___. .___ _ ___. / _| | \ / \ / ._| \ \ | o_/ | | | |_. .\ \ | | | o | | | | The |___/ociety for the |_|romotion of |_|_|dventure \___|ames. ISSUE # 23 -- 2000 IF Competition Special Edited by Paul O'Brian (obrian SP@G colorado.edu) December 29, 2000 SPAG Website: http://www.sparkynet.com/spag SPAG #23 is copyright (c) 2000 by Paul O'Brian. Authors of reviews and articles retain the rights to their contributions. All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine with the traditional 'at' sign. REVIEWS IN THIS ISSUE ----------------------------------------------------- Ad Verbum And The Waves Choke The Wind At Wit's End Being Andrew Plotkin The Big Mama Desert Heat Dinner With Andre The Djinni Chronicles The End Means Escape Guess The Verb! Kaged Masquerade Metamorphoses My Angel Nevermore 1-2-3 Planet Of The Infinite Minds Prodly The Puffin Rameses Shade Transfer YAGWAD SPECIFICS ========= Shade EDITORIAL------------------------------------------------------------------ I've been spending a little more time on ifMUD lately, and recently one of the denizens there asked me a question: "Why does SPAG have an annual competition issue?" I'm still turning this question over in my mind. Of course, there's an obvious, easy answer: tradition. SPAG had extremely close ties to the comp in its first few years, because the founder and then-editor of SPAG, Kevin "Whizzard" Wilson, was also the guy who *ran* the competition. It was only natural that the zine celebrate the comp with reviews, author interviews, in-depth analyses (precursor to the modern SPAG Specifics) and such. Since then, SPAG has chronicled the comp each year as a matter of standard practice. Still, tradition alone isn't a satisfactory answer to the question. After all, the zine and the comp are run by different people now. Too, competition reviews are hardly in short supply. In fact, reviewing comp games has become so de rigeur that by the time the comp issue of SPAG comes out, the community has already been treated to opinions from dozens of different comp reviewers, myself included. This is, of course, a great thing (as it would be if non-comp games got the same treatment), but it does tend to call into question the usefulness of an annual SPAG full of comp reviews. However, after giving it some thought, I believe there are several points in favor of an annual comp issue. One, SPAG solicits reviews that go into greater depth than the majority of the treatments that appear on rec.games.int-fiction. Looking through the reviews collected on Stephen Granade's site at http://interactfiction.about.com reveals that many consist of just a few sentences, transcribed notes, fragmentary thoughts, or offhand reactions; many also include spoilers, which make them unfriendly to people who haven't yet played the game. As the number of comp games increases, so too does this tendency toward brevity and skimming. SPAG reviews, on the other hand, try for a bit more cohesion, a bit more depth, and work hard to avoid spoilers. Even the comp reviews reprinted from rgif are selected with these qualities in mind. Including these reprints allows SPAG to feature a selection from some of the best reviews to appear on the newsgroups in the post-comp review glut. Reviews are chosen for their insight into particular points, their humor, or sometimes their sheer enthusiasm for a game that may have been overlooked by the majority of other respondents. It's important to me, though, that the comp issue not be dominated by these reprints -- I've always tried to keep the ratio of new reviews to reprints at least one to one, if not greater. In fact, I believe that original content is another good reason for a SPAG comp issue. The majority of comp reviews come in a massive deluge the day after the comp ends, and I think there's a value to comp reviews that are written after that initial flood, and that perhaps even respond to the points raised by some of those early assessments. Of course, this idea is predicated on people actually *writing* these reviews, and though fewer people seem to be drawn to this type of assignment, the output of those few can be quite valuable. This issue's original reviews were provided by Mark Musante, Duncan Stevens, and Tina Sikorski. Tina's reviews in particular are in a format which differs a bit from the traditional SPAG review -- she assigns and explains letter grades for Writing, Puzzles, Plot, NPCs, Technical skill, and a final factor called "Tilt", which functions similar to the wildcard points in regular SPAG scores. In addition, she provides an overall grade and the score she submitted for the game. Though these reviews aren't SPAG's usual style, I found their postdiluvian perspective intriguing, and have included a healthy sample. One last justification: the SPAG comp issue has always contained more than just reviews. As in previous years, we've interviewed the authors of particularly successful comp games -- this time around we've got interviews with Ian Finley, Emily Short, and J. Robinson Wheeler, authors of the first, second, and third place comp games, respectively. All three of these authors took the time to give long and thoughtful answers to SPAG's questions, and their thoughts are likely to be interesting even to those who are a bit weary of comp game reviews. In the end, I've decided that the annual comp issue of SPAG is a worthwhile endeavour after all, but there are ways to make it even better. For next year's comp issue, I'll be soliciting creative ideas for comp-oriented material to stand alongside the reviews. This could be anything from authors' notes to humor pieces to essays looking at the patterns created by the comp games as a whole. The future of the comp issue, and the future of SPAG in general, is in the hands of its contributors as much as mine. I'm optimistic that the energy and creativity of the IF community will keep that future a bright one. NEWS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- COMPETITION RESULTS There's been a general consensus that the 2000 IF competition was one of the best ever -- not only were a record number of games entered, but an impressive number of those were significant achievements. As usual, we all owe a debt of gratitude to organizer Stephen Granade and vote- counter Mark Musante. This issue is full of reviews that examine the comp games in depth, but for posterity's sake, here are the final results: 1 Kaged Ian Finley 2 Metamorphoses Emily Short 3 Being Andrew Plotkin J. Robinson Wheeler 4 Ad Verbum Nick Montfort 5 Transfer Tod Levi 6 My Angel Jon Ingold 7 Nevermore Nate Cull 8 Masquerade Kathleen M. Fischer 9 YAGWAD John Kean aka Digby McWiggle 10 Shade Andrew Plotkin 11 Guess the Verb! Leonard Richardson 12 Letters from Home Roger Firth 13 Rameses Stephen Bond 14 The Djinni Chronicles J. D. Berry 15 The Best Man Rob Menke 16 And the Waves Choke the Wind Gunther Schmidl 17 At Wit's End Mike J. Sousa 18 Dinner with Andre Liza Daly 19 Planet of the Infinite Minds Alfredo Garcia 20 The Big Mama Brendan Barnwell 21 The End Means Escape Stephen Kodat 22 Punk Points Jim Munroe 23 A Crimson Spring Robb Sherwin Enlisted G. F. Berry 25 Futz Mutz Tim Simmons 26 Return to Zork: Another Story Stefano Canali 27 Unnkulia X Valentine Kopteltsev 28 Desert Heat Papillon 29 Got ID? Marc Valhara 30 Castle Amnos John Evans 31 The Masque of the Last Faeries Ian R Ball 32 The Pickpocket Alex Weldon 33 The Trip Cameron Wilkin 34 Happy Ever After Robert M. Camisa 35 Prodly the Puffin Craig Timpany & Jim Crawford 36 Withdrawal Symptoms Niclas Carlsson 37 Aftermath Graham Somerville 38 The Clock Cleopatra Kozlowski 39 Wrecked Campbell Wild 40 Threading the Labyrinth Kevin F. Doughty 41 VOID: CORPORATION Jonathan Lim 42 1-2-3... Chris Mudd 43 Escape from Crulistan Alan Smithee 44 Stupid Kittens Pollyanna Huffington 45 Marooned Bruce Davis 46 On the Other Side Antonio Márquez Marín 47 Jarod's Journey Tim Emmerich 48 Infil-traitor Chris Charla 49 Comp00ter Game Brendan Barnwell 50 Little Billy Okey Ikeako 51 Asendent Sourdoh Farenheit & Kelvin Flatbred 52 What-IF? David Ledgard 53 Breaking the Code Gunther Schmidl NEW GAMES Even though the competition is over, the flow of new games has not stopped! Among the new arrivals are another fiendish Andy Phillips puzzler, an innovative storytelling experiment from the 6th place author in this year's comp, and the first game (to my knowledge) using the SUDS development environment. * The MONDAY Adventure by Mikel Rice (http://www.geocities.com/mondayadv/mdayndex.html) * Heroine's Mantle by Andy Phillips * Hortulus by Florian Edelbauer (a game in German, available at http://www.textadventures.de/hortulus/hortulus.html) * FailSafe by Jon Ingold * Snow Night by Chuck Smith (http://www.ksu.edu/wwparent/story/nature/) SO FIND A new website by the name of ifFINDER has recently appeared at http://www.corknut.org/ifFinder/. This site catalogs a collection of IF- related pages, sorting them by category and offering a search engine for those more specific requests. There are currently 109 pages indexed there, and the site offers a submission form if you know of a site that should be on there but isn't. INFOCOM POSTMORTEM It's been 11 years since the last Infocom text adventure, and in that time there has been no definitive resource chronicling the rise and fall of the most important company in Interactive Fiction history -- until now. A group of students from MIT, the same university that spawned the original group of Imps, has released a paper entitled "Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc." Their conclusion: "Infocom did not fail simply because it decided to shift its focus to business software... Behind the scenes, the transition created a litany of problems that hurt both the games and the business divisions of the company. Combined with some bad luck, these problems -- not simply the development of Cornerstone -- ultimately led to Infocom’s downfall." The paper is available at http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/infocom/ UPTHUMB AND I Have you ever wanted to endorse a game personally, but not felt up to writing a review? Brendan Barnwell has the solution for you. It's called Upthumb, a web site at http://members.aol.com/brenbarn/upthumb.html. This site allows visitors to register their appreciation for IF games and be added to a list of that game's endorsers. REVIEWERS? ANYONE? ANYONE? BUELLER? SPAG lives or dies by the contributions you provide to it. If you want to review a game, but aren't sure which one to pick, consider choosing a candidate from the following list of my deep desires: SPAG 10 MOST WANTED LIST ======================== 1. The Best Man 2. Dangerous Curves 3. FailSafe 4. Gateway 2: Homeworld 5. Heroine's Mantle 6. Letters From Home 7. The MONDAY Adventure 8. The Mulldoon Legacy 9. Snow Night 10. T-Zero INTERVIEWS----------------------------------------------------------------- In addition to the innumerable hours they poured into their comp entries, the top three authors in this year's IF competition were kind enough to spend some time answering SPAG's questions about their lives, their work, and their opinions. J. Robinson Wheeler even took those questions and changed the whole thing from an interview to... something slightly different. You'll see when we get there. SPAG is proud to present the following interviews with Ian Finley, Emily Short, and J. Robinson Wheeler. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-Ian Finley, author of "Kaged"-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- SPAG: When SPAG last spoke with you, you were a 17-year-old high school student living in Bountiful, Utah. Aside from being three years older, what else has changed in your life between now and then? IF: Certainly not my maturity level ;) I'm currently studying acting at the University of Utah with vague hopes of going on to study directing at Columbia or NYU, and have graduated from a Byronic gay teen to full fledged glamour boy and queer activist. My focus lately has been on performance, including a series of original performance art pieces done as benefit for the Utah Gay and Lesbian Community Center, as well as playing the Logician in a production of Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" that's going to tour California in February. Unfortunately neither acting nor IF quite pays the rent (let alone the tuition) so I've also been teaching at the university's Theatre Conservatory during the summers for the past couple of years, which has been incredibly rewarding. SPAG: Do you do any other kinds of writing besides IF? IF: Most of my writing lately has been for the stage (unsurprising, given the focus of my current studies). In the past three years I've written several plays and other theatrical pieces that have been performed around Salt Lake in different venues as I've slowly crept up the ladder towards competent writing. SPAG: What's your assessment of the current shape of IF? IF: Multifaceted. It's rare to find a "niche market" that has something for everyone. More than ever before, I think IF has broadened its scope and appeal; producing works ranging from comedy to tragedy, puzzle-based to puzzle-less, massive to miniature. Authors are beginning to see just how much this medium can accomplish (and becoming more aware of its weaknesses) and pushing the boundaries of that. This is an exciting time to be involved with the IF community. SPAG: You've been a perennial entrant to the IF competition. Now that you've won, what's next? Do you plan to write any more IF, and if so, do you think you'll submit it to the comp? IF: Good question. The reason I enter games in the competition is for the promise of response: I'm an actor, I need direct response to my craft to really feel it's working. On stage that's easy, (are they laughing? are they crying? are they cringing?) but with IF you have to hope and pray that if someone responds they'll be gracious enough to tell you. The competition greatly increases that chance. At the same time, part of the purpose of the comp is to encourage new authors, not glorify old ones, so I am wary of entering again. SPAG: Last year, you chose to enter anonymously (in fact, to enter twice under two different pseudonyms!) This year, you entered under your own name. What was your rationale for that decision? IF: Last year I didn't want people to see the name Ian Finley and think "Oh, this will be like Babel" and be utterly disappointed or confused by Exhibition. I also wanted Exhibition to stand or fall on its own merit, as opposed to people thinking they SHOULD like it because they enjoyed Babel. On the other hand, I entered Beal St. anonymously for very different reasons: I wasn't at all sure I wanted my name associated with it at all! If Adam Cadre and several others on the MUD hadn't figured me out that game might very well have gone unclaimed by any author to this day! Why then did I enter Kaged under my own name? Because I wanted it to get noticed. ;) People have certain natural feelings going into a work by an author they know: I sit down to open a volume of Camus in a totally different mindset than when I settle in to read Oscar Wilde or Jane Austen. This is neither good nor bad, just different. Repeatedly, I'd seen with "Hunter, In Darkness" in '99 the remark that if players had known it was Zarf they would have rated it higher, not just *because* it was Zarf but because they would then trust the author enough to take certain risks with him. Instead of "I'm in a maze, I'll quit playing now," players said they'd be more inclined to think, "This author wouldn't put this maze here without a reason, I'll keep playing." So, I figured this time around, since part of my overall concept was to appeal to as broad a base of players as possible, I'd submit under my own name. I can promise though that any games I do enter in the future will be under various cryptic pseudonyms. SPAG: What gave you the idea for Kaged? IF: As always happens with me, several different images came together in a sort of stew. The original idea came from reading some very clever, very short horror stories, all with one neat little twist and wondering how many times I could twist a plot, lie to the PC in some way, and still get away with it. Then I saw an amazing production of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" at the Lab Theatre here in Salt Lake. That same week I started studying the German expressionist silent films, most notably the classic "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari." I began wondering how an expressionistic world-view wedded with Kafka's dark, to the point, bureaucratic style might work for IF. The visual style of "Cabinet," filled with monstrously skewed perspectives and slanting, terribly acute angles, was one of its most memorable devices, so I began wondering how I could adapt that to non-visual IF. As a result, the descriptions of almost all the rooms in Kaged mention their odd angles, acute corners, and lack of perpendicular stability. After brewing for a bit, these random images crystallized into the backbone of Kaged. Interestingly enough, though many reviewers have likened the game world to 1984 or Brave New World, I have never actually read anything by Orwell or Huxley (I'm behind, I know, I know) and indeed if I had I may well have been too daunted or swayed by their worlds to attempt to create my own dystopia! SPAG: Some people have noted that Kaged is a more traditional IF game, and wondered if that's why it placed ahead of more experimental works like Rameses and My Angel. Did you set out to give Kaged a broad appeal, or was its form dictated by its content? IF: There's some truth behind both statements, but my return to a more traditional form was largely an intentional move to appeal to a broad audience. After Exhibition, which I felt accomplished the goals I had set out for it, I felt slightly guilty that I had somehow let the IF world down, after the popular success of Babel. Moreover, both download.com and AOL, which have distributed tens of thousands of copies of Babel, both refused to distribute Exhibition, apparently having no category it fit into. Add to that a seeming trend towards more completely puzzle-based games that's started to mirror the recent growth in puzzle-less games and which seems popular among many people on the newsgroup. For all these reasons, I made a little deal with myself, saying: "I'll alternate. For each experimental game I write I'll write a more traditional game with a broader appeal." I figured in this way I could reach audiences at both ends of the spectrum at one point or another, produce "games" which wider distribution mechanisms like download.com might be interested in (thus bringing more people into the IF community), and still have an opportunity to write experimental, story-oriented works, which are my biggest interest in the area of IF today. Sure, it could be said why don't I try to integrate both elements into one game, and I'm working on that (and I hope Kaged has at least a few unique, somewhat experimental elements to it) but I've not quite reached that level of proficiency yet. However, now that I have written a game that seems to have won the popular vote, I do intend on focusing my energies more towards experimental forms, like Exhibition and like this year's very unique and laudable experimental entries like Rameses and My Angel. SPAG: Of all the conversation systems on display in the comp, the one in Kaged was arguably the least interactive: the player simply types "TALK TO " and the game dictates the dialogue from there on. What were the advantages and disadvantages of using this method? IF: This is owed entirely to The Last Express, the finest piece of interactive storytelling I've ever seen. NPC interaction has always baffled me, and one of my primary efforts in writing IF has been finding ways to sidestep the issue. Babel was written to have no NPCs at all the character could interact with; Exhibition was written about themes isolation and the impossibility of communication at least in part to justify the inability to talk with the NPCs in the gallery. Oh, I'd tried other ways. The first season of Vivaldi, a massive IF epic that I started right after Babel and has gone down unforeseen and interesting paths since then, involved a NPC that responded with the usual ask/tell system. After coding responses on some seventy-five topics that varied with the given situation, I realized that writing NPCs in this way wasn't going to work (the fact that Emily Short somehow made it work is why I consider Galatea to be one of the true landmark games of modern IF). So, after tearing my hair out and attempting to program menu-based conversations for Kaged, I played The Last Express and hit upon the most elegant solution. If the PC is a well defined character, as I was hoping Aackmann would be, then in any given situation the plot will dictate what he is going to say if he chooses to talk. Of course, this required some puppeteering from behind the scenes and led to some slightly artificial almost-cut-scenes at some major plot points, but I felt that on the whole it allowed me to keep things under control without overloading my programming skills or utterly breaking mimesis. It was a good compromise for this game and may be something I return to, depending on its suitability, for other works in the future. SPAG: Speaking more generally, what are some of your thoughts on balancing the need for interactivity with the need for telling a story? IF: It's damn hard. ;) As a storyteller, I feel that I have to remain in control a great deal for the story to come through and I think that the best "story" games from this years comp (BAP, Rameses, etc.) were all fairly tightly controlled. Possibly the greatest "story" game of all time, Photopia, was a very controlled game, but I think there are ways of offering interactivity in other ways that don't necessarily relinquish that control. Level of detail is one of these for me. Essentially every object in Kaged is described, including the walls, floor and ceiling of every room, and down to the moss of the tiles in the showers in the bathroom. Several objects, and every single actor, has several different descriptions, based on when you look at them. Of course, there's always room for more detail, but the more you can add, the more time you're willing to put into that step the richer the world becomes and the more apparently interactive. There are scenes in Kaged where you're forced to stand about for several turns, but I felt if I could at least offer lots of different things to look at and poke at the more engaged the player would be. I don't think however there's any "right" balance of interactivity to story, there are just ratios that are more suitable and less suitable for what you're trying to convey and the audience you're trying to convey it to. SPAG: What did you think about this year's competition? Any favorite games? IF: SPLENDID competition. It was terrifying to see so many wonderful games. Shade, Rameses, Ad Verbum, My Angel, Masquerade; these were all fine and memorable games that have definitely earned a place on my hard drive. Above all though, I must say that Being Andrew Plotkin (which I waited for with great excitement since first seeing the title in an e-mail sent to all the authors) and Metamorphoses (which I waited for with even greater excitement since Emily first declined to test Kaged because she was putting together something of her own for the comp) especially charmed me and I'm honored to share the top rankings with them. SPAG: Any advice you'd care to offer for prospective competition entrants? IF: Beta-test! I know this sounds like old hat to everyone by now, but testing really is what makes a game successful. And I'm not just talking about cleaning up bugs here, but also cleaning up text and design errors. Hoooo boy, you should have seen Kaged (or any of my games) on their first drafts. Doubt you'd even recognize them. Get testers. Get LOTS of them (I think I sent inquiries off to about twenty people initially this year). Spend time with them, a period of time at least half as long as the time it took you to write the game, if not an equal period. Kaged took two months of steady work to program and another two months of steady work to test. And be gracious. These people are doing a tremendous job for you, absolutely for free, while trying to juggle lives of their own. These are the people who can really "make" your game and they deserve respect and gratuitous thanks. ;) -=-=-=-=-=-=-Emily Short, author of "Metamorphoses"-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- SPAG: For starters, could you tell us a little about yourself? Who are you, what do you do for a living, and so forth? ES: I'm a PhD student in Classics, which means that I have a teaching assistantship and go to classes. Whether or not this counts as doing something for a living is open to question. I also travel as much as I can, write fiction and nonfiction, teach a course in writing for home-schooled high school students, collect Requiem masses on CD, read the occasional romance, cook the occasional elaborate dinner. I frequently develop passionate fascinations with topics that have nothing to do with Greek, much to the frustration of my advisors: being an undergraduate was more fun. The world is an intensely interesting place and I would like to see as much of it as possible from as many angles as possible. SPAG: How did you first become introduced to IF? ES: My mother has held various computing jobs since the early 80s, and I have dim childhood recollections of watching her play Adventure and Zork, and then a bit later of trying my own hand at Infocom games. I was really fascinated by Deadline despite the fact that I had no idea what was going on or what I was supposed to be doing. Enchanter was another favorite of mine. I don't think I completely solved one on my own until Plundered Hearts, though. I even started (in BASIC, heaven help us, with the most primitive conception of a parser imaginable) a game called 'RingQuest,' about which the less said, the better. I was twelve, so there may be some excuse. Then Infocom went under and I kind of figured that was that. I didn't hear about Inform or the new community or r*if until 1996 or 97, when a college friend of mine who knew about my old fondness for Infocom games introduced me to Curses. At which point it became clear that I had to learn the language and do one of these things myself. SPAG: So far, you've created a game with a very deeply implemented character (Galatea) and a game with very deeply implemented objects (Metamorphoses.) What is it about this kind of depth that interests you? ES: I'm not very interested in the kind of game that consists chiefly of a series of puzzles with single solutions. (Especially if the puzzles are hard. At Wit's End is a perfect example: it's probably quite well done and very appealing to certain people, but it turned me off completely as soon as I realized how it worked. I play IF more for atmosphere and story than for the sake of enjoying the frustration factor.) Better, in my opinion, to set up a system with a set of rules that the player can learn and then manipulate in various ways to achieve various goals. In Galatea, there's not even a set problem -- you decide what you want to try to do. Metamorphoses is a lot closer to being a puzzle game, but the simulationist element means (I hope) that the player will feel as though the solutions are a seamless expression of the possibilities inherent in the world. I think this issue first came into my consciousness when I played Spider and Web. There's a two-stage process: figure out how the stuff you have works, and then come up with ways to use that knowledge. The experience, it seemed to me, was a lot more satisfying than your average get-thing, use-thing puzzle, no matter how trickily disguised. Ultimately I'd like my work to be effective as toy (richly implemented and fun to play with), as game (actions lead to progress towards a goal), and as story (actions fit naturally into the scheme of a plot). SPAG: You've become known as someone whose games are liable to feature a large number of endings. Tell us a bit about why you employ this strategy. ES: I'm not committed to writing only games where there are multiple endings; it just happens that both of the games I've released so far have seemed to demand it. In the case of Galatea, I wanted to keep the player a little off-balance all the time; I wanted to make a character who seemed a bit unpredictable. I particularly did *not* want there to be one "answer" or "explanation" that could be spoiled for people in advance. And I also wanted the process of discovery to be guided by what the player was interested in. It's a game designed to be as responsive as possible to the player's personal approach. With Metamorphoses I had a plot reason rather than a mechanical reason. The development of the PC is from slavery to freedom, from restriction to choice. So I wanted the freedom she gains to be reflected in the game-play. There's been some discussion, but I think this is the right choice: different players have liked different endings for the story. SPAG: What was your process for writing Metamorphoses? I'm wondering things like how long it took, what inspired it, how you went about coding it, and the like. ES: I talk about this a little bit more on my web page (emshort.home.mindspring.com/games.htm), but the basic gist is that I began it as a coding exercise for a materials-simulation library I was writing, and then it developed a life of its own. How long did it take? I spent a lot of time during the summer of 1999 writing stuff that eventually found its way into the game -- room descriptions, objects, most of the puzzles -- as part of a much larger and more ambitious game under the working title "Practical Alchemy." The thematic material was broader -- Hermeticism, Kabbalism, Della Porta's natural magic, some strands of Chinese elemental theory -- a wide range of the stuff that fed into the alchemical tradition, rather than the simplified Neoplatonism of the game as it now stands. It was also going to have an extremely complicated Inquisitor NPC; a demon-possessed cat; divisible liquids and measurement puzzles; a 'copy' machine that would let you replicate any of your inventory... it was a mess. There were some bits for which the coding was cool: I had a mystical book coded up to produce randomized Latin gibberish that would still consistently scan as dactylic hexameter, for instance -- but WHO WAS GOING TO NOTICE? So I threw it out. And I did have the object-copying machine worked out, with a cute little copy room for it to go in. Along with the parse_name code that distinguished formerly identical objects one of which had been modified in size or material. So all that was there, sitting around, as of last November or so, and I shelved it to work on other projects. When it came time for comp registration I signed up without being certain which of several things-in-progress I'd wind up entering. Around the beginning of September, I came to the conclusion that none of my other projects was worthy of notice yet, that I liked the setting for this game better than anything else I had going on, and that I could make something workable out of it if I stripped the design down to basics. From there in it was a month of focused work. I cut extensively, designed the last couple of puzzles, reshaped the plot, and, as They say, raced like the wind to finish on time. The coding is not exotic. Everything difficult -- timed burn routines, divisible liquids, copied objects, breakables that leave behind shards sharp enough to be used to cut other objects -- all that got edited out of this game. I have a class of Changeable objects that have properties representing their materials and shapes and sizes. Verbs are reworked to behave appropriately, so that for instance hitting a glass object with a hard object breaks the glass -- there are some minor complexities involving containers, but mostly this was all just handled with a lot of switch statements. And then the puzzles check for the presence of the right physical characteristics. So instead of coding up a condition as if (noun == persian_rug) { blah blah blah; } I have if (noun.size > 2 && noun.shape == PLANAR && noun.mater == CLOTH) { blah blah blah; } Then I did a lot of tinkering around -- and had my beta testers do a lot of tinkering around -- trying to come up with interactions I hadn't thought of yet. It didn't occur to me that someone might try to hang cloth objects on the hook, obvious though that is, until it showed up in my sister's transcript. This pretty much describes how I seem to write IF in general. First I get some hair-brained idea for a system (conversation, material interactions); in the process of coding it up, an appropriate story and setting suggest themselves; then I play with the game a lot, and have other people play with it, in order to find the places where the implementation needs to be deepened. Of the changes I made between versions of Galatea, a couple stemmed from extra ideas I'd had in the meantime, but the majority came from looking at people's transcripts and listening to their complaints about what they wanted to be able to do. SPAG: Can you talk a bit about the relationship between the PC and her Master in Metamorphoses? ES: It's not quite as monolithically dark as some people seem to believe: he's somewhere between adoptive father, teacher, and slave-driver. He doesn't hate her; he just considers his ultimate goal more important than her comfort or his own, which means that he has to push her harder than is humane. And so far she hasn't done a very good job of standing up for herself -- *and* she's rather intrigued by this strange stuff she's involved in, isolating and difficult and painful though it sometimes is. SPAG: Do you plan to write more IF in the future? ES: I am writing more IF currently. SPAG: What did you think about this year's competition? Any favorite games? ES: Kaged, Shade, Being Andrew Plotkin, and Masquerade. BAP and Shade both earned points for producing a strong personal response: BAP was the funniest game I've played in a long time, and Shade the scariest. And Kaged and Masquerade were both engrossing, Masquerade because I wanted to find out what happened in the plot and Kaged because the atmosphere was so effective. I share the general opinion that the competition was a strong one this year, though there were also some things that I think should've been left in the oven a little longer. That's always the case, though. SPAG: Any advice you'd care to offer for prospective competition entrants? ES: Don't submit a game that's not ready. If you can't tell whether it's half-baked or not, get beta-testers with some experience with IF. (Showing it to three of your closest friends doesn't help if they don't know what the state of the art looks like.) This is obvious advice, but I think it's important. SPAG: Finally, you have a reputation as a passionate advocate of cheese. Is there anything you'd like to tell us about what drives this passion of yours? Are you planning to write the definitive cheese game? ES: Cheese is a glorious thing. All dairy products partake partially of this glory, but cheese stands at the apex. For those who are interested, I have a cheese-centric ratings/review page at emshort.home.mindspring.com/cheese.htm. If you look at that page, though, you'll note that there's a sad dearth of games that explore the pleasure and wonder of cheese in all its varieties. I'd like to write such a game, but I alone cannot be a sufficient advocate. Which is why we need a CheeseComp in the very near future. -=-=-=J. Robinson Wheeler, author of "Being Andrew Plotkin"-=-=-= We sent our SPAG correspondent-at-large, Snappy Von Beakerhead, to meet up with IF Competition winner Celie Paradis -- or rather, J. Robinson Wheeler. His previous IF release was the comedy 1998 Competition entry "Four in One," a game about the Marx Brothers set in the glory days of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. His entry this year, "Being Andrew Plotkin," another movie-related comedy, placed third and garnered positive reviews, including a few raves. Von Beakerhead writes: "I met up with J. Robinson Wheeler, or Rob as he is familiarly known, in the upstairs section of a coffee house in Austin, Texas. He arrived about fifteen minutes late, wearing blue jeans, a blue button-collar shirt covered by a worn flannel overshirt (in a third shade of blue), and a blue fedora. He made polite apologies about traffic, and as we chatted he sipped alternately on a pint glass of coffee with milk and sugar and a pint glass of ice water. "When we started, he seemed moody, as if the world were weighing down on him, and he rarely made eye contact. As we talked, he seemed to brighten. When I asked about his upcoming TADS game, he lit up. I talked with him about 'Being Andrew Plotkin,' about this upcoming full-scale text adventure, and about what he sees for IF's future." SPAG: For starters, could you tell us a little about yourself? Who are you, what do you do for a living, and so forth? Rob: (laughs) These are actually the kinds of questions I have the most trouble with. The normal ones -- "So, what do you do?" "How are you today?" SPAG: Why is it a problem for you? Rob: I think it's that I have to gauge who I'm talking to because there's a number of ways I could answer, from superficially to very personally. SPAG: Well, feel free to answer however you like. Rob: I grew up in Austin, got a bachelor's degree from Stanford, pursued and then dropped out of graduate film studies at USC, where I also studied music. I was a cartoonist for a while, and a screenwriter, then I worked as a sound mixer for independent films, and as a freelance Web designer. I'm currently unemployed. My main activities this year have been directing and editing a movie and writing IF. How's that? SPAG: Fine. How did you first become introduced to IF? Rob: When I was in fifth grade, which was 1980-81, I had a friend named Mike Benedict. One day, Mike started raving to me about this "adventure game" called Zork. Our fathers were both professors in the astronomy department at UT-Austin, and so we'd walk over there after school, log into the VAX computer, and go to the games section. Later they took the games off the university computers because people were abusing the system resources. But before that, they had "Advent" and "Zork," as well as ones that are now lost to the mists of time -- one called "Haunt," another one called "Aardvark." SPAG: I think "Aardvark" is on the gmd archive. Rob: Yeah, I downloaded it recently and sent it to my brother, who was obsessed with that game for a while. So anyway, after that I discovered there was a BBS [bulletin board service] in Austin called the Black Box, and they had Infocom games on-line. You could dial up and play. I remember playing "Starcross" on that, until we abused it so much they took the games off. (laughs) Then we used to get Infocom games for Christmas and birthdays and stuff. And from those earliest times, I tried writing my own text adventures using BASIC. SPAG: Did you finish any of them? Rob: Only one, and it was an end-of-year project for a Latin I class in 7th grade. You wandered around ancient Pompeii and typed Latin vocabulary as commands. The teacher was impressed, since she'd never seen anything like it before. SPAG: So let's cut to the present. You just placed third in the 2000 Comp with "Being Andrew Plotkin." How does that make you feel? Rob: Terrific. SPAG: So you're content, or would you rather have placed even higher than that? Rob: I'm content. Third place actually feels pretty good. "Kaged" and "Metamorphoses" were great entries. I still get to be interviewed by SPAG, so it's all good. SPAG: You've mentioned that you used some specific techniques to simulate the Zarfian mode, and also that you employed a different writing style for each viewpoint character. Can you go into a bit more detail about how you achieved these effects? Rob: I'm a little unclear on what you mean by "the Zarfian mode." SPAG: What I mean is, a Zarfian atmosphere to the game. Rob: Well, that effect was mostly achieved by cribbing bits of Zarf's actual writing and sticking it into the game at selected points. The game starts out in kind of style-neutral mode, with nothing particularly Zarfian going on. The first hint of it is when you start to move the file cabinet, and you get a little wisp of cool air -- an effect borrowed from the beginning of "So Far." I wanted people to think, hmm, obviously we're about to enter a Zarfian world, the same way you are led into the strange other worlds of "So Far" from a fairly mundane starting location. The next thing was to write a very detailed description of the weird tunnel that you enter. I was trying to describe the tunnel that was used in the "Being John Malkovich" movie, but with Zarf's diligence to detail. Evocative adjectives, active verbs. I spent a while writing that one description. I like the reference to sharkskin that it uses -- it's slick and smooth in one direction and resists any movement against the grain. I think that it's a metaphor for the way that the game railroads the player along and doesn't give any rewards for straying off the track. The game doesn't go anywhere but forward. SPAG: Did you really mean it that way when you wrote the tunnel room description, or are you making that up in hindsight? Rob: I think I meant it but I didn't know it until later. I often find that there's a part of my brain that's smarter about making connections than my conscious mind is. SPAG: About the different viewpoint characters -- Rob: Oh right. Well, it's not true that I used a completely different writing style for each character viewpoint. The writing style was basically the same for the Valerie and Peter characters, but being different people, they would see things differently. SPAG: For example? Rob: Oh, for example -- the window in the file room. Peter sees it as a "measly window letting in one tiny square of sunlight," as if it's this pathetic thing that aggravates him. It does so little to help brighten the confines of the room, that it might as well not be there. Valerie thinks the window gives the room -- which she sees in a positive way, because it's so tidy -- a sense of openness. She thinks it's a bonus. SPAG: Okay, but when the player character is Zarf -- Rob: When the player character is Zarf, I decided to have some fun. How would Zarf see the world? And when I say Zarf, I kind of mean the mythological Zarf. SPAG: (interrupting) Who is the mythological Zarf? Rob: Well, I think it mostly comes from "So Far," which was such a surreal journey. You get the idea of a Zarfian landscape from there. And when Zarf writes this game, which is so provocative, and then refuses to explain what it means at all, that enigmatic silence seems Zarfian. So the mythological Zarf stems first from this notion of "Zarfian-ness." We collectively created the mythological Zarf as an attempt to fill in the blanks. I guess. By his silence he leaves it up to our imaginations, and we're an imaginative group. SPAG: The IF community is. Rob: Yeah. So I thought the mythos was a fun idea. How would this mythical Zarf see the world? What would be inside his head? The building blocks that created the real Zarf's creative output. As if to say, he's written this stuff because it's inside his head. And he puts a lot of detailed descriptions into his writing because that's how he sees the world. So that's what my fictional Zarf does. If I hadn't done that, people might have said, "Aw, I was hoping to see what the world looks like through Zarf's eyes." A lot of people noted that the world-through-Zarf's eyes was one of the things that made them laugh out loud in the game. It played directly to the Zarf mythos that we're all carrying around despite ourselves -- those of us who have played his games or have interacted with him on ifMUD, anyway -- and kind of nailed it. It wasn't even exactly in Zarf's style, but the excessive attention to detail and use of adjectives was enough of a nod for people to get the joke immediately. I think it's cool that we have a guy like Zarf in the community, a guy who has this funny reputation, a sort of public image that's a shared, tongue-in-cheek joke. Zarf plays along with it; we all do. SPAG: BAP is full of allusions and tiny homages. Can you mention a few that some players might have missed? Rob: Whew. Let's see. The first ones that come to mind are ones that people probably did catch. The dinner that Zarf is cooking in his kitchen is from his 1998 Xyzzy Awards acceptance speech. He had nothing to say, so he gave a recipe, and at the end he said we'd "better remember all that, because it's the solution to the endgame puzzle in next year's game." I couldn't work it into the endgame of BAP because of the plot structure, but it would have been a double or maybe triple joke if I had. SPAG: I think people probably caught that one. Rob: Well, let me try to get more obscure, then. In the game's opening text, there's a reference to a "bizarre interview with Human Resources" -- which was an allusion to "Human Resource Stories," the infamous game from Comp98, as if you got this file room job by having *that* be your interview. It mentions that the character Peter entered a previous comp and came in 16th -- which is an oblique "Four in One" reference. Melvin's last name, Prufrock, comes from the name of the detective in the first Choose Your Own Adventure book that I read, "Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?" I think it was the ninth one in the series, and you were Inspector Prufrock. I might be wrong about that, but I think that's the memory I summoned when I was trying to think of a funny name. SPAG: Okay, that is definitely obscure. But it's distantly related to IF, so it counts. Rob: People might not know about the Zarf Classified/Declassified jokes. One is that the word "zarf" means a type of cup holder, which is what's in the Classified folder. The other is that there was this government document about something called "Zarf" which was stamped "Declassified" -- meaning only that the existence of some secret government project code-named "Zarf" was allowed to be known about, not the actual project itself. So, the code word "Zarf" was moved to "declassified" status. Zarf had a scan of this on his web page, but lost it in a disk crash, and unfortunately no one had a backup. I always thought that was sad, so I resuscitated it for the game. I could go on, if you want more references. SPAG: Maybe just a couple more. Rob: There are others that don't relate to IF at all. If you try to taste the secret door, it tastes like snozzberries. Which is a "Willy Wonka" reference. Peter's middle name, "Danielson," is the name of the female lead in the movie I'm making. For the name "Zefferelli" I was thinking of the film director who did "Romeo and Juliet" and "Hamlet." In the endgame, Melvin brandishes these razor claws, which is obviously a reference to the superhero Wolverine -- but I was also thinking about Freddy Kreuger from the "Nightmare on Elm Street" movies, who had razor blade fingers and would always end the movie by chasing the heroes through a twisty dream landscape. SPAG: Hard on the heels of the competition ending, you announced that you're in the testing phase of a massive TADS game called "First Things First." Tell us a little about this game. Rob: Aha. Well, this is actually the first real IF project I started writing when I discovered TADS and the IF newsgroups in 1996. All those years, following that Latin Adventure game, I'd had an itch to write IF. I don't know why it was there, because it was a strange impulse. Just this itch I couldn't scratch. "I want to write a text adventure game." Always kind of there, especially if I had an empty Saturday afternoon or something. Not to play IF, but to write one. Then my brother bought TADS -- it was shareware then -- and when I looked at it, I could instantly understand the language. Suddenly, I was free to unlock my imagination, because TADS just made perfect sense to me, unlike the other adventure game languages I'd looked at in those long intervening years. My brother and I both sat down to test out TADS. He wrote a one-room, one-puzzle game in about two days. I wrote a few rooms, then some more rooms, then some more rooms, and then found myself coming up with plot and puzzles. A few weeks later, he wondered when I'd be done. I told him just another week or so, but the thing kept growing. Now, four years later, it's finally almost done. SPAG: Okay, that's good, but what I really meant was: what is the story? What's the game about? Rob: Oops. It's a time travel story. The game is set in basically one location, outside the PC's house. The PC is a time travel buff who's always going to the library to read about it, about time travel. When the story starts, you're coming home one night and discover you've forgotten your keys and are locked out of your own house. How will you get in? In the course of wandering around trying to solve this most basic of IF puzzles, the locked door, the entire plot unfolds, taking you to the same physical location in five different eras -- twenty years ago, ten years ago, the present, ten years ahead, and twenty years ahead. And the future doesn't look as rosy as you might have hoped. Maybe there's something you can do about it. Or maybe not. Am I spoiling it? SPAG: If you stop there, probably not. Rob: Okay, good. Anyway, the people that are testing it seem to be enjoying it for the right reasons. I think it'll justify the work went into it, and I'm really looking forward to having it off my plate. Finally! Done! I'll do a little dance when I finally release it, sometime early in 2001 I guess. SPAG: Are you planning a post-comp update to BAP, and if so, do you foresee any significant changes to the game beyond bugfixes? Rob: Actually, I'm not planning a post-comp update to BAP. It was sort of part of the game that I would take a month to write it, and then I would be done with it. The bugs that are in it, I knew about them before I submitted it to the Comp, but they didn't seem essential to fix. The game kind of works anyway. BAP was never intended to be note-perfect. I think I just want to let the Comp version stand as the one and only official release. SPAG: Each of your newsgroup posts ends with a web address for something called "The Krone Experiment." What is this? Rob: This is the digital video movie I'm producing and directing, one with an interesting pedigree. It's an adaptation of a science thriller novel that my Dad, J. Craig Wheeler, wrote. It came out in 1986 and then in paperback in 1988, and sold fairly well both here and in the UK and Japan. Since my Dad's an astrophysicist, he paid careful attention to the science of the science fiction. We collaborated on the screenplay a few years ago, just after I left the graduate film program at USC. We sold it to a producer, then the rights reverted back to us. I decided that I wanted to make the movie myself rather than keep trying to get it produced by Hollywood. It's coming together well, and everyone involved is kind of excited, kind of confident that we might have a hit independent movie on our hands. We'll see. I don't want to get my hopes up falsely, but there is kind of a vibe. SPAG: Do you plan to write more IF in the future? Rob: Definitely. I kind of have to wait for the good ideas to hit me. There is another work in progress, a collaboration, but it's been top secret. I just learned that another IF author is working on a similar game, which is a bummer -- I had always intended to resume work on it after FTF was released. But there's also a new piece I just started cooking up a week ago. Maybe it'll end up being my Comp entry next year, because I can already tell it's going to be slow to develop. SPAG: Are you going to stick to comedy, or are you planning more serious works? Rob: Well, FTF isn't exactly a comedy. It starts out in a lighthearted mood, that sort of general Infocom style, and then gets darker as the story progresses. I think it might get too dark, though. I guess I'm going to keep searching for just the right balance, because that's the most satisfying for both the author and the player. SPAG: What did you think about this year's competition? Any favorite games? Rob: My three favorites, the ones I voted for Miss Congeniality, were "Dinner With Andre," "Shade," and "Rameses." After I read all the reviews, I played a few more games, and I was definitely impressed with "My Angel." I think it was a great step forward in storytelling IF as opposed to puzzle IF. I liked "Kaged," too, which I hadn't played before the judging was over. It gives me a good idea of what I might have to come up with if I want to place higher than 3rd next time. SPAG: Is that your goal? Rob: I would like to place first in the Comp someday, yes. Not just to have done that, but for the satisfaction of having written an excellent IF game. SPAG: What do you see as the future of the IF medium, and what's your place in it going to be? Rob: I'm intrigued that there's now the ability to integrate multimedia into IF with the standard languages and tools, but that not very much experimenting has been done yet. There were also these teasing developments this year, what with the notion that there might be a market for text games on mobile phones and such. I actually had a dream one night, last year I think, where I foresaw a commercial future for IF. I flipped open a Wired magazine in the dream, and saw this elegant advertisement for an IF company. They were marketing IF the way champagne is marketed, or any luxury item, as this high quality product for discerning tastes. Not as a broad appeal, but as a niche market, one with snob appeal. I think that might be one strategy to use if one were going to try to sell IF on a regular basis. Then again, it was just a dream. Maybe I ate some cold pizza before going to sleep, and that's all it was. But if it did go that way, I would love to work for that company. I'd love for there to be a business model that would work, where IF authors could at least make some good money on the side even if it can't ever be their sole income. I don't think it would work if it were a real company with a corporate headquarters, renting office space, with all of that overhead. I think it should be a virtual company, an organized version of the creative anarchy that we've already got in the community. With elegant advertising in Wired. How we'd pay for the ads, I have no idea. SPAG: Any advice you'd care to offer for prospective competition entrants? Rob: Let me see if I can think of something non-generic to say. Like, besides "Test, test, test your games, give yourselves enough time to finish," blah blah blah. Here's what I did. I wrote a Comp game, submitted it, and saw how it did, which was middling. I determined to do better the next time, so I listened to the reviews my game got. I also listened to the reviews the top games got. I played the top games. I then sat out for a year, and just watched the Comp play out from the sidelines. I read all of the discussions, again looked at how things did, the way that judges approach games, the way they're often short-tempered but will walk a mile with you if you give them what they're hungry for. There's no formula, but you can kind of suss out the rules of the game. This is assuming you're playing to win, but it's not crass to do that. It means you're endeavoring to write something good. By that I mean, there's no way to cheat. You either write something people like or you don't. And I don't think it's pandering to the lowest common denominator to please a large number of the judges with your work, because most of the judges are smart, creative people with good taste. That's what's been attractive to me about the IF community. So anyway, I guess my advice is, play to win. Enter the best you've got in you to enter. Swing for the fences. Oh, and be original. SPAG: Or be Zarf. Rob: Right, if you can't be original, be someone else. It worked for me. KEY TO SCORES AND REVIEWS-------------------------------------------------- Consider the following review header: NAME: Cutthroats AUTHOR: Infocom EMAIL: ??? DATE: September 1984 PARSER: Infocom Standard SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: LTOI 2 URL: Not available. When submitting reviews: Try to fill in as much of this info as you can. If you choose, you may also provide scores for the games you review, as explained in the SPAG FAQ. The scores will be used in the ratings section. Authors may not rate or review their own games. More elaborate descriptions of the rating and scoring systems may be found in the FAQ and in issue #9 of SPAG, which should be available at: ftp://ftp.gmd.de:/if-archive/magazines/SPAG/ and at http://www.sparkynet.com/spag REVIEWS ------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mark J Musante NAME: Ad Verbum AUTHOR: Nick Montfort EMAIL: nickm SP@G nickm.com DATE: October 2000 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters AVAILABILITY: GMD URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/adverbum.z5 VERSION: Release 1 / Serial number 000925 One line summary: Nord and Bert with attitude. This isn't Nick's second game, but it is the second game of his that is fairly widely known. The first one was "Winchester's Nightmare" which took an interesting tack in trying to get the player to be really part of the story. Instead of the usual ">" prompt, the player is presented with "Sarah decides to", and you get to fill in what you would like her to decide to do. This really made you feel part of the action, but it had the drawback of eliminating the standard commands we came to know and love over the past 20+ years of IF. Notably, 'i' for inventory, 'n' for north, and so on. "Sarah decides to sw" doesn't make much sense as a sentence. "Ad Verbum" takes this into account in a thoroughly amusing and clever way. If you use commands like 'up' and 'north', the room descriptions will also use them. If you instead use 'u' and 'n', so do the room descriptions. Some people might find this off-putting. I found it grin-worthy. But enough of that. The game itself presents the player with a seemingly simple stint: acquire all objects from a house and dump them in the Dumpster. The catch is that the house once belonged to the "cantankerous Wizard of Wordplay", so it's not as simple as going through each room and picking up the objects. You have to obey the rules. For example, in one room, you can only use words that begin with the letter 's', however the only way to leave it is to the north, which is a word you can't use. You also have to be able to pick up objects in those rooms, again only using 's'-words. Naturally, when you're in an 'n'-, 'e'- or 'w'-only room, it's hard to save the game, so Nick has you read a warning message before entering those rooms explaining the situation. It's a bit on the defensive side and it definitely breaks the flow of the game, but I'm sure that beginning players would find it useful. I, on the other hand, would have preferred to see that as a puzzle one discovered during the course of play. After all, the game is short enough. Too short, really, because these are the kinds of puzzles I love to see. Reading the text, thinking up possible solutions, a bright flash of discovery, the eagerness to see what's next... that's what IF is all about. The only downside to the game is that it didn't recognize quite as many words as I thought it ought to. It's frustrating to think of a perfectly good word ('scarper' to leave the 's' room, for instance) and then have it not work. I'm sure Nick will be getting plenty of suggestions from others, if he hasn't already. That being said, this was the game that made the whole competition for me. I enjoyed it from intro to quit. Nick, if you're reading this, keep writing more! I'd love to play a full-size game with this sort of wacky wordplay and perplexing puzzles. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Duncan Stevens Infocom, in its heyday, produced some games the likes of which has never been seen since, either because there's no perceived interest in such games (the mysteries in particular) or because amateur IF writers don't have access to the proper technology (the more graphical games). Neither of those objections necessarily applies to Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of it, a wordplay game, but Nick Montfort's Ad Verbum is arguably the first free- or shareware IF game to follow in Nord and Bert's footsteps. (Dennis Cunningham's T-Zero had some points in common, but there was more going on than wordplay--pop culture references and such.) Ad Verbum is a worthy successor: like Nord and Bert, not all of it is particularly inspired, but the moments that work really, really work. The plot, again like Nord and Bert, is simply an excuse for wordplay puzzles--you're looking through the Wizard of Wordplay's mansion and moving through various rooms that are devoted to specific types of wordplay, thereby to collect objects. Many of the puzzles are a bit obscure, and some are only tangentially related to wordplay--or, rather, involve forms of wordplay that aren't necessarily familiar to anyone but the most hardened of GAMES magazine addicts. (One puzzle that involves moving a sofa down a flight of stairs is particularly baffling to those not on the author's wavelength.) Another, involving a little boy who's a dinosaur fan, I found simply misleading--at least, the solution suggested in the hints was something of a surprise to me. The heart of the game, however, lies on the "initial" floor of the house: there are passages lying to the north, east, west, and south, and going north yields this: "LISTEN WELL!" a sonorous voice booms out, in attempted hollowness. "Know ye that passage back through here is difficult for some, impossible for others! Should you wish to transport yourself - without your cherished possessions - out of these constrained confines, utter the magic command: NEW!" Neat Nursery Nice, nondescript nursery, noticeably neat. Normally, nurslings nestle noisily. Now, none. No needful, naive newborns. Nearby: ... nifty nappy. The parser, as you might have guessed, has been rewritten to require that every word of every command begin with N. Violating the rules elicits "No! No! Negative, novice. Nasty notation." or "No! No! Nefarious nomenclature. Narrate nicely, now." The NEW command mentioned above is your only way of getting out of the room: RESTORE, QUIT and everything else has been disabled. Needless to say, in the rooms to the east, west and south, the parser has been similarly reworked for the appropriate letter. You have a goal for each room--extracting some objects and getting out of the room, using only the appropriate letters--but even after the goal is accomplished, it's worth hanging around to experiment with the alliterative parser. The results are more often than not hilarious, as with the following: >nip nappy Naughty, naughty! Nibbling nappies not normal. Or: >examine effigy Enemy effigy. Extreme enormity evident. Execrable evildoer! There's plenty more amusing stuff in each room: the parser-rewriting was done with plenty of intelligence and wit. (WAIL in the appropriate room elicits "Waaaah!", which amuses me no end for some reason.) In short: nicely notated, Nick! Erudite, esoteric effusions entertain endlessly. Winsome, witty wizardry will woo wordsmiths, who will whisper "Wow!" without wearying. Surely, such semantic skill should solicit stratospheric scores. There are some variants on the alliterative parser--another S room with another restriction, and a room with objects whose content suggests that the proper TAKE replacement for each object will involve letter-avoidance of one sort or another. (There was a nasty bug in the competition version of this room that has been squashed--naturally, the game in the updated version reports a literal squashed bug.) The parser is not, however, rewritten for each object, so most of the fun of the alliterative rooms is lost, and only the wordplay puzzle remains. It's a fine puzzle, of course, but it doesn't have the same effect. The other puzzles are likewise not nearly as inspired--there's a "twin bedroom" that requires that all commands be in the form >HAMMER HAMMER, but there isn't nearly as much room for experimenting there. To the extent that Ad Verbum works--and it depends mostly, I think, on the extent to which the player is amused by the alliterative rooms--it works for different reasons than Nord and Bert worked. The latter called for all sorts of cleverness from the player, and getting through it produced a real feeling of accomplishment; some of the puzzles were quite difficult. In particular, certain scenarios required that the player deploy various clichés or idioms, often in amusingly twisted ways, to get through the scene--and not a small amount of creativity was required. Ad Verbum doesn't ask nearly as much of the player--the most difficult feat of wordplay is clearly coming up with the appropriate alliterative words, and in most rooms that's not especially difficult. (Getting out of the N room is a challenge--sufficiently obscure that if you go in there without first encountering the fellow who wanders around dropping hints, you're unlikely to get it--but the others are pretty straightforward.) But the author here has put his own skills on display, much more so than the Nord and Bert authors did, and the result is just as amusing. In other words, the fun is more passive here than it was in Nord and Bert--the interactivity isn't as important--but there's still fun to be had. Ad Verbum is not an unqualified success; without the alliterative parser, I don't think there'd be much interesting about it. But I got enough laughs out of those rooms that I can't give it anything less than a 9. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Alfredo Garcia [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: And The Waves Choke The Wind AUTHOR: Gunther Schmidl E-MAIL: gschmidl SP@G gmx.at DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/atwctw/atwctw.z8 VERSION: Release 1 Here's a story that starts with the meat. It's a classic 'What the...?' moment for our PC, who awakens to find himself on a lifeboat, floating in an empty sea, bound and (it would seem, rather unnecessarily) gagged. The introductory puzzle is good, as it encourages us to examine the PC down to the smallest details, all of which are implemented well. Here's an ambiguity you don't have to clarify too often: >CUT HAIR USING THE KNIFE Which do you mean, your dreadlocks or your pubic hair? And if you think that's going a shade too far, you'll find that even your anus is implemented - a smuggling puzzle later on, perhaps? At first I thought this all a little excessive; in fact it was totally in keeping with the theme of (at least) this preview - self-scrutiny. The generic theme is more immediately obvious - Lovecraftian Horror. The author does well to create a sense of foreboding throughout the piece, and generally it succeeds in maintaining an atmosphere of dread. This was only occasionally deflated by a poorly chosen phrase ('butt naked' and a reference to 'the enemies you've wasted' seem anachronistic) or an unsuitable quotation (Lovecraft and the Necronomicron are fine -- but Nine Inch Nails?) As we progress, the PC is revealed to us through a series of flashbacks. It sounds like this shouldn't work, but it does. Too much pathos is injected, yet it's nice to feel something for your character by the end of the game, and I did. It's a shame the author didn't enter a more interactive section of his work. All there is to do here is explore. The descriptions are well handled, but I found very little for me to *act* on. I really didn't like the proliferation of talk menus towards the end - but then again, I really don't like talk menus generally. (More on this later) So then, as a game this seems a little uneven, but as a preview it really whets the appetite. Rating: 6 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Sean T Barrett [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: At Wit's End AUTHOR: Mike J. Sousa E-MAIL: msousa SP@G efortress.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: TADS standard SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/tads/awe/awe.gam VERSION: 1.00 TITLE: Dinner With Andre AUTHOR: Liza Daly E-MAIL: liza SP@G retina.net DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/dinner/dinner.z5 VERSION: Release 1 >GET OUT OF THE FRYING PAN Take the PC and put him or her in a situation where everything has gone JUST RIGHT. The PC is on top of the world. And then something goes a little wrong. Just a little wrong, not ludicrous or unrealistic. But, hmm, a tad unfortunate. And then the player gets the PC out of the situation and things just go from bad to worse. AWE starts better: the PC is in a tough situation where things could go bad or things could go good. (Heck, it may actually be possible to fail the first puzzle, or it may not, I don't know.) Then by solving a really easy puzzle, *then* the PC is on top of the world. It's a really nice, cheesily happy moment--and then trouble starts. But the player got to participate in hitting that top of the world. You were pretty sure it was going to happen (although it was possible you'd fail and it would instead be a redemption story), but even so, it was a good moment. Oh, and then the accident. It doesn't rob the PC of being at the top of the world--the PC's achievement isn't called into question or offset in any way--the PC just starts having a (largely unrelated) misadventure. DwA does not start quite as strongly--your character is already (almost) at the top of the mountain, and you don't share in the experience of having gotten to the top. As well, DwA turns out to be a farce, but holds off on revealing this until things start going wrong--which makes it all the more crazy, but can get a player invested in the game the wrong way. Still, the waiter comes over, and if the player makes the obvious choice of answer, there's a nice moment of feeling "yes, everything is perfect" that is triggered by player action. Oh, but then things start going wrong. And where none of the problems of AWE relate to the achievement directly (the PC has already climbed back down the mountain he'd climbed), in DwA its the mountain itself being put at risk. A tremor, a threat of a landslide, and then wooosh... I think of these sorts of games as "out of the frying pan and into the fire" games because at every moment, once you resolve the situation, a new peril threatens. (The movie "After Hours" pops into mind as well.) The last half of Kaged was more explicit that way; in some ways it was more effective, since the peril threatened in Kaged was your life; the peril threatened in AWE is, well, your ability to return home; and the peril threatened in DwA is public humiliation. One of the reasons "out of the frying pan and into the fire games" tickle my fancy is because they make the character's motivation explicit. At any moment, I know what I'm supposedly to be accomplishing in the short term (crucial to being able to play the game) and I also know why that action fits in with my end goal (not getting humiliated, or returning home). Far too many games put you in a situation where all you can do is poke around at suspicious-seeming objects and solve the puzzles related to them. To me, this is what storytelling in IF should be about; giving the player a high-level goal (a story to achieve) and then giving the player enough information (e.g. a low-level goal) to be able to carry out tasks *for the purpose of achieving that goal*. Why is this storytelling? When the player of DwA confronts the challenge of the four waiters at once, I can imagine the zany British TV sitcom where this exact sequence of events plays out. Whereas many games, say, The Pickpocket or The Planet of the Infinite Minds or even Transfer, I can't imagine comprehending this go by on a screen; the motivations of the protagonist would be incomprehensible. Or maybe you could imagine it as a mystery where the audience is left in the dark; but when, in IF, the audience is controlling the protagonist, that way of looking at it makes little sense. "Out of the frying pan and into the fire" isn't the only way to achieve such "storytelling"; when I change the color of an object in Kaged it's for a pretty obvious reason, to achieve a pretty obvious goal that has to do with the overall situation; but when I create a library in Planet of the Infinite Minds I'm just doing it 'cause it's there. In fact, "out of the frying pan and into the fire" may not be the most effective way of giving the player lower-level goals; letting the user set her own pace is probably a better experience most of the time. In fact, an "out of the frying pan and into the fire" sequence can end up just feeling like a series of set pieces--the mouse sequence in Transfer is a fairly good example of a set piece, although it does rely on one piece of game-specific knowledge--so a game that integrates its puzzles, rather than leaving them a series of disconnected events, may turn out to be a stronger work. In the case of DwA, though, I thought the pieces meshed together really well; they all tie into the initial scenario, and the pacing is superb: a series of linear puzzles, then the game "goes wide" with a tough multi-element puzzle, then tightens down and is at peace briefly, easy, relaxed, everything is going right... and then BAM, ouch, followed by an easy end game. Perfect. As an added plus, the elements of DwA end up serving as a bit of a parody of some romantic genre cliches, indeed with the ending almost coming off as (unintentionally) mocking Masquerade, which uses those cliches to create its archetypal romance genre story. AWE gets off to a rollicking start with simple, tight, timed puzzles, but then goes much too broad and much too hard, at least for my tastes. While all the puzzles seemed reasonably logical, but the breadth meant a lot of time pursuing irrelevant alternatives, and the difficulty would have required an awful lot of player time to solve without excessively relying on hints/walkthroughs, which I was unwilling to do. Therefore I can't comment on how successful the pacing is beyond that point. But up until it goes broad, it is an amusing alternation of "oh shit" and "ho hum, what now?" which I quite enjoyed, since at each moment (say, walking up to the house), I was tensing up waiting for what would go wrong next. (And the title helped--it was GOOD that I knew I was doomed to be going into the fire.) I'll go out on a limb and make a specific design suggestion of the sort I think is pretty pretentious of me to make, but what the hell: the spine of the story was trying to return (which generally meant escaping each situation); as far as I played, *everything* that happened was on the spine of the story, except having to eat. Having to eat jarred me horrendously because of that. Realistic? Sure. Related to the story? Not at all. I'd cut it. (You can argue that it's on the spine if the central peril of the story is dying, but that was how it felt to me anyway--tangential.) -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Sean T Barrett [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: Being Andrew Plotkin AUTHOR: J. Robinson Wheeler E-MAIL: wheeler SP@G jump.net DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/bap/bap.z5 VERSION: Release 1 TITLE: Prodly The Puffin AUTHOR: Craig Timpany and Jim Crawford E-MAIL: timpany SP@G pingus.cx, pfister_ SP@G mindspring.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/prodly/prodly.z5 VERSION: Release 1 >SAY "PARODLY IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY" I don't like Pokey the Penguin. In fact, Pokey the Penguin ranks right up with jerkcity in terms of massively annoying me, simply because *several* different people have recommended it to me, and each time I go check it out, look at it, and say "I still don't get it". Am I annoyed at other people for thinking it's funny? Am I annoyed at myself for not getting it? I don't know. I'm just annoyed. Like I said in my review of Asendent and Comp00ter Game. Misspelling? Funny once, maybe. For Prodly (PtP), non sequitur? Funny once. Ok, PtP is better than Pokey in this regards. I dutifully avoided asking myself about anything because that led to the stupidity that I fail to see any humor in. The rest of it was mildly amusing and surreal, along the lines of "Stupid Kittens", with a few great touches: the mysterious hovering beak, and the one bit that made me laugh out loud, the "bug in the menu system" bit. PtP is, then, a game which is sort of a parody and sort of an homage to an existing property which is itself (supposedly) humorous, and it managed to make me laugh out loud once. BAP is an homage to an existing property which is itself humorous, and it managed to make me laugh out loud twice. (And no other comp games made me laugh out loud.) Starting off, I was very worried about BAP (although perhaps not as much as I was PtP after seeing its opening quote), fearful that it would slavishly imitate "Being John Malkovich". And, in fact, it did at first. Worse yet, the initial scene's trivial puzzle is underwritten in an implementational sense: not only do you have no particular reason to push the button (indeed, the game will advance at that point simply because it triggers an unrelated event), but you can open the lid of the copier, and there's nothing in it to copy; and you're not carrying anything to copy, either. The game stayed pretty close to the movie for quite a bit longer, which continued to worry me, along with the questionable decision to make "open drawer" and "pull drawer" distinct commands--is there some other way to open a drawer? Still, it was managing to amuse me, and I stuck with it, and it turned out that the author very carefully both stuck to and deviated from the movie, in exactly the right way so that he could work economical fragments of humor by referencing the movie, and yet deliver jokes all his own. For example, Melvin, the character who maps onto the old lecherly guy with a secret in "Malkovich", is both wimpy and lecherly, but he not only has a different secret, but this secret explains those two behavior patterns in a totally different way--and indeed his POV was the first laugh-out-loud moment for me. "Malkovich" is about a puppeteer who gets the once-in-a-lifetime chance to control another human being. Of any funny movie one might choose to adapt into IF, this one gets the obvious thumbs up for the thematic relevance; indeed, I believe in the very old days some people would explain text adventures to newcomers by describing the PC as a 'puppet' under the player's control. (In fact, the first thing I tried to do after my tunnel ride was type something like "ZARF, DRINK"--and I was disappointed when this was misdirected at an object I was carrying.) In the end, I had so much fun with BAP I couldn't deny it second place of all the games I played (and no, I've never been on ifMUD). Of course it was horribly on rails. Why didn't this bother me? I don't know. Scenes I would have like to have seen: * a puzzle that required typing "x yz zy" instead of "x zy" * the player controlling Peter controlling Andrew Plotkin controlling Zarf, if you know what I mean =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Tina Sikorski TITLE: Being Andrew Plotkin AUTHOR: J. Robinson Wheeler E-MAIL: wheeler SP@G jump.net DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/bap/bap.z5 VERSION: Release 1 Walkthrough? Yes Genre: Mixed/Movie tribute/In-Joke/SF +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating B |Submitted Vote 8| |Writing B+|Plot B+| |Puzzles C |NPCs A | |Technical B |Tilt C+| +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts Although I had not ever seen the movie _Being John Malkovich_, I had been fairly certain from the moment I saw the title that it was, in fact, related somehow. Reviewing this from the perspective of someone who doesn't know a -thing- about the movie may change things a bit; if you -have- seen the movie, you're probably better off with someone else's review. You'll notice I had a hard time classifying this into a specific genre. I'm open to other suggestions... *** Writing (B+) Throughout, the writing was consistently good. At times, it was actually far better than that. And what's best is that I often felt like the author was just having a plain old great time writing it, which for some reason always appeals to me. For instance, this line: Valerie plummets into the big hedge with an unladylike ka-thump-krickle. ...was the kind of thing that, had I written it, I would've been giggling a bit to myself when I did, not at my own cleverness but rather at the sheer delight of creating a line like that. I hope I'm right about this; people who have fun creating things tend to create more. Too, there were little bits like this: "There are sweat stains on them. Stifling the urge to make a comment, you adjust your grip to touch only the dry spots." Not really necessary, just color -- but what color it is! I read this and I think "Okay: So, Marvin is a loser, and you really don't care for him; he has COOOOOTIES." [Okay, well, maybe the author wasn't thinking of cooties, but hey, -I- was.] No need to spell it out explicitly; it's all about the feel. I also enjoyed the way things changed a bit when there was a perspective shift, but I'll get into that more under NPCs... *** Plot (B+) To be honest, this would probably have been different if I knew anything about the movie beyond the very, very basic premise. I found the execution of the idea hilarious (and I'm beginning to think I may have to go rent the movie if it's -anything- like this) and particularly with the bits and pieces that let you see the world in different ways (again, more under "NPCs"). To be perfectly honest, I didn't get the optimal ending, and I was in too much of a hurry to try replaying and fixing this, but for some reason that didn't faze me; perhaps just because what I'd experienced up to that point was... cool. The thing is, I can't actually narrow down what about it was cool -- which is a major fault in a reviewer, I admit, but alas, remains the case. Maybe it was just the entire idea of being in ZARF'S head (a scary idea to me). Maybe it was just the whole concept of your boss (I swear I've worked for this "man"). I wish I could explain. Suffice it to say: it was worth doing. *** Puzzles (C) Hmm. My notes don't go into a lot of details on this, which pretty much supports the mid-range rating. Taking a quick look through, the only time I seem to have gotten outright stuck (other than, I'm ashamed to admit, the recursion problem) was because it just didn't occur to me to type "look at mud" -- for some reason I wanted to "look at computer" (which didn't give me any more detail) or "type" (which just didn't work). For some reason, specifically thinking of the MUD as an object just didn't occur to me. *** NPCs (A) This was really, really the big strength of the game. Not only did we have several NPCs, we actually got to -be- some of them. And every time we did, something changed a bit about the perception of the world we were in. I thought -all- the characters were interesting. While they were a bit limited in conversational style, they still feel fully developed, and even better, when they look at -each other-, they see the people they interact with differently. This, to me, is primo stuff. I know that people like saying "Ho, hum, just character switching again, everyone does it", but... folks, not everyone does it WELL. In fact, it's quite rare. Again, as with the writing in general, the little touches are what makes this category absolutely superb, for instance, both Valerie and Peter dislike Melvin, but they still see him differently, and the rooms have some minor differences depending on who you are. *** Technical (B) Actually, in retrospect, I'm not sure I know why I gave this a B. Maybe just the sheer impressiveness of writing x number of different descriptions of each area based on who would visit it and keeping correct track of something on that scale. Too, I found no bugs, which is generally a good thing. So, er... (*fumbles*) Okay! Nothing to see here, move along. Oh wait. One -bad- thing: >go through secret door You can't, since the secret door is in the way. *** Tilt (C+) and Final Thoughts In retrospect, I think this deserved a higher 'tilt' from me. I suspect I was a bit frustrated with not finding the recursion puzzle answer when I handed out the 'tilt' score (which is always my initial score), and not seeing the last bits of the game. And some of it was just that while I enjoyed the game, it really was a one-time sort of joke. Here's a few other things that I have in my notes, for amusement value: You give the stuck cabinet drawer the old heave-ho, and instead of merely opening, it yanks loose from the wall, revealing a strange, small door in the wall! >of course it does That's not a verb I recognize. [I frequently talk to the games. This is probably not something you needed to know.] **** that code (Melvin) for some reason reminds me of COBOL, which is scary. **** No Ikea! Ikea bad! **** I don't WANT To be Zarf! It scares me! -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Adam Cadre [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: The Big Mama AUTHOR: Brendan Barnwell E-MAIL: BrenBarn SP@G aol.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard, with conversation menus SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/bigmama/bigmama.z5 VERSION: Release 8 I don't think the author was trying hard enough. If you're going to put the phrase "the big mama" into pretty much every response, why stop there? Why, it could've appeared in every paragraph or, indeed, every sentence. (The big mama.) I mean, if it's good ten thousand times, why not a hundred thousand? Why not write in the style of Henrietta Pussycat, only swapping in "the big mama" for "meow"? What a missed opportunity. Also, the big mama. So, let's see. I do like the idea of a sort of multi-turn AISLE. But the thing about AISLE was that most of the endings were really well-written and interesting in and of themselves, not to mention diverse. The same cannot be said of THE BIG MAMA. There are a lot of games in the comp for which I scribbled down notes like "rocky prose" or "semi-literate," but this game proves that you can have an excellent command of the language and still provoke winces. (The big mama.) Let's see, there was the bit where a sign warns you about how the next 1.5 miles of beach are private: "'Stupid imperial measurement,' you mutter." Urgh. Why not just give the player-character a renaissance flute while you're at it? Oh, and the little boy. "Almost every day I billa cassel." Throw this kid into the nearest wood chipper, please. I mean it. Stop him before he soliloquizes again. Also, the big mama. Even the less egregious paths all seem to lead to inane conversations and fairly ham-handed passages desperately trying to hammer home the theme that the ocean is pretty. Sometimes the inane conversations result in relationships, but none of these sequences is really even remotely convincing -- I'm sure every day there are beach encounters that lead to hookups, but I doubt that any of them have resembled even one of the paths set forth in this game. Also, the big mama. There are also some quirks with the way the various characters are programmed: the surfer alternates between sunbathing and surfing about every eight seconds, and the teenage girl seems to have no memory whatsoever -- you can scare her off with some creepy line, watch her wander off, and two turns later she's back and seems to have no idea who you are. This is the sort of thing that makes characters look like chunks of code rather than representations of people. Also, the big mama. More bugs of note: jumping the rail takes you to the beach, but once you get there, the game tells you that "You're not up for that kind of leap." Sounds like some routine is neglecting to return true somewhere in there. Oh, and while the game notes that "everyone in town speaks Spanish," I have to wonder -- "las" is a plural article. The only way that works with "Lorena" is if "Lorena" is a last name and the name of the town is a reference to a all-female family: "The Lorena Sisters", or some such. Which I could buy as a novelty musical act from the early 70s, but not as the name of a city. Also, the big mama. Perhaps my favorite bit: | 0: Say nothing. | 1: "Yeah, let's watch a movie." | 2: "A walk sounds great." | 3: "Let's play a game." | 4: "" Me, I thought it was a bit early in the evening to propose illegal object number 357, but hey, turned out she was into it. Kinky! Score: a low THREE. Also, the big mama. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Tina Sikorski Walkthrough? No Genre: CYOA/Mixed/Romance +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating C |Submitted Vote 6| |Writing B |Plot C-| |Puzzles n/a|NPCs C+| |Technical C |Tilt C | +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts As a few other people have mentioned, I would have expected the sea to play a larger part in this work, which is basically a choose-your-own- adventure with no particular focus on the sea. I called it a "romance" genre game in part because a LOT of the routes seem concerned with romance, but there are a few other routes that don't contain it. *** Writing (B) I can't help but take a moment to compare this to last year's entry by this author (Lomalow, which I, quite frankly, did not like). Although the styles are different, there's an element to both of them that is similar: the attempt to evoke some specific emotions. This year's entry does a much better job with the writing; it doesn't feel as forced, as heavy-handed. It's still got some flaws, but overall I feel much less preached at than I did last year and there were times when there were hints of excellence. I don't know if you can attribute this to the different format, practice, or even the different topic matter, but whichever it is, I'm actually quite glad to see something I like from Brendan. If I had any complaint it was that at times it was too long, a hazard, I think, of the CYOA format choice. I do enjoy longer text breaks than some people will accept gracefully, but there were a few times when too much happened on a trigger. What I enjoyed the most, I think, were occasional clever or cute turns of phrase, such as these portions of some room descriptions: "These little establishments sell everything from shrink-wrapped, dessicated muffins to decent hot dogs." "The breeze is straight out of some beach-blanket B-movie: salty, soft, and refreshing." But even the more serious writing is honest, and while there isn't a LOT of substance to this as a game, (see "plot", below), I enjoyed reading it. *** Plot (C-) As with many CYOA games, it's so hard to rate plot. First off, there are multiple "plots" here... although as I mentioned above, many of them seem to have the same basic tilt, which is: romance. But what I saw was a bit... thin. Not quite Calista Flockhart, but definitely thin. Still, they weren't bad little plots. Just not a lot of substance, much more the Twinkie of IF than the dinner at Ruth's Chris. [If you haven't ever encountered Ruth's Chris, they are the most incredible steakhouse ever.] *** Puzzles (n/a) Due to the CYOA format, I did not rate on puzzles, breaking my "formula" but, ultimately, I think, being more fair. *** NPCs (C+) This game is basically NPC driven, in that it's almost entirely conversationally driven. So you would hope that the NPCs would have some depth to them -- and, actually, they do in spots. But you don't really get a good glimpse about what they're -really- like, mostly because your interactions with them are so short. Whether this is a shortcoming of the format or whether they were simply undeveloped is hard to judge; they DO have personality, but it's pretty focused. *** Technical (C) There was certainly nothing in particular that was outstanding technically here, and only one bug of note, so I gave it an average rating. *** Tilt (C) and Final Thoughts I found 4 or 5 different endings before I stopped playing, so there may be more depths here I have not plumbed. Those of you with more patience than I (and a CYOA roto-rooter) may discover more. It was an amusing diversion. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Tina Sikorski TITLE: Desert Heat AUTHOR: Papillon E-MAIL: amethystphoenix SP@G yahoo.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: None (CYOA) SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/ VERSION: 1 Walkthrough? No Genre: CYOA/Romance/Bodice-Ripper +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating B-|Submitted Vote 7| |Writing B+|Plot B | |Puzzles D |NPCs B | |Technical C |Tilt C+| +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts A lot of people don't like choose-your-owns, so to them, this will not appeal. In truth, they don't always appeal to me. In this particular case, however, I actually thought it worked fairly well. I didn't explore all the possible choices (although I did double up on a couple paths) so I don't know how flexible the game ultimately was, but it looked to have at least some degree of freedom in it. *** Writing (B+) Despite some perhaps overly-lengthy prose in spots, the writing in this was rather well-done. I found many of the descriptions quite enchanting, bringing to mind a definite feel and genre that itself is quite magical, and one in which it is easy to get drawn in and lost within when it is (as it was) done correctly. Take, for instance, this bit from the opening: "The sound of windblown sand smoothing the dunes and scouring the city walls is the only song nature produces in Hajima." With the very first sentence, mood and setting are already firmly in place, a setting which is only enhanced (and never contradicted) by further room and event descriptions. And best yet, although the game does tell you "this is who you are, this is what you can do", it never seems to do it in a way that felt limiting (to me), though ultimately, of course, it was rather narrow in scope. *** Plot (B) As with all CYOAs (and how many times have I used that phrase, anyhow?), there is not a LOT of flexibility in plot, but as is more rare, there is a rich plot here. It is true that it is quite stereotypical. It is also true that sometimes that's a good thing. (See also NPCs, below.) Stereotypical stories are sometimes, instead, more -archetypal-; they use settings, people, and situations that we all are familiar with, and merely attempt to display the story in a manner in which will appeal. I believe that this was the author's intent (although don't know for sure), and if so, it worked quite well for me. Others, looking for something new and original, will probably prefer to give this a pass, although I might add that there is not much in the way of either new or original left in the world. It is merely the skill with which stories are displayed that, ultimately, determines how people react to it. *** Puzzles (D) As a CYOA adventure, it should perhaps not really be rated on puzzles, but as there are several critical decision points that can make a large difference, in this case I elected to do so. And that is where things fall short. Could it have been done differently and retained the format? Yes. There could have been more decision points; they could have been presented in a way that combined both more internal world knowledge with more difficult choices. When it came to a point where I had to make a choice, often I felt as if I were presented with choices that the -character- would understand the implication of but I would not. That, alas, was the big flaw in an otherwise enjoyable experience. *** NPCs (B) Adam Cadre, whose opinion I quite respect but with whom I frequently disagree, felt offended by the stereotypes in this game. Others saw his point. I disagreed, because I felt there was no intent to hold up and portray negative and shallow characters. I felt they were meant to be archetypes (see also Plot, above). So, be warned: there are no terribly deep characters in the game. You see only glimpses of their true personality, and even those show something fairly basic and, yes, cliche. But... it WORKS. This is not the real world. This is the storyworld, where everyone has a defined role, and everyone has a part to play. And it is the success in -that- upon which I rated the NPCs highly. Realism in NPCs is a prized thing, difficult to obtain, but the clever and careful use of caricature and archetype can result in some lovely story building. Desert Heat accomplishes this with flair. *** Technical (C) CYOA games are not difficult to produce. I found no bugs. *** Tilt (C+) and Final Thoughts This is definitely not a game for everyone. Simply the genre alone would ensure that; I myself have a love-hate relationship with romances, if you will pardon the potential pun. The format and style as well are both potentially off-putting. Still, if you have any interest in a richly told tale, I would suggest giving the game a chance. It was one of the more enjoyable -- if not one of the longest lived -- moments of the comp. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Duncan Stevens TITLE: The Djinni Chronicles AUTHOR: J.D. Berry E-MAIL: berryx SP@G earthlink.net DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/djinni.z5 VERSION: Release 2 J.D. Berry's Djinni Chronicles is one of the shortest games of the comp, but it's also one of the densest--there's not much room for exploration or experimentation without save-restore. There are some game-specific rules, moreover, that make it likely that you'll have to do some save-restoring. Still, there are some ideas worth exploring that come across in those few moves. You are a djinni, discovered and summoned by various masters, whose wishes you strive to grant in one way or another--but you also have your own purposes that are only somewhat compatible with those of your masters. The nature of your existence is such that you can't stray far from your "container," the vessel where you reside when you're not about your business; indeed, the beginning of the game functions mostly as an introduction to the rules of your world. You learn, for example, that the tendency of wishes to come with unfortunate side effects isn't simply djinni contrariness; rather, it's because they don't (generally) have the power to accomplish the change by their own will, and have to harness the power of another "undercurrent" with somewhat different effects. You also learn that some djinni derive power from sources other than their summoners, and seek to gain enough power to act independently. The defining measure is known as "Purpose," here expressed as a number, and maintaining Purpose, one way or another, becomes your overriding goal. What emerges is an imaginative portrait of djinni ethics, as it were: the djinni that you play aren't bound by any particular ethical norms as such other than the desire to gain and maintain purpose. Arguably, those djinni that aren't bent on destruction serve their masters' wishes not out of any sense of loyalty, but simply because they derive no advantage from acting independently. (The anterior question, why some djinni are one way and some are another, isn't addressed, but the game is complex enough; there's no need to introduce another layer of cosmology.) In a sense, the path of the game is fairly well defined simply because the character's powers are limited; the player can't really expect to be able to wander away, since that causes the game to end promptly. The wishes of your masters also define your goals most of the time, and when they don't, the game spells out your personal objective. And yet figuring out your motivations at any given point can be complicated, particularly if you assume that you feel some inherent responsibility to your master--and it's not until about halfway through the game that you learn what you're really doing, so to speak. Once you understand the larger plot, it's intriguing; the only problem is that you don't have much part in influencing where it'll go, other than figuring out the command that will move things along. The linearity factor actually serves the purposes of the story--the whole point is that your powers are limited, and your ability to influence events doesn't go much beyond your master's interests--but it might also be a bit more satisfying to be able to affect how the plot turns out, not just whether the one possible plotline progresses. The end of the game suggests that the point isn't simply to devise an inventive mythology of djinni and how they work and what motivates them; rather, the behavior of the djinni suggests something about human nature and the ways that these particular spirits (with their own motivations) choose to manipulate their masters. In that respect, portraying the details of djinni existence serves some of the same function that C.S. Lewis's elaborate bureaucracy of hell did in Screwtape Letters: to describe the spirit world in order to provide a context for the way those spirits tempt and manipulate humans. Obviously, this is a little different, since the relationship isn't entirely adversarial--you need your masters to accomplish your purposes, which doesn't exactly describe Screwtape--but the message is related: suitable manipulation of our baser instincts can turn them into enormously destructive forces, and the game suggests that the less noble impulses are considerably more powerful than altruistic ones (since the djinni that serves a master with relatively unselfish goals doesn't seem to accumulate much Purpose). As a game, apart from the theory and theology that might underlie it, Djinni Chronicles works reasonably well. As noted, picking up on the rules takes a while, and the limitations on the character are initially frustrating when you're used to a great deal of freedom--but it doesn't take long to adjust and to appreciate your new powers. (For instance, walls are no hindrance.) The game is quite linear, true, but to some extent that's inevitable if the author wants to tell a particular story about the spirit world and human nature: if the player has the power to put a different spin on the relationship between the PC and its masters, the result is no longer what the author set out to tell. This sort of thing might not have gone over well just a few years ago, but linearity, I think, has come to be viewed as the inevitable price of more story-oriented IF, and when the story is as intriguing as this one, it's a price worth paying. There's another advantage to the linearity: the puzzles are well integrated into the plot, rather than artificial constructs that distract from the story. That's a feature not directly related to the breadth of the game, of course, but it's inevitable that a game with a large field of options doesn't really sustain much of a story, since the author can't exercise much control over how the game progresses--and by restricting the options, Djinni Chronicles ensures that the task at hand is always part of the story. Moreover, the linearity factor restricts the amount of things that can go wrong; this is a technically solid game, in part, perhaps, because the nature of the game prevents players from doing outlandish things that could violate the game's expectations. The only real fly in the ointment is a lengthy section that's written in not especially inspired verse; it doesn't serve an obvious purpose in the game, and it distracts the player from what was otherwise highly competent writing. The main flaw in Djinni Chronicles, at the end, is that it leaves the player wanting more--more plot, more character development--but there are worse sins, I suppose. It's an imaginatively told story--intelligent enough to earn a 9 from me. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Adam Cadre [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: The End Means Escape AUTHOR: Stephen Kodat E-MAIL: skodat SP@G blazenet.net DATE: 2000 PARSER: TADS standard SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/tads/endmeans/endmeans.gam VERSION: Release 1 I really liked the first segment of this game. Not only were the animate objects cool and funny, but the way the player is meant to go about resolving the situation -- asking everyone about everyone else -- appealed to me much more than if the solution had been to perform some clever engineering trick. I wasn't quite sure how the stuff I was doing was getting me any closer to opening the door, but I went along with it and entered the book... ...and then splat. I didn't get part two at all. I understood how to manipulate the words -- the hint system told me that much -- but I didn't have the slightest clue what my goal was, and the hints crapped out at that point. So I put the game away, figuring I'd give it about a five. Then I read a solution to part two on the newsgroup -- and I *still* didn't get it. It was like getting stuck on a puzzle where you're trying to open a safe and finding out that the combination is 43-49-25... and why? Because it just sort of is. "You turn hard"? Say what? And then the third segment... goal, please? I think this says it all: >HINT There's just some people standing around. Right. And I was one of them. Maybe there are some people who, presented with a bunch of playing pieces in a game they don't recognize, would start messing around with the pieces for hours on end until something happened; me, I'm more inclined to just leave them alone until I have some *reason* to play with them, some *objective* I'm using them to try to accomplish. And "escape" is insufficient. Yes, you do escape, but how are you supposed to know that X will achieve Y? Doing what the hints tell you to do with the segments' various playing pieces, and consequently "escaping," is like the bit in A GOOD BREAKFAST from Comp97 where you're looking for a spoon, happen across a robot, play Lights-Out with it, and then when you win, the robot randomly hands you a spoon as a reward. Or, to use an invented example for the sake of clarity: You're in a cell. You want to get out. The door won't budge, and there's a guard posted outside. You have a gold coin. GOOD DESIGN: Get the guard to open the door and let you go free in exchange for the coin. BAD DESIGN: Swallow the coin. This randomly causes the door to fall off its hinges onto the guard, allowing you to make a break for it. THE END MEANS ESCAPE is full of examples of the latter type of design. Open up a guy's surgical incision? Why? Just because you can (with difficulty)? Apparently so -- that's how you advance to the next stage, though there's no particular reason why that's so. The end justifies the means? In this game, they rarely seem remotely connected. Score: a low THREE, and only because I did get some fun out of the first bit. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Tina Sikorski Walkthrough? No (in-game hints) Genre: Surrealism +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating B+|Submitted Vote 8| |Writing A-|Plot C+| |Puzzles B |NPCs B | |Technical B |Tilt A+| +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts A lot of people really disliked everything but the first section of this game. I, on the other hand, got more into it the more I played it; I won't say I enjoyed the first section the least, but neither did I find it the best of the sections. I believe this will be a narrow appeal game, which in a way is a pity and in a way is just how things work. I will note that this was the game that got me to dub this "Surreal Comp"; between it, Shade, and (to a lesser extent) Planet of the Infinite Minds, not to mention the Rybread parody, this was probably the most surreal of the comps ever... *** Writing (A-) First off: bonus points for the correct use of "its", something a lot of authors don't seem to understand. Any game in which there are word puzzles is probably going to garner either a rather low or a rather high score in writing. In this case, you will see it's "rather high". But this was not only because of the (somewhat difficult, but entertaining) word puzzle in the second section, but the sheer amount of work that must have gone into crafting the initial section's NPCs, giving them character and consistency. Many of the descriptions were simple and unadorned, but knowing when to do this is as important to writing as elaborate, full, and intense descriptions of one's environment. Others (mostly later in the game) are detailed and interesting, but oddly those seem to occur when they are least important. I don't know if this was a deliberate stylistic choice, but for me it added to the surreal factor -- and I so enjoy the surreal factor, so this is a good thing. Possibly the best use of words was not in the writing itself, but one of the puzzles (see below). Indeed, until that section, I was actually somewhat out-of-sorts with the style presented; as I put it in my notes "This is the kind of HIGH-FALUTIN' High Art thing I dislike, isn't it?" However, it grows on one... *** Plot (C+) Now, those of you who played this game will be saying "Plot? Was there a PLOT?" Well, yes and no. There was certainly no coherent plot I could identify, but it seems as if each section contained a bit of one, and they were internally consistent. On this basis -- rather than that of understanding and being able to articulate the plot -- I rated it just above average, consistency being one of the building blocks of a good plot. So if you're looking for a full-blown story, I'm afraid you are out of luck; this game does not, so far as I could tell, have one. There are basically four (five?) little tableaus that are, at least as far as I could tell, separate, yet each has as its basis understanding or at least discovering the nature of something. This, I think, is what ties the game together. I may be the only person getting this out of the game (other comments certainly suggest such) but... for me it works. *** Puzzles (B) Oh GOD, the PUZZLES. They are fiendish! They are evil! They required me to use the hints regularly... ...and yet... I'm fascinated by word puzzles. I was particularly fascinated by the one in part two of this game, where your inventory contains a certain number of words, the room contains a certain number of words, and you have to manipulate them in various ways to make certain phrases. In the interest of leaving -some- surprises to the reader, I shall not reproduce the entire puzzle, but I will say that: a) There is more than one (somewhat) sensical "solution", but only one actually -works- b) Yes, it did mean something to ME (though not, I gather, to others). Then there was the puzzle with the basically inanimate people. That one, I did not like. No. But it wasn't because I felt it was unfair or even that it was difficult to figure out (aside from being very limited in solvability). It was just that it was... icky. I suspect it was meant to be metaphorical, but some metaphors I'd rather not, er, explore. Still... frustrating at times, but the hints do work well, and... if you like symbolism and wordplay, you should enjoy this aspect of the game. *** NPCs (B) Well, some of the NPCs were a bit wooden and stiff... (that's a joke only those who have played the game will get). Many of the Others you interact with in this game are not, strictly speaking, people. They have personalities, they speak, they react, but... they're objects. Animate objects. It's quite bizarre. Surreal, even. And I loved the way it was done. Each object had a personality that fit with what it was. Each object had something to say about its surroundings and fellow objects. Sure, it was simple, a closed environment, but that's something you can't say about some games: the NPCs knew about each other and would comment on each other. In fact... it was vital to the game. *** Technical (B) A few little neat tricks gave me reason to up the technical score a bit, despite a couple really nasty disambiguation problems in one section. Specifically, I liked the fact that changing state (due to actions taken) resulted in changing responses (descriptions and reactions), something that takes some time and care and effort to do, and I enjoyed the word-inventory puzzle as a purely interesting technical feat as well as just as a puzzle. It's nice to see a little extra like this. *** Tilt (A+) and Final Thoughts Many people started this game, liked it, and then slowly grew to dislike it. I started out not enjoying the philosophical High Art but grew to appreciate it once I began to see the full shape of things, and aside from an "ick" factor at one point, enjoyed the entire experience. This may say more about me than the game. If you can deal with fiendish (if well-hinted) puzzles, surreal situations, and the sense that you are in an alien landscape -- or if those things outright appeal to you -- this game is worth checking out. Even if that is not your usual bag, the first section is possibly worth taking a look at. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Tina Sikorski TITLE: Guess The Verb! AUTHOR: Leonard Richardson E-MAIL: leonardr SP@G segfault.org DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/guess.z5 VERSION: Release 1 Walkthrough? Yes (in-game) Genre: SpecFic (but see below) +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating B |Submitted Vote 7| |Writing B+|Plot B | |Puzzles C |NPCs C | |Technical C-|Tilt B | +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts When I saw the name of the game, I said, "Oh, no. NOT a joke game!" No. It's not. Well, at times it is (it certainly doesn't take itself too seriously), but it's not the -obvious- joke game. I put this under the category 'Speculative Fiction' (otherwise known as "sf/fantasy") because it contained elements that were (including the initial premise), but I think perhaps it might also fall into the category of "comedy". *** Writing (B+) Any game in which I can read the description of a corn dog and be entertained really has something going for it: >l at corn dog The corn dog is a curious creature. Its life cycle begins when the larval corn dog is cooked and put on a stick. The corn dog is dipped in batter to form a cocoon and fried. Inside the batter cocoon, the baby corn dog metamorphoses into an adult phase which is then purchased, slathered with mustard, and eaten. The rumbling of your stomach tells you that the end is near for this particular corn dog. We will miss you, corn dog. Much of the game's description, even when more serious than this, contains elements of this style. It's clever, it's cute (in the good way), and it is, above all, interesting. I did not bestow an A rating on the writing simply because while it is true that the writing meets my criteria for "good", it never thoroughly immersed me in the experience. This may be a result of the game's style, not a reflection on the author's ability; I don't think we were really -meant- to be immersed. *** Plot (B) Really, this should be "plots", plural; these are several stories tied together solely by method of entry. Perhaps if you complete all the scenarios there is a larger plot revealed, but if so, I did not find it. Certain sections were better than others, but all contained a sort of "Now rejoining your regularly scheduled program in progress" sort of feel at insertion point, which is another interesting way to tie things together. Whether or not this was deliberate is something only the author could answer. Some sections might be more interesting to people than others, as there is quite a range covered by this. *** Puzzles (C) Puzzles were definitely a weak point, not because they were bad but merely because they were tough and at times very difficult to understand the context of. Whether this was a function of the fragmented nature of the plot or the function of poor puzzle design is not something I feel I can judge. I could not solve several of the puzzles, however, and as a result never saw the -complete- version of several of the scenarios, despite the availability of a walkthrough. I think an adaptive hint system would have been a BIG help in this game; I didn't really want to ruin other sections by walkthrough-consulting that forced me to read all of it. *** NPCs (C) We never really seem to see enough of any given NPC for it to feel particularly deep, and there is definitely a problem with non-responsiveness even in the required interactions. *** Technical (C-) There were at least two points in which directions were not bi-directional (which is to say, going east does not result in west returning you to your original point). If this was deliberate, so be it, but if not, I would suggest correcting this. (One occurs getting to and from the area behind the booth, one occurs in the college scenario.) Aside from that, I found no particular bugs and no particular tricks. *** Tilt (B) and Final Thoughts Despite the problems I had with the puzzles and the walkthrough, I did find this an interesting diversion. I think it might be interesting to see some expansion on this game, some more involved scenarios, in a post-comp release that didn't have to fit a 2-hour limit, but even as is the game is worth a look; if nothing else, if you don't get a scenario you like, restoring to right before you choose is easy enough. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Suzanne Britton [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: Kaged AUTHOR: Ian Finley E-MAIL: domokov SP@G aol.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: TADS standard SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/tads/kaged/kaged.gam VERSION: 1 I hope Ian leads a happier life than his protagonists. His games get grimmer every year. "Kaged" is a dystopian tale strongly reminiscent of 1984 (but not derivative). Like just about everything its author has produced, it is strikingly original, evocative, well-written, and suicidally depressing :-) I quite liked it, though it is, in my opinion, not as successful as "Exhibition" or "Babel". It is more ambitious than either of those works, which leads me to be somewhat forgiving of its failures. As a mood piece, "Kaged" is excellent. Every bleak, oppressive nuance of the world you live in comes to life in the vivid writing, enhanced by graphics and sound (the opening picture is especially evocative), and your own character is well-drawn. As a story, it is ambitious, but less excellent. I felt that what began as tightly woven threads unraveled near the end--and not just because of the protagonist's dissolving sanity. I came out of the experience with no real understanding of what had happened and why. Many hints, many seeming contradictions, no certainties. Normally, I like it when a game leaves the player with a mystery, but this was just unsatisfying. It's hard to pinpoint why...perhaps partly because I felt I was expected to understand much more than I did. Certainly, my protagonist seemed to be way ahead of me, and as a result, I felt less connection with him. (Postscript: I've since spoken with Ian, and to some extent "it's intentional". Apparently, his playtesters kept pushing him for more ambiguity. Ah, well.) The programming was also not quite as polished as I've come to expect of this author. Again, it was trying to accomplish more than in earlier works, I think. The world was very fleshed-out, but flawed. I encountered a number of guess-the-verb problems. Perhaps the most egregious was the matchbook. It was lazily (and unintuitively) implemented as a single object, leading me to fumble for awhile before I simply typed "strike match": >get match You already have the book of matches! >get match from matchbook The book of matches isn't in the book of matches. >look in matchbook There's nothing in the book of matches. Rating: 8 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From: Suzanne Britton [originally posted to Usenet on rec.games.int-fiction] TITLE: Masquerade AUTHOR: Kathleen M. Fischer E-MAIL: mfischer5 SP@G aol.com DATE: 2000 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD) URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/mask/mask.z5 VERSION: Release 3 "Masquerade" is an excellent work of story-based IF in a little-used genre (romance, specifically, Civil-War era romance). It is perhaps the most immersive game I've played yet this year. When I started playing, my mind was still spinning with outside thoughts and residual stress. Soon, I became utterly engrossed in the well-sketched gameworld and all else faded to black. The setting is impeccable: no anachronisms or oversights. I truly felt like I was in the 1800's. The protagonist (a feminist before her time) also came across quite strongly, and I enjoyed stepping into the shoes of someone so like and yet unlike me. Though the plot of "Masquerade" is fairly linear, for most of the way, there are several forks in the later parts of the game which lead to different endings based on your decisions. This was a big part of my enjoyment: of the 12 endings, I've found about a third, and am eager to go back and find more after the comp. I was especially pleased that choosing to strike out on your own (sans deed, sans husband) was a valid option, and though the author didn't quite sanction it as a "winning" ending (an odd word to use with story-based IF anyway), the outcome was positive and rewarding (it's my favorite ending of those I found). In that respect, Masquerade is hardly a "genre" romance. In spite of this praise, "Masquerade" didn't quite make my 9-10 bracket. There are several reasons for this. The first is something the author couldn't have done much about: the genre is not my usual cup of tea. I prefer stories with fantastical or SF elements (the story-in-a-story in "Photopia" counts) to straight fiction. The second is implementation: there were enough guess-the-verb and guess-the-action problems to be annoying. This is an especial show-stopper in such a linear game, which often halts your progress entirely, locking you in your current location, until you deal with the matter at hand. Example: "dance with Jonathan". It sounds embarrassingly obvious now, but at the time, I assumed that we would go into the ballroom together, then dance. But "west" returned the stock failure message about Mrs. Stanford being at the door, and this stymied me for a while. Sometimes the problem is syntax, other times it's more a problem of being expected to read the author's mind. I'm not referring to puzzles (of which there are a few), rather cases where what I want to do is obvious, but how to tell the game that is not-so-obvious. Another example: the only way I've found to get Ethan's attention in the train is to "get tickets". Until I've done that, I can't talk to him, touch him, sit with him, or otherwise interact with him. The reason given is fairly lame ("You wouldn't want to be that forward") and doesn't do much to point me in the right direction. Worse, if I flounder around like that for more than a few turns, I'm ejected from the train and it takes off! When the game mechanics worked--and make no mistake, they often did--they worked splendidly. I wended my way through the story in mimetic bliss, barely conscious of the fact that I was typing rather than living out my actions. The tight boundaries of the gameworld remained invisible. But when the mechanics failed, they failed with a loud crunching halt. (One extra positive note on implementation: I was impressed by and appreciative of the many stock message replacements [in fact, I've been impressed that way by several games this year]. E.g., when you type an invalid command: "You mutter something incomprehensible". Or for disambiguation, "You pause to think, or ?") Third: the game sometimes went overboard in limiting my actions. Some of this is acceptable--there are things a 19th-century woman simply does not do--but some of it came across as programming laziness. Whatever the reason, I was disappointed at not being allowed to give Jonathan a good slap! Rating: 8 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From: Tina Sikorski Walkthrough? No (in-game hints) Genre: Historical Romance +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating B |Submitted Vote 8| |Writing A |Plot B | |Puzzles C |NPCs B | |Technical B |Tilt A+| +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts It's interesting. I'm not a big romance story fan, but I am a fan of historical romance... perhaps because I'm a big fan of historical -anything-. And this story is set in a period that I find fascinating. So right from the start, I was interested. But it wouldn't have held if the game wasn't so extremely well constructed.... *** Writing (A) Simply put, the writing in this story is first-rate. It was descriptive, it was evocative, it was thorough without being wordy, it was fun to read, and best of all, it fit the period the game was set in. If there -were- any errors, they escaped my notice. The example I have in my notes -- which I feel is representative -- is from the interior of a coach: "The coach is richly appointed, with two leather cushioned benches facing each other and a nice clean smell that marks it as either privately owned or an expensive rental. Heavy black drapes have been drawn across the windows, casting the interior in a gloom that precludes close scrutiny of the conveyance or its passenger." As someone who is a big fan of (mostly horror) stories written in the late 1800s, I can say that this actually is the type of