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Comp 2003 reviews

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Richard Bos

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Nov 17, 2003, 5:03:02 AM11/17/03
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Yet another judge's completely autocratic, self-sufficient and
prejudiced reviews of this year's comp games. As usual with me, these
reviews may range from adulatory to downright sarky; you have been
warned. If I'm scathing about your game, don't take it personally,
consider that my reviewer persona is even more arrogant than my
everyday one, but do remember that I'm always right ;-)
And if there seems to be a discrepancy between the review and the mark
the game got, that's because I base the mark on nothing but how much I
enjoyed the game, not on a rational scoring system.

As usual, these may, indeed do, contain spoilers for some of the games.


Adoo's Stinky Story: 5
Hmmm... here is nothing special, nothing very awful. The story is
uninspiring, indeed pedestrian; and the same thing goes for the semi-
joky descriptions and schoolboy humour. The characters don't shine with
interaction and convincing characterisation, either. In fact, Adoo
manages to be almost completely unimpressive, either positively or
negatively.

CaffeiNation: 4
This game is buggy in several ways, and gives a decided impression of
being imperfectly tested. This would have been a substantial setback
in any case, but in CaffeiNation it's aggravated by the walkthrough
being incorrect - I could not get rid of the boss in the way it
indicates.
As if that wasn't enough, the storyline doesn't manage to interest -
after all, what's so special about getting a cuppa? Adding unlikely
obstacles doesn't turn a mundane non-problem into a good plot. In
addition, the main character failed to attract my sympathy. All in
all, not a delightful experience.

Gourmet: 7
This was a nice game, and the unusual requirements and intents make
for a refreshingly different kind of play. Ok, there's just a touch of
unpolishedness here and there (for example, I got a "This lobster is
not fit to serve" message when I'd just done exactly that, and in
doing so had already won), but none of it was intrusive. Also nice was
the touch of detail with which everything, in particular the kitchen,
was implemented.
One thing, though: why can I only manage to get 58 points when I've
won - were there, perhaps, more courses originally planned than fit in
the two hours?

Slouching Towards Bedlam: 9
Ok, this is impressive. Very impressive. The alternative-history
background is very well worked out (Wheatstone & Co. was a neat touch;
but surely it would take more than an industrial revolution to put
Fleet Street next to Smithfields market?); in fact, the entire world,
its oddly recognisable, yet slightly alien atmosphere, and its
intricate, half-plausible, half-fantastic machinery are worked out in
beautiful detail.
Added to this is a very good story, which is told well, and well-
paced; and some interesting twists in the way it interacts with the
player, resulting in a very interesting playing experience indeed. In
particular, I liked the alternative endings, even though I'm still
trying to find out how one gets to endings D and E. It's a sign of a
good game, though, that I really want to read them, even though the
two hour judging period is over.

Amnesia: 3
The first thing that struck me about Amnesia was the frankly awful
execution. This starts with lots of bad spelling, awful punctuation,
and rather random capitalisation. Then there's the silly meta-humour -
yes, we all know we're playing your first game, no need to rub our
noses in it. And, of course, there is the odd couple of bugs, most of
which seem to stem from an imperfect understanding of how programming
with flags works.
Still, it's not so buggy that it can't be finished, and it does
actually have a working puzzle or two, however hackneyed, so for
effort it does deserve a couple of points. But next time, test
before releasing.

Temple of Kaos: 2
I'm afraid I found this game completely unguessable. The poetry is
awfully distracting and its stilted language makes the game much
harder to play - it might have worked with a more regular metre, but
the way it's done in Temple of Kaos simply hampered my reading. It's
slightly buggy, too, here and there, with default messages occuring at
wrong moments - something which might have been a slight distraction
in another game, but which made Kaos even less understandable than it
already is. All in all, the intended counter-logic ends up as a lack of
any kind of logic at all.

Bio: 4
Bio is another game which is notably buggy. Unfortunately, this is
already evident in the first room: a dresser is described, but you
need to refer to an "armoire". Because of this, you can't survive for
more than a dozen or so moves without resorting to the walkthrough.
There are bugs and missing descriptions to be found throughout the
game.
In addition, the language is unaccomplished, and the spelling and
punctuation are so-so in places. Add in a rather hackneyed plot and
some puzzles straight out of 1980's adventure games, and you're left
with a game that is finishable, but not very pleasant.

The Fat Lardo And The Rubber Ducky: 1
The first thing I usually do when I play any work of IF is type
"about", to see if there's something interesting to discover about the
game or its author. Some games reward me for this, many don't. The Fat
Lardo... swears at me. Well! I don't mind a bit of strong language
inside a game, but swearing at the player isn't the best way to gain
his approval, is it?
But wait - it gets "better". When I decided to leave the game for the
time being, I discovered that it had blocked the "quit" command! The
gall... Trying to stop me from using my computer the way I decide to
is, of course, a deadly sin. I'm not having any of it, and this author
isn't having any points. Well done, buster.

Baluthar: 5
Technically, Baluthar really isn't bad. At the very least, I could
find no notable bugs. However, as a work of Interactive Fiction, if
seems half thought through. Its background story, in particular, is
scrappy; half fantasy half science fiction, with so little explanation
that it's hardly possible to figure out why things happen as they
happen. Taken separately, all the puzzles are OK; but the game as a
whole just barely hangs together.

Hercules First Labor: 3
Ok, first things first: next time, _do_ test under different browsers.
This game almost, but not quite, worked under Opera, meaning that I
wasted a lot of time going through the game only to have to dig up
Internet Exploiter from somewhere to finish it. If people wrote ZCode
games which only worked under Nitfol, but not under Frotz and Zip,
nobody would consider this acceptable; for JavaScript, the same
principle should hold. M$'s ubiqitousness really is no excuse for non-
conforming code.
Apart from that, Hercules' First Labor made it painfully obvious how
far we've come since Adams. The two-word, very inflexible parser was
unpleasant to use; and some of the puzzles were unnecessarily awkward.
This wasn't ameliorated by the text, which is ridiculessly sparse for
these days. In short, this might have been good enough in 1985, but it
isn't now.

Scavenger: 6
It's hard to say why this didn't impress me much, but for some reason
it didn't. It's not that it's buggy, or that the writing is
particularly bad; it isn't that the puzzles are boring, and the story
isn't unpleasant, either. By any objective measure, in fact, Scavenger
is good enough, but somehow it just didn't make me enthusiastic. Don't
ask me why, though, because I do not know.

No Room: 5
Cute, but this really is a one-trick game. The underlying idea is nice
enough, the single puzzle is amusing, and the No Room concept of the
title is perhaps interesting from a philosophical point of view, but
all that is not quite enough to make a real work of IF.

Risorgimento Represso: 8
Hmmm... probably the best word to describe my reaction to Risorgimento
Represso is "amused". Amused first of all by the descriptions of the
various objects, especially around the castle; and also by the decent
dose of extra responses to various silly actions. Amused, as well, by
the puzzles, some of which were particularly well designed (and of
course, being able to solve one using my old high school chemistry
book was fun). The alternative ways to solve to several of the puzzles
were pleasant, too.

Domicile: 3
This is one weird game. The semi-random collection of ill-fitting
scenes, and the hardly systematic magic, don't manage to convince me
that there's really a fictional world behind all this. It's just all
so scrappy, there's no sense of really being able to explore something
or working towards a goal.
Of course, the vague, mixed-up hints, which are sometimes incorrect
and sometimes appear at the wrong place, don't help. In fact, the
state of the hints, the lack of interesting responses almost
everywhere, and the fact that an image file is mentioned (at the
altar) but not provided, all give Domicile a definite air of being
mostly unfinished. Maybe this raggedness even makes it unfinishable -
in any case, I couldn't finish it within the 2 hrs.

Episode in the Life of an Artist: 5
If this really is like an Episode in the Life of the IF author, I pity
you. Not just because a life like that, working on the most pointless
kind of assembly line jobs, must be mind-numbingly boring, but also
because what little excitement there is is, frankly, not very well
executed.
The scenery is meagre, and what there is isn't very well described,
and there aren't enough synonyms to refer to objects. The action, too,
isn't all that interesting, and the things that do happen are
unbelievable, weird and random. Of course, the lack of description
doesn't exactly make for a more followable plot line.
Oh, and there's rather a show-stopper of a bug near the end: "switch
switch" makes the game unfinishable, because like "turn switch on" it
sets the switch flag, but it doesn't trigger the required action.

Cerulean Stowaway: 7
If there's one thing Cerulean Stowaway is not, it's forgiving. In
fact, it's easy to get stuck early if you leave some things behind,
and there's no indication that you'll need them. It's also easy to
run out of resources (in particular the spray cleaner), but this, at
least, is indicated. The adaptive hints aren't always as useful as
they could be, either; however, after a couple of tries everything
does fit together, and the game ends up well playable.
The story is Skiffy, of course, but not tiresomely so - it's told well
enough. In fact, the non-standard ending is actually quite good.

The Atomic Heart: 6
The main problem I had with The Atomic Heart was that the cables are
overly fussy - sometimes I had to copy walkthrough commands literally
in order not to get stuck plugging the wrong cable into the wrong
hole. It also meant that one needs to do lots of typing, and it isn't
even always clear what is attached to what. Apart from that, the
technical side of the game doesn't present much problems.
The story is, basically, the same old robot-rebellion sci-fi; telling
this from the point of view of one of the robots is a change, but
didn't stop it from being mostly predictable. Overall Atomic Heart
playable enough, but not the most inspiring game in the Comp.

The Erudition Chamber: 8
A good game, with some nice puzzles. The various solutions and
different endings make The Erudition Chamber a game to replay. It
isn't large, but for this kind of game it probably shouldn't be. A bit
more background story would've been nice (in particular, the
relationship between the Keep and the outside world), but the internal
philosophy is good.
An odd thing, though: I got an assertion failure once, and the game
locked up hard (as in, I had to pull the emergency break to abort the
'terp and restart the program) twice. All of these occured during
restore or restart, so there wasn't much lost, but it's still weird.

The Recruit: 4
Yeah, well... erm, yeah. Ok. So it works. But why? Who cares? I'm
supposed to be a tester for an Interactive Fiction company who has,
apparently, been given a woefully inadequate job description and ditto
case briefing. This might have been an original starting point for a
work of IF, were it not for the fact that, as a judge in the IFComp, I
am _already_ testing IF, often based on incomplete case briefings. The
only difference is that IFComp judges have all the information they
need on what is expected on them, which is rather an improvement over
what is happening in The Recruit.
Now, had this just been another layer around a normal, playable text
adventure, that would've been so-so, but not disastrous. Here,
however, it is used as an excuse to present a typical collection of
"puzzles I thought of", everything but the kitchen sink, basically,
except that in kitchens the appliances are usually present in some
logical arrangement, not thrown together any which way. Without a real
design to bring them together, the individual puzzles don't make up a
real game.
And the automatic restore? Bad idea. I can decide when I want to do
that myself, thanks.

A Paper Moon: 5
Last year, there was a game involving origami, and I complained about
not being able to fold a crane. And lo and behold, this year, I get to
fold a crane! It's probably accidental, of course, but still, it's a
nice idea. Alas, this is also the best point about A Paper Moon,
because the rest is not conductive to enthusiasm.
There's a rather haphazardly connected collection of odd rooms, some
of them too sparsely described; inhabiting these are some rather
unresponsive objects and NPCs, none of which give the expression of
being anything but a small piece of code. Partly as a result of this
lack of reactions, some puzzles are unfairly unguessable, in
particular the origami ones - one would at least expect to know, or be
able to find out, what one can fold, but I haven't been able to find
any way to discover this.
Still, it does get a point bonus for the crane.

Internal Documents: 7
Down sides first: there are too many unnecessary scenery locations,
and not enough working scenery objects, in Internal Documents. This
gives it an air of being very empty, while the same game with fewer
bits of road and more furniture in the house would've been more
interesting. There are also a couple of slight bugs (the score only
goes up to 626 of 628 - was this intentional or not?), though none of
them are show-stoppers.
The story which is played out in this sparse world is good, though,
and the puzzles in it are nice - the collapsible cellar was a
particularly neat trick. The end result is a game which is enjoyable,
but could've been even more so.

little girl in the big world: 2
This is just not good enough at all. It starts with a primitive parser
which isn't equipped to deal with "it" or "all", but that's just the
start. Worse is that there are not nearly enough actions that give
sensible responses; some reasonable verbs aren't recognised at all (a
puppy not knowing how to break things is... unusual <g>), and many
that are known don't give reasonable answers for unsuitable objects,
but bluntly tell you that "That didn't work", exactly like all other
limited verbs.
The language, too, lacks sparkle. It's not just that it betrays the
author's nationality (hey, I should be able to live with that!), but
there seems to be very little creativity in the various descriptions.
The world just doesn't come to life. Besides, even one of my
compatriots should be able to get his spaces right!
The final blow, though, is that "little girl" is much too small. I
would've finished it in fifteen minutes if it hadn't been for the
unruly parser.


While judging this competition, one thing struck me, and I think it's
a curious observation: on average, TADS games seem to be significantly
less technically accomplished than Inform games. Of course, it could
be that TADS simply is a slightly more primitive system than Inform,
but frankly, I doubt that, since _some_ of the TADS games are quite
advanced. It could also be the case that TADS authors are, on average,
less able programmers than Inform programmers; but I can't think of a
logical reason why this would be true.
So, then, is it just my imagination? It's possible. I'm rather more
used to Inform games than to TADS ones, which I've only started
playing last year. It may also be that TADS players prefer a more
sober environment, which merely gives the false impression of being
less pretty. I'm curious what other people - both coming from Inform
and moving to TADS, and vice versa, think of this.

Richard

Mike Sousa

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Nov 17, 2003, 10:05:48 AM11/17/03
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Richard Bos wrote:
[snip]


> The Recruit: 4
> Yeah, well... erm, yeah. Ok. So it works. But why? Who cares? I'm

[snip]


> And the automatic restore? Bad idea. I can decide when I want to do
> that myself, thanks.

You can toggle the Auto Restore feature by typing AUTO (or AUTO
RESTORE). It's described in the HELP section.

Maybe now it's not such a bad idea? :)

-- Mike

Richard Bos

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Nov 18, 2003, 11:26:17 AM11/18/03
to
Mike Sousa <mjsousaR_...@comcast.net> wrote:

> Richard Bos wrote:
>
> > The Recruit: 4

> > And the automatic restore? Bad idea. I can decide when I want to do
> > that myself, thanks.
>
> You can toggle the Auto Restore feature by typing AUTO (or AUTO
> RESTORE). It's described in the HELP section.
>
> Maybe now it's not such a bad idea? :)

Well, yes and no. It's not _such_ a bad idea, but it still is a bad
idea. You see, I don't read the help sections on special commands for
every game, since I don't expect something like this to happen. I only
knew that this feature was present when I started the game again
(wanting to play a new game from start - I had used the save file
previously, but it was completely unimportant to this particular game)
and it suddenly dumped me right into my previous game.
It might be a useful feature if it had been off to begin with, and you
could turn it on yourself. Even then, I would not use it, certainly not
for something as short as a comp game, but if the game hadn't written
several unasked-for files on my hard disk and simply given me the
_option_ of having my last saved game automatically restored, that might
have been a nice idea.
Most importantly, perhaps, I think that meta-features like this belong
in the 'terp, not in individual games. Especially when it involves
writing unexpected files to the disk.

Richard

Mike Sousa

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Nov 18, 2003, 8:35:38 PM11/18/03
to

>>Richard Bos wrote:
> Well, yes and no. It's not _such_ a bad idea, but it still is a bad
> idea. You see, I don't read the help sections on special commands for
> every game, since I don't expect something like this to happen. I only
> knew that this feature was present when I started the game again
> (wanting to play a new game from start - I had used the save file
> previously, but it was completely unimportant to this particular game)
> and it suddenly dumped me right into my previous game.
> It might be a useful feature if it had been off to begin with, and you
> could turn it on yourself. Even then, I would not use it, certainly not
> for something as short as a comp game, but if the game hadn't written
> several unasked-for files on my hard disk and simply given me the
> _option_ of having my last saved game automatically restored, that might
> have been a nice idea.
> Most importantly, perhaps, I think that meta-features like this belong
> in the 'terp, not in individual games. Especially when it involves
> writing unexpected files to the disk.

Ah. Therein lies the rub. If I may, the unexpected files probably have
more to do with the bad idea than the actual feature. My apologies for
that.

I probably should have defaulted to off but part of the comp is to try
new things. So I did.

FWIW, if you haven't played _Till Death..._ or _No Time To Squeal_,
don't; either that or set the terp to not allow write access to the
current dir. Both those games write temp files.

-- Mike

Richard Bos

unread,
Nov 19, 2003, 11:19:30 AM11/19/03
to
Mike Sousa <mjsousaR_...@comcast.net> wrote:

> Richard Bos wrote:
> > Most importantly, perhaps, I think that meta-features like this belong
> > in the 'terp, not in individual games. Especially when it involves
> > writing unexpected files to the disk.
>
> Ah. Therein lies the rub. If I may, the unexpected files probably have
> more to do with the bad idea than the actual feature. My apologies for
> that.

Mno... that's only part of it. The bad idea is, probably, doing
something completely unexpected that was not part of the story itself
but interfered with the way I could play the game. This involves both
writing unexpected files to disk and, more importantly, doing something
at the start of the game that didn't let me start a new game
immediately, as I expected to be able to do.

> I probably should have defaulted to off but part of the comp is to try
> new things. So I did.

Sure. And part of judging the Comp is remarking on features of the game,
and I did :-)

> FWIW, if you haven't played _Till Death..._ or _No Time To Squeal_,
> don't; either that or set the terp to not allow write access to the
> current dir. Both those games write temp files.

Let's put it this way: if the version of "Till Death" from last year's
Comp creates temp files to disk, it cleans up after itself. I have no
problem with that; I expect programs to write temp files while running.
I just don't like them to clutter my disk, unasked-for, after I quit.

Richard

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