carrie, very important theatrical performance", or lurching into ridiculous archaisms like "Carrie! Oh Carrie! Ever whole in that thou art hopeful!", Dreiser's control over the English language often reminds the reader of a four-year-old trying to steer a Saturn V rocket. Still, there's a reason I had to read SISTER CARRIE four times, and it's not because my professors were trying to get me to break out the aerospace refs. The prose, rough as it is, is often startlingly effective: the railway strike chapter, for instance, is rendered with a you-are-there intensity unmatched by many a more polished writer. Which is why Dreiser was very much on my mind as I played Cattus Atrox. Cornelson's prose isn't going to impress anybody: it's full of comma splices and other errors, not to mention such howlers as "lust-filled orgasms" and a character screaming "LIONS!" into a telephone and then hanging up. Nevertheless, Cattus Atrox provides the most intense visceral experience of any game in this comp. Now, I'm not one to lose myself in a game the way some people apparently are: at no point did I myself feel fear when the lions were smacking the PC around. But you couldn't tell from the way I was playing. During the chase scene, I was entering directions as fast as I could, running around in a panic, typing N then W then N then E then S then W then S again without even bothering to glance at the text flashing by. Not really the recommended method of playing IF, but, y'know, I had to get away from those lions. I mean, they were, like, eating me and stuff. And then when I found the crowbar, I mean, forget it. Here I'm the guy whose game specifically penalizes the player for being so cruel as to do violence to an animal, and the second I find the crowbar, I switch into full-on Neanderthal mode. I beat that lion cub to death with the club and then stood there beating its corpse over and over again even as on a conscious level I recognized that the game was spitting error messages at me for doing so. I took that crowbar and spent the next half hour whacking anything I registered as a noun. It got to the point that I half expected that if I threw the crowbar into the air it'd turn into a spacecraft. So while the prose is less than masterful, the syntax for some required commands is often weird, and the ending is silly and over the top, Cattus Atrox gets high marks for grabbing me by the collar and yanking me out of detached-observer mode. This game stuck with me. Several games later I had to restrain myself from rushing into the Muse telegraph office and tapping out "LIONS!" on the telegraph. My score: 7.3 (5th place) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Second April NAME: The City AUTHOR: Sam Barlow E-MAIL: sb6729 SP@G bris.ac.uk DATE: 1998 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/city/city.z5 VERSION: Release 2 Part of the charm of the IF competition is that it brings out interesting ideas, ideas which might not be suitable for a full- length game but do something interesting that contributes to the IF oeuvre in one way or another. The converse, however, is that having a forum for short games may discourage authors from developing stories as completely as they might. Sam Barlow's The City is a case in point: it has an interesting idea, but in its present form, there isn't much more than an idea, and the result is rather unsatisfying to play. The premise, though suspiciously reminiscent of Delusions, is reasonably well done. You're trapped in a room with no way out and a video recorder and tape on hand; the tape shows a man taking a pill; you accept a pill from a handy assistant, take it, and black out; repeat. The man in the tape is, of course, you; your goal is to break out of the loop and see what you find. Unfortunately, you don't find much, and you certainly don't find much that's surprising, and it isn't clear that anything you do goes to accomplish anything. (Being trapped in a nightmare laboratoryish sequence is starting to feel a little familiar as an IF premise; the IF world may be getting overloaded with bizarre dystopias, though that certainly isn't Mr. Barlow's fault.) Now, if a sense of futility is the point here, IF is ideal for conveying that. Ain't nothin' more frustrating than IF that goes in circles. However, as noted, Delusions already did that pretty well, even if the resolution was different. More importantly, sheer futility generally does not a satisfying experience make, IF experience included. Likewise, there's a point toward the end where there's only one action available, and it's fairly obvious that you don't "really" want to take that action--but there's no way around it. (Piece of Mind, from the 1996 competition, did something similar--but, IMHO, much more satisfyingly.) The game keeps you from doing plenty of obvious things without explanation, which certainly hits the frustration angle--but it's frustration with the mechanics of the game, not with the situation depicted. (Okay, you can argue that it's all one. But merging the character's frustration with the player's does not produce a fun game.) The problem is that, really, The City doesn't do enough with its premise. The backstory never really shows up, and backstory is what might have distinguished this from its many predecessors; if there were some interesting story behind how things became how they are, the game might stay with the player for more than a few moments after playing. There's painfully little to do once you _do_ break out; the "outside" world isn't any more interesting than the "inside." The futility idea might be more interesting if there were a stronger illusion of control, but there isn't much; you can't get very far, and you can't get anywhere appealing. The City needs to be about twice as long as it is in order to involve the player in the story; as it is, it ends almost as soon as it starts. Moreover, whereas Delusions mixed its futility with a sense of urgency owing to frequent and short time limits, The City eschews all time requirements--in other words, you are never required to take a pill--which means frustration is mixed with, if anything, boredom. Technically, everything works well enough, apart from the failure to provide logical choices at certain points. The author disabled undo and save/restore to no particularly vital purpose, as far as I can tell; if the idea was to remind us that we're at the mercy of other folks and can't do much about our own fate, well, we weren't likely to forget, save/restore or not. Still, there are no technical problems to speak of, and in fact one rather complicated aspect of The City is handled well: the tape that records you actually does play back whatever you did last time around, and describes your actions reasonably well. (On the other hand, there's not a lot you can do anyway.) There are some other odd features--none of the rooms have names, for some reason, though they are distinctly different rooms. (Perhaps the idea was to suggest that you can't really get anywhere, but it's rather confusing at first.) There's no status line, no opening title, no compass directions, etc., and the minimalism doesn't distract much from the game; in that respect, The City works well enough. Still, there isn't much here that anything could distract anyone from, and besides a few gripping moments--on the roof, notably-- it's a rather frustrating experience. It's technically sound enough that I gave it a 7, but it doesn't make much of what might have been an intriguing game. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "david ledgard" I played this game once and didn't get very far. So later came back to it, armed with some hints. The game is quite small, but with a thought provoking plot, a bit George Orwell 1984ish. Some puzzles were fairly easy, others not so. It was difficult to work out what you were supposed to do next and whether the plot had actually advanced. I know for a fact that I would never have completed it without hints, not in a million million years. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Second April NAME: Downtown Tokyo, Present Day AUTHOR: John Kean, writing as Digby McWiggle E-MAIL: keanj SP@G agresearch.cri.nz DATE: 1998 PARSER: Inform, altered somewhat SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if- archive/competition98/inform/tokyo/tokyo.z5 VERSION: Release 1 Perhaps 1998 was the year that authors gave up on text alone and resorted to other means of keeping players involved--Arrival and The Plant used HTML-TADS graphics and sound effects, Photopia used a color scheme, some others (Enlightenment, Muse) used .gif files external to the game. And then there was Downtown Tokyo, Present Day, which featured some dramatic moments rendered in...ASCII art. On the other hand, the drawings fit the tone of the game nicely, which is a cross between spoof of and homage to old B movies, and the whole effect is rather enjoyable. There's one interesting experiment going on that doesn't, unfortunately, work as well as it might: the player inhabits both the protagonist and a movie-theater onlooker, and commands sometimes are directed to the viewer persona rather than the protagonist persona without warning. Part of the reason it doesn't entirely work is that the protagonist's actions are all in the third person--"our hero enjoys a long slurp of soup"--but some of the library responses trickle in now and again. To be sure, it's pretty hard to keep that from happening, but it also doesn't take much of it to break the spell. (On the other hand, it reminded me of the actual experience of being in movie theaters--being absorbed in what's happening on the screen and suddenly having the spell broken, either by a flaw in the film itself or by some distraction in the theater. If that was the intent, it's quite well done.) Then again, I'm not sure there's a better way to keep the viewer and the protagonist distinct, and if they're not distinct, this could turn into a "you're sucked into the movie" game, which wouldn't be a tenth as interesting. It's a flawed experiment, but it's not a bad idea. The plot is minimal, and it's to the game's credit that the whole thing is rather casual about the story--plenty of room for even time-sensitive actions, and the story essentially stops in the middle so that you can wander around and have fun. This is the sort of thing I'd disapprove in most IF but which works just fine here, since B-movies don't exactly set a high realism standard and it's so much fun to play with the toys you're given. Indeed, this middle section (if you can call it that in such a tiny game) is the best thing about Downtown Tokyo; the beginning and end come off more as quotations, homages, than as parodies, and the parody is much more fun. The author provides for plenty of silly actions, logical and not. Still, even if you're inclined to try those silly things, this won't detain you for more than 10 or 15 minutes, and there isn't much reason to come back to it. Adding to the fun is the satire: the author claims never to have seen a monster movie, but he has a good feel for Hollywood cliches anyway. At the end, for example, when the hero and heroine are together, we learn that "their clothes are alluringly torn," pointing to the way films like to fuse danger and sex. Likewise, when people fall, they fall in slow motion, so that you have plenty of time to react. The only real problem with Downtown Tokyo is that it doesn't work particularly well as a game. At the outset, for instance, you can do essentially nothing for about 20 turns; so determined is the author to make fun of the plot contrivances that he doesn't let you interfere with them, logic be damned. The controls in the helicopter you end up flying around are rather nonintuitive--at least, the initial hurdle to overcome is a little strange. It's also distinctly possible to get lost in the city--the unimportant locations don't loop back, so you can wander very far away from the relevant scene. It wouldn't have broken too much with logic to keep the player from wandering away ("You can't leave now. Your reputation as a hero as at stake."). As it is, the game provides some cute satirical moments but not much more. There isn't a lot to Downtown Tokyo, Present Day, but what's there is pretty funny; the author manages to spoof old monster movies in a variety of ways. This was intended for the chicken- comp, and it would have been among the better entries had it been entered. As it was, in the real competition, I gave it a 6. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "Paul O'Brian" Another very short (TextFire-length) game, Tokyo was originally intended for submission to Adam Cadre's Chicken-Comp, but the author didn't finish it in time. All the better for us, because the game is funny and entertaining, and still finds a little time to be innovative as well. With a game this short, it's hard not to give away plot spoilers in any extended discussion, but I'll try to be as discreet as I can. I'll only say as much as this: Tokyo is a very funny spoof on a beloved Japanese film genre (and it's not martial arts movies), one which often features the city of Tokyo (or the rubble thereof) as a setting. Considering this was originally intended to be a Chicken-Comp game, you can probably imagine how it works. There are several reasons why Tokyo is fun, not the least of which is the writing. Random description "events", while having no effect on the main storyline, give the chaotic scenes an antic charm, and the depictions of movie cliches should bring a knowing smile to the face of any film buff. One interesting experiment in Tokyo is its use of a split PC. In other words, the player actually controls the actions of two characters, both a rather anonymous individual watching a movie and the hero of that movie. This is an imaginative idea, and it sometimes works very well. At its best, Tokyo evokes the kind of split consciousness that actually happens while watching a movie. We are present, in the theater, there with the plush seats, the popcorn, and the people around us. But once we become immersed in the movie, we are inside of it as well. We forget about the theater and become part of the story, at least until the baby behind us starts crying, or the teenagers in the front make a wisecrack. However, the game is not always at its best. The split focus creates some confusion as to how commands will be interpreted -- you can never be sure whether your command will be executed by the viewer or the hero. This generally doesn't cause a problem, but it might have worked better if the transitions were smooth and complete, and the only interruptions happened outside of the player's control. In addition, the standard library has been mostly unmodified, so that its messages remain mostly in the second person voice. When that's the voice of the entire game, this is not a problem, but Tokyo asks second person POV to take on the special duty of signaling that the viewer, rather than the hero, is reacting. Consequently, messages like "You can't see any such thing" (rather than "Our hero can't see any such thing") can create a little confusion. Finally, I can't review Tokyo without mentioning its graphics. No, it's not a z6 game, but Tokyo has some surprises up its sleeve. Finding them provides some of the funniest moments of the game. Tokyo does a great many things well, and is one of the better short-short games I've played. Again, it's a bit disappointing when a game this enjoyable ends so soon -- I think this concept had quite a bit more mileage in it than was used by the author. Still, I enjoyed it while it lasted -- it won't entertain you as long as the average summer blockbuster movie, but it will probably entertain you more. Rating: 7.9 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Second April NAME: Enlightenment: A One-room Absurdity AUTHOR: Taro Ogawa E-MAIL: Taro.Ogawa SP@G navy.gov.au DATE: 1998 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/enlighte VERSION: Release 7 Enlightenment is proof positive that one-room games need not be one-joke or one-puzzle in style; in fact, they can be quite diverse and difficult. In a competition with several of them, Enlightenment stands out as the most accomplished: there is a certain unity to the puzzles that justifies the one-room framework, and they are difficult enoguh to tax the player's mental energy, even within the confines of the room. The game also features a take-off on the Infocom "feelies" of old, with an HTMLized excerpt from Popular Enchanting and several silly but amusing tidbits. The excerpt reproduces the goofball feel of the Infocom manuals, and fits with the game's persistent tweaking of Activision (the darkness is inhabited by g***s, notably, and being eaten by one is "both g***ling and g***some"). (The prologue also refers to Frobozz Magic Napalm and a Frobozz Magic Tinning Kit, so there's not much ambiguity about who we're imitating.) The game blends traditional fantasy elements with anachronistic bits like battery-operated appliances in a way that likewise recalls Infocom; one of the familiar objects is a aerosol can of g*** repellent. The puzzles, though the solutions are sometimes silly enough to recall Steve Meretzky, would qualify as among Infocom's more difficult: several turn on realizing the physical properties of some of the objects you're holding, properties not at all obvious to the unscientifically minded. Still, the puzzles are inventive and require some lateral thinking--and some combining of objects in several cases--to solve; the difficulty stems less from unfairness or obscure facts than from the one-object or one-property conventions of most IF puzzles. The real fly in the ointment is the hint system, which seems badly broken--one must go through the hints for the concept of the game as a whole in order to get to those for specific puzzles, whether or not one has already grasped the goal. There may be a reason for that--the headings for the individual puzzles might give the game away for the player who hasn't picked up the point yet--but surely there must be a way to avoid that problem without such a maladaptive system. At any rate, in a game this difficult, the hint system is essential--and beyond the initial glitch, the system works well. The plot--at least, what can be revealed here--is simple enough: at the end of a cave-crawl hack-and-slash fantasy quest, you have to cross a bridge guarded by a troll. Therein lies the excuse for giving you an inventory full of sundry objects, presumably, which makes possible difficult and complicated puzzles. But the way you go about getting rid of the troll is more inventive than the premise suggests, and suggests an ironic reversal of one of the adventurer's commonplace tasks. Likewise implied is a jab at the interchangeability of fantasy quests, since the quest as a whole is clearly generic; you never find out, after all, what you were after in the first place. The joke, of course, is that the game sprinkles offhand references to other things you've already encountered in your quest, as if the premise were actually worth developing, more than an excuse for the one-room problem. Enlightenment is a short but extremely solid game: the puzzles are challenging enough that solving them feels rewarding. If it feels less like a game than a small section of a larger game, that's presumably the intent, and while it might be more satisfying to play a full-blown game, this sort of entry is ideal for the competition. With enough Infocom references to make fans nostalgic, and some of the feel of early Infocom, Enlightenment is an unabashed puzzle-fest that boasts some of the competition's toughest problems. It does what it does well enough that I gave it a 9 in the competition. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "Paul O'Brian" What is it with all the one-room games this year? There must be some kind of movement happening in the collective IF unconscious which says "Plot? Who needs it? Give me one room, and as long as it's got one or more puzzles in it, I'm happy." Well, sometimes I'm happy too. And, more or less, this is one of those times. Despite its title, Enlightenment has very little to do with gaining awareness or understanding Zen koans. To say what it *does* have to do with would probably be a bit too much of a spoiler, but it involves deliberately placing yourself in a situation that most text adventurers would avoid at all costs. Because of this, it took me a little while to actually catch on to how the game is supposed to work -- I just couldn't believe that deliberately placing myself in danger was the right path. It is, though, and getting there is all the fun. Like last year's Zero Sum Game, Enlightenment puts the PC at the *end* of an adventure of dizzying proportions. Unlike Zero Sum Game, Enlightenment isn't really an unwinding of the PC's accomplishments -- you get to keep your score, and even increase it. You've already overcome dozens of obstacles, collected lots of treasures, and scored 240 points out of 250; now there's just the little matter of getting past a canonical troll bridge and scurrying out of the caverns with your loot. But how? In the game's words: If only you hadn't used your Frobozz Magic Napalm on that ice wall... If only you hadn't used your TrolKil (*Tm) to map that maze... If only you hadn't sold your Frobozz Magic Tinning Kit. If only you hadn't cooked and eaten those three Billy Goats Gruff... ... or that bear ... If ONLY you'd checked the bloody bridge on your way in. This brief excerpt is representative of the writing in the game: it is both a very funny parody of the Zork tradition as well as an enthusiastic participation in that tradition. In fact, as you can see from the above quote, the game actually features some familiar parts of the Zork universe, such as Frobozz Magic products, rat-ants, and even certain slavering lurkers in dark corners. Activision apparently granted permission for this usage, as they did for David Ledgard in his adaptation of the Planetfall sample transcript for his game Space Station. Activision's willingness to grant permissions for such usage, as well as their donation of prizes to the competition and their sometime inclusion of hobbyist IF on commercial products, is great news for a fan community like ours -- their support of IF means that more people will devote their time to it, resulting (hopefully) in more and more good games. Enlightenment is one of the good ones, and one of its best features is its writing. Another way in which it is unlike Zero Sum Game is that it doesn't take an extreme or harsh tone. Instead, the writing is almost always quite funny in both its comments on text adventure cliches (the FULL score listing is a scream) and its usage of them. The game is littered with footnotes, which themselves are often littered with footnotes. Sly allusions and in-jokes abound, but they're never what the game depends on, so if you don't catch them, you're not missing anything important. Of all the one-room games I've seen this year, Enlightenment is definitely the best-written. It even includes some fun outside documentation in the form of the HTML edition of the latest issue of Spelunker Today: "The magazine for explorers and adventurers." This kind of mood-building file has been included with a few competition games this year, and Enlightenment's extras are definitely the best of the bunch. The writing in the faux magazine is just as good as the writing in the game, and the graphics look sharp and professional. I like these little extras -- they really do help set the mood of a game -- and they definitely add to the fun of Enlightenment. The one problem I had with this game was that, although the writing is funny and clever, it is sometimes not precise enough to convey the exact nature of a puzzle or its solution. In a heavily puzzle-oriented game like Enlightenment, this can be a major setback. For example, at one point in the game you're called upon to cut something, but it won't work to use your sword on it. You must find something else to cut with. Well, there is something else, but that object is never described as having a sharp edge. This is one of those puzzles that made me glad I looked at the hints -- the only way I would have ever gotten it is by brute force, and that's no fun anyway. In another instance, a part of the setting is described in such a confusing way that I still don't quite understand what it is supposed to look like. Part of the difficulty, I think, is that the game features a gate, with metal spikes at its bottom set into the stone floor. Now, this made me think of bars, like you might see on a portcullis. However, as far as I can determine the game actually means a solid wall, with spikes at the bottom, which I wouldn't describe as a gate. This kind of imprecision is a real problem when the objects so imprecisely described have to be acted upon in precise ways in order to solve puzzles. So I used the hints for a number of the puzzles, and I don't mind that I did, because I wouldn't have solved them on my own anyway. But imprecision aside, I'm still glad I used them, because it enabled me to play all the way through Enlightenment, and the trip out of that one room was well worth taking. Rating: 8.6 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "david ledgard" This game is based in the Zork Universe. You have just completed your mission and escaped with a load of treasure, but a troll blocks the last bridge to freedom, you can't go back because you've booby-trapped the gate. This is a one room adventure which I find a bit constraining, with only one NPC, the troll. Your inventory includes a lot of treasures, and a few other adventurer type items. I'm afraid I couldn't work out what to do, and was running to the hints within 10 minutes. I thought all the illuminated objects were some kind of programming error, probably me being a bit dense. I'm afraid the level of puzzles in this game was to complex for me, I only managed to solve a handful by myself, and kept having to use hints. I could never have completed it on my own. The game also comes with a mildly interesting HTML web page set-up. The author would of been wise to include a few subtle hints here, so people wouldn't have to use the hint system straight away, and point out it exists in the run file. Once you start using hints it ruins the game, and just becomes a chore of reading hints, and typing in what they say. The game also has a footnotes system, but I never found footnotes much fun after the novelty value, and the old Footnote 10 - Read Footnote 11, Footnote 11 - Read Footnote 10; and Footnote 20 - we didn't mention that Footnote; jokes have worn off. It's just a thing to show off one's programming skill, and annoy the player. This game is well coded - I didn't find any errors - but too complex for my taste, and I suspect a lot of other people. The author has a Japanese sounding name, whether he is or not I don't know, but the game certainly seems Japanese: Ultra Efficient, and Ultra Boring. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "david ledgard" NAME: Fifteen AUTHOR: Ricardo Dague E-MAIL: trikiw SP@G hotmail.com DATE: 1998 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/fifteen VERSION: Release 7 I quite enjoyed this game although it was very simple. Clearly a first adventure. The main item in the game is the Fifteen Puzzle which is implemented like one of those simple text games, you used to see in computer pre-history a bit like Robots, by Torbjörn Andersson, available from the IF archive. I remember playing Wrap and Zombies (a variant of Robots) on a Commodore Pet (yes, computers did once exist that used Tape Drives, and had memory measured in single 1K units), kind of nostalgic, showing my age. The rest of the game is very simple, locked doors, put the treasures on the table etc... I worked out the remote control program in about half a microsecond, but then I am a seasoned IF hand. I had a bit of trouble working out how to use the ladder, a guess the verb problem, which could be fixed. The game is short on narrative, with a lot of short room descriptions, which could be fleshed out a bit. Clearly this game was never going to have a good showing due to it's simplicity, but it was enjoyable none the less. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "Paul O'Brian" NAME: Four in One AUTHOR: J. Robinson Wheeler E-MAIL: wheeler SP@G jump.net DATE: 1998 PARSER: TADS standard SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/tads/fourin1/fourin1.gam VERSION: Release 1.0 Playing Four In One, I was in an unusual, unprecedented (for me) situation: I was playing a game of which I had already read a complete, winning transcript. Not a walkthrough, but a transcript of commands and game responses. It seems that the author submitted this transcript to Stephen Granade's IF Fan Fest, an informal quasi-competition held at Granade's Mining Company web page. If I had known this transcript was also going to be a competition game, I wouldn't have read it, because I hate spoilers. But I didn't know that, so I read it, and it made playing the game a very strange experience -- the whole thing gave me a very strong sense of deja vu. Now, granted, the transcript isn't an exact one. You can't follow that transcript and hope to win the game, because the commands are not all perfectly duplicated, and there are some other differences between the two as well. However, they have a *lot* in common. Now, the funny thing about this is that when I initially read the Four in One transcript, my thought was "It's a funny idea, but it would be far too difficult to actually turn into a game." Well, I have been proved wrong. The idea behind the game is that you're a film director in the heyday of the Marx brothers, and you're directing them in their first picture for MGM. Or at least, you're trying to direct them. Apparently, keeping all the Marxes in one room, getting along, and working productively is somewhat akin to herding cats. Consequently, you're forced into the position of chasing after them, collecting them one by one, and forcing them to follow you around to their (and your) considerable annoyance. Even once you've got them all on the set and rehearsed, there's no guarantee that one or more of them won't go bolting off to make a phone call, hang out at the catering table, or read a book. What's worse, you have only two hours to get a good take on a crucial scene, or you and the picture will both be canned. The transcript makes this into a hilarious situation, showing the Marx brothers at their zaniest even when the cameras aren't rolling. In fact, *all* the comedy takes place when the cameras aren't rolling. This is the kind of thing that I didn't think an IF game would be able to pull off, but Four in One is the living proof. It's not as funny as the transcript, but it works, especially in places like Chico's dressing room, where more and more people keep entering, pushing you inexorably to the back wall like the first entrant in a phone-booth-stuffing competition. Scenes like this can be irritating as well, and the game sometimes steps across the fine line between funny aggravation and just plain aggravating aggravation. However, with the exception of one internal TADS error that I found, the technical details of the writing and coding are executed superbly, and this goes a long way towards smoothing out any annoyances. The place where the game's technical proficiency shines the most is in its characters. Four In One is a the most character-intensive piece of IF I've ever played. Almost every location has one or more characters in it at all times, and these characters are as fully implemented as they need to be. The gaffer, for example, is not terribly talkative -- ask him about the movie and he'll say "A job's a job," but ask him about the lights and he has an opinion, as he should. Every character has responses about the things they should know about, though if you spend much time in conversations with them you will run afoul of the game's time limit. The Marx brothers can tell you about each other, the movie, MGM (Groucho says, "MGM stands for 'more godless movies.'"), and anything else they ought to know about. Four in One does an outstanding job juggling all these characters, giving them just the appropriate depth of implementation so that the game really rewards replay. After I had solved the game, I went back and just chatted with the various characters, and was delighted with the extent to which they are implemented. The author's research is quite apparent in these moments, and it makes a big difference. Four In One taught me things about the Marx Brothers that I had never known before, and made me want to go out and rent A Night at the Opera again. That's entertainment. Rating: 8.7 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Second April If competition entries got individual awards, Four in One would have to be recognized as the Greatest Sheer Effort. The game is simply littered with NPCs--24 by my count, and considering the way the characters wander in and out, I'm sure I missed at least a few. Some of them essentially stand still (though all have some dialogue potential), others have painfully complicated movement daemons, and just thinking about what it took to code all of them made me want to cry. (The source code is now available, but I haven't looked at it yet. Perhaps some day when I'm feeling especially brave.) Unfortunately, all that elaborate coding doesn't necessarily add up to a rewarding game--though given how much time the author obviously put into this, I certainly wish I could say it did. The premise: you're "Sam Wood," trying to put the finishing touches on the latest Marx Brothers movie, and you're charged with the task of assembling everyone on the set so that the last scene can be filmed. Your clout as director only goes so far, however, and trying to keep the brothers on the set long enough to film is, even for you, is like building a house out of Jello. You have a trusty sidekick who, frankly, isn't much use, and the set is filled with extras and techies and other actors. Egos being what they are, however, you don't seem to be able to delegate the task of rounding up the brothers, and so you scurry around the studio as if you were a lowly assistant. Since the end of the competition, the cry regarding Four in One has been fairly uniform: cute but too frustrating. The cry isn't wrong, as such, but let's be clear about why it's frustrating: it's not because there are a lot of NPCs to understand and manipulate. It's that so much of the NPCs' behavior is random, as far as I can tell, that a given game can be impossible to win if certain random events go against you often enough. If two certain characters get in a fight, for instance, another would leave, slowing down the rounding-up process. Too many fights and you'd lose your power to gather people together, for various reasons. I don't know whether the fights happened at random or were related to some other factor, controllable or not; if there was another factor, it was obscure enough that I never caught on. Likewise, another character gets bored after a certain amount of moves and wanders away--and if you don't get him to do what he's supposed to do before that happens, you've wasted a chance, and you don't have a lot to spare. To be sure, part of what makes the game realistic is that the NPCs are not entirely malleable; to that end, Four in One gets lots of realism points. Getting the brothers to do what you want is, as someone said, like herding cats. But all the realism points seem to come out of the fun column. However, there's an upside to all this: there's lots of replayability in Four in One, partly to find Easter eggs and partly because there's lots of extraneous detail to sift through. Most of the characters respond to a variety of questions--about the movie, other characters, life, etc. Because a winning game can vary so much--two different games can present different challenges: solving the game once doesn't guarantee that you'll be able to solve it on the next try. (Then again, the random events might just not be on your side the next time, as noted.) The game is consistently funny--Groucho has lots of good one-liners, and Harpo has plenty of amusing antics, even if they usually impede your progress. The thoroughness of the coding is not limited to the NPC daemons--different characters have distinct reactions when they enter certain rooms, for instance, and putting certain characters in rooms together has unexpected results. In short, so much of Four in One works so well that it seems rude to point out that the game itself isn't always a lot of fun, at least if the player is interested in achieving the goal the game presents. Most of the fun to be had is extraneous to that goal. In summary, Four in One reminded me of Tempest from the previous year's competition--a brilliant idea, thoroughly and intelligently done, that I wanted to like more than I did. And just as Four in One arguably worked better as the transcript submitted to the IF Fan Fest, so Tempest works better as, well, the play, and the literacy of the attempt to translate it can't hide that. Four in One is quite a testament to the author's skills; as a game, however, it's flawed, and I gave it a 7. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "david ledgard" This is quite an interesting concept, putting a new spin on IF. Instead of the game being object-centric, it is NPC-centric, with NO objects of any use what so ever, and more NPC's per square pixel than any other game I have played, although most of them are thinly implemented. But basically what happened is NPC's become gloryfied objects. You are on a film set and only have four remaining takes to complete a picture (hence the name), or you're out on your ear. The film includes the four Marx Brothers, I've vaguely heard of Groucho that's about it, and I thought there were only two. The problem is to get all the stars and extras in the same place at the same this. To do this you can TAKE people, to get them to follow you. The trouble is they keep wandering off while you're finding the others ones, sometimes after only one turn. There are, however, two NPC's who can help you locate missing people. Most of the time actors tend to go to the same places, but some won't follow without overs. Read the special commands to see how to control them. I'm afraid I couldn't finish this game, and suspect very very few people actually did. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "david ledgard" NAME: Human Resources Stories AUTHOR: Harry M. Hardjono DATE: 1998 PARSER: Multiple-choice (mostly) SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/hrs A lot of people pooh-poohed this game, just because it wasn't standard IF. I think the author was quite brave, trying a different format, and applying the genre in a different way. I don't think it deserved to come last. The suspension of the save facility was a bit annoying, but justified by the game context, I suppose. The game was a lot more complicated than most people appreciate, with it calculating a different job grade/wage depending on your answers. Also I think, but am not sure, the wrong answers changed depending on your previous answers. Vive la difference. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "Jason F. Finx" NAME: I Didn't Know You Could Yodel AUTHOR: Michael R. Eisenman and Andrew J. Indovina EMAIL: I don't know, and frankly I can't really say I care DATE: Some time in 1996, apparently (the copyright message at the top of the game says 1997, but the copyright message it gives when you get the "last lousy point" says 1996, so I'm assuming the earlier one is when the game was first created). PARSER: Better than Scott Adams, but not up to TADS/Inform standard. SUPPORTS: IBM PC only AVAILABILITY: Freeware, though the surviving author seems to be planning a commercial (or at least shareware) release. Currently available in the contests98 folder of the gmd.de IF-archive. URL: http://chorn.com/~scorpion/yodel.html ftp://if-archive/games/competition98/msdos/yodel "Oh, no. It can't be." That was my reaction when I looked at the results from the 1998 IF contest and saw, near the bottom of the list, the title "I Didn't Know I Could Yodel". Why this reaction, you might ask? Well, about six months ago I downloaded a game by that title from FreeGames Online (www.freegamesonline.com), and made the mistake of actually playing it. This was before I had heard of SPAG or the IF archive, and had I heard of those, and known how many other, much better text adventures were available, I would never have slogged my way through this one. As it was, I probably still wouldn't have were it not for a promise of some spectacular ending. I was, at least, gratified to see how close to the bottom of the list the game had placed (ranking even below a game coauthored by the infamous Rybread Celsius! ;) ), which meant that other people had shared my opinion of it. But no, I later reasoned; it couldn't possibly be the same game. After all, the 1998 competition rules explicitly state that no game could have been released prior to its entry to the contest. Either this was an illegal entry, or it was a different game by the same name - which was, I thought, entirely possible; after all, the title came from a rather old joke. Then I looked at the file "yodeltxt.txt", and saw the phrase "type 'vanna' to play hangman", and knew that my worst fears were realized. It was the same game. (Before I go on, a few notes about the fact that the game had been released well before the contest date. If I understand the rules correctly, and this does constitute a violation of them, then there are things which lead me to believe that the rule violation was not intentional. The statement in the file yodeltxt.txt that "[a]fter the contest, I would like to try to release it, if that's ok with you guys" suggests that the author assumed that "release" means "attempt to sell for money". If, as I suspect, the author did equate "releasing" the game with charging money for it, then his violation of the rules was not a knowing one.) [ Editor's note: According to the Contest organizer, David Dyte, the pre-competition release of the game was made unbeknown to the authors, and without their permission, and a decision was made to let it compete despite this. ] Now, why did I dislike this game so much? Well, the main problem with it I can sum up in two words: bathroom humor. (And I use the word "humor" loosely.) More bathroom humor than I've seen in all the other text adventure games I've ever played combined. At two different locations in the game, you find yourself in desperate need of - ah, emptying your large intestine - or dire consequences result (i.e. your character dies horribly). If that were the end of it, well, that would be that, but unfortunately it isn't; there's also a repulsive bit after the second time involving... well, we'll all be better off if I don't go into that. Actually, toilet humor wasn't even all of it. The game almost seemed to go out of its way to be offensive and disgusting at every opportunity. There are ethnic slurs, gay jokes, and jokes involving a certain other bodily secretion (I can't be more specific without giving away one of the puzzles), and at two different points you have to kill an innocent character (two different characters, of course). I think the single section of the game that stands out as the most repulsive was the Jed's House sequence, but the bulk of the game wallows in the same filth, if to a slightly lesser degree. Also, the insult-the-player-character device is getting really old, and this game takes it to rather extreme levels (which makes the endgame make even less sense than it otherwise would). And speaking of devices that are getting really old, and are taken to extreme levels in this game, some other games may include their authors as powerful NPCs, but... well, I can't say more without giving away part of the ending. Speaking of NPCs, though (while I'm segueing anyway), the NPCs of this game - and there are a lot of them - are fairly typical for old, second-class (i.e. not by Infocom or the other classic companies) text adventures. Most of them are only there as puzzles to be solved; you can't interact with them outside of a few very narrow possibilities (the NPC, DO SUCH-AND-SUCH command structure isn't even implemented), and they do nothing on their own; either they just stay in one place until you get rid of them, or they appear, do whatever they're supposed to do, and then vanish. The only possible exception is the comedian, and even he only really has a set joke he spouts on entering each new room, which isn't even related to the room itself. Actually, there was a lot of missed potential with the comedian - he could have made sarcastic comments on the player's actions, taunted the player when something didn't work, et cetera - but no; for the most part he just spouts irrelevant jokes. Now, to the technical issues. To be honest, I didn't remember much about these details, but I figured if I was going to write a review of this game I'd better play through it again (especially since the version submitted might have been a later release than the one I played originally), so I stiffened my lip and subjected myself once more to its inane repulsiveness. As it turns out, the grammar and spelling are far from perfect - there are some misplaced modifiers, missing ending quotation marks, and words that should be capitalized that aren't, among other things, and quite a few misspellings (the most annoying of which was the constant "your" for "you're", though I found it odd that the authors misspelled "monstrous" two different ways in the same paragraph!) - but it could have been a lot worse. The writing is awkward, though; sometimes a simple contraction or two would help its flow immensely, and in a few places there are obvious mistakes (usually in the form of omitted words) that the authors failed to catch, such as "A pudgy cop steps out the vehicle". The attempt at poetry in the dogs' challenges in the Lawn is particularly awful, but at least its awfulness is acknowledged within the game. (Perhaps it was meant to be _dog_gerel? Nah, I don't think the authors were that subtle.) Most of the scenery objects are examinable, though there are some glaring omissions. For example, one room contains dogs with sombreros and big mustaches, but the game doesn't recognize the words "sombrero" and "mustache", and despite the fact that the game tells you that you read the walls of a bathroom stall, and examining the walls tells you they're "written all over", typing "read walls" gives the message "There's nothing to read". Many room descriptions, unfortunately, neglect to mention the exits (and in at least one place the exits are listed incorrectly!). The parser - a homemade one written in Modula-2 - can handle multiple-word commands - adjectives and prepositions are allowed - but I got the idea that it didn't really so much parse them as just do a keyword search. If there's an NPC you're supposed to ASK about something, for example, if often doesn't make a difference what you're asking about, or even whether the NPC is the object or the object of the preposition! At the West End of Lawn, for example, "TALK TO WAITER", "ASK WAITER", "ASK WAITER ABOUT TOMATO", and even "ASK PRUNES ABOUT WAITER" all elicit exactly the same response from the waiter (which incidentally has nothing to do with tomatoes or prunes), while "TALK", "ASK", or even "ASK PRUNES ABOUT TOMATO" yield a different response from the waiter, even though you haven't said you're talking to him. Worse, if there's an NPC around but not one the game requires you to talk to, the ASK and TALK commands get the response "There is no one to talk to," regardless of the objects. Also, such now-standard commands as "undo" and "oops" are missing ("wait", rather inexplicably, yields the response "You must supply a noun"). Additionally, there are a few places that could use better support of synonyms or rewordings: you can MOVE or PUSH a certain body, but not TURN it OVER or ROLL it OVER (despite the fact that when you push it it rolls over anyway), and KNOCK ON DOOR works where KNOCK is answered by the response "It doesn't do any good." There are a number of relatively minor bugs, but I only found three that I would consider really disastrous. First, even after everything else is done, "ENTER BOAT" makes a voice say "YOU ARE NOT READY FOR THE BOAT YET!", but "WEST" gets you on the boat just fine, which is likely to lead players who only try the former command to think there's something left they have to do first. Second, when the game requests a one-letter response, it only accepts lower-case letters, and in fact entering a capital letter in the hangman game (don't ask; its connection to the rest of the game is tenuous) crashes the program with the error "function fell thru the end". Last, if you go to the Indian Battle Ground after getting the collar from the dogs, your collar disappears and you can't get another one, which makes the game unsolvable unless you've already finished everything in the dogs' area. As for the puzzles, well, to be honest, most of them weren't bad, and some of them were quite imaginative. There were few that seemed totally illogical; though I admit I was turned off enough by the bathroom humor that I cheated on a few puzzles by looking at the code to get it over with (there was no walkthrough available when I first played it in August), even for those few puzzles that I cheated on when I found the solutions I thought I could have gotten them if I just hadn't given up so soon. (Granted, though, a few of the puzzles that I did get without cheating involved little logic and a lot of guessing.) One of the two puzzles that involved killing an innocent person was especially clever and well-done, though I wish they had made it so the NPC was only incapacitated instead of killed in cold blood. Another puzzle (getting past the enraged Injun Simon) had me stuck for a long time when I first played it, but when I did finally figure out the solution it seemed blatantly obvious - which I think is one mark of a good puzzle. Most of the puzzles were, however, very disconnected, and there wasn't any plot to speak of (despite the explanation at the end); this again is fairly typical of many old second-class text adventures which were just hodgepodges of plotless puzzles. Also, I seldom like the idea of riddles in a text adventure, and this one had a lot of them. They were readily solvable (well, the last one had me stumped, and even after I cheated by looking at the code I didn't understand it for a long time, but after I finally "got" it I thought I should have gotten it sooner), and the end of the game at least gave some justification for them. In fact, for what it's worth, the ending didn't completely fail to deliver on its promise. It didn't completely succeed either: the fate of your character was positive, but far too much so, so much that it seemed unmotivated (especially given the previous constant emphasis on your character's stupidity and general worthlessness - what exactly did he do to earn such a great reward?), and frankly rather unspectacular by its very superlativeness. I did, however, like the idea of the brief descriptions of what later happened to all the game's NPCs. Unfortunately, the authors' descriptions of what happened to the characters were as juvenile and unfunny as the rest of the game, but the _idea_ of having such a "where-are-they-now" list was original (as far as I know) and entertaining, even if the implementation in this particular game left a lot to be desired. In fact, something similar could be said of much of the game. The authors were not at a loss for good ideas. Subpar parser, plotlessness, and static NPCs aside, the biggest problem this game had was simply its authors' fixation on bathroom humor - and that _was_ a big problem. There were quite a few positive aspects of the game, however. Quite a bit of imagination went into it; it's just too bad that so much of it was directed toward jokes involving bodily functions. There was at least one very nice red herring that I was convinced I must have to do something about (but, as it turned out, I didn't). The geography, if bizarre and illogical, was at least consistent (with the possible exception of wherever exactly that horde of desert natives was supposed to be). The "last lousy point" is actually given for something that makes sense for a change (within the context of the game). In short, these authors aren't completely without potential - well, "this author", I should say; according to the notes in the yodeltxt.txt file one (Michael Eisenman) is now deceased. The main thing he needs to do is get his mind out of the gutter. Sadly, in "I Didn't Know You Could Yodel", the authors' minds were so deeply and firmly wedged in said gutter that this completely overwhelmed any positive things about the game. If Mr. Indovina makes another game without all the toilet jokes and other objectionable attempts at humor, it may conceivably be worth looking at (though unless he takes great strides in a lot of other aspects too it still will be far from top-of-the-line). But unless you have the sense of humor of a particularly snickery preteen, "I Didn't Know You Could Yodel" is decidedly not worth the download. My score for "I Didn't Know You Could Yodel": Atmosphere 0 - None to speak of except repulsive "humor" Gameplay 0.9 - Not bad for a homemade parser, but far from state of the art. Writing 0.3 - The writing was pedestrian at best, and far from devoid of spelling and grammar errors, but at least it didn't have as many as some other games. Plot 0.2 - No real plot, but at least there's some attempt to explain things at the end. Discretion 0.3 - I didn't like toilet humor when I was 10, and I don't like it any better now. I didn't give a 0 for the discretionary points, though because I felt the authors deserved some credit for a few unique touches like the "where are they now" bit at the end. Characters 0.3 - Lots of NPCs, but they're all caricatures you can't interact with Puzzles 1 - By far the best aspect of the game, but still, few really interactive puzzles, and a few felt like guessing games. Plus, the riddles annoyed me. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "Paul O'Brian" NAME: Informatory AUTHOR: William S. Shlaer EMAIL: shlaer SP@G aol.com DATE: September 1998 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/informat VERSION: Release 1 Every year I've been writing reviews for the IF competition, I've seen several games which are their authors' first attempt at learning Inform. These usually aren't the better games -- I find that most of the really good Inform games in the competition are not the first pieces of code ever hacked together by their authors. Informatory, however, gives a twist to this tendency -- it is the author's first attempt to *teach* Inform. Rather than replicating its author's apartment or dorm room, Informatory instead replicates a number of familiar scenes and objects from various canonical IF games, and allows its player to peek at their source code in order to give some insight as to how Inform could be used to create them. It does this through a handy device known as the "Codex Helmet" -- whenever the player character wears this helmet, source code for all objects becomes visible. Of course, a couple of elementary puzzles must be overcome in order to gain access to this miracle of technology, but hints are provided for those puzzles. Once the Helmet is acquired, Informatory presents a new kind of puzzle: to progress in the game, you must decipher the Inform source code of its objects so that you may use their special properties to your advantage. For me, this kind of puzzle worked well, because it relied on information I had already acquired through working on my own Inform creations. However, for someone who did not know Inform and wasn't particularly interested in investing much time to learn it, I think those puzzles would be a major nuisance. In fact, if you're not interested in learning Inform, my advice would be to give this game a pass. Its interests are much more in helping novices to learn Inform in a fairly fun and ingenious way than to provide a fun gaming experience for everyone. This is a perfectly acceptable goal, but it makes Informatory more educational software than entertainment software. The game invokes the genie from Andrew Plotkin's Lists and Lists, and the reference is quite apt -- that game also didn't much care about entertaining, instead giving the focus to its own (remarkable) z-machine implementation of Scheme. Informatory didn't feel quite as oppressive as Lists to me, probably because I'm already familiar with Inform, an advantage I sadly lacked when it came to Scheme. However, the two share a common theme: they are not so much games as teaching tools, and if you're not interested in learning, the tool isn't for you. Having thus limited its audience, Informatory does its task rather well, I think. The author bills it a "not-very-interactive tutorial," and I think he's only half-right on both counts. Depending on how you define the term "interactive", I think Informatory is quite interactive indeed. It's probably the only game I've ever seen that actually assigns outside reading to its players so that they have a better chance at the puzzles. This obviously doesn't work in the competition context, but someone might find it a little useful when used as a tool in its own right, especially if that person is already in the process of learning Inform. Furthermore, Informatory's source-code-oriented puzzles are *much* more interactive than the typical tutorial style of "announce the concept, show the concept, now you try it." Now, this is a double-edged sword too: sometimes the lack of guidance can really be rather frustrating. I sometimes found myself wishing for the genie from Lists to keep hanging around, giving me clues when I needed them. Consequently, I didn't find Informatory to be "not-very-interactive", but I didn't really find it to be a "tutorial" either. Instead of teaching Inform piece-by-piece, it assigns reading in the Designer's Manual, and in fact those assignments are only reachable after solving a number of source code puzzles. Informatory therefore isn't much of a teacher, but it's a good quiz for those who are already learning. As a competition game, it's no great shakes: at its best, it's about as much fun as taking a really interesting test. However, I can see it becoming one useful tool for people who are beginning to get their feet wet in the sea of Inform. Rating: 6.8 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "david ledgard" The first time I tried this game, I couldn't get in the White House so gave up. I had another look at it because I was suckered into doing these reviews, and am rather glad I did. The problem wasn't very difficult, just took a bit of time and intellectual albow grease. There are quite a number of humerous jokes in this game including the leaflet (having written a game myself I totally agree), and the sink and flame jokes. This game resonates with me, and I'll wager (a) the Author is British, and (b) has spent several years doing a computer course. A few minor gripes, toad should have said 'POOP! POOP!', and the letter Z is not recognised by "crudely" or "carved", ditto for the journal. I kind of figured I'd find a skeleton key in the skeleton, comment required for this action. I had thought of including inform snippets in my Spacestation game as well, but ran out of time. They'll probably be in the next version. The codex helmet did get very annoying very fast, though, it was just like looking up hints, only much more tedious. A FULL command, telling you where you scored your points, might have been good too. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Second April NAME: Little Blue Men AUTHOR: Michael Gentry E-MAIL: edromia SP@G concentric.net DATE: 1998 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/bluemen VERSION: Release 1 Little Blue Men is, at bottom, a highly bizarre game. It begins in a ho-hum office setting and abruptly shifts into...well, it's hard to say. Sci-fi/horror/dystopia/fantasy, maybe. The result, though uneven in spots, is certainly unique, and rather disturbing as well: familiar elements of the office environment are given a sinister cast, and the game is enlivened throughout by macabre humor. The game begins with you at your desk doing menial tasks, and it can end there very quickly as well unless you, the player, decide to put down your menial tasks at a certain point and go explore the rest of the office. In other words, the game gives you a quick "ending" after about five moves and doesn't emphasize that this ending is suboptimal. In an IF Competition rife with one-room or one-puzzle games, the size of the story file might be the only thing keeping the player from missing most of the game. This is an issue mainly because the game keeps you from wandering away at first, and provides minimal motivation for you to get up and wander around; it's not clear _why_ you do what you do. The problem of unclear motivations recurs later, as the game transforms into, well, whatever it is: some of your actions have no obvious reasons. The author, to be fair, was trying to explore the idea of a protagonist motivated by evil ends--or, at least, ends with which the player cannot easily sympathize. It's an underdeveloped area in IF, and this is an intriguing stab at it. But without some flashes of intuition in that regard, the player is likely to discover what the character's goals are through the hints, which doesn't exactly have the same effect. As the game progresses, though, and the genre/setting becomes more clear, the author delivers several excellent shock-twists in ways reminiscent of Delusions, and just as effective. Once the player accepts the premise (and figures out what it is), Little Blue Men is terrific sci-fi in a vaguely absurdist way. Some lengthy speeches by NPCs could have come straight out of schlocky movies or books, but that just adds to the overall effect here: the author's main satirical theme is the line between irritating office banality and sheer evil, and the game plays the dichotomy for all it's worth. The puzzles largely reinforce that: most involve putting conventional office objects to new, devious uses, or turning humdrum objects into weapons, or conquering perennial office irritations (like the blaring smoke detector or the fickle vending machine). The cross-genre nature of the game leaves a lot of unanswered questions, of course--more backstory would help--but the dystopia part is so thoroughly done that it works well nonetheless. One of the more interesting aspects of Little Blue Men is its separation between goal and motivation. The character's goals are not always clear; it is clear that the character does not anticipate the ending of the game before it happens. Instead, the goals are more personal, more centered on the self: your emotional balance is somewhere between "steamed" and "frosty," and your object at any given moment is to become more frosty and eliminate those things that make you steamed. Once the player accepts that premise--that your objective is to get rid of annoyances--it drives the game, yet the author never provides any goals larger than that. The result is, in a sense, a rather narcissistic game--the importance of everything around lies in how it makes you feel--which is, no doubt, just what the author intended. One of the questions that Little Blue Men poses is whether getting rid of those things that annoy you leads to anything better: the ambivalent nature of the ending suggests otherwise. In fact, one of the best, and most frustrating things, about the game is the ending: the effect is both surreal and disturbing. It is not clear that the player has "won" when he or she reaches the end of the game; there is good reason, in fact, for thinking that the end of the story is merely another ending, no better than the "deaths" you can die earlier on. This is a Zarfian ending taken a step further: whereas other games have given a clear resolution without allowing the player to "win," in the sense of resolving the problem or riding into the sunset with the treasure, Blue Men raises the distinct possibility that it might have been better not to reach that ending at all. It's a unique feeling that, unfortunately, doesn't necessarily make for a satisfying game experience, assuming the player realizes what's going on at all. Indeed, Little Blue Men works somewhat better on the theoretical level than as a game, though it's still a good game. The author seems to have set out to demolish certain IF tropes, and, give him credit, he does. Many of his points are sufficiently subtle that they're easily missed--after all, not many games attempt such things. The game itself, though funny in spots, doesn't work as well as the theory behind it: the unclear or questionable motivations are part of it, but it's also that the cross-genre feel keeps the player off balance, wondering where the story will go next, for most of the game. Those not interested in the theory of game design might well get to the end, say "what was THAT all about?", and quit. Still, perfect marriages between entertainment and subversion/experimentation in IF are rare--Spider and Web comes close; not many others do--and Little Blue Men does well to get the player through the game and raise some intriguing questions. This is, in short, an interesting effort, perhaps best suited for those experienced in IF and willing to question its conventions. There's lots of intriguing stuff going on in Little Blue Men, enough that I gave it a 9 in this year's competition. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "Paul O'Brian" WARNING: Because Little Blue Men uses obscenities in its text, that language will also appear in this review. Well, the first thing I have to say is that starting Little Blue Men right after finishing Human Resources Stories was quite mind-bending. The game starts with a character who is sitting at his desk thinking of his job as "another day in the trenches," looking at his corner as his "own little slice of the shit pie those sons of bitches call an office." I had this sudden vision of IF authors as angry loners, driven by their misanthropy and lack of social skills into highly solitary hobbies like writing and programming, friendless misfits who hate their jobs, hate their lives, and generally hate people, and who write supposedly entertaining games that are really about how much the world sucks. Luckily, the vision passed as the game underwent a curious transformation. First of all, the game's disclaimer assured me that "at its most fundamental level, this game is about learning to love yourself." OK, maybe we're not loving anybody else yet, but loving yourself is at least a little positive. Next, I entered a few commands, the first ones that came to mind, really, and... won the game. Or did I? My final message said "*** You have learned to love yourself ***", which is what I was told the game was about. So I won, right? In 10 moves? I wondered how in the heck a game whose .z5 file was 171K could end up being so short. I wondered, in the game's words, "What the hell...?!" It turns out that although LBM may be about learning to love yourself, if you do the things that help you reach that goal too quickly you end up missing the entire story. That story consists of scheming ways to kill or otherwise waylay your co-workers, destroy the things that aggravate you, discover the secrets hidden behind the bland office walls, and figure out just who or *what* your boss, "that bastard Biedermeyer", really is. In short, it consists of getting an unpleasant character to do unsavory things, in service of a plot that grows more and more metaphorical and surreal as you progress through it. When I finally got to the end, I wasn't sure that I was any more satisfied with the "real" ending than the one I got to in 10 moves. In his postscript, the author tells us that he wants the story's structure to help us question to help us analyze some of our assumptions about IF. For one thing, we should think about what really is the most "optimal" ending of the game, and whether it's worth it to actually play through a game if it's possible to reach a positive ending at the beginning, and/or if the motivations of the character are twisted and repugnant? Now, these are not new ideas. Andrew Plotkin's A Change In The Weather offers a similar situation at its outset -- if you rejoin the picnic, you end up having fun after all, but you also miss the story. To go back earlier, Michael Berlyn used a related technique in Infidel by making the main character a shallow, exploitive greedhead who probably deserves a desert demise, then asking you to solve puzzles and find treasure on his behalf. Little Blue Men, though, makes these propositions starker than ever before by making its main character thoroughly repulsive and an optimal ending immediately reachable. Now, my answer to this question in its abstract form is that responses will vary depending on the player. Some people probably have no interest in playing a repulsive character, and so will just delete the game. Others might be driven by curiosity to complete the game even though they find the experience unpleasant. Still others will view it as a chance to get a glimpse into abnormal psychology, or to have some fun playing a villainous character. In this way, playing such a game is akin to watching a movie like Natural Born Killers, or reading a book like In Cold Blood -- it may be very well-done, but it's not everybody's cup of tea, and that's fine. Consequently, I guess I don't view the question as all that interesting, maybe because any assumption I might have had about IF characters having to be good was eliminated as soon as I finished Infidel (in 1986). But even though I feel this way, LBM still didn't work for me, not because of its main character but because of its choices of setting, imagery, and metaphor. The game invokes the movie Jacob's Ladder a couple of times, which is a movie I loved. That film was by turns profound, chilling, and inspiring. LBM only achieves glimpses of these things, and I think the reason is because I found its imagery muddled and incoherent. The game is obviously taking place on some metaphorical level, but it was never at all clear to me what the metaphors were supposed to be representing, and as they stack up it only becomes more confusing. In addition, there was basically no connection with reality, which left the game's symbols floating unanchored. Some flashback scenes, some glimpses of reality, *some* type of explanation for the heaven/hell dichotomy the game presents would have gone a long way toward connecting its symbolism with something more meaningful than just other symbols. There's a lot to like about this game. It is written well, and although it doesn't achieve an overall arc, it does contain moments which can be quite moving or frightening. Technically I could find very little for which to fault it, both in its writing and its coding. Its puzzles may have had some unpleasant content, but they were clever and engaging, and generally quite well integrated with the storyline. But for me, it did not succeed as a work of art. Nonetheless, I respect it for being an ambitious but flawed experiment -- I'll take that over competent repetition any day. Rating: 6.3 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "david ledgard" I quite enjoyed this game, although it was a bit vulgar, but not too vulgar. Basically it's about a guy in an office, trying to get though the day, with out getting too stressed, by the job, and his colleagues, and failing miserably. I would probably have given this game first place. I got about half way through the game before I felt the need for hints, and then went into hint-o-matic mode and totally ruined the game, and gave up. I really don't think it's a very good idea including on line hints, they're too tempting. Maybe people just want to show off their programming skills. It's much better to have easier puzzles that you can solve yourself, then you get the satisfaction of completing the game, and if you do have complicated puzzles make it difficult for people to obtain hints, so they give them a go. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Second April NAME: Mother Loose AUTHOR: Irene Callaci E-MAIL: icallaci SP@G csupomona.edu DATE: 1998 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/loose/loose.z5 VERSION: Release 2 Though Mother Loose is enjoyable, its premise is slightly misleading. The game begins alongside Humpty Dumpty, who is perched on a wall and asking for help, and it might seem that your mission will be to intervene to save some nursery-rhyme characters or to set their affairs right. But nursery rhymes are largely tangential to the story, it turns out; the real goal is to rescue your mother, who is in charge of this nursery-rhyme-influenced land, so that things return to normal. In a way, this is better than the alternative; it certainly allows for more originality than a player restoring a set of scenes to the pattern set down in the rhyme. But it takes some time to figure out where the game wants to do, unfortunately, and some parts are rather misleading. You meet someone named Mary who is indeed contrary, but her garden is not relevant to anything in the game. (She also has a little lamb, but the lamb does nothing of importance, and it certainly doesn't follow her.) In short, the player may get confused if he or she takes the texts of the rhymes as controlling or even illuminating; it is better to view the rhymes as providing a setting and some characters, but, with one exception, no more than that. The author wrote this for her granddaughter Jennifer, and in some ways it's suitable for kids. Its messages are simple and direct, and the humor is accessible to most ages. Some of the puzzles are difficult enough that kids are unlikely to get them without help, though--they rely on connections that children might not make. (The last puzzle is particularly difficult.) However, most can be solved more than one way; in fact, there is much more to do in the game than is strictly necessary to solve it, giving it lots of exploration and replay value. Your mother also scolds you for doing things you shouldn't, meaning that you can go back and try to eliminate those things from your path. There's a freshness of spirit to Mother Loose that is unusual--getting points for things like returning objects to their owners, not because it serves ulterior ends in the game but merely because the author feels it's a good thing to do, reminds the player that children are part of the intended audience. Were some of the red herrings either more fleshed out or eliminated, lest kids get frustrated, this could be the first genuinely child- friendly work of IF since Infocom faded from the scene. Plenty of wit went into the writing of Mother Loose: one character disparages the wolf as a refugee from fairy tales, not suited to nursery rhymes at all. Not all the jokes are solely for kids--kicking a cat elicits "I suppose you pull the wings off butterflies too"--but the author has plenty of fun with your various naughty deeds. There are, however, some odd moments--the wolf that follows you around makes a variety of comments, such as "Hey, what are you doing?", apropos of nothing at all, for example--and many of the naughty actions have no effect beyond one turn. (You can, for example, pull a character's loose tooth and get an angry reaction, but that character will smile and wave goodbye when you walk away the next turn.) Though not seamless, the writing is entertaining enough to make Mother Loose fun even for those not stumped for long by the puzzles. Mother Loose is notable, in short, because it represents a rarity in current IF: a well-developed story environment, thoroughly coded with humor to boot, whose elements do not necessarily exist for the sake of puzzles. It's not quite accurate to call it an example of story-based, rather than puzzle-based, IF, because the story in Mother Loose does not exactly dominate: indeed, the player is most likely to discover the entire story at the end of the game. Rather, it's a game where the setting and atmosphere are its most memorable features, and the author clearly devoted significant time to fleshing out the setting and making it real. It's the sort of game that requires thorough and creative writing to make the environment feel real, and Mother Loose does have that. In short, this is a well-realized, entertaining entry that deserves a look from those who didn't judge the competition, and I gave it a 9. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Second April NAME: Muse: An Autumn Romance AUTHOR: Christopher Huang E-MAIL: xhuang SP@G po-box.mcgill.ca DATE: September 1998 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/muse/muse.z5 VERSION: Release 1 Christopher Huang's "Muse: An Autumn Romance" is unquestionably a unique IF experience, and it's an ambitious effort. It attempts a story-centered approach; it emphasizes the characters and the plot over the puzzles, and virtually everything in the game turns on NPC interaction. While the writing is good enough to make Muse an enjoyable story, as story-driven IF it doesn't fully work. The story is that you're an elderly Victorian clergyman on your way back to your home parish in England, about to board a boat in a French coastal village, when you spy a German girl, traveling with her father, and are smitten. A poor artist named John Austin is also staying in town, and his looks and artistic ability may figure into the story--but they may not. Muse has several different endings, all of them quite plausible, though some are harder to reach than others. In particular, one suboptimal ending--one that is categorically different from the others--is almost impossible to attain without knowledge obtained by previous playings, in that you must do certain actions in a rather nonintuitive order. That aside, though, the alternate endings fit the feel of the story well: the game portrays your situation as torn between diverging paths; the decisions you make, it is clear, have a more than incidental effect on the course of your life. It makes sense to structure the game in such a way that you try to figure out how to change your life for the better, not simply how to make it progress. Furthering that aim is the first-person-singular-past narrative, which reinforces that the story is happening to a real character, not the player in period costume, and also conveys the feeling that the story is a reminiscence, not a happening-right- now tale of adventure that the character has to make his way through. Setting the story in the past makes it more clearly a "musing." Unfortunately, though story-centered, Muse is not entirely puzzle-free, and some of the puzzles break the feel of the story. One in particular requires calculated manipulation of a character to achieve certain ends, different in process but not in nature from manipulating objects to pass obstacles, as might happen in your conventional puzzle-oriented game. It makes your character less human and sympathetic to have to figure out which of another character's buttons to push. This is not an atypical IF experience, particularly in NPC interaction, when many games require the character to fire off conversation topics until the right one unlocks the door, so to speak, of the NPC--but Muse stands or falls on its NPCs, and it's disappointing when they become doors to unlock. (Moreover, in some situations, the game closed off entirely without warning--the conversation could progress no further.) Exacerbating that feeling is the small array of topics available--again, typical, but still frustrating, particularly when it produces results like these: >ask konstanza about mother's death Chatting with Konstanza, even on frivolous subjects, was a pleasant experience, and it was a while before I realised how far we had digressed. Muse does endeavor to show the limitations on conversation imposed by Victorian customs, and the feeling of constraint produced thereby is well done: I was forced to get at what I wanted indirectly, much as someone of the period would have had to. But so arbitrary seemed the point that determined whether certain information was available that it broke mimesis; it made the requirement seem like a programming flag, not a real turning point in the conversation. It's a shame because, as observed, Muse has a lot of terrific ideas going for it. The interactions among different NPCs are complicated and well-rendered; they don't feel nearly as artificial as those between the player character and the NPCs because they're not so obviously controlled. Muse makes a valiant attempt at bringing out the psychologies of its characters and making them central to the game. The reasons for many NPC actions are quite subtle--they may be doors to unlock in some instances, but they certainly are interesting doors. (Though only three of the seven NPCs offer much in the way of psychology, unfortunately--the others are fairly flat.) The game also relies on your role as a clergyman--your actions make sense from that perspective, you are constrained by that role, and other characters see you through your collar--which helps amplify the story element of Muse. And the story itself is rather moving at many points, particularly in the various endings, and the various box quotes that the author uses--Lewis Carroll, T.S. Eliot, Francis of Assisi--are particularly effective. The author has seamlessly rewritten the Inform parser for the first person, past tense, and I could find no technical problems with Muse. In virtually all respects, it's a thorough, well-thought-out, effective story. The inherent limitations of IF puzzles put a crimp in the NPC interaction and make you less a character than a player pushing through to the end of the story, which is unfortunate because you really do inhabit much of the story as a character. I enjoyed Muse, but considered it an idea with unrealized potential, and I gave it an 8. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Adam Cadre THE CALLIOPE EFFECT Muse by Christopher Huang A few minutes into this game, I scribbled down the following in my notepad: "I grow old... I grow old... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." Later on the game quoted those lines back at me. I wondered just how aware the author was of all the implications involved. You see, those lines were written by TS Eliot at the oh-so-elderly age of twenty-two -- the same age as the author of Muse. Prufrock himself, from whose "Love Song" these lines are drawn, is given no specified age in the poem, but I tend to side with Fred Crews in believing that he too is somewhere in his twenties, sure that his prematurely thinning hair indicates that his life is effectively over. In which case Eliot is mocking those twenty-two-year-olds who would write unironically from the perspective of a fifty-nine- year-old. (If not, of course, then Eliot is such a one himself. But there's too much implicit mockery in "Prufrock" for me to believe that if Eliot were to see those lines quoted at the end of Muse he would say anything other than "No, no -- if the mermaids aren't singing to you, it's probably because they're picking up that you're the type who identifies with someone three times your age. For pity's sake, Prufrock is not a role model!") I also couldn't help thinking about a comment I received on an early draft of my novel, which revolves around a bunch of high-school-aged kids: "Ninety-nine percent of the manuscripts I read are about middle-aged people giving up or old people wondering why they didn't give up sooner. I can't tell you how refreshing it is to read about some people who are actually *looking forward* to life!" This is of course not the state of affairs in IF: indeed, Muse deserves credit for introducing a well-realized PC unlike any IF PC I can think of. But still, considering that a good deal of the fun of IF is to step into a space where you can do anything -- go ahead, hitchhike naked! kick that head! scrape that parrot! -- it's rather draining to play a character who can barely make it up the stairs. But let me, like J. Alfred Prufrock, reverse myself yet again. The fact that the good reverend's collar felt confining is a testament to the author's success in creating a world with an atmosphere so seamless that I did very much feel like I was there. And since that may well be what I like best about playing IF -- the ability to walk around a world born from someone else's mind, and knock over vases while I'm there -- Muse guaranteed itself a top score from me right from the get-go. Not only was the world well-constructed, with nary a line to break the illusion of being somewhere else, it was exactly the right size for the story being told: any larger and it would have been daunting; any smaller and I would have been overcome by claustrophobia. This is just one small example of the craftsmanship involved in this game, which is simply superb throughout. The idea behind the game gives one pause, though. Here we have a game that advertises itself as having been built around interacting with NPCs -- the hardest thing to do well in IF, especially with an ASK/TELL interface. And Huang doesn't quite carry it off. The characters are all quite thin: partly because they each only have maybe a dozen things to say, and partly because what they do have to say isn't really all that interesting. It was hard for me to work up any kind of feeling for my ostensible love interest when she couldn't have been less exciting had you shot her up with a tanker truck full of Haldol. But, of course, that made sense in a way: she *is* Victorian. I'm used to getting frustrated struggling with the parser; in Muse, I found myself in a similar struggle, not with the parser, but with Victorian protocol. That seemed to me to be an evocative association: I wondered how not being able to act naturally even to the extent we can today, having to fit everything you did or said into the strict bounds of a rigid code of propriety, resembled struggling with a sort of "parser" every waking moment of your life. And then I started musing (appropriately enough) about Konstanza's character, or lack thereof. So she's completely colorless as a character. This may be boring -- but is it unrealistic? This was, after all, a culture where women were trained from day one to be purely decorative creatures with nothing to say, no wills of their own... a culture that squeezed the life out of half the population until they stopped being human and became -- wait for it -- NPCs. At this point, Muse's author may be happily nodding, pleased that I picked up on the fact that his game is in fact a sly critique of the Victorian era, and hoping that I now realize that his "Prufrock" reference is another clue that we're supposed to recoil from the world he presents; on the other hand, he may be horrified at just how violently I'm reading against the grain here. If it's the latter, I can only imagine how he'll take to the idea of me reconstructing the source code to his game and recompiling it with one little difference: this time around, the lass with whom the good reverend will find himself so taken is Tracy Valencia. (Turn #3: >SUFFER STROKE.) My score: 8.6 (2nd place) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Brian Blackwell Christopher Huang's 'Muse - An Autumn Romance' is, as far as I know, the first ever attempt at a Bronte-esque period piece of interactive fiction. It's an ambitious undertaking, but thanks to Huang's superb writing and characterisation, it is, for the most part, a success. The protagonist is the Reverend Stephen Dawson, a single, middle-aged, emotionally repressed English clergyman, who, at the suggestion of his sister Emma, takes a holiday in a secluded French village. In a series of exquisitely written paragraphs, the Reverend immediately falls for the beautiful Fraulein Konstanza von Goethe, who happens to be staying to be staying in the same inn with her father Herr Viktor. A conversation with Viktor and Konstanza reveals the reason for their journey to France, and also a certain coolness between father and daughter. Also staying in the village is an English painter with low self-esteem who eventually becomes involved in the plot. The game is written in the first-person past tense - a risky decision, but in this case it is extremely effective. The emotions 'felt' by the central character would simply not work in the traditional second-person perspective. It also makes the considerable restrictions placed on your actions seem natural and convincing. The quality of writing is excellent, and is consistent with 19th-century style without ever descending into cliches. For example, take the Reverend's first glimpse of Konstanza: From the corner of my eye, I saw her. Like an angel descended from heaven, she stood on the cobbles at the other end of the pier. Her head was partially turned away from me; I caught a flash of a delicate throat and lustrous chestnut-brown hair.... Time stood still, arrested by her presence. I had no desire to move, lest I lose sight of her. For an aching second, her parasol shielded her face from my sight. The characters are well fleshed out with varied and believeable responses to the player's questions. The exchanges with Konstanza in particular are affectionately handled, and the final scene in the 'winning' outcome is a real tear-jerker. I have rarely been so affected by a scene in a work of IF. For me, this was the most satisfying game of the competition. It's great to see 'puzzleless', literary IF becoming more and more popular with authors. Criticisms? A few of the actions necessary for the optimum outcome are rather obscure (fortunately the hints section is fairly comprehensive). This certainly does not detract from the scale of Huang's achievement. A highly enjoyable work. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "Paul O'Brian" I've been sitting here for 10 minutes trying to find the right words to begin a review of Muse, but I can't seem to come up with anything that speaks as eloquently as the game's own prose. Muse is the most gorgeously written piece of IF in the competition -- I've still got several games left to play, but I would be very surprised if any of them even equaled Muse's marvelous skill with words, let alone surpassed it. The game is like the IF version of a Merchant-Ivory movie: quiet setting, stellar production values, highly character-oriented, and deeply, deeply felt. It's been a long time since I've been as moved by a piece of IF as I was by the "optimal" ending of Muse -- even some of the less satisfying endings are crafted so well that in themselves they can be quite emotional. The game takes place in a French village in 1886, as viewed through the eyes of Rev. Stephen Dawson, a 59-year-old clergyman from Barchester, England. It is not a typical IF setting, and Dawson is hardly the typical IF hero, but Muse is far from a typical game. It is a story, one of the most successful pieces of interactive fiction I've seen for pulling off the *fiction* as much as the interactivity. Its characters feel real, including its main character; it is the story of Rev. Dawson's own struggle for acceptance of himself and his role in life, of his journey past regret and into contentment. Through its masterful writing, excellent coding, and some clever techniques, Muse creates a story of someone else's emotional transformation, made all the more affecting by our direction of that character's actions. One way in which the game accomplishes its goal is to eschew the traditional second person, present tense IF voice, settling instead on a first person past tense narration. A typical exchange looks somewhat like this: >I I had on my person the following items: my pocket New Testament >READ BIBLE I practically knew its contents by heart. >GET TRUNK Oh, but the trunk was heavy! I managed to lift it just high enough for the purpose of moving it around, but I was getting far too old for this sort of thing. At first, I was surprised how little a difference this made to me. The game still felt quite natural, which I think is another testament to its writing. On reflection, however, I think that the changes did make a difference. By choosing a first person voice, Muse sidesteps all of the controversy surrounding assigning emotion to the player character. In fact, the game is *constantly* ascribing emotions to the PC, but it never grates because the first person POV assumes this role quite naturally. Having a game say things like "you practically know its contents by heart" or "you are getting far too old for this sort of thing" would cause much more dissonance for me, especially as the game moved into its deeper emotional registers. The past tense achieves a similar sort of distancing from the player, as well as heightening the "period" effect, not that the game needs it. Muse evokes the Victorian feel extremely well, and the spell is never broken by any piece of writing, any detail of setting, or any development of character. There's only one problem. One part of Muse's realistic, natural approach is that events go on without you if you aren't in the right place at the right time. On my first run through the game, I was off doing text-adventurely things like examining all the objects, trying to talk to various characters about dozens of different subjects (an effect which the game also pulls off remarkably well -- its coding is quite deep in some areas) and exploring the landscape. Even though the game was giving me gentle nudges to check into the inn, I didn't do so, because for one thing I couldn't find it right away, and for another thing I was having too much fun exploring the very rich world of the game. As a result, one of the major plot points happened without me, putting me into a situation where, as far as I can determine, the optimal ending was unreachable. What's worse, I didn't *know* I couldn't reach the best ending; because it was my first time through, I didn't realize I had missed anything I could have participated in anyway. I ended up wandering around, quite frustrated with my inability to cause the story to progress. When I finally looked at the hints, it became clear to me that I had failed to perform an important task, and that as a result the happiest ending had been closed to me. Now, this is of course very realistic -- we miss things all the time that could change our lives significantly, and we never know that we've missed them -- but I don't think it's the best design for a game, even a game so story-oriented as Muse. The loss was affecting in its own way, especially when I replayed it after completing the game with the happiest ending, but I didn't like it that I had "lost" without having any way of knowing I had done so. I don't think it had to be that way -- I can certainly envision how the game might have at least pushed (or strongly nudged) me into a less optimal ending, so that I might realize more quickly that I had missed something, or perhaps the game could even have left the optimal path open even when the plot point had been missed. I would have loved the chance to complete such an incredible story my first time through, without having to resort to hints. Rating: 9.3 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Second April NAME: Persistence of Memory AUTHOR: Jason Dyer E-MAIL: jdyer SP@G u.arizona.edu DATE: 1998 PARSER: Hugo SUPPORTS: Hugo interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/hugo/memory VERSION: Release 1.0 I can count the amount of works of IF set in wartime--that I know of, at least--on one hand, and I wouldn't even need all of that hand. There have been spy-thrillers that drew on Cold War assumptions, but Once and Future is the only work to be set even partly on a battlefield, other than Persistence of Memory. It's not obvious why; after all, latter-day IF authors appear to be fond of grim, bizarre, chaotic situations, and not many things fit that description better than war. Persistence of Memory is an interesting spin on war IF, though an extremely brief one, as well as yet another in a large collection of one-location games in the 1998 competition. The premise: you're a soldier in a nameless war against a nameless enemy, stuck in a field with one leg on a land mine, with a malfunctioning radio. Unlike some other one-location games, the puzzles are not available at the outset for you to find; rather, they come to you, one by one, and you have a limited time to deal with each one. The experience is consequently rather limiting; the game attempts to make you feel powerless, and it does that quite well, with the exception of one puzzle solution that breaks the "powerless" feel somewhat (though there's a good reason for it). Among the obvious ironies of the game is that the protagonist is forced to depend on the inhabitants of the country he has been happily destroying, but the game doesn't do as much as it might have with that idea. Indeed, it's hard to say what Persistence of Memory is about, other than the superficial plot. If your encounters with the natives are supposed to be cathartic, or cause you to Rethink This Whole War Thing, the text provides only oblique hints to that effect. One message is that failure to communicate causes waste and destruction, a point well made, but is that the point of the story? It's hard to tell. Perhaps it's merely that certain experiences humanize an otherwise faceless enemy--not all that groundbreaking an idea, but then again just about any thoughts on war in the IF medium are new, as noted. Whatever the underlying message, the story works well; the game changes your motivations and thoughts effectively over its course, from "getting off this land mine" to more complex goals not necessarily centered on survival. Or, alternately, one could view your motivations as still focused on personal survival even as you realize the consequences of war upon the villagers, and your internal conflicts are a product of your guilt. Persistence of Memory is susceptible to a wide variety of interpretations; it is to the author's credit that he doesn't fill in many of the blanks. The scene is vividly described: one particularly well-done aspect involves the various physical discomforts you encounter over the course of the day, stuck in your awkward position, developing cramps and soreness and becoming more and more thirsty. (On the other hand, the game doesn't make as much as it might of your psychological discomfort.) The puzzles themselves aren't particularly hard; most of the solutions are fairly obvious. There are no multiple solutions. Indeed, it is almost impossible to deviate at all from the main narrative path and still complete the game, meaning that there is no replayability here. That's not a major drawback, given the nature of the story--the goal is less to challenge the player than to present some ideas--but the small size of the game makes it likely that, just when the player is settling into the character and the setting, the game ends, and there really isn't much incentive to go back and try again. (The message of this game and of Photopia, for me at least: if you want us to care about characters, make us spend significant amounts of time with them.) To the extent this game works, then, it does as thought experiment or as a statement about the nature of war; no one should play it for the puzzles. That's not, of course, a bad thing. But, as with Photopia, it isn't entirely clear that this story _needed_ to be set in the IF medium to be effective; this one has somewhat more claim to interactivity than does Photopia, since there _are_ problems to solve, but it does lay a rather linear path. The one-room aspect reinforces that; more so than in the other '98 one-room entries, the premise is a limitation, a confinement, and you the player do actually feel confined. That sense of limitation pervades the game and constrains the available experience considerably. The Hugo game engine is up to the task, though the task, technically, isn't all that much. The game does handle one action not easily translated into IF-speak quite well, though, accepting a wide variety of syntaxes and synonyms. Moreover, the WAIT command is altered for the occasion: time passes until something of note happens, rather than 1 or 3 or 10 turns. This proves very handy, though the player might find the game unspeakably boring if he or she does not realize that the action comes to the character, rather than the character producing the action. This and other functions are handled quite well; the hint system is minimally necessary but thorough nonetheless. Persistence of Memory does, I think, what it was trying to do: it's a short piece of IF set in wartime that raises complex questions of a soldier's personal responsibility and the needless loss wrought by war. It does all that reasonably well, enough so to merit a 7; it doesn't, unfortunately, work quite as well as a game. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "Paul O'Brian" NOTE: Because of the nature of Persistence of Memory, it's difficult to talk about it without revealing a key secret. Therefore, be warned that any and all of the following review could be considered a spoiler. Memory is a new twist on the one-room game. The setting is war; could be Korea, could be Vietnam, but it's never really specified, and it doesn't really matter. It's a war in a foreign land, with villages, dense foliage, helicopters, rifles, and land mines. Especially land mines. In the first move of the game, you step on one, and realize that if you remove your weight from it, it will explode. Thus the potential paths which the game appears to have at its outset are reduced to one: wait. This restriction of freedom is a recurring theme in Memory. In incident after incident, the scope of action contracts until it becomes clear that there is only one action which will lead to your survival. Sometimes these actions are rather horrifying, but the game demands them if you wish to finish. I have mixed feelings about this kind of forcible plotting. On the one hand, it makes for an extremely linear game, and it curtails interactivity quite dramatically. This obstruction seems to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom about IF -- it violates one of the Players' Rights in Graham Nelson's Craft of Adventure: "To have reasonable freedom of action." In Nelson's words, "After a while the player begins to feel that the designer has tied him to a chair in order to shout the plot at him." On the other hand, I also think that interactive fiction can be a very good medium for conveying a sense of futility or entrapment. Because IF by its nature seems to require at least to a certain degree freedom of movement and action, and because it also creates a sense of immersion in the story's world, when a piece of IF chooses to violate that perceived requirement the player's sense of identification with the trapped character can be very strong indeed. Something about the frustration of having so few actions available to me which would not result in death made the equation of my situation with the character's feel more intense than it would have were I just reading a story about this character. Because of the game's premise, you don't seek out the puzzles; the puzzles come to you. And each puzzle must be solved if the character is to survive. Luckily, all of the puzzles make sense and have intuitive solutions, though in some of them it's not clear what the deadly moment is until it arrives, and sometimes I found myself resorting to a save-and-restore strategy in order to defeat a puzzle's time limit. I don't think I could have solved the game straight through, because some puzzles had rather unexpected and uncomfortable solutions. This is where I found myself ill at ease with the game's lack of interactivity -- there's a fine line between identifying with a trapped character versus simply feeling trapped into an action because the designer allows you no other choice, even though more options might have been available in reality. It's hard to explain without revealing more spoilers than I already have, but some pieces of the plot felt rather forced, as though only one solution was provided because only that solution would create the game scenario desired by the designer. However, the choices worked in the end, and I found I only needed to look at the hints once, and in retrospect I think I probably could have avoided that had I spent more time on the puzzle that was stumping me. The writing could get a little histrionic at times. Some descriptions tiptoed along the line between what works and what doesn't. For example, the mud around your feet is described as "torpid", a word which usually refers to a sluggish mental state. I suppose the mud's thickness and viscosity could be compared to slow mental processes, but it's a stretch. There weren't too many moments like this -- for the most part the prose did a fine job of conveying the situation, and in fact sometimes was quite good indeed. The description of the hairs rising on the back of your neck as you try to conceal yourself from enemy soldiers was chilling and engrossing. I found no technical errors in the writing, nor in the code. Overall, Memory does a very good job with an unusual choice of subject matter, and when it was over I felt not triumph, but relief. I suspect this is what the game intended. Rating: 8.3 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "Paul O'Brian" NAME: Photopia AUTHOR: Adam Cadre E-MAIL: adamc SP@G duke.edu, grignr SP@G retina.net DATE: 1998 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/photopia.z5 VERSION: Version B If there was a prize for "competition game most mentioned on the newsgroups before the deadline had passed," Photopia would win hands down. Everyone was quite courteous about it, spoiler warnings and rot13 and all that, but there was a marked impatience to talk about this game, recommend it to other people, make it the test case in any number of arguments. There is a reason behind this impatience: Photopia is an amazing piece of work. It's also very hard to talk about without giving spoilers away, so please forgive me if I'm a little vague in my language. One of the most brilliant aspects of the game is its plotting. It has what Adam Cadre, in an unrelated discussion, called a Priest plot, named for writer Christopher Priest. I don't know if this is a term that Adam just made up, but it's a useful term nonetheless. It refers to a plot which just gives you fragments, seemingly unrelated to each other, which coalesce at (or towards) the end of the story. When the fragments come together, and you figure out how they relate to one another, the result can often be surprising or revelatory. When they came together in Photopia, I found the revelation quite devastating. I won't say too much more about this, except to say that it wasn't until the end of Photopia that I realized what a truly incredible, powerful story it is. It's the kind of thing where when you've played it all the way through once, you can then replay it and all the pieces fall into place, everything interlocking from the beginning in a way you can't understand until the end. I think that this is the game that opens new frontiers of replayability in interactive fiction -- I needed to play through Photopia twice in order to see all the text again, knowing what I knew after the end of the game. Actually, I hesitate to call Photopia a game, but not because it failed to live up to a standard of interactivity. It's just so patently clear that Photopia is not interested in puzzles, or score, or some battle of wits between author and player. Photopia is interested in telling a story, and it succeeds magnificently on this count. Unfortunately this deprives me of the use of the word "game" in describing it -- perhaps I'll just call it a work. In any case, it's a work that anyone who is interested in puzzleless IF should try. At no point was I even close to getting stuck in Photopia, because the obvious action is almost always the right one -- or else there is no right action and fated events occur with heavy inevitability. Oddly enough, this creates a strange contradiction. I was on ifMUD looking for a word to describe the plot of this work (I couldn't think of the phrase "Priest plot") and someone said, jokingly, "linear." But actually, that's true. Despite the fact that it's completely fragmented, and despite the fact that it jumps around in time, space, and perspective, Photopia is a linear composition. There's only one way to go through it, and the player has little or no power to make it deviate from its predestined course. I think the reason that this didn't bother me, that in fact I *liked* it, is precisely because Photopia isn't a game. Because it is a story, the emphasis is taken away from a teleological model, where the player tries to steer for the best outcome. Instead, you're really just along for the ride, and the ride is one not to be missed. Now, this is not to say that Photopia may as well have been a short story rather than interactive fiction. In fact, it takes advantage of the capabilities of the medium in some very inventive and almost unprecedented ways. One of the foremost of these is its use of color -- each section of the game (oops, there's that word again. Make that "the work") is presented in a preset color, and these colors also play a part in the Priest plot. I understood their function by the end of the piece, and once I understood, I knew exactly why they were there and how much they enhanced the storytelling. Unfortunately I found the colored text a little hard to read at times, especially the darker colors on a black background, but I wouldn't go back and play it in blue and white. The colors, like everything else in Photopia, worked beautifully, adding artfully to the overall impact of the story. The work is interactive in other important ways as well. In fact, in many aspects Photopia is a metanarrative about the medium of interactive fiction itself. Again, it wasn't until the end of the story that I understood why it *had* to be told as interactive fiction. And again, to explain the reason would be too much of a spoiler. I have so much more I want to talk about with Photopia, but I can't talk about it until you've played it. Go and play it, and then we'll talk. I promise, you'll understand why everyone has been so impatient. You'll understand why I loved it, and why I think it's one of the best pieces of interactive fiction ever to be submitted to the competition. Rating: 9.9 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Second April [Disclaimer: what follows is my own opinion, as always, but it is also distinctly a minority view. For other views on Photopia, the reader is advised to consult Deja News, or alternatively to read Paul O'Brian's review in this issue.] There is no denying that Adam Cadre's Photopia is a well-written, engaging work of fiction. (Well, okay, somebody probably will deny it. But it won't be me.) It tells a powerful story in well-crafted prose heavily seasoned with implicit allusions to other works, notably Russell Banks's "The Sweet Hereafter" (and Atom Egoyan's film thereof), and Carl Sagan's "Contact." (The power of the story, incidentally, derives in part from figuring out its nature and structure, and hence I won't go too much into detail here.) It skillfully uses multiple narrators to tell its tale, and carries themes and images throughout that help give the story life. In short, it's an excellent work of fiction. SPAG reviews works of _interactive_ fiction, however, and the interactivity quotient in Photopia is slight enough that it would arguably work just as well as a short story. Graham Nelson wrote several years ago of linearity in game design, noting that the player comes to feel that "the author has tied him to a chair in order to shout the plot at him," and Photopia suffers in that regard. No one would complain of having the plot shouted at him in a short story; the nature of story-based non-interactive fiction is that the author dictates and the reader absorbs. But the genius of good IF is that the player shapes the development of the story, even if the author has a certain end in mind; choices that the player makes affect the text recited at him in a material way. Admittedly, many games throw in the towel with rudimentary or nonsensical plots that serve as excuses to cobble together puzzles--the victory of the crossword over the narrative, in Graham's terms. Photopia represents the opposite, and less explored, extreme, with no puzzles to speak of--and though there is more to chew on here than past "puzzleless IF" efforts such as "In the End," the result, for me, was just as unsatisfying. It should be noted that the game does not simply ignore idiosyncrasies in the way you play the game; many choices are accounted for. Notably, one choice regarding whether you bring along a certain object or leave it behind is particularly clever and well-written. But the result is that the game achieves precisely the same result-- your "choice" affects the beginning of one paragraph. (The minimal changes in the text highlight the noninteractivity; it's almost as if the author were seeking out ways to keep the player from changing the course of the story. There is an obvious purpose to that in this particular work, but it puts a major crimp in the interactive aspect.) The difference may seem to boil down to quantity rather than quality--the amount of text that the player's decisions affect--but quantity matters: it can mean the difference between the player feeling like he has actually experienced the events described and feeling like he has watched a lot of text scroll by. Adding to this effect is the sheer amount of stuff that often happens between inputs--or, in other words, the amount and type of unforeseeable events that your actions produce; again, it's as if an existing work of fiction were translated to the IF medium. Photopia's invention of plastic geography--the player in some instances may travel in any direction, but the direction chosen will always lead to a certain location--makes the world seem larger than it is, and while it does that very effectively, it once again lessens the player's impact on the story. Another experiment that the author attempts ends up cutting off the player from the story even more, namely the conversation trees: rather than ASK/TELL, the player types TALK TO [character] and is given a short list of topics (1. TELL PRESIDENT CLINTON ABOUT IRAQ, 2. ASK PRESIDENT CLINTON ABOUT IMPEACHMENT, or 0 to say nothing). This is, of course, a matter of taste, but I found the conversation trees the least successful part of Photopia, because they completely destroy what illusion remains of interactivity. In one sequence, your character explains the basics of solar radiation, planetary accretion, gallium production, and other astrophysical phenomena; it is _very_ hard, unless the player has ample background in astronomy, to avoid the feeling that you are watching a conversation unfold, not participating in it. I don't think it's impossible to give the character more knowledge than the player is likely to have, and then have the player act on that knowledge. But that requires more development of the character than Photopia affords: the player's involvement with the character is so brief that there is no time to warm to the part before the character starts rambling about the inverse square law. It is undeniable that the scene plays an important part in the story; it is also arguable that identifying the explainer of astrophysics as "you" heightens the emotional impact. But that scene and others like it give Photopia the sense that the "interactive" element is only a thin veneer over the "fiction" part. It is possible that more extensive conversation trees, encompassing a broader variety of topics relevant to the conversation might help; perhaps future games will answer the question. Having severely limited conversation topics is not essentially different from ASK/TELL with only a few subjects available, admittedly. But most games that implement ASK/TELL do not put words in the player-character's mouth to the extent that Photopia does, and leaving to the player's imagination how he or she would have phrased a question keeps the admittedly clunky interface from breaking mimesis excessively. In other words, the presumed advantage of conversation trees, that they give the character more natural speech (one question in Photopia spawned by TALK TO is ASK ALLEY ABOUT HOW I SOUND LIKE HER DAD, which no parser could handle, rather than something like ASK ALLEY ABOUT DAD), assumes that the player actually imagines the character grunting out curt questions. But it ain't necessarily so; it certainly ain't for me. Finally, though Photopia in many ways does what it does brilliantly, it doesn't do it for very long; one has to be a very, very slow reader to play a game this short from beginning to end longer than 20 or 25 minutes. Of course, the player can replay, but he or she will shortly discover that, as noted, the course of the story alters hardly a whit, no matter what the player does. This is, of course, a personal reaction: I can hardly say categorically that the brevity of Photopia waters down the emotional force when the game clearly had considerable emotional impact on many. (On the other hand, the two other people I have prompted to play it were likewise underwhelmed--and I did not tell them my own thoughts on the game until afterwards.) It is possible that the story's major twist would be more effective if there were more preceding it, more time for the player to get to know the characters. (I also thought the game overplayed its emotional hand a bit--exaggerated a certain character's traits--but that can be, and has been, argued.) Technically, Photopia is outstanding--the abovementioned textual changes, even if brief, are woven in seamlessly to preserve the story. A variety of changes in text color didn't work for me when I tried the colored version on WinFrotz, but clearly the colors worked fine for others. The conversation trees, whatever their merits, work just as they are supposed to; the experiment with plastic geography works brilliantly from a technical standpoint. Many other small things indicate that the game was exhaustively coded, never a bad thing--for example, examining a certain NPC while playing different roles yields a variety of perspectives. There are many other little things that are done well--transitions between scenes are particularly well done; the first sentence of each section of the story recalls the last sentence of the previous one, often in illuminating ways. But Photopia stands or falls on the player's reaction to the story, and my reaction, for whatever reason, was tepid enough that I gave it a 7 in the competition. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Brian Blackwell Few works of IF have caused as much of a stir as Adam Cadre's 'Photopia', the winning entry in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition. It is certainly vastly different from Cadre's last creation, the raunchy comedy I-0. It is a short, puzzleless, literary work which packs a powerful emotional punch, despite some shortcomings. The primary interest in Photopia is its structure - it makes the fairly simplistic plot seem much more complex than it actually is. The game jumps back and forth through the chronology of the storyline, leaving the player to mentally piece together these 'vignettes'. The different scenes are linked by different colours - red, green, blue, and so on. These transitional passages provide some truly magical moments. The very first scene in the game involves a pair of drunken 'fratboys' (an Americanism, I assume) and a car. Following this scene, we are immediately thrust onto Mars, taking control of 'Wendy Mackaye, first girl on the red planet'. This dramatic juxtaposition is confusing at first, but ultimately makes sense in the scheme of things (I won't spoil it for those who haven't played it yet). The story revolves around Alley, a butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth sweetie with an extremely precocious grasp of astro-physics. The player, throughout the game, plays the roles of various characters in the story - including her mother, father, a young girl whom she is babysitting, and a smitten teenage boy - but never Alley herself. The wide variety of angles from which we see Alley partially makes up for the fact that she is a relatively one-dimensional character. Beguiling, yes, but perhaps not as believeable as she could be. And the astro-physics? In an conversation with her father, the young Alley - a toddler at this stage - is given an impromptu (and very lengthy) lecture in 'inverse square law' and 'gallium production'. All very impressive, but a little over-the-top. These points, however, still don't dull the sheer emotional impact when you realise how the story ends. And because of the work's ingenious structure, this realisation actually comes around the middle of the game - and of course this will vary from player to player. The clever part about this design is that the game still continues even when it's obvious what the eventual outcome is. Ironically, structure is also the game's main downfall. The player has no real control over the story at all. This is not a problem in itself; in fact, all interactive fiction relies on the 'pick a card' principle - that inevitably the player will choose the author's path, with the number of choices available giving the illusion of 'interactivity'. It's hard to explain why this didn't completely work for me in Photopia, but I could never escape the feeling that I was merely a passenger on the ride. It is not really interactive fiction in the traditional sense, but I must say that this does not alter the effectiveness of Photopia as a *work*. It may seem like I've been terribly harsh on this one, but when a work of IF has been hailed as 'literature' by the rec.arts.int-fiction crowd, it's only fair that it's judged on a similar level. And, at the end of the day, I enjoyed this immensely. It's certainly one of the most groundbreaking works to have appeared in ages, and will generate vigorous debate for some time to come. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "david ledgard" I personally wouldn't have given this game first place. This isn't sour grapes, having entered a game of my own, but due to the fact that the game never really grabbed me. The first scene doesn't have any puzzles at all, although the multi choice conversation thing was clever, the usual way you never know what NPC's are going to understand. The second scene has a simple puzzle of find an item, and bring it back to a location. Although it had a clever thing where by which ever direction you went, the next location was created there, I'm not sure how this was programmed, but I imagine it could be quite complicated. A lot of people probably missed this entirely. The third scene, had restrictions on movement that really got my goat, saying you don't have a compass, so can't use the compass directions. This is where my patience ended, and I gave up, the game being too fiddly to play. The rest might have been really good, but I will never know. The narrative to puzzles ratio seemed very large, i.e. too much text, and too few puzzles. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Second April NAME: The Plant AUTHOR: Michael J. Roberts E-MAIL: mjr SP@G hotmail.com DATE: 1998 PARSER: TADS SUPPORTS: HTML-TADS interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/tads/plant/plant.gam VERSION: Competition Edition You're a witness to a hijacking. You're seeking a McGuffin in the form of a strange silver crate. You're investigating cover-ups in your company. You're breaking into a strange plant. You're just generally trying to create mayhem. You're unveiling a government cover-up. All these things go on in Mike Roberts's The Plant, an entertaining caper better enjoyed for its sheer daffiness than as a coherent story. The initial premise is that your boss's car breaks down and you want to get help, but it's a thin veil, since you promptly witness soldiers hijacking a convoy of trucks and evidently forget all about trying to get your car started again, since you decide you want a piece of whatever action the soldiers are after. Weird coincidences drive much of the plot from there on: you defeat a security device to get into this supposedly ultra-secret plant by using stuff lying around, which seemed a tad absurd. The puzzle you solve to get into the underground laboratory area is clever but relies on everyone in the complex being either blind or thoroughly stupid; other puzzles function on similar assumptions. As such, the tone varies somewhat; what might have been a sinister feel, created by the opening section, is subverted by the story's failure to develop any real sense of menace. The Plant works better viewed as a series of obstacles to overcome than as a real story, since the story is not always engaging. The author consciously decided to make it impossible to lose or otherwise make the game unwinnable, a design choice that works well in some contexts but not in this one. The story, after all, to the extent I could make sense of it, involves some danger; breaking into heavily guarded top-secret complexes usually entails negative consequences if caught. But there are several points where harm should be imminent, logically, and knowing that the danger will just keep getting closer but never arrive, Zeno's-paradox style, destroys the illusion of the story and takes away the tension. This is particularly true at one point late in the game, when guards see you through a window, carrying out nefarious acts, and pound on the window. There is, of course, a door right next to the window, but you can examine everything in the room, take a nap, make faces at the guards, etc., and they will never, as far as I know, walk through the door. What might be an exciting moment is fairly ho-hum. Now, admittedly, with an IF engine that supports UNDO as well as SAVE/RESTORE, any "death" is but a passing setback--but avoiding death does affect a player's emotional experience, and knowing that there was no death to avoid reduces whatever emotional effect there is. What might be a good choice in another sort of game does not, in short, serve this one well. Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy here. The puzzles rival those of Enlightenment as the best in this year's competition: they are challenging but fair, with the exception of the one where an object is discoverable only with the command READ AUTHOR'S MIND. There are also enough of them for the player to feel like he or she has accomplished something, but few enough that the game is finishable within two hours. Several of them involve more than one object, or require manipulating the environment in creative ways, though a few rely on a few rely on random scenery-searching. The ones that involve opening passages or passing obstacles provide short cuts once the initial puzzle is solved, a great time-saver. The author also fairly consistently rewards the player for solving a puzzle by supplying more story, usually via cut-scenes of sorts--the player witnesses something going on. Some of the cut-scenes actually are cut-scenes--the text all goes by at once--and some aren't, and the logic of the distinction was not obvious to me. (The ones that force the player to keep typing Z don't actually give any potential for difference in how the player experiences the scene--at least, not obviously so.) The nature of the puzzles solved does make the player feel like he or she is coming closer to the goal, and getting glimpses of the McGuffin when obstacles are cleared reinforces that feeling to great effect. Your boss, along for the ride, is directly relevant only occasionally, though it seems like he might provide information about a few things if asked; still, he's a vaguely comic figure that helps lighten the feel of the story (another reason why the tone is a bit inconsistent). The Plant feels well-crafted as a whole; bugs are few, the writing is outstanding, and objects, even complex ones, largely do what they're supposed to do. That feeling of polish helps overcome the flaws in the story--or, more accurately, the flaws in the story don't detract much from its enjoyment because the game is so playable as a whole. The best puzzle in the game leads directly to its most ridiculous moment, but as long as the player can suspend disbelief, it doesn't really matter--because there's no question whether the moment works as the author intends it to. The Plant illustrates how a skillful IF author can spin an entertaining yarn even with a contrived or silly plot, as long as he or she attends to the details that matter to the player; this one works well enough that I gave it an 8. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "Paul O'Brian" You know, by the time I get finished writing these reviews, I'm pretty tired. It takes a lot of energy to put out twenty or thirty thousand words about competition entries, and even though my reviews are shorter than last year's, and there are fewer games involved, they were also written in a much more compressed judging period, so my exhaustion level is about the same. However, every year I've been reviewing the competition games I've gotten a little reward in the final game of the batch. In 1996, I was playing the games in order of filename, so the last game I played was Tapestry, an excellent piece of work by Dan Ravipinto which ended up taking second in the competition as a whole. Last year I let Lucian Smith's Comp97 order my choices randomly, and ironically the last game on the list ended up being Smith's own The Edifice. And true to form, that was another excellent game to finish on, and it ended up winning all the marbles in the 1997 comp. So it was with both trepidation and eagerness that I broached the final game of this year's batch, The Plant. When I saw it was by Michael J. Roberts, the legendary implementor of both TADS and HTML-TADS, my anticipation was increased even further. I've never played one of Roberts' games, having been an Inform initiate when I started programming, and having entered the IF scene just shortly before Roberts' departure. And after this buildup, I'm pleased to say that the Plant completely lives up to my mini-tradition of grand finales. It was a great game to end the competition with -- the reward I was hoping for, so that this review wouldn't be too hard to write. Probably the thing I liked the most about The Plant was its puzzles. I know there were several other games this year that were focused on puzzles, and some of the puzzles in those games were excellent. However, I liked The Plant's puzzles better precisely *because* the game wasn't focused on puzzles. Instead, its puzzles were very well integrated into its story, so solving the puzzles really propelled the narrative. It's much more interesting to solve a puzzle when it opens the door to the next piece of the story, rather than being just one of a roomful of puzzles that you have to solve to escape that room. The Plant was probably the only game in this year's competition to give me a feeling similar to what I have when I play Infocom games. I love that feeling of uncovering an exciting story by cleverly putting pieces together, using items in unexpected ways, or doing the right thing at just the right time. And the game's story is definitely an exciting one. It begins as you are stranded on an abandoned side-road with your boss, marooned by his unreliable car. It's up to you to find a phone or a service station and get moving again, but when you go looking you may find more than you bargained for. I won't give too much away about the secrets that are eventually revealed, but the game definitely packs plenty of surprises. The pacing is excellent -- I only felt completely stuck once. I turned to the walkthrough to solve the problem, just because I wanted to finish as much of the game as I could in the two-hour time limit, but if you're playing The Plant for the first time, let me urge you *not* to check the walkthrough unless you're completely stuck. All the puzzles are completely logical, none of them require reading the designer's mind, and many of them are quite satisfying to solve, requiring several steps or clever combinations of objects, or both. Now, the story itself does have some flaws. There are some parts that felt quite implausible to me, and from time to time the fact that your boss follows you around in your travels doing the same two or three things all the time starts to feel a little artificial. In addition, there are one or two minor spelling errors in the game. Outside of this, the plotting and writing are quite good. The Plant's prose often conveyed a very vivid sense of the visual. I drive by a plant like this about twice a month, and the game's descriptions of it, how its completely industrial and utilitarian networks of pipes and lights can seem almost like an abstract fairyland when glimpsed from afar, are right on the mark. I could really visualize most of the places in the game, and the mental pictures the game's text creates are quite dramatic and compelling. In addition, the game uses a few small touches here and there which utilize the power of HTML TADS. No pictures or sound, but a few well-placed hyperlinks in the help text and one or two spots with specially formatted text really make the game look sharp, and add to the very visual quality of the prose. If you sometimes start to feel a little impatient with all the growing that the medium of interactive fiction is doing, and long for a good old-fashioned Infocom-style thrill ride, check out The Plant. I think it may be just what you're looking for. Rating: 9.0 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Second April NAME: Purple AUTHOR: Stefan Blixt E-MAIL: flash SP@G df.lth.se DATE: 1998 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/purple VERSION: Release 1 Not many works of IF are spellbinding or even compelling from beginning to end; a game with a few memorable moments or some good puzzles may be remembered fondly and replayed often, even if the rest of the game is undistinguished. A notable example, to my mind, is Sorcerer, the bulk of which is rather ho-hum but which features two brilliant puzzles that most consider among Infocom's best ever. This is not to suggest that Purple, Stefan Blixt's entry in the 1998 competition, is in Sorcerer's league; it's not. But as with that game and others, an otherwise undistinguished entry is redeemed by a few compelling moments and some intriguing ideas. Nuclear holocaust is imminent, but your brother Karl is planning to evade the blast and start over in the postapocalyptic world. To reveal precisely what you do would, I think, spoil the best moments of Purple: at its best, it has some of the austerity of well-imagined post-holocaust science fiction, such as Walter Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz; the way that remnants from the "before" turn up in the "after" is sometimes rather chilling. Purple is, to be sure, not even as well written as most average sci-fi, and certain moments go underdescribed--but the spareness of the prose serves the author well in spots. Descriptions are concise enough that they convey what happens and let the player mentally fill in the details. There is one moment at a turning point in the story that gave me a real chill--the author handles a certain transition particularly well--and I was disposed to like the game from that point on, I think. There are other things that are done well: a certain hidden object is nicely clued, and the behavior of a certain NPC is well described. Disturbing details are scattered here and there, rather than filling every room description, suggesting a measure of restraint. As indicated, however, the general quality of Purple is uneven at best. The writing hits several potholes, particularly in certain events toward the end of the game, where it becomes difficult to tell exactly what's going on. There are plenty of typos and spelling problems, and a few places where the brevity of the descriptions becomes confusing. Technical problems abound as well: there are a few crashes, a major disambiguation problem, and one character who consistently asks you for something no matter how often you give it to him. More generally, several plot angles go unresolved--it would be nice to see Purple extended or followed up to make some more sense of the story. As it is, it's a little like a trailer: lots of intriguing things happen, but it would be worth knowing more about them. There are other problems. After a certain point, Purple's pacing suffers: there aren't any time limits or even anything encouraging haste for most of the game, which is a shame because a sense of urgency might have made the plot more compelling. There are some points where wander-around-and-explore is a good mood to set, but after a while the exploratory feel needs to stop. Karl simply doesn't have enough to say--he has a few interesting responses, but too many things elicit no response, and his stable of comments is annoyingly small. (His one major task receives so little description that the effect is almost comic.) More generally, it's hard to escape the feeling that the author needed another month to fill in the details of Purple and clean up the bugs: if you deviate too much from the author's storyline, the seams start to show. (Particularly toward the end, if you do things out of sequence.) Given that the game provides minimal direction about what to do when, the effect can be a bit confusing. The author provides plenty of interesting details in his world, but never manages to make it seem coherent. But Purple, I think, is greater than the sum of its parts, and the few compelling moments made up for the many bugs and slip-ups. If lack of polish bothers you, avoid this one; if you're so used to rough edges that you've learned to look past them, and you haven't tried Purple, you might appreciate the pieces of an interesting story that occasionally appear amid the bugs. Though far from a resounding success, Purple is a nice effort with some effective moments (and a huge improvement over the author's Pintown from the previous year), and I gave it a 7 in the competition. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "Paul O'Brian" NAME: Research Dig AUTHOR: Chris Armitage E-MAIL: TheFarseer SP@G MailExcite.com DATE: September 1998 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/research VERSION: Release 1 Research Dig has pieces of a good story, inexpertly handled so that they don't reach their full potential. In fact, the experience of the game was a bit like a real research dig -- you have to mine through some errors, cliches, and unclear writing, but you can come away with some pretty good pieces. So let me first focus on the positive. The game has an intriguing premise -- you are a beginning archaeology student, sent on a minor dig on behalf of your research center to an old abbey where the groundskeeper has uncovered "something old." When you arrive, you meet the groundskeeper's daughter, who whispers to you that the old piece belongs "to the Little People," who live underground. (Exactly how little these Little People are remains in question, but I'll get to that in a bit.) From this interesting start the game lays out a sensible map which delivers mystery and magic in reasonable proportions, never so much that it seems like a simple dungeon crawl or D&D knockoff. The writing can be rather atmospheric in several sections and some of the design contributes to this feeling, such as some important red herrings which lead nowhere but help to flesh out the game world. Overall, Research Dig feels like it was written by a beginner, but a beginner with good ideas and a passion for interactive fiction. That being said, it's also important to note that the game has a number of problems as well. Though the map was logical, it also felt quite a bit cliched, with underground tunnels, spooky crypts, mysterious rune-encarved stones, etc. There wasn't anything that felt very unique once the game got to this point, and it felt like a game with a lot of potential had devolved into another ho-hum underground excursion. In addition, the writing suffered at several points from basic proofreading errors. Spelling and grammar mistakes were not legion, but there were enough of them to be seriously distracting, especially since they sometimes turned up in places that would be read over and over again. For example, from the beginning of the game you find that you have a "referance book" in your inventory. After 10 times reading the misspelled word, my patience started to wear thin. It's the kind of error that could have been avoided so easily, I have a hard time understanding why it's there. The same is true for some key coding errors, like the key whose short name is "a key labelled 'Shed'." The problem with a short name like this is that Inform already provides articles for objects, so in the inventory the key is listed as "an a key labelled 'Shed'." Compounding the problem, there are two keys with this same error. The glitch is all the more aggravating because it comes up almost every time the game tries to refer to the keys. My favorite example: "Which do you mean, the a key labelled 'Shed" or the a key labelled 'Conservatory'?" These mistakes were small, but sometimes small mistakes can make a big difference, and this game had the perfect example. However, before you read it, I should warn you that in order to explain my example, I have to spoil part of the endgame. Read on if you so choose. OK, so at one point you find an urn in the groundskeeper's house with a piece missing. Then later on you find a rune-encarved "slab of stone, about 2' square." That's two feet square. That's way too big to be a piece of an urn. However, at the end of the game, you find out that it *is* in fact the missing piece of the urn. Meanwhile, you see the groundskeeper defeated by "a small person, you guess at about 3" high." That's three inches high. That's mighty small! However, by this time you begin to suspect that the game confused its notations, and is using ' for inches and " for feet. This may seem like a minor error, but it changes the meaning of the things it affects so completely that it ruins any possibility of building the mystery. There's something to be learned here: in some ways writing (I mean creative writing) and programming aren't so far apart. Just as a missing semicolon can cause you no end of misery during compilation, so can a very small change completely deflate your story. Also, in both disciplines the semantic and syntactic errors are easiest to find, and your work is unacceptable until it is free of these. Logic errors are more difficult to detect, and take much more sweat to ferret out. Unfortunately for would-be writers, there is no automatic proofreading service for fiction that provides the error-checking of a good compiler. You have to do it yourself. Rating: 6.2 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "Paul O'Brian" NAME: The Ritual of Purification AUTHOR: Jarek Sobolewski E-MAIL: sable SP@G polbox.com DATE: September 1998 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/ritual VERSION: Release 1 The feeling I got while playing Ritual reminded me of nothing so much as those old Dr. Strange comics from the 60's, back when the master of mysticism was drawn by Steve Ditko, himself a master of the bizarre. The game is full of strange, hallucinatory images: a road that melts into nothing, an arch with marble carvings on one side and black decay on the other side, exploding and melting universes. The whole thing made me feel like I was immersed in a Ditko landscape, and the fact that the main character is a spellcaster on an astral voyage didn't hurt either. Of course, some of the scenes in Ritual could never have taken place in a 60's comic -- at least, not one that adhered to the Comics Code Authority. There's nothing really outrageous, but there are scenes of sexuality, drug use, and gore that you'd never see Dr. Strange experiencing. I'm not suggesting that the game is some sort of Dr. Strange rip-off, or that Ditko was an inspiration for Ritual -- that's just what it reminded me of. However, one source of inspiration for the game was clearly some of the more obscure poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. At the completion of almost every puzzle, the game throws a box quote from Poe, usually one which has some relation to the obstacle just overcome. These quotes are well-chosen, digging deep into the Poe archives and highlighting how much he inherited from William Blake, as well as how much he prefigured H.P. Lovecraft. At its best, most deranged or sublime moments, the game evokes the weird, dark mysticism shared by all these creators. On the whole, the effect is very trippy, and a fair amount of fun. Unfortunately, there are some false notes as well. From time to time a character will say or do something fairly anachronistic, which tends to break the spell pretty thoroughly. In fact, at one point you can get a character to whip out a bong and start taking hits from it, which brings the whole elevated plane of symbolism and wonder dive-bombing back to earth. The effect is not so much of Alice in Wonderland's "hookah-smoking caterpillar", but more of Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It just doesn't fit. There are also a few times when the game seems to slip into cliches or "AD&Disms" -- one beast is described as "biting easily through a set of plate mail", and some of the spells feel suspiciously close to ones I remember from 7th grade basement role-playing sessions. In addition, the game has a number of grammar and spelling errors, usually minor problems like missing punctuation or vowel mistakes, but again they break the spell. Finally, and worst of all, there's a bug in the game which causes it to not respond at all if a certain action is taken sooner than the game expects it. There's nothing that ruins immersion quite so much as when a game just doesn't respond to a command in any way. Well, maybe not *nothing* -- crashing the interpreter would probably ruin immersion more, but because of the lack of response problem I ended up turning to the hints, only to find that I had in fact given the right command to solve the puzzle -- I just gave it a little too soon. The game suffers a bit from the "unconnected symbols" syndrome -- sometimes it feels like all of these dreamlike images are just images, with no meaning or substance attached to them. However, the game manages to pull them together somewhat through its title, intro, and ending -- the bizarre symbols with which the game is littered are all loosely connected through a theme of purification, of facing inner demons and the pain & joy of life in order to become a better person. It didn't entirely work for me -- some of the symbolism seemed arbitrary or cliched to my mind -- but I think it was a good beginning. I would really like to play a game with this kind of tone which had freed itself from shopworn images and RPG leftovers. Something with imagery like the more arresting parts of Ritual, but which really cohered to make a powerful statement on some aspect of the human condition, could really take advantage of IF's immersive capability to create a remarkable work of art. Ritual isn't it, but I hope it becomes the jumping-off point for someone (the author perhaps?) to create something like it but better: no writing errors, no cliches, no anachronisms, no bugs -- just the Ditko universes exploding and melting all around us, with meaning. Rating: 6.9 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Second April NAME: Trapped in a One Room Dilly AUTHOR: Laura Knauth E-MAIL: Laura.Knauth SP@G asu.edu DATE: 1998 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/dilly/dilly.z5 VERSION: Release 1 Laura Knauth's Trapped in a One Room Dilly is virtually the antithesis of her Travels in the Land of Erden from the 1997 competition--where that game was sprawling and filled with plot, Dilly is tight, focused, and almost devoid of plot. But while this is probably a better game than that one was, it has some deficiencies even as one- room games go. From the outset, Dilly more or less declares that it is forgoing plot: the initial room description states that "ou have no idea how you came to be in this room or what you were doing just before." You therefore commence solving puzzles that eventually allow you to get out of the room--the title adjective "trapped" rightly suggests that being in this room is a problem. What is missing, however, is a sense of direction--you fiddle with the objects at hand, which eventually lead you to a way out, but not in a way that could remotely have been foreseen when you started fiddling. (Whereas at the beginning of Enlightenment, say, the entire concept is apparent from the beginning, and the challenge is using the materials at hand to solve the problem.) Dilly is therefore a fundamentally different sort of one-room game than Enlightenment, or In the Spotlight, or Persistence of Memory--and while that's not a bad thing, it's a little less plausible than more unified one-location games. As in, someone had to put together this bizarre room full of objects that, suitably manipulated, allow you to get out; why did they do that? To give Dilly credit, one of the wittiest parts of the game is a bookshelf full of made-up plots that could answer that question--alien abduction, government experiments, etc.--but making a joke of it only underlines the point: stories that could make sense of such a premise require a strange, contrived plot, with the situation engineered by some malign intelligent entity. Dilly works better, in short, when considered as a set of puzzles thrown into one room, rather than as a piece of a story that happens to fall within one location. The mechanics of Dilly are not quite as elegant as they might be. The room is evidently _crammed_ with stuff to play with--and though that isn't bad, as such, the relative sparseness of Enlightenment suggests that it needn't be that way. Very few objects in Dilly have multiple uses, or uses beyond the obvious; there just happen to be a lot of objects thrown into one room. Dilly could work as a two- or three-room game without losing its flavor, so to speak; other games, where the story or the atmosphere are tied into the one-room conceit, would not. (Such as, say, Enlightenment or Persistence of Memory.) Dilly might also be a little less confusing if it were more spread out; there are so many knobs to turn and buttons to push in that one room description that it is easy to lose something in the shuffle. Still, let me be clear: Dilly is a well-done example of a one-room game. There are some inventive puzzles, particularly involving the physical properties of common objects you run across and components you can take out of larger objects. One change-the-environment puzzle could be clued a little better, but it's a good puzzle nonetheless. There are several points where you destroy or damage objects rather than simply working with them, which I found somehow refreshing: it meant thinking outside the lines, never a bad thing. (Of course, it can break mimesis to require destructive actions in some contexts--homes, public places, etc.--but this is not a setting where such actions would be a problem.) Even the more artificial puzzles--a dartboard that requires a certain number of points scored, a "myriad" puzzle--are reasonably well-crafted; the latter has some unusual patterns, the former adeptly uses the "practice" dynamic also seen in Edifice. And there are nice extras--there is a slot machine, and you can play it using coins you find, though as far as I can tell it is impossible to win anything. There are plenty of nice touches that help to alleviate the sense that the author has grafted together a set of puzzles that didn't fit in other games. It's not clear what Dilly contributes to the genre of one-room games. The author ruminated about the possibility of a full-length one-room game, which may yet be possible--but, I would venture to say, not the way Dilly does it, not with a room full of stuff and no guidance given the player. Much of the relevant material should be hidden at first to avoid discouraging the player; more importantly, objects should be involved in more than one puzzle each. Moreover, goals and motivations should change during the game, to break up the monotony of staying in one room the entire time. Nevertheless, this is an intriguing effort, and I gave it an 8 in this year's competition. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: "Paul O'Brian" OK, probably the first thing I should confess is that I'm not hip enough to know what a "dilly" is. My handy dictionary suggests that it means "something remarkable of its kind" -- their example is "a dilly of a movie." Somehow I don't think that's what's meant here. So, judging from context, I'm going to assume that "dilly" means "relatively enjoyable puzzle game with good coding and writing, but a few guess-the-verb problems and sometimes not enough synonyms implemented." If this is what dilly really means, then Trapped In A One-Room Dilly has the most accurate title of any game in the 1998 competition. Like many others in this year's competition, Dilly is very puzzle-oriented. Perhaps what we're seeing this year is a bit of a backlash against the periodically swelling outcries for "puzzleless IF." If backlash it is, I don't think that's entirely a bad thing. Sometimes because literature has so much more cultural capital than puzzles, we can get into a mindset which tries to shun puzzles in favor of an elusive brand of literary merit. Don't get me wrong -- I myself am much more interested in IF for its literary qualities than its puzzles, but I also think it's important to remember that (for some of us, anyway) there is also a pleasure in puzzle-solving, the "crossword" part of IF as opposed to the "narrative" part. I believe that interactive fiction can cover a very wide spectrum indeed, but that there will always be a place for puzzle-oriented IF on that spectrum, and I'll probably always enjoy a really well-done puzzle game. Dilly is the closest I've seen yet in this competition to that lofty standard, but before I talk about the things it does right, I have to take one step back and talk about a game from last year. The author of Dilly entered a game in last year's competition called Travels in the Land of Erden. Ironically, these two games could not be more different. Erden was a sprawling, gigantic game with an enormous map, any number of subplots, and a generally broad scope. When reviewing that game, I wrote about the benefits of focus, and suggested that "if the author had concentrated her energies on a game perhaps a quarter of the size of this one, she would have had time for much more extensive proofing and beta-testing, and the result might have been a tight, polished gem rather than the rough and gangly work she submitted." Well, when I'm right, I'm right. Dilly benefits enormously from having a much tighter focus than Erden. The game narrows its scope to (as you might have guessed from the title) one room, and the room is a really *interesting* room, full of enough gadgets and gewgaws to keep me busy for two hours. At no time in Dilly did I lack for something to figure out, look at, or do. The game crams about 10 puzzles into this one room, but it didn't feel particularly strained to me. In fact, Dilly makes a sly gibe about its lack of plot by including a bookshelf full of books whose plots are plausible explanations for your situation (Intelligence testing, alien abduction, the bomb shelter of a wealthy wacko, etc.). The puzzles are generally creative and fun, and all of the coding and writing is technically proficient. Well, almost all. The only times I ran into trouble with Dilly were when I was close enough to the solution of a puzzle that I should have received some slight confirmation, but the game didn't provide it. For example, at one point in the game something is ticking and vibrating. If you listen closely to this object, you can hear it ticking. However, if you touch it "you feel nothing unusual." This is one of those instances where after I found out what was happening, I felt cheated. If I'm that close, I want at least a little nudge. In another instance, I had more of a guess-the-verb problem -- the game wants you to tie two things together with a rope, as in "TIE FROG TO LOG." (That's not really what you're tying, but I'm trying to avoid the spoiler here.) However, if you first "TIE ROPE TO LOG" you get a message along the lines of "That's useless." If I had tried "TIE ROPE TO FROG" first, the game would have picked up on what I meant to do, but I didn't make that lucky guess. I don't like to be put in the position of making lucky guesses. Nonetheless, these are relatively minor problems, easy to fix. They didn't stop me from enjoying my time in the one-room... whatever it was. Rating: 8.5 READER'S SCOREBOARD --------------------------------------------------------- Notes: A - Runs on Amigas. AP - Runs on Apple IIs. GS - Runs on Apple IIGS. AR - Runs on Acorn Archimedes. C - Commercial, no fixed price. C30 - Commercial, with a fixed price of $30. F - Freeware. GMD - Available on ftp.gmd.de I - Runs on IBM compatibles. M - Runs on Macs. S20 - Shareware, registration costs $20. 64 - Runs on Commodore 64s. ST - Runs on Atari STs. TAD - Written with TADS. This means it can run on: AmigaDOS, NeXT and PC, Atari ST/TT/Falcon, DECstation (MIPS) Unix Patchlevel 1 and 2, IBM, IBM RT, Linux, Apple Macintosh, SGI Iris/Indigo running Irix, Sun 4 (Sparc) running SunOS or Solaris 2, Sun 3, OS/2, and even a 386+ protected mode version. AGT - Available for IBM, Mac, Amiga, and Atari ST. This does not include games made with the Master's edition. ADVSYS - Available for PC and Macintosh only, or so my sources tell me. (Source code available as well. So it can be ported to other computers.) HUG - Written with Hugo. Runs on MS-DOS, Linux, and Amigas. INF - Infocom or Inform game. These games will run on: Atari ST, Amiga, Apple Macintosh, IBM, Unix, VMS, Apple II, Apple IIGS, C64, TSR-80, and Acorn Archimedes. There may be other computers on which it runs as well. Name Avg Sc Chr Puz # Sc Issue Notes: ==== ====== === === ==== ===== ========= Aayela 8.6 1.6 1.7 1 F_TAD_GMD Adventure (all variants) 6.6 0.7 1.0 7 8 F_INF_TAD_ETC_GMD Adventureland 4.0 0.5 1.5 1 F_GMD Adv. of Elizabeth Highe 3.1 0.5 0.3 2 5 F_AGT Afternoon Visit 4.1 1.0 0.8 1 Alien Abduction? 7.9 1.7 1.7 1 All Quiet...Library... 4.7 0.8 0.7 4 7 F_INF_GMD Amnesia 7.8 1.5 1.7 2 9 C_AP_I_64 Another...No Beer 2.4 0.2 0.8 2 4 S10_IBM_GMD Arthur: Excalibur 8.0 1.3 1.6 4 4, 14 C_INF Awakened 7.7 1.7 1.6 1 Awakening 5.4 1.0 1.0 1 Awe-Chasm 2.4 0.3 0.6 1 8 S?_IBM_ST Babel 8.2 1.7 1.3 2 13 F_INF_GMD Balances 6.6 0.7 1.1 5 6 F_INF_GMD Ballyhoo 7.7 1.8 1.5 4 4 C_INF Bear's Night Out 7.7 1.2 1.5 1 13 F_INF_GMD Beyond the Tesseract 3.7 0.1 0.6 1 6 F_I_GMD Beyond Zork 8.1 1.6 1.9 4 5 C_INF BJ Drifter 7.3 1.5 1.5 1 Border Zone 7.3 1.4 1.4 6 4 C_INF Broken String 4.2 0.5 0.6 2 F_TADS_GMD BSE 6.6 1.0 1.0 1 Bunny 6.6 1.0 1.4 1 Bureaucracy 7.5 1.6 1.3 6 5 C_INF Busted 5.2 1.0 1.1 1 F_INF_GMD Castaway 1.1 0.0 0.4 1 5 F_IBM_GMD Castle Elsinore 5.3 1.0 1.2 1 Change in the Weather 7.4 0.8 1.5 7 7, 14 F_INF_GMD Chicken under Window 6.9 0.0 0.0 1 Christminster 8.6 1.8 1.6 6 F_INF_GMD Corruption 7.8 1.6 1.1 3 x C_I Cosmoserve 8.7 1.3 1.4 2 5 F_AGT_GMD Crypt v2.0 5.0 1.0 1.5 1 3 S12_IBM_GMD Curses 8.4 1.3 1.7 9 2 F_INF_GMD Cutthroats 6.2 1.4 1.2 6 1 C_INF Dampcamp 6.0 1.0 1.4 1 Deadline 6.9 1.2 1.3 6 x C_INF Delusions 8.4 1.8 1.6 1 Deep Space Drifter 5.5 1.4 1 3 S15_TAD_GMD Delusions 7.4 1.3 1.5 2 14F_INF_GMD Demon's Tomb 7.4 1.2 1.1 2 9 C_I Detective 1.0 0.0 0.0 5 4, 5 F_AGT_GMD Detective-MST3K 6.1 0.8 0.1 4 7, 8 F_INF_GMD Ditch Day Drifter 7.1 1.2 1.6 1 2 F_TAD_GMD Dungeon 7.4 1.5 1.6 1 F_GMD Dungeon Adventure 6.8 1.3 1.6 1 4 F_SEE REVIEW Dungeon of Dunjin 5.8 0.7 1.4 3 3, 14 S20_IBM_MAC_GMD Edifice 7.5 1.5 1.7 3 13 F_INF_GMD Electrabot 0.7 0.0 0.0 1 5 F_AGT_GMD Emy Discovers Life 4.1 1.0 1.0 1 Enchanter 7.1 0.9 1.4 6 2 C_INF Enhanced 5.0 1.3 1.3 1 2 S10_TAD_GMD Eric the Unready 6.9 1.5 1.5 2 x C_I Everybody Loves a Parade 7.3 1.2 1.3 1 Fable 2.0 0.2 0.1 1 6 F_AGT_GMD Fear 7.6 1.5 1.6 1 F_GMD Firebird 8.1 1.7 1.6 1 Fish 7.6 1.2 1.7 3 x C_I Foggywood Hijinx 7.6 1.7 1.7 1 Forbidden Castle 4.8 0.6 0.5 1 x C_AP Frenetic Five 5.1 1.2 0.2 1 Friday Afternoon 6.3 1.4 1.2 1 13 F_INF_GMD Frobozz Magic Support 8.0 1.6 1.7 1 Gateway 7.5 1.6 1.5 1 x C_I Glowgrass 7.4 1.6 1.5 2 13 F_INF_GMD Great Archaelog. Race 6.5 1.0 1.5 1 3 S20_TAD_GMD Guardians of Infinity 8.5 1.3 1 9 C_I Guild of Thieves 7.3 1.2 1.6 3 x C_I Gumshoe 6.3 1.3 1.1 2 9 F_INF_GMD Hitchhiker's Guide 7.6 1.4 1.5 8 5 C_INF Hollywood Hijinx 6.4 0.9 1.6 7 x C_INF Horror30.zip 3.7 0.3 0.7 2 3 S20_IBM_GMD Horror of Rylvania 7.5 1.5 1.3 2 1 F_TAD_GMD Humbug 7.0 1.7 1.5 2 x F_GMD Ice Princess 6.2 1.1 1.6 1 I didn't know...yodel 1.7 0.3 1.0 1 17 F_IBM_GMD Infidel 6.9 0.0 1.4 9 1, 2 C_INF Inhumane 3.6 0.2 0.7 1 9 F_INF_GMD I-0: Jailbait on Inte 8.0 1.7 1.3 4 F_INF_GMD Jacaranda Jim 7.9 0.9 1.0 2 x F_GMD Jeweled Arena 8.0 1.5 1.5 1 x ? Jigsaw 7.7 1.4 1.5 7 8, 9 F_INF_GMD Jinxter 6.4 1.1 1.3 2 x C_I John's Fire Witch 7.1 1.1 1.6 6 4 S6_TADS_GMD Journey 7.8 1.6 1.3 3 5 C_INF Jouney Into Xanth 5.0 1.3 1.2 1 8 F_AGT_GMD Kissing the Buddha's 8.1 2.0 1.2 1 Klaustrophobia 6.7 1.2 1.3 5 1 S15_AGT_GMD Leather Goddesses 7.1 1.3 1.5 8 4 C_INF Legend Lives! 8.9 0.9 1.6 2 5 F_TADS_GMD Lessen of the Tortois 8.1 1.6 1.6 1 F_TADS_GMD Lethe Flow Phoenix 6.8 1.4 1.5 3 9 F_TADS_GMD Light: Shelby's Adden 8.3 1.8 0.9 2 9 S?_TADS_GMD Lists and Lists 7.5 1.5 1.8 1 Losing Your Grip 8.2 1.3 1.4 2 14S_TADS_GMD Lost New York 8.2 1.6 1.6 1 Lost Spellmaker 5.4 1.2 0.8 1 13 F_INF_GMD Lurking Horror 7.2 1.3 1.3 11 1, 3 C_INF MacWesleyan / PC Univ 5.6 0.7 1.0 1 x F_TADS_GMD Magic.zip 4.5 0.5 0.5 1 3 S20_IBM_GMD Magic Toyshop 4.3 0.7 1.1 2 F_INF_GMD Matter of Time 1.4 0.3 1.4 1 14F_ALAN_GMD Mercy 9.2 2.0 0.7 1 Meteor...Sherbet 8.5 1.6 1.9 1 F_INF_GMD Mind Electric 5.1 0.6 0.8 3 7, 8 F_INF_GMD Mind Forever Voyaging 8.4 1.3 0.8 7 5 C_INF Moist 8.4 1.7 1.6 1 Moonmist 5.7 1.2 1.0 11 1 C_INF Mop & Murder 5.0 0.9 1.0 2 4, 5 F_AGT_GMD Multidimen. Thief 5.6 0.4 1.0 3 2, 9 S15_AGT_GMD Mystery House 4.1 0.3 0.7 1 x F_AP_GMD New Day 5.5 1.3 0.9 1 13 F_INF_GMD Night at Museum Forev 4.2 0.3 1.0 4 7, 8 F_TAD_GMD Nord and Bert 6.1 0.8 1.3 4 4 C_INF Odieus...Flingshot 3.3 0.4 0.7 2 5 F_INF_GMD One Hand Clapping 6.9 1.2 1.4 3 5 F_ADVSYS_GMD One That Got Away 6.7 1.3 1.2 3 7, 8 F_TAD_GMD Oo-Topos 5.7 0.2 1.0 1 x C_AP_I_64 Path to Fortune 6.8 1.4 0.8 1 9 S_INF_GMD Pawn 6.5 1.0 1.2 1 x C_I_AP_64 PC University: See MacWesleyan Perseus & Andromeda 3.4 0.3 1.0 1 x ? Phred Phontious...Pizza 5.2 0.8 1.3 1 19 F_INF_GMD Planetfall 7.4 1.6 1.5 9 4 C_INF Plundered Hearts 7.2 1.3 1.1 5 4 C_INF Pyramids of Mars 6.0 1.2 1.2 1 Quarterstaff 6.1 1.3 0.6 1 9 C_M Ralph 7.3 1.7 1.5 1 Reruns 5.2 1.2 1.2 1 Ritual of Purification 5.8 2.0 1.0 1 17 F_GMD Sanity Claus 9.0 1 1 S10_AGT_GMD Save Princeton 5.8 1.2 1.3 2 8 S10_TAD_GMD Seastalker 5.5 1.2 0.9 6 4 C_INF Shades of Grey 8.0 1.3 1.4 4 1, 2 F_AGT_GMD Sherlock 7.3 1.4 1.4 3 4 C_INF She's Got...Spring 7.8 1.8 1.8 2 13 F_INF Shogun 7.1 1.5 0.5 1 4 C_INF Sins against Mimesis 7.7 1.7 1.6 1 Sir Ramic Hobbs 5.0 1.0 1.5 1 6 F_AGT_GMD Small World 5.9 1.4 0.9 1 So Far 8.7 1.4 1.8 4 F_INF_GMD Sorcerer 7.3 0.6 1.6 5 2 C_INF South American Trek 0.9 0.2 0.5 1 5 ?_IBM_GMD Space Aliens...Cardigan 1.6 0.4 0.3 5 3 S60_AGT_GMD Space under Window 7.3 0.0 0.0 1 Spellbreaker 8.3 1.2 1.8 5 2 C_INF Spellcasting 101 7.0 1.0 1.2 1 x C_I Spellcasting 201 7.8 1.5 1.6 1 x C_I Spellcasting 301 7.5 1.4 1.5 1 x C_I Spider and Web 8.5 1.7 1.7 3 14F_INF_GMD SpiritWrak 6.7 1.3 1.1 2 9 F_INF_GMD Spur 7.2 1.4 1.2 1 9 F_HUG_GMD Starcross 7.0 1.1 1.3 5 1 C_INF Stationfall 7.6 1.6 1.6 5 5 C_INF Stiffy - MiSTing 4.2 0.1 0.1 1 Sunset Over Savannah 8.3 1.3 1.5 1 13 F_INF_GMD Suspect 5.8 1.2 1.0 3 4 C_INF Suspended 7.2 1.3 1.3 5 8 C_INF Tapestry 6.9 1.2 0.7 2 14F_INF_GMD Tempest 5.6 1.0 0.6 1 13 F_INF_GMD Theatre 7.0 1.1 1.3 5 6 F_INF_GMD TimeQuest 8.6 1.5 1.8 1 x C_I TimeSquared 4.3 1.1 1.1 1 x F_AGT_GMD Toonesia 6.4 1.2 1.3 4 7 F_TAD_GMD Tossed into Space 3.9 0.2 0.6 1 4 F_AGT_GMD Travels in Land of Erden 6.2 1.5 1.5 1 Treasure.Zip 3 S20_IBM_GMD Trinity 8.6 1.3 1.7 11 1, 2 C_INF Tryst of Fate 7.1 1.4 1.3 1 Tube Trouble 3.3 0.5 0.4 1 F_INF_GMD Uncle Zebulon's Will 7.1 0.9 1.4 8 7 F_TAD_GMD Undertow 5.2 1.0 0.8 1 F_TAD_GMD Undo 1.9 0.1 0.4 2 7 F_TAD_GMD Unnkulian One-Half 7.0 1.2 1.6 7 1 F_TAD_GMD Unnkulian Unventure 1 7.1 1.2 1.6 6 1, 2 F_TAD_GMD Unnkulian Unventure 2 7.2 1.4 1.5 4 1 F_TAD_GMD Unnkulian Zero 9.0 1 1 F_TAD_GMD Veritas 7.9 1.6 1.7 1 Waystation 5.7 0.7 0.9 2 9 F_TAD_GMD Wearing the Claw 6.8 1.1 1.1 2 F_INF_GMD Wedding 8.0 1.7 1.6 1 Wishbringer 7.4 1.4 1.3 7 5, 6 C_INF Witness 6.9 1.6 1.2 7 1,3,9 C_INF Wonderland 7.5 1.3 1.4 1 x C_I World 6.5 0.6 1.3 2 4 F_SEE REVIEW Zanfar 2.6 0.2 0.4 1 8 F_AGT_GMD Zero Sum Game 7.5 1.7 1.2 1 13 F_INF_GMD Zork 0 6.3 1.1 1.4 5 14C_INF Zork 1 6.3 0.8 1.5 12 1, 2 C_INF Zork 2 6.5 0.8 1.5 8 1, 2 C_INF Zork 3 6.1 0.7 1.4 6 1, 2 C_INF Zork Undisc. Undergr. 6.5 1.0 1.2 1 14 F_INF If you've voted, but haven't seen any change in the scores above, please note that I've received a few votes which haven't yet been entered into the score list. They will appear in time for the next issue. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- The Top Five: A game is not eligible for the Top Five unless it has received at least three ratings from different readers. This is to ensure a more democratic and accurate depiction of the best games. There are no changes in the top five list since the last issue: 1. So Far 8.7 4 votes 2. Trinity 8.6 11 votes 3. Christminster 8.6 6 votes 4. Spider and Web 8.5 3 votes 5. Curses 8.4 9 votes CLOSING REMARKS ------------------------------------------------------------- I really hope that you won't have to wait as long for the next issue as for this one. There are lots of interesting games out there to review, so keep the reviews coming! We also hope to cover the first IF Art Show in the next issue. Until the next issue: Happy Adventuring! ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thank you for helping to keep text adventures alive!