Michael Martin's Comp04 Reviews
Michael Chapman Martin
IFCOMP 2004
This looks for all the world like a totally deserted
plaza, despite the fact that you know there are dozens
of comp games battling it out. It is dead silent. Or is
it?
> LISTEN
Silence. Yes, definitely silence. You strain your ears,
and suddenly a booming voice shatters the night,
screaming:
"MORTAL KOMP-BAT!!!!!!!"
You collapse dead from shock.
*** FATALITY ***
Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, REVIEW
the competition or QUIT?
> REVIEW
Right. So, this was the first competition where I
actually played all the (Linux-capable) games: I'd
sampled around the earlier comps (and played most of the
games that were eventually deemed notable therefrom),
and compared to what I saw there, here are my
observations on the comp as a whole:
First off, it was pretty good. Six of the games fell
firmly into my "Excellent" bin, with two more not
falling therein solely because of a few problems that
nevertheless significantly impacted its play experience.
Truly awful games were outnumbered at least two-to-one.
Second, as kind of mentioned in my little lead-in, there
sure was a lot of direct combat in this comp. I counted
ten games where the point was to > ATTACK NPC in the
right way, repeatedly, to wear them down or prove your
mastery or whatnot. Sometimes this was incidental;
sometimes it was the whole point. These games were
scattered fairly evenly through the scores, too, so it's
not like this is intrinsically bad or good, but it sure
felt odd.
Third, We didn't get a half-a-dozen steampunk entries
like Emily Short predicted last year. Only one game had
any stylistic elements even remotely resembling STB,
and, as near as I could tell, only one had a significant
choice point, both of which end in widely varying but
defensibly "happy" endings.
___________________________________________________
Mingsheng, by Rexx Magnus
(DISCLAIMER: I betatested this one, and was a loud and
obnoxious beta tester, too.)
This game is trying very hard to be Chinese, and it's
fairly obvious from the writing and the general attitude
that this was written more by an enthusastic student of
Chinese culture rather than a full member of it. This
isn't necessarily a bad thing, and in my opinion a
setting that thinks it's exotic is going to feel more
exotic. (Even if the settings here aren't exotic to you,
they're exotic with respect to the rest of the IF
canon.) It wouldn't surprise me if certain of my
Asian-American friends muttered unpleasant epithets at a
few of the turns of phrase; however, I judge that this
is their problem, not Mingsheng's.
Of course, if we travel all that way and find we're just
on another treasure hunt, except a few of the Fabulous
Valuables are now Ultimate Techniques, we might wonder
whether it was really worth the trip. Fortunately,
Mingsheng flips a few expectations here, too.
I'm mostly happy with the ending mechanic. I would have
liked to see more "winning" endings -- especially since
> SCORE tells me that only I can rate my achievements --
but that would make handling the expectation-flipping a
lot dicier.
So yes. It's a nice journey, well worth taking. Go play
it. Preferably on a system that can handle Chinese
characters in Unicode. (Yay exercising unusual corners
of the Z-Spec! Especially in good games!)
Score: None, since I was a beta-tester. It would have
been an 8 if I had, though.
___________________________________________________
A Day in the Life of a Super Hero, by David Whyld
This is superhero parody, not the serious stuff. The
backstory can't seem to decide between "sure,
superheroes are everywhere and you're one of them" (from
Frenetic Five at the low end of superheroism through
City of Heroes at the high end) and "You poor deluded
fool, thinking you're a superhero." Really, I prefer the
first to the second, but the inconsistency is
particularly jarring and ends up getting you the worst
of both worlds.
I begin tied up to the top of a bridge. Despite being
tied up, I can still take the seagull that's pecking
through the rope. Despite the fact that I've taken him,
though, the death-timer in the first scene keeps going.
Then I still seem to be able to take actions after
dying. And this is just the first scene.
Oh. That reminds me. If you have a section in the about
text saying the game is never unfinishable (albeit
possible, if you try really hard, to not get the best
ending), don't include 28 ways to die. Especially not
when one of them involves letting a timer run out in the
first scene.
The conversation/menu system was incredibly buggy in
SCARE, sometimes giving the generic "I don't recognize
that sentence" error for the game in response to menu
options, and sometimes selecting one at random for you
without ever giving you a prompt. An unfortunate side
effect of this was that I couldn't get the walkthrough
to work, and thus never saw the actual end of the game.
I do believe I made it to the final confrontation,
though.
I can't comment reasonably on most of the puzzles; most
seemed to be clued by "this happens, and you missed your
chance, so restore and do it right", but it's hard to
tell because I spent the first 90 minutes just in the
first couple of scenes, and then spent the remaining 30
with the walkthrough.
I would suggest, first, that the author decide on a
specific tone and world-model for his work, and keep it
consistent through the game. It's more important to have
a clear reason not only to do the things you do directly
to solve the puzzles, but also to do the things that
make it possible to do those things. (That is, the Big
Goal puzzles are well motivated, but they require access
to items that you do not have motivations to acquire.)
Score: 2
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All Things Devours, by half sick of shadows
I am filled with dread by the title, until I end the
game in one move and then see where the title comes
from. OK, I can live with this. Let's see...
Nice, simple goal. Obvious failure condition. Nested
failure conditions. Maybe this isn't such a simple goal
after all. The primary widget is awesome, sez I, as is
the mechanic. It's almost too complex for the
competition, but there's just enough there to keep me
busy for the judging period.
All in all, absolutely fantastic. The notes indicate a
new version will come out with extra puzzles and more
unforgiving timing. I can't wait.
It appears that there was a crash bug involving the lab
doors, but I didn't run into it during my judging
period.
This was my favorite game of the competition.
Score: 10
___________________________________________________
Identity, by Dave Bernazzani
A solid little piece, with good puzzles marred by
somewhat weak writing. Only this weakness keeps this
from falling into the "excellent" category.
I don't really have a lot to say here because it stands
pretty well on its own, and the implementation seemed
quite robust as well. As such, the only recommendations
I can make to the author are (a) try to get someone with
a good ear for prose and storytelling to help you check
your prose, and (b) write more games, because I'm
greedy.
Score: 7
___________________________________________________
Die Vollkommene Masse, by Alice Merridew
OK, so a drow being held captive by something from
Slayers. Grammar and spelling are terrible, the high
concept is vaguely disquieting in a "hormone-drenched
13-year-old-fan-fiction" sort of way, > PUT ALL IN
BACKPACK has you strip down almost totally, the map is
convoluted, and the walkthrough commands involving the
fairy don't work. I have to consider the game
unsolvable, and what I saw either didn't excite me or
actively disquieted me.
Things that need to be done: Get a native speaker to
proofread it. Don't openly derive stuff from fanficcy
sources; you could have filed off all the references
without changing anything. Test your provided
walkthrough to make sure it actually works. Clothes are
tricky, and should be invisible if they aren't named
explicitly.
Score: None, as the author has pulled it from the
competition. The score would have been low due to
incompleteness, but it seems unsporting to explicitly
rate that given the circumstances.
___________________________________________________
Gamlet, by Tomasz Pudlo
Yay! Troll!
Score: 1
OK, but we might not know that if we don't read the
newsgroups or the ABOUT text. So, I wandered around the
house for awhile, found that the thing I sought was
gone, and that I then could not do anything of
importance, and no more hints were to be found. It's
also potty-mouthed and pretentious at the same time.
It turns out then that there is an undocumented
WALKTHROUGH command, so I could then see most of the
rest of the game. Most of what I discussed above still
holds throughout the game. There's also the issue that
following the walkthrough kills you, guaranteed. Solving
the final puzzle then has it insult you for four or five
screens, then crashing you out to the prompt.
Which is really, all told, a way of saying that I don't
have to change my assessment.
Score: 1
___________________________________________________
Goose, Egg, Badger, by Brian Rapp
Very, very strange. Innocuous actions put abstract
entities into your inventory. Your inventory includes an
"urge" that, when examined, gives context-sensitive
hints about your current goals. This is fantastic.
The puzzles baffled me, but the duck puzzle at least
seemed reasonably logical. Wow, that's a really long
walkthrough. After the fact, some of them made a bit of
sense, but the puzzles really do boil down to "do this
because it needs to be done, even if it is midnight."
The variant verbs are great. That it gives you "style
points" for using them is greater still. Unfortunately,
I didn't know they even existed until I checked
walkthrough 2. That kind of dampens the effect.
Is the title a veiled Hofstadter reference?
... Yeah, it is. I just tried > XYZZY. Hee, sez I.
Score: 6
___________________________________________________
Stack Overflow, by Timofei Shatrov.
OK, this is random. And incredibly poorly written and
implemented. Even the author notices this, as one of the
room descriptions reads "Why oh why, you are stuck in
such a boring place?" Well, I know who I'm blaming.
XYZZY response is a Gostak reference. That's a bright
spot, at least. It would have been brighter if I'd
xyzzied deave unheamily, but I suppose one can't have
everything.
Oops. I walk into a room, and cannot leave it, because
the room was not given any usable exits except a closed
door that I cannot refer to. That's generally my cue to
just stick to the walkthrough.
Uh. So, in the end game you must put in THE SECRET
4-DIGIT CODE or you lose. The hints indicate that
they'll give enough info to figure this out. The only
info they give is that you must put in THE SECRET
4-DIGIT CODE. Right. Good thing I'm already in "just
follow the walkthrough" mode.
OK, so, upon experimentation, you hit on THE SECRET
4-DIGIT CODE by chance. But that's still no excuse. And
then there's an extra endgame that makes no sense
whatsoever.
Score: 1
___________________________________________________
Typo! by Peter Seebach, Kevin Lynn, and Flavorplex
This isn't really a game, it's a tech demo with a cute
ending. I'd really have rather had a full game based on
the kind of situation that was appearing in the endgame.
That would have been a very nice metapuzzle.
As it stands, this is technically IF, but not much F
there. The tech demo is quite impressive, but I really
can't feel good about rating thus much above a 4.
Score: 4
___________________________________________________
Order, by John Evans
John Evans has had a knack for making conceptually
complex mechanics and then not implementing them
thoroughly enough to be completable. Order has a nifty
mechanic, and the game is completable, so that's worth a
cheer.
Unfortunately, the nifty mechanic isn't quite as general
as it should be; I was at a loss in the final two
challenges, and the hints implied I should have been
creating much more modern entities than I'd been using
to that point. Also, the Wind puzzle was much less
clear, and the failure message didn't really clue me
into what was actually going on, and why I had failed.
Other than that, this is a solid, but not particularly
remarkable bout of villain defeating.
Score: 6
___________________________________________________
Blue Chairs, by Chris Klimas
This is a fine adventure in the modern-surreal vein. I
did end up hitting the hints a few more times than I
should have, but I only needed to do this at the
beginning.
Despite initial hostility to the tone, I was drawn in
quite quickly and played on my own to the end. Then I
checked the walkthrough to see what I missed, and saw
that everything was completely different. I then played
it through again just to see the other elements -- and I
got a different happy ending. Wonderful. The game told
me at the beginning I had a lot of free will; I'm going
to have to explore this one a bit more once the comp is
over.
My only real quibble is that I can't refer to the "anime
comic book" by its correct name "manga". I'm cool with
the protagonist not knowing the word, but the parser
should.
Score: 9
___________________________________________________
Who Created that Monster? by N.B. Horvath
The game blurb (and, indeed, prologue) is as follows:
Baghdad, 2026. The work of the Allies here is nearly
complete, and so is your work as a journalist. Major
institutions have been rebuilt and the historical
record set straight -- almost. There is but one
unanswered question. Few dare even ask it.
So, what kind of game is this? Here's a few guesses I
had, all of which could have made excellent (or at least
entertaining) games:
* A self-congratulatory dystopia, where the "work of
the Allies" was the systematic looting of all
resources in the region. An apparently local
strongman is solidifying his hold on the state and
the Allies are backing out to let him continue his
lavishly murderous ways -- this apparently local
strongman then turns out to be CIA. (Bonus points
for docking points or outright killing the PC for
referring to 'lifts' as 'elevators' or the like.)
* A political thriller set in a projected
half-Westernized Iraq, where the point isn't really
so much the intrigue as experiencing the hybrid
society. This would, of course, be nearly impossible
to do accurately at this point (who'd have predicted
Hello Kitty in 1953?)
* (After checking my initial inventory, and finding a
heavily redacted memorandum describing Rumsfeld's
visit to Iraq in 1983, apparently given to me by a
contact in Beijing:) A mostly didactic game that
outlines US/Iraqi history while giving you an excuse
to poke around a future history (as above). However,
given that this information is all readily available
in 2004 in about 15 seconds given access to Google
-- complete with photographs and analysis -- one can
only assume that the Chinese contact did this to
distract you from whatever they were doing in
Xinjiang or Tibet. (No wonder your editor didn't
want you to fly to Baghdad to check this out.)
Alternatively, maybe President Ashcroft banned the
Internet in the US in 2013 shortly after beginning
his second term.
Unfortunately, here's the kind of stuff we get:
* Terrorists running around just about exactly like
the dwarves in Adventure, right down to the
vanishing in a puff of smoke when I defeat them.
Perhaps they are ninja terrorists, escaping to
terrorize another day!
* The traditional AMERICAN CULTURE CONQUERS EVERYTHING
future. Jennifer Government did it better, and even
it reads wrong to cynical Americans.
* The historical information is given as random
intercutting as time passes.
* No real interaction with the Iraqis themselves, just
industrialists and ambassadors from European
countries. Here's a gem:
You are standing in the lobby of the Norwegian
embassy. Norway is a northern country, known for its
fjords and its fine performances in the Winter
Olympics. Norwegians worship Thor, the God of
Thunder. Stairways lead up and down. The exit is to
the southwest.
The other countries are similarly accurately
treated.
* The ending undercuts the material that's actually
accurate, and completely dodges the (rather more
interesting) question of why the material you've
collected is relevant in 2026 or not. In 2004, as
near as I could tell, the fact that the US propped
Hussein up was really only a talking point if you
were (a) American, (b) liberal, AND (c) in favor of
the invasion, because it let you say "We put the
bastard there, it's our duty to take him out." Given
the tone of the rest of the piece (which seems to
think (incorrectly) that it's brilliant political
satire, or is a parody of same), it seems unlikely
that the author is all three of these. So some
context would have been nice. Why should we care?
* No real puzzles as such, just wandering around
talking to NPCs. The closest thing to a genunine
puzzle in the game (getting in to actually speak to
one of the ambassadors) involves exploiting a
property that was no doubt fun to implement, but
which violates all laws of causality and physics,
and which is never adequately explained.
Ironically, as near as I can tell, most of the
information regarding Iraq's history you acquire in this
game is actually basically accurate: the West, and
particularly the US, played Hussein against Iran, sold
him dual-use stuff that could be made into chemical
weapons, looked away when he used them, and eventually
turned on him when he got uppity. A few missing events I
thought were relevant; I didn't see the imposition of UN
Sanctions, nor the imposition of the no-fly zone. It's
kind of too bad everything else is ludicrous BS that's
failing to be satire, because this begs the player to
dismiss the truthful parts as equally fanciful.
Score: 3
___________________________________________________
I Must Play, by "Fortytwo".
Solid, but unexceptional. It's an IFArcade in a box.
Competently implemented, reasonable operations, but a
few actions were unclued and the concept of "linked
games" didn't really work for me. I think I may have
smirked once or twice while playing, at points where the
author wanted this.
Score: 7
___________________________________________________
Trading Punches, by Sidney Merk
The text style strains so much it risks hernias. This is
also the third game I've played so far that involves
skipping stones. (I betatested Mingsheng.) Is something
in the water? Besides the stones afterwards, I mean.
The interludes require EXAMINE commands to advance the
plot, as near as I can tell. This is officially Not
Cool.
This is a long story; I am buffeted by the forces of
history, but never really feel in control. I have a
simple task to perform, and I do it, and in the end it
all comes to nought. Very dense, a fair amount of world
creation, but still all ultimately unsatisfying.
As a novella, I'd have been happier (though the ultimate
futility of everything is a downer, and the casual
acceptance of doom seemed a bit unbelievable). As IF, I
found it far more distancing, as the actions I the
player controlled were all ultimately meaningless.
Score: 4.
___________________________________________________
Luminous Horizon, by Paul O'Brian
It's harder to write a fair review when your
expectations are already through the roof. I loved the
first two E&S games, so my expectations for the
conclusion were very high. I wasn't disappointed, but I
also wasn't entirely enthused.
There are lots of technical experiments in Luminous
Horizon, and those are mostly pulled off with style. The
continuity questions at the beginning were well-handled,
and I played with them a bit to determine how they
influenced the introduction. Character changing was
flawless, which was a good thing, given the puzzles; if
it hadn't been, I don't think I'd be able to solve the
game.
Using TALK TO as a hint system was a cute concept, but I
don't think this experiment actually worked. This was
for three reasons:
* Getting a nudge takes a turn. The climactic
sequences are intensely tightly timed, so by the
time I got the clues I needed to solve it, I had to
restore to take advantage of this knowledge.
* There's no way to know whether you're getting
banter, clues, or a spoiler before you talk.
* I needed spoiler hints at two points. In one (the
first scene), I got it before I was ready, and in
the other (how to enter Part III), I couldn't get it
at all. Fortunately, violence is the answer enough
of the time that simply blasting everything in sight
as Sky worked out in the end. (That did try Earth's
patience, which amused me. As did the reply if you
forget who you are and thus talk to yourself, or try
to blast things as Austin.)
I mentioned tightly timed puzzles. Oh, yes. Most of the
climactic puzzles are actually superpowered battles, and
these are well written and -- in my experience --
incredibly unforgiving. There must have been alternate
solutions, but the ones I found actually failed if I
wasted any moves at any point, or even if I started with
the wrong character. I found myself longing for the
ability to give commands to Austin and Em at the same
time.
The ABOUT text indicates that the game can't be made
unfinishible; I must assume that there were thus
alternate solutions to the Part III battle that I didn't
find.
The conclusion is satisfying and works out very well, in
my opinion. All in all, this is a worthy conclusion to
the series.
Score: 9
___________________________________________________
Murder at the Aero Club, by Penny
A cute little mystery, though I had enough evidence to
identify the guilty party before the game thought I did.
A few improbable actions are necessary to get the best
ending, so I needed to hit the walkthrough after I'd
worked out what was going on.
Score: 6
___________________________________________________
Zero, by William A. Tilli, Santoonie Corporation
I'm a goblin, we've been raided by marauding chicken
people (oh, excuse me, "the fowl humans") and I need to
take stock of the damage and set things right. I
wandered around and freed someone and clothed them, then
died of hunger. Never once did I see anything resembling
food (well, except the spy, whom I couldn't eat.)
Restarted, played a little more, and found that they'd
implemented several ways of quitting, involving objects
in the game. Who am I to deny what is the obvious course
of action?
Score: 2
___________________________________________________
Chronicle Play Torn, by Algol
It wants to be atmospheric and spooky, and in a way it
is; I did spend most of my time experiencing the
environment. However, I also couldn't advance without
following the walkthrough nearly exactly, and the
writing would have benefited from another four or five
rounds of editing.
Score: 4
___________________________________________________
01
Ladies and gentlemen, I hereby give you the best line in
this comp:
The trout swings through the air, making a swishing
noise that bodes bloody carnage.
Unfortunately, the rest of the game doesn't even begin
to live up to this. The grammar is sometimes awkward,
but it's recognizable English. I didn't notice typos,
but I moved on to skimming rather quickly. Line breaks
were highly inconsistent; I can't tell whether or not
this is the author's fault or Alan's, but no word wrap
was occurring.
No plot to speak of. I'm imprisoned by bad guys, so I
escape and kill them and take their stuff and escape.
For full points, the completeness of "take their stuff"
is quite extreme; I missed full points my first time
through for failing to sample everything the coffee
machine in their break room made.
No real puzzles. No coherent plot. Several extremely
nasty guess the verb situations. Legendary failure to
implement nouns. The concept of first-level and
second-level nouns is well known; to properly complain
about 01 I must bring up the concept of zero-level
nouns. These are nouns that appear as objects in their
own right in paragraphs at their own at the end of
descriptions, looking for all the world like an
automatically generated object description. 01 has some
of these zero-level nouns unimplemented, and this goes
beyond sloppy into actively offensive.
Score: 2
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Blink
An extremely short tale with no meaningful choices, and,
in my opinion, no meaningful impact either. The tale
jumps through time, and a conversation happens, or you
wander through a scene, and then it jumps again, and
after a couple of these, you're done.
The writing jumps between the high end of mediocre and
the low end of good, but the biggest problem with this
is that there's just not much there, in time, space, or
concept.
Score: 4
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Redeye, by John Pitchers
Not terribly well written. Lots of guess-the-syntax. The
plot, such as it is, doesn't really do much for me.
Small cultural note: delis aren't really specific to
Australia.
In several locations the only way to advance the plot is
to repeatedly attempt unwise actions until we are beaten
senseless. This really doesn't motivate one much.
Oh, and I can't > ASK AGENT SMITH ABOUT NEO, but the
fact that I even tried is probably a good sign that I
wasn't all that engaged. That said, I didn't seem to be
able to ask Agent Smith about anything other than the
one thing mentioned in the walkthrough.
The ending plot "twist" was so telegraphed as to be
offensive. Maybe the PC is shocked because he's been
beaten senseless so many times.
Score: 2
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The Great Xavio, by Reese Warner
There sure are a lot of murder mysteries this year.
Fortunately, this one is a lot of fun. Dr. Todd is
hilarious -- and the Darkness message made me laugh out
loud, as did his response to anything that the parser
doesn't understand.
The multiple puzzle solutions were nice; I found a few
of them.
We seem to be Berkeleyites. It's too bad I can't ask him
about The Big Game or whatnot. (I also can't ask about
the professors I took my own CS classes from, but then,
I didn't really expect to be able to.)
This was by far the most engaging mystery of the
competition.
Score: 9
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Sting of the Wasp, by Jason Devlin
You, an aging matron of the glitterati, are caught in an
indiscretion with the help, and must con and blackmail
your way into recovering and destroying this evidence
before your marriage -- and, more importantly, your
access to your husband's vast, vast wealth -- is
destroyed.
It's well-constructed for what it is; but I can't help
but think "Wow, this is just like Varicella, except
instead of a murderous force of ambition and justice,
obliterating rivals far nastier than I am, I'm just a
spoiled conniving bitch."
Also, some of the text didn't really seem to fit the
character quite right:
>smell
Ugh, that's what roses smell like? Where's the
benzaldehyde? the phenetol?
I'm supposed to be one of the idle rich, not a chemist.
For the most part, though, slips like this are rare. (I
guess we can also add that Primo Varicella had taste,
and Julia only thinks she does.)
All in all, it's a fine piece of work, but it left me
cold and sneering at the PC.
Score: 6
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A Light's Tale, by vbnz
One of the themes in A Light's Tale is an actively
hostile and controlling narrator: instead of "You can't
go that way," for instance, you get "I won't let you go
that way." Done well, this could be an interesting
conceit to explore; however, in this attempt, it's lost
in the spotty grammar, pointless actions,
incomprehensible universe, and puzzles that are only
solvable because the narrator gives clues -- all choices
are "go the way I want or die, even if I hint that the
way I want is the 'die' way."
A modest example of the writing and the world logic:
You exhale in the direction of the Gorrary, and the
fire roars. The plant magically comes to life! It is
now bright, vivid red. The plant has come to life!
You have saved the planet! Tim rushes to you and
says: "That was so awesome! Thank you for saving all
our lives!"
(This is, incidentally, in an otherwise unremarkable
flower shop, not at the roots of Yggdrassil or
anything.)
Now I'm facing three thugs, named Thug1, Thug2, and
Thug3. At this point I should really say "If you don't
have enough time to give your characters decent names, I
don't even have time to follow the walkthrough," but I'm
feeling unusually generous.
This is quite a surprise! This looks just like a
fully-furnished room! There is a bright white cabinet
down here, and a bright white chair. Wait a second...
every furnishing in this room is white! There is no
light down here. The only reason you can see the
things is because they are all white!
Being terrible doesn't make us laugh. In fact, it
severely undercuts the otherwise interesting "hostile
narrator" approach -- the lines like "I won't let you go
that way" come across just as an additional case of bad
writing.
The descriptions have a bit too much stuff in them that
aren't description, too:
You stand in front of what you now know to be
Fernando's Headquarters. This is a moment of truth.
As soon as you open the door, you will be forced to
somehow stop Fernando. You are still not even sure
why you are fighting against Fernando. You will soon
learn. For now, you should probably figure out how to
move this massive door.
OK, I guess I'm not feeling so generous after all. I
will say that it is notable in being the purest form of
"Mary-Sue" I've ever seen in IF. (I refer, of course, to
the Blue Room here.) May I never see anything purer.
Score: 1
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The Big Scoop, by Johan Berntsson
The opening scene involves an extremely tightly timed
sequence and not one but two commands with extremely
finicky syntax, and mistaken syntax causes you to lose
immediately.
Now there's a viewpoint shift, but I have to go to the
hints to actually realize this. > X ME has changed but
isn't actually inconsistent with my initial state.
Conversation is standard ask/tell, with the addition of
a > TOPICS command to list all relevant things you can
ask about. However, the topics list gives away way too
much, and permits me to ask about things that I can't
possibly know about. This needed more care to work
properly, especially for a mystery. The dialogue also
isn't generally present:
> ASK POLICEMAN ABOUT CATS
The policeman tells you he doesn't like cats.
I am to enter a code on a keypad, but the parser will
not let me enter the key '1', instead interpreting "push
one" as push the door. Ditto "Push 1". As it happens, I
can "PUSH" the entire code, but this should have been
tested.
This could have been decent, but it needs much clearer
syntax checking and perhaps some slightly less tight
timing. As it stands, even if clues are given, you can
only learn by losing the game repeatedly.
Score: 5
___________________________________________________
PTBAD 3, by Xorax
Boring and incomprehensible, and a few items
mysteriously edible. You seem unable to do nothing of
import.
Score: 1
___________________________________________________
Ruined Robots, by nanag_d
The directions on this walkthrough don't seem to
correspond to actual things in the map. And there's a
hunger daemon. And there's a flashlight daemon. Also
weight and item limits, though I can fit the garden
sledgehammer into my knapsack. Random events are
rampant, they cost you points, they're buggily
implemented (the beaver, for instance, has longer and
longer action lists as time goes on), and the writing is
uninspired at best, and "You are in a place called
gapwest. The exit is to the southeast." at worst. And I
eat a spinach sub and become so muscular that I cannot
leave the room. This seems to imply some kind of mutable
"strength" attribute. Random exploration locks the game
off without warning. Oh, and there's something that very
much resembles a maze.
AHEM. ALL THESE THINGS, BY DEFAULT, SUCK. YOU SHOULDN'T
DO ANY OF THEM WITHOUT AN IRONCLAD REASON. MUCH LESS TEN
ALL AT ONCE. AIYA, OY VEY, AND ANNOYANCE IN SEVERAL
OTHER LANGUAGES AS WELL.
This game is either a subtle troll or it was tested on
masochists. Or it was sufficiently incomplete that it
never reached the testing phase at all.
Score: 1
___________________________________________________
Escape from Auriga, by Florin Tomescu
I'm a soldier, I'm trying to escape from a doomed ship
full of Giger-style aliens, and maybe heal and rescue my
fellow crewmates and throw the self-destruct sequence.
Well, it was supposed to feel like an Alien movie, but
it really felt to me more like the old Sega game Alien
Syndrome. This is something like the eighth game I've
played so far involving battle sequences, and there's
more weapons in this thing than your average Quake
level. I'm really starting to tire of it.
There's an EVIL WRONG password sequence that requires
techniques I don't think are fair -- Stack Overflow and
A Light's Tale did it too, but there was some context to
help figure it out. It's still evil and wrong.
But I do miss Alien Syndrome.
UPDATE: Yeah, it was supposed to feel like an Alien
movie, to the point where it was DQed for violating Rule
1. And Alien Syndrome runs pretty well on DosBox, but
wasn't nearly as great as I remember it being. So it
goes.
Score: 5
___________________________________________________
Kurusu City, by Kevin Venzke
Manga/Anime style adventure, in the Feisty High Schooler
Saves World vein. The puzzles, individually, are solidly
implemented, and the writing is more than servicable.
Suspension of disbelief gets a little difficult when (a)
most people seem happy with their Robot Overlords, and
(b) said robots will summarily execute minors for
entering the shower while clothed. Then again, this is
also a world where "celebrity revolutionaries" shrug off
having limbs blown apart.
But neither of those things really bothered me. Things
that did bother me:
* Having the hints be a rot13ed text file instead of
using a progressive hint library like everyone else
does. They use 'em 'cause they're convenient for
everyone involved, you see. Actually, given that
half your hints had "Don't continue until you've
[MINOR SPOILER]" as one of the steps, this was a set
of hints that just cried out for adaptive hint
menus.
* The hints weren't complete. This was actually
partially a good thing; I had a few extra "aha!"
moments because I had been led to clever connections
I wouldn't have made had I just been going to a full
walkthrough. However, I deduced that I needed to
amplify the power of one of my devices, and the
hints let me down utterly. I thus never made it into
the Authority Tower.
* The game was far, far, FAR too easy to make
unwinnable, without it actually being the player's
fault. In particular, random encounters could
transport you to a certain section of the game (or
kill you if you didn't submit to this). If this
encounter happens too early, you don't have the
inventory you need to get the item here you need to
win the game. If this encounter happens once more
after this, the game is made immediately unwinnable.
I saw no way to evade this other than UNDOing if the
sequence began at the wrong time. (If there was a
way out, this screams for explicit hints.)
* THANK was mapped to KISS. This produced some
slightly awkward exchanges.
* By the time the plot demands you open the mailbox,
you've necessarily closed off the path the hints
give for getting the mailbox key. This is a serious
cluing failure. (Oh sure, if you're a packrat,
you'll have known to get it, but this is still
pretty seriously annoying.)
With a little bit of rethinking and reordering of
events, and perhaps the addition of some alternate
solutions, this would be top-notch.
Score: 6
___________________________________________________
Square Circle, by Eric Eve
The first puzzle (involving said 'Square Circle') is
more an excercise in sophistry than geometry, but the
conversations surrounding it worked pretty well for me.
Most of the rest of the game felt pretty painfully
arbitrary though. A lot of the information that I needed
to know in order to take proper precautions came too
late to really be helpful.
This is also the second game in a row involving
"psephology." Well, I've learned a new word this comp.
Yay, I guess. The document including the term this time
around had me snickering for some time.
All in all, though, most of the game felt workmanlike.
Nothing obviously terrible, but nothing to grab me and
make me cheer either.
Score: 5
___________________________________________________
The Realm, by Michael Sheldon
Man, talk about having your expectations raised hugely,
then seeing them come crashing down. I stumbled into the
first solution to the Armorer's puzzle with a lucky
guess, and thought that I had found an amazing
simulation of a legitimate "guess-the-noun." Then I
tried to do the same trick to get the sword, and was
stalled. It's still a nice puzzle, but I wasn't as
impressed as I had been. (A version of it appeared in
"Eric the Unready," too, and its nature there was much
fairer, but also more obviously constrained.)
Unfortunately, much of the rest of the game was very
bizarre. I can't say "unclued," because everything was
adequately clued, but "unmotivated" to the point of
wondering why on Earth I would actually consider various
actions to be productive. I found the hamster in
particular to be most unsporting. And un-other-things.
Yecch.
Not quite surreal, not quite lighthearted; but it's
definitely a complete game. The ending was nicely
understated. Deadpan is good.
Score: 4
___________________________________________________
Magocracy, by Scarybug
Um.
Um, um, um.
So yeah. As I've said, there's been a lot of combat this
comp. This game is nothing but combat. It's really quite
well-mechanicked combat, and the large number of spells
is pretty cool, but you're just too outclassed for too
much of the game for this to not just be a ridiculous
UNDO-fest.
"Amputar the Barbarian" is the best name ever.
Definitely stealing that name for my next game of
Nethack.
This mostly works out its own logic. No plot other than
"ensure death of all others. Take their stuff. Gain
power and use it to smite the others." As such, it's
kind of like Typo. It's really neat, but I wasn't really
having much fun. And it seriously needs to be
rebalanced.
Score: 4
___________________________________________________
The Orion Agenda, by Ryan Weisenberger
I don't want to talk much about this game, because it
really was quite well done. Reactive and somewhat
self-willed NPCs, good writing, mostly fair puzzles, and
a XYZZY response that works into the plot without
screaming HI, I'M AN INJOKE. It's also just about the
perfect length, if you explore the branching paths.
I have two quibbles with it, both of which are instances
of the same problem.
The game begins with a flashback. In a sense, the
flashback is handy; it gives you a striking sense of
where you're supposed to end up, and then moves you into
the story's true beginning.
Quibble One: You can apparently die during the flashback
sequence (I didn't, but the hints indicated that the
stuff I did as a matter of course was necessary to avoid
dying.)
Quibble Two: You're offered a Significant Choice that's
the sort of thing that branching plots can often only
dream of pulling off -- complete with reasons why going
either way would be a good idea. Except, because of the
flashback's context, you clearly picked one of them
already. Furthermore, attempting to go the other way
closes the game off immediately.
The important factor for changing the endings was
adequately clued, but given the existence of the
Significant Choice the effects of these actions really
should have had a slightly smaller role.
Despite this, this is still an excellent game. It's just
on the low end of "excellent", which means...
Score: 8
___________________________________________________
Splashdown, by Paul J. Furio
The "feelies" distributed with this made me chuckle a
few times, so this is a good start. In fact, the sample
transcript solved an argument I had had with some other
compatriots involving how to abbreviate when mixing
fore/aft/port/starboard with north/south/east/west
(solution: use "SB" for starboard). While SB is
implemented, F, P, and A weren't. I missed them.
The actual reason for the crisis had me laughing
maniacally.
However, I found the layout highly confusing and needed
to go to the walkthrough just to figure out how to
interact with things I knew were around. The hints need
to be a bit more explicit to make this work, I think, as
well as make clear how to shut down the global timer
that begins the game.
But in general, this is a pretty fine and very "crunchy"
piece of work.
Score: 7
___________________________________________________
Bellclap, by Tommy Herbert
This is probably the most hilarious player/narrator/PC
relationship I've ever seen. Of particular hilarity are
the "I have no idea what you said" message, the replies
to > JUMP (and followups), > PRAY, and > SCORE all had
me laughing out loud.
It's really excellent at handling rhetorical questions,
as well.
Unfortunately, its cluing is terrible. There's an ingame
clue to indicate what you should be ordering him to do,
but try as I might I could not trigger the cluing until
the correct course of action had already been performed.
As this is really the only puzzle that counts in the
game, it pretty much makes the walkthrough mandatory, so
I can't in good conscience count it amongst the
"excellent" games. Once the cluing issue is resolved, it
will be an excellent, if very short, game.
It's not listed in my own "Excellent" class, but you
really, really, really have to play it anyway. Certain
ironic aspects of it are enhanced if you're listening to
suitably epic music (I had The Battle of the Pellenor
from the RotK soundtrack going) as well.
Score: 7
___________________________________________________
Blue Sky, by Hans Fugal
Heh. A nice, if somewhat slight, little piece about
being a lost tourist in Santa Fe. I actually have been
to the area they're talking about here, and got an extra
warm feeling from the food. (Not for the same reason our
daring hero did, either -- they make "tourist salsa" for
those such as myself that hope to live to our old age
with our taste buds intact.) There were fewer llamas
involved in my trip, though.
I can't help but think that my life would have been way
easier if, having seen my tour group walk into a place I
can't get to, I merely waited by the door to rejoin
them.
So yeah, the puzzles were poorly motivated, but I
enjoyed the trip anyway.
Score: 5
___________________________________________________
Ninja, by Dunric
This was a compiled GW-BASIC program, and as such ran in
DosBox. Generally not worth the effort though. EXAMINE
was unimplemented. You are in a shrine, told the exit is
to the south, and it replies to > SOUTH with "The path
is blocked. Say > EXIT SHRINE instead." It will not let
you > QUIT. Though this doesn't matter as you get
randomly slain after a few dozen turns.
Score: 1
___________________________________________________
Getting Back To Sleep, by IceDragon
I couldn't get this to run, even on my XP partition. Bad
C#.
The README did spend a lot of time talking about how
awesome the parser is. I'd approve, except that
everything it described is the default for every
authoring system out there (except ADRIFT), so crowing
over having a tokenizer and a real state-machine parser
is kind of like an action game crowing about joystick
support.
Score: Not Rated
Rexx Magnus
> Mingsheng, by Rexx Magnus
>
> (DISCLAIMER: I betatested this one, and was a loud and
> obnoxious beta tester, too.)
That was the best way to be though, without your feedback, I'm sure it would
have been rather rubbishy. :)
> This game is trying very hard to be Chinese, and it's
> fairly obvious from the writing and the general attitude
> that this was written more by an enthusastic student of
> Chinese culture rather than a full member of it. This
> isn't necessarily a bad thing, and in my opinion a
> setting that thinks it's exotic is going to feel more
> exotic. (Even if the settings here aren't exotic to you,
> they're exotic with respect to the rest of the IF
> canon.) It wouldn't surprise me if certain of my
> Asian-American friends muttered unpleasant epithets at a
> few of the turns of phrase; however, I judge that this
> is their problem, not Mingsheng's.
I think exotica is in the eye of the beholder - always a case of the grass
being greener on the other side of the farthest mountain range.
People coming from a culture/place that you like will tend to treat their
surroundings and traditions as passé - we're all guilty of it, I think. So I
know that a lot of my Chinese friends wouldn't think of it as anything
special. So far though, it seems to have given the right impression to those
reviewing it, so I'm happy. :)
> Of course, if we travel all that way and find we're just
> on another treasure hunt, except a few of the Fabulous
> Valuables are now Ultimate Techniques, we might wonder
> whether it was really worth the trip. Fortunately,
> Mingsheng flips a few expectations here, too.
>
> I'm mostly happy with the ending mechanic. I would have
> liked to see more "winning" endings -- especially since
> > SCORE tells me that only I can rate my achievements --
> but that would make handling the expectation-flipping a
> lot dicier.
Yes, it was a bit of a compromise - at least the ending that I settled on
was better than the first beta ending! That would have been a total letdown.
I think that deciding on the journey being more important than the goal was
the significant part though.
> So yes. It's a nice journey, well worth taking. Go play
> it. Preferably on a system that can handle Chinese
> characters in Unicode. (Yay exercising unusual corners
> of the Z-Spec! Especially in good games!)
>
> Score: None, since I was a beta-tester. It would have
> been an 8 if I had, though.
To email me, visit the site.
Sidney Merk
>
> Trading Punches, by Sidney Merk
>
> plot, as near as I can tell. This is officially Not
> Cool.
You can also talk to him. Or look around a few turns, and he'll talk to you.
---- Mike.
tzu...@gmail.com
2, 3...-style with something like "So, tell me about the Accord". (In
which case, >TELL HIM ABOUT THE ACCORD sounded like the obvious reply,
and indeed, it worked.) The thing is, though, I didn't mind this
obvious prompting, because I could tell that the interludes were just
short breaks for me to take my time and continue as I saw fit. I
appreciated the response to >MODE INTOX, for example.