[Comp03] Paul's reviews -- part 2 of 6 (LONG!)
Paul O'Brian
reviews for the following games:
GOURMET
CURSE OF MANORLAND
INTERNAL DOCUMENTS
THE ADVENTURES OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF AN ARTIST
These reviews are also available at
http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~obrian/IF.htm
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GOURMET by Aaron A. Reed
A few years ago, I was searching around for a way to describe Liza
Daly's "Dinner With Andre", and came up with "sitcom IF." That moniker
seems apt enough to describe Gourmet, a game that aims for screwball
humor but too often is just screwed up. Not that the problems are
obvious at first -- indeed, the premise and opening scenes are
delightful -- you're the harried chef and owner of a brand new
restaurant on the night that a famous dining critic is to visit. Of
course, everything goes wrong: your entire staff flakes out, your food
supplies are woefully minimal due to late distributors, and all your
fancy new equipment seems primed to malfunction. I was having a ball
picturing the PC as a Kelsey Grammer type, a model of urbane
sophistication whose cultured veneer gets slowly dissolved by an
avalanche of calamitous and kooky circumstances. Much of the writing is
witty enough to pull it off, too -- objects both animate and inanimate
acquire an air of implacable comic malice, and the setting is packed
with fun little details, such as the range-top knobs that the PC had
custom made to go up to eleven. Characters, though one-dimensional, are
nicely evoked, and the game has a neat little structure too, divided up
into hors d'oeuvres, first course, and main course, just as you serve
the finicky critic.
Sadly, Gourmet quickly falls victim to the same problem Dinner With
Andre had, which is this: having decided that wacky problems deserve
wacky solutions, the game fails to anticipate enough of the sensible (or
even alternately wacky) solutions that might spring to the mind of a
desperate player. It's difficult to talk about these without getting too
spoilery, but here goes. Take one instance where an uncontrollable mess
is happening in the kitchen. The game anticipates the first obvious
recourse and stymies it. Fair enough. The next recourse might be
something like blocking and cleaning the mess with a towel -- surely any
kitchen has towels, right? Wrong. Not only are they not implemented,
neither is the reason for their absence. Certainly I'll grant that this
level of realism is a lofty and difficult goal, but much of the game
turns on the tension between the realistic demands of the setting and
the ridiculous circumstances created by the plot. Players who are pushed
and prodded about in the name of realism have the right to expect a
satisfyingly thorough implementation thereof. A more blatant example:
you need to prepare a particular drink, which requires the proper
vessel. Stunningly, however, your kitchen is so unequipped as to
completely lack the necessary piece of tableware. In fact, there seems
to be only one such item in the entire restaurant. It would be one thing
if this bizarre situation was excused with some appropriately goofy
explanation, but as it is we're left to feel that the game is
unreasonably shepherding us into wackiness (or even just into
puzzle-solving) by virtue of shoddy implementation. Part of what makes
these logic gaps so intensely frustrating is that the game really does a
great job of ladling on the tension -- I restarted several times because
I was a nervous wreck with the feeling that too much time was elapsing
while I flailed around. I don't know that there actually are any timers
in the game, but it certainly *feels* like there are, and under that
sort of pressure my patience was quite short with what felt to me like
halfhearted implementation.
The bugs get worse as the game progresses, soon moving into responses
that are absent or outright wrong. I turned to the hints almost right
away, and every time I tried to forego them in order to increase the
pleasure of the game, I felt that pleasure turning to frustration as I
struggled in vain against one buggy or unimplemented section after
another. It doesn't help at all that the game makes such basic errors as
making your finger a key plot point, then failing to properly parse
"finger", or parsing "climb" differently from "get on." In another
pinnacle of frustration, the game presents you at one point with a small
animal on the loose that you must find, yet greets any attempt to LOOK
UNDER anything with "You expect you would find nothing of interest." Say
WHAT? That is the exact *opposite* of what the PC would expect (and hope
for) in the circumstance. Additionally, some key NPCs are much too
thinly implemented, and it's perhaps a sign of my frustration that even
on puzzles that offer multiple solutions, I still found myself unable to
even try the ideas that seemed most obvious to me, and ended up turning
to the hints in exasperation. When I got to the point where even one of
the solutions offered in the hints utterly failed to work, I knew that
Gourmet was a huge disappointment. The game credits no testers (in fact,
I couldn't find anybody besides the author credited at all), and the
lack of outside input is all too apparent. There's at least one in every
comp: a game with great potential, clever writing, and fun portions that
dissolves into a mind-numbing bugfest at its end, apparently the product
of a rush to deadline and a lack of patience. In Comp03, Gourmet is the
first game of that type I've played, and the letdown is as stinging as
ever. If interactive fiction ever got reviews in People magazine, the
write-up for this game would probably end with, "BOTTOM LINE: Good
ingredients, but undercooked."
Rating: 6.2
CURSE OF MANORLAND by James King
So here we are in 2003 and people are still writing games in AGT. Even
more disheartening, they're still writing *terrible* games in AGT. Most
bad comp games at least have the virtue of being short, but not this one
-- it's *huge*, and unrelentingly bad all the way through. Now look, I
want to offer constructive criticism, although with a game like this
it's hard to imagine that any suggestions will be implemented, since
quality doesn't exactly seem to be valued. Nevertheless, in lieu of a
detailed review, here are ten ways to improve Curse Of Manorland:
10) Don't use AGT. There are better tools out there now.
9) Settle on a point of view. In the beginning section, I had this
exchange:
Chrissy's room
Your room is covered in rock posters but has Rupert the bear bed
sheets there is a full length closet mirror on the east wall. On the
south is a window. The carpet is bright pink
> x sheets
I loved Rupert - it was my favourite show when I was little - I want
to get Buffy now - she's such a strong character.
Thus, in just a few lines, I got third person ("Chrissy's room"), second
person ("Your room"), and first person ("I loved Rupert"). Pick one.
8) Puzzles need to make sense. I can't imagine anyone (except maybe the
author) ever getting through this game without the walkthrough.
Actually, I didn't even get through it *with* the walkthrough, since the
walkthrough failed to specify the exact moves for the nonsensical maze,
and the game itself was (unsurprisingly) no help. I was using that
walkthrough from the very first puzzle, a puzzle whose solution makes
absolutely no sense at all.
7) Sentences get to have both a subject and a verb. If one of those is
missing, then what you have is a sentence fragment. These are fine, in
certain circumstances, but avoid them until you've mastered writing
regular sentences.
6) While we're at it, both fragments and real sentences end in periods,
not commas, and certainly not just nothing. This is unacceptable:
> x window
A white painted window,
It's especially unacceptable when we need to know that this window is
the size of a mattress. Actually, that comma is sort of an exception --
the vast majority of stand-alone sentences in the game have no terminal
punctuation whatsoever.
5) If the player is supposed to interact with some object, the game
should maybe *mention* that object. It's pretty hard to come up with
"TIE ROPE TO TREE" when there's nothing about any tree in the room
description.
4) Error messages must not lie. If you're looking for "CHOP TREE WITH
AXE" and I type "CHOP TREE", do *not* reply "Don't know how to chop
here..." That doesn't tell me to try another syntax. Instead, it tells
me to forget the chopping idea altogether. The game lied to me like that
over and over again.
3) For heaven's sake, do *not* put random messages in the game that
prevent commands from being carried out without saying so. And
*certainly* do not litter the game with them for hundreds of moves
before a solution is available.
2) Please, forget the inventory limit. And please please please, if
you're going to make me drop stuff, let that stuff not disappear.
1) Spell-check. Beta-test. Have your prose proofread by someone fluent
in English. Don't enter long and/or terrible games in the IF
competition. Give us a break, huh?
Rating: 2.0
INTERNAL DOCUMENTS by Tom Lechner
After Curse Of Manorland, it was a relief to start into a game that
seemed at least to be composed of coherent sentences, although the
incredibly long, clause-upon-clause opener was a bit of a red flag.
Still, the premise of the PC as civil servant investigating electoral
fraud in a small town seemed like it had potential, and I began the game
excited and interested. Sadly, Internal Documents fails on a number of
levels, and by the end of the game I was just annoyed and
disgusted, typing straight from the walkthrough. Some of its problems
are pretty standard, such as the writing issues -- typos and grammatical
errors are common, and a noticeable number of sentences just fail to
make any sense. The coding is similarly problematic. At one point, I
tried to read a document that (according to the hints, anyway) contains
important clues. Here's what happened:
>read manual
Chapter 1 reads:
Xy Yi Z
Zm x b k a c k
a d k a e k a f k a
g Y k a h ( k a i k a j
y k a k 0y k a l 1u k a m 2o k
a 3c 3u
I think this freakiness happens because of a particular quirk in Inform,
because I vaguely remember using it intentionally in LASH to demonstrate
illiteracy. However, in this game it obviously wasn't intentional, and
even the most basic testing should have revealed that it wasn't working
properly.
Another one of Internal Documents' big problems is one that I'd like to
discuss in more depth, because I think it's a signpost for anybody who
wants to design good IF. Basically, the mantra is this: THINK LIKE A
PLAYER. This game doesn't, and falls down badly as a result. Here's an
example: early on in the game, I walk into a bar, and after the room
description and a bit of incidental business, I get this:
The bartender cuts in and asks you, "So what brings you around here?"
Remember now, I'm a player. I'm trying to be immersed in the game's
fictional world, to do what the PC would do. So I type TELL THE
BARTENDER ABOUT DUE DILIGENCE. In the game's words, "This provokes no
response." So then I try to TELL THE BARTENDER ABOUT several other
things, with no results. I proceed to strike out with TALK TO BARTENDER,
ANSWER BARTENDER and ASK BARTENDER ABOUT <a variety of topics.> With
sadness, I realize that the game has asked me a question but has no
intention of providing me with a way of answering. So much for
immersion. See, as a designer, I might know that the bartender isn't
useful, and therefore give him only the bare minimum implementation.
Maybe I want him to seem a little bit alive, so I give him a line of
dialogue when he's first sighted, and maybe I don't so much care just
what that line is. As a player, though, I have no idea whether the
bartender is useful, so if he has some dialogue that encourages further
interaction with him, I'll take it as a cue that indeed he is supposed
to be interesting. Then, when I encounter his minimal implementation,
I'm annoyed and disappointed. The solution? Make the bartender surly and
uncommunicative, so that his thin implementation seems like a natural
aspect of his character. Your game is going to shape your player's
expectations -- there's no way around that, so it should shape them to
its advantage rather than to its detriment. On another "think like a
player" point, remember that what's fun for you isn't necessarily fun
for your player. You may really dig writing up three hundred slightly
varying descriptions of the same sort of rather ordinary room, but by
all that is holy, it is not fun to walk through them. Don't set up
situations where the player ends up wandering huge swaths of useless,
pointless territory, or has to sit around or walk around aimlessly for
dozens of moves waiting for a random event to trigger. That's not fun,
and it produces no particular emotional effect except for irritation.
That's not what players want from their IF.
Another aspect of thinking like a player is recognizing that if the game
prevents a particular action repeatedly by use of unlikely coincidence,
the player is going to believe that this action is forbidden and
unimportant. If you think that the player will later be moved to attempt
to do that forbidden thing as a way of solving a major puzzle, you're
probably wrong, especially if much more sensible solutions are
disallowed. If I the player end up looking at the walkthrough, you want
me to think "Oh, of course! Why didn't I think of that?" Instead, I end
up thinking, "First of all, I thought the game didn't allow that action,
and second of all, how does that make sense as a solution to that puzzle
anyway?" There's a larger point here, which is that implementation
generates expectations. If 99 out of every 100 nouns in your game are
unimplemented, as is indeed the case with Internal Documents, I will
come to expect a very bare-bones experience. I will not type out a long
and unusual command construction, because what possible reason would I
have to believe that the game would understand it? If you do expect me
to do things like that, the game becomes either an intolerable exercise
in attempted authorial telepathy, or else it ends up having to dole out
sledgehammer-like hints (such as 1-2-3's notorious "Don't you want to
ask me about her breasts?") Before you even begin coding, think about
what it will be like for players to experience your game, and if the
answer is "boring", or "irritating", or "confusing", stop those problems
before they start. Otherwise, you end up with something that's great fun
for you, but not for anybody else... something like Internal Documents.
Rating: 5.3
THE ADVENTURES OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES by Mikko Vuorinen
It's been a long time since I've played a Mikko Vuorinen game. The last
one was his 1999 comp entry King Arthur's Night Out, which bizarrely
recast King Arthur as a henpecked husband in a domestic farce. Some
people, like Adam Cadre, apparently found this hilarious, but it mostly
left me cold. Still, I was pleased to see Vuorinen's name on a comp
entry this year, and playing TAOTPOTUS felt like a reunion with a
seldom-seen relative -- even though its behavior was often exasperating,
I couldn't help feeling a certain fondness for it, both because of its
reliably predictable traits and because of my sense of shared history
with it. Vuorinen hasn't lost his affection for putting iconic figures
into strange and comical circumstances, and indeed one of the most
charming things about TAOTPOTUS is its gleeful disregard of realistic IF
conventions. Consider, for example, this bit of game territory:
The United States of America.
Good old USA, in your mind the greatest country in the world. Home of
you and millions of other fellow Americans. The White House is a
magnificent place, but once in a while it's good to see the real
world. As you know, Canada is to the north and Mexico to the south.
> n
O Canada.
Their home and native land.
Lots of trees and that's about it.
To the west is Alaska and to the south the rest of the United States.
Next to you is a particularly tall maple tree.
This isn't any kind of carefully worked-out fantasy trope -- it's not as
if the President is suddenly a literal giant, walking across the
continents in state-spanning strides, though at times it's hard to avoid
that mental image. Instead, it has the childlike feel of marching an
action figure around a big map of the world, having little adventures in
different places without much regard for any sort of fictional
coherence. I mean this in the best possible way. I loved feeling like I
was part of an innocent "let's pretend" session, miniature toys tromping
across a world-themed game board. From the game's title, I was wondering
if it would be a political satire, but as close as it comes is to
suggest that perhaps our President really does see the world in terms as
abstract and simplistic as these. Then again, maybe that's plenty. There
are some moments that suggest a gentle satirical agenda, such as when
you try to go south from Russia and are told "You don't want to go to
the Middle East. Some people there might not like you." There are also
some moments that that made me laugh out loud, such as when I typed HELP
and was told, "You do not need any help. You are the President of the
United States of America." I tried to STOP THE WAR, but sadly the game
informed me that the word "war" is not recognized. If only that were
true.
Unfortunately, fun with icons wasn't the only Vuorinen trait that made
it into this game -- there are also a handful of good old guess-the-verb
puzzles as well, along with the typical admonishment in the walkthrough
that there are no guess-the-verb puzzles, and that the game should be
simple enough for anyone to finish without clues. I got stuck on the
very first puzzle, and discovered from the walkthrough that, just like
in King Arthur's Night Out, there's an item that needs to be SEARCHed,
even though examining it yields a dismissive response. Some of the
puzzles made sense to me, but there were others that really felt like an
exercise in reading the author's mind. The environment (what there was
of it) was reasonably well-implemented, though there were several bits
of dodgy English, and I struggled from time to time with the
deficiencies of the Alan parser. I also need to take a moment here to
grouse about the typically feeble Alan game engine, which fails to
include such essential bits of functionality as UNDO, AGAIN, and
especially SCRIPT. I really dislike having to periodically copy the
scrollback buffer into a text editor in order to keep a record of my
interaction with the game, especially since I only belatedly remembered
that this buffer keeps a rather paltry amount, and consequently I lost
the transcript from my first 15 minutes or so with the game. Okay, I
feel better now that I've vented. Overall, TAOTPOTUS is brief and kinda
fun, and if you're a Vuorinen fan, you'll probably like it a lot.
Rating: 7.5
EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF AN ARTIST by Peter Eastman
My wife used to teach a college course called "Shakespeare For
Non-Majors," which was usually full of business and engineering
students, there either to fulfill their dreaded "Literature and the
Arts" core curriculum requirement, or else to, as she sometimes put it,
"get their Cultural Literacy cards stamped." Students generally came
into this class with one of two attitudes towards Shakespeare. Some of
them hated him -- they called him "boring", and groused of having him
thrown at them all their lives as some sort of ultimate authority.
Usually, a major part of these students' problem was that they actually
just didn't understand the meaning of the words when they looked at a
Shakespeare text. The other category of students *loved* Shakespeare,
and actually embraced and revered him as an ultimate authority. They
would claim stridently that he was the Greatest Author Of All Time, that
he had a perfect understanding of Human Nature, that his works are
Timeless, and that every scrap of his texts embodied Deep Truth.
Interestingly, these students usually *also* didn't understand the
meaning of the words when they looked at a Shakespeare text, but they
knew enough to recognize that much of our culture sees Shakespeare as a
dispenser of wisdom, and believes that if you can quote strings of words
from his sonnets or plays, that ability indicates that you're an
intelligent person with great insights about life. The PC of Episode is
one of this latter type. His life could hardly be more mundane -- he
gets up, gets dressed, eats breakfast, and goes to work at a factory,
where he spends all day in front of a conveyer belt putting green
widgets on red wodgets. Yet he thinks of himself as smart and wise -- an
artist, in fact, and hence the title. "No one could put those widgets
together like I could," he says of himself. A large part of his faith in
his mind and soul comes from the fact that he carries around a book of
quotations, of which he has memorized great swaths, and he can pull out
a quote for even the dullest occasions. Yet, as the text makes plain,
knowing a quote isn't the same thing as understanding it. For instance,
when an unexpectedly blue widget suddenly appears on the conveyer belt:
Ralph Waldo Emerson said that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin
of little minds, and he knew what he was talking about. He knew that
sometimes the widgets would be green, and sometimes they'd be blue.
So I've been doing this job for eight years, and every widget I've
ever seen has been green. That doesn't mean the next one won't be
blue. You've got to just take what comes and go on with your job.
Emerson understood that, and that's why he was such a great genius.
Of course Emerson wasn't thinking of blue and green widgets when he
wrote the "foolish consistency" line, and of course that line comes from
a much larger explanatory context, but those things don't bother the PC
a bit -- in his mind, he has access to Emerson's "great genius", to what
literary critic John Guillory (swiping a term from sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu) called his "cultural capital", and that genius is helping the
PC deal with a difficult situation. In fact, all he's really doing is
taking his own thoughts and slapping the label "Emerson" on them so that
he can call them wise and not have to question them any further. This
trait permeates the character, and makes him one of the most intriguing
PCs I've seen in an IF game for a long time.
The design of Episode nicely reinforces the PC's character. At first, I
was annoyed with it for making me go through such extremely quotidian
tasks as showering, picking out clothes for the day, and so on. Once I
grokked the PC a little better, though, I loved the game for doing that.
By forcing me to step through those tasks, and to experience the PC's
unwavering interest in and enjoyment of them (as well as hearing his
ceaseless grab-bag of quotes applied to them), the game let me become
closely acquainted with the PC's mindset in a way that still felt
interactive and advanced the plot. Because it's preceded by such an
exceedingly ordinary morning routine, that blue widget and the PC's
shock at it carries much more of an impact than if it had been the
beginning scene of the game. Speaking of shock, I was rather jarred by
the fact that the game apparently takes place in the Zork universe. The
PC carries a five-zorkmid bill in his wallet, finds a Dimwit Flathead
lunchbox, and so on. Now, granted, one of the game's major plot points
rests on its Zorkian setting, but it feels a little strange to see
references to people like Emerson and Shakespeare, or to see crates
labeled "USDA GRADE A", as if those things had some part in the Zork
universe. There's also the fact that nowhere does the game acknowledge
that permission for use of these things was sought or received from
Activision. It's almost as if the game itself takes some part of the
PC's simple-mindedness.
That's what's so puzzling, and vexing, about this game. For all that it
seems to be very cleverly written and designed, it also suffers from
these logic gaps, as well as from sloppy coding and some serious bugs,
one so bad that it can derail the game completely and force the player
to a RESTORE or multiple UNDO. With a game like Rameses, part of the
clue to look beyond the surface of things is the fact that the game is
obviously coded with intelligence and care. I didn't find that to be the
case with Episode -- aside from the aforementioned bug, I suffered
synonym problems, guess-the-verb, and basic weirdnesses like the fact
that the score stayed 0 out of 100 for the entire game. I found no
mechanics problems with the prose, which made the lackluster coding feel
all the more odd. I still can't decide whether this game is the product
of great writing skill paired with novice coding abilities, or whether
it's just a not-very-good game that ended up unintentionally profound.
If it's the former, Episode would benefit greatly from a once-over by
someone like Mike Sousa, who enjoys collaboration and whose TADS skills
are impeccable. If it's the latter, well, I guess I'm about to give my
highest score ever for a bad comp game.
Rating: 8.4
--
Paul O'Brian obr...@colorado.edu http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~obrian
Won't you please contribute your original comp reviews to the SPAG
Competition issue? The deadline is December 5th!