Michael Martin's IFComp 2006 reviews
Michael Martin
http://www.stanford.edu/~mcmartin/if/review06.html. What follows in
this post is my introductory summary and some quick summaries of the
games that I thought demonstrated interesting things. The reviews at
the website are more thorough.
There were three trends I noticed this year. First, car accidents. Lots
and lots of car accidents. I counted five. Also, there were a several
games from authors I was mostly aware of from other contexts, or who
had previously to now only done joke games. This was part of a general
trend of a lot of really quite good games from first-time authors. I've
ranted in previous years about how one should look at games that got an
average of 5 in previous competitions, and if one couldn't at least
reach that level, one should not bother submitting to the Comp. I still
think this is true, but it was mostly actually done, and as a result
the average quality of games was much higher than normal.
That said, this also meant that I tended to take interaction failures
or grating stupidity as a personal affront unless it was in the service
of something really cool, so these reviews are more than a little
grumpy at times. But the general quality is quite good.
In previous years, I'd generally say that I'd recommend actually
playing anything that I gave an 8 or above. This year, there are so
many good games, and sufficient gradation between them, that anything
that I'm giving a 6 or above is probably worth at least checking out
(and would have been in the 8+ range in previous years).
Certain games exemplified things I thought were particularly good or
bad, though.
Traveling Swordsman: This was my favorite game of the competition.
It's rare enough that a game makes my feel like my character is even an
adventurer; this is one of the few gems where it's really about being a
*hero*.
Polendina: There have been various debates about when it is justifiable
to mess with the meta-verbs. It is never, never, never, never, EVER
justifiable to disable QUIT. Ever.
Labyrinth: Yes, so, the maze is the best part. But it's a really cool
maze, and the fact that your ability to manipulate the maze is strictly
additive and the abilities combine to give you complete control is
really, really cool.
Another Goddamn Escape The Locked Room Game: So, the only reason to
bother with a joke game is because you want to poke around in the
corners and get funny responses. Here, the scoring system is bent to
this. You don't get points for solving puzzles, but for discovering
the various silly easter eggs. Once you've gotten the maximum score,
you've basically seen what there is to see. This is a neat repurposing
of the scoring system.
Mobius: There's a certain kind of "guess the syntax" that IF
expectations lead you to get wrong the first time. The resulting
interaction sequence is wonderful.
Wumpus Run: Does this count as an ADRIFT Abuse?
Initial State: The intro ends with "Type Q to quit, and you may as
well." If you're that convinced your game is terrible, don't waste our
time with it either.
Delightful Wallpaper: The opening maze in this game didn't work as well
for me as Labyrinth's, and I think it was because in Labyrinth,
everything I needed to know to work out what to do next was right in
the room with me. I'd need a game board to keep track of everything
going on in this one.
Aunts and Butlers: This has the best "You may not do this action
because it will lose you the game" technique I've ever seen. This
*precise* form of it probably can't be imitated, though. If you
skipped one because homebrews are uniformly terrible, play this one,
because it's not.
--Michael
bfe...@gmail.com
> Initial State: The intro ends with "Type Q to quit, and you may as
> well." If you're that convinced your game is terrible, don't waste our
> time with it either.
I took it as the author's attempt to foster a melancholic atmosphere
from the very beginning. Overall, I think that, while the mechanics of
the game were clunky and there were many glaring errors, the gradual
revelation of the backstory and its importance to deciding the eventual
goal of the game was a greatly redeeming factor.
Thus, despite the fact that it was, from a programmer's perspective,
poorly written, I ranked it amongst my favorites for this competition.
Richard Bos
> Wumpus Run: Does this count as an ADRIFT Abuse?
Not IMO. It may be Wumpus in Adrift, but it plays like any other Adrift
game.
Richard
Andrew Plotkin
>
> Another Goddamn Escape The Locked Room Game: So, the only reason to
> bother with a joke game is because you want to poke around in the
> corners and get funny responses. Here, the scoring system is bent to
> this. You don't get points for solving puzzles, but for discovering
> the various silly easter eggs. Once you've gotten the maximum score,
> you've basically seen what there is to see. This is a neat repurposing
> of the scoring system.
It was cute, but it somehow didn't translate in my mind to "This game
is all about the funny responses!"
In fact I have a weakness for Flash escape-the-room mini-adventures,
so this was a pleasing setup. The author isn't going for fancy room
descriptions -- nearly all the objects are basic "... is here" lines
-- but that's fine; it's solid and there is a well-distributed
undercurrent of humor.
The puzzles are not all well-clued enough for an IF game. Finding the
safe combo was okay; the waiting puzzle, not so okay. Similarly, the
repetition gag worked (and was funny) for the cans, but not for the
aspirin.
The ending was sort of off-key, also. The gimmick (sorry, I'm getting
spoilery here) is that after you succeed in leaving the room, you die.
This could work (as an ironic commentary on the whole silly genre),
but the way it's presented here doesn't have enough closure to work
that way -- it feels like you failed to solve a puzzle, but there are
no more puzzles. So I was left unsatisfied.
Then the hints explain that there *is* another puzzle -- just not one
that can remotely be discovered or solved without looking at the
hints. (Yes, I'm waiting for someone to post that they figured it out
without the hints.) Again, the *idea* of this structure is good, but
the game doesn't do enough to lead you into it.
(The author avers that the story is ridiculous, but he's wrong. The
story makes sense, and the game structure -- an escape-the-room game
which leads you to uncover why you're amnesiac and locked in a room --
also makes sense. What is ridiculous is the series of logical leaps
you need to reach the "good ending".)
Random things I wish had been implemented: diagonal directions ("nw"
to go from the south side of the room to the west side, etc.); "get
down" (when standing on something); "turn dial to X".
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
Bush's biggest lie is his claim that it's okay to disagree with him. As soon as
you *actually* disagree with him, he sadly explains that you're undermining
America, that you're giving comfort to the enemy. That you need to be silent.
Michael Martin
> Then the hints explain that there *is* another puzzle -- just not one
> that can remotely be discovered or solved without looking at the
> hints. (Yes, I'm waiting for someone to post that they figured it out
> without the hints.) Again, the *idea* of this structure is good, but
> the game doesn't do enough to lead you into it.
I will admit that (even though I was considering the puzzles window
dressing at that point), I kicked myself upon reading the hints for
*not* working out well in advance who had locked me in the room.
--Michael
Emily Short
Michael Martin wrote:
> My IF Comp reviews for 2006 are up at
> http://www.stanford.edu/~mcmartin/if/review06.html. What follows in
> this post is my introductory summary and some quick summaries of the
> games that I thought demonstrated interesting things. The reviews at
> the website are more thorough.
Thanks for your reviews.
You said, re. Floatpoint:
> Basically, you're being put into a complex and messy situation
> in which there aren't really any good options and it's rather
> debatable even what the least bad option is. Deciding upon
> and acting on that is largely the point of the game. However,
> this degree of choice didn't feel terribly liberating, precisely
> because it isn't easy to feel good about the results, ever.
Yeah, guilty as charged. I kind of waver from day to day about which
ending I think is the least awful (though I have a couple of
preferences); but this game was born of a huge frustration and grief
about problems -- both personal and political -- that have no easy
solution; that sometimes seem not even to have any *acceptable*
solution.
So I wasn't really aiming for it to feel liberating. What I envisioned
(and I'm not sure that this is actually what anyone's playthrough was
like) was that people would try one of the more obvious gift/color
combinations; then think they might have a better solution, go explore
more, come up with an alternate approach, but find in the process that
that had drawbacks too, and so on. I think this may have been sabotaged
partly by the (argh!) massive bug, and maybe the design didn't really
encourage that as well as I hoped anyway.
Still, the more you dig into the world, the more the problem is
supposed to present itself as a difficult one; so ultimately you can
pick an approach depending on what feels most morally and pragmatically
palatable, but no solution will be easy and none will leave you without
misgivings.
The element of fantasy is that one person gets to cast the deciding
vote on such a massive issue. In real life, you usually have the
additional muddying factor that your big moral decision depends for its
outcome on what a bunch of other people also decide. I suppose that
makes things easier in some ways -- if you voted for the losing side of
something, at least you can feel that you're not entirely responsible
for the botch being made by the winning party. But in others it just
makes matters worse: harder to understand the implications of a choice,
harder to act, harder to feel that you're doing anything about the
suffering or injustice or gross folly you see going on, harder to be
sure that if you were in charge you'd do any better.
Frustration and grief, like I said.
TheR...@gmail.com
disallowed the action, telling me I'd start a war if I tried that. ^_^
I thought the "multiple endings, none truly 'optimal'" scenario was a
nice touch, but I would like to voice one minor complaint: it didn't
seem clear to me that the basement was accessible from the museum. To
be frank, the location seemed a fair bit nonsensical. When I was told
there was a ramp down, I assumed it meant one back to the entrance. >_>
I didn't find the "massive bug" people are talking about, but I did
note that when I restored a game and typed "wait", the conversation
with Pamela from earlier would continue. (I was in front of the
terminal.)
On a completely unrelated note: am I the only one who noticed how The
Sisters and Initial State both share the unfortunate flaw of making the
ending accessible before it should be? You can go through the steel
door in The Sisters before you get the key to it, and you can open the
airlock in Initial State before disabling the control panel. (Of the
two, I think I personally liked Initial State more. God knows why.)
Emily Short
TheR...@gmail.com wrote:
> I tried putting the "little man" in the box and got a kick when Liam
> disallowed the action, telling me I'd start a war if I tried that. ^_^
> I thought the "multiple endings, none truly 'optimal'" scenario was a
> nice touch, but I would like to voice one minor complaint: it didn't
> seem clear to me that the basement was accessible from the museum. To
> be frank, the location seemed a fair bit nonsensical. When I was told
> there was a ramp down, I assumed it meant one back to the entrance. >_>
I'll see about rephrasing the descriptions in the next release; thanks.
> I didn't find the "massive bug" people are talking about, but I did
> note that when I restored a game and typed "wait", the conversation
> with Pamela from earlier would continue. (I was in front of the
> terminal.)
Hm. Not sure why restoring the game would have put you in an unusual
situation. I'll see if I can figure it out.
TheR...@gmail.com
something about how "Pamela takes your silence as a listening pause" or
some such.
JDC
Emily Short wrote:
> > I didn't find the "massive bug" people are talking about, but I did
> > note that when I restored a game and typed "wait", the conversation
> > with Pamela from earlier would continue. (I was in front of the
> > terminal.)
>
> Hm. Not sure why restoring the game would have put you in an unusual
> situation. I'll see if I can figure it out.
Mike Snyder also reported some strange behavior with restoring in
Mobius. I haven't looked at his transcript yet to try to diagnose the
problem, but it looks like my scenes might not be getting reset
correctly. Do you know how I7 handles scenes with restoring, and if
that might be the problem?
-JDC
Emily Short
JDC wrote:
> Mike Snyder also reported some strange behavior with restoring in
> Mobius. I haven't looked at his transcript yet to try to diagnose the
> problem, but it looks like my scenes might not be getting reset
> correctly. Do you know how I7 handles scenes with restoring, and if
> that might be the problem?
I don't, but it's conceivable that something odd is happening there.
It's also conceivable that I simply messed up the conditions pertaining
to that scene. There was a bug in that part of the game during late
beta, and while I thought I'd quashed it, there's some evidence to
suggest I didn't entirely succeed.
Anyway, if you look at the Mobius transcript and it seems like an I7
problem rather than a your-code problem, please do report it. This is
probably the first time that enough I7 games are getting played under
normal-play conditions to turn up bugginess across save/restore.
(Though I do know there's some weirdness where it's possible to restore
a z-code I7 game on Frotz and wind up with some debugging rules
inexplicably turned on. I have no idea how to reproduce that or what
the cause is, though, and I don't think it can be related to this.)
dgen...@hotmail.com
Michael Martin wrote:
> My IF Comp reviews for 2006 are up at
> http://www.stanford.edu/~mcmartin/if/review06.html. What follows in
> this post is my introductory summary and some quick summaries of the
> games that I thought demonstrated interesting things. The reviews at
> the website are more thorough.
I shared many of Michael's opinions about labyrinth and delightful
wallpaper. Both maze games. Both remarkable efforts in programming.
Both three dimensional in their world model, but one-dimensional in
their narative structure.
But for me, the difference was this: Labyrinth was like a rubics cube,
and Wallpaper was like a Tower of Hanoi Puzzle-- You have to travel
repeatedly through the same series of rooms just to open a single door
on the opposite side of the castle.
Labyrinth, I solved in about an hour. It was fun. I felt proud of
myself for mapping it out, discovering the symmetry between rooms.
Wallpaper, I played for about an hour, developed some vague notion of
what I would have to do to get through it. Realized how tedious it was
going to be to come up with the full solution on my own, turned to the
walk-through. Got stuck in the dining room, even following the
walk-through. Eventually found an error in the walk through (I'm
surprised no one else has mentioned it). Made it to the second half,
just as my two hours were up.
Lots of judges are saying the second half was more fun. Maybe I'll try
again. Perhaps the author can release a version with a secret word to
go directly to the second half? XYZZY comes to mind.
> Wumpus Run: Does this count as an ADRIFT Abuse?
Ahh, yes, the third maze game of the competition. I remember playing
the original Wumpus on my public library's single Texas Instruments
computer when I was in fifth grade. It seemed like the coolest game
around at the time.
I'm afraid it didn't translate very well into 21st Century Interactive
fiction. I was especially disappointed that the "map" didn't actually
work, once I found it. Does it work better in other interpreters? I
was also disappointed that so many of the room names and descriptions
felt like they had been cribbed from old Infocom mazes. This game did
not provide me with a convincing sense of immersion.
Dave
Andrew Plotkin
Since the restore operation should be completely transparent to the
game program -- in both I6 and I7 -- it may be related after all. I
suppose the correct debugging move is a version of Frotz that checks
that the Z-machine RAM is exactly the same after restore as it was at
save time.
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
Just because you vote for the Republicans, doesn't mean they let you be one.
Andrew Plotkin
> [Wallpaper]
> Eventually found an error in the walk through (I'm
> surprised no one else has mentioned it). Made it to the second half,
> just as my two hours were up.
Nobody else has mentioned it, and I did check it. Are you sure?
Emily Short
dgen...@hotmail.com wrote:
> Wallpaper, I played for about an hour, developed some vague notion of
> what I would have to do to get through it. Realized how tedious it was
> going to be to come up with the full solution on my own, turned to the
> walk-through.
What surprised me about this passage was that -- though it looked like
it was *going* to be too hard to solve -- I never needed to map, never
needed to take any notes, never really needed to strain to envision it.
I kept expecting to have to break down and put more work-like effort
in, and yet from moment to moment I always had just enough information
right there on the surface to suggest what I might try next. And then,
startlingly, it was done before I'd ever gotten quite to the point
where it became a slog.
Evidently this didn't work for everyone, but I found it a pretty cool
effect.
Emily Short
Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> Since the restore operation should be completely transparent to the
> game program -- in both I6 and I7 -- it may be related after all. I
> suppose the correct debugging move is a version of Frotz that checks
> that the Z-machine RAM is exactly the same after restore as it was at
> save time.
Well, but if one of the games in question is a Glulx game? I am
assuming here that a Mobius scene restoring problem is likely to be the
same as a Floatpoint scene restoring problem, rather than being the
same as a debugging-rule restoring problem. Also, that they can't all
three be the same thing, because Floatpoint wasn't running on Frotz.
Stephen Bond
I agree. The notebook really helps in this regard, and also the design
of the maze is elegant enough that once you figure out how to reach
certain areas (e.g. the garden at the base of the central tower),
they become freely accessible. Wallpaper doesn't force you to go
through any tedious repetition; instead, it constantly focuses you on
areas of the maze that require new insight to solve.
"Tedious repetition", however, pretty adequately describes the writing
in Labyrinth:
"A Sweet-Smelling Room
The room is a perfect cube, about 30 feet on a side. The ceiling is
yellow and the floor is purple. The north wall is blue, and the
eastern wall is green. To the south, the wall is orange, and the
western wall is red. The walls are bare of ornament, and no
furniture occupies the room.
"There is an archway through the floor, extending inward from its
southern edge.
There is an archway halfway up the south wall, extending from its
eastern edge toward the middle of the wall.
There is an archway in the east wall.
There is a door in the north wall, but it is upside-down, extending
downward from the ceiling."
After seeing two room descriptions like this, I had no interest in
seeing any more of Labyrinth. Compare with a description of an
archway-filled room in Wallpaper:
"...the Sitting Room,
...a casual arrangement of davenports and ottomans,
surrounding tiny tea tables and a shallow fireplace. The room is
subtly divided into conversation spaces and private corners --
an excellent use of space. The wallpaper does not distract.
Peaked archways lead north, east, and south. A smaller
doorway leads west."
With writing like that, it's really no surprise that so many judges
found Wallpaper much less of a slog.
Stephen.
dgen...@hotmail.com
Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> Here, dgen...@hotmail.com wrote:
> > [Wallpaper]
> > Eventually found an error in the walk through (I'm
> > surprised no one else has mentioned it). Made it to the second half,
> > just as my two hours were up.
>
> Nobody else has mentioned it, and I did check it. Are you sure?
I just tried them again and they worked. My apologies.
During the competition I used several text-editting commands to alter
the walk-through so that I could paste the whole stream of directions
into my interpreter at once. The error I encountered was apparently
one I introduced myself, and not in the master copy.
Dave
dgen...@hotmail.com
Stephen Bond wrote:
> Emily Short wrote:
> > dgen...@hotmail.com wrote:
> > > Wallpaper, I played for about an hour, developed some vague notion of
> > > what I would have to do to get through it. Realized how tedious it was
> > > going to be to come up with the full solution on my own, turned to the
> > > walk-through.
> >
> > What surprised me about this passage was that -- though it looked like
> > it was *going* to be too hard to solve -- I never needed to map, never
> > needed to take any notes, never really needed to strain to envision it.
> > I kept expecting to have to break down and put more work-like effort
> > in, and yet from moment to moment I always had just enough information
> > right there on the surface to suggest what I might try next. And then,
> > startlingly, it was done before I'd ever gotten quite to the point
> > where it became a slog.
>
> I agree. The notebook really helps in this regard, and also the design
> of the maze is elegant enough that once you figure out how to reach
> certain areas (e.g. the garden at the base of the central tower),
> they become freely accessible. Wallpaper doesn't force you to go
> through any tedious repetition; instead, it constantly focuses you on
> areas of the maze that require new insight to solve.
>
Playing "Wallpaper":
>From the Western Hallway, travel clockwise through three other rooms,
bringing you back to the Western Hallway, but now the door is "open"
(if only temporarily) to the tower and garden.
Visit the garden twice (not "freely", but by the same circuitous path
described above) in order to get past the next set of locked doors.
Assuming that the walk-through is the "optimal" solution, it takes
about 78 moves to get from the Foyer, back to the Foyer with an open
front door.
Can you appreciate why I'm comparing this to the Tower of Hanoi puzzle?
Compare that to "Labyrinth", in which an expert player really can move
"freely" to any location in the maze in about 8 moves (traveling
through, at maximum, two intervening rooms).
Both of the maze games cited above suffer from a weak story line. The
somewhat more interesting room descriptions in "Wallpaper" lose their
impact since I have to visit the same rooms repeatedly, and can't
actually interact with anything in them.
Dave
Emily Short
dgengl...@hotmail.com wrote:
Re. Wallpaper:
> Assuming that the walk-through is the "optimal" solution, it takes
> about 78 moves to get from the Foyer, back to the Foyer with an open
> front door.
>
> Can you appreciate why I'm comparing this to the Tower of Hanoi puzzle?
Sort of, but I think the problem with the Tower of Hanoi is not that it
involves a lot of movement, as such. The problem with a Tower of Hanoi
puzzle is that you figure out an algorithm, then apply it, and apply it
more, and apply it more, and...
...much much later you're done, assuming you did not ever goof up a
single step. Or get bored and quit.
"Wallpaper", by contrast, has new realizations doled out throughout;
you're solving a lot of small-scale puzzles in the process of solving
the large one. (How do I make the floor go up? How do I make it go
down? Now that I've reconfigured the space *this* way, what can I do
that I couldn't do before? And the later solutions to some extent build
on your understanding of the earlier ones.) So there may be some
repeated circuits of paths, but they're not being done on autopilot.
Stephen Bond
> Playing "Wallpaper":
> >From the Western Hallway, travel clockwise through three other rooms,
> bringing you back to the Western Hallway, but now the door is "open"
> (if only temporarily) to the tower and garden.
>
> Visit the garden twice (not "freely", but by the same circuitous path
> described above) in order to get past the next set of locked doors.
I don't have my transcript here, and I've forgotten the details; I
just remember that the garden was quite easily accessible after
I found it, and the door from the music room changed direction.
I evidently didn't think it much of a chore to travel through all of
three other rooms to get there.
> Assuming that the walk-through is the "optimal" solution, it takes
> about 78 moves to get from the Foyer, back to the Foyer with an open
> front door.
Dull if you're typing straight from the walkthrough to
get to part 2, perhaps, but then you're not playing the game.
I spent many more than 78 moves figuring out the maze, and,
as I've said, didn't find it a slog at all.
> Compare that to "Labyrinth", in which an expert player really can move
> "freely" to any location in the maze in about 8 moves (traveling
> through, at maximum, two intervening rooms).
It takes 8 moves to travel through two intervening rooms? You're
not making this maze sound any more interesting.
> Both of the maze games cited above suffer from a weak story line. The
> somewhat more interesting room descriptions in "Wallpaper"
"Somewhat more interesting" is quite the understatement. You're
comparing smooth and witty prose with an autistic description of
a Rubik's cube.
> lose their
> impact since I have to visit the same rooms repeatedly, and can't
> actually interact with anything in them.
I thought the writing in Wallpaper made each new location a reward
to find, and was a real incentive to get further in the maze.
Stephen.
Andrew Plotkin
But there *is* no code that restores the scene mechanism, as we all
know. (Only code that restores RAM, which contains arrays and objects,
which represent scenes as well as everything else in the game.) So
I still find it more plausible that a bug affects restoring, with
unpredictable effects on the game, than that there is a bug in the
scene code.
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
Making a saint out of Reagan is sad. Making an idol out of Nixon ("If the
President does it then it's legal") is contemptible.
Emily Short
Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> But there *is* no code that restores the scene mechanism, as we all
> know. (Only code that restores RAM, which contains arrays and objects,
> which represent scenes as well as everything else in the game.) So
> I still find it more plausible that a bug affects restoring, with
> unpredictable effects on the game, than that there is a bug in the
> scene code.
Yeah, I get that; I guess I was assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that
there might be some specific area of the game structure that gets
corrupted, or something. Which may not really make sense: I know
relatively little about those internals, so your guess is likely to be
better than mine.
Well, we'll see.
JDC
I've gotten Mike's transcript and hope to look at it this weekend, so
after I undoubtedly find my own error this might be moot...
-JDC
Mike Snyder
news:1163793579.2...@m7g2000cwm.googlegroups.com...
>
> I've gotten Mike's transcript and hope to look at it this weekend, so
> after I undoubtedly find my own error this might be moot...
I hope it doesn't turn out that I really *am* crazy...
---- Mike.
Cirk R. Bejnar
> So I wasn't really aiming for it to feel liberating. What I envisioned
> (and I'm not sure that this is actually what anyone's playthrough was
> like) was that people would try one of the more obvious gift/color
> combinations; then think they might have a better solution, go explore
> more, come up with an alternate approach, but find in the process that
> that had drawbacks too, and so on. I think this may have been sabotaged
> partly by the (argh!) massive bug, and maybe the design didn't really
> encourage that as well as I hoped anyway.
This is a fair description of my playthrough; though once I had a good
idea of the structure and was fairly sure that there was no "right"
solution my main goal was to see what different endings had been coded
since I was failry certain which choice I would make. I did give up,
however, when I couldn't get the knife (the only other obvious gift to
try after the vacine, my kiddush cup, and the little man).
Cirk R. Bejnar
Emily Short
Ah. Spoilers below:
For an edged object, you can use either the knife (there are hints
about how to get it in Valenti's journal, though possibly not obvious
enough) or the drill edge from the glacial probe (less obvious,
perhaps, unless you've already found it for other reasons).
The bunny slippers work too, and are similar to the cup in
significance, though the exact form of the ending differs.
Out of curiosity (if you don't mind saying), what choice was it that
you picked?
JDC
Nope. I was able to reproduce the main problem without
saving/restoring, so the problem has nothing to do with saving (and is
thus undoubtedly my own error). There is a weird thing with the game
reprinting the last line of game output after answering "restore" at
the end of game message, but that may also be my fault.
Sorry for the false alarm.
-JDC
Emily Short
JDC wrote:
> Mike Snyder wrote:
> > "JDC" <jd...@psu.edu> wrote in message
> > news:1163793579.2...@m7g2000cwm.googlegroups.com...
> > >
> > > I've gotten Mike's transcript and hope to look at it this weekend, so
> > > after I undoubtedly find my own error this might be moot...
> >
> > I hope it doesn't turn out that I really *am* crazy...
> >
> > ---- Mike.
>
> Nope. I was able to reproduce the main problem without
> saving/restoring, so the problem has nothing to do with saving (and is
> thus undoubtedly my own error).
Aha. Thanks.
I would not be entirely surprised to find that something similar is
true of Floatpoint.
Mark Tilford
There's another choice for what to put in the box that Emily forgot to
mention in the walkthrough.
> Cirk R. Bejnar
>
quic...@quickfur.ath.cx
> On 2006-11-18, Cirk R. Bejnar <eluch...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > This is a fair description of my playthrough; though once I had a
> > good idea of the structure and was fairly sure that there was no
> > "right" solution my main goal was to see what different endings had
> > been coded since I was failry certain which choice I would make. I
> > did give up, however, when I couldn't get the knife (the only other
> > obvious gift to try after the vacine, my kiddush cup, and the little
> > man).
>
> There's another choice for what to put in the box that Emily forgot to
> mention in the walkthrough.
I might also add that Emily had taken the trouble to ensure that only
objects for which there are endings written can actually end up inside
the box. I've actually tried to put all kinds of things in it,
discovering a few endings I missed in the process. :-)
QF
--
INTEL = Only half of "intelligence".
Reiko
Emily Short wrote:
> Michael Martin wrote:
> > Basically, you're being put into a complex and messy situation
> > in which there aren't really any good options and it's rather
> > debatable even what the least bad option is. Deciding upon
> > and acting on that is largely the point of the game. However,
> > this degree of choice didn't feel terribly liberating, precisely
> > because it isn't easy to feel good about the results, ever.
>
> Yeah, guilty as charged. I kind of waver from day to day about which
> ending I think is the least awful (though I have a couple of
> preferences); but this game was born of a huge frustration and grief
> about problems -- both personal and political -- that have no easy
> solution; that sometimes seem not even to have any *acceptable*
> solution.
Oddly enough, I got the opposite effect when I played it. Maybe I was
in a particularly positive frame of mind, I don't know. But yes, while
each option has its downside, I also got the impression that somehow
each option made sense, and that everyone was making the best of the
situation no matter what I decided. However, playing through multiple
endings in a row (which is quite easy, since they all seem to stem from
the one decision) gave me quite a disjointed feeling, since, after all,
they're mutually exclusive endings. And yet, the NPCs always reacted in
such a way that made what I'd done seem to make sense, seem to be the
right answer. That's quite a trick I think, really, and was one of the
things that improved my rating of the game.
Maybe I wasn't really thinking about it the right way. By the end, I
wasn't even really trying to find the "right answer": I was just trying
different things to see what the result would be. But I found that for
most of the things I tried, I was reasonably happy with the results.
Some endings I would prefer over others because of my values for
freedom and the like. But in a sense, when disaster strikes, everyone
does what they must, even if it's not ideal, in order to preserve life
and make the best of the situation. That sort of perseverance was the
impression I got from some of the endings, whether it was intended or
not.
~Reiko
Cirk R. Bejnar
> Out of curiosity (if you don't mind saying), what choice was it that
> you picked?
Personal object and black clothing. Even in the white coat, I wasn't
convinced that the sacrifices necessary to bring them to Earth were
worth it. The additional information about the ice age I recieved
while getting my sweater though added a complication. Doling out the
exposition so that you are sure to know the downsides of whatever
choice you make was an excellent decision.
Cirk R. Bejnar
Emily Short
Cirk R. Bejnar wrote:
> Emily Short wrote:
>
> > Out of curiosity (if you don't mind saying), what choice was it that
> > you picked?
>
> Personal object and black clothing. Even in the white coat, I wasn't
> convinced that the sacrifices necessary to bring them to Earth were
> worth it.
Interesting. One of my beta-testers said she had real trouble with
testing the sweater endings, since they went strongly against her own
opinions, and I wondered whether I'd slanted the situation too much. So
it's neat to hear that someone did go that way.
> The additional information about the ice age I recieved
> while getting my sweater though added a complication. Doling out the
> exposition so that you are sure to know the downsides of whatever
> choice you make was an excellent decision.
Thanks! This was, indeed, one of the main organizing principles.
Mark Tilford
I meant leaving the box empty.
Emily Short
Mark Tilford wrote:
> >> There's another choice for what to put in the box that Emily forgot to
> >> mention in the walkthrough.
> > [...]
I didn't mention this in the walkthrough because I thought of it as
essentially a losing ending. But this is an interesting point -- I
suppose some people might consider putting off the whole problem (at
least for the time being) to be the best choice.
Mark Tilford
I had thought that there would be different endings depending on what color
you wore with the the empty box, especially considering the black/blade
ending.
Emily Short
Hm! Okay, reasonable point. I'll think about it for Release 2.