Dan's IntroComp '05 Reviews
Dan Shiovitz
forward to seeing them completed. My reviews are a little on the short
side, but be assured that when the games are completed I'll have
something a little longer :) Also, I'm sorry I haven't been keeping up
on reviewing some of the other games that have come out recently -- I
do intend to get to them eventually, but I've been buried under some
other projects. Anyway:
Like all my reviews these are archived on my website at
http://www.drizzle.com/~dans/if/introcomp.html
If you're reading this post after a few days there may be a more
updated version there.
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Deadsville
by William McDuff (Z-Machine)
When my main complaint about an introcomp game is that it's too short,
that's generally a good sign. Deadsville is a fun zombie comedy with a
nice twist -- you're the zombie. The implementation is pretty detailed,
probably even excessively so (but I imagine that'll taper off in a full
game). Like I said, it was a little too short, but it certainly got my
attention, and I'll be looking forward to the full game.
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The Fox, the Dragon, and the Stale Loaf of Bread
by David Welbourn (Z-Machine)
So, uh, the title promises it'll be a game about a fox, a dragon, and a
stale loaf of bread, and I cannot deny that is precisely what it
delivers. It feels perfectly well-implemented, and the writing is nice
and consistent except for the froofy room description on the cliff, but
I can't help wondering where it's heading from here -- if we've already
seen the three title characters in the intro, what's the rest of the
game going to be about? Since this is an intro, I guess I will just
have to play the rest of the game and find out.
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The Hobbit
by Serhei Makarov (Z-Machine)
Hrrm. I think the problem with this game is mostly a feedback one. The
actions it expects you to take aren't totally unreasonable, but they're
pretty much unclued, so unless you are exhaustively trying everything
or get lucky, you're not going to make much progress. Or at least I
didn't (until I hit the walkthrough). The overall tone is kind of
inconsistent, too: it is partly a creepy explore-the-darkness game and
partly a solve-arbitrary-puzzles games, and it's hard to stay creeped
out when you've got this magic hat. But that said, I did like many of
the bits in the game, and it felt like it was just getting the most
interesting when it ended -- which is probably the best way for an
introcomp game to be.
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Weishaupt Scholars
by Michael C Martin (Z-Machine)
I am totally a fan of spy games, so this gets points just for that, and
I didn't see any implementation blunders or anything. But, still, I
found myself a little disappointed. I think the thing was that even
though the game set up a fun premise and had a few teasy plot things,
it didn't actually let me do anything except report for duty. Lame. It
seems like given the little amount of backstory the game actually gave,
it could have just begun in the middle of an action scene and let the
player do some cool stuff -- even if it was totally scripted, it'd be
about the same feel as the game now, only you'd be following a cooler
script. That said, the hints at a plot were interesting enough that I'm
looking forward to the game, I just wish this intro gave me a better
idea of what it'd be like.
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The Amazing Uncle Griswold
by David Whyld (ADRIFT)
Well, I guess this intro does a good job of suggesting what the final
game will be like, since it suggests that it'll be pretty similar to
most of Whyld's other games, which I assume will be the case. I still
don't really care for his sense of humor -- it feels kind of overdone
and self-consciously "look how bizarre I am, isn't that wacky?" -- but
if you do, I imagine you will like this.
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Negotis
by Robert DeFord (TADS 3)
Man. Ok, see, the games I can write a bunch about tend to be those that
prominently illustrate some aspect of IF craft. The problem is that
this means that sometimes you end up with a review like this one, where
it's going to basically just a list of things that irritated me about
the game. I can't really kid myself that the author is going to sit
down and revise the game in response to my comments, but hopefully some
of them will help for a later game. Anyway:
Ok, first off, if you are thinking about disabling UNDO in your game,
reconsider. You have to figure that like 5% of people who start up a
game with no UNDO will quit as soon as they realize this, because it's
too annoying. 15% of people will play until they die, then realize they
haven't saved recently, and quit instead of restarting. 79% will play
through most of the way but write nasty comments about it, and the last
1% will say "hey, seemed fine to me." If dropping UNDO is worth writing
off 99% of your audience, then hey, go for it, but know what you're
getting into.
The UNDO thing is actually a good example of a general problem with the
game -- subsystems that are irritating to the player in a UI sense, add
little to the game experience, and can be subverted anyway. Another
example of this is the skill system. I haven't seen this much in IF
games before -- you have, eg, a Stealth score, that improves by being
stealthy (or by not being stealthy), and you can try and sneak past
guard NPCs, with a success chance based on your Stealth score. I
suppose this is why UNDO was disabled, to prevent people from UNDOing
every time they failed to sneak past -- but even if you don't save and
restore, you can usually just walk out of the room after one round of
the NPC attacking you, then re-enter and try and sneak again. Meh. If
you're going to have a skill system like this, I think it's a bad idea
to make it random -- make it so you just can't sneak past the guard
until you have a sneak skill of 6, and then the puzzle is working out
how to raise your sneak skill to that level (or working out some other
way of getting past the guard).
The buy/sell system is kind of a similar deal. First off, buying
anything from the NPC requires you to go through a complicated haggling
process (he says 200, you have to guess a number, and if it's too low
he gets pissed off, so you guess 150, he says 195, you say 155, and so
on, until he decides to accept your offer). Curiously, this is
inconsistent with selling anything to the NPC, where he just makes a
flat offer that you can take or leave. But, ok, despite having this
complicated buying and selling system which is integral to the game
(since, right, the world is named Negotis and all the people are into
buying and selling), it's all irrelevant, because you can get arbitrary
amounts of money fairly easily. Feh.
The writing is nothing special -- there's a few typos but it's not
terrible -- and the storyline is cliched but not unpleasantly so. I was
kind of interested in how it was going, in fact, which is why it was an
anti-climax to have the game just peter out -- instead of seeing a
teaser message, you get dropped in a little area and can wander around
until you get bored. But the fundamental problem with Negotis, I think,
is that it's trying to show off too many different things -- a
detective story, this skill system, this negotiation/finding money
system -- and they're not well-integrated. Picking just one or two of
those and writing an intro that really showcased it in a number of
interesting ways would have been much more successful.
So, yeah, Negotis didn't work for me, although it has a number of
subparts which could be interesting with some more polish.
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Somewhen
by Bryce J Rhaiz (Z-Machine)
This is one of the games that is best illustrated by a quote from the
transcript, I think:
Front Entrance
Outside the majestic West Baden Springs Hotel. The circular structure
curves away to the northwest and southwest. Far to the southwest lie
the springs and waterpark. To the north is the emerald golf course,
and a tree-lined drive leads east to the magnificent gates, and
beyond, the airport. The registration desk lies beyond the glass
doors to the west. The original limestone can just be seen beneath
the expanse of neon and chrome.
>e
You're pretty much stumped as to how to get anywhere here. Best to
just relax and enjoy the scenery.
>x golf course
You can't see any such thing.
..Right. Eventually I figured out you could walk around the hotel, even
if you can't enter it, and so I did that, and then it turned out there
didn't seem to be any plot or puzzles or anything, so I quit.
--
Dan Shiovitz :: d...@cs.wisc.edu :: http://www.drizzle.com/~dans
"He settled down to dictate a letter to the Consolidated Nailfile and
Eyebrow Tweezer Corporation of Scranton, Pa., which would make them
realize that life is stern and earnest and Nailfile and Eyebrow Tweezer
Corporations are not put in this world for pleasure alone." -PGW