reveling in the loot that accrues from his malicious prowess. The IF
version of BOFH, then, casts me as an apprentice Bastard, eager to wreak
havoc on the deserving.

Thus forearmed, I fired up the game. The very first thing I noticed was
that the debugging verbs are left on. Not a good sign. Shortly after
that, I discovered that the game suffers from grammar problems, and some
rather poor implementation, like the laptop that can be neither opened
nor switched on. Also, the writing fails to explain critical points,
such as the fact that after somebody magically appears, he also
apparently magically disappears without notice. It seems that newlines
also frequently disappear (or rather, never appear to begin with), which
looks ugly. Shortly after all that, I found the room where an NPC
repeats the same exact speech over and over again, because that speech
is apparently implemented as part of his "initial" property, and since
he never acquires the "moved" attribute he never switches from using
this attribute to a more reasonable description. It was at about that
point that I decided, "Hey, I'm a BOFH, right? It's my job to punish
stupidity with cruelty, right? Let's go, then." I typed TREE to get a
look at the game's object tree, then PURLOINed any items that looked
interesting. I PURLOINed the NPC, which shut him up quite handily. A
SHOWOBJ confirmed that indeed, his speech was implemented in his
"initial" property. Tsk tsk.

After a while, the charm faded from this activity, so I just restarted
the game and went through according to the walkthrough, still employing
the occasional judicious PURLOIN or GONEAR when something looked like
too much trouble to bother with. It doesn't get any better. Rather than
mutating entirely into the Bastard Reviewer From Hell, I'll just say
that it would seem Mr. Travaglia should have requested editorial control
rather than just giving permission carte blanche, since I'd be rather
surprised if this is the game he wants representing his work as IF. My
advice is to spend your time reading the stories on his archive if cruel
humor is your cup of tea. They're sure to be more entertaining and less
frustrating than this game, which turns out to be less of a Bastard and
more of a luser.

Rating: 3.4 (so close, but ah well, there you are)

FOUR MILE ISLAND by Anonymous

Note: I can't really think of a way to review this game without
including one major spoiler. So one major spoiler is included. Just FYI.

In Comp2000, Chris Charla entered a game called Infil-Traitor, which
purported to be a rickety BASIC game from 1982, but was in fact a
rickety BASIC game he had programmed himself the month before the comp
started. I didn't play that game because the compiled version had a
fatal bug, so it fell to the bottom of my list and I never got around to
actually recompiling it in order to try the playable version. Given that
I only found out after the comp was over that the entry was submitted
under false pretenses, I kinda thought I'd dodged a bullet there. I was
wrong, because he did it again. Four Mile Island comes with a long and
detailed readme which tells the story of how the author used to work in
a warehouse that some computer magazines had used as office space and
found an old, never-published type-in computer game, typed it in and
entered it in the comp with the permission of the author. Even if all
this was true, it'd hardly make for a promising comp entry, but of
course it isn't true, it's just a made-up cover to allow the author to
create a near-perfect facsimile of an early Eighties magazine type-in
adventure game.

Of course, the question that leaps to mind here, and I'm sure I'm not
the only one asking this is: why? Those who played Infil-Traitor are no
doubt asking, "For God's sake, man, why *twice*?" I mean, sure, it plays
just like a game whose source code might appear in a 1984 computing
magazine. Yeah, it's written in BASIC. Yeah, it's got a two-word parser.
Yeah, the plot is something about the Cold War and nuclear bombs. Yeah,
it's pretty buggy. Yeah, it's got an annoying maze. I grant all these
things. But are they virtues? They were the best we could do at the
time, but are they worth recreating? Not to me, they aren't. I actually
*like* being able to save my game. I think UNDO is a *good* thing. I
think it's kind of cool how a game can end now and I can actually read
the ending text because it's not running in a DOS window that shuts down
after the program exits. An exact replica of a primitive game is no more
fun to play than an actual primitive game. I think that's one of those
Zen aphorisms, or something.

Of course, that's just me. We all have our preferences. And I'm quite
sure that to some, my fascination with Infocom-style text adventures and
their modern descendents would be just as quirky as someone else's
fascination with type-in games. So let's hear it for the IF competition,
which allows even the strangest retro-text-gaming passions some outlet.
If somebody's idea of a good time is to write up a BASIC two-word parser
game that feels just like one I might have typed into my Atari 800 when
I was 14 years old, more power to 'em. It just doesn't happen to be my
idea of a good game. Tastes vary.

Rating: 4.1

OUT OF THE STUDY by Anssi Raisanen

A few years ago, I made up some vocabulary to describe a common aspect
of IF. I'm not really sure if anybody else uses it, but I've found it
immensely handy. The vocabulary is this: I call a noun that appears in a
room description a "first-level noun." These nouns either will or won't
have descriptions implemented, and the more of them that are described,
the better, in my opinion. Nouns that appear in the descriptions of
first-level nouns I call second-level nouns. Nouns from second-level
descriptions are third-level, and so on. The deeper these levels go, the
more complete and immersive the interactive environment, as we've seen
in previous games like Hunter, In Darkness and Worlds Apart. Out Of The
Study puts this technique to some of the best use I've ever seen, going
very deep indeed with its levels of description:

   > x family photo
   In the photo you see the professor together with his family.

   > x family
   The professor is standing in the photo with his wife and five
   children.

   > x children
   The photo is really rather old as the children in it are still very
   young. You know that none of them lives at home anymore. On the left
   there are twin boys, looking to be of the age at which they have just
   started going to school. In the middle, the youngest child, just a
   baby, is sitting in her mother's lap. It seems to be hardly one year
   old: you cannot tell if it's a boy or a girl, even from the clothes.
   [...]

   > x baby
   The baby, whose sex you are not able to tell, is dressed in a pink
   overall.

   > x overall
   It is just an ordinary babies' outfit.

Given that OOTS is a one-room game, this depth of implementation goes a
very long way towards making the environment feel real and interactive.
Intriguingly, the point of this depth isn't just to increase immersion;
it's actually an element of the game's puzzles, and clues are often
buried several levels deep. Enlightenment, from Comp98, explored this
technique a little, but OOTS takes it much further.

This game's puzzles are definitely its best feature. Like many one-room
games, it has only a modicum of plot -- you're a thief who has been
trapped inside the place you're robbing, and you must investigate the
environment to figure out how to escape. To do so, you have to figure
out the mindset of the room's occupant, and all the regular puzzles are
subsections of that overriding goal. The design is generally sound, and
I appreciated the fact that the environment was so richly implemented,
but it would have been a lot more fun were it not so buggy. There's a
bit of an insect theme in this game, but actual game bugs are not
welcome no matter how many metalevels of irony they provide. Some of the
problems may have been due to the ALAN parser; for instance, I found I
couldn't refer to objects by their adjectives, as in the following
example where both a "torn photograph" and a "family photograph" are in
scope:

   > x photograph
   [It is not clear which photograph you mean.]

   > x torn
   [You must supply a noun.]

Being able to refer to an object by any of its name words is a behavior
I've come to love in IF, and I missed it a great deal during this game.
Other things were clearly the game's fault. For instance, "examine" and
"read" were implemented as different verbs, but their implementation was
not well-tested, resulting in exchanges like this:

   > read books
   There is nothing written on the books.

Hope you didn't pay too much for those books, professor -- they aren't
worth the paper they aren't written on.

Between the game's bugs, its quirks, and its lack of a walkthrough, I
came thisclose to just abandoning it altogether. Happily, some folks
over at ifMUD helped me get unstuck so I could reach the ending.
Unhappily, that ending is a bit of a disappointment. OOTS succumbs to
the temptation to tack on a rather cutesy "twist" ending, but my
reaction to it was neither "awwwww" nor "whoa!", but rather "huh?" In my
view, all that ending does is to make hash of everything that came
before, as well as to make the player's labors seem rather fruitless. I
don't even think it can be justified as bringing some sort of justice to
the thief, because it's unclear how much reality has actually shifted,
or how much we are to assume about the game as a whole. There are some
good puzzles and a very well-crafted setting here, and with a round or
two more of testing and a better ending, OOTS could be a pretty good
piece of IF.

Rating: 7.0