SPAG
The
Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games
ISSUE
#53
SPAG #53 is copyright (c) 2008 by Jimmy Maher.
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.
IN
THIS ISSUE
Editorial
IF News
A Cry for Help!
IF Comp 2008 Reviews
The
Absolute Worst IF Game in History
Afflicted
Anachronist
April in
Paris
Berrost's
Challenge
Buried in
Shoes
Channel
Surfing
Cry Wolf
A Date
with Death
Dracula's
Underground Crypt
Escape
from the Underworld
Everybody
Dies
Freedom
Grief
The Hall
of the Fount of Artois
LAIR
of the Cyber-Cow
The
Lighthouse
The
Lucubrator
Magic
A
Martian Odyssey
The
Missing Piece
Nerd Quest
The Ngah
Angah School of Forbidden Wisdom
Nightfall
Opening
Night
Piracy
2.0
Project
Delta: The Course
Recess
at Last
Red Moon
Riverside
The
Search for the Ultimate Weapon
Snack
Time!
Trein
Violet
When
Machines Attack
IntroComp 2008 Reviews
Bedtime
Story
Fiendish Zoo
Nine Tenths
of the Law
Phoenix's
Landing: Destiny
Storm
Cellar
The Bloody
Guns
Other Game Reviews
Ausflug
am Wochenende nach München
Recluse
What
Happens in Vagueness
SPAG Specifics
Photopia
Rendition
EDITORIAL
So, another
Competition has come
and gone, and once again I'm left here trying to decide what I think
about it. It was an odd year, I think, with some encouraging and some
not so encouraging elements. After a few years that seemed to show that
authors were finally beginning to understand that they simply
must
test and polish their entries, this year was a real slide back. The
entries that received substandard scores from me, and as usual there
were a lot of them, virtually all suffered from the same problems, to
the extent that at times in writing my reviews I felt like I was simply
running out of ways to explain that beta-testers are not an optional
luxury. The number of authors who put considerable work and spirit into
their games only to neglect this mandatory step continues to amaze me.
My amazement here is rivaled only by my surprise at the number of
authors who continue to roll their own games from scratch in the belief
that this will be somehow good enough. At least the number of people
doing the latter is much less than the number doing the former.
Also
notable this year was a certain lack of ambition on the part of the
average author. A surprising number of the entries not only fit easily
into the two-hour time limit but could be completed in thirty minutes
or less. I don't really think this is a problem in itself taken in
isolation; after all, one of the most fascinating works of IF I've ever
played is
Aisle.
I do, though, wonder why more authors aren't willing to stretch
themselves a bit more.
More
encouraging are the sheer number of settings and genres to be found in
the Comp. Space opera, urban fantasy, horror, comedy, Tolkien-esque
fantasy, romantic intrigue, and more were present and accounted for.
Some games, especially
Freedom
and
Buried in Shoes,
were even brave enough to tackle very difficult subjects, and another (
Opening Night)
almost made me cry.
As someone who has made his wish that we spend less time talking about
IF as a form and more about the content of our stories all too known,
I'm cautiously optimistic about future developments.
And this
Comp gave us a dozen or so games that are well worth playing, in
addition to a handful of others that just need some more polishing and
testing to get them there. Twelve out of 35 ain't so bad,
really.
I'm going to spare you more thoughtful (or at least more extended)
editorializing in this issue. Between
reviewing
35 Comp games for my personal website and reviewing
yet more games for this issue of SPAG, I'm feeling a bit like a lemon
that's been squeezed dry, at least when it comes to the subject of IF.
Let me recharge the old batteries and (to mix the metaphors a bit more
thoroughly) add some gas to the tank, and I'll be back next year with
more brilliant essays on The State of IF Today. Before I go, though,
let me take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to
another issue that I am
very proud of. Nate Dovel, Dark Star, and Valentine Kopteltsev make up
my crack IF Comp 2008 reviewing squad; Paul Lee and David Monath
contributed additional reviews; and Victor Gijsbers contributed not one
but two more extended SPAG Specifics pieces that take IF criticism to a
whole new level. Thanks, one and all!
And thank
you
for reading and continuing to support IF. Have a great holiday season.
I'll see you in 2009, when SPAG's next issue will feature interviews
with the winning Comp authors (assuming they agree, which they always
do) and lots more good stuff which you'll just have to wait to find out
about (and I'll have to figure out what it's going to be).
Back to Table of Contents
IF
NEWS
IF Comp 2008 Results
The 2008 edition
of the annual IF Competition has just closed. We have reviews of all of
the games in this issue, and will feature more Competition coverage in
the next. Congratulations to Jeremy Freese, whose
Violet took the top honors. Here's the top five finishers (see the IF Comp website for the full list of final rankings):
1.
Violet by Jeremy Freese
2.
Nightfall by Eric Eve
3.
Everybody Dies by Jim Munroe
4.
Afflicted by Doug Egan
5.
Piracy 2.0 by Sean Huxter
http://www.ifcomp.org
IntroComp 2008 Results
Out of six entries (each representing an introduction to a propose
full-length IF work),
Phoenix's
Landing: Destiny by Carolyn VanEseltine was judged by the
IntroComp judges to be the most worthy. I didn't get a chance to play
the introductions during the judging period due to minor little Real
World things like getting married, but I did play them after the fact
and can state without hyperbole that every single entry has
real potential to be the seed of a great larger work. You can check out
more of my opinions in this issue, or you can just download the entries
and see for yourself. I'm sure the individual authors would love to get
your feedback, even if the judging period is over.
http://www.xyzzynews.com/introcomp/
One Room Game Competition
2008
Francesco Cordella will be hosting the one-room game competition again
this year. Entries are due by midnight, November 23 Central
European Time, and may be written in English or any other language. The
judging period will run until midnight, December 28 Central European
Time.
http://www.avventuretestuali.com/orgc/orgc2008_eng
iFrotz
Eric Idema has recently released an early beta of (yet another) a new
web-based Z-Machine interpreter. Unlike Parchment and others, this terp
runs on the server side rather than through JavaScript alone, which
should mean it will run games (particuarly Inform 7 games) at a much
better clip. It's got a long way to go, but looks like it has real
potential. Check out the webpage and the tiny demonstration, and think
about signing up for beta-testing if you find the project interesting.
I think that if we continue to support projects like this one will
eventually emerge to become the full-featured, practicial web-based
terp we're all looking for. And then we can start to think about
Glulx...
http://ifrotz.org/
AutoBlurb
Conrad Cook has created a tool for would-be IF authors who are
struggling with trying to come up with plots. His AutoBlurb will
randomly generate simple, rather generic plots which you can then flesh
out into full-blown IF stories. The tabletop RPG aid Inspiration Pad
Pro 2.0 is required, but it's a free download as well.
http://misc.conradcook.net/autoblurb
The David Fisher
Mini-Comp Bonanza
The indefatigueable David Fisher will be hosting a series of six
mini-comps over the course of 2009, each highlighting a particularly
difficult or interesting area of IF design theory. Many
judges have already been recruited, and IF Wiki pages have been set up.
The deadline for entries into the first of the comps --
SimComp, focusing on, you guessed it, simulationism and emergent
behavior -- is February 1.
http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/SimComp
Back to Table of
Contents
A Cry for Help!
Are you a reasonably
experienced
IF player who would like to lend a helping hand to help raise IF's
profile a bit? If so, I've got just the opportunity for you. Let me
allow my friend Harry Kaplan to explain:
Do
you have what it takes to join the IF Diplomatic Corps?
Mission:
to explore strange new websites, to seek out new IF enthusiasts, to
boldly go one where no one - all right, no one but Emily Short – has
gone before.
Adventure
Classic Gaming, a website primarily devoted to graphic
adventures, has reached out to the IF community for help in developing
an IF track. The intention is not to create a major IF site –
hey, we’ve got them, and they preach to the converted – but to expand
the gaming world of ACG’s readership to include IF old and
new. Jimmy Maher, having a modicum of exposure to this
particular subject, has been kind enough to let me interview him on the
history of IF, and the first half of that interview should be posted on
ACG in the relatively near future (stay tuned). We hope the
piece will attract interest not only at ACG but also within the IF
community as well, since Jimmy has challenged me to take the interview
into some intriguing areas not fully covered in his published IF
history, “Let’s Tell a Story Together.”
I think this
is a perfect outreach opportunity for IF, but I will need help from the
community in order to make it work. If you would be
interested in writing IF articles and/or reviews targeted at a
community of gamers who have indicated a real desire to explore IF but
need some friendly Sherpa guides to show them the terrain, please
contact me at harrykaplan SP@G adventureclassicgaming.com. As
I see it, if we can make this happen, everybody wins.
As
Harry says, this is a great opportunity for someone(s) to do the kind
of outreach we need a lot more of. Over the last few years we've been
relying on Emily Short, Stephen Granade, and one or two others to do
this kind of thing, but that's a bit unfair, wouldn't you say? They
have games and other projects of their own to work on, after all, and
there are hundreds if not thousands of us. Won't somebody step forward
and take the plunge? I believe that Harry will be looking to kick off
Adventure Classic Gaming's IF coverage with a "getting started with IF"
sort of article, but who knows where things might go from there. Play
your cards right and you might even have your own little IF soapbox
like I have here at SPAG.
Seriously, folks, it's a good cause. Please email Harry if you have the
time and willingness to help out.
Back to Table of
Contents
IF Competition 2008 Reviews
Rather than publish
(or re-publish) reviews of the Competition entries weeks or months
after the fact, I wanted to present them to you this year when the
excitement of the Comp is still fresh. I therefore recruited a crack
team of elite reviewers -- Valentine Kopteltsev, Nate Dovel, and the
ever-mysterious Dark Star -- to divide up the entries and write capsule
reviews of each of them
for SPAG during the actual judging period. Their impressions of all 35
games, along with just a few of my own, appear below. If you're
interested in reading my more extended opinions on all the games,
you'll find them at
http://home.grandecom.net/~maher/if/comp08.html
The usual
interviews with the top Comp authors will of course be appearing in
SPAG's next issue, due early next year.
| Title: |
The
Absolute Worst IF Game in History
|
| Author: |
Dean Menezes
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Nate B. Dovel |
| Reviewer Email: |
atreyu918 SP@G gmail.com
|
During
college, in an experimental film studies course, our class screened
Andy
Warhol's
Bottoms.
The conceit was to feature the many and
diverse derrieres of Mr. Warhol’s friends, unclothed and close-up, as
they strolled
along a treadmill and talked aimlessly with Warhol.
Most of the class (including the professor, interestingly)
deserted by the 45-minute mark.
I
hung
on through the whole 80-minute mess, but only so I could brag to those
who left
that they
totally missed the
amazing
(non-existent) plot twist at the end.
The only possible motive I could ever deduce for this
butt-jiggling
cinematic opus was the desire to make a completely pointless thing, the
pointlessness of which people would nonetheless discuss, ironically
giving it a
point within the mind of the author.
No
doubt Warhol had a good laugh as critics tried to ascribe some meaning
to it.
I blame the
same motivation for giving us
The
Absolute Worst IF Game.
The game is
an indistinguishable maze with nothing to explore or interact with,
victory or
failure is awarded randomly (once I won by looking, another time by
going east),
and the only story is a single sentence about searching for a McGuffin.
While it is clearly
intended to be this dumb,
it is not that endearing kind of dumb like
The
Toxic Avenger or those blank books entitled
Everything
Men Know About Women.
There is no biting minimalistic commentary on the bland
stereotypes of
IF.
No delightfully
overwrought
dialogue.
No
insanely but amusingly
unguessable solution like "stick fish in ear".
Like
Bottoms,
it is only a waste of time- I was going to write a "painful" waste of
time, but it's not even that.
Painful,
metaphorically speaking, maybe gets you in the hospital with lots of
beeping
machines, strange patients, and free cable.
This is just a papercut.
The game ultimately serves the
author's sense of irony, not the reader's.
Which is fine, if you're the author.
I wrote a "game" once with one room and an exploding
Pop-Tart.
There was
no goal, no story-
the source code is maybe half a page.
I
found it hilarious.
Anyone
else playing
it might wonder what was wrong with me.
Which is why you'll never find it on the submission page
of IFComp.
Hammering
a nail in the wall might be art to
some people, but it's courteous to hang something interesting on it for
the
rest of us.
Score: 1 out of 10.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Afflicted
|
| Author: |
Doug Egan
|
| Author Email: |
dgenglish SP@G hotmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Nate B. Dovel |
| Reviewer Email: |
atreyu918 SP@G gmail.com
|
As story
conceits go, a fastidious health inspector forced to scrutinize a
disgusting,
disease-ridden restaurant whose owner happens to be a fat, evil
creature of
darkness is pretty great.
Afflicted has you searching the
horrendous dive bar, looking for infractions which you dutifully record
in your
notebook.
These
demerits serve as your
game score.
This
was entertaining enough
just by itself, for some reason; maybe it's the obsessive-compulsive in
me, but
I loved discovering and documenting each new repulsive violation,
making little
humorously bureaucratic suggestions.
It's like collecting Snapple caps for the factoids.
But you get the added bonus of a
genuinely creepy story, as well!
I'll
try to stay vague to avoid spoilers, but at one point I reentered a
room to
discover something wholly unexpected and frightening, especially given
a drastic
event that had occurred just minutes before.
It was a perfectly executed, somewhat surreal moment,
layering one
sudden nightmare on top of another, such that I anxiously realized I
had no
idea what I should do.
Yet
even when
confronted with horrors, the tone of the main character remains
amusingly detached,
committed to his job with ludicrous enthusiasm.
Finding a dismembered body part, for example, is not
reason enough to
summon the authorities; it does, however, cost the restaurant five
points on
their review!
The
characterization is top-notch. Your
heart goes out to the rundown, miserable waitress, Angela, and her
abuse at the
hands of the repulsive, amoral sack of donkey dung that is Nikolai, the
proprietor. The
first thing I did upon
encountering Nikolai was test if I was allowed to kill him outright. I usually at least examine
an NPC first, see
if they have any valuable information, before I childishly attempt to
pull
their legs off. But
Nikolai provoked me
right off the bat, a testament to the author's aptitude in creating an
emotional connection with the characters.
Even
the
environment has a seamless, involving personality.
Your curiosity is rewarded with detailed and
satisfying, though not over-long, descriptions and an appalling variety
of
grotesque working conditions. Not
only do
the correct health code violations have great responses, but so do the
incorrect ones, keeping the player engaged even when they stray a bit
off-objective, a courtesy more games should provide. Most
effective, though, is the tone: scenery,
innocuous at first blush, grows sinister with further exploration. Every room has a smell. Rats and roaches will
occasionally traipse
before you. The
change is palpable as
you venture into the dim bar from the desolate but well-lit street, and
once
things get bizarre, it is maddening that safety is so brightly visible
but
unattainable through the dirty windows.
As
of this
writing, I have not finished the entire game, though I am eager to do
so. I was into it
enough to blow through my
IFComp-adjudicating two hours just reveling in what feels like only the
first third
of the experience. Assuming
it maintains
the sense of gleeful dread and the admirable level of detail, it has
earned my
vote as one of the best of the crop this year.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Anachronist
|
| Author: |
Joseph Strom
|
| Author Email: |
j-strom SP@G verizon.net
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru
|
I have to confess, I have a soft spot in my heart for anachronistic
setting elements. Therefore, I had certain hopes for this entry. This
was rather naive of me, as it turned out. As the author puts it
himself, "If you're looking for a good story you won't miss anything by
stopping after the first three paragraphs." The rest of the game is
dedicated to roaming through several barren and essentially unrelated
to each other worlds, trying to find out how the game mechanics work.
Unfortunately, I felt very little (if any) motivation to do so, and
thus played from the walkthrough. Therefore, I'm not the most suitable
person to judge on that, but my impression was it would have taken me
much more than two hours to beat the puzzles if I played "fair"
(considering that some seemingly innocent actions are likely to lock
you out of victory). Too many things were not obvious, and too many
areas seemed to be just red herrings or decorations. There were a few
implementation glitches. Besides, the author had some evident problems
with English (hate to say that, because I have them too;); for
instance, one of the commands suggested by the walkthrough isn't a
correct English phrase. Still, the lack of motivation for the player to
do anything is a much more serious issue for this work.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
April
in Paris
|
| Author: |
Jim Aikin
|
| Author Email: |
midiguru23 SP@G sbcglobal.net
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
TADS 3 |
| Version: |
1.0
|
| Reviewer: |
Dark Star |
| Reviewer Email: |
darkstar SP@G infodarkness.com
|
April in Paris is a short game written by Jim Aikin that brings to life
a small street side cafe. It's a little challenging, in design and game
play, but also enjoyable with an ending that ties it all together.
You play a tourist visiting Paris, while having lunch in a charming
Parisian sidewalk cafe. It's a small enough place; but with the
descriptions being so close together everything kind of looked the
same, making it hard to know where I was and how to get around. This is
mitigated a bit by being able to go to a particular person or object,
but I probably should have turned right to the map in the beginning to
get my bearings. It doesn't give away too much.
The puzzles are a little hard even though they fit right into the
setting. I had one problem with an object not really standing out from
the crowd, and dealing with the dog is practically a Bable fish puzzle
that wouldn't end. I also noticed a few bugs with some of the objects
and even the hints are bugged, not being able to type in a number over
9.
But in the end, much like the cafe itself, I found it charming. The
characters had deep enough backgrounds to feel real, tying into one
another that made for a solid cohesiveness. So if you don't mind
looking a little bit at the hints to get you through, this is an
enjoyable game.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Berrost's
Challenge
|
| Author: |
Mark Hatfield
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
TADS 2 |
| Version: |
1.0
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru
|
The first thought I had after reading the intro was, what a
dull writing. On the other hand, it dispelled any illusions I might
have had about this entry from the outset, and did a fine work in terms
of product placement, unambiguously defining the work as a traditional
treasure- (or, rather, magic scroll-) hunty puzzlefest. Speaking
objectively, the puzzles as such probably weren't bad, although they
left me pretty cold. Some of them required lengthy (and not very
motivated) wait&observe sequences. A couple had guess-the-verb
problems that became even worse, since they weren't mentioned in the
hints. To be honest, somehow the game managed to make it clear to me
from the beginning there're going to be non-standard commands in it,
yet the confined time of Comp play isn't suited for trial and error
vocabulary research exercises very well. One of those problems I solved
by decompiling the game (and I don't think I'd be able to beat it
without cheating even if there wasn't the two hours limit, since a more
common and perfectly reasonable synonym was dismissed with a very
confusing message). Also, the player has to buy some items during the
story. Getting the money for that represents an additional puzzle in
the game, which is OK; however, you only can retrieve the funds by
small amounts, and any additional purchase results in a tedious string
of actions including running to your financing source through several locations, getting the bread, and returning
back. The conversation system in
Berrosts's
Challenge
induced me to practise some self-citing -- a sloppily implemented
menu-based system isn't any better than a shoddily implemented
traditional "ask about/tell about" system...
The game has its
clever moments, too -- for instance, there are hunger and sleep
daemons, as well as an inventory limit, but players who prefer to go
without them can just turn them off any time. Still, as I was nearing
towards the end of the two hours limit, I noticed I just wasn't having
fun. Therefore, I acted a bit unfair -- I stopped playing and just read
the ending out of the decompiled game file... And yes, the finale was a
fine match for the previous story.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Buried
in Shoes
|
| Author: |
Kazuki Mishima
|
| Author Email: |
lunasspecto SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 6) |
| Version: |
Release 3
|
| Reviewer: |
Dark Star |
| Reviewer Email: |
darkstar SP@G infodarkness.com
|
Buried In Shoes
is a short game that seems written for those just trying out
interactive fiction. It feels a bit disjointed, jumping between
flashbacks, but has a bone-chilling ending.
With a file size of
only 72k the game should take you less than a half hour to finish. It
accomplishes this small size with a succinct writing style that is
terse and to the point. Personally I like this, it gets right to the
game play and doesn't beat around the bush. Also, the story is paced
out well, dropping certain hints now and then, and does everything it
needs in order to set-up the ending, which becomes the focal point of
the story.
There are no puzzles to speak of, another reason I
think it will make a good candidate for first time players, with game
play that is very intuitive. The player always knows what to do next,
and there is never a need to fight the machine to figure out what needs
to be done.
Overall I feel this game is flawlessly executed,
though the subject matter is questionable at best, and I see it
possibly becoming a game that is highly recommended to those unfamiliar
with interactive fiction. Well done Kazuki.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Channel
Surfing
|
| Author: |
Mike Vollmer
|
| Author Email: |
eblivion SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru
|
This game
impressed me to some extent -- maybe because the few previous works I
played were outright weak. It's a dystopia of sorts, about how
television manipulates people. Its probably neither very deep nor
groundbreaking, but at least it handles the subject aptly enough. The
protagonist finds himself in a row of episodes, each time with very
limited options (even more so, since the implementation level keeps to
be pretty shallow; come to think of it, it even might be deliberate,
and meant as a way to demonstrate the player (s)he's moving through a
fake television world). Anyway, the limited options make it easy to
figure out what to do next. The only thing that gets in the way is, the
synonyms' implementation is as shallow as that of the environment. I
was a bit disappointed how my actions towards the finale of the game
failed to affect the outcome; on the other hand, a happy end clearly
would be totally out of place here, and I'm glad the author resisted
the temptation (if there was any) to append one.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Cry
Wolf
|
| Author: |
Clare Parker
|
| Author Email: |
parkerc SP@G reed.edu
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Dark Star |
| Reviewer Email: |
darkstar SP@G infodarkness.com
|
In
Cry Wolf
you play a veterinarian who is confronted with helping an injured wolf
in the dead of night, but the story has a few twists as the plot
unfolds. It's told over five acts, that have a real symmetry as they go
from night to day and back to night, and the writing is wonderful,
creating some vivid imagery even if there are a few typos.
The
game is long; it took me over four hours to finish, but I did get hung
up on one of the puzzles pretty early on. There are also a few bugs. I
even found a conversation menu that stalled out, and so you
might
want to save at the beginning of each act. Also, some of the rooms are
reused, but a lot of the objects don't update for the current time of
day; and there are even a few sudden deaths, but all of those can be
undone. The game is pretty ambitious, with a lot of code that needs
tightening up.
The structure of the game is pretty standard IF
in the first three acts, you'll need to get past a handful of puzzles
while talking to a few characters. But the last two acts really becomes
a series of conversation menus that have a lot of black and white
choices. The game could have used a bit more subtlety here, with a few
responses that could be a little grayer, giving the game a bit more
depth and the players a little more agency.
I really liked this
game. It's not perfectly executed, but it sets up some nice scenes, and
it created an atmosphere that drew me in. The last two acts break away
from the IF standard, but they help fill in the rest of the story, even
though you see a lot of it coming. The game could use a bit more
polish, but there is a game here, unlike a lot of the entries we've
seen this year that took under an hour to finish. It's enjoyable and
the story is fully flushed out. If you haven't played it already, I
think you'll like this one. It really worked for me.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
A
Date with Death
|
| Author: |
David Whyld
|
| Author Email: |
dwhyld SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
ADRIFT |
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
Dark Star |
| Reviewer Email: |
darkstar SP@G infodarkness.com
|
A Date With Death
is a humorous game, in a Monty Python sort of way, that is based upon a
deep lore with wild characters that are perfect for the setting. But it
also suffers from frustrating game play, with puzzles that could be
made easier, and occasional bugs that break down the mimesis. You might
want to save often.
This is the third game in a series created
by David Whyld, but you don't need to play the other two in order
understand what's going on. Death is coming for you, because of what
happened in the previous games, but everything is made clear within a
few minutes of game play, and reinforced throughout the rest of the
game.
You play a King, practically locked up in own his throne
room, by a High Chancellor who controls most of the people you see; and
he keeps your subjects in line with the executioner's blade. Keep in
mind there's only about six rooms to move through, each filled with a
lot of text containing a comical tone that rings throughout the setting.
A
lot of the humor comes from when the High Chancellor calls upon you to
oversee numerous problems within your kingdom. Talk menus here, which
are handled numerically, make it easy to sort through the evidence
and hand out your decree. A lot of the characters you run into feel
like they're from
Monty
Python's Holy Grail, and the humor is handled quite well
-- nothing too over the top -- with the King himself being the voice of
reason.
The
game is also frustrating to play. A lot of things seem buried; either
in conversation topics, or in room objects that you might have failed
to notice. Also, it has hard coded events that you can't get around,
and you can run into time constraints. There is a hint system here, and
I got really far using it; but I needed a walkthrough to complete the
game; some of the puzzles really stumped me. Problem is, the game
doesn't come with a walkthrough on hand, and you have to figure out the
verb on your own in order to unlock this feature. I ended up e-mailing
the author.
Some parts of this game are great and really
entertaining, creating a tone that'll ring your funny bone. But you'll
have to drudge through a few puzzles that are obscure in order to get
to the end. It's sort of a sweet and sour mix, both frustrating and
funny. But I'm sure it will be worth your time, and at least a few
laughs.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Dracula's
Underground Crypt
|
| Author: |
Alex Whitington
|
| Author Email: |
eggheadcheesybird SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru
|
By no means is
this a good game -- lots of spelling mistakes (even if you remove the
ones that are intentional), non-obvious puzzles... It also seems more
like an intro than an actual game. Still, there also was at least one
likeable thing about
Dracula's
Underground Crypt
-- namely, its humour. Call me a pervert, but it is to my taste;). One
of the most important things for a joke is to stop in time. Mr.
Whitington managed to do so. Don't expect too much of this entry --
just perceive it as a little joke, and you won't be
disappointed.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Escape
from the Underworld
|
| Author: |
Karl Beecher
|
| Author Email: |
eggheadcheesybird SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 6) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G grandecom.net |
In this one you play a low-ranking devil who has gotten a bit tired of
all the scouring and torturing that goes on in Hell. You've decided to
make your escape up to the world of light.
I wasn't too impressed with the opening of this, and didn't have much
hope for it in light of the dismayingly minimalist initial descriptions
and its minuscule file size. A strange thing began to happen as I
played on, though -- I discovered quite a nicely crafted little
adventure game, not innovative or even overly memorable, but
entertaining enough. Its puzzles are well done in their not too taxing
way. While the implementation is rather sketchy, basically just
sticking with the stock Inform 6 parser and library, the parser issues
are not too horrific. Even the writing seemed to get better as time
went on, and the game even offered up some lines that made me laugh out
loud:
You overhear one of the demon administrators gossiping.
"... Hey Timothy, great news! The guy who invented the Microsoft Office
paper clip will be cast down here on Friday. I can't wait to get to
work on *that* guy!"
The
game was thus doing surprising well for itself on my judging scale,
until I got to the end. There, the little implementation and parsing
problems caught up with me in a big way. I knew what to do to solve the
final puzzle (or thought I did), but I simply could not figure out how
the game wanted me to express my intention. I finally had to turn to
the walkthrough for the correct syntax.
So,
that bit left me with something of a sour taste at the worst possible
time, and definitely cost the game a point or so in its final score.
But its good qualities remain, and make it worthy of a qualified
recommendation. The author even promises us a sequel at the end, which
I would enjoy playing if he's willing to just pay a bit more
attention to technical details and testing.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Everybody
Dies
|
| Author: |
Jim Munroe, illustrated by Michael Cho
|
| Author Email: |
jim SP@G nomediakings.org
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru |
Somehow, this game made me think of Chris Mudd's works --
1-2-3... and
Jump; in
Everybody Dies, you
are railroaded through the story almost as blatantly. This said, I have
to confess I enjoyed
Everybody
Dies
a lot more, since you (a) don't need to play "guess the next topic" --
there is practically no conversation in the game, and (b) the whole
thing is short enough, so that the railroading aspect doesn't really
become a frustration. The story itself is well-constructed and tight,
although when it's over, there's a bunch of unanswered questions left.
It features character switching, nice comics sequences, and even a
puzzle. The implementation level is somewhat terse, yet... adequate --
yes, that'll be the right word. While I still felt more like an outside
observer rather than a direct participant of the story, I'm not sure
whether it's the game's fault or mine.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Freedom
|
| Author: |
anonymous
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 6) |
| Version: |
Release 0
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G grandecom.net |
This game begins with you standing in your apartment, never a
particularly good sign. You have a handy to-list that tells you what
your plans are for the day: buy groceries, check to see if a book you
ordered came in at the local bookstore, and finally attend a meeting at
the local college. All of the areas you will visit in doing this are
"described" in two or three bland lines mostly concerned with listing
the exits. Still, you might think at this point that you are in for a
light-hearted slice of life satire, in which purchasing groceries
requires solving a mountain of puzzles. Alas, no. Purchasing groceries
in this game entails walking to the minimally described grocery store
and typing GET GROCERIES. The other tasks are no more interesting.
The author provides a note explaining "some of the reasoning behind the
game." Thinking this had to be good, I dutifully had a look. Well, it
seems that the game is "intended to recreate the experience of
suffering from a social anxiety disorder." That's a very noble idea,
and sounds like a great application for IF. Unfortunately, I'm at a
complete loss as to where my social anxiety is in this
game. From the complete non-sequiter of a title to the
arbitrary final "puzzle" to the author's fixation on normal
grocery checkout lines versus express lines versus automated lines,
this is one strange entry. I don't know whether this game is a joke or
an honest (albeit spectacularly failed) attempt at exploring its
subject. I do know, however, that it's neither fun nor informative.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Grief
|
| Author: |
Simon Christiansen
|
| Author Email: |
simonchris1729 SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Dark Star |
| Reviewer Email: |
darkstar SP@G infodarkness.com
|
Grief
is a very interesting replayable puzzle game, with several different
endings, that will take multiple attempts to come to the conclusion.
It's short, so you probably won't even have to save. The game play
itself is solid, handling the number of scenarios well, though the
implementation could be a little deeper, giving it a bit more
verisimilitude.
You start out waking up from a dream, and right
away your goals become very clear, but if you do get stuck, there's a
great hint system to help you along. The play area is small and easy to
navigate, which is important because you'll be running through it
several times, but the overall feel of the game is a bit
claustrophobic.
Only the essential rooms are in the design,
and I feel this cheats the mimesis. The office building really suffers
by this, with only the hallway and your office implemented.
Even
though it's not necessary, it would've felt more like a real workplace
if there were a few extra cubicles, perhaps a bathroom, and even a
cafeteria. Your home suffers in the same way too, missing a living room
and a bathroom. There could even be a few extra objects in the living
room that could confuse the player, yet set up the ending.
But
all nitpicking aside, this is really a great game with a story that is
set up right from the start. It has multiple endings, and a fair amount
of agency. I do feel it suffers from a lack of implementation that
makes the game feel like a series of props instead of a simulated
world; but I figure most people will overlook this, and really enjoy
the sort of meta-puzzle here needing to be unlocked.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The
Hall of the Fount of Artois
|
| Author: |
Simon Ellis
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
MS-DOS / Windows executable
|
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G grandecom.net
|
Every year's Competition gives us a few time-capsule games, games that
are blissfully unaware of the past two and a half decades of IF
evolution.
Artois
is one of this year's batch. It's written from scratch in
BASIC, just the way the old-school kids used to do it, and features all
the old-school text adventure standbys: a large and complicated map,
plenty of darkness problems, a timer, some guess the verb fun,
inventory limits, and, inevitably, a maze. It seems you have
been asked to free the old Artois family mansion from a curse.
And so you begin at 7:00 PM, with exactly twelve hours to
explore, solve puzzles, and hopefully accomplish your mission.
By the rather underwhelming standards of its sub-category,
Artois is not a
complete disaster. While the writing has a few problems here
and there, it's downright verbose and descriptive by old-school
standards, and manages to conjure a believable-enough facsimile of an
old Victorian-style mansion. Every manipulatable object in
each room is listed separately at the end of the room's description,
which might not make the best aesthetic impression but does at least
save you from trying to fiddle with a bunch of unimplemented scenery to
see what is actually needed and what is just for decoration.
While there are plenty of things in its world that don't make
much sense (why can I see in some outdoor rooms and in others find it
too dark?), I didn't find any aggressively obscure or
ridiculous puzzles in my hour or so with the game, although I certainly
can't promise they aren't there.
By the standards of modern IF, however, this one is loaded with
problems. The parser, as is typical of these home-brewed
efforts, is not really a proper parser at all, but more of a simple
pattern-matcher, as I found when I typed LOOK UNDER SCONCE and was
greeted with a room description. There is no SCRIPT command,
no VERBOSE, not even the abbreviation X for EXAMINE. (No
surprise there, I guess -- Infocom first implemented X around 1986,
long after this author apparently stopped playing text adventures.)
Some good news: there
is
a SAVE command. Some bad news: the
RESTORE command
doesn't work, at least on my Windows XP machine. The game
locks up and finally, after consuming several hundred megabytes (!) of
memory, crashes.
Like many of us, I played plenty of games like this back in the day,
and I tried to give this one a good-faith try, if only for nostalgia's
sake. The lack of a working RESTORE command in this game with
a time limit and at least one learning by death puzzle, though, taxed
my willpower, and when I found the "greatest maze in England" I just
couldn't continue.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
LAIR
of the Cyber-Cow
|
| Author: |
Harry Wilson
|
| Author Email: |
hrrwlsn741 SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
ADRIFT (version 3.90 Runner ONLY)
|
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
Dark Star |
| Reviewer Email: |
darkstar SP@G infodarkness.com
|
LAIR Of The CyberCow
is a strange game at best, with a collection of eclectic characters
borrowed from fantasy and science fiction. The game is poorly
implemented to the point that the player has to frequently turn to the
walkthrough to get through it.
The first problem I ran into is
that the file won't play under the latest ADRIFT Runner, and I had to
convert it using the ADRIFT Generator. Not a good sign. Apparently even
converting the file is a bad thing, and you'll have to find an older
interpreter to run it.
Well the game starts out at a bus stop,
but gives the player no real direction to go in. It should at least
mention that the PC has received a letter, but the letter is no real
help either. The layout of the game is small enough that you don't need
a map, and it was kind of fun to wander around checking out the
surroundings, but when it came to actual game play it feel apart real
fast. For example, the description for the chapel yard is useless:
Chapel Yard.
It is daytime. You can move north, east, south and west.
It
doesn't describe what's around, let alone that fact that there's a well
right in the middle of it. I had to go to the meadow in order to see
the well. This makes the game all but unplayable. The game also needs
to have better responses for negative actions. "The parser didn't
understand that..." makes it sound like the action can't be done, but
under the right circumstances it can.
Overall the game is
practically unplayable, and you'll have to turn to the walkthrough to
get through it. The story makes no sense, and leaves you asking
questions like: what is a CyberCow, why is it at the bottom of the
well, and why does it have a well furnished, teak modeled, lair. In the
end, I'd give this one a pass.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The
Lighthouse
|
| Author: |
Eric Hickman and Nathan Chung
|
| Author Email: |
Ifiction SP@G live.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7)
|
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru
|
This is a very
unambitious and short game -- in fact, it can be finished within as
little as thirteen (pretty obvious) moves. It seems more like an
exercise of its author in learning Inform than an actual game. At
least, it wasn't too annoying, didn't take too much of my time, and
probably was entered with good intentions.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The
Lucubrator
|
| Author: |
Rick Dague
|
| Author Email: |
shstein2002 SP@G yahoo.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7)
|
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Nate B. Dovel |
| Reviewer Email: |
atreyu918 SP@G gmail.com
|
When I
first loaded up
The Lucubrator, I
had
no idea what the title meant, though it sounded enticingly pornographic.
One visit to
dictionary.com later, and I
determined it meant "one who engages in laborious
work, study, thought, etc., especially at night."
This is an apt title in only two ways: 1)
Killing people and eating their brains is probably hard work, and 2) It
was way
too much of a chore playing this game.
You
play a scientist waking up to discover that your former co-workers-
unrepentant
assholes, the lot of them- have killed you and resurrected you as a
zombie for
undisclosed reasons.
Probably
because
they're two-dimensional, uninterestingly melodramatic characters who
couldn't find
a better use for their vaunted intellects. Obviously, things do not go
as
planned, and everybody but you dies painfully.
I lament my survival, however, because this game pulls off
the IF Holy
Trinity of Problems: confusing design, bad story, and lazy editing.
The
first room's challenge was actually quite promising.
I
had to figure out how to free myself from
the autopsy table while my cocky captor rhapsodizes about his
awesomeness and
my stupidity.
This
made it all the more
satisfying when he finally lay in a pool of blood at my feet.
Afterward,
though, the room didn't feel it needed to explain how to exit.
I managed "enter door"
finally-
awkwardly- only to uselessly find out later it was to the north.
I realize writing, "A door
is to your
north." is not terribly eloquent, but this is interactive fiction.
That stuff needs to be
crystal clear.
That's just
one of many annoying but surmountable nitpicks.
The real problem is the second puzzle, the killing of a
security
guard.
I had a
traditional weapon, but trying
to use it just gets the default "Violence isn't the answer to this
one."
OK, fine, but
since this is a
horror game and every solution involves violence, you'd think I could
get a
response more relevant to the story, let alone a clue about what act of
violence I'm
meant to commit.
Maybe a "Your rocket
launcher is out of
ammo!
Your
rocket-shaped pet ferret
consoles you with a lick."
Furthermore, the missing link doesn't even seem necessary
for what it
helps accomplish- think brushing your ferret before you stuff him in
the
bazooka, so he'll be more aerodynamic.
I
would suggest using the walkthrough, unless that hypothetical sounds
intriguing.
The
story is brief and forgettable.
Each
enemy is either a juvenile moron with a mad scientist persona
scotch-taped on
or a hapless but dull bystander you feel fleetingly guilty about
slaughtering.
I
like blood and guts as much as the next
fellow, but it's much more satisfying to snack upon the innards of a
well-developed character.
Finally,
I know it's petty, but it bugs me when the tense switches for no reason
mid-sentence, or the perspective jumps from "you" to "we",
or easy words are misspelled.
A
little
proofreading goes a long way, that's all I'm saying.
The
potential for fun is here, but too many roadblocks and potholes kept me
from
enjoying the mindless mayhem.
If
you
like Troma horror flicks with all of their bad dialogue, poor lighting,
and
continuity problems, you might enjoy this story.
Otherwise, rent
Dawn of the Dead.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Magic
|
| Author: |
Geoff Fortytwo
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
TADS 3
|
| Version: |
1.01
|
| Reviewer: |
Nate B. Dovel |
| Reviewer Email: |
atreyu918 SP@G gmail.com
|
Geoff Fortytwo’s
Magic is subtitled
“A Story of the
Dangers That Magicians Can Face”.
However,
magic- in this case the kind practiced by birthday party entertainers-
has
surprisingly little to do with the story.
The story begins with your public humiliation by a crowd
of skeptical
and derisive children.
After
fleeing to
the trusty magic shop, you find a spell which lets you metamorphosize a
limited
range of items into something helpful to finding and destroying your
homicidal
stage rabbit and his cronies.
But you might as well be a plumber
or grocery clerk for how much magic concerns the story beyond that.
The player character’s
personality is
decidedly neglected after the initial birthday fiasco.
He neither redeems himself as a magician nor commits
more career-related gaffes until an incidental and frankly irrelevant
ending
coda prompted not by logical narrative flow but by simply winning the
game.
I don’t want to be too down on it,
though- there is some great humor, spent often on casual moments rather
than
invested in the broader story.
The
various ways you can die made me chuckle, and the vicious rabbits,
while the motive
for their madness goes completely unexplained, are endearingly strange.
The NPCs have great
possibility- each is unique
and engaging at first, but they only dip their toes into the pool of
the
humorously odd, never really cannonballing in as I wish they would.
A dead mime in an
interrogation room, a
boisterous, explosives-loving surplus store proprietor, a devotee of a
rabbit-worshipping religion, an apathetic vagabond- I want to know
more, but I’m
given few personal details.
Their
gaming
purpose, it seems, is paramount to their character depth.
The final joke, though-
just prior to
defeating your nemesis- is really quite amusing.
I do so love word play, though you’ll have to
be a Monty Python fan to get it (though who isn’t?).
As for the mechanics, the magic
trick is intriguing and the tutorial fairly helpful.
Let’s say you have a pair of scissors and a
lawn.
The trick
lets you compare the
scissors to the lawn, thus transforming the scissors into a lawnmower.
But even the tutorial
itself admits that the
transformations are seldom so conceptually logical, rather that you
have to
“guess at [them] based on what you really need to achieve”.
In other words, be ready
for a lot of head-scratching
until you figure out that comparing the turtle to a pile of rocks will
get you turtle
food.
Fortunately,
an optional (and
rather funny) hint system will dole out progressively transparent clues
if you
get stuck.
And you
will.
There are also some minor glitches
and bad editing here and there.
After
performing a transformation early in the game, I returned later to find
both
the pre- and post-transformed items paradoxically co-existing and not
existing
at the same damn time, and neither functioned normally.
Sound confusing?
Try
working it out on a rain-soaked
roof.
A little
post-design polish might
have cleared this up.
Magic
is a somewhat dull and misleading title.
Almost Magic is a bit
more
apt.
Play it for
the amusing in-jokes
and chuckles, but don’t expect much more.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
A
Martian Odyssey
|
| Author: |
Horatiu Romosan, music by Thom Brennan
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 6)
|
| Version: |
Release 2
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru
|
This entry has
such a wonderfully generic title (and an even more generic subtitle --
"a science-fiction text adventure of space exploration and
interpersonal communication"), and it must be said the game lives up to
the expectations aroused by its name. The writing, indeed, is as
austere and unremarkable as the Martian landscapes it's describing for
the most part. This has two effects: lack of motivation to do anything
on the player's part, and puzzles becoming more difficult than they
should (and were intended to) be, because it's often problematic to get
an idea what an object looks like from its description. This made me
resort to the walkthrough from the very start, which I never regretted.
However,
there was at least one outstanding thing about this game: namely, its
size. More than 50 Mb! I didn't do any special research in this
respect, but I think it could very well be the largest text adventure
ever published -- at least, in terms of occupied HDD space. However,
most of it can be attributed to the soundtrack, it seems. (BTW, I
couldn't find any way to turn the sound off other than muting the
loudspeakers of my PC -- which kind of sucked, and cost the game at
least one extra point).
P. S. OK, later I learned
AMO
was an adaptation of a Sci-Fi story, but it didn't make me feel like
changing anything in the review. Not even the phrase about the generic
title (although it probably wasn't as generic in 1934, when the work
AMO is based on was
published).
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The
Missing Piece
|
| Author: |
C. Young
|
| Author Email: |
mail SP@G intelligent-digital.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Windows executable (.NET framework required)
|
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru
|
This is a text
RPG. It's obvious how much work has been invested into the interface --
and it really works, never getting in the way. I'm not a fan of RPGs,
but it seemed to me the game is pretty well-balanced, letting the
player going on step by step, allowing him to deal with monsters he can
beat, and to leave the ones that are too strong for him until later.
The part of the game I saw hadn't much of a plot (and I doubt most
players would see more within the two hours limit - the battles take a
lot of time!), but it's probably OK for the genre. The descriptions are
anything but verbose, and there are very little puzzles. Still, I'd
certainly rate this entry at least one point higher if RPGs were my cup
of tea.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Nerd
Quest
|
| Author: |
Gabor di Mooij
|
| Author Email: |
ragtimenerds SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Java (MechaniQue)
|
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
Dark Star |
| Reviewer Email: |
darkstar SP@G infodarkness.com
|
Nerd Quest
is a home-brewed text adventure, written in Java, that fails on a
number of levels. There's not much to do, the goals aren't clear, and
the interpreter suffers by not implementing a number of IF standards.
In
this game you're a developer for an IT company that doesn't want to be
late for a date with his girlfriend, and a hacker has broken into the
mainframe. You're locked in the server room by your boss and forced to
fix the broken terminal; but the goal the game sets up isn't the real
goal of the game, a discrepancy that makes it hard to play from the
start.
Other problems abound in this hand-coded interpreter. It
doesn't understand commands like restart/save/restore/quit/verbose or
transcript, though I couldn't put the game into an unwinnable state.
Shortcuts like 'l' for look aren't implemented either, and standard
verbs like 'examine' are missing too.
The writing in this game
is minimal, if you can call it writing, and it's very frustrating to
play because you don't know what or how to interact with the few things
that are implemented in the rooms. I quickly lost confidence in the
interpreter and turned to the walkthrough.
Also, if you use the
run.bat file to play the game it will end abruptly, and you end up
missing the final remarks. In order to see what takes place you'll have
to run it from the command line. Of course, I'm a PC user.
I
think if this game was implemented in something like Inform or TADS it
would have held up a lot better. The interpreter is weak, along with
the room descriptions and interactivity. There's not a lot to enjoy
here, and you'll probably find yourself turning to the walkthrough
early on. I can't see it doing very well in this competition; the
home-brewed aspect just kills it, but at least it's short.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The
Ngah Angah School of Forbidden Wisdom
|
| Author: |
Anssi Räisänen
|
| Author Email: |
anssi.raisanen SP@G kam.fi
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
ALAN 3
|
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
Dark Star |
| Reviewer Email: |
darkstar SP@G infodarkness.com
|
The Ngah Angah School of
Forbidden Wisdom
looked like it was going to be pretty good. There was a translatable
alphabet that came with the game, and I always had fun with these when
I was a kid. But in practice, the alphabet turns into a guess-the-verb
puzzle that I couldn't figure out, and without a walkthrough, I didn't
get very far.
In this game you're trying to complete three
magical tests to get into the school so you can be with your
girlfriend. It never captured me; the very motivation for going through
all of this doesn't seem to be there. The first test is right up front,
so after looking around a bit, I found myself trying out all sorts of
combinations to get past it. The instructions aren't really clear here.
I'm not sure that I'm supposed to be trying to guess a magic word, I
just think that's the goal, and the translatable alphabet is only
failing me. Maybe if the game supported graphics for the symbols. I
don't know if Alan can handle graphics, but there are tools out there
that can, like Hugo. So after guessing for a while, I gave up.
Maybe
it's because I've come to the end of the competition, but I didn't feel
like struggling with another game that didn't compel me with its
setting or story. One thing that I've learned throughout this
competition is, if you're going to do puzzles, you better do them
right; and having one that bottlenecks the game right at the beginning
is just death for the thing. Others might enjoy it, but I'm more of a
zombies/vampires sort of guy, and I can't recommend this one. So I
guess I failed to enter the School of Forbidden Wisdom.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Nightfall
|
| Author: |
Eric Eve
|
| Author Email: |
eric.eve SP@G hmc.ox.ac.uk
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 7)
|
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G grandecom.net
|
Us reviewers can be so predictable sometimes, even to ourselves. When I
first scanned over the games entered into this Comp and the authors who
wrote them, this was the one I was most immediately interested in
playing for the simple reason that Eric Eve is my favorite currently
working author of IF.
Nightfall
fell near the end of my randomized playing schedule, and all through
playing through its predecessors I kept hoping something would wow me
sufficiently to be worthy of a ten. A few came close, but it never
quite happened. Failing that, I was almost hoping that
Nightfall would not
be quite on the level of Mr. Eve's previous efforts, and would itself
not be worthy of my ten. That didn't happen either. And so here I am,
having awarded exactly two tens in three years of judging Comps -- and
both of them have gone to Eric Eve. I think I've officially descended
into hopeless fanboyism.
As
Nightfall
begins, your city -- an anonymous English town set right here in our
own time and universe -- is being evacuated due to the approach of some
unknown Enemy. You decide at the last moment to stay behind when you
realize that a mysterious woman you've had a crush on for years has
also decided not to
flee. You have the vague hope of saving her from some ugly fate by
convincing her to come to her senses -- and, of course, being a typical
male, of parleying your newfound collateral into the relationship
you've been pining for all these years.
The game takes place entirely within the darkened, deserted
confines of your city over the course of a single evening. The only
other people left are some police officers who are combing the streets
for stragglers like you, along with a drunkard or two with nowhere else
to go and, presumably, the woman you're here to "rescue." It's an
eerie, tense play. You don't know just when this Enemy is supposed to
arrive, or even what its true nature might be. Mr. Eve plays the
tension up with the expected but effective series of mysterious sounds,
sightings of distant unknown figures, mysterious lights on the horizon,
etc. As you learn more, your sense of unease does not decrease but
rather the opposite.
At the heart of the game is your relationship with this mysterious and
beautiful woman you have been so obsessed with for so long. This sort
of thing isn't exactly new territory for Mr. Eve, mysterious and
beautiful potential femme-fatales having become something of a staple
in his work. However, the relationship does develop differently here
than does the relationship in
The
Elysium Enigma. You have very little direct contact with
the woman this time around. Rather than through conversation, here you
must piece together your judgments about the woman through a series of
memories that are triggered by visiting various places in the city and
through clues you find that shed light on her personality and motives.
You and the woman have a long history this time around, and thus much
of what you are doing here is discovering backstory that the actual
protagonist is already aware of, at least at some level. Now, at one
level this is a decided step down in storytelling ambition. It's no
bold assertion to say that in general we rely too much upon discovering
backstory, as opposed to making a story of your own, to make our IF
narratives compelling. (It's also no secret why that is, of course,
interactive storytelling in general being so damn hard.) Mr. Eve makes
it work really, really well here, however, and for once it feels like
this was simply the best way to tell the story he was trying to tell,
as opposed to being a shortcut put in place for technical reasons. In
other words, the foreground story of discoveries here is the one he is
really interested in, as opposed to just looking for a device
to convey the backstory in an interactive medium.
The game design works equally well. The game is by no means puzzleless
-- there are in fact plenty of challenges to overcome. None are huge
stumpers, however, and there are multiple solutions all over the place.
Say you find a window which you want to use to enter a locked building,
but that is set into the wall just above your head. As you would
expect, there are various objects you can find about the city that
might allow you to get inside. When something
should work for
solving a problem like that, it does, or you are at least provided with
a plausible reason why it does not. Further, you by no means have to
solve and find everything to complete the game. In fact, you'd have a
very hard time doing so on the first playthrough. When you finish the
game, Mr. Eve even gives you a helpful list of things to try next time
to piece together more of the story. Thankfully, though, going
everywhere and solving everything is not necessary to get the gist of
the situation and get a perfectly satisfactory ending.
Can I complain about
anything
here? Oh, of course. One or two puzzles are a bit two
"text-adventurey," particularly the one involving a certain wino who
will not let you pass until you give him something. The whole thing in
general is so polished and well-tested, though, that it lives up to the
standards of Mr. Eve's previous work easily. I may be predictable, but
I must say that this is a superb piece of work, and qualifies easily as
my game of the Comp for 2008.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Opening
Night
|
| Author: |
David Batterham
|
| Author Email: |
drbatter SP@G drbatter.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7)
|
| Version: |
Release 3
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru
|
There weren't too many unconditionally likeable entries in this year's
Comp. However,
Opening
Night was one of the few lucky exceptions for me.
In
this game, you are a worker who spent his last money to buy a ticket
for a musical his favorite actress is starring in. But they won't let
you in, because you're not dressed fine enough...
The story is
very strong, with a big surprise for the player waiting at the end. The
impact was immense, which was to a no small degree the merit of the
wonderful writing.
It's difficult to talk about
Opening
Night's
virtues without spoiling the aforementioned surprise for the reader;
thus, let's turn to a topic that is much more habitual for an old
nitpicker like myself;) -- the faults that prevented me from giving it
a ten.
Well, the main complaint I have about this game are its
puzzles. Its opening puzzle (overcoming the dress-code obsession of the
guard at the theater entrance), to be more precise. It's not bad on its
own -- but it is a total misfit for the rest of the game, since it is
entirely based on adventure game logic (the solution would work with a
probability of less than 5 % in your everyday life), and thus, in my
eyes, entirely unsuitable for a work intended to be realistic. I spent
quite a time trying solving it; at the very moment I was opening the
walkthrough file I thought, "well, maybe I should try *that*!" My
second (dismissive) thought was, "no, that can't work here, this is
AGL!" Yet, a second later I ascertained this was the correct solution...
Even
if, as one of the members at the Russian interactive fiction forum
suggested, this was done deliberate in order to confuse the player --
well, this device didn't work for me. I can understand the idea, but
the same approach could have been used more elegantly (as it is done,
for instance, with other puzzles: at first glance, they might
seem like a misfit too, but as the story progresses, it becomes clear
what they mean).
Then, there were a few implementation issues.
The game sometimes persists on carrying out mundane actions that should
be implied too much (this is very similar to the UNLOCK DOOR THEN OPEN
IT problem that was discussed some time ago in SPAG). For instance, in
a scene, you find yourself standing on a trash can. If you decide to
leave your current location, you can't just type a direction -- the
game will tell you you have to get off the trash can first. But even
DOWN doesn't work -- you have to explicitely enter GET OFF TRASH CAN,
or (thankfully) just OUT. Besides, there were a few outright bugs --
like, an empty room, which the player can enter by going in a direction
not expected by the game author, or another location telling you there
are paths running in all directions, but saying you can't go that way
if you try following any of them. Of course, those are pretty minor
quibbles, and they only get annoying because of the overall quality of
the work; in a less impressive game, I probably wouldn't have noticed
them at all.
Finally, this game is about theater, and, like in a
real theater, there are moments where you are a passive spectator, just
hitting "z" turn after turn. These sequences are rather prolonged,
especially in relation to the (rather small) overall game size. Well,
this wasn't really a problem for me -- the wonderful writing I
mentioned before really helped to enjoy those periods of inactive
waiting; speaking objectively, though -- a fair amount of players might
not like it.
Despite all these cavils, though, I rated
Opening Night an 8
(which means "excellent" on my scale).
And from Dark Star:
Opening Night
is an interesting piece that sets up many questions, but delivers
before the curtains fall. It's a tight design that only took me an hour
to finish, unveiling a back-story that really draws you in, but some of
the puzzles might force you to turn to the walkthrough early on.
You
play a factory worker attending the opening night of Miranda Lily's
latest show. This game focuses on story over puzzles, though in the
beginning the direction wasn't clear; but as the story progresses, it
smoothes itself out, with game play becoming more playable. The
implementation is solid, with almost all the scenery present, but it
lacks any real NPC interaction. Also, a few of the puzzles do
bottleneck the game, which caused me to turn to the walkthrough. A bit
of redesign would really help here.
There's a really enjoyable
narrative going on, that's propelled by the undercurrent of the
back-story. The code is solid, though some of the puzzles are a little
hard. If it throws you in the beginning, stick with it. The game does
pay off in the end.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Piracy
2.0
|
| Author: |
Sean Huxter
|
| Author Email: |
piracy SP@G huxter.org
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 6)
|
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru
|
Another very
oldschoolish game. Here, you have to defeat the pirates who captured
your spaceship. Contrary to what the author is saying, the game isn't
very suitable for a two hours play. It requires a profound approach --
alone finding out how all the ship control systems are operated will
take a lot of your time. It's also very likely that you'll have to
grope for the winning strategy by trial and error (or, in other words,
by saving and restoring). As you might have guessed already, it's a
puzzlefest -- but a very solid one.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Project
Delta: The Course
|
| Author: |
Emilian Kowalewski
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
MS-DOS / Windows executable (Node-X)
|
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
Nate B. Dovel |
| Reviewer Email: |
atreyu918 SP@G gmail.com
|
There's not
a lot to say about
Project Delta: The
Course.
The
author calls it a
"prequel" in the introduction, but it's more accurately just a demo
of a new IF system the author has designed.
Instead of exploring and interacting with the simulated
world via a
verb/noun/prepositional phrase command, such as "hit nate with the
frying
pan," you have a palette of five or so options listed after a short
block
of text describing where you are and what is happening.
Type the number next to the command, and you
carry out that action.
I
appreciate this
clean, simple interface, and I imagine this is an ideal format for IF
newbies
who get annoyed that the game doesn't understand "grab Nate by the
collar
and slap some damn sense into him."
However,
in
trying to simplify things, the author has thrown out the baby with the
bath
water. By outright
listing each possible
action, any challenge the game might have presented is lost. Gone is the sense of your
presence in a
physical space you can explore creatively at your discretion. By necessity, any
inconsequential but interesting
actions such as "eat pencil" are missing, because the list of options
would grow far too long if it enumerated every frivolous possibility. It might have been a
better idea to have a
few of the major actions for the current location listed in this way,
maybe
even just the exit choices, but still allow the player to explore their
surroundings through text commands.
This
way, the player doesn't get stuck, they have the benefit of the
clutter-free
display, but they also get to exercise some freedom.
As
for the
game portion, the prose just isn't very well written.
You are told "you are a young and white
female with shorter hair and a smooth body making a fit impression" who
is
"wear[ing] a black tattoo." A
smooth body? Wearing
a tattoo? What, am
I an alien gym instructor with
detachable skin? That
said was in a
manner awkward sentence. Helped
would
have proofreader. The
plot is something
irrelevant about being an amnesiac, elite agent for a secret
military... whoa,
just nodded off there.
The
game is
far too short and the final goal is unforgivably lame- you shoot a
target. That's it.
Hope I'm not ruining anything for you.
Note to authors everywhere:
IF is
not meant for tests of hand-eye coordination or spatial accuracy. There is no challenge or
satisfaction to
typing "shoot target," or in this case especially, selecting the
option "shoot target" from a list of EXACTLY ONE OPTION. There is a great medium
for this: the game
industry calls it a first-person
shooter, and they pump out approximately nine hundred thousand each
year. One of them
must be hiring. Or
you could just build a better dart
board. The plot
would be better than Halo, at least.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Recess
at Last
|
| Author: |
Gerald Aungst
|
| Author Email: |
gerald SP@G aungst.org |
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 7)
|
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Dark Star |
| Reviewer Email: |
darkstar SP@G infodarkness.com
|
Recess At Last
is short game in which you play a fourth grader who can't go outside
due to not turning in your homework. The goals are clear, and the
implementation is solid, but the game play is too easy. There's not
much here, just a few puzzles that have no real challenge. Also, it
didn't feel like fourth grade; everything was sterile. None of the kids
were picking on me, no classmates were throwing spit wads,
and
there weren't any children playing around behind the teacher's back. It
wasn't humorous, and the ending left me flat. Maybe if the game made
some sort of point it would have worked better for me, but that's kind
of hard to do in a fourth-grade setting. This one probably isn't worth
your time.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Red
Moon
|
| Author: |
Jonathan Hay
|
| Author Email: |
gerald SP@G aungst.org |
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7)
|
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru
|
The game reminded
me of
Symetry
by Rybread Celsius (although I think the similarities are pure
coincidence). It is very short, but it's not easy to beat, and can be
ended in several ways. Once you get the idea of how to go about winning
it, though, you probably won't have much trouble finding the
alternative endings.
Unlike Mr. Celsius, the author of
Red
Moon
managed to create a satisfyingly scary atmosphere; however, there
seemed to be some problems with the way the story was told. Me, for
instance, misinterpreted it, and had to read the accompanying materials
to get it right. But this is a minor issue. My main complaint about
this entry is, it simply doesn't work on its own in its current form;
making it a scene in a larger game suggests itself.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Riverside
|
| Author: |
Drew, Jeremy, and Vic
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7)
|
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru
|
Riverside made me
think of a passage from the IntroComp FAQ:
WHAT'S TO STOP ME FROM JUST ADDING "AND THEN THEY ALL DIED -- THE END"
TO MY ENTRY AND THEN CLAIMING MY PRIZE? BWAHAHAHA!
Indeed, it looked like an IntroComp game entered in the wrong
competition... or like a bad joke.
The
stub of story before the abrupt ending was told very nicely, although
there was some gentle but obvious railroading present. There were no
puzzles to speak of -- in each of the four episodes, I received a
rather clear (and pretty trivial) goal, and had to master it to advance
the plot. Apart from the baffling ending, the only serious thing to
complain about was the scarce implementation -- most items mentioned in
the descriptions couldn't be referred to, and of those that could many
reacted with generic responses.
Still, the whole thing was quite likeable (thanks to the prose for the
most part)... If only it was finished!
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The
Search for the Ultimate Weapon
|
| Author: |
Sharilynn
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Windows executable (SUDS)
|
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G grandecom.net |
Do you know those
Asian kung fu movies -- or parodies of Asian kung fu movies -- in which
the dialog is horribly translated, horribly acted and dubbed, and often
doesn't make much sense at all? Well, playing this game is a bit like
watching one of those movies. The nicest thing I can say about it is
that it almost attains "so bad it's good" status, in an "all your base
are belong to us" sort of way.
You play an historical Chinese figure, a woman named Wu Mei who will
eventually go on to found a new school of martial arts. At the moment,
though, you are concerned about finding an "ultimate weapon" with which
to take revenge on a prince who has murdered your family. Perhaps I can
convey some of the flavor of this one by saying that its title is
completely earnest, meant with no irony whatsoever. I am quite certain
that the entire game is written in the same spirit. This means that
although the martial arts master you talk to speaks
exactly like Yoda,
this is either pure coincidence or accidental pop culture channeling.
Which makes it ten times more funny than it would be if it was
intended as an
ironic bit of fun, of course.
So, then, finding this weapon involves visiting a monastery and
learning from the monks there. The master there gives you a couple of
puzzles to solve, and after doing so you learn -- no surprise here --
that the ultimate weapon was within you all the time, yadda yadda
yadda. At the end you get to demonstrate your new wisdom by -- no
surprise here -- electing not to give into your hate and kill
the prince.
So that's the (bad) plot. But that's only the beginning of the problems
here. I have the impression that the writer is not a native English
speaker, as revealed by his frequent strange and inappropriate choices
of words. She has all kinds of problems with tense, veering
from past to present not just from paragraph to paragraph or even
sentence to sentence, but within individual sentences. The game is also
badly bugged. When I talked to Yoda for the first time, he gave me the
first of two tasks I had to carry out to gain his assistance. In my
general messing-about, I accidentally completed the second task before
completing the first or even being informed what the second task
was. Sure enough,
when I returned to Yoda he announced that I had completed my tests and
was now ready to receive enlightenment. His big insight was that the
guards at the evil prince's palace take a nap every afternoon. This
leads to two questions: 1) Couldn't I have figure this out for myself,
just by observing things a bit? 2) Didn't anybody at the palace ever
think that nap-time for guards might be a Bad Idea?
Other things are just as weird. The game has a day / night cycle. Okay,
fair enough -- except that by my calculations each turn must use at
least an
hour
of real time. Taking my inventory requires an hour; looking at an
object requires an hour; etc. Perhaps I am just so hugely enlightened
that I give myself over to these simple tasks so completely as
to lose an hour at them -- but that doesn't explain why walking from
the isolated monastery to the palace of the prince absorbs the exact
same amount of time as looking at the hoodie I'm wearing. (No, I didn't
know that people wore hoodies in ancient China either.)
This game was created using a system called SUDS. It's hard to judge
the system fairly when playing a game written by such an inept author,
but I nevertheless wasn't much impressed. SUDS plays fairly similarly
to Quest -- all manipulatable objects appear in menus which you can
select with the mouse. Verbs are given icons at the top of the screen.
Luckily, it's possible to play the old-fashioned way as well. I found
the entire presentation rather garish, but some of that may be down to
the game author's choices: each phase of the day reveals a more
unreadable color combination than the last, and the text inexplicably
doubles in size occasionally for no reason I could see. On the other
hand, the interpreter does not do MOREing, and the parser is (alas,
predictably enough) atrocious.
I'll give SUDS a more thorough critique, however, when I find a more
competent game written with it. I've complained enough here as it is.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Snack
Time!
|
| Author: |
Hardy the Bulldog and Renee Choba
|
| Author Email: |
hardythebulldog SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7)
|
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Nate B. Dovel |
| Reviewer Email: |
atreyu918 SP@G gmail.com
|
A story
told from a unique perspective can make a good game great, or even a
bad game
mediocre.
I can
happily live the rest of
my life without another game starring an armored space marine or a
simple
commoner thrust into an epic struggle or a spunky Japanese anything.
Put me in the shoes of an
octopus shoe
salesman, though, and I don't care how lame the gameplay is, I'll at
least have
a memorable chuckle, even if I only play five minutes.
Snack
Time! is a fine example of the good made great.
You play the authorial
bulldog.
In a
charming twist, though, you view your
human caretaker as your own dimwitted but lovable pet who you must
influence
with your canine abilities in order to satisfy your munchies.
This is a simple game with
a simple story,
but I loved every minute of it.
It
is a
brief adventure, to be sure (I finished in under an hour, and I play
very
deliberately) but it is often hilarious and rewarding.
The progression is not difficult
but does require some thoughtful interaction, as your character does
not
analyze his world like a human.
Simple
things like toilets and socks become mysterious and amusing
irrespective of
their intended purpose, and to use them effectively, you must learn a
stable of
new, well-implemented verbs, such as "lick" and "chew".
You do not have the infinitely deep pockets
of a Zorkian cave crawler- you can carry only one thing in your mouth
at a
time.
And you
cannot directly converse
with the most important interactive element, your master, so you must
be
creative to gain an understanding with him.
All this creates an immersive experience which encourages
curiosity and
rewards experimentation, though such dense variety comes at the expense
of a
short leash.
I
would love to see a follow-up
set in a larger world, perhaps a park or a kennel.
It is entirely possible that one
must be an animal lover to enjoy this game.
Like most pet owners, I often wonder what my furry
companions think of
the world around them, and me specifically- am I well-liked, or just
patronized
because I know how to open the kibble bin?
How much power do I wield over them, or more importantly,
how much do
they subtly wield over me?
One
who is
not interested in this relationship as I am may not get the same
satisfaction I
did from
Snack Time! Put it this way- if you
know what "lolcats"
are, and they bring you great joy, you will have a great time with this
game.
If not, you
at least get a short, quirky
experience peppered with a few eye-rolls and snickers.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Trein
|
| Author: |
Leena Kowser Ganguli
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7)
|
| Version: |
Release 2
|
| Reviewer: |
Nate B. Dovel |
| Reviewer Email: |
atreyu918 SP@G gmail.com
|
Trein,
first and foremost, is in dire
need of proofreading.
Spelling
and
grammatical errors are rife.
The
narration cuts awkwardly back and forth between ornate period language,
full of
"shalls" and "dare nots", to clunky modern
phraseology.
The
total amount of
descriptive text can probably be cut in half, mostly by eliminating
unnecessary
wording, like starting every other sentence with "additionally" or
"presently".
A new
sentence
implies the presence of something additional!
We know the events are happening presently, we're playing
a game in the
present tense!
I'm
sorry, but excessive
wordiness is like walking around with Jell-o down my boxers.
A couple of spoonfuls may
liven things up,
but stuffing the whole mold down there just makes it hard to
concentrate.
I
don't think an understanding of language
and structure, the basic essentials of readability, is too much to ask
for.
You play an
aide to a medieval lord, who has sent you to investigate the strange
goings-on
in a town called Trein Hill.
You
must
gather evidence that a conspiracy is afoot.
That's about as detailed as the story gets.
You are never told the
specifics of the
crime- the final MacGuffin is laughably referred to only as "an
Evidence."
Eat your
heart out,
Matlock.
The NPCs
are all gratingly
flat, their contributing dialogue being exactly one scant nugget
pertaining to
whatever the next plot point is.
Don't
bother asking the bartender about the bar, the town, or those
boisterous guards
at the next table.
She
has nothing to
say about any subject save the next link in the rather short, dull
chain of
events.
On the surface, the atmosphere is
dark and foreboding- the town has clearly seen better days and almost
conveys
an intriguing melancholy.
Almost.
Then you realize the
author has not bothered
to go into any detail about your surroundings.
At one point, I encountered a location where, according to
the room
description, a roof had collapsed into the street.
Curious, I type "examine
roof".
I was graced
with "You
can't see any such thing."
This
emptiness hits you constantly, like you're merely a blind man amongst
studio
backlot facades, not a fully realized environment.
Bizarrely, some items have the opposite
problem.
Investigating
the potato bag
yields this helpful tidbit:
"You
look at the Bag- yes, it contains potatoes."
Some rooms describe their decorations and
furniture in detail, only to have the automatically generated list of
the
room's contents redundantly and blandly rattle it all off again because
the
author forgot to program them as scenery and not something that might
fit in
your pocket.
The "puzzles", as the
walkthrough generously refers to them, are all of the mundane
lock-and-key
variety.
There are
multiple endings, but
none of them seem relevant or even worthwhile, since your character has
almost
no personality and your quest no substance. I would suggest this
fiction might
be better told in a non-interactive medium, such as a short story,
hopefully
forcing the author to be more focused in both preparation and execution.
But as an interactive
world it is ultimately a
sloppy and uninteresting chore.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Violet
|
| Author: |
Jeremy Freese
|
| Author Email: |
jeremyfreese SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7)
|
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G grandecom.net |
This game
does something with the avatar / narrator relationship which I can't
recall ever seeing before. You play a procrastinating graduate
student who desperately needs to complete his dissertation. You
need to do this not only for the obvious reasons -- career, money, the
indignity of being perpetually in school while all your friends long
ago got real jobs, etc. -- but also because your girlfriend has told
you she is going to leave you if you don't get on with it and get
finished so that the two of you can start the next stage of your life
together. She has sent you to your office as the game begins,
giving you the choice of either writing 1000 words or of having her fly
back to Australia and out of your life forever tomorrow. And
here's the twist I mentioned: the whole game is narrated to you by said
girlfriend, the eponymous Violet. It's certainly a clever
conceit, and one that works pretty well. As you play, you learn
more and more details about your and Violet's personalities, your
relationship, and how exactly you came to this impasse, mostly through
Violet's comments upon the various items in your office and upon your
actions.
Aside from this very notable wrinkle,
Violetis
an extremely well-implemented one-room puzzle game. Winning
requires, obviously, that you find a way to write those thousand words.
Willpower not being your forte, you must eliminate a whole host of
distractions: the temptations of the Internet, the temptation to
eavesdrop on the conversation of your ex-girlfriend in the office next
door, that book on your shelf that you haven't yet read and feel you
must before you can get started actually writing, etc. Gameplay,
then, comes down to a sort of modern version of the famous
Hitchhiker's Babel
Fish puzzle. You eliminate distractions one by one through
extremely convoluted means, until at last you can find no possible
reason to procrastinate any more.
Violet
is at first glance very much of the "IF as casual game" aesthetic that
has emerged in just the last few years, of a piece with games like
Suveh Nux,
Child's Play, and even to some extent last year's Comp winner
Lost Pig.
These games offer simple, light-hearted plots onto which are
fashioned the "juicy" style of gameplay that Emily Short wrote about
somewhat recently in her blog. They very much encourage their
players to experiment with actions, offering coherent, often humorous
responses to even the craziest. They also share a certain
similarity of tone: humorous but never offensive; difficult to solve as
puzzleboxes but at the same time never overly demanding of their
players' emotions or time. They are well-written but light; were
I a Marxist I'd be tempted to call them the quintessential bourgeois
games. While I appreciate the craft and effort that go into games
of this ilk, craft that makes them in some ways among the most
impressive works of IF being created today, the overall aesthetic is
just not my favorite. They are impressive games that just don't
really hit my sweet spot.
I was ready for a while to dump
Violet
into this category, motivated not only by its style of play and general
tone but also by the sheer mundaneness of its subject matter, especially
in light of my own life. (Playing the role of a procrastinating
graduate student struggling to complete his dissertation is, shall we
say, not exactly a big stretch for me.) And then, as my
frustration mounted with the puzzles, I began to loathe the weak-willed
sponge of a man that is the PC and to get almost equally irritated with
Violet's own jocular, oh-so-Aussie tone, which descended in my mind
from fresh and charming to overbearingly twee as my time with the game
went on. In the end, though,
Violet
rose again in my estimation, first by delivering some dribs of real
emotion and tension amidst the drabs of light humor, and then by
offering an ending which is actually moving and inspiring.
But I
still have complaints about the gameplay. These puzzles are hard
-- really, really hard, and hard in a very frustrating way. I
spent the full two-hour judging period just overcoming the game's first
significant challenge. Faced with beating my head against what I
assumed would be at least a handful of similarly difficult challenges,
I went to the walkthrough out of sheer exhaustion. I'm glad I
did, as I don't think I ever would have solved a couple of these.
The
game's design makes solving each puzzle rather unrewarding.
In a conventional adventure, a difficult puzzle solved usually
means more rooms to explore, or some sort of significant narrative
development. Here, it just means that you get to be thwarted in
your efforts to write by something else. Sure, you're making
progress, but it doesn't feel like terribly rewarding progress.
And the thing is, the puzzles don't
need
to be this hard. All of the game's strengths -- the try
anything to see what happens playfulness, the amusing narrator, the
endless little gags and clever asides, and ultimately the
resolution of the PC's romantic and career crisis -- would have stood
just as well with more straightforward, clearly clued puzzles. In
fact, they would have stood in sharper relief, unobscured by the
player's frustration with the brick-wall difficulty of the puzzles.
Yes, the game has hints, and they're very well done, but no one
likes to solve a game by reading the hints. A fighting chance of
the player getting there on his own would leave him better served.
But
even if I am a bit disappointed with the puzzle design, the amount of
care that went into this is rather breathtaking. It's by far the
most technically impressive game of this Comp,
does something genuinely new with the player / narrator relationship,
and stands out for the sheer quality of its writing. I
suspect this one will challenge for the #1 slot overall, and while it's
a bit too frustrating for me to give it that honor on my personal
scorecard, I'm nevertheless very impressed.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
When
Machines Attack
|
| Author: |
Mark Jones
|
| Author Email: |
m4rk70ne5 SP@G hotmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 6)
|
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Valentine Kopteltsev |
| Reviewer Email: |
uux SP@G mail.ru
|
This
game feels like a wild mix of impressions and adoptions from a whole
bunch of sci-fi horror works poured out on the unknowing player. There
are problems everywhere: the story is full of contradictions, stretches
and outright nonsense; the writing -- of spelling mistakes and
unnecessary tautologies; the implementation demonstrates many features
revealing WMA is a first attempt -- like, the repetitive messages that
keep popping up at the end of each turn even if the previously
displayed description made them obsolete. It takes somewhat longer than
two hours to finish this work -- and that even if you play from the
walkthrough. If I played fair, I'd probably spent the whole judging
period of the Comp trying to beat WMA -- not only because of its size,
but also because on several occasions it's not clear what to do next,
and some puzzles require prolonged sequences of mundane actions to be
solved. It's also very difficult to navigate through the game world
without mapping it out -- it's effectively a single maze, with the
exits often not mentioned in the descriptions (oh, and those
that
are
mentioned often don't match the actual directions you have to go in to
leave the location). The game features a few overlong railroading
sections (the
most annoying were the trip through the plant at the
beginning, and the one towards the end, where I had to hit "z" nineteen
times). All in all, this entry was one of the rare occasions making me
feel that my urge to carry through any affair I've taken up is a bad
habit.
Back to Table of
Contents
IntroComp
2008
Reviews
While I wasn't able
to play the six entries in this year's IntroComp
during the judging period, I did play each of them shortly thereafter.
In the interest of assuaging my guilt for not participating as a judge,
I here present short reviews of a very worthy batch of games that are
all to one degree or another worthy of serving as the basis for the
sort of IF epics some of us still miss and pine for.
Authors:
I have more or less complete transcripts of my time with each of these.
Just drop me a line if you'd like me to send yours to you.
| Title: |
Bedtime
Story
|
| Author: |
Marius Müller
|
| Author Email: |
the-ghoul SP@G gmx.de
|
| Release Date: |
August, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G grandecom.net |
Bedtime Story
is the tale of a prince in a fantasy kingdom who is attempting to
rescue his inevitable princess.
Yawn.
But wait, don't go... for this game is
really the story of
a father and son who are concacting this slab of fantasy gobblygook
together.
I say that you are working together because your son, as children will
do, constantly interrupts to clarify small points or point our your
story's flaws and incongruities, or just because the story starts to go
in a direction incompatible with his current whims. Suffice to say that
by the end of this very short introduction the troll guarding the
entrance to the castle that holds the princess has turned into a robot
due to Danny's recent interest in
Space
Rangers.
I'm
not generally the best audience for slices of domestic contentment like
this one, but I found this effort completely charming and far removed
the from the sort of cloying sweetness its concept might first suggest.
Mr. Müller makes your interactions with your son not only funny but
completely
real.
Clearly this is a man who has been in this particular situation. In its
own unassuming way,
Bedtime
Story plays with the player / avatar / narrator
relationship in a similar way to
Violet.
I personally found
Bedtime
Story
to be even more effective, as its constant breaking of the fourth wall
felt more natural and less overbearing -- or perhaps just because I
liked little Danny and his father more than Violet and her
procrastinating boyfriend. It stands as my favorite entry of this
IntroComp.
Verdict for the Author:
This is a fine, fine start. Finish with the same level of care and
quality that you've begun with, and you've got a winner.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Fiendish
Zoo
|
| Author: |
Elizabeth Heller
|
| Author Email: |
theliziz SP@G hotmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
August, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G grandecom.net |
Fiendish Zoo
casts you as curator of a zoo in (I think) Hell, whose inhabitants are
manticores and cockatrices rather than the usual tigers and bears. Its
overall tone reminded me quite a bit of
Escape from the Underworld
from this year main Comp: a sort of comical Pratchett-esque portrait of
the nether regions as places just as banal to its inhabitants as our
world is to us. Less fortunately but also like
Escape,
Fiendish Zoo
is quite underwritten and underimplemented, which serves to bleed a lot
of the potential out of its setting and runs the risk of turning its
puzzles into an extended round of Parser Fun. Also, the game's subject
matter makes it a bit of a balancing act that I'm not sure this author
is prepared for. A cute little kitten is present, a kitten which is
strongly implied as earmarked to become manticore food. Thankfully,
this introduction doesn't make me carry through with delivering the
kitten to its fate, but if it did this animal lover would be guranteed
to quit and never return. Jokes about torture and death as everyday
banalities are one thing; making us directly engage in hellish
activities is quite another.
Verdict for the Author:
The idea behind this one is clever, and could result in a fine little
light-hearted adventure. However, you need to raise the bar on your
descriptions and your implementation level substantially, and always
remember that
hellish
cruelty might be funny in the abstract but it's nothing to laugh about
in the specific.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Nine
Tenths of the Law
|
| Author: |
Jack Welch
|
| Author Email: |
ninetenths SP@G templaro.com
|
| Release Date: |
August, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 6) |
| Version: |
Release 112
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G grandecom.net |
The
author describes this old school puzzler as "difficult," and that's a
description that few are likely to argue with. The author also
describes his game as "fair," but that's a description that might
arouse some debate. Absolutely nothing is spoonfed to the player. You
begin the game as some sort of immoble plant-like creature, and this is
pretty much what
I
remained
for a long, long time, until finally realizing that the first puzzle is
in fact a guess the verb that requires giving some thought to the
cliche that is partially formed by the game's title. If similar puzzles
continue to crop up, this game is likely to be completely inaccessible
to folks who are not
very
familiar with English and its common cliches and idioms, a fact which
gives the lie to the author's contention that "no special external
knowledge is needed" to solve this one. That's not meant as a
blanket condemnation;
Nord
and Bert is one of my favorite games. It is, however,
something for the author to be aware of and think about.
This
is quite a large entry in IntroComp terms. In fact, I'd say that even
in its IntroComp form it's larger and more ambitious than at least half
the games that were entered into this year's regular Comp. It presented
such a challenge that I didn't want to struggle with it too much
knowing its was incomplete, but what I saw did impress me in its way.
The writing and surrealist atmosphere rather reminded me of one of my
all-time favorites, the obscure old homebrew classic
t-zero. I would
love, absolutely love, to play an old-school epic puzzler with that
kind of feel again.
Verdict for the Author:
I really like the feel of this one, but pulling it together into the
tough as nails but solvable puzzler that I think you want to create
will be no small task. Lots of tweaking will be needed to get the
balance right. Pull it off, though, and maybe you've got a classic on
your hands.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Phoenix's
Landing: Destiny
|
| Author: |
Carolyn VanEseltine
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
August, 2008
|
| System: |
Glulx (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G grandecom.net |
This
entry wows with its sheer ambition. It's a fantasy tale set in a quite
well-developed world that generally (if not completely) manages to
avoid outright cliche, even if it's quite obviously in debt to plenty
of genre literature. The game begins with a well-realized RPG-style
character creation, done not through assigning blocks of numbers and
skills but rather through an intuitive series of choices presented in
the context of the story. After this there unspools quite a lengthy and
varied -- if linear -- introduction that is much longer than
the
average main Comp entry. Throughout, the game seems to do a good enough
job of integrating and adapting your character choices into the story,
but if this really does represent only the barest beginning of the epic
envisioned by the author... well, the mind boggles. It's one heck of a
task she's taking upon herself.
The writing is sold and vivid
enough, and this entry already must represent many hours of
effort. Some underclued puzzles and some parsing problems near the end,
however, do detract a bit from a generally well-tested and polished
entry. But my biggest concern is whether one person working on a
hobbyist basis can ever really
finish
something so monumentally ambitious. Not that I wouldn't love
to play it if she did...
Verdict for the Author: Even
as an introduction this has one heck of a lot going for it. And yet,
and while I admire your verve and ambition, I wonder if you wouldn't be
better served to scale the character creation system at least back a
bit. The combinatorial explosion factor is going to be huge, and I'm
not sure how much all of these options will really add to the player's
enjoyment.
Neverwinter
Night 2
and games like it are cool... but alas, you don't have a team of dozens
working for you, and perhaps IF isn't the best medium for that sort of
thing anyway.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Storm
Cellar
|
| Author: |
P.F. Sheckarski
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
August, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G grandecom.net |
This
is the most problematic of all the entries in this year's IntroComp.
It's a zombie story, a genre we've been oddly innundated with lately,
and a thinly written, poorly implemented one at that. The game begins,
in classic horror movie fashion, with you driving along a deserted road
with the sun setting and an ominous looking storm on the horizon. The
implementation problems start with these very first turns. I had no
idea what the game wanted me to do here, or how much role it wanted me
to take in actually, you know, driving:
>x me
You
glance at your reflection in the rear view mirror, but see nothing
unexpected. Your eyes are brighter than you'd expected at this hour.
You feel newly minted, ready for anything.
>i
You glance away from the road for a second, then decide you can worry
about that later.
>drive w
The
road continues on to the west, the way you've been headed for hours.
You haven't seen any side roads, and there's no point heading back east.
>drive
What do you want to drive?
>car
(the rental car)
You already are.
>w
You're already headed that way.
>z
You
resign yourself to the drive. Within moments, however, you catch
yourself falling into a trance again. You shake it off, determined to
stay alert.
>turn on radio
You scan through the stations, but, except for the occasional garbled
voice, it's all white noise out here.
>z
You're determined to stay focused, for safety's sake.
>z
You're determined to stay focused, for safety's sake.
>z
You're determined to stay focused, for safety's sake.
>x clouds
Even
if you stopped the car, the clouds still would be surging toward you at
an alarming rate. Maybe the storm will blow itself out before it gets
to you, though you doubt it.
Your eyes return to the road -- just in time.
Another vehicle, a truck, sits motionless on the road, blocking both
lanes. You are still traveling 70 miles per hour.
Anyway, what follows is a rather threadbare but gory tale of zombie
horror that rather reminded me of
The
Lucubrator
from this year's main Comp, although this entry actually fares better
by virtue of being fairly solvable for those willing to overlook and/or
work around its bugs and parsing problems.
Verdict for the Author:
To be honest, this game isn't really to my taste, and probably wouldn't
be even if you fixed its many problems and punched up your writing
considerably. However, it seems that there are quite a few people who
really
like
gory zombie
horror, and to my knowledge no one has completed a good,
polished
game in this genre that seems to attract a lot of second-rate dabblers.
So, if you're ready to get more serious about your craft, there's your
opportunity.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
The
Bloody Guns
|
| Author: |
Stuart Allen
|
| Author Email: |
stuart SP@G animats.net
|
| Release Date: |
August, 2008
|
| System: |
JACL |
| Version: |
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G grandecom.net |
The Bloody Guns
has an unusual setting for IF: it takes place in Darwin, Australia,
during World War II. The game appears to be very well researched; just
this short segment does a great job of evoking the mood and feel of its
times, in addition to getting the bare details of the military hardware
right. You play an anti-aircraft gunner, and your goal for this
introduction is (naturally enough) to shoot down a Japanese plane that
is attacking your base. After accomplishing that, however, you are
assigned to a commando raid of sorts to a nearby island -- and there,
in true cliffhanger fashion, the story stops for now.
The game
is written in an IF development system of Mr. Allen's own devising
which he calls JACL. It acquited itself surprisingly well. I
encountered no obvious parsing problems, and the whole thing, including
some nicely done atmospheric sound effects and music, felt very
polished and professional. The same compliment can be extended to the
writing. My only real concern here is that this introduction is very,
very railroaded. That's probably okay for the opening sequence of a
game, but Mr. Allen will need to start allowing the player a lot more
agency once the game begins in earnest. Otherwise, though, bravo for a
neat concept set in a fascinating and underused (in IF) period of
history.
Verdict for the Author:
I'm concerned about the linearity. As long as you know that you cannot
get away with railroading your whole game in the way you did this
introduction, though, you could build something very special from this
beginning.
Back to Table of Contents
Other
Game
Reviews
| Title: |
Ausflug am
Wochenende nach München
|
| Author: |
Utah State University Creative Learning Environments Lab
|
| Author Email: |
david.neville SP@G usu.edu
bmcinnis SP@G imail.hass.usu.edu
|
| Release Date: |
September, 2007
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 6) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Jimmy Maher |
| Reviewer Email: |
maher SP@G grandecom.net
|
I've been striving (or at least actively pining) to learn
German for the last five years or so with moderate but far from
breathtaking success, language learning being something I decidedly
lack any natural talent for. Being a technological sort of fellow, I've
tried to use computerized tools of various sorts to aid me along the
way. I must say, however, that I'm rather nonplussed by the quality of
the software out there for this purpose. The heavily hyped
Rosetta Stone
programs are useful for building vocabulary, but fail to effectively
teach grammar or the all-important art of understanding and forming
sentences on the fly in a conversational setting. The less heavily
hyped
Tell Me More
programs
do make a stab at providing a more well-rounded language education, but
are partially spoiled by too many cutsey animations and other
multimedia bits that only slow down the process of actually learning,
as well by as a clumsy, limited interface. I eventually found my best
technological friends to be the Pimsleur series of language learning
tapes, which at least got me comfortable pronouncing German and to some
extent building sentences of my own on a real-time basis. For the rest,
I've found no substitute for books and, of course, practice with a
patient living human being -- a luxury I have unusual access to, since
my wife is German. But still, and while it's hard to imagine books and
live practive ever becoming truly unneccessary for the achievement of
real fluency, I'm really quite surprised as I write this that better
computerized tools have not been developed, given that the teaching of
languages is a huge and profitable educational industry. It's
a
truism that the best way to learn a language is via immersion, the more
complete the better. Given that, I think what is needed is a sort of
conversational simulator, to replicate the experience of cultural
immersion as completely as possible, albeit without the nerve-wracking
discomfort of trying to interact with strangers in a language one
grasps little or not at all.
Which brings me to IF. I've heard
plenty of stories over the years of people from non-English speaking
countries using text adventures as a route to English. (Granted,
relying too heavily might lead to a somewhat odd way of comunicating --
asking people to EXAMINE lots of things, saying Z when one means WAIT,
etc. -- but the general point holds I think.) Tradional IF doesn't
offer all or even most of what I would like to see in my hypothetical
conversation simulator, as it (usually) has no real-time or audio
component, but it does force its player to read and understand text and
to respond by formulating phrases of a sort -- albeit simplistic ones.
I've thus mused on and off since beginning my little German odyssey
about the potential for IF as a language learning tool.
And it
seems that the folks at the Utah State University Creative Learning
Labs have been thinking about the same thing, because last year they
released an IF "game" designed for just that purpose. It's called
Ausflug am Wochenende nach
München, which translates to
Weekend Outing to Munich,
and it plays out in two stages.
The
first part is a tutorial written largely in English, with the purpose
of simutaneously introducing the medium of IF as a whole (no prior
knowledge at all being assumed) and of teaching the basics of how to
interact with the command line
in
German.
There's a surprising amount of information that needs to be conveyed in
this latter category, German having a much more complex and
subtle
grammar than English. Verb tense (first person singular), two part
verbs (put the second part at the end of the phrase), and of course
what to do about those pesky umlauts all must be explained. (For some
reason the game does not understand umlauts even if your keyboard is
capable of typing them. Whether this oddity is a limitation of this
game only or the deutsche Inform-Library that powers it I don't know.)
Then there is the issue of German articles, which convey vital
information about a given noun's role in a sentence and thus cannot be
so lightly discarded as can their English counterparts. But, in the
interest of keeping this review from turning into a language lesson
itself, suffice to say that all is succinctly and clearly explained,
and then the actual game, which is written entirely in German, begins.
Said
game is basically a simple and traditional but fairly well designed
text adventure of the sort that most of you reading this have
probably played by the score. You play an American college student
studying abroad in Freiburg who has decided to take an outing
this
bright Saturday morning to Munich. The game takes place entirely in and
around the Freiburg train station, where you must purchase a ticket and
some provisions for the journey and find your way to the correct train.
This being a text adventure, accomplishing all this naturally requires
overcoming a few obstacles by solving some fairly typical adventure
game puzzles. And that's about it. Were the game written in English it
would be pleasant but altogether unmemorable, one of those unassuming
little titles that appear in every year's Comp that I literally cannot
remember ever playing or reviewing -- at least by glancing over their
titles alone -- by the time the next Comp rolls around. Also in common
with many middling Comp games, it falls down a bit in technical polish
here and there, the most egregious problem being the plot events that
are occasionally included in the room descriptions.
But it's not
written in English, and that's the important thing here. As a route
toward bettering my German, I found it surprisingly effective. The
first thing to understand is that, perhaps surprisingly, this is not
pitched at the absolute beginner. The game assumes a basic familiarity
and comfort with the language that will make it much more useful to
third or fourth semester German students than those in their first
semester. That said, it offers considerable aid and comfort. Its
vocabulary and diction stay relatively simple throughout, being at
about an average (American) high school reading level, and it comes
packaged with a very helpful vocabulary list explaining the more
specific or esoteric words used in the text. As an extended but not
always terrible disciplined student of the language, I found the
difficulty just about perfect for own needs. I did have to turn to the
vocabulary list on a fairly frequent basis, but could otherwise work
through the text without too much difficulty. The most gratifying part
of the experience came once I had been playing for a while, when I
found myself ceasing to endlessly translate between German and English
and vice versa but rather to actually
think
in German. This is of course the key point that every language student
wants to get to, the one that defines true fluency in a language. It
was thus gratifying to experience, if only for a little while through
this game, and further reinforces my opinion that IF has real
educational potential in this realm.
The biggest problem with
Ausflug
as a learning tool is that there simply isn't enough of it. Even for
those who might have to struggle with its German even more than I did,
there simply aren't more than two or three good hours of interaction in
here. While that's certainly better than nothing, it nevertheless means
that the game serves more as a proof of concept than a viable learning
tool. On the other hand,
Ausflug
does provide a gentle way of coming to terms with the general mode of
interaction with a work of German IF. While the German IF community is
not exactly thriving, there do seem to be at least a few new games
being written each year, games I for one should really look into. In
the meantime, I don't know what if any future plans the Creative
Learning
Environments Lab might have for this project, but I'd certainly love to
see more tools like this, as both an IF zealot always looking for new
applications of the form and as a typical (almost) monolingual American
who wants to broaden his own language horizons.
Back to
Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Recluse
|
| Author: |
Stephen Gorrell
|
| Author Email: |
recluse_if SP@G yahoo.com
|
| Release Date: |
March, 2008
|
| System: |
TADS 3 |
| Version: |
1
|
| Reviewer: |
Paul Lee |
| Reviewer Email: |
bainespal SP@G yahoo.com
|
While I can stand to play a game that
incorporates puzzles, I have been able to finish few true
puzzlefests. The thrill of exploration and problem solving is
not lost on me, but I usually cannot be motivated to stick with a game
that makes no attempt to provide a plot line serving more of a purpose
than to provide a weak excuse for the puzzles. Recluse is
just that kind of game, though its well-designed puzzles gave me enough
incentive to endure.
The game layout is quite good, and the way the puzzles in different
areas are interrelated is intriguing. This is not to say that
they are flawless. At one point, the game refused to allow
the player to take an object that seemed to fulfill one of the PCs
goals without giving any good reason as to why. The author
hardly even attempted to explain the refusal with the humorous message
produced; it is clear that there was no reason except that allowing the
player to acquire said object at that point did not fit the design of
the game or the scheme of the puzzles. However, in general I
enjoyed the puzzles greatly. They are difficult but
well-clued, and a good hint system is provided. Obviously,
these puzzles are the crowning achievement of the game.
The mechanical aspects are mostly well-done as well. The
author went out of his way to ensure that the game understands anything
logical the player might try, even when that meant more than just
adding a few synonyms. Aside from one point where the hints
revealed that I was trying about the right thing, but the game was not
responding, I was quite impressed. There is nothing
innovative about the technique or presentation, but several complicated
features relating to the puzzles struck me as well-coded and as things
that must have been hard to program. I noticed one major
glitch involving an object that did not show up in the inventory list
when it should have.
Unfortunately, the puzzles and perhaps some solid coding are the only
things the game has going for it. There is nothing wrong with
the writing, save for a few typos, but neither is it particularly
inspired. The change of atmosphere when the player enters the
endgame is far worse. Throughout most of the game, the tone
is very light, with a lot of joking and very little plot to speak of as
the player works on the puzzles. After the player completes
the PC's immediate goal given in the opening text, however, the
gameplay becomes very narrow, with the player simply going along as an
attempt at a story is given. Additionally, when the winning
ending is finally reached, the closing text is inconclusive and fails
to even wrap up what little plot the game has, leaving me feeling very
unsatisfied and wondering what the point to going through all those
puzzles was. The game would have been far better had the
author just slapped on an ending when the PC completed his goals,
but even then the game would be lacking, in my opinion, for
its lack of even a simple but real plot to tie the puzzles together.
Recluse is hardly a bad game by any means, but my impression is that it
is very unbalanced. Perhaps I am missing the point, as the
game was clearly intended as nothing more and nothing less than a
puzzlefest, but I think even a puzzlefest could benefit from some kind
of a coherent story line. Despite being unsatisfied with the
ending, I think that I am ultimately not sorry that I played this
game. It is up to each individual player to decide whether it
is worth it to spend a lot of time playing a puzzle game that does not
seem to take itself entirely seriously.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
What Happens
in Vagueness
|
| Author: |
IF Whispers 4 Team
|
| Author Email: |
|
| Release Date: |
August 26, 2008
|
| System: |
Z-Code (Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1 |
| Reviewer: |
David Monath |
| Reviewer Email: |
dmonath SP@G gmail.com
|
Welcome to review 3.0.
I wanted so very much to write an objective, passionless
critique of What
Happens in Vagueness that, after vast effort and exquisite
attention to detail. . . I wrote an objective, passionless critique.
Observe the fail: score 96% for utility, and zero for
interest. What happened was after
filtering out every last bit of my characteristic verve and snarkiness,
there was nothing left but a chasm of apathy, like a vacuum in my
figurative heart where the anticipation and expectations built by the
first few scenes are systematically freeze-dried and pounded into
microscopic, miserable dust. See,
it's even forced me to mildly anthropomorphize the shards of hope.
To be fair, collaborative
works of any sort are notoriously difficult: especially Interactive
Fiction, wherein an already built-in tendency toward linearity is only
exacerbated by the serial nature of Vagueness, as it is composed of
successive scenes written by ten different authors. Much like in
college group projects, you are only as strong as the weakest member
you can sideline and convince not to participate; this work suffers
from approximately six such individuals.
The best thing which can
be said about it is that it starts well. The long stretches
of empty road, your dead-on-arrival junker, the near-mandatory unsavory
canine companion and American frontier-inspired wasteland all provide
an instantly recognizable setting.
While your initial goal is
to obtain transportation to your Aunt's Mabel's 100th
birthday celebration, that quest is quickly overcome by events and
eventually lost entirely as the progressively less related vignettes
unfold. The second and third authors are actually done a bit
of a personal disservice, since they thoroughly succeed in matching the
first author's well-worn, post-apocalyptic tone, disguising the changes
of scene.
Unfortunately, therein
lies the beginning of the end, like 4th century
Rome. The first five scenes are
largely related, while the final five bear almost no relation to each
other, the foregoing scenes, or even a remote sense of
plausibility. A significant problem throughout, but
especially in the latter scenes (with one remarkable exception –you
know who you are, Jacqueline A. Lott), is a jarring lack of descriptive
depth. Rooms routinely feature descriptions of significant
items which aren't even implemented as scenery.
Tables and chairs, a
curiously ruined ceiling, and even intriguing machinery mentioned in
room descriptions are not found on closer
examination. While accepted and forgiven in the
Infocom heyday, this has long been considered an unacceptable faux pas
in genteel IF society. One scene
revolves around interaction with an unending supply of alcohol which,
regardless of how much one consumes, never has the slightest effect on
one's perceptions or the room's description. Having
been in the military for a significant portion of my life, I am
prepared to take a stand against this unforgivable violation of
verisimilitude.
At one point you find
yourself in a gambling pit, and this occurs:
>x pit
You can't see
any such thing.
>x
gambling pit
I only
understood you as far as wanting to examine the gambling tokens.
And thus it turns out you
have gambling tokens, which is news. Shortly afterward, there
is an inevitable discovery that the verb "insert" has not been
implemented in a casino, of all places. If
you choose to play the slots in Vagueness,
you may as well direct commands to your cat, for all it will accomplish.
(Do not construe this as advice to purchase a cat, unless
you are hardy of ego or possessed of an innate desire for victimology.)
While there are countless
such examples throughout Vagueness,
that one hit at a particular emotional low point in the play through .
. . by which I mean, any time after the Rusty Bolt Fiasco (see the
below paragraph). The only redeeming element of the casino
scene is that it was immediately followed by an even more sparsely
implemented scene: the most egregious case of descriptive laziness
(let's say "ever") in Scene 7, of which the only notes taken during
play were, "The point at which I lost all interest. Horribly
unimplemented. I'm playing a shell."
In one of Vagueness' few
points of consistency, the puzzles are just as clumsily patched
together. Hitting a rusty bolt (I told you we'd come back to
it) with a gun barrel somehow bruises your knuckles, but attacking the
bolt with your knife successfully breaks it . . . Elsewhere,
an object is stuck in a chandelier, but climbing on a nearby shelf and
standing on a counter are refused as "not much is to be achieved" by
such an action, and nothing may be thrown at the chandelier or object.
Climbing an open staircase in the same room renders
the chandelier completely inaccessible. There is a
nearly limitless
supply of logical solutions to every puzzle to which the authors
decline to give even a passing review.
In Scene 9 you are
required to use a verb which at every point up to this in the game
appeared entirely unutilized. Later,
you can decode a message informing you that you've followed a red
herring to the wrong location; this clue gives you your true
destination, but when you try to leave you are told, "This is the place
to be. You don't have any other clues yet about where to
be." Yes, that sound you just heard in
your imagination was in fact my psychic death scream.
You may even choose to hear it voiced by Leonard Nimoy in
the original Star Trek
episode "Devil in the Dark." PAAAIIIINN!
Thanks, Leonard.
However, there are a few
bright points. As indicated earlier, Jacqueline A. Lott's
Scene 8, "Heaven is a Heart-Shaped Box," while brief, was mercifully
colorful, vivid in description, and well implemented in
scenery. It bears no stylistic or narrative relation to the
rest of the game, but neither do any of the final five
scenes. Ms. Lott would do well to explore her creative
talents on her own.
Carl Muckenhoupt, in his
Scene 5, "Invisiclues," deserves credit for creating one of the most
logical, albeit unlikely, puzzles, which hinges on a genuine point of
physics. This was the final point in the game which held any
verisimilitude, although, ironically, the same one which lets you drink
guiltless (and profitless) gallons of alchohol.
It is difficult to give
one rating to a work created by ten individuals, but given the
illogical and inconsistent nature of the puzzles, the shoddy
implementation, lack of descriptive depth, and incoherency of narrative
and style, perhaps one star out of five. After all,
you can
complete the game by reading the source code. For
the love of any other game you could be playing . . . please don't.
Back to Table of
Contents
SPAG Specifics
The following are
not
a conventional reviews, but rather in-depth discussions of
design.
As such, they
contains
spoilers, and are recommended reading for
after you have
completed the games in question.
| Title: |
Photopia |
| Author: |
Adam Cadre
|
| Author Email: |
172 SP@G adamcadre.ac
|
| Release Date: |
October 1, 1998
|
| System: |
Z-Code(Inform 6) |
| Version: |
1.22
|
| Reviewer: |
Victor Gijsbers |
| Reviewer Email: |
victor SP@G lilith.gotdns.org
|
It is now
almost exactly a decade ago that
Photopia was
released, and in that decade it may well have been discussed more often
than any other post-Infocom interactive fiction (with the possible
exception of
Galatea).
All this discussion notwithstanding, the game has been consistently
misunderstood; a theme, message and purpose have been attributed to it
that it simply does not have, while its true theme, message and purpose
(which are in many respects the opposite of those of the received
reading) have gone unnoticed. This tenth anniversary of
Photopia seems as
good an occasion as any to attempt to change this situation.
The received reading of
Photopia
can be split in two parts that reinforce and complement each other, and
which we can call the surface reading and the depth reading. We will
discuss the surface reading first.
On this surface reading of
Photopia,
the piece is primarily the tragic story of a girl who is killed in a
car accident. What it sets out to achieve, and what it achieves in some
readers but not in others, is a strong emotional response to Alley's
death. It is thus primarily a sentimental piece, and its effectiveness
is proportional to the strength of the emotional response it manages to
evoke. In this vein, Duncan Stevens writes that "
Photopia stands or
falls on the player's reaction to the story." [
1]
Critical responses to
Photopia
often move entirely within the space of this surface reading. Here is
Emily Short:
Some people consider it the most moving piece of IF they've
ever tried. I personally found it wavered between effective and
manipulative, with the main character too saintly to be true.
[
2]
Similar sentiments have been expressed by Jimmy Maher:
That story is a pretty good one, but doesn't move me to the
extent it does some others. From a purely literary perspective, it's a
bit heavy-handed and emotionally manipulative. Alley, the teenage girl
at its emotional core, is more of a sentimentalized geek
wish-fulfillment fantasy ("She's beautiful and charming and she likes
science!") than a believable character.
Short and Maher are almost right. If
Photopia had been
primarily intended as a sentimental tale that must move us to tears in
order to succeed, then it falls far short of perfection. There is very
little bonding with the main character, partly because we see very
little of her, and partly because what we see are not the kinds of
scene that might make us care about her. We don't hear about her
thoughts, her wishes, her dreams, about all the things that make up her
unique personality and that would turn her death into an emotionally
gripping event. Duncan Stevens writes:
The message of this game and of Photopia, for me at least: if you want
us to care about characters, make us spend significant amounts of time
with them. [
3]
and that seems solid advice. But this ought not lead to the conclusion
that
Photopia
fails because Adam Cadre failed to have us spend enough quality time
with Alley; rather, it should make us question the received surface
reading of the game. Is it really the case that
Photopia is
primarily a sentimental piece? Or can Cadre's design decision be better
understood on a different reading of the piece?
One argument in favour of the received surface reading is that the
game
in fact
appeals to most of its readers on a direct emotional level, and that
this would be a mystery if it hadn't been designed to do so. This
argument does not convince me. That people react in such an emotional
way to
Photopia
may well result from the fact that the bleakness of its frame story is
totally unexpected, unexpected, that is, by people who did not believe
that computer games could be so bleak, and who did not sit down to play
this game with the emotional barriers in place that they would
certainly have put up if they had gone to see a movie or had sat down
to read a book. If this is the case, the emotional responses to the
piece may be no more than a side effect of writing a computer game in
which the protagonist (necessarily but undeservedly) dies.
I would like to stress that taking away the sentimental aspect
of
Photopia
in no way diminishes the artistic quality of the piece. Consider Emily
Short's point about games that make us cry:
In addition, I think the metric of how a game makes us feel
needs to be treated with caution. While I like and admire good comedy,
I've also laughed at movies that I thought were complete trash.
Likewise, the ability to evoke tears may be valued by audiences, but it
isn't, in itself, a guarantee of either depth or literary quality. I've
felt tears well up over news reports; over schlock children's movies;
even, occasionally, over well-constructed ads. [
4]
Indeed, taking away the sentimental aspect of
Photopia will help
us see its true artistic quality. Instead of a manipulative piece that
doesn't work for its more sophisticated readers (and that includes
almost everyone who reads it for a second time), we will be able to see
that it is in fact a carefully constructed and highly effective
meditation on death, hope and influence. But before we can see this, we
must first do away with the received depth reading.
The received depth reading of
Photopia is that
its theme is the distinction between determinism and free will; and
that its message is that freedom is an illusion, that the world will go
its pre-determined course no matter what we try. The main technique
that it uses to drive these messages home is the linearity of its plot,
that is, the player's inability to change the outcome.
There is ample evidence that sophisticated readers have tended to view
the piece this way. It is almost impossible to read a discussion
of
Photopia
without coming across statements to the effect that the piece is
extraordinarily linear and non-interactive. Emily Short writes that the
game makes "a point of the player's inability to change the plot" [
5].
Krish Raghav says:
The core of its emotional impact is its ability to turn
this expectation of interaction in a traditional video-game narrative
on its head, and use the LACK of interaction as a narrative form in
itself. Events in Photopia hurtle towards their inescapable fate, and
the jigsaw puzzle timeline provides occasional flashes of what that
conclusion might be, and that sense of foreboding, created by glimpses
of understanding as the plot slowly unravels, only intensifies as the
game progresses. In a sense, the very lack of interactivity becomes the
reason Photopia works [...] Suffice it to say that the inability to
influence the fate that awaits Photopia's characters, and the
claustrophobia that the game's limited interactivity creates within
that universe works fantastically. [
6]
These sentiments are widely shared. Melfi writes "
Photopia presents
these facts of life as unavoidable...as a reader, player, participant,
and mortal human being, we ultimately have no control over our lives." [
7]
Even Wikipedia tells us that "
Photopia
has few puzzles and a linear structure, allowing the player no way to
alter the eventual conclusion but maintaining the illusion of
non-linearity. This gives weight to some of the story's motifs --
questions of free will and determinism." [
8]
The main evidence put forward for the received depth reading is the
linearity of the plot. The fact that you cannot change the way the game
progresses, that it always follows its predetermined course, is felt by
many people to be the most obvious feature of the game, and it is
supposed that since it is the most obvious feature of the game, it must
be there for a thematic reason, and must in fact be the central theme
itself.
First question: how much of the interactive fiction that
precedes
Photopia
allows the player to change the outcome of the story? (And indeed, how
much of the interactive fiction that came after
Photopia allows it?)
The answer is, of course, "almost none". It is a nearly universal
tradition in interactive fiction, only seriously challenged in the past
decade, that there is a single story line with a single outcome. You
could get stuck; perhaps you could even die. But those were not real
narrative strands of the piece. In all this interactive fiction, the
plot was pre-planned for you. Does anyone think it is a central design
feature of
Spider
and Web that you cannot help but escape, and does anyone
draw from that the conclusion that
Spider and Web is
about free will and determinism? Certainly not. Does anyone believe
that
Shade
is about free will and determinism? No. Still, like
Photopia, it only
allows you to move towards a single bad ending. It is every bit as
linear.
So what makes
Photopia
a game that people believe to be about determinism? Certainly none of
its structural features, since these are (in this respect) absolutely
unremarkable and shared with 99% percent of the current IF corpus.
Rather, I think it is the fact that
Photopia's ending
is an ending that people actively wish to avoid; and when they find out
that this is impossible, they are so upset by this that they believe
the unavoidability to be the central message of the game.
But once we stop believing that games are "naturally" mechanisms of
wish fulfillment, power fantasies where we can always get what we want,
then a game with an inevitable undesirable ending seems no more
remarkable than a game with an inevitable desirable ending. There is no
reason to believe that either is about the inevitability of Fate,
unless the
content
of the game supports this notion.
Second question: does the content of
Photopia suggest or
reinforce the idea that it is about free will and determinism, and
specifically, the lack of the former?
Absolutely not. Just consider the scenes that make up
Photopia. Going to
Mars to find a seed; crashing in the ocean; walking along a golden
beach where you find dirt; casting off your space suit to fly away;
feeding a wolf in a forest by planting the seed; telling your daughter
about astrophysics, the dinosaurs, and how she is more than just a
collection of atoms; saving your daughter from death by drowning;
telling a child bed-time stories -- none of those scenes touch on the
theme of determinism
This is a real problem for the received depth reading of
Photopia. If the
illusion of free will is indeed the core theme of the game, then how
can we explain that this theme comes up almost nowhere in the work? It
would have made sense if Cadre had at the very least reinforced his
message through the tale-within-the-tale, but the coloured sequence is
about saving a life and bringing new hope to a dead world, hardly the
kind of fatalist message one would expect if the received depth readin
were true. If the interpretation of a work can make sense of only one
of its elements (Alley's unavoidable death) but remains barren when
confronted by all the rest, it is a strong indication that better
interpretations are possible.
Third question: if Adam Cadre had wanted us to feel our powerlessness
in the face of Fate, would he have ordered the scenes in the way he
actually has ordered them?
Again, no. If that had been his aim, he could have made the piece much
more effective by a simple transposition of scenes. In
Photopia, the
player is never really in a position where he (a) knows what is going
to happen, (b) could plausibly prevent it from happening, but (c) isn't
allowed to do so. One might argue that the scene where Wendy's father
drives Alley through town does put us in this position, but this is a
bit of a stretch: since Wendy's father cannot possibly know that
something bad is about to happen, he could not plausibly prevent it
from happening; and if he fails to prevent it from happening, this is
hardly proof of his powerlessness, but rather proof of his ignorance.
No, the only scene in which the protagonist knows that something bad is
going to happen, and in which he and we really want to stop it, is the
very first scene, where you play the boy who wakes up in a car driven
by his drunken friend. If Adam Cadre had wanted us to feel powerless,
he would have put this scene at the very end,
after we understand
what is going to happen. Then, our frantic but futile attempts to stop
our friend before he goes through the red light would drive home the
cynical message that the received depth reading attributes to
Photopia. But Cadre
has not put it at the end but at the beginning, the exact opposite,
where it functions as the given, as that about which we cannot even
have the illusion that we might change it.
Until now I have stressed that we cannot find the theme of determinism
in
Photopia,
and that the fact that the course of the story is inevitable is not
remarkable and does not call for a special explanation. But of course,
I can hardly deny that there are differences in terms of interaction
between
Photopia
and most other pieces of interactive fiction. There is a sense in which
the game does give you less freedom than other games do. Let us explore
that a bit, to see whether it supports the received depth reading of
the piece.
In most interactive fiction, you are at total liberty to explore the
fictional world in which you reside.
Photopia limits
this liberty in four ways. First, it chains its locations in an almost
totally linear fashion, so that you cannot choose what to do first and
what to do later. Second, in two scenes it even manipulates the
geography of the game world in order to ensure that you see one thing
first and another thing later. Third, a couple of scenes have timers
such that after only a few moves, they end in a predetermined way.
Fourth, there is a scene where the game goes as far as to make the
player character do something if the player does not make her do it
first (running down the steps in order to save the drowning Alley).
Can we best explain these limitations by interpreting them as comments
on determinism? I think not, and for three reasons.
First, as a comment on determinism, these scenes and tricks are utterly
lame. They do not convince us. Surely it was
possible for
Alley's mother to remain in her office. If the red planet had been a
real place, it would have been
possible to visit
the seed pod before the power plant. If these sequences must convince
us that there is no such thing as free will, Cadre has done a
particularly bad job.
Second, there is a plausible alternative out-of-game explanation for
the lack of freedom in these scenes: pacing. All four limitations of
freedom listed above have the effect that Cadre controls the pace at
which the narrative unfolds, and that he controls what events come
before what others, so that we see that the exit to the castle is
closed off before we find out how to open it, and that we see the
destroyed colony before we find what we are looking for. These are
reasonable design goals for Cadre to have, and these goals explain the
relative lack of freedom in
Photopia at least
as well as the received depth reading does.
Third, there are plausible in-game explanations for the lack of freedom
in these scenes. In the coloured scenes, Alley is acting as a kind of
"game master", and she naturally introduces new events and places as
she sees fit for the story. In the black-and-white scenes, we are
reliving memories people have of Alley, and the laws of logic dictate
that these must remain consistent with the present. (Alley cannot have
drowned in the pool, because then she couldn't be babysitting Wendy;
and so on.)
Faced with the choice of attributing to Cadre an unsuccessful attempt
at speaking about determinism or a successful attempt at introducing
pacing into his game and respecting the inner logic of the fictional
world, we should choose the latter. The interpretation that
Photopia wishes to
convince us that freedom is an illusion does not do justice to the
work. This will become only more clear when we take a look at the real
themes that the work exhibits.
Let us first focus on the tale-within-a-tale that Alley tells to Wendy.
It starts on Mars (or perhaps some other red planet), where among the
debris of a failed attempt at colonisation, we find a single seed pod
left undamaged. Through a series of adventures that take us to the
bottom of the sea, a beach made of gold, and a crystal maze, we finally
arrive in a dead and petrified forest. Here, we plant the seed in order
to save the life of a wolf.
In summary: the tale that Alley tells to Wendy is the tale of a seed
taken from ruins, which then gives life to a dead world.
A recurring motif in the tale-within-the-tale is the difference between
the organic, which is good an useful, and the inorganic, which is
barren and uninteresting. Among all the ruined machinery on the dead
rocks of Mars, the one thing we must retrieve is also the one thing
that is alive and therefore full of potential: a seed pod. Among the
golden treasured amassed on the beach, the one thing that is worth
having is again organic: the wooden box filled with soil. Even the
technological artefacts that seem useful to us at the start of the
tale--the spaceship and the spacesuit--end up imprisoning us and
keeping us from reaching our full potential. At the start of the
underwater scene, we must first escape the spaceship, lest it become
our tomb. Among the crystal walls and towers of the maze, we have to
shed the spacesuit and learn to rely on something organic: our own
wings, which are made of feathers. Then, finally, we witness the
ultimate triumph of the organic over the ino rganic: among the
petrified trees, the potentiality of the seed pod and the soil is
revealed as we use them to bring life to the forest and the wolf.
Although all the worlds we traversed were dead and static, the last
word is spoken by life and change as a bush laden with infinite fruits
springs up.
Several of the real-life scenes show us where Alley got the ideas for
her story. There is, first, the scene where Alley almost drowns, which
gives her the idea for the underwater castle. There is, second, the
scene where Alley talks to her father, which gives her the idea for the
golden beach, but perhaps also for Mars and indeed for the message of
the tale she tells Wendy. There is, finally, the scene with the
Photopia, which shows how even her earliest memories shape and
influence the story she tells.
The analogy between the real-life scenes and the coloured scenes from
Alley's tale is clear: both are about seeds that are planted and then
come to fruition, literally in the fantasy story, metaphorically in the
real-life scenes. Alley's father's words are seeds planted in her mind,
that grow into bushes and then continue to bear fruit; one of those
fruits is Alley's tale to Wendy.
The scene where Alley talks to her father is the beating heart
of
Photopia.
It shows clearer than any other scene the metaphorical seeding in
action: her father's words have obviously made a big impression on
Alley, and still excite her imagination years later. At the same time,
it clearly and explicitly makes the point that Alley also tries to
make, namely, that the organic is infinitely more valuable than the
inorganic. Let us reread her father's final paragraph:
"You're not made of a whole lot that's particularly exotic
-- the only stuff heavier than iron, the only things you'd need a
supernova for, are trace elements: a little iodine to keep the goiter
away, that kind of thing. You're made mainly of the most common star
stuff: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen. But you can't just trade yourself in
for a sack of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen the way you can trade gold
for gold. What makes you you is the way that star stuff is arranged,
and that's totally unique. Which makes you more valuable than all the
gold from all the stars in the sky."
This is exactly the same message that Alley, a little more awkwardly,
wishes to convey to Wendy in the scene on the beach. Thus, is this
single scene, most of the message of
Photopia is
concentrated. The only major element of the game that is not repeated
here is that of Alley's death. So let us address the questions: Why
does Alley have to die in the piece? How does that fit in with my
proposed reading? The answers are easy.
Photopia's
message is this: "Do not despair at death, for from the tiniest seeds
we have sown, new and abundant life can come forth."
It is clear that this is the message of the tale-within-the-tale. But
it also the message of the real-life story. It is demonstrated to us
that telling someone a tale of wonder can influence them and make them
creative years later. Then, we witness Alley's die--but only after she
has told a tale to Wendy, thus sowing seeds of her own in that young
mind. Can we doubt that these too will come to fruition? Alley is dead.
It really is the case (as Brendan Barnwell says) that
The story can now be seen as a transition from the happy
baby Alley, full of potential, to the teenage Alley, dead, her
potential destroyed. [
9]
It also really the case (as Adam Cadre himself writes) that:
The colony on the red planet (not necessarily Mars, you'll
note) had so much potential, but something went wrong early on and
snuffed it out before it had a chance - just like Alley. This
is a theme that I've had something of a personal stake in since my
sister's death. [
10]
But
although Alley's potential is destroyed, she had already sown her
seeds. Her potential lives on vicariously, in the minds of those who
knew her; especially in Wendy, but certainly also in that of the boy
who asks her for a dance, and perhaps in those of others as well. There
it will continue to bear fruit. Far from giving us a message of
despair, as the received reading claims, Adam Cadre gives us a message
of hope.
In fact, all of
Photopia
can be seen as a seed pod. Alley dies in the very first scene of the
work--the word "Red" flashing onto our screen is her death. Everything
that follows are memories of those who knew her; each one of them a
seed, planted and watered, that may in time bear fruit.
As far as I have been able to find out, only one reader has
read
Photopia
the way I have read it: Lucian Smith. He wrote, back in 1998:
"No!" I cried, "You can't end yet! I need
closure! I need to know that some good came out of this! I
need to know that that poor boy worked up the courage to ask someone
out again!" But it wasn't there. I replayed the entire game, hoping to
find some way out, but there was none, and absolving myself of some
complicity by dropping myself off in the first scene was small comfort.
But there is hope here, I think. The planted seed that feeds the wolf
in the midst of death is rich with metaphor, and one explanation would
be that the seed is the seed of creativity and wonder planted in the
mind of Wendy. [
11]
Our reading of
Photopia
as a tale of influence, of how we plant seeds in the minds of others,
receives powerful support from some autobiographical details that Adam
Cadre reveals in the
Photopia
FAQ. He there discusses how he got the ideas for the coloured scenes,
and when he gets to the golden scene he writes:
The beach of gold was an idea I'd had ever since I was six,
when I read in Carl Sagan's COSMOS that gold was formed in supernovae.
That book and TV series also sparked my interest in Mars - hell, it
sparked my interest in everything. Virtually the entirety of
any sense of wonder I may have is derived pretty much solely from that
book. I also believe that Carl Sagan is responsible for any eloquence I
may have developed over the years: his work was what taught me the
power of a well-wrought sentence, a perfect paragraph. Around the time
of his death in December 1996, I read many testimonials from people who
said that Carl Sagan's work had been what prompted them to go into
science. I didn't go into science. But Carl Sagan's work is what
prompted me to become a writer. Without COSMOS, I don't think
I'd be a tenth as creative as I am. I'd be living a life straight out
of Human Resources Stories. [10]
Psychologically, then, we can see
Photopia as Adam
Cadre's tribute to Carl Sagan and his creative influence, a tribute
that takes the form of a celebration of influence and an affirmation
that creativity is stronger even than death.
This concludes my analysis of the game's main theme and message. There
is, however, a secondary theme that is also worth dwelling upon
briefly: this theme is the potential of interactive fiction as an
artistic medium, and the things that are keeping it back from turning
potential into actual success.
The potential of interactive fiction is deftly established by Cadre
through the purple scene, Alley's dream of death. Although the entire
game has been linear, and we thus might believe that our interacting
with the work has been totally inconsequential, the purple scene proves
that this is not the case. In this scene, control is taken away from us
for the first time; the commands at the prompt are filled in
automatically, and we can only see the story unfold without having any
influence on it at all. And the interesting thing is: it feels totally
different than all the other scenes. Through one simple trick, Cadre
shows us that interactivity fundamentally changes the act of
reading,
and
he manages to associate non-interactive reading with the non-potential
of death. Thus,
Photopia
is certainly a declaration of love to interactive fiction.
But it is also critical of the present state of the medium. This
criticism would have already been felt if Cadre had just, in a total
break with the tradition, refused to put any puzzles in the piece. It
would have been strengthened by the anti-technological bias of the
game, where machinery--the favoured material of puzzle builders--is
totally inert and devoid of meaning to the human individual. But in
what has to be described as a stroke of genius, Cadre
did put in a single
puzzle, to wit, a puzzle that utterly undermines the idea of puzzles
and that points to a freedom beyond puzzles.
I am, of course, referring to the famous maze-puzzle, where the player
must take off her spacesuit and type "fly". The symbolism cannot be
missed. We are faced with the most archetypal of IF puzzles, and to
solve it, we must refuse to solve it. We must, in a literal as well as
a figurative sense, rise above it. This gives us an instantaneous
freedom that interactive fiction until now has explicitly denied us.
Photopia,
then, presents itself as the seed from which a new and better kind of
interactive fiction can grow. And indeed, it is growing--already, we
see the puzzle losing its grip on our medium. The process is slow. It
has to be slow, since we have no weather salesmen that can give us a
little rain when we need it. But the bush is growing and fruits are
ripening on it, and this is in no small measure thanks to
Photopia.
The piece thus demonstrates the truth of its message in practice as
well as in theory.
Back to Table of
Contents
| Title: |
Rendition |
| Author: |
nespresso
|
| Author Email: |
insectsneverhurtme SP@G gmail.com
|
| Release Date: |
July, 2007
|
| System: |
Z-Code(Inform 7) |
| Version: |
Release 1
|
| Reviewer: |
Victor Gijsbers |
| Reviewer Email: |
victor SP@G lilith.gotdns.org
|
Rendition,
a political art game by nespresso, has already seen a fair share of
discussion. It has no less than seven reviews on the IFDB, it has been
featured on Play This Thing!, and it even has its own Wikipedia
page--all that in spite of the fact that it cannot have taken the
author more than a handful of hours to code it up.
Rendition consists
of a single, very sparse room, and its game play is incredibly
repetitive. So what is all the fuss about? Why are reactions
to
Rendition
so diverse that it gathers as many 1-star rating as 5-star ratings? And
what does this game really achieve? If we want to answer those
questions, we need to add some more discussion to the already
substantial pile.
Rendition
can be summarised in a few sentences, with little of its content left
untold. You are an anonymous, "as good-looking as ever", and presumably
American torturer, who has been given the task of kicking the shit out
of a failed suicide terrorist called Abdul. In order to win the game,
you must abuse a variety of Abdul's body parts in a variety of ways;
possible commands are "kick left buttock", "scratch right ear",
"urinate on head" and "tweak left testicle". Once Abdul has been hurt
enough, he will start answering your questions--never revealing any
useful information, and most of the time speaking Arabic (which the
reader will probably not understand).
That is all. We do not find out why Abdul wanted to become a suicide
bomber. In fact, we don't find out anything about him. We don't find
out anything about ourselves either, except that we have a counsellor
whom we need to visit in order to talk about the odd thoughts we have
been having lately. (This latter fact is revealed in response to such
actions as "kick me".) The game makes no attempt to give us a reason to
torture Abdul; it is only stated that we have to torture him. The game
makes no attempt to have us understand any of the parties involved. It
is nothing but the monotonous repetition of violence, only that,
nothing else.
This is not by itself a reason to love or to hate it.
What does
Rendition
want to achieve? The game calls itself a "political art experiment".
This raises a question: in what sense the game could be called
political. (It also
raises the question of what kind of experiment it is supposed to be;
who are the test subjects, and what data is sought in order to decide
on what hypotheses?) In order to understand why this question is not
trivial, we must reflect for a moment on the nature of the political.
The act of torture, like any other act, is not in itself a political
act; but, like any other act, it becomes political only by being put
into the right context. What kind of context? A context where the act
is justified by appeals to what are recognisably political values and
where this justification is accepted as potentially (though perhaps not
actually) valid by those asked to judge the action. I torturing Abdul
is in itself no more political than I drinking a cup of tea; it becomes
a political act only when I attempt to justify it by appealing to
values such as "protecting the safety of our state", "punishing
disobedience to international law", or "following the commands of high
politicians", and when this justification is accepted by my
interlocutors as a potentially valid defense of my action.
Interestingly, this dimension of justification is mostly absent
from
Rendition.
A few times the protagonist attempts to justify himself, but he never
ventures beyond remarks like "let that be the lesson to anyone who
dares to fuck with the chosen people"--remarks that do not come
together to form even the semblance of a coherent political stance or
ideology that might justify his actions. There is thus nothing
political about the
torture in
Rendition;
it is simply torture.
Of course,
Rendition
could be a political game even if the acts that the protagonist takes
are not recognisably political acts. There are hints--such as the
subtitle "an interactive war on terror"--that the game is meant as a
comment on torture as it is currently used by the United States. The
piece's cover art also points in this direction, since it is based on
one the Abu Ghraib photographs. But if
Rendition is a
comment on a current practice, what is it trying to say? That torture
is bad? That torture is revolting? That torture is unheroic? We were
already convinced of that, and the piece does nothing to convince us
further, nor does it seem to try very hard.
The piece could potentially have made a more subtle point about what is
going on in contemporary politics by exploring either the political or
the psychological dimensions of torture; but such an exploration does
not take place in
Rendition.
The only thing the game explores is the player's ability to keep
playing; and even here it is not very effective, since the mechanics of
the game are so transparent that the only perseverance that is needed
is perseverance at a mechanical task. Perhaps this is the point of the
game, that torture quickly becomes a mechanical and unemotional task
for the torturer. Perhaps; but
Rendition does not
convince us of that point, nor does it give us any insight into the
psychological mechanisms that would make this happen, nor (again) does
it seem to try very hard.
If
Rendition
wants to make a political point, it does not succeed. Many reviewers
agree with this judgment, and they have essentially the same reasons as
I do. They cite the fact that the game doesn't really pose a dilemma;
that it does not explore the psychology of its characters; that it
becomes mechanical far too quickly; that it does not allow us to see
the actors as human beings before subjecting them to the process of
dehumanisation. Perhaps we can summarise these wide-felt complaints as
follows: in
Rendition,
torture is portrayed as shallow and inconsequential, and not even this
shallowness and inconsequentiality are sufficiently thematised.
Rendition
also got some very positive reviews, though. On IFDB, "Hermes" gives
the game five stars and writes:
It's an incredibly shallow approach to simulating a highly
disturbing scenario, likely to be dismissed as "sick" by the easily
offended. But look deeper to reveal the pro-humanist agenda [...]
disguised underneath is a bleakly funny role-playing game that asks the
question: "How far are you willing to go?". And by extension, how far
are you willing to let those in positions of authority, the ones that
represent you, go? Does your meek head-in-the-sand acquiescence not
vindicate and legitimise their warlike aggression?
Yes, the results are both disgusting and offensive... yet it somehow
brings you closer to the truth than any number of "balanced" news
reports could ever do. [
1]
It seems to me that Hermes is projecting far too much of his own ideas
into the game. There cannot be, for instance, a discernible
pro-humanist agenda in
Rendition,
because it never brings into play the political, moral or ideological
concepts that would be needed to formulate a pro-humanist
agenda--regardless of whether the game wanted to express its agenda
directly or through criticism of its opponents. Nor does the game ask
us the question "How far are you willing to go?", because it never
gives us a reason to torture--unless it asks us to measure our
resistance to torture against our wish to progress in the game, but in
that case the discrepancy between goals and means is so vast that we
cannot take the set-up seriously. No, if
Rendition contains
any agenda, if it makes a point, if it allows us to see a truth, this
must be an agenda, a point, a truth that we ourselves project into it.
And perhaps
that
is why
Rendition
can be called a "political art experiment". The experiment is this: we
let someone play the game and we watch that person's reaction.
Since
anything
that the test subjects reads in the work is a projection (possibly
inverted) of her own ideas, this is an ideal way to find out what his
or her moral-political stance is. In such an experiment, the absolute
contentlessness of
Rendition
is a great virtue; and sushabye is right when (s)he writes:
I realized that the game is intended as a kind of mirror
for those who play it. It is very opaque, and doesnt spell out its
intentions at all, so any judgement about its worth, or offence at its
subject matter, says more about the person playing it than the game
itself. [
1]
We can postulate that the goal of the experiment called
Rendition is to
measure which political ideologies prevail in the interactive fiction
community. An interesting goal, but one which
Rendition
doubtlessly fails to reach. It turns out that many reviewers don't care
enough about the game to take it seriously as something with content,
and are thus not tempted to project any political meaning into it at
all. For the experiment to succeed, a more detailed, longer game would
have been needed, a game that seduces us to step into it, care for it,
and then suddenly presents us with a void that we will then inevitably
and almost unconsciously fill up with whatever political view we happen
to have.
Even as an experiment, then,
Rendition must be
judged a failure. Does that mean it is worthless? Not quite. There is
one aspect of the game I have not yet commented on, its most
interesting aspect, the one thing about this game that is truly worth
remembering. If you have not seen it in action, I will inevitably spoil
it for you (as Adam Thornton spoiled half of it, but only half of it,
for me). On the other hand, it is so easy to miss that not reading my
comments will very likely deprive you of the experience as well.
We have seen that within the game, it is impossible to learn anything
about either of the two main characters. Abdul is just Abdul; the
player character is just as good-looking as ever. But in fact this is
true only if two conditions are met: that we ourselves are not aware of
Arab culture, and that we are not willing to step beyond the bounds of
the game in order to learn about this culture from independent sources.
But if we
are
willing to make the effort needed to understand Abdul, using the little
clues that the game gives us (but which it fails to interpret for us),
then some surprising facts about both Abdul and the player character
are revealed.
Thus, Adam Thornton writes:
[W]hen you DIAGNOSE Abdul, one of his body parts is a
foreskin. He's not even Muslim, not that the protagonist is smart
enough to realize it. That was a brilliant touch. [
2]
Thornton's interpretation need not be right: as far as I have been able
to ascertain, circumcision may not be obligatory for males who convert
to Islam later in life. But whether the foreskin is a sign of Abdul
being a convert or of him not being a Muslim at all doesn't matter:
what matters is that there is something personal we can learn about
Abdul, something that the game allows us to glimpse, but
only if we are
willing to make more of an effort to understand Abdul's culture than
the game itself is willing to do.
A similar, even more interesting revelation, can be had by those who
are willing to actually translate the Arab sentences that Abdul speaks.
Generally, they mean things like "I need a doctor" and "I don't
understand". A significant number of his expressions are lines from a
popular song called "Sawah", and translate to such things as "A long
journey, and I'm wounded from it".
But the most interesting thing is that several of the sentences that
Abdul speaks have, in Arabic, both a masculine and a feminine version,
and that Abdul uses the feminine form. Thus, he says "Takalam bebot'
men fadleki?", which means "Can you speak slowly?". It is the feminine
form of this sentence; the masculine would be "Takalam bebot' men
fadlek?". Now I know next to nothing about grammar of Arabic, so my
interpretation may well be wrong; but what Abdul's choice of words
seems to imply is that the person to whom Abdul is speaking, the player
character, is in fact a woman. You, the torturer, the one cast in the
typical male role in the typical male scenario, you are a woman.
This is indeed a brilliant touch. Only by not being satisfied with the
information supplied to you by the game, only by stepping outside of
its boundaries and trying to find the truth yourself, are you able to
discover something about Abdul and the character you are
playing.
This,
at last, is a real point that the game is making, a point not only
about our relation to the media and how they function in political
situations, but a point also about our relation as readers to works of
literature. Through this simple but devious move (and of course it
might not have been a conscious move on the part of the author, but
that is irrelevant for reasons that appear at the end of this
sentence)
Rendition
makes us question the idea that works of interactive fiction are
self-enclosed spaces of meaning that are completely under the control
of the author. When they are related to the world--and how could they
not be?--works of literature are open to interpretations that make use
of knowledge that is not contained within the work itself. The paucity
of meaning within
Rendition
turns out to be at least partly a result of the paucity of our attempts
to understand it.
I think this is an interesting lesson for any author of interactive
fiction. The applications to a "think for yourself!"-school of
political art experiments is obvious; but even those who favour
old-school games can profit greatly. We suddenly realise that it would
be great to have puzzle-fests where finding the solutions involves
real-life investigation (for instance on the Internet). What could be
more fun than a game that has me explore fake Facebook-profiles (set up
by the author of the game), search for clues in
Hamlet and use
Google Earth as a map? A world of possibilities is opened.
This is the lesson that we should take away from
Rendition: a game
can afford to be only one half of the medallion. The other half already
exists; it is the world we live in.
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