Jason's (very few) IFComp revies
Jason Devlin
aren't so much reviews as general impressions. Also, I've only played a
fraction of the games. Oh well, some shoddy feedback is better than none,
so here goes.
As a general note, I only played those games that gave a good first
impression. I know it's been drilled into us by every half-rate english
teacher, but it really is important to hook the player with the very first
few lines (up until the first prompt, I'd say). This isn't such an issue in
the comp: many people are going to play your game whether the first part
grabs them or not, but unless you want your hard work to fade into oblivion,
you have to grab the the player right away. Rest assured, if your game is
listed here, you succeeded in grabbing my attention (although not in a good
way, necessarily). If not, don't worry. You game may be totally awesome
(last year I didn't play ATD or Square Circle and they were great), the
intro just didn't get to me. Also, be sure to change the library PC
description. If I hear "As good-looking as ever" one more time I will die.
Even if it's apt, it gives the impression that you don't care about the
game. Also, for Inform games, remove strict mode. It screams last-ditch and
rushed-out-the-door. Enough rambling, on to the reviews!
Ninja2.0
Ok, here's the only example of a game grabbing my attention that wasn't in a
good way. Due to Panks's notoriety and the insatiable lure that was
prompted by "Dare you beat Dragon?", I had to play this. If anything, Panks
lives up to his reputation. Sudden death, poor verbs, etc. It was all
there. Still, I had a perverse sort of fun playing it. When ATTACKing,
HITting, and KILLing the Dragon all don't work, you have to go a different
way. But of course! You have to BEAT Dragon. I dared, and I did. Also, I
like it how "The ice dragon beathes fire on you!" That cracked me up whether
it was intentional or not.
Tough Beans
This was the first game I played, and I wasn't disappointed. The intro
totally grabbed me (I'm a sucker for the PRESS ANY KEY and italics effects),
and it was a great lead to how good the rest of the game was.
Unfortunately, I'm writing this a couple weeks after playing, so my memory's
a little fuzzy and specifics might be few. Very few things irked me, one of
which was the walkthrough. When you include a walkthru with a game, please
put it in a form that can be copied and pasted directly (instead of putting
Wait (repeat 7x)). It helps when I need to rapidly skip ahead if I forgot to
save or switched computers. Especially if the game is composed of discrete
scenes. Also, I ran into a problem near the end when I was trying to enter
the coffee shop and it assumed I was talking about the car (I think I typed
IN or OPEN DOOR or something). Other than that, the game was flawless. I
loved it. It was a little chickflick-turned-IF, but I like that sort of
thing. The ABOUT text says the author is friends with Chris Klimas. I'd
like to say I saw his influence, but I'm rather bad at picking up things
like that. However, they definitely were similar in the strength of writing
and characterization.
Snatches
This game was amazing! I was genuinely scared a fair bit of the time, which
I find rare in horror IF. The only problem was that it felt a little
rushed. This game had all the makings of possibly the scariest IF I've ever
played, but a few things bogged it down. There were a handful of bugs, but
they didn't really detract much. Except at the end when I tried to attack
the enemy and got an Inform programming error. The others were minor. You
can take the girl's book and it stays, etc. The part where it felt a little
haphazard was more in the descriptions as seen by different characters.
There was some changes, but I would've liked more. For example, the dog
looks at the cars and sees that they're pretty much all the same except for
the shiny red one. Granted, the dog might notice that, but it was said in
the exact same words as the guy who owned the car. (BTW, I loved how for
the dog SMELL mapped to LOOK). Really, I shouldn't complain this much. I
loved the game and really hope for a post comp release with more time spent
on descriptions.
FutureGame (tm)
Really cute. Not really a game at all, but it gave me 5 minutes of
entertainment so it wasn't a wasted effort (especially considering it
probably didn't take a whole lot longer to code).
Mix Tape
I had mixed feelings about starting this one. The intro was good, but the
ABOUT text gave me pause. I like music, but it doesn't do anything to me
anywhere near to what it does to the author of this game. Still, I gave it
a shot. I liked it a fair bit, but in a strange way. It had a weird effect
on me. A little over a month before I played the game, I was dating someone
named Val (Valdemar, not Valentine, but still). And I ended it. It wasn't
quite what Val and Peter had from the game, but it was still something. So
the whole time I played it, I felt like I was on the other side of the whole
thing. Plus the fact that Val's (your) gender is actually fairly ambiguous
from what I could tell. The description didn't say anything particularly
feminine and the name is more of a man's name than a woman's to me. The
point of all this is that sometimes a game can have a completely unintended
effect on a player. People will inevitably draw from their own experiences
and feelings to make a game something that it's not (or wasn't intended to
be). Anyway, enough digression. The game was good. I didn't get the music
references for the most part, but they still worked. The whole game
reminded me of Tough Beans in a way. The kind-of crappy relationship, the
resolution, the strong/weak female protagonist. Of the two, I think I liked
Tough Beans better, but maybe that's just cause this one hit me a little
close to home and made me feel like a jerk/Peter.
Distress
I wanted to play this game from the start, but I was a little turned off by
the setting. I like sci-fi only interesting sci-fi, and I wasn't sure if
this was going to be it. I was wrong. The writing was great, the story
intense, and the pacing perfect. The only real problems I had was with the
parser. This was the first hugo game I'd ever played, so I wasn't quite
sure of what verbs were already incorporated. One, BURN, wasn't. Sure, burn
isn't necessarily a common verb, but in this game it made quite a bit of
sense to me to be used in some spots. Even if I was wrong, it would have
been nice to have gotten a non-standard response. But once that was out of
the way, the rest of the game flowed by smoothly. I had to restart a number
of times, but the game is short, so that wasn't a problem, and it all made
perfect sense why I would have to. Survival horror just isn't survival
horror without the ability to make mistakes.
I'm not going to spoil the ending, as it is quite a neat little twist, but I
will make a few comments. I kind of wish the ending was the whole game. Or
at least what manifests itself in the closing paragraph was the essence of
the game itself. As nice as it is to get it described, it'd be nicer to get
to live it through the PC.
Looking back, it seems like I'm complaing a lot. Don't let that give you
the wrong impression. I loved it. I just wish it had gone a little bit of
a different direction as the writer obviously has the skill to take it
there.