2001 Interactive Fiction Competition
These are my reviews of the games I played in the
2001 Interactive Fiction Competition.
I play/review as many games as possible depending on my current
platform (windows or linux); this means tads, inform, hugo and usually
also alan, adrift, quest, and windows/msdos executables. When I'm
on a windows machine I use multimedia interpreters where appropriate.
I've sorted games into three categories, "highly recommended" (the best of
the competition), "recommended" (worth the time spent playing), and
"not recommended" (not worth playing); and then sorted the games
alphabetically within those categories. I've put an asterisk (*)
by some games that were difficult to categorize or when the
categorization feels extremely subjective; you may want to read the
review before deciding whether to play them.
Some of these reviews may contain minor spoilers. Unfortunately, for
some games, even knowing that there is a spoiler in the review may
itself be a spoiler. I don't know what to do about this short of the
Magic Amnesia Stick. If you have the time and inclination, I recommend
playing the games first, but if not, go ahead and read the
reviews. Nothing major is spoiled.
If a game was entered by proxy or under a pseudonym, the actual author
is listed afterwards in square brackets.
- Highly Recommended Games
- Recommended Games
- Not Recommended Games
Highly Recommended Games
All Roads (Jon Ingold) Z-Machine:
This is probably going to get pointed out as one of the brighter spots
of the competition, and that's fairly legitimate. This game has a lot
of nice aspects: the plot is convoluted but unrolls well with
discussion, the characterization is sparse but reasonable, and some of
the visual imagery (the broken glass, the birds, the sunlight) is
nothing short of stunning. But, hrm. Somehow it's always tempting to
spend reviews of good games talking about their flaws. There's this
thing for a certain kind of game where the point is to figure out
what's going on: ideally, it should be satisfying both in conclusion
and then after you sit down and think about it for a while. All Roads
is pretty good in the latter, although not all the questions are
answered completely, but it falls down in the former area. When I
finished this game, I was left with, well, mostly confusion. I talked
it over with some people and came to a better understanding, but when
I finish one of these games I want an immediately satisfying a-ha, and
it didn't come here. Beyond that, my gripes are mostly about the
game's linearity. As usual it's not so apparent on a first playthrough,
and it's somewhat excused by the story, but it's still frustrating.
All that said, this is quite a good game and well worth your time
playing, so, like, go play it.
Best of Three (Emily Short [Emily Short]) Glulx:
The really amazing thing about Short is not so much that she writes
these games but that nobody else is doing anything like it. Like, this
game's conversation system is a really impressive achievement compared
to Pytho's Mask, which in turn is impressive compared to Galatea, which
in turn is still better than any other conversation system
anyone else has come up with even today. That said about the
technological part, the game part needs some work. It is of course not
an error with the writing, which is up to Short's usual high
standards. But somehow it all comes off feeling not particularly
consequential. I think part of it is the NPC is overeager. The game
itself just consists of a conversation, and unlike most games, the PC
is in control of the conversation only about half the time. So, hmm, I
guess this is not enough for me, and I end up feeling swept along a
lot of the time. Added to that is sort of an uncomfortable feeling
about the characters. They're all there is to the game so it pretty
much stands or falls based on them, and they're both obnoxious, the PC
too meek and NPC too slick. This isn't an indictment of the game as a
whole — the writing's too good and the conversation engine's admirable —
but it does keep it from being as completely satisfying as Short's
earlier works.
Heroes (Sean Barrett) Z-Machine:
If you don't like fantasy games, this is not going to appeal to
you. This is not to say that it's not a good game, but it calls itself
a most traditional CRPG experience and this is in fact what it
is. There's more to it than just the CRPG aspect, but mostly it's "You
chose to be a thief, so you can pick locks and climb walls. You must
steal the jewel!" The fun of the game is using your particular
abilities (there is, eg, a good implementation of an Enchanter-style
spellcaster) to solve the same general problems, while piecing
together The Big Picture out of all the separate parts. And it's here
that the game doesn't quite work, because that big picture never gels
fully. You get lots of cool little details and hints at a greater plot
but not quite enough information to make out the whole story, so you're
left wondering what exactly happened, even after having played through
all the different games.
The Isolato Incident (Alan DeNiro) Alan:
I was really quite pleased with this one. It is pretty easy to do a
surreal game since, like, you just have to slap a bunch of things
together; it's harder to write a surreal game where the pieces
actually work together. The writing here is also very good, witty and
bizarre at the same time. Some people found the ending too unconnected
and unsatisfying, but I don't agree — it's not led up to much (the
game is too short to do that, anyway) but I thought it capped things
off nicely. A fun play.
Journey from an Islet (Mario Becroft) TADS 2:
I liked this one a lot and I can't quite explain why. In retrospect it
reminds me a lot of the
The Little
Prince and presumably this is obvious and intentional since it's
got a snake and a sheep and so on. But the resemblance goes deeper
than that; Becroft has done a fine job of creating a world that
feels, hmm, pleasant and pastel and dreamlike, and it's nice to wander
around there and look at stuff. The graphics add a nice touch, as does
the changing background color: if you have a chance to play this in a
HTML-TADS-supporting interpreter you should do so. There are a few
puzzles but they don't really feel urgent, just a thing or two you
need to do when you get around to it and feel ready to move on. In the
meantime the island has other things to play with and places to
explore, and this is enough.
Recommended Games
2112 (George K. George [George K. Algire]) Windows Exe:
It is in fact possible for a home-grown system to have a parser
comparable to TADS/Inform/Hugo, as this game demonstrates. It's even
possible to have one that does that and, as a native-code executable,
takes advantage of various windows (or whatever) special features to
present spiffier graphics and so on. So this has slow-scrolling text
with typewriter noises and plays sounds and plays around with text
coloring and stuff. The question, I guess, is what does this all buy
you? It seems like it's sort of a pity when you go to all the trouble
of hand-rolling a parser and all the other basic blocks of IF, and
then you write a game that's basically a pretty standard work of IF
with puzzles and not-really-responsive NPCs and sort of a thin
storyline. Like, you should take advantage of the strengths of your
chosen platform, and if those aren't portability and standardization,
you shouldn't try and compete with games written on those grounds. I'd
like people doing executables for windows and dos and so on do games
that do things you can't do elsewhere, wacky things with displays or
user interface or graphics. But oh well. Anyway, 2112 is a pretty
standard science-fiction adventure. You're this kid going on a field
trip to Mars, and you stumble on this conspiracy, and the world is in
danger, and you're the only one who can save it, and there's this side
bit about consumerism and stuff. I dunno. The writing here is entirely
adequate but not really more than that and the same goes for the story.
an apple from nowhere (steven carbone [Brendan Barnwell]) Glulx:
This is one of those games that would be objectionable if it was much
larger but at its current length sticks to being amusing. It's not
actually, like, interactive or anything, and the story will happily
roll over any commands you type. But the story is amusing if
meaningless and kept me occupied for the short time it took to play
through the game.
The Beetmonger's Journal (Aubrey Foil [Scott Starkey]) TADS 2:
I felt kind of like a Jehovah's Witness or something playing this
game; I kept going up to NPCs and doing
>TELL NPC ABOUT BEETMONGERISM. That aside, this was
a pretty good game. You play a novice beetmonger (who actually sells
beets; I'm not sure what the author thinks members of the Rotary
club do) who decides she must respond to the prince's rather
unclearly-motivated denounciations of beetmongerism. There are a
couple puzzles which are pretty good although in need of a few more
in-game hints. This whole thing is wrapped up in a story about a famous
explorer and his sidekick which is in some ways more interesting than
the core story, although the outer story has a pretty weak
ending. Overall a pretty generic fantasy game, but hey, it's
competently done and the writing's not bad.
Carma (The Wanna-be Writer [Marnie Parker]) Glulx:
There's that complaint about some IF games being ones where the author
ties you to a chair and shouts the plot at you. This is one where the
author ties you to a chair and shouts a musical at you. There's
basically no significant player input here; you can do stuff but only
to make the plot step along, and you're jerked around from scene to
scene. But in consolation you get to see lots of funny pictures and
hear music and stuff, and there's one truly technically impressive use
of glk stuff. If you don't have a multimedia interpreter, you can give
this a miss, but if you do it is a fun and unobjectionable ride.
The Cave of Morpheus (Mark Silcox) ADRIFT:
Look, it's an ADRIFT game on the recommended list. Crazy, eh? The Cave of Morpheus
is a surprisingly charming game about a hapless adolescent rescued by
one of the guiding lights of IF. The game is also interesting as a
demonstration of ADRIFT's abilities and limitations: Silcox includes
timed delays and an advent snippet, but has to split this into two
games in order to have the narrative shift from first-person to
second. The Cave of Morpheus is short and doesn't overstay its welcome, and the
writing is snappy enough to keep the tone up.
The Chasing (Anssi Raisanen) Alan:
Raisanen's game is a pleasant surprise: it's a very nice and
well-mannered game, with just the right amount of easy not but not
quite trivial puzzles. It's set in Generic Fantasyland (the kind with
magicians and lawnmowers) and you spend the game walking around
looking for your lost horses and oh-so-coincidentally solving puzzles
along the way. It's quite good-natured and has a walkthrough if you
get stuck, so go play it.
The Coast House (Stephen Newton and Dan Newton) TADS 2:
I like these kind of games. This one's set in a small town in Texas
and, like On The Farm or A Day for Soft Food, is mostly about hanging around,
checking out the scenery, and feeling the atmosphere. And also like
those two, The Coast House has kind of a uneven plot that doesn't really
captivate. But that's fine, since I was busy wandering around and
talking to people and stuff. I would have liked to see this game be
bigger; more things to look at, more stuff to play around with (ie,
puzzles), more people to talk to. As it is it's a pleasant little romp
(with a very strange ending) that could have been more.
The Cruise (Norman Perlmutter) TADS 2:
Let me start off with this:
>FLUSH TOILET
Whoooosh
That was fun! But hanging out in the bathroom and flushing the toilet
just to see what happens is not exactly your idea of a dream
vacation.
Norman Perlmutter, you are SO WRONG. Anyway, this game has a flushable
toilet, so props for that. It also has "If you don't hurry up and go
to the dining room you'll be late for lunch!" which amuses me more
than it has any right to. It also has a gandalf-ripoff sitting at the
cruise ship's bar who tells you that you have to find the three magic
whatsits to stop the evil guy from taking over the world or something,
and you only have 275 turns to do it. Why 275, you are wondering, and
I cannot tell you. Basically the whole story is pretty dull and
unoriginal and the puzzles are mostly not so hot. One puzzle in
particular violates the primary rule of puzzle design ("If I'm doing
the right thing, tell me I'm doing the right thing"). On the plus
side, though, the setting is quite well-laid-and and the game has a
number of very well implemented things, like water, clothing, and a
slot machine. Perlmutter shows he has the coding skillz in this game,
but still has a ways to go in the plot department.
Earth And Sky (Lee Kirby [Paul O'Brian]) Z-Machine:
Hmm, another demo. This one puts you in the role of a comic-book
heroine, your brother in the role of a comic-book hero, and your
missing parents in the role of a comic-book running plot device. Since
it's a demo, the game spends part of its time introducing the setup,
part of the time introducing the characters and their powers and
stuff, and part of the time annoying you by ending early before
anything has really happened. I am also somewhat torn about the
writing; on the one hand the jokes your character makes are actually
funny, but on the other hand nothing you say actually makes any
difference to the plot, and the other characters always take the jokes
you make completely literally, which seems to defeat the
purpose. There's only one puzzle in this game and it's kind of lame;
this is understandable for a demo but still not really as fun as it
could/should be. Even though I'm recommending this I think I'd advise
holding off and seeing if the whole game really does come out (best
bet: it won't, since a demo has been released), and playing this only
if you can't get a bigger version.
Film at Eleven (Bowen Greenwood) Z-Machine:
It's weird how this doesn't work as well as it ought to work. It's
a pretty solidly implemented detective story with decent writing. It
claims to be a journalist story, but it's really a detective
story. You're wandering around a small town looking for evidence of a
particular set of breaking news, and perhaps that's the real problem
with the game. The news doesn't break. Or, rather, it remains constant
in its half-broken state until you come around and prod each piece
into action. If this was a real town, there'd be people wandering
around, things would happen as time passed, and it would, like, matter
if you typed >Z a bunch. But as far as I can tell the clues
just sort of hang out until you're ready to take a look at them, so I
never feel any particular urgency or connection.
Fine Tuned (Dionysius Porcupine [Dennis Jerz]) Z-Machine:
Man, such a disappointment. This game is funny (it even has actual
jokes that made me laugh), it's well-written, it's got a great
setting; too bad it's buggy and unimplemented enough to be only barely
playable and not, as far as I can tell, winnable. You're a
happy-go-lucky adventurer in the dawning age of the automobile; there
are nefarious villains to thwart and beautiful damsels to rescue and
stuff. You have a sidekick, which is pretty much all I should have to
say. And this is all good, but the game also crashes randomly, gets
into guess-the-verb holes, and I know only one person who's gotten
past the cellar scene and she can't explain how she did it. So don't
play this version, but if the author cleans it up and releases a real
version post-comp, definitely play that.
The Gostak (Carl Muckenhoupt) Z-Machine:
The obvious comparison here is Lighan ses Lion, of course. This is another
game written in a foreign language (although here the language is a
strange mix of English and Gostakian or whatever, so you get some
translated right from the start — the how-to-play-this-game menus
suddenly take on a new level of helpfulness), and most of the game is
figuring out what it says. Unlike Lighan ses Lion, there's much too much text
to translate the whole thing (whereas there the problem was not enough
text to translate), but more to the point, Zarf's transcript was about
a world much like our (or the Zork adventurer's) own. Muckenhoupt's
piece, on the other hand, is about someplace different, someplace we
don't and can't fully understand. It's alien and inexplicable, and
this is cool, but I found it also ultimately unsatisfying for that
same reason.
Moments Out of Time (L. Ross Raszewski) Z-Machine:
This is an extremely ambitious game that doesn't quite have the
writing or plotting to meet all its goals. The coding, on the other
hand, is quite impressive, but this is only to be expected, as
Raszewski is well known for his various Inform library releases. The
premise is relatively simple: you're a time traveller sent back to
poke around a house and find out as much about the occupants as you
can. There are no real twists or turns; the whole plot really is just
poking around the house with a variety of fancy devices to trace out
the people's lives. I like nothing better than an excuse to snoop
around somewhere, and it's a pretty interesting story that comes
out. The problem is that there's no final coherence, even if you manage
to track down all the details (no easy task). In a way this makes
sense: real research isn't a neatly-plotted plot arc but the careful
accumulation of details. But, still, this isn't satisfying for the
player, and it's almost certainly going to be especially unsatisfying
on the first few playthroughs; the game is difficult enough that
you're unlikely to find anywhere close to the whole story on the first
runs unless you resort to the walkthrough. This is compounded by
only being able to pick a few of the initials devices to take with you:
this adds to replay value but lowers the value of any given
playthrough. Whether this is a worthwhile tradeoff is a hard call to
make. Anyway, I'm generally in favor of this game but it's more about
the journey than the destination, as it were.
(Disclaimer: I was a beta-tester for this game)
A Night Guest (Dr. Inkalot [Valentine Kopteltsev]) TADS 2:
A game where every (correct) turn corresponds to a stanza of a poem is a cool
idea, especially with scattered random illustrations. I am perfectly
willing to forgive the poetry being not very good, but it's more
annoying that you can't seem to progress without doing the exact right
thing each turn. This game also does that big game design no-no,
berating the player each turn you fail to solve a puzzle. This is
almost always a bad move by the author, the moreso since generally the
reason the player is stuck is because the author designed a bad
puzzle. Anyway, uh, I had to use the hints most every turn but that's
ok, the game went fast anyway and it was amusing enough. So there you go.
No Time To Squeal (Mike Sousa and Robb Sherwin) TADS 2:
It's weird how this really does feel like a game written by Sousa and
Sherwin. Sherwin's credited as doing the writing, but presumably Sousa
did a certain amount of it also, as the text generally lacks the
reckless energy (and profanity) that characterized, say,
Chicks Dig Jerks. Plot-wise, the game is divided into a number of real-world
sections, followed by a somewhat longer fantasy section. The
real-world sections are considerably stronger in terms of character
and setting (which shouldn't be too surprising; Sherwin's demonstrated
a mastery of roughly sketching out interesting characters, and Sousa's
At Wit's End, whatever its other faults, had a broad and quite well-executed
setting). The fantasy-world section is pretty blah; it's a riff on
Alice pretty similar (I imagine) to
American McGee's Alice
but it doesn't really make that much sense and it doesn't feel
particularly fresh or innovative. That's especially disappointing
considering that Chicks Dig Jerks and A Crimson Spring had a bunch of cool fantasy
stuff. Maybe Sherwin writes best when it's real-world-gone-odd, not
straight fantasy? It's hard to say. In the end I'm inclined to call
this collaboration a mixed success: a lot of the energy and creativity
found in Sherwin's writing seems to have vanished, and, although
Sousa's influence (I assume) has led to relatively quite polished writing
and coding, the end product comes out kind of blah. Also, and I don't know
whose fault this was, not one but two plotlines are left completely
dangling at the end. What's up with that?
Prized Possession (Kathleen M. Fischer) Z-Machine:
My, this is grim. I am not exactly sure if this is a romance novel as
such: is there a subgenre of romance novels where the heroine is
always at risk of getting raped or killed or sent into a nunnery? I
guess there's always the risk of it, but in this game it
actually happens. Repeatedly. Because if you don't do just the right
sequence of moves you generally end up in a Bad Ending within a few
turns. Granted, this game is set in the middle ages (the real-true
middles ages, not a generic fantasy riff), and you're female, so
presumably it is somewhat realistic to have life pretty much suck with
badness around ever corner, but it's not clear this is actually fun to
play. Anyway, the writing's good, the setting's not bad at giving a
real medieval feel, but the linearity and frequent ways to suddenly
end the game unpleasantly make this game sort of a mixed bag.
Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country (One of the Bruces [Adam Thornton]) Glulx:
Good lord. When this game says it's offensive, it is so not kidding.
It is also hilarious and more or less the sort of thing you would
expect if the author of Sins Against Mimesis got really drunk and read a bunch of
Space Moose comics, which is
more or less what I assume happened. But primarily it's offensive, and
if you happen to be playing with an interpreter that can handle the
multimedia, it turns into something really extraordinarily
offensive. This is not to say it doesn't rock, just that, like, I
wouldn't play it around my grandmother.
To Otherwhere and Back (Gregory Ewing) Alan:
This is a walkthrough comp entry, not finished in time to enter, so
Ewing went ahead and submitted it here. It feels kind of weak as an
entry in the main comp, but it's still pretty solidly written and
coded and good for the same fifteen minutes of amusement you get from
the other walkthrough comp games.
Triune (Papillon) TADS 2:
Probably I should start off by saying this is not much like Papillon's
previous game, Desert Heat, even though it has a certain amount of
violence and a certain amount of, well, sex-like things. But this game
is mostly about hitting adolescence and the sex and violence are the
adolescent kind, raging and raw and not particularly real. And it's
specifically about female adolescence: the plot-paths the game takes
are related, rather heavy-handedly, to, er, female life-paths. So
that's all fine. The setting is not fine. The game is in large part a
fantasy game that comments on fantasy games, a la Bliss. The problem
is, like in Bliss, the fantasy world that it presents is annoying
and weak, and the fact that it is there as commentary does not change
that. It's not a bad game but it doesn't have much originality to
it. The ending starts to go somewhere interesting but it's not really
long enough or well-enough thought out to count for much.
Not Recommended Games
Bane of the Builders (Bogdan Baliuc) Z-Machine:
Enh. It's sort of a generic sf adventure with a maze. There are some
aliens and a weird pseudo-time-travel thing that's never explained and
an elevator and a general feeling that the setting doesn't really make
sense and people couldn't have actually lived here. It's not really a
bad game as such but it's not all that entertaining. I do like
that it has an atomic flashlight, though.
Colours (Anonymous [J. Robinson Wheeler]) Z-Machine:
Hmm. It's hard to tell if this game is a good idea that didn't get
fleshed out fully, or a not-very-good idea that did. I'm kind of
inclined to the former idea since there are good bits and there are
noticeable bugs that presumably would have been straightened out given
more time. On the other hand the idea feels somewhat complete as it
is, and I don't really know where it would have gone. I think the
problem is the author had this one puzzle idea and built a game around
it and was going to fill it out with other puzzles but ran out of
time. Or something. I dunno. Props for the puzzle but it would have
been just as good as one of those cryptic crosswords or something.
Crusade (John Gorenfeld) Z-Machine:
Parody is easy, comedy is hard. Or something. This isn't exactly a
parody; it's got one part with you as a crusader wandering through the
desert looking for a heathen city, and one part with you as Jesus. In
both cases the intent is to combine a very loose interpretation of the
text with modern sensibilities to produce humor, and it's mostly, hmm,
not especially successful. Part of the problem is there aren't that
many actual jokes, and at least for the me, the situations are
not original enough to be inherently funny. Like, there have been a
zillion skits about Jesus-as-modern in one form or the another, so
seeing it again isn't all that humorous. Jesus as dentist, now that's
comedy, but a bit based on "hey, why didn't Jesus beat those guards
up? can't the son of god kick ass?" isn't all that funny, and that's
almost the only joke of the scene. This game isn't completely without
humor but it doesn't have enough of it given that that's more or less
all it has to offer.
Elements (John Evans) Z-Machine:
This is almost recommended. There are some neat items, some cool
events, fairly interesting places, and it doesn't quite add up to
anything. Part of the problem is the weak implementation; most rooms
have exactly one useful item in them, and virtually nothing else will
be coded, not even to the extent of "That's not important". The
plot/setting has some neat parallelisms but it's never fully
exploited, I think because each layer is not particularly detailed and
so there's not enough to compare. A side issue is that the setting
comes off as pretty generic fantasy, but that could probably be fixed
also if the game had more details. I think if Evans had shrunk the
number of rooms and put the resulting effort into descriptions and
extra objects and stuff, that would have helped immensely. There's
also one blatant programming error in one of the early rooms that
should have been caught by beta-testing; I don't know if this game had
no beta-testing or if this was just a late change. Oh, and one last
gripe: the game makes a big deal of offering to give you tattooes of
various designs in various places, and then does nothing whatsoever
with this information. Bah on that.
The Evil Sorcerer (Gren Remoz) Z-Machine:
This is one of those games where the author had a whole bunch of ideas.
Some of them were good, some of them were bad, and some of them were
just unoriginal. The difference between a skilled IF author and a
novice is, the novice author puts all the kinds of ideas in the
game. The skilled author has all three kinds of ideas, but throws
away the lame ones. This game has, for instance, a wallet that has a
driver's license, a visa card, and an alien id card with a picture of
a weird lizard thing; an evil sorceror that has to be killed because
otherwise he'll summon a demon or something; a good wizard to help you
out but who otherwise does nothing; and the Necronomicon. Not all of
these ideas should have made it in. The game has too many puzzles
which involve finding keys in unlikely locations (the more unlikely
since somebody supposedly lives in the house and needs access to the
locations regularly), has only so-so writing, and as mentioned, the
ideas are a mixed bag. Remoz has some potential but needs practice;
I'd be more interested in the game he writes two or three games from
now.
Fusillade (Mike Duncan) TADS 2:
Fusillade is a extended series of short, extremely linear snippets
which are generally all more interesting than the game as a whole. The
problem seems to be that Duncan had too many ideas and didn't have the
nerve to cut it down to a few that could be developed, or possibly the
issue was that he never really worked out a compelling overarching
story so all the individual bits just dangle. They're cool in
themselves but extremely linear; your commands never make a
difference, either because the plot advances anyway or because they're
the only way to make it advance. This would have been far better if
he'd taken any of the snippets, particularly some of the more exotic
ones, and expanded them to the point where they could stand on their
own. Instead we see each one for a few turns and care about none, with
the result that the game as a whole has no impact whatsoever.
Goofy (Ricardo Dague) Java Applet:
Enh, I dunno. This is basically a demonstration of the fact that if
you spend your time working on the parser and object model and stuff,
you don't have time to work on the game, and the result is not people
saying "wow, this is really a good parser considering it was written
from scratch", it's people saying "this parser isn't as good as the
standard TADS/Inform/Hugo one, and the game is pretty lame besides".
Grayscale (Daniel Freas) TADS 2:
This game is much bigger than it should be. The setting is mostly
composed of unnecessary rooms and pithy quotations which mean
nothing. There's the fairly well-known guideline in IF writing that
the game doesn't have to implement every place in the setting, it just
has to implement enough to suggest the setting. And the problem is,
even if you trimmed this down to a dozen rooms or so, there's still
not that much content. It's mostly wandering around in a setting that
doesn't really have any internal structure, and the puzzles aren't
really compelling enough to make it worth sticking around long enough
to try and figure out what's going on. This is made especially
difficult by all the extra rooms, since most of the stuff you
encounter really is irrelevant, but there's, eg, one quotation
out of the dozen that matters. The implementation here is solid, but
I ended up feeling like the rest of the game was casually slapped
together.
Invasion of the Angora-fetish Transvestites from the Graveyards of Jupiter (Morten Rasmussen) Windows Exe:
Man, with a title like this, how could a game be bad? Except this
is. Or maybe it isn't, and I just didn't find out because I felt no
motivation to keep playing. The game starting off with you at a train
station is good. The game then continuing by you having to find your way
through a large city to your house, find your way across the city to a
record store, then find your way elsewhere in the city to a record
studio or something, thatsa no good. I gave up at this point, without
even seeing a single killer transvestite. (Speaking of killers, I
notice that this game is real-time and built on kind of a
single-player-mud engine so everyone has hitpoints and you can wander
around killing the NPCs.)
Jump (Chris Mudd) Z-Machine:
Ok, my new theory is that Mudd is a Rybread-Celsius-esque self-parody
who is now unable to write any other kind of game. And I'm making this
theory after Mudd's only written two games. But his earlier one was
1-2-3..., and this is like that, only moreso. More or less all the
gameplay's been removed and it retains only the offensiveness.
Kallisti (James A. Mitchelhill) TADS 2:
I honestly can't tell if we're intended to totally dislike the
protagonist and the main NPC and the world and everything else about
this game, or if there is just some horrific misunderstanding going
on. Anyway, um, you're this guy, you work in a printer's firm, there's
this chyk (a virgin, the first sentence of the game explains), you
want to make it with her, and you do so by engaging in long postmodern
discussions. If I were female, that'd certainly be the way to get in
my pants. So the game is mostly you talking to her, then having
sex with her, and then the Surprising And Symbolic Conclusion. The
writing through the whole thing is just incredibly awful. Not so much
badly spelled or ungrammatical or anything, just awful. Like, to pick
one random bit, here's the last few lines of the PC's description:
The truth was that he was a true European, tied to no one state,
except by accident of birth. He was foreign everywhere, the traces of
an accent lingering on every word he spoke. His thoughts were
impenetrable, guarded by the fortress of his face. Whenever he played
poker, he won; but he won every game he played.
And the whole game is like this, including the sex
scenes. Now, I am all for pornography, but I don't want it to involve
Michel Foucault. Anyway, possibly the game is some kind of elaborate
parody or something and I'm just missing the point, but even then I
can't really recommend it, and if it's actually serious, man.
The Last Just Cause (Noob [Jeremy Carey-Dressler]) DOS Exe:
This is the more advanced game written by Noob (who also did You Were Doomed From The Start).
It is better in the sense that it uses other commands besides 'pickup'
but that is about it. Most of the game that I found involves randomly
walking around fighting wandering monsters every three turns (and it's
always the same wandering monster, and they're never hard to kill, and
you always have to spend about four turns fighting them, and when it
misses you the message is always "The Double J missed! ;-)" and so on).
Basically, look, ok, presumably the author is a teenager and has coded
his own IF system and his first real game and this is all very
impressive that he was able to do it, but the end product still sucks,
and is one more testimonial why people should spend their time working
on the game, because that's what the user cares about, and not the
parser and stuff, which the user doesn't notice unless it doesn't work.
Lovesong (Mihalis "DarkAng3l" Georgostathis) Quest:
I don't remember Pintown from the '97 comp all that well, but I
think this is pretty similar, being one of those
boy-and-his-guitar-and-his-girl games. It's written in Quest and isn't
really much of an argument for the authoring system, frankly; the
verbs are all pretty basic and most of the puzzles are just
use-thing-on-other-thing. It's sort of cute and feels sincere enough,
but it's not really all that good, frankly.
Mystery Manor (Mystery [Mystery]) ADRIFT:
Hee hee. Stepping through the upstairs, I see one description that
tells me the flashes of lightning show a second shadow in the room
even though I'm all alone, and then the next room over mentions a
mysterious cold draft, and then the next room has a ghost with spikes
in his head, and then a headless woman walks into the room and so on
and so on. Presumably the author was under the impression that if one
ghost is scary, twenty ghosts is twenty times as scary, and a ghost
every turn is as scary as possible. In fact, It Does Not Work Like That.
The Newcomer (Jason Love) Z-Machine:
Grr. I think if an author is going to enter a game in the comp, it is
the least they can do to finish all the room descriptions. Is that
asking so much? This game has an interesting premise and setting but
is nowhere close to being a completed game. It is "winnable", but good
luck finding either of the solutions without txd. Bah, I say, bah.
Schroedinger's Cat (James Willson) Z-Machine:
Like In the Spotlight, this game is basically just a single puzzle with no
accouterments. Unlike that game, Schroedinger's Cat doesn't even have a way to
win, it's just a thing you play around with and ultimately give up on
because Willson has given you no reason to care, not even the pretense
of a story. It's sort of a cool puzzle — more interesting than it
appears at first (check out the hints and try some of the things it
suggests, particularly the third thing). But on its own, a puzzle is
meaningless, and this game is nothing but a puzzle, so enh.
Shattered Memory (Akbarr) Z-Machine:
Man, it really feels like Akbarr was trying hard here. He had an
interesting story going on, something about standing around with no
memory (ok, that's not the interesting part) in a big line, trying to
figure out what the hell's going on. Unfortunately, doing so is almost
impossible without the hints (which were not provided until after the
comp started), and when you do, the story isn't really clear and
doesn't quite make sense. Why is the line necessary? Why are people's
memory removed? Why was a mistake made, especially one so easily
corrected? These are just a couple questions the game raises only to
answer unsatisfactorily or not at all.
Silicon Castles (Jack Maet [David Given]) Z-Machine:
If you recall Lists and Lists, this is that, only now the genie plays
chess. Furthermore, there's no exercises or attempt to teach you chess
strategy with mini-puzzles or anything; if you don't want to play with
a chess-playing genie, this game has nothing to offer you.
Stick it to the man (H. Joshua Field [Brendan Barnwell]) Glulx:
You're an anarchist attempting along with a couple of your friends to
put the title into action. You are also possibly disillusioned with
the Movement and not really sure What It All Means anymore, and then
you go to a rally and look around and and see some propaganda that the
author of the game wrote and then the game crashes, and you say "man,
didn't he play through this game before submitting it?"
Stranded (Rich Cummings) TADS 2:
If you don't have HTML-TADS I would probably give this a miss, as most
of the attraction for me was wandering around looking at the pictures
of wildlife and scenery, some of which kept trying to kill me or suck
me under or whatever. And it has ample opportunity, because I spent a
heck of a long time wandering around looking for food and being lost
in the swamp and stuff, which is a great simulation of what it's like
to be stranded on an island but not in fact a lot of fun to play. This
is compounded by having lots of sudden-death rooms filled with
quicksand or something (plus other rooms that look like those
but in fact are vital to go into), read-the-author's-mind puzzles, and
a plot that is developed in the prologue and in the epilogue but not
anywhere in between. All that said, the pictures were nice, and the
random messages actually worked pretty well in setting the scene. I
think the game should have been shrunk considerably room-wise and more
effort put into the storyline and the individual rooms, even if this
meant not using some of the photographs.
SURREAL (Matthew Lowe) GAGS:
This game is in GAGS. GAGS, the adventure system designed in 1985 and
supplanted entirely by AGT in 1987. And yet it lives today! Well, if
you call this living. I think all the puzzles can be solved using
>UNLOCK X WITH Y. In fact, they have to be, since this game
doesn't have what you might call a large vocabulary (or even what a college
football player might call a large vocabulary). There are a few
possibly-good ideas in here crying to get out, but they're buried
pretty deep beneath the authoring system.
The Test (Matt, Dark Baron [Matt, Dark Baron]) ADRIFT:
This is the game you would expect someone signing themselves "Matt, Dark
Baron" to write, only much, much worse. Nevertheless, I have a certain
affection for it, if only for the fact that it starts out with you
sitting bored in maths (not math class — this is british) class only
to discover: your maths professor is actually a time lord!! Just as
you always suspected!! Then it goes pretty much directly into a
series of thinly-linked puzzles that are stolen from other games,
require you to solve a math problem (no doubt one just learned in
maths class only minutes before!!), and/or are annoying. The
prize for Most Annoying Puzzle Ever In The Entire World Including
Anything You Can Name From a Phoenix Game goes to this game, for a
puzzle that requires you to listen to a badly-recorded MIDI file of
beepings in morse code and translate those (using the
helpfully-provided chart) into letters. This is so unimaginably
painful, all I can say is, it's a good thing the author didn't
password-protect the game so you could pull it up in the editor and
see what the command is. Anyway, um, Peter Berman is probably stunned
by the brilliance and artistry of this game, but everyone else should
probably give it a miss.
Timeout (Stephen Hilderbrand) Z-Machine:
This is a science fiction game, teetering on the brink of copyright
infringement of Paranoia but apparently not quite falling over the
edge. I haven't played Paranoia before but I realize it involves a
maniacal computer and random death (but you have clones, so it's
ok). And this part of the game is in fact fine and good and stuff. But
there's not sufficient direction in the game after the first ten turns
or so, so I do a lot of wandering, and the coding is only so-so (I
find closed things that don't understand 'open', and hit one or two
things that made frotz bomb out entirely). So, plusses for the
setting, which unfortunately is not by Hilderbrand, minuses for the
actual plot and coding, which unfortunately are.
Vicious Cycles (Simon Mark) Z-Machine:
It's noticeable how many not-very-good games have a decent setup
laid on top of some really lame, cliched backstory. I don't know why
this is — maybe people think up something cool and then run out of
imagination when it comes time to explain the cool thing. So this game
has a nifty event-repeating thing going on, backed by what appears to
be a completely unoriginal story about people inventing a time machine
and meddling with things Man Was Not Meant To Know. Then it has a
game-stopping bug midway along and there doesn't appear to be any way
to work around it. Oh well. (Later, I was informed that there is a way
around it, so it's merely a badly-coded puzzle rather than a
game-stopping bug. My apologies. But then the ending thus revealed is
a pretty unpleasant science-is-bad-hulk-smash sort of conclusion which
I found both offensive and unconvincing, so.)
Volcano Isle (Paul DeWitt) TADS 2:
I've only played a handful of Scott Adams games but this is what I
imagine they're like. Or, rather, this is what someone who wanted to
make a Scott-Adams-esque game in TADS would make. Anyway, you arrive
on an island, there's treasure you have to collect, there's a
mysterious stranger wandering around on a preset path, there's even (I
wince to say) a maze. I think this is a reasonably faithful attempt at
a style of game which is not very popular nowadays. But, like, I think
it's not very popular for a reason, so.
You Are Here (Roy Fisher) Z-Machine:
This is sort of almost interesting but not quite. Fisher's blurb
makes it clear that this is a game based on a mud, submitted as a
promo for a play about virtual-and-then-real relationships that take
place on that mud. What the game does not make clear (at least I was
surprised) was that this is a hack-and-slash lpMUD type, not a
hang-out-and-chat tinyMUD (or ifMUD) type. Now, lord knows I am all
for mud-related smoochies, but I gotta say, hack-and-slash is fairly
uninteresting when you're actually doing it on a mud, let alone when
you're pretending to do it on a mud. The brief glimpse of tinysex is
amusing but feels kind of out of place, although maybe it's more
usual on the muds the play is based on. The puzzles are pretty
typical for mud quests, which is to say, not really up to IF-standard.
If you're a die-hard lpMUDder you may dig this; I'm not and didn't.
You Were Doomed From The Start (Noob [Jeremy Carey-Dressler]) DOS Exe:
This is a demo game written by somebody for his homegrown IF system. It is
unclear why he thought it was worth entering in the IF competition. A notable
feature of the game is it supports only about a dozen verbs, two of
which are >QUIT. Make of this what you will.
And that's all. For other IF-related things, including many more reviews,
you can go to my main IF page.