Dwhyld's IFComp reviews (and associated rambling)
dwh...@gmail.com
IFComp this year. Being the sole ADRIFT entry in 2003 and 2004 was
pretty daunting, particularly considering ADRIFT's less than flattering
reputation among the rest of the IF world (some of it with good cause,
most without). At least this year I ought to have the joy of reading
derogatory comments about the crappy parser in someone else's games as
well as mine (only joking... :) ) And I suppose a special thanks ought
to go to this year's troll, Slan Xorox, for writing his appalling mess
PTBad6andoneeighth with ADRIFT. Whatever faults there are with my own
game, by comparison with that sorry effort I've written a masterpiece.
So what was the Comp like as a whole? Some good games, some bad ones, a
lot of in between efforts that had the potential to be good but got
lost somewhere along the way: Waldo's Pie I think I would have enjoyed
a lot more if it hadn't kept crashing every few minutes. Space Horrors
could really have benefited from being written in an actual program and
not a shaky HTML page. A New Life would have been better if I had a
clue what I was supposed to be doing in it.
My favourite game in the Comp was an ADRIFT game - The Plague: Redux -
that I also helped to test. I suppose the inevitable question is: do I
really like this game more than anything else in the Comp? Or am I
simply saying it's great because it's ADRIFT? After all, you might
reason, I've used ADRIFT for years myself now and have entered an
ADRIFT game in three IFComps in a row. I can hardly heap praise on my
own game without someone calling me Panks, so am I heaping praise on
another game written with ADRIFT purely to make my own game look better
by comparison? Judge for yourself. But I suspect I won't be the only
one who rates The Plague: Redux high in their lists for this year's
Comp entries.
Other than that, the ADRIFT entries were kind of average. Vendetta had
the makings of a better game than it was; Escape To New York was okay
but could have benefited from some better NPCs. And the less said about
PTBad6andoneeighth the better.
As usual, there were some truly appalling games entered in the Comp.
Some were deliberate joke entries - PTBad6andoneeight and FutureGame
being prime examples - but some were just... well, bad. Ninja II was
every bit as bad as Ninja from the IFComp in 2004, but then as Paul
Panks wrote it, I'd have been amazed if it had been any better. I
didn't play his other game but does a biblical game written with a
custom-made system strike me as a good idea? No thanks. Hello Sword was
one game that definitely shouldn't have been entered in the Comp. While
there's nothing wrong with people whose first language isn't English
writing games - Beyond, after all, was great - if they don't understand
enough of the language to make their games at least understandable,
they're pretty much wasting their time entering the Comp in the first
place. At the very least, they ought to have an English-speaking person
check it through for them. Phantom: Caverns Of The Killer was another
game that I could tell within the first five seconds of playing it was
going to be a stinker. Please learn to spell before you try to write a
game, okay?
I wonder what the author was smoking when he came up with that idea...
For "The Colour Pink" which starts with you exploring an alien planet
and trying to find a missing colony, abruptly turns everything a
hideous shade of pink, and then transports you to a generic fantasy
land.
The hard-as-freaking-nails damsel in distress...
For "The Plague: Redux" which features vicious, ferocious, deadly,
man-eating zombies... who get their asses handed to them on a plate by
one girl with a metal pole.
Nice game, shame about the system... (part 1)
For "Space Horrors". Not a system as such, but a freaking HTML page
which is about as buggy as a day at a bug farm with extra bugs on hand.
Great game, nice idea, well written... just don't play it until the
author rewrites it using a proper IF authoring system.
Nice game, shame about the system... (part 2)
For "Waldo's Pie" which I was enjoying immensely... until the program
kept crashing on me and forced me to quit.
For the love of God, what *were* you thinking entering a game in the
IFComp...
For Paul Panks. Just... because.
Realmente devo imparare l'inglese prima che scriva un gioco in esso...
For "Hello Sword" which might have been a decent game... *if* I had a
clue what it was all about.
Guess what I'm thinking... (part 1)
For "Mix Tape" which expects me to tear pages out of a scrapbook
instead of just burning the entire book; 'serve dinner' instead of
'give dinner to peter'; and put away the groceries in an invisible
pantry.
Guess what I'm thinking... (part 2)
For "Neon Nirvana" which requires me to find a glass, find the
bouncer's car (only, of course, I don't know it's the bouncer's car
because it doesn't say so anywhere in the game), shoot his tire (why
would I do that? I'm a cop for crying out loud!), smash the glass, put
the glass on the ruined tire (again, why?) and then go and tell the
bouncer about his car. And for my next trick, I shall successfully
count the number of stars in the Milky Way.
Guess what I'm thinking... (part 2)
For "Chancellor" which carries the requirement that the player be
psychic to try and figure out just the game is about.
Die, you troll...
For "PTbad6". An otherwise strong ADRIFT showing... and then *this*
piece of crap shows up.
It's so funny you'd never believe it was an accident...
For "Cheiron", a game about doctors and hospitals. Examine the patients
and you're told "you don't need to refer to the patients during this
game". Ha!
... sigh...
For "FutureGame", a joke entry which was about as funny as a kick in
the groin. If the author wants to find himself something more rewarding
to do with his time, I'd suggest suicide would be a good place to
start.
Once a thief, always a thief...
For "Escape To New York" which has a ship sinking... yet the player is
*still* trying to swipe stuff even as he's drowning.
The game with a great name...
For "Dreary Lands" which does an excellent job of describing itself in
its title.
It started bad...
For "Beyond".
... but then got better...
For "Beyond". Please, please, please, if you're going to write a good
game *don't* give it such an awful beginning. I almost quit.
It started bad... (part 2)
For "Phantom: Caverns Of The Killer".
... and just got worse... (part 2)
For "Phantom: Caverns Of The Killer". Spelling mistakes! Grammatical
errors! Crap storyline! Crap puzzles! Crap crap! *And* it's got a maze!
All it needed was a sign saying "this game is intentionally bad" and it
would be complete.
Am I missing something...?
For "Cheiron", which lots of people seem to like... except for me.
Games not reviewed for one reason or another...
"Amissville II" - Another game by the Santoonie Corporation, whose
reputation for quality games is almost on a par with Malinche (i.e.
completely non-existent). As last year's Santoonie entry was a complete
mess, I decided to avoid this year's and play a proper game instead.
"Internal Vigilance" - meant to but ran out of time.
"Jesus Of Nazareth" - I limit myself to one Paul Panks game a year. Any
more and I tend to start frothing at the mouth in sheer despair that,
unbelievably, there really are people out there who still persist in
writing games in some custom system that plainly doesn't work. Aside
from anything else, I'd used up this week's quota of hate and vitriol
reviewing his other game so I wouldn't have been able to do it justice
anyway.
"Mortality" - Because I wrote it and I'm not impartial enough to write
an honest review of my own game.
"A New Life" - ran out of time.
"PTBad6" - Strange as it sounds, but there are actually people out
there who set out to deliberately write the worst game in the comp.
Why? Beats me. (They're onto a loser anyway seeing as Panks entered the
comp for the second year running...)
"Son Of A..." - ran out of time.
"Unforgotten" - ran out of time.
S C O R E C A R D
1) The Plague: Redux (8)
2) Tough Beans (7)
3) Vespers (6)
4) Waldo's Pie (6)
5) Beyond (6)
6) Space Horrors (6)
7) The Colour Pink (5)
8) Distress (5)
9) Mix Tape (5)
10) Xen: The Contest (5)
11) Snatches (5)
12) Son Of A... (5)
13) Internal Vigilance (5)
14) A New Life (5)
15) Vendetta (4)
16) On Optimism (4)
17) Gilded: The Lily & The Cage (4)
18) Escape To New York (4)
19) Sabotage On The Century Cauldron (4)
20) Off The Trolley (3)
21) Neon Nirvana (3)
22) History Repeating (3)
23) Unforgotten (3)
24) Chancellor (2)
25) Dreary Lands (2)
26) Sword Of Malice (2)
27) Psyche's Lament (2)
28) Cheiron (1)
29) Phantom: Caverns Of The Killer (1)
30) FutureGame (1)
31) PTBad6 (1)
32) Ninja II (1)
33) Hello Sword (unrated)
GAME: Beyond
AUTHOR: Mondi Confinanti, Roberto Grassi, Paolo Lucchesi and Alessandro
Peretti
Beyond was one of those games that starts bad and then gets better.
Unfortunately, it seemed to take an age to get better and I came very
close to quitting before things took a positive turn.
The beginning was weird. Too weird for my liking. A bizarre set of
locations and even more bizarre characters - one called The Mad Joker
whose speech certainly indicates he was well named. Following a very
long and very confusing conversation with him, I was finally able to
make progress to the main part of the game. Where, thankfully, things
began to get better.
Beyond is a murder mystery with you as the detective assigned to solve
a brutal murder at the Paradiso Hotel. There you are met by your
assistant, Grassi (one of the game's writers making an appearance as
an NPC!) who fills you in on the details.
There were a few niggling problems with Beyond, the main one being that
none of the game's writers have English as their first language (I'm
assuming, though I could be wrong) and so sometimes the text you're
reading is a little strange. It's never as bad as, say, in Hello
Sword where it's just about illegible and you have to read every
sentence half a dozen times just to figure out what's going on, but
it might have been an idea to get an English-speaking person to have
proofread it before release.
Getting the hotel part of the game out of the way is harder than it at
first seemed due to a requirement on the player's behalf to carry out
what seemed to me like an unnecessary action. I'd been around the
hotel, questioned all the suspects, examined items all over the
place... and yet there didn't seem to be an option to wrap things up
and move on to the next part. Strangely enough, when I checked the
walkthrough for guidance, I saw that I needed to climb through a window
in one of the rooms. After that, Grassi spoke to me once I reached the
location where he was and I was able to finally finish this part of the
game. I suppose it's possible I'd have gone and climbed through the
window sooner or later anyway, but there's no reason to suggest that
it's necessary and no reason after that to suggest anything in the
game should change as a result.
Beyond is a large game that I'd played barely a fifth of before the
two hour Comp deadline rolled around, but what bits I'd seen of it
struck me as the beginnings of a very good game indeed. The incorrect
phrasings due to the authors' lack of English was a tiny fault
against the game but this was easily overlooked.
6 out of 10
GAME: Chancellor
AUTHOR: Kevin Venzke
This is what the hints file says about Chancellor:
CHANCELLOR is an epic adventure of legendary difficulty. Completing it
is sure to cement your status as a champion adventurer in the immortal
annals of adventure fame! Oh dear.
The little bit of Chancellor that I actually managed to play (all six
locations of it) wasn't so much legendary difficulty as legendary
bad. Okay, that's a bit harsh. It was reasonably well written. It's
just that... well, I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to be
doing and the game didn't seem willing to give me any clue. All I'm
told is that I have a task to be completed. And what might that task
be? Beats me.
Maybe it involves getting the game tested more thoroughly before
releasing it. This was my first command:
>n
(Opening the reddish door)
The reddish door is locked.
Followed by:
>open door
It's already open.
>n
(Opening the reddish door)
The reddish door is locked.
Ouch and double ouch. Annoying errors in the very first location in the
game aren't a good indication that the rest of the game is ever going
to live up to much, but as I didn't manage to play the rest of the
game that's probably not an issue.
The only NPC around was my father who I couldn't get a meaningful
response from no matter what I tried asking him. The conversation
system used was the dreaded ASK NPC ABOUT SUBJECT thing as opposed to
TALK TO NPC. At the best of times I find this a major pain as trying to
figure out just what needs asking is a nightmare game of guess the
verb. Here it was particularly bad. My father wouldn't even tell me
what it was I was supposed to do and after a dozen or more tries to
yield some kind of response from him, I just gave up in dismay.
Attempts to kill him were likewise unsuccessful.
In other location I almost got eaten by a mountain. Yep. A mountain.
As I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to be doing, there was no
walkthrough, and the only hints were coded (a great way to encourage
people to quit playing your game incidentally), I found myself bashing
out QUIT just as soon as possible.
2 out of 10
GAME: Cheiron
AUTHOR: Elizabeth Polli & Sarah Clelland
There was an amusing bit at the start of Cheiron, a game about doctors
and hospitals, when I tried to examine the patients and was told I
wouldn't need to refer to them during the course of the game. Ha!
So what's Cheiron about then? Well, you're a doctor and there's a
hospital and there's patients and several very bland locations to
wander around. And... that's about it.
There was a game entered in the Spring Comp 2005 called Authority which
featured a remarkably bland set of locations with very little storyline
and even less to do. Cheiron reminded me of that game (albeit this one
has some very poor graphics to complement its very poor gameplay). A
game set in a hospital could potentially be an interesting -
operating on patients, saving lives, etc - but if any of that occurs
during this game I never came across it. Instead I just wandered around
and became very bored very quickly.
I came across a number of patients but was never allowed to examine
them or speak to them because I required consent first. How I was
supposed to go about this I wasn't sure. There's a phone but
nothing I tried with it produced any worthy results. Which pretty much
summed up my time spent playing the rest of the game.
The game weighs in at a hefty 2.3 MB but the bulk of this appears to be
the somewhat naff graphics that feature at the top left of the gameplay
window. After looking at the first half dozen in the game, I'm curious
as to why the authors even bothered. If you're going to include
graphics in your game - and enough graphics to bloat the game file to
2.3 MB - at least put some decent ones in. Or was the intent of the
graphics to distract attention away from the decidedly poor quality of
the text?
All in all, a bland idea and poorly executed. Even on a fast broadband
connection, this wasn't worth the time it took to download.
1 out of 10
GAME: The Colour Pink
AUTHOR: Robert Street
This was a strange game that actually seemed like two completely
unrelated games joined together.
It begins with you arriving on an alien planet to investigate the
mysterious disappearance of a colony that once lived on the planet. The
colony, it seems, has gone walkabout and you, being the unfortunate
chap that you are, have got to find out what happened to it.
I spent a while at the start of the game wandering around, picking
things up, dropping things, and generally not making a whole lot of
progress. The opening section of the game is fairly small and I'm not
able to wander away from the building where the colony lived. So moving
forward means persevering and... and in the game I managed to figure
out what I needed to do. And then things got decidedly strangely.
I was a little bemused by the game's title to begin with. Has it got
a racism slant? Is there something mysterious about the colour pink?
No, it seems that, once you reach a certain part in the game, the
locations you are in, and everything in them, become... well, pink.
Seriously. Like everything has been daubed with pink paint.
But that's not the strangest thing about the game. What was looking
like a science fiction game with a bizarre twist later on becomes a
fantasy game with a bizarre twist as you leave the alien planet and the
missing colony, and the general pinkness, behind and find yourself in a
generic fantasy land. What has this to do with the alien planet and the
missing colony? I'm guessing some kind of hallucination but I could be
wrong.
The early part of The Colour Pink was difficult and I didn't manage
to get very far without resorting to the excellent in-game hints, but
the section set in the fantasy land is so easy it's a wonder there
are any puzzles at all and the author didn't just greet you with a
"well done, you've finished it!" sign the moment you first show
up. Okay, that's a slight exaggeration. There are puzzles and they're
not ridiculously easy or so straightforward you're going to solve them
all without any kind of struggle, but compare the later part of the
game to the earlier part and the difference in the difficulty levels is
quite bewildering.
But then the difference between the earlier part of the game and the
later part is bewildering full stop. Was this written as one big game
or as two smaller, completely unrelated games that the author decided,
for whatever reason, to join together? I suspect the latter. While both
parts of the game are good enough in their own right, they're just too
different to make playing the entire thing anything less than jarring.
I think I'd have preferred either a game fully set on the alien
planet and the missing colony or a game in the fantasy land. The two
together are just downright weird.
5 out of 10
GAME: Distress
AUTHOR: Mike Snyder
Mike Snyder entered a game in the IFComp in 2004 called Trading Punches
which I liked a lot to begin with, but less and less the more I played
it. In many ways, I felt the same about Distress. It takes an
interesting subject matter - a spaceship crash landing on an alien
world, two of the crew are injured and you have to save them, throws in
a monster lurking around - and then focuses too much on the minor
details and misses out on the more interesting ones. I spent way too
long chasing around a sheet of vellum, tying one item to another and
the like and not enough exploring what could have been a very
interesting game.
In some ways I liked Distress. In others it was a frustrating game and
an even more frustrating game playing experience. Frequently I would
try to venture off in one direction only to be told that I had no
reason to go that way yet. Yes, it's one of those games where
perfectly logical commands - i.e. exploring the general layout of the
land - is restricted until certain requirements have been met. While
this limits the player from wandering off completely at random and
ensures the games progresses in a nice, orderly manner, it's also
somewhat annoying to be told you can't do something without a better
rationale than "you've no reason to do that" being given. If I
want to wander away from the crash site, shouldn't I be given the
option to do so?
There also seem to be a number of timed events which generally annoy
me. Certain things occur that halt the progression of the game until
after they've occurred. Here it's a tad more annoying than usual as
the WAIT command doesn't move matters on, so a good portion of my
time spent with Distress was moving back and forth between a couple of
locations hoping to trigger the next event. While timed events are
logical, they're also annoying.
But... overall I found myself liking Distress. Frustrating bits aside,
and there are more than a few, it was well written and overall
interesting. I'm not sure how long I would have continued with it if
there hadn't been a walkthrough accompanying it as it's also the
kind of game to kill off the unwary player frequently. (And with the
monster turning up and eating you being a timed event, it's one
you're not going to avoid just by being in a different location when it
occurs.) It also kind of irked me that game wouldn't give me any
hints until I'd first typed HELP. Why? Either the author was looking
for news ways to introduce annoying aspects into his game or he thinks
this kind of thing is a good idea.
Overall, this is probably better than the rating I've given it but I
knocked a point or two off for the frustrations.
5 out of 10
GAME: Dreary Lands
AUTHOR: Paul Lee
I'll start by saying that I didn't play this game for very long so
the following review is kind of sparse on details. But then as the
author didn't spend very long writing the game, I guess that's kind
of appropriate.
Dreary Lands has all the hallmarks of a first work of interactive
fiction by a newbie. Minimal testing, uninspired story, no kind of
logic, and guess the verb through the roof. Heck, the intro even says
it is a first game. Does that excuse the spelling mistakes in the
intro? Not as far as I'm concerned it doesn't. Even newbies have
access to spell checks.
The game starts pretty dismally: you're in a locked chamber and have to
escape. Ho hum. Not come across that idea before. As it happens,
getting out of the chamber is simplicity itself. There's a hot
pink-coloured rod that you pick up and then, hey presto, you're dropped
out of the cell into a hot pink-coloured car. Makes me kind of wonder
why the game even starts you in a chamber if it's as easy as that to
escape. But then as the chamber, walls, ceiling and just about
everything else that you might care to try and examine can't be
examined, it's perhaps just as well.
Once out of the cell, I found myself in a car. Out of the car... well,
there's nothing. A large room which, apparently, doesn't have any
exits. (How did the car get in?) And while OUT works fine for moving
you out of the car, IN doesn't work for moving you back inside it.
That's when I gave up. Too many errors, too little testing, too
little attention spent on the finer details that are what text
adventures are all about. I might have been tempted to play a bit
further and write a more detailed review, but then the game's ABOUT
command reveals that the author doesn't think the game's up to much
and he's not planning to release a better version. Why did he even
release the game in the first place? Beats me.
2 out of 10
GAME: Escape To New York
AUTHOR: Richard Otter
You play the part of a thief who has stolen a priceless painting and
has decided to 'escape to New York' with it. Only you've had the
slight misfortune to book yourself passage on a ship that's soon due
to have a rather serious encounter with an iceberg... yep, you're on
the Titanic.
By far the most annoying aspect of the game for me was the way the
player will often talk out loud to himself, like:
"Three days lost!" you mutter to yourself. "I could have been having a
look at all those first class cabins, with all that loot waiting to be
liberated!" Aside from making him come across as some overly dramatic
loony, it's also kind of strange that the player is even concerned
over the loot he could be 'liberating'. After all, he's just
stolen a priceless painting. Why risk getting arrested when he already
has all the money he'll ever need?
Although that sort of thing tends to be present throughout the rest of
the game as well. Despite having a priceless painting in his
possession, the player makes a point of stealing everything he can get
his hands on, even though there's a cop on board the ship who's
already suspicious of him. Wouldn't it have been wiser to just lie
low?
The game ended suddenly for me quite a few times, and often just as I
was thinking it might have been a good idea to save my position. As the
default ADRIFT end game system is used, that means no quick bashing of
the UNDO command to return you to the action. Annoying.
Characterisation is generally pretty poor. The NPCs never really seem
believable, although it isn't helped that several of them are just
referred to as 'bursar' and 'barber'. Others tend to move
around the ship in a very set fashion and will often wander away
partway through a conversation with you. Dialogue with them is stunted
and they tend to display all the warmth of cardboard cut outs.
Escape From New York wasn't a terrible game by any means but it
wasn't one I particularly warmed to, either. The woodenness of the
NPCs, the frequent death of the player and similar problems prevented
me enjoying it any more.
4 out of 10
GAME: FutureGame
AUTHOR: The FutureGame Corporation
A short joke of a game which seems to consist of a couple of questions
after which the game ends. I'm pretty the author (who will probably
remain anonymous forever if this is the kind of tripe he's capable
of) intended this as an amusing little effort but it's actually more
'feeble' than 'amusing'.
"Do you want to win the game?" the game asks at one point.
"Try writing one and I'll answer that question," I reply.
One to avoid.
1 out of 10
GAME: Gilded - The Lily & The Cage
AUTHOR: A. Hazard
I wasn't quite sure what to make of Gilded, perhaps the most
uninteractive interactive game I've ever played.
On the positive side of things, it was well written. On the negative
side, I'd argue that it was even really 'interactive' fiction. The
interactive side of things, you see, implies that the player has some
sort of choice in the way the game progresses, yet the beginning of
Gilded would seem to think otherwise. The game begins with you lying
beneath the legs of a table at which a couple of people are talking
(you, at this stage, I am assuming are some kind of animal, but the
text gives the impression you're actually just a shadow). The people
talk at length (and when I say 'at length' I'm adding special emphasis
to the 'length' part) about treasure and you decide it would be a good
idea to join them in their quest.
So does the game start then? Well...
It becomes slightly more interactive here with a series of questions
fired at the player, but my answers didn't seem to steer things in a
different way. Leaving the first location was still impossible so I was
forced to hang around for an age while my companions chatted amongst
themselves. Finally the game let me move outside, and then I got hit by
another brick wall - another conversation! I was tired of the seemingly
endless conversations by now so I hit 0 to end the conversation and get
on with the game itself, only the game still wouldn't let me leave till
I'd finished talking. The big problem here is that no matter what I
typed, I just couldn't figure out a way to get the conversation started
again. TALK TO [NAME] won't work, and while ASK [NAME] ABOUT [SUBJECT]
yielded a few responses, none of them were at all helpful.
Faced with wading my way through all those endless screens of text
again to try a different conversation option next time or quitting just
didn't appeal to me in the least. Hitting UNDO didn't seem to do the
trick, either. So I typed QUIT instead.
I felt that Gilded might have made a better game if it had been less
wordy. Seriously, there's no need to load up the screen ten times in a
row at the start of the game with enough text to fill a medium sized
novel. The same information that took half an hour to read through
could have been conveyed to me in a few sentences, and the game would
certainly have benefited from not bombarding the player with
information overload at every turn. Or maybe all that mountain of text
could have accompanied the game in a simple README file that could have
been read, or not, at the player's choice.
Nicely written? Yes. Interactive fiction? Not from what I saw of it.
I've played CYOA games where I've been given more choices about what I
want to do.
5 out of 10 (3 for the interactive side of things, 7 for the writing,
so 5 seems a fair score)
GAME: Hello Sword
AUTHOR: Andrea Rezzonica
Okay, maybe it's just me being nasty but people who don't
understand the English language really shouldn't be writing games in
it. Seriously they shouldn't. The intro to Hello Sword contained more
typos and grammatical errors than I've ever read in any intro ever
before; every sentence is littered with at least one. Reading it is
painful. Literally painful. I was three lines into this game and
wishing I'd never even started playing it. Even the little blurb that
starts most Inform games was buggy:
HELLO SWORD - The journey
English version of the same italian textual adventure written by Andrea
Rezzonico
Type INFO to enter into the menu of informations.
Release 1 / Serial number 050929 / Inform v6.30 Library 6/11
Capitalisation? And what pray tell does "Type INFO to enter into the
menu of informations." mean?
If there's ever a way to discourage someone from playing a game, this
is it. The first command I entered was QUIT and that was more than
enough for me.
Please, please, please, if you're going to write a game in English
learn the language first.
Unrated
GAME: History Repeating
AUTHOR: Mark & Renee Choba
I wasn't really sure what to make of this game. It could have had
potential but just seemed too rushed for my liking.
You start with a routine day of drudgery at the office and then,
without warning, mysteriously find yourself transported back to your
class in school.
Properly handled, this could have been interesting but it's been
written about with all the depth of a shallow puddle. The enthusiasm,
too. Strangely enough, my character doesn't even seem particularly
surprised to find himself moving through time and space.
Bugs and errors abound. My teacher speaks to me yet I'm not able to
speak back to them because talking out in class isn't allowed. In
another location I found some chap called Mr Mitchell who couldn't be
spoken to or even examined. One room has a description which advises me
I can only exit via the door or the window yet GO WINDOW moves me to
the nearest desk and sits me down. Trying CLIMB THROUGH WINDOW produces
the helpful response that I can't even see the window! Funnily
enough, when I hit upon OUT, the game told me that I had just moved out
of the desk. Hmmm... I typed hints at one point and I was informed that
there aren't any as the authors ran out of time to include any. After
playing this game for a while, I'm pretty sure hints aren't the only
thing they didn't have time to include.
I struggled to get anything done in History Repeating. Maybe that's
just me being especially dim when it comes to the puzzles on offer, or
maybe it's just the game being especially hard. Some of the puzzles
just plain don't make any sense. I was kind of baffled when I checked
the accompanying walkthrough to find that I was expected to peek
through a hole in the wall, see some students sitting there and then go
and tell the dean about them. How was I supposed to figure that out?
Beats me.
Overall, too little time and effort has been spent on this game, the
puzzles are the sort of thing you're only likely to figure out if
you're either one of the authors or playing the game with the
walkthrough at the side of you, and the game just doesn't appeal to
me. Not terrible, but definitely not a game that should have been
entered in the IFComp.
3 out of 10
GAME: Mix Tape
AUTHOR: Brett Witty
Parts of Mix Tape I really liked. Others had me tearing my hair out in
frustration. It's one of those games best played with the walkthrough
to one side of you because you're never going to finish it otherwise.
It's a game about a break up. You're Valentine (strange name by the
way) and your boyfriend Peter has called you up to a cliff top to split
up. You're going to burn a scrapbook you made of your time together and
reminisce over stuff.
First the good points: it's well written. Very well written in parts.
Nicely wordy without it ever seeming like you're being forced to wade
through so much text your eyes begin to glaze over. Full marks for
that.
But the bad points? Oh dear. The very first command in the game - and
one I was even advised by the game to try - ASK PETER WHY YOU ARE
HERE produced YOU SEE NO PETER WHY YOU ARE HERE HERE. The same response
got me for ASK PETER WHY *WE* ARE HERE as well. Fortunately, this is
one of those games with timed events that just tend to move on if you
don't actually do anything, so after a few more attempts to elicit a
response from Peter, I stood there and waited for a bit. Thankfully the
game moved on.
Peter very helpfully kindles a fire for me and I try to burn my
scrapbook only to be told that I don't need to burn it. Turns out
that this is one of the game's many guess the command errors. The
obvious commands seldom seems to work in this game, as I found to my
dismay. But helped by the walkthrough, I managed to get a bit further.
The next scene involved cooking dinner for Peter. This was a fairly
simple affair on the face of it as the kitchen has precisely one
cookable item in it and one means of cooking it. But actually getting
him to eat the meal was a different matter. Honest question: would
anyone else try SERVE DINNER before GIVE DINNER TO PETER? No, didn't
think so.
After that, I played the game with the walkthrough, just typing out the
commands one by one. In a way this was bad because it's downright
cheating, but as it allowed me to reach the end of the game without
slitting my wrists in sheer frustration I consider it a reasonable
thing to do.
Aside from the guess the command/verb problems, there were some other
errors in Mix Tape. Some of them outright bizarre. I was told I
couldn't lie on Peter's bed because I was too large for it. (What
- am I a giant or something? Or is Peter a midget?) I couldn't make
the bed because I don't know how to 'cook' it. Further in the
game, I was advised to put my groceries in the pantry before going into
the rest of the house. Which pantry? Beats me. It wasn't listed in
the room description. Funnily enough, when trying to examine it the
first time I'm told it's empty and that it's closed. How do I know
it's empty if it's closed? (Okay, okay, I've just bought some
groceries but surely I couldn't see that it was empty if it's
closed?)
Frustrating bits aside, I enjoyed Mix Tape more than quite a few other
games in the comp. Play it with the walkthrough to hand and it's an
enjoyable game; otherwise it's just infuriating.
5 out of 10 (for forcing me to play the game with the walkthrough; +2
if the guess the verb errors and guess what the author was thinking are
fixed)
GAME: Neon Nirvana
AUTHOR: Tony Woods
I didn't get very far in Neon Nirvana before resorting to the
walkthrough that accompanied the game file. Why? Well... it's a bit
on the impossible side.
The storyline is about a detective determined to arrest an elusive
criminal by the name of Herman Walter Perron who frequents the club of
the game's title. Along with your two sidekicks - Agents Prost and
Sanger - you're here to bring the bad man to justice.
In theory anyway. Only the bouncer on the club's main door wouldn't
let me in. I tried to arrest him but found I couldn't - apparently
this would be wasting a good handcuff. Hmmm. Sounds like a bit of a
copout there. If I was a detective about to bring a major criminal to
justice, would I let a bouncer on the door stop me entering a club?
Heck no, I'd arrest his ass and charge him for obstructing a police
officer.
That was about as far as I got before I went to the walkthrough. And
considering the string of commands required to actually get past the
bouncer, it's a good job I did as they're hardly the sort of thing
anyone is ever likely to figure out.
(Bit of a spoiler following so you might want to skip the next
paragraph.)
It turns out you need to find a glass in another location, find the
bouncer's car (only, of course, you don't know it's the
bouncer's car because it doesn't say so anywhere in the game),
shoot his tire (why would I do that? I'm a cop for crying out loud!),
smash the glass, put the glass on the ruined tire (again, why?) and
then go and tell the bouncer about his car. Why oh why oh why would
anyone think to do all of that? Unless you're the sort of person who
tries out every single thing in a text adventure just to see if you can
do them, it's unlikely you'd ever figure that lot out.
This kind of guess the command had blunted my enthusiasm for the game
and after playing for another half hour or so (most of which was spent
struggling to get anywhere), I quit and decided I'd be better off
trying something else instead. The guess the command issues aside, the
game itself seemed reasonably okay but struggling to make any kind of
progress isn't my idea of a fun game.
3 out of 10
GAME: Ninja II
AUTHOR: Paul Allen Panks (aka Dunric)
(Okay, a quick disclaimer before I start this review proper: I don't
particularly like the author (Dunric or Paul Allen Panks or whatever
he's calling himself), don't like his games and would probably
really struggle to find a nice word to say about anything he did. So
bear that in mind when you read the following review.)
Ninja was an entry in the IFComp 2004. It was, and let's not beat
about the bush here, dire. Appalling. Awful. Crap. And whatever other
insulting words you want to say about it. If there was a template for
how not to write a text adventure, then Ninja was that template. It
was, quite simply, the kind of game that a toddler could have improved
upon.
Ninja II is even worse.
It has the usual flaws that bog down every one of Panks' games that
I've had the misfortune to play and which, despite constant criticism
for literally years from literally dozens of people, he never bothers
doing anything about. "L" doesn't work, "I" doesn't work...
funnily enough "X" does work. What - Panks actually listening to
what somebody suggested and including an abbreviation command in his
game years after everyone else? My god! Has he bothered to write a
proper game this time then? And a storyline? And... But no, that would
be expecting too much.
The game starts with you, as the ninja of the title, standing outside
the same shrine you were standing outside in the first game. This time
there's an Ancient Chinese Ice Dragon here (playing on a computer of
all things) who has come to kill you. Trying to fight it results in the
Dragon breathing fire on you (not very hot fire apparently as it
doesn't kill you). Yawn.
I gave up with Ninja pretty soon after starting to play it, and the
same fate befell Ninja II as well. It's... well, not just bad, but (I
suspect) deliberately bad. It's like the author took a good long look
at his first game and thought to himself "now, how can I make it
worse?" Personally I'd have said making a worse game than Ninja was a
physical impossibility, but Panks has pulled it off. Congratulations to
him. His title of Worst Game Writer In The World looks to be secure for
another year.
This might well be just a joke entry by the author, but with this
author it's hard to tell when he's making a genuine effort to write a
game and just messing around. It's so bad it could be a joke entry, but
then again it's not much worse than his entry last year which was, to
all intents and purposes, a serious entry. So I'll judge it on its own
merits: it's a stinker.
Well, Mr Panks, if you're determined to prove to the world just what a
terrible game writer you are, then you've certainly scored one hell
of a home goal with Ninja II. Well done, it's even worse than Ninja I
and that is an achievement in itself.
1 out of 10
GAME: Off The Trolley
AUTHOR: Krisztian Kaldi
Some games just don't appeal to me much and before I've been playing
them for more than a few minutes, I'm yearning to try something else.
Off The Trolley was one of them.
You're a trolley (bus/coach) driver who's spent his life on the
trolley and is utterly fed up with it. You've decided to get 'off
the trolley' in a spectacular way.
The introduction hints that the player might be able to crash into
buildings with the trolley, which sounded like a lot of fun in a
violent childish sort of way. Unfortunately when I tried this it
didn't work. Then again, the game didn't understand the word
"drive" which I thought was a bit of a failing in a game which
takes place on a moving vehicle.
I spent a while trying to get to grips with the actual driving of the
trolley. This appeared to consist of a button to start it and a brake
to stop it. I'm guessing the trolley in question must be following a
grid of some kind because there doesn't seem to be any way of
steering it (actually, when I first saw the word "trolley" I
assumed "supermarket trolley"), speeding it up or slowing it down.
Gripping as this was, it didn't make for a particularly enthralling
game playing experience so I got up and had a wander around the
trolley. There wasn't much to see. A passenger charmingly referred to
as "the Bum" and several other passengers who just sit around
chatting. I tried engaging the Bum and the others in conversation but
to no avail. I then tried beating a few of them up and ran into the
usual flaw in the TADS parser which expects me to attack enemies with a
weapon. My bare fists apparently aren't good enough for TADS. As I
didn't have a weapon, I'm clearly not going to finish my last day on
the trolley being arrested for beating up the passengers.
Making progress was awkward. The trolley was easy enough to operate but
there didn't really seem to be anything to do. I could press the
button and hit the brakes all I liked. I could wander around the
trolley while it wasn't in motion. But that seemed to be about it. So
I cheated and went to the walkthrough. I found a note about a key and a
panel but when I tried to insert the first into the second I was told I
couldn't. As this was the only panel I could find, my game seemed
pretty much screwed.
Nice enough writing, and no typos or grammatical errors that I could
see, but the game just plain didn't appeal to me.
3 out of 10
GAME: On Optimism
AUTHOR: Tim Lane
The IFComp seems to attract a few gimmick games every year and I'm
never usually very fond of them. On Optimism was no exception.
It begins with the player killing himself in distress after the death
of his partner and waking up in a room called 'Heart'. There's a
poem here that the player can read if he's so minded and another room
a short time later called 'Room Of Your Joy'.
My opinion of this game started low and dropped lower the more of it I
played. In a way, I'm disappointed I didn't enjoy it more as there's
a neat idea as the game's basis, but at the end of the day I just
couldn't summon any kind of enthusiasm for it. As a very short game
- playable in ten or twenty minutes - I might have struggled
through to the bitter end just to see how it panned out, but a neat
idea doesn't always make a neat game, and On Optimism was too weird
for my liking.
Technically it was fairly accomplished and the writing was better than
average, so I'll add a couple of points on to my overall opinion of
the game to reflect this.
4 out of 10
GAME: Phantom: Caverns Of The Killer
AUTHOR: Brandon Coker
The first thing I noticed about this was the terrible introduction:
typos, grammatical errors and the kind of writing I'd generally
associate with someone still attending nursery school. (If the author
is still in nursery school, apologies.) In fact, the very first
sentence in the game reads
"Legends speak, of a great egyption warrior."
Ouch. A comma where one isn't needed. And when oh when has Egyptian
been spelt like that?
But on with the game. What's it like? Well... pretty awful to be
honest. Room descriptions seem to be a line or two long on average and,
here's the best bit, there's a maze right near the start of the game.
Oh joy! Now I'm a big fan of retro 80's text adventures but mazes are
one of things I'm glad have gone out of fashion. So plunging straight
into one within three moves of starting the game was never going to go
down well with me. If the rest of the game had been better, I might
have tried a bit harder to find enthusiasm for Phantom: Caverns Of The
Killer but as the rest of the game seemed to be even worse, I just lost
interest.
Spelling mistakes litter just about every location. There are also a
number of irritating bugs, not the least of which being a food stall
where I type EAT FOOD, and then the following two lines tell me first
of all that I've taken the food and then that it isn't portable. Food
not portable? Hmmm...
Overall, a pretty appalling game and one that was never in a fit state
to be entered in the IFComp.
1 out of 10
GAME: The Plague: Redux
AUTHOR: Cannibal
The idea of zombies attacking the living seems a popular theme for the
past few years, what with the remake of Dawn Of The Dead, a pastiche
Shaun Of The Dead and then George A. Romero's (very disappointing)
Land Of The Dead, and here the idea makes its way into a text
adventure. With pretty impressive results, too.
You play the part of Stacie, out for the night with some of the girls,
who gets caught up in all the chaos at a subway station when the undead
start turning on the living. Your friends become lost and you are
trapped in the subway station, weaponless. It's just you...and a
horde of ravening zombies.
The bulk of The Plague: Redux takes place in the subway station as
Stacie, the aforementioned damsel in distress, struggles to get out in
one piece. Along the way, she encounters a few other survivors
(including some pleasant chap who tries to rape her (not a game for
kids clearly)) and, yes, zombies galore. The writing is excellent for
the most part and does a good job of evoking the scene of a terrified
young woman in mortal danger of being killed by zombies.
Unfortunately there are some serious errors that let things down. I
found some zombies feasting on a corpse in a cubicle and options were
displayed on screen to either [F] Fight or [E] Escape. Neither worked.
Nor did attacking the zombies work. In fact, I wasn't able to do
anything at all about the zombies, and worst still, when I typed LOOK,
I was alone in the cubicle without the zombies. Worse was the fact that
when I left the cubicle and re-entered, the zombies were back. This
time, however, I wasn't given the option of [F] Fight or [E] Escape,
but just killed them straight off with a weapon I was carrying.
Elsewhere I found a woman who had been mauled by zombies. Even though I
didn't know her name, the game helpfully referred to her as Kate.
After some struggling to help her, I figured out what needed doing but
ran into a problem in that the game wouldn't accept my GIVE [OBJECT]
TO KATE but only GIVE [OBJECT] TO WOMAN.
If there are any faults with The Plague: Redux (gameplay faults, that
is, and not outright errors or bugs like those mentioned above), it's
that the early parts are far too linear. The intro seems to take an age
to get through and involves little more than the main character and her
friends fleeing from a horde of zombies. There's also the problem that,
despite zombies running around and killing people all over the place,
it's possible for the player to take as long as they want in getting
anywhere. And the threat of the zombies themselves is somewhat weakened
by the fact that the player - a young woman armed with a metal pole
- is able to kill them without too much difficulty. How has the
zombie threat progressed this far if they're so easy to kill? (Then
again, it never made much sense in the films that unarmed, shambling
corpses who can't think for themselves could overpower soldiers armed
with machine guys...)
A large portion of the game has the player wandering around the subway
station trying to find some money for a bottle of water from a
dispensing machine. Why? Because she's thirsty. This struck me as a
pretty flimsy excuse for what is - due to the way the money is
actually found in half a dozen or so different places, some of them not
very obvious - a very lengthy and time consuming puzzle. I must have
spent a good hour wandering around the subway station searching for a
few extra coins for the water... all the time wondering just why I
didn't simply go into one of the many shops scattered around the
place and help myself to some. Unfortunately, the water is required for
an event later in the game and without it you won't get anywhere, so
it's not a case of you being able to miss it out if you don't want
to.
Examining items and looking under and behind them is often a different
thing entirely in this game. Something that I discovered after
examining just about every item in the subway station, not finding
much, and then realising I had to go over the whole place again to find
what I needed. A little README file indicating that examining items was
different from looking under and behind them would have been a good
idea.
But the problems with the game (aside from the errors with the
disappearing zombies in the cubicle) are relatively minor ones and,
with a bit of perseverance, can be overcome. Overall, The Plague: Redux
is a great text adventure, and certainly the best ADRIFT game I've
played this year.
8 out of 10
GAME: Psyche's Lament
AUTHOR: John & Lara Sichi
I'm going out on a limb here and guessing Psyche's Lament was written
by a duo who have never written a game before. Why? Well, for the
simple fact that getting anything done was more painful than having
teeth extracted (something I can personally attest to having visited my
friend the dentist just a few days prior to writing this review). The
old Inform chestnut of THAT'S NOT SOMETHING YOU NEED TO REFER TO IN
THE COURSE OF THIS GAME (the system's default response when you try
to examine an item the author hasn't covered a response for (i.e.
just about every item in the game)) popped up on screen so many times
during my first five minutes that I began to wonder if the authors were
being paid to display it or something.
The storyline? Confusing. You wake up in the dark and then Aphrodite
(your mother) opens some seeds before you and they drop on the floor.
Hmmm... probably not the worst introduction to a game I've ever come
across but it's hard to think of a worse one on the spur of the
moment.
After struggling for a few minutes to get anywhere in the game, I came
to the conclusion that this was either a joke entry or one just so bad
it appeared to be a joke. So I went to the walkthrough. As it turned
out, it wasn't a joke entry but the sheer number of non-obvious
commands required to get anywhere made me wonder if the authors were
secretly having a laugh at my expense. 'Cry' is a command used at
one point; elsewhere I'm expected to 'zap green' - why would I
think to do this? Damned if I know.
After that, sorry to say, but I lost interest. The rest of the
walkthrough seemed to revolve around more non-obvious commands and as I
wasn't particularly impressed with the game so far I decided it was
high time to quit.
2 out of 10
GAME: Sabotage On The Century Cauldron
AUTHOR: Thomas de Graaf
I had a five minute run through this game right at the start of the
Comp, didn't like it much and decided to give up with it. A while
later, after playing through all the other Comp games, I came back to
it.
So would I have been better off not returning to the game? Or is it a
masterpiece in the making? Probably a bit of the former unfortunately.
As the title implies, you're a saboteur aboard a spaceship named The
Century Cauldron. Quite why you've decided to sabotage it is something
of a mystery. The walkthrough (which I found myself looking at very
quickly into the game) says that examining the pictures hanging on your
cabin wall reveal the reason for your sabotaging ways, but as this just
shows you a photo of your dog and says you've left him behind, I wasn't
too sure if I was missing something. Are you really planning to
sabotage a spaceship and potentially kill all the people on board
because you accidentally forgot to bring your dog along?
I quite liked the game to begin with. The layout of the ship isn't
particularly inspired, and the people you meet are more caricatures
than real believable people, but the game seemed to flow along nicely
enough. It was only when I started trying to make progress that I
became stuck. A quick glance at the walkthrough showed me why. The
first main puzzle in the game - getting hold of the keycard that allows
you into the lab - has one of those solutions that probably seems
really inspired to the writer, but less so to the player. One of the
solutions involves poisoning another crew member with an item that I
wasn't even aware at the time was poison (strangely, when I tried to
drink it, it didn't kill me), taking an item from him and substituting
it for the keycard I need. The other solution looks to be a pretty
random thing whereby if you happen to wait around in a certain location
at the same time as a couple of other characters are there, they will
start arguing and then will chase each other through the ship,
eventually unlocking the door you need to get access to.
And I'm supposed to figure that out how exactly? Maybe I'm just getting
really bad at these sorts of games but, to me, that strikes me as the
kind of puzzle that I'm not, never in a million years, going to figure
out.
Incidentally, I waited around in the relevant location for a while but
nothing seemed to happen. Another time, I managed to be around when the
two characters start arguing and I was able to chase them around the
ship for 50+ moves, although I never noticed them unlock the door in
question or even go anywhere near it. The chase itself was amusing but
after 50+ moves of following the two around, I was pretty much near my
wit's end.
For the time I spent playing Sabotage On The Century Cauldron, I quite
enjoyed it (non-obvious puzzles notwithstanding), but I doubt it's a
game I'll be going back to any time soon. A better indication of just
why I'm trying to sabotage the ship would have been nice, as well as
making it clearer just how you're supposed to go about your goal. Oh,
and disabling the UNDO command is just going to annoy people. It
certainly annoyed me.
4 out of 10
GAME: Snatches
AUTHOR: Gregory Weir
I wasn't too keen on Snatches to begin with. The beginning of the game
seemed poorly implemented, with locations being pretty much empty and
there being little to do in them. But just about at the time where I
was thinking that maybe I should quit it and go find some other Comp
game to play instead, it began to improve. I got snatched.
The title refers to the game's strange habit of jumping from one
seemingly unrelated scene to another, often also seemingly unrelated.
What triggers the move from one part to another is never really clear -
it happened after I started the car in one scene - although maybe the
problem was that, once I realised Snatches was a game of many parts, I
tended to try and get through the many parts as quickly as possible in
the hope that I might get an explanation at the end of the game.
Unfortunately not. The game ended with me even more confused than when
I started playing it.
I ran into a strange error right at the start of the game which I
wasn't sure was an error on the author's part or a strange flaw in the
Inform program. Trying to open the door revealed to me that it was
locked, yet when I attempted to go north through it I unlocked and
opened it. Why does going north open the door for me yet the more
obvious command - OPEN DOOR - not work?
Snatches is a series of very small games all joined together, although
an explanation for each part is never really made clear. I moved from
the first part (after struggling with some guess the verb issues in
that START CAR was required instead of DRIVE CAR) to the second, and
then from the second to the third, and so on, without really
understanding what was going on. Some of the parts seemed to refer to
other parts, although what the connection between them was I wasn't
entirely sure. Most of the parts were so short that little more than a
few minutes work was required to finish them off, yet quite often I
would leave that part of the game and never be sure just whether I had
achieved anything in it or not. Some, in fact, were even shorter than
that. One I managed to complete by moving in a compass direction right
off, and then I was snatched and taken somewhere else.
But while it was a confusing game that didn't make any kind of sense to
me whatsoever, Snatches was still fairly interesting to play. Trying to
fathom out what was going on, and wondering over just what kind of
creature the shadow that popped up from time to time was, passed an
hour or more pleasantly enough. I couldn't say I really liked the game
overall but there was enough about it to make to me feel it was one of
the few in the IFComp 2005 actually worth playing. I just wish I had a
clue what it was all about.
5 out of 10
GAME: Space Horror
AUTHOR: Jerry
Ah, good old CYOA. I've always been especially fond of these sort of
games, (heck, I've even written a few myself) so when I saw what this
one, I eagerly tried it.
Getting the thing to work was a pain to begin with. The game installed
to my Program Files directory but I decided I'd sooner have it in My
Documents because that's where most of my programs are. Bad mistake.
The way the game is set up, it won't work if it's anywhere but the
Program Files. So I had to copy it all back. Sigh.
Did it work then? Kind of. I wasn't sure which of the 152 objects in
the game file I was supposed to click on to actually start the game, so
I tried "Space Horror I" and completely missed the introduction.
Several clicks later and I found the right one.
On with the game...
Aliens have landed! Yep, it's one of those games which pits you, the
hapless average guy, against a ravening horde of space aliens hell bent
on conquering the world.
I liked Space Horror for the most part. The storyline was kind of
uninspired, not to mention unrealistic as hell, but I still enjoyed
reading it and following my character through to the many various
endings. I wasn't too keen on the way it was set up, though. Clicking
the links at the end of the page seemed more troublesome than, say,
typing a number or a letter would have been. Then there were the
annoying errors when the screen kept flickering from time to time -
pretty distracting when you're trying to read something on it. A time
or two, I even clicked on a link, the screen refreshed a few times, and
then I found myself back at the start of the game again. I'm sure I
hadn't died, and hadn't accidentally clicked the wrong link, so
clearly there are a few bugs in this that need ironing out. The delay
between clicking on some of the links and being taken to relevant
section was annoying as well. The game was tested with IE6 but I use
Firefox so maybe that's where the problem lies.
Space Horror isn't a large game. It's split into just 124 sections,
of which at least half don't have any kind of option at the end of
them, just a link to click to take you to another section. It's
easily playable in two hours, though, and maybe that was the intention.
Despite enjoying the game, I quit before the two hours were up. Why?
Too many bugs, too much tedious waiting to be sent to the correct
section, too much screen flickering. I'd like to see everything this
game has to offer, but only if it's in the form of a game written
with a proper IF authoring system.
6 out of 10 for the game itself (about 2 out of 10 for the errors)
GAME: The Sword Of Malice
AUTHOR: Anthony Panuccio
I've never been a big fan of intros to games that try to cram a huge
amount of history into a few short paragraphs. Either tell the back
history in a more interesting way or spend a while longer doing it.
Here we have the entire history of your race - the Sekoniun - and their
thousand year war against their bitter enemies - the Altari. The
Sekoniun elders, it transpires, have discovered ancient texts that have
told them how to create the ultimate weapon that will defeat the Altari
forever. All they have to do is build it. How do they go about this?
Organise a crack team of elite soldiers to gather the necessary pieces
of the weapon together? Nah. Just get one helpless chap (i.e. you) to
get all the pieces on your own. After all, it's the only the fate of
your entire race hanging in the balance so it'd be overkill to send
more than one person, right? And then you go and get yourself captured
and thrown in a cell.
A cell that's pretty hard to escape from as the command listed in the
walkthrough - PULL CHAINS - doesn't do anything. (PULL CHAIN, however,
does work.) Some guess the verb with the chains and the bars in the
door didn't help either. TIE CHAINS TO BARS won't work but PULL BARS
WITH CHAIN will.
Does a bad start to a game equal a bad game? Not necessarily, but it
did here. Once out of my cell, I wandered through a considerable amount
of very empty, very dull locations. Most are a line or two in length
and lack any kind of depth. Most, also, lack exits displayed in the
text so most of my time seemed to be trying an exit at random, being
told I couldn't go that way, and then trying another. Needless to say,
it wasn't long before I was banging out the QUIT command with the
belief that this game was a long way away from being ready to be
submitted to the IFComp.
2 out of 10
GAME: Tough Beans
AUTHOR: Sara Dee
Although the storyline - which was basically about a woman called
Wendy who discovers her boyfriend is cheating on her - didn't
appeal to me much, I really enjoyed Tough Beans and felt it was one of
the strongest games in the Comp. It certainly made a refreshing change
to play a game that was actually well written, pretty bug-free and not
littered with more spelling mistakes than I could shake a stick at.
Coming as it did after half a dozen such games, Tough Beans made for a
welcome game indeed.
After the strange beginning, the game begins properly with you getting
ready for work and entertaining the possibility that your boyfriend,
Derek, might well not be as faithful as you'd like to think.
Not the most riveting start to a game I've ever played, but nicely
written and the main character seems a believable one. But then Tough
Beans isn't one of those games that focuses on larger issues like
saving the world or finding hidden treasure. It's a game set in the
real world and deals with real issues. And is all the better for it.
I didn't discover any outright bugs while playing Tough Beans but
there were a small oddities that popped up from time to time. Upon
trying to smell the stain I discovered on the shirt, I was asked which
stain I meant - small or large. The strange thing is that the
description for both is identical. Why the need for two stains if
they're both identical?
The difficulty factor is set just right for the most part, although I
struggled to get the puzzle with the dog sorted out. A little on the
non-obvious side? Yes, a little. Other than that, there seemed to be a
slight reluctance to let the player make progress on their own and the
game was constantly herding me along a very set path. I wasn't able
to leave the first location until a certain amount of time had passed,
even though I'd done everything that was required in there. But I
managed to reach the end of the game without running into anything I
wasn't able to figure out. And all within the two hour requirement
for the Comp as well.
All in all, Tough Beans is an impressive first game and certainly bodes
well for the future.
7 out of 10
GAME: Vendetta
AUTHOR: James Hall
In Vendetta, you play the part of Jem Bitter, a genetically enhanced
'super soldier' and soon to be decorated for your part in
preventing terrorists from detonating a nuclear device in the heart of
London.
On the face of it, that all sounds like a pretty interesting back story
for a game, but, for one reason or another, it didn't impress me
anywhere near as much as I thought it should. As I made my way through
the game, my character, despite the genetic enhancements, didn't
really do anything very 'super soldier'. Does he have special
abilities that set him aside from his fellow man? If so, I never seemed
able to make use of any of them, aside from during cut scenes where
control of the game is taken out of my hands.
Despite a bit of background for the main character given at the start
of the game, it's quite a while later before you actually find out
what Vendetta is all about. To begin with, I wandered around, solved a
few puzzles, found a suitcase, took a taxi ride, met my girlfriend and
attended a restaurant with her... but it was only when I got kidnapped,
after I'd been playing the game for close on two hours, that I
discovered what the whole thing was about. I can't help thinking that
it might have been a better idea to have cut the first part of the game
out altogether and just start it with the kidnapping as that's the
point at which the game really seems to start. (Then again, I helped
test the game and the idea didn't occur to me until now...)
There seemed to be a lot of waiting around in Vendetta. Too much for my
liking. This isn't a terrible thing in itself, if done in moderation,
but quite a few times I seemed to be required to wait around in certain
locations for something to happen without any real indication that
anything was going to happen. Then again, none of the time-based
puzzles like this presented me with any real problems because, in the
early part of the game where they hit the hardest, there's not much
room to explore and before long you're going to find yourself wandering
around the same set of locations again and again simply because
you've exhausted every other option. Inevitably, you'll most likely
stumble on the solution through sheer persistence.
At other times, Vendetta becomes very non-interactive (if that's even
a phrase. If not, you probably understand what I mean.) There is huge
amounts of information to be relayed to the player, and whenever this
information is being relayed, the game seems to pretty much lock up.
You're generally stuck in a location with no way out and, irrespective
of what you do, the game progresses on its own without any intervention
on your part. Now I've done this sort of thing in a few of my games so
I probably shouldn't be the one complaining over it, but when faced
with one screen after another of text, none of which is avoidable, my
eyes begin to glaze over and I tend to just skim through it to get the
gist of it. It also isn't helped by the fact that a lot of the
information relayed to you in this way isn't really that interesting.
It might have been better as a series of questions that could be asked,
instead of just being delivered to you over several screens of text.
There are also times when Vendetta goes into 'auto pilot' mode. You
know the thing. Your character creeps along a corridor and then,
without you doing anything, he just rushes along and does something
completely unexpected. Here it's a guard you attack. It might have
been nice to be given the choice of deciding whether you wanted to
attack the guard, and not just have the game do it for you.
Vendetta is a big game with a huge amount of rooms, a good number of
which could have been cut out of the game and it wouldn't have
suffered for their loss. The latter part of the game takes place at the
Falcon Lithoid, a gigantic complex on many floors that contains vast
amounts of rooms. Most of which are either empty or as good as empty.
The Falcon Lithoid is surrounded by a dozen or more empty locations
with nothing to do, all of which are pretty similar in appearance, and
don't really seem to serve any purpose other than to make the Lithoid
seem even bigger. Was that the aim? If this was the 80's, when more
locations = better game, I could understand it but it seems kind of
strange having so many locations in a game these days, particularly
when the majority of them don't really seem to serve any purpose.
In the end, I felt that Vendetta was an okay-ish game that came close
to being good but missed out in quite a few different areas. A lot of
effort has been expended on it, but the overall storyline just isn't
that interesting. Jem Bitter is presented as a super soldier yet never
gets the opportunity to use his super soldier abilities. I can't help
but feel that the 'terrorists detonating a nuclear bomb in the heart
of London' would have made a better idea for a game than the one
presented here.
A missed opportunity.
4 out of 10
GAME: Vespers
AUTHOR: Jason Devlin
I wasn't too sure about Vespers to begin with. A game about monks
that starts with a quote from the bible? Hmmm... not my cup of tea to
be honest. But I played it for a while longer just to see if it managed
to capture my interest...
... and got hooked.
Vespers is a murder mystery. You are the high priest of a monastery,
close to a village named Rovato where a deadly plague has infested the
populace. You've closed the gates of the monastery to the dead and
dying in the hopes of saving yourself and your fellows monks... but to
no avail as the plague has reached you all the same. The game begins
with all of the monastery's monks beginning to show signs of the
plague. The future looks bleak.
The murder mystery side of things comes about before long, with the
monks at the monastery turning on each other. Have they been driven mad
by the plague? Or is something more sinister at work?
It took me a while to get anywhere in Vespers due to the game being the
kind that has a series of staged events that each have to be reached
before the next one goes ahead. So a lot of time was spent wandering
from location to location until I hit upon the correct series of events
required to trigger the next event... and so on. But once things start
moving, Vespers turns into a very interesting game indeed.
The only aspect of the game I didn't like, and one which annoyed me
more and more the longer I played it, were the frequent pop-up windows
in the middle of the screen containing biblical quotes. I'm not sure if
these were supposed to add depth to the game (if so, they didn't
succeed) or provide clues (which they didn't) or there they were for
some other reason. Whatever the reason for their appearance, they
annoyed me with the way they would often appear right over the text I
was trying to read which meant bashing return a few times to shift the
text up the screen a bit and allow me to read it. I'm assuming this is
some kind of flaw in the Inform program and not the game, but it was
still a pain.
I felt some parts of Vespers were a little unfair. There's a scene
whereby you can be murdered in your sleep if you don't take
precautions before going to sleep to protect yourself from this sort of
thing. Only you don't know before you go to sleep that you might risk
being murdered so it's only after you've been murdered and started
the game again that you know to take the precautions the next time. (Of
course, I just hit UNDO and took the relevant precautions but that's
neither here nor there.)
I liked the author's entry in the IFComp 2004 but I think Vespers is
a better game overall than Sting Of The Wasp and will certainly be one
of the top three games in the IFComp 2005.
7 out of 10
GAME: Xen: The Contest
AUTHOR: Xentor
Guess the verb hit this game. And hit it hard. One of the first
locations I found myself in was the cafeteria where I was advised to
get some food. Unfortunately upon trying GET FOOD I was advised that
"the food isn't important". I tried examining a few of the things I
could see but as it happened I couldn't see any of them as the author
hadn't bothered including a description for them. BUY FOOD didn't
work. Nor did BUY BURGER or PURCHASE BURGER. By the time I finally
resorted to the walkthrough and saw that ASK CHEF FOR BURGER was
required, I was half convinced this was some kind of cleverly hidden
joke entry. After that, thankfully, the game got quite a bit better.
There were a few things I liked about the game: the room descriptions
were lengthy and nicely written and the style of writing was certainly
okay. But my enthusiasm waned a bit whenever I tried to examine some of
the scenery and found I couldn't. Most of the items described in any
given room description can't be examined, which left me with the
impression that this game had either been written by someone in a great
hurry or someone who hadn't bothered testing it afterwards. Or maybe
both. Oh, and the description of the bookstore displays the description
of the bookstore clerk. The store itself doesn't even have a
description.
For a while I just wandered around the game and saw what there was to
do. Which didn't seem to be a whole lot. With the majority of items
mentioned in room descriptions being of the non-examinable sort, that
left me with not much to do as the game isn't one of those with huge
amounts of activity packed into each location.
In the end, and as time was pressing, I went to the walkthrough. It
advised me to try something I'd already tried once: knocking on
Kevin's door. The response I'd got to begin with was that he
wasn't in, so I'd figured I needed to do something else first.
Which led me to one of the game's main flaws: guessing what's in
the author's head. It turns out Kevin doesn't show up in his room
until a couple of other completely unrelated events have taken place
- buying some books and meeting your roommate and his friends. I
suppose it's possible you could hit upon this by sheer luck, but I
always prefer puzzles that actually make sense and can be figured out
if you take the time to do so.
I didn't play much more of the game afternoon that as I was rapidly
approaching the two hour deadline for Comp games, but while the game
had a certain charm to it, the subject matter so far hadn't
interested me a whole lot. Maybe there's more to it than simply
starting your first day at university but, if so, it might have been an
idea to begin the game with this rather than simply eating a burger,
buying books and finding out your roommate's a bit of a thug.
5 out of 10
dun...@yahoo.com
Ninja II was a joke entry. I made it as bad as possible.
Jesus of Nazareth was a semi-joke entry, although I tried to at least
make it halfway decent.
Paul
Katzy
dwh...@gmail.com wrote in message
<1132126679.9...@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>...
>GAME: Vespers
>AUTHOR: Jason Devlin
>The only aspect of the game I didn't like, and one which annoyed me
>more and more the longer I played it, were the frequent pop-up windows
>in the middle of the screen containing biblical quotes. I'm not sure if
>these were supposed to add depth to the game (if so, they didn't
>succeed) or provide clues (which they didn't) or there they were for
>some other reason. Whatever the reason for their appearance, they
>annoyed me with the way they would often appear right over the text
You are right. I reported this twice; even sent a picture of the screen.
<quote>
the new windows with the short announcements are
annoying, because the way they appear. Hereby attached a vespers.gif
so you can see what I mean.
# The pop up windows still are disturbing all the text: did not you
see the gif file I attached last time (7 sep 05)?
</quote>
>I felt some parts of Vespers were a little unfair. There's a scene
>whereby you can be murdered in your sleep if you don't take
>precautions before going to sleep to protect yourself from this sort of
>thing
This too:
<quote>
There is not at all a sphere of threatening, at least I did not notice
yet... so why the need to close the door with the desk?
</quote>
Greetz, Katzy.
Kevin Venzke
<dwh...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1132126679.9...@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
>>n
> (Opening the reddish door)
> The reddish door is locked.
>
> Followed by:
>
>>open door
> It's already open.
>
>>n
> (Opening the reddish door)
> The reddish door is locked.
What's happening here is that when you type "door," the game
assumes you're talking about the open door, which is the important
one. If you try to "open reddish door" you'll get the proper response.
> As I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to be doing, there was no
> walkthrough, and the only hints were coded
Well, it says you're trying to get past the mountain. That part wasn't
coded.
Kevin Venzke
Mike Snyder
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> GAME: Distress
> AUTHOR: Mike Snyder
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> somewhat annoying to be told you can't do something without a better
> rationale than "you've no reason to do that" being given. If I
How's this: You can, but you'll be killed by a monster. The only reason I
couldn't say that is the PC didn't *know* this for sure, at least until
later.
The creature is never actually referred to as such until it's encountered
for the first time. This makes it strange on repeat plays, because the
*player* knows what to expect but the PC doesn't.
> want to wander away from the crash site, shouldn't I be given the
> option to do so?
I should have allowed it, you're absolutely right. It would have been
insta-death, but I should have at least allowed it. :)
My thinking was (a) there are already enough ways to mess up without making
it easy to do so, and (b) everything I needed to do could be done in a very
small number of rooms. Extra exploration might have had a negative impact on
the game, because people would wonder what they were supposed to do in those
extra places. I wanted the player to feel safe at the crash site (hence the
monster comes faster elsewhere, and everything is described as dark and
dangerous). This succeeded for some players, but not all.
Greg Boettcher probably had it right, in beta-testing. But I just didn't
want to mess with what I had already done so close to the deadline. He
suggested that there be better reasons to restrict the area -- for example,
a steep ridge that the PC won't traverse until it's *really* important to do
so. Great ideas to keep me on track in future games.
> There also seem to be a number of timed events which generally annoy
> me. Certain things occur that halt the progression of the game until
> after they've occurred. Here it's a tad more annoying than usual as
> the WAIT command doesn't move matters on, so a good portion of my
Not true. Nothing requires waiting for things to happen. I guess this is the
downfall of a design like this. Things happen if you take no action, to keep
things moving so you never get stuck. But if you *do* take action, you can
finish the game in about three dozen moves (see the "Speed Run" from the
walkthrough). Everything you need to do, in other words, can be done
independent of the timed events going on around you.
> time spent with Distress was moving back and forth between a couple of
> locations hoping to trigger the next event. While timed events are
> logical, they're also annoying.
You were doing unnecessary things. Inky had a good observation in his
"thinking like a player" article, though, that you probably couldn't have
*known* that this wasn't necessary. I fault my design for this, but it's
interesting that you didn't notice how it worked at least by the end. :(
> But... overall I found myself liking Distress. Frustrating bits aside,
> and there are more than a few, it was well written and overall
> interesting. I'm not sure how long I would have continued with it if
> there hadn't been a walkthrough accompanying it as it's also the
> kind of game to kill off the unwary player frequently. (And with the
Built-in hints have reportedly worked well, too.
> monster turning up and eating you being a timed event, it's one
> you're not going to avoid just by being in a different location when it
> occurs.) It also kind of irked me that game wouldn't give me any
It won't kill you until either (a) it's taken the other two first, or (b)
you attack it more than twice in the same encounter. However, when you're
not at the crash site, it does approach a lot quicker. All in all, I think
the timing is a lot less tight than it seems. There is still plenty of room
to look around, save for the north-run timed bit, which at least has two or
three intro moves to look at the creature, etc, before timing is really an
issue.
> hints until I'd first typed HELP. Why? Either the author was looking
> for news ways to introduce annoying aspects into his game or he thinks
> this kind of thing is a good idea.
I couldn't predict whether people would first type "hint" or "help", and
what their intention would be in doing so. Would they want general tips, or
actual spoilers? So this seemed like the best idea. Plus, it requires a
conscious effort to get into the hint system this way. So far, I don't think
anyone else has mentioned it. It's really only a pain when you restart and
then go to the hints again.
> Overall, this is probably better than the rating I've given it but I
> knocked a point or two off for the frustrations.
Fair enough. :)
--- Mike.
Sophie Fruehling
><dwh...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>news:1132126679.9...@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
>>It also kind of irked me that game wouldn't give me any
>> hints until I'd first typed HELP. Why? Either the author was looking
>> for news ways to introduce annoying aspects into his game or he thinks
>> this kind of thing is a good idea.
>
>I couldn't predict whether people would first type "hint" or "help", and
>what their intention would be in doing so. Would they want general tips, or
>actual spoilers? So this seemed like the best idea. Plus, it requires a
>conscious effort to get into the hint system this way. So far, I don't think
>anyone else has mentioned it. It's really only a pain when you restart and
>then go to the hints again.
Or UNDO. And boy, I undid a lot. :)
--
Sophie Frühling
The cube tastes like sugar. You are suddenly surrounded by a herd
of moose. They start talking to you about a moose-load of things.
Mike Snyder
news:l35nn19h5jknuimp5...@4ax.com...
> >anyone else has mentioned it. It's really only a pain when you restart
and
> >then go to the hints again.
>
> Or UNDO. And boy, I undid a lot. :)
Ah, yeah... if you get a hint, then UNDO to before it. Good point. :)
--- Mike.
dwh...@gmail.com
Mike Snyder wrote:
> I couldn't predict whether people would first type "hint" or "help", and
> what their intention would be in doing so. Would they want general tips, or
> actual spoilers?
I think it's a fair bet when people type "help" that's just what they
want. And if you type help and then see something you didn't want to
see... well, it's your own fault for typing help.
> help
Type help again if you want help.
> help
Are you sure you want help? If so, type it again.
> help
Are you really sure about that?
> help
You're certain you want help then? Okay, just once more...
> help
Well, once more after that and I'll help you.
> help
Maybe just another time...
> quit
:)
Mike Snyder
news:1132175168.3...@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> Mike Snyder wrote:
> I think it's a fair bet when people type "help" that's just what they
> want. And if you type help and then see something you didn't want to
> see... well, it's your own fault for typing help.
>
> > help
> Type help again if you want help.
>
> > help
> Are you sure you want help? If so, type it again.
>
> > help
> Are you really sure about that?
>
> > help
> You're certain you want help then? Okay, just once more...
>
> > help
> Well, once more after that and I'll help you.
>
> > help
> Maybe just another time...
>
> > quit
This is quite strange. Are you sure it was "Distress" you were playing? In
Distress, typing "help" gives a help screen. Doing so then unlocks the hint
system. At no time is it necessary to repeatedly confirm the intention, and
the help screen is meant to be helpful. So I sit here scratching my head at
the bit above. In fact, I don't remember any of the comp games working in
the way you described.
Weird, indeed.
--- Mike.
dwh...@gmail.com
Mike Snyder wrote:
> This is quite strange. Are you sure it was "Distress" you were playing? In
> Distress, typing "help" gives a help screen. Doing so then unlocks the hint
> system. At no time is it necessary to repeatedly confirm the intention, and
> the help screen is meant to be helpful. So I sit here scratching my head at
> the bit above. In fact, I don't remember any of the comp games working in
> the way you described.
>
> Weird, indeed.
>
> --- Mike.
Er... that was actually me being sarcastic and taking an example to an
absurd extreme. Rest assured, I didn't see it in any comp games.
dwh...@gmail.com
dun...@yahoo.com wrote:
> David,
>
> Jesus of Nazareth was a semi-joke entry, although I tried to at least
> make it halfway decent.
You failed.
dun...@yahoo.com
Your opinion doesn't matter.
Paul
dun...@yahoo.com
Naaaahhhhh... :)
Paul