Lots of dark themes this year in the comp; take some
   anti-angst before diving in. Also, there was a really
   widespread failure to maintain a consistent tone throughout
   the game. A vast number of games had the narrator break
   character severely enough to throw me out of the game. Maybe
   I was just hyper-picky this year, but euuuugh.

   So, first the games sorted by score, and then the reviews,
   in the order I played them:
     * 10: Beyond
     * 9: Vespers
     * 8: A New Life
     * 8: Snatches
     * 8: The Colour Pink
     * 7: Psyche's Lament
     * 7: Tough Beans
     * 7: Vendetta
     * 7: Distress
     * 7: Escape to New York
     * 6: Unforgotten
     * 6: History Repeating
     * 6: Son of a...
     * 6: Internal Vigilance
     * 6: Xen: The Contest
     * 5: Off the Trolley
     * 5: Mortality
     * 5: Chancellor
     * 5: The Sword of Malice
     * 5: Gilded
     * 4: Space Horror I
     * 4: Waldo's Pie
     * 4: Mix Tape
     * 4: Jesus of Nazareth
     * 4: Cheiron
     * 3: Neon Nirvana
     * 3: Dreary Lands
     * 3: On Optimism
     * 3: Phantom: caverns of the killer
     * 3: Sabotage on the Century Cauldron
     * 2: FutureGame(tm)
     * 2: Amissville II
     * 2: Hello Sword
     * 1: Ninja II
     * 1: PTBAD6
     * 1: The Plague: Redux
     _______________________________________________________

   Unlike my scores last year, recommendable games don't
   necessarily all have "excellent" scores. If you didn't play
   all the games this comp, I do, of course, recommend anything
   with a score of 8 or higher (and strongly recommend the top
   two), but FutureGame (tm) is worth the time it demands.
   Furthermore, if you can forgive serious flaws in execution,
   both Xen: The Contest and Internal Vigilance have excellent
   games at their core.
     _______________________________________________________

Ninja II

  by Paul Allen Panks

   I'll actually be rather surprised if this doesn't get
   disqualified, as it seems to be identical to Ninja 1.02 from
   last year's comp, with two major differences. First, the
   background color is blue, not black. Second, the shrine is
   guarded by a fire-breathing ice dragon who's playing
   Spacewar on a PDP-1.

   With the help of the strings utility I was able to deduce
   that I needed to type BEAT DRAGON to defeat the dragon and
   continue with a seemingly-identical retread of the first
   Ninja. All other synonyms for ATTACK fail, because the ice
   dragon breathes fire at you.

   QUIT still isn't implemented.

   Also, you defeat the fire-breathing ice dragon with a slash,
   despite the fact that you don't get the sword until after
   you defeat him. Fear your elite ninja skills!

   Did I mention the ice dragon breathes fire?

   Score: 1
     _______________________________________________________

Space Horror I: Prey of your Enemies

  by Jerry

   This was filed as a Windows game, and I suppose it is, but
   it really shouldn't have been one. Since the whole game is
   really a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story implemented with
   HTML, the only Windows-specific components are the fact that
   the installer .exe is Windows-based, and some (but not all!)
   of the links in the HTML it installs are absolute links
   instead of relative ones. Since all the content is actually
   all in the same directory, there's no reason for this at
   all; with a little hand-hacking of URLs, I ran it under
   Mozilla Linux just fine. Ok, so some of the media content
   was also in traditionally Windows formats, but mplayer could
   handle them. That said, if it used MPEG instead of WMV, and
   used relative links everywhere, and shipped as a ZIP file
   instead of as a Windows installer, this would be fully
   crossplatform.

   That's the engine, though. What about the game itself?

   Well, as noted, it's all static HTML, so interactivity is
   kind of limited. It's really a choose your own adventure,
   though some tricks that don't work with numbered paragraphs
   make some appearances as well. Even allowing for this,
   there's not much of a story here; your choices tend to boil
   down to (a) Save World, or (b) Die. Worse, there are some
   plot points that affect the ending, but the game doesn't
   keep track of them; it just asks you point-blank whether you
   did X, and then takes you at your word. This won't do for
   computer-refereed adventures. In fact, it doesn't really
   hold water even in numbered-paragraph games; the traditional
   approach is to have the reader keep a slip of paper around
   and make notes on it at points ("If you were instructed to
   write "Note F" on your sheet, go to paragraph 47; otherwise,
   go to paragraph 93.") This is difficult but not impossible
   to handle in static HTML (you may end up multiplying
   paragraphs), and it's pretty much mandatory.

   That said, it's a reasonable enough introduction to a longer
   story, I suppose.

   Score: 4
     _______________________________________________________

Jesus of Nazareth

  by Paul Allen Panks

   Dunric strikes again! Actually, this is easily the strongest
   game he's produced in some time; it looks like he may have
   been recycling some of the machinery from his earlier more
   serious games (though I haven't looked at Westfront PC, the
   interface looks similar to B-Venture) and so we get a more
   recognizable text adventure experience here.

   The plot is simple enough. You are Jesus, and you're
   wandering around collecting treasures, er, I mean,
   disciples. This generally involves completing fetchquests
   for them first.

   There's also randomized combat, for those of you who think
   that no holy parable can really stand up without random
   sequences of Jesus kicking butt. Or, in my case, getting his
   butt kicked by some random centurion, at which point I
   received the message:

                  *** It's Game Over, Jesus ***

   As is so frequently the case with Dunric games, it's not
   entirely clear how serious he thinks he's being, but I found
   the massive incongruity between the subject matter, the
   rather clumsy way in which it is manifested, and the game
   milieu in which it has been placed incredibly amusing. Any
   game in which I can't keep a straight face while describing
   it can't truly be considered a waste of time.

   Score: 4
     _______________________________________________________

On Optimism

  by Tim Lane

   This is going to be a difficult review to write. It wants to
   be a Work of Great Pathos and Significance, a Cri de Coeur
   that will Rock You To Your Very Soul. Unfortunately, it
   falls so far short of that mark that it's more of a cocktail
   napkin that has had "zOMG TEH ANGSTZ0RZ!!!11!!" scrawled on
   it in crayon. Black crayon.

   This is made even more maddening by the fact that in the
   endnotes we get an entirely different voice coming out of
   the writing, and that voice would have informed a pretty
   decent game. What we are actually playing, however, is an
   attempt at "serious writing" that has mistaken "blood,
   despair, and lots of big words and strained similes" for
   "serious writing." This is made even more jarring by the
   facts that the big words and strained similes tended to (a)
   involve geometry or pop culture, and (b) involve them
   incorrectly (misspelling "Sméagol" as "Smeagle"; describing
   a diamond as "a perfect equilateral triangle" instead of its
   facets as such).

   The puzzles, for me, were either complete brick walls or
   very straightforward. As a result, after the second or third
   brick wall I tended to fail directly over to hints -- and
   the correct actions were obscure enough that I never got an
   "I should have figured that out" out of it.

   Score: 3
     _______________________________________________________

PTBAD6

  By Slan Xorax

   If you played PTBAD3 last year, you know what to expect from
   PTBAD6: nothing. And, indeed, the walkthrough has one
   command, and it's to go in a direction that isn't listed in
   the opening room.

   I'd like to suggest that if Mr. Xorax makes another sequel,
   the walkthrough should again be one command: QUIT.

   Of course, PUTPBAA already did that gag.

   Score: 1
     _______________________________________________________

Vendetta

  by Fuyu Yuki

   This is a near-future-style techno-thriller, and it's really
   pretty well done, with an interesting PC and subtly though
   nicely handled character development. The writing is always
   at least servicable, you always have a goal of some kind,
   and the interaction is mostly smooth (smoother than I've
   come to expect from ADRIFT games, actually, though I did get
   the "You can't move that" from PULL TARP when I should have
   said PULL TARPAULIN.) The map felt a little sparse (lots of
   corridors) towards the end, so I would have needed to map
   carefully had I had time. I didn't, but I was following the
   game well enough to be able to say "Now I need to go to room
   X", copy a bunch of move commands out of the walkthrough,
   and end up in room X.

   The only other suggestion I'd make is that cutscenes should
   really be fully non-interactive. I don't like sequences
   where you need to repeatedly wait or examine stuff to be fed
   the cutscene.

   This is probably the best ADRIFT game I've played.

   Score: 7
     _______________________________________________________

The Colour Pink

  by Robert Street

   I always get nervous when I see .z8 games entered into the
   Comp; I usually assume I won't have time to finish them. But
   not this one! It felt like a traditional puzzle-solving sort
   of romp, and I worked through the puzzles and found myself
   solving it at about the 75 minute mark.

   And then I got the puzzling little message, "You never left
   the Path of Daedalus." And then I flipped through the
   endnotes, where it explained that, as I was adventuring in
   an area formed at least in part by the projections from my
   internal state, I could jump between the "Path of Daedalus"
   where I was helping people out in traditional Adventurer
   fashion, and all was cute and fuzzy, or the nightmarish
   "Path of Diomedes", where I slew, tricked, or otherwise
   overpowered the filth that opposed me -- and you'd switch
   between them by going against type for whatever world you
   happened to be in. This is really neat, and it was well
   handled. The only problem with it, if "problem" is even the
   right word, is that players are likely to follow their cues
   and thus stay on the path of Daedalus all the way through.

   Score: 8
     _______________________________________________________

Waldo's Pie

  by Michael Arnaud

   This is the first ALAN3 game I've played. I'm not impressed
   with the mechanics: the game file is nearly half a megabyte,
   and the save files produced are in the 200kB range. This for
   a game that's significantly shorter than The Colour Pink.
   Not only that, but RESTORE and UNDO aren't turn-exact; they
   seem to kick one back multiple numbers of moves.

   The plot is a little strange. It starts out with you taking
   your kids to the circus as a retired clown, but then they
   get kidnapped by an evil magician and you have to defeat a
   dragon to get the components to build a mind-destroying pie
   to confuse their kidnapper sufficiently for you to get your
   kids back. It gets Weird fast enough that I don't know if I
   can call it fully inconsistent, but it did feel like at
   least half of my concerns at any given time were either
   incongruous or insane.

   Also, it appears that the reason I retired was because I
   unleashed the power of my own mind-destroying pie recipe
   upon myself; this seems a bit unlikely.

   I also had to replay most of the game due to messing up my
   inventory management and being made basically unable to
   backtrack, nor to get myself killed.

   Score: 4
     _______________________________________________________

Amissville II

  by the Santoonie Corporation

   I'm too new to the community to remember Amissville I, but
   I'm given to understand that it was legendarily bad. Now we
   have a sequel, which cheerily opens with "Keeping with
   Santoonie tradition, there is no walk thru. The game was
   written for the amusement of it's [sic] authors." However,
   it also included the line "Only the woods stand in your way
   and a herd of llamas", which was easily the best line from
   any sub-7 game this comp.

   So, how's the game itself? Well, the map is pretty terrible.
   Room descriptions have only a vague correlation to the
   actual ways you can go. An exhaustive breadth-first search
   of the rooms was necessary to figure out that, despite there
   being three ways of getting to the town (and thus the first
   objective), there was only one way back. And the necessary
   room exit is unclued. (There are Inform routines that will
   check out your map and ensure that there are no accidental
   one-way exits and such; there must be something similar for
   TADS.) Also, the global layout is kind of weird; you can end
   up in town by going vaguely south, but in order to get back
   to camp from town, you end up going purely south. It's like
   the map is a very very small globe.

   That said, though, the world seems pretty nicely laid out.
   Exploring the game world (which wound up taking about 100 of
   my 120 minutes) felt mostly natural (as long as I didn't try
   to backtrack), and I enjoyed the scenery and the general
   travel experience. I also note with approval that unlike
   Delvyn and Zero, Santoonie's previous comp entries, the
   hunger daemon code has been disabled.

   I only managed to solve two puzzles in the time allotted
   (recruit Baron, defeat dog.) I found the stirrup but it
   claimed I still needed "the a stirrup" to ride it, even when
   it was on the horse. This implies there are probably some
   event trigger issues still left.

   Had the map issues been worked out so that one could more
   easily get back to camp by retracing one's steps, I'd have
   seen much more of the game, and given the scope that it
   intended, it would probably have been in the 5 or 6 range,
   depending on how it all worked out. As it stands, though,
   it's basically unplayable by normal means.

   Score: 2
     _______________________________________________________

Gilded

  by A Hazard

   This is a "fairy tale from the other side"; you're one of
   the Fair Folk, and you're gleefully terrorizing and pranking
   the humans in your realm. As such, you get a wide array of
   nifty powers, including the CREATE verb. It's better
   implemented than it was in last year's Order, but it's still
   too open-ended and as a result it becomes Guess The Noun on
   steroids. In fact, after this game, I'm just about ready to
   conclude that CREATE doesn't work at all, and this should be
   handled in a manner more akin to the Enchanter-style spells
   (you know everything you can create, and earn the ability to
   create other things by solving puzzles).

   A lot of the event triggers -- even the ones not involving
   the CREATE verb -- were pretty obscure, too. I realize I'm
   supposed to be all fey and random, but it's hard to be
   random in the right way without looking at the walkthroughs.

   Speaking of which, the walkthroughs and hints were horribly
   inadequate and arguably not even Comp-ready. Three were
   offered - a bare-bones walkthrough, a "scenic route", and a
   middle-level one. However, only the bare-bones one actually
   worked, and the scenic route walkthrough didn't even exist.
   (Note to authors: if you haven't implemented something,
   don't call attention to its absence. There was no need to
   have the scenic route option at all, and the middle road
   could have been called the "scenic route".) The middle road
   walkthrough included commands that either didn't do anything
   or gave "You see nothing special about the X" responses, and
   didn't successfully trigger the endgame. The hints got me
   into the endgame, but didn't get me out of the tavern in the
   first scene; despite its assurances that I didn't need to do
   anything in the tavern, there were, in fact, two things that
   needed doing to advance the plot.

   This is immensely ambitious, but it falls well short of what
   it aims for, and it needs a few more rounds of polishing
   before it can properly shine.

   Score: 5
     _______________________________________________________

FutureGame (tm)

  by The FutureGame Corporation

   Well, I suppose it had to happen. Somebody submitted "Hello
   World" to the Comp.

   Relax, gentle reader; it's not as bad as all that. It's
   respectful of the player, and it does have a point of sorts
   to make, too. It's essentially an argument against
   unfailable games, and the nature of the argument would
   really be diminished if it weren't presented as a game.

   There are even two choice points, so it's arguably
   interactive, sort of.

   So yeah. It gets a low score, because there's no there
   there; but authors and aspiring authors should spend the
   five minutes it takes to experience FutureGame(tm). It has a
   lesson to impart, and the lesson is worthy.

   Score: 2
     _______________________________________________________

Chancellor

  by Kevin Venzke

   This was by the creator of last year's Kurusu City, which
   was a fun little romp, but which suffered from stonewalling
   the player via incomplete hints. That's basically what
   happened this time around, too; I wound up wasting a lot of
   time dealing with the boring stuff in order to get to parts
   where I do the fun stuff.

   The univeral-malfunctioning-of-everything in the modern area
   was annoying. The suddenly-stops-malfunctioning of some of
   them, without warning or explanation, was very annoying.

   I ran out of time trying to find the door the mechanic's key
   fit.

   Score: 5
     _______________________________________________________

Mix Tape

  by Brett Witty

   This is a slice-of-life story in which we watch the fiery
   collapse of a dysfunctional relationship. The problem with
   this kind of story is that we enter just as it's beginning
   to collapse. We only hear about the good parts in flashback,
   and most of what we see shows both characters at their
   worst.

   Most of the interaction was decently done, but with nothing
   driving the game but the story, an inability to identify
   with or care about the characters is fatal.

   Score: 4
     _______________________________________________________

The Plague (Redux)

  by Cannibal

   In attempting to play the first scene of this, I was dropped
   into an unimplemented room with no exits or descriptions. I
   then checked the walkthrough and it looked like I'd done
   everything right. I then experimented more with the intro
   and didn't seem to be able to do anything to avoid that
   room.

   Score: 1
     _______________________________________________________

Mortality

  by David Whyld

   This had, in a sense, much the same problem that Mix Tape
   did; it's mostly story, and the characters are all basically
   loathesome. In Mortality, this is kind of the point; it's
   trying to be dark and gritty, and it mostly succeeds. There
   are a number of places where the tone wobbles, but it's
   never quite fatal. It could use a few run-throughs by people
   more familiar with gritty and/or occult style writing,
   though.

   It's quite a bit more interactive than Mix Tape -- however,
   most of this interaction is of a CYOA form; your choices end
   up modifying a tally that determines the nature of the
   ending. This is kind of neat, but in terms of "game", it's
   really all there is, so it ends up feeling a bit slight.

   Score: 5
     _______________________________________________________

History Repeating

  by Mark and Renee Choba

   OK, so, first off, the core gimmick here is kind of lame; a
   high school science teacher has invented a time machine, and
   the only thing he can think of to do with it is to bring
   back one of his students from 20 years in the future so as
   to make him not screw up a report?

   Like most time machines, this tends to end up really being
   more useful as something else Last year's All Things Devours
   had a "time machine" that was really more of a total
   conversion powerplant. History Repeating's time machine is
   actually an immortality device--you're sent back to your
   younger self's mind, so you can just perpetually live out
   your life.

   The game itself is OK, but you have to accept that you're
   here to solve puzzles; most of your more adventure-y antics
   could have been dodged handily by waiting a few hours and
   then hitting a hardware store. Likewise, the final puzzle,
   which involves destroying an object, should have permitted a
   simple ATTACK or even EAT.

   That said, not too bad a game.

   Score: 6
     _______________________________________________________

Psyche's Lament

  by Now We Have Faces

   This was a light and silly puzzlebox sort of game; a rarity
   this comp. It felt quite refreshing as a result of this, and
   I definitely had more fun playing with it than I did with a
   lot of these.

   As a result, it's kind of short and sweet; however, the wand
   needed much more significant cluing, as I basically wound up
   having to hit the walkthrough for every use of it.

   Score: 7
     _______________________________________________________

Neon Nirvana

  by Tony Woods

   Well, it's always good to have feelies with a game. However,
   the writing felt a bit stilted, and so I was a bit less
   confident going in. (This wasn't helped by the fact that it
   was a .z8 file despite fitting well within .z5's size
   limits.) Then I was greeted by the first paragraph:

     You shiver. The crisp autumn nights of October are always
     to blame. Tonight's the night you're undercover to take
     down elusive criminal Herman Walker Perron, in his
     nightclub, Neon Nirvana. You've got a bad feeling about
     this. You've only been here minutes, and already you're
     thoroughly annoyed with the misty air around you, the
     fidgeting of Agent Prost, and the underconfidence that
     can only come with a detective's first undercover
     operation. It's probably just nervousness, but in the
     sinister architecture of the sinister night, you know
     that Perron, like the Minotaur in the labyrinth, lurks
     somewhere inside those walls.

   This is another case where an attempt at "serious" writing
   has gone horribly awry because the author has mistaken big
   words and similes for good writing. This is particularly
   comical in later sentences like "This is a quiet little
   place to have a drink or two in the outside atmosphere".

   Even this attempted-intellectual tone isn't consistently
   maintained. A lot of the room descriptions are almost
   aggressively conversational, referring to "you" as the
   player moving the PC around like a pawn. This is much pretty
   fatal to any attempt to maintain the gritty
   police-procedural tone the plot and characters seem to want.

   Speaking of which. In such a game, the narrator should never
   -- EVER -- say "w00t." Ever. Particularly not as part of a
   reaction to TAKE PAPER.

   This doesn't even get into the problems with the game
   (suddenly knowing things about items you've never seen
   before, describing containers as empty when they aren't,
   total lack of reasonable alternate solutions to puzzles, a
   car bomb that, given where everyone else was, could only
   have been set by the victim, and a crackling radio unit that
   breaks in, referring to you as "Undercover Unit" during an
   infiltration...)

   All in all, it needs so much work I'm not sure it can be
   salvaged in a recognizable form.

   Score: 3
     _______________________________________________________

Unforgotten

  by Quintin Pan

   WARNING: The first paragraph of this review is arguably a
   spoiler. Skip it if you want to experience the game
   "cleanly". The short form: Game aspect needs work; writing
   is mostly good; world-creation above par; theme can't be
   discussed without spoilers, so here we go...

                            * * * * *

   You know, I'm really, really tired of unrelenting futility
   plots. Unforgotten is the tale of a man whose entire life is
   a lie, and whose every joy in life is (a) a total sham, and
   (b) secretly part of a sinister plot to use him as a tool
   for the ends of people who couldn't care less whether he
   lives or dies. If you can get past that, though, there's
   some good stuff to be had here.

                            * * * * *

   The game aspects need a few more rounds of testing and
   enhancement, though. There are a lot of places where default
   responses happen where they really, really shouldn't. If my
   duty is mopping floors, MOP FLOOR should really work.
   Likewise, CLEAN FLOOR shuld give something better than "You
   achieve nothing by this." Likewise, when I'm taking my
   daughter to her birthday party, HUG DAUGHTER should not give
   the default "Keep your mind on the game."

   Also, puzzles that are basically only solvable through
   attempting random actions in otherwise unremarkable rooms
   are Not Fun. The situation where this was necessary could
   have been handled by modified room and item descriptions and
   this would have lost nothing and been way less irritating.

   This, despite the casual profanity and the spotty
   implementation and the random heinousness and the
   soul-crushing betrayals at every turn, actually is a pretty
   successful piece of serious writing. (Given this, the
   response to SCORE was incredibly jarring and had no place in
   this piece.) I'm not fully sure it works as science fiction,
   since the "special abilities" that are revealed as the story
   progresses don't really seem to be bound by any laws or
   limitations except as convenient to the plot. All the same,
   when I was done, I had a good idea of what had gone on and
   where all the characters fit in.

   Score: 6
     _______________________________________________________

Internal Vigilance

  by Simon Christiansen

   I admit it; I'm a sucker for conspiracies and ominous
   shadowy authority figures in my modern and near-future
   fiction. Internal Vigilance was really designed to play in
   favor to my prejudices. I particularly liked that not only
   were all of the Ominous Bureaucracy's Men In Black assigned
   sunglasses for the express purpose of making them look
   cooler, the command WEAR SUNGLASSES gives the response
   "Things look darker. You get cooler."

   However, the game suffers painfully from bad writing
   mechanics (comma splices, its/it's errors, etc.) and almost
   fatally from coding problems. Not only does the initial
   suspect's mother live in two different addresses at once
   depending on where you look, if you enter her apartment (as
   one optional plot-branch demands) you can end up locked in
   her apartment with no way out! Fortunately, this is an
   optional thread, so this didn't make the game uncompletable,
   but it still hurts a lot.

   I can't recommend this as-is. But if a fixed post-comp
   edition is released, go play it immediately.

   Score: 6
     _______________________________________________________

Tough Beans

  by Sara Dee

   Oh dear. Games revolving around Having to Get Coffee have
   been notoriously bad in the past. This one works out pretty
   well, though, since it also operates mainly as a slice of
   life. The character starts out as a harmless ditz, but she's
   capable of growth.

   One particularly nice trick here is that you're faced with
   The Tremendously Long Line as a puzzle source. Now, this is
   usually a bad thing, since the obvious and civilized
   solution (the earlier you get in line, the earlier you get
   served) has to be made to be Not The Answer, and this can
   get contrived fast. Tough Beans solves this by ensuring that
   there's basically always something else you should be doing,
   and once you've dealt with all this, the situation has flown
   so far out of hand that the line is gone and you can pick up
   the coffee as an afterthought in a cutscene -- which is
   really where coffee breaks belong. I noticed one gap, where
   a player might be inclined to just do the civilized thing,
   and that's the time between getting your form signed and
   having Derek show up.

   The writing is smooth and mostly error-free; the errors that
   showed up looked like either copy-paste errors or cases
   where old text hadn't been properly deleted when it was
   being replaced. So it needs all its text strings run through
   by a decent copyeditor, and then it will be an excellent
   slice-of-life work.

   Score: 7
     _______________________________________________________

A New Life

  by Alexandre Owen Muñiz

   Now this, on the other hand, is the first unreservedly
   excellent game I've played this comp. (I note in passing
   that it also uses the non-standard Platypus libraries for
   Inform, and that I wouldn't have noticed this without
   reading the game header. Really, that's highest praise
   possible for alternative systems.) It describes itself as
   "multilinear, from several points of view," but I think I
   disagree. I think it's got many stories tied up in it, and a
   PC who can gain some unique viewpoints, but it's still a
   single narrative.

   Much of this narrative takes place in backstory and
   remembrance. This was both a strong backstory, and it was
   very well handled. It uses the REMEMBER verb, but this is
   the best implementation of it I've ever seen. The status bar
   cues how many topics you have relevant memories for, and the
   REMEMBER command gives you a set of topics to infodump on.
   This is pretty much ideal, because it lets you get
   information as you want it, lets you know when it's
   relevant, and there's no guess-the-syntax for information
   that -- by hypothesis -- the PC not only already knows, but
   actually has at the forefront of his mind.

   I also need to call out the instruction manual for the magic
   bag as being quite seriously hilarious.

   I only have a few complaints. The main one is with the claim
   that the game cannot be made unwinnable. I don't think this
   is true; in particular, the game will kill you beyond the
   ability of UNDO to save if you dawdle in a hazardous area
   while unprepared. As it turned out, I could have saved
   myself with the right move that one turn, but I hadn't
   advanced the plot to the point where the saving move had
   been clued. Running away should really have been permitted
   at that point.

   Other than that -- and the fact that the hero has no real
   compelling motivation other than curiosity to go on his
   adventure -- this is a deep, clever, and well-thought-out
   game.

   Score: 8
     _______________________________________________________

Snatches

  by Gregory Weir

   There's not a lot to say about the writing in this game; it
   does what it needs to, and the plot is straightforward and
   decently handled. The writing is also actually well-edited,
   which is an astonishing rarity this comp. There are still
   some wobbles -- particularly in auto-generated text ("a
   ceremonial clothing").

   The coding needs some extra testing to actually look pretty
   on all interpreters; text mode interpreters had serious
   issues with the status line, and with the opening screen.

   It's been said that logical sequel to a horror story should
   always be an action flick, as proper resources are brought
   to bear against whatever the horror was. Snatches handles
   this transition fairly well. I managed to get two of the
   "win" endings, and it seemed like several others would be
   possible.

   There's less here than there was in A New Life, but it's
   more readily accessible. Good stuff. Just, check it on
   console Frotz next time, eh?

   Score: 8
     _______________________________________________________

Phantom: caverns of the killer

  by Brandon Coker

   Hmm. Well, the opening text makes me immediately give up any
   hope of decent writing in this game, but it looks like it
   wants to a puzzlefest. Unfortunately, the puzzles basically
   fall into two categories: mazes (one maze of twisty little
   passages all alike, one all different; the differentness
   comes from different grammatical errors, so it's not
   entirely clear this is fully intentional), and a bunch of
   lady-or-tiger puzzles that could be solved with in-game
   clues but for which SAVE/RESTORE or UNDO-based brute force
   is much faster.

   I feel kind of bad dismissing this as entirely pointless,
   because it's well-intentioned and the author clearly played
   and liked a lot of the older games long ago (the Infidel
   influence is particularly strong), but, well, there's
   nothing that's actually fun here. You've gotten the homages
   out of your system; go forth and build something new now.

   Score: 3
     _______________________________________________________

Off the trolley

  by Krisztian Kaldi

   From the title and the apparent goal, I'm a lunatic. But I
   like that I'm a considerate lunatic, attempting to mostly
   minimize casualties; indeed, the puzzles revolve around as
   their primary goal ensuring that nobody else is endangered
   by your mad scheme of destruction. (In fact, this
   consideration continues to hold all the way to the end, on
   some endings.)

   There's a certain degree of weariness about standard puzzles
   in here too; the comment about how the wire must have fit
   the terminal perfectly due to their identical colors hit
   home nicely. Unfortunately, there are a number of very
   unfortunate parser wobbles. The most aggravating was that
   PULL BRAKE was not implemented (apparently it needed to be
   PUSHed, but most emergency brakes I've seen were levers that
   you pull), and that you cannot UNLOCK PANEL WITH KEY and
   must instead PUT KEY IN PANEL. TURN KEY. Furthermore, the
   refusal for UNLOCK PANEL WITH KEY implies that I need to
   find a prybar of some kind.

   The endgame neither vindicates nor repudiates the main
   character's delusion. This was a nice touch.

   Score: 5
     _______________________________________________________

Distress

  by Mike Snyder

   This is both plot-heavy and puzzly, which is kind of nice --
   it also includes one of the better implementations of first
   aid I've seen. Outside of critical actions, though, a lot of
   actions are unobvious or unmotivated, but necessary. This
   meant I had to fail over to the walkthrough a lot. The plot
   also kind of doesn't work on traversals that aren't winning
   playthroughs, because cause and effect don't end up working
   out right.

   That's hard to avoid given the premise though, and it is in
   any case a well-designed and well-written piece of work.

   Score: 7
     _______________________________________________________

Cheiron

  by Sarah Clelland and Elisabeth Polli

   Graphically, this game is beautiful. It duplicates the old
   Legend Entertainment UIs pretty closely in Glulx.
   Unfortunately, its target audience is medical students, and
   if you aren't actually a medical student, this is just Aunt
   Nancy's Hospital. There aren't any reachable goals, and you
   can only wander about and explore.

   There are hints, but they aren't really useful for the
   layman; there's a huge list of all the tests you can run and
   all the diagnostic questions you could conceivably ask, and
   then there's an answer key. There's no place in-game to put
   your answers in, so the game has no end condition. More
   critically, there's no explanation of which tests would give
   the indicators that would lead to the target diagnosis.

   It also didn't help that I hadn't heard of three quarters of
   the ailments my patients had. I might just be ignorant, but
   this could have been a great science popularization tool. As
   it stands, though, it's just baffling.

   Score: 4
     _______________________________________________________

Beyond

  by Mondi Confinanti

   This is another beautiful Glulx game. Excellent work with
   the artwork, which is thematic and appropriate; also major
   approval for including a .z8 version for pure text.

   This is an episodic, noir-y investigative detective story
   with a creepy but very effective frame story. The writing is
   almost universally excellent, though there are a few wobbles
   on grammar and word choice. (And even then, I might be
   over-reacting to "hematoma" having just played Cheiron.) My
   favorite conversational exchange: "I heard a second voice,
   before." "That's not very strange. I can usually hear
   sixty-seven different voices at once."

   Something that isn't the game's fault, but worth noting if
   you're using Zag: if you use the default JVM options, Zag
   will run out of heapspace about halfway through. If you play
   over multiple sessions this doesn't happen; I must assume
   some kind of memory leak in Zag.

   It's a great mystery, and a workable thriller. In the end,
   it also was my favorite game of the comp. So...

   Score: 10
     _______________________________________________________

Son of a...

  by C.S. Woodrow

   The opening here doesn't really fill me with glee, and there
   are a lot of little annoyances. The worst was that the map
   exits aren't really symmetrical, especially around the
   tavern.

   On the other hand, that's really the worst complaint I can
   make. The puzzles were well-designed and mostly decently
   integrated into the plot. The scoring system was unusual for
   these sorts of games, which made point awards kind of
   function like clues. That a neat trick too. "Oh, I got
   points for picking this up/going here; this must be
   important."

   It needs a slightly better hint system; it's possible to
   lock yourself out of specific puzzle solutions, and so a
   simple walkthrough doesn't really suffice.

   It's clearly a first effort, but it's a perfectly acceptable
   one.

   Score: 6
     _______________________________________________________

Dreary Lands

  by Paul Lee

   This is also clearly a first effort, and a less acceptable
   one. The author knew this; the ABOUT text was a lengthy
   apology. Don't do this; if the game is crap, and you think
   so too, DON'T SUBMIT IT. Compare yourself to the games that
   got 5 averages in the last year's comp, and if it's not at
   least that good, don't waste our time.

   So yeah. Problems are legion. Grammar and spelling are
   problematic. A set of game-critical objects (which are
   actually arrows) are called "which is currently burning)"
   when described -- this despite the fact that they are not,
   in fact, burning. The inventory limit is too small, and
   there's no need for an inventory limit in the game. You
   can't wear the shield. The midgame, which was supposed to
   make sense, wound up being more incomprehensible than the
   intentionally surreal and incomprehensible opening (which I
   solved without hints, mind -- the opening was not a
   problem).

   That said, the story he wanted to tell is not a bad one, and
   the puzzles are, while perhaps a bit too straightforward,
   reasonable. (I'd move the tar somewhere else, and consider
   an alternate solution involving turning the stick into a
   torch.) If it didn't have all the serious writing and coding
   flaws, it'd easily be in the 6-7 range, but as it stands,
   it's unplayable without a walkthrough and riddled with
   flagrant errors.

   Score: 3
     _______________________________________________________

Escape to New York

  by Richard Otter

   This is an extensive, and pretty well done, caper in which
   one is attempting to get stolen goods to America on board a
   fairly ill-fated passenger liner. Most of the fun in the
   game involves committing additional theft along the way,
   although I note that this seems kind of silly when
   succeeding at the primary goal would have me set for life.

   The writing is mostly good; grammar errors are restricted to
   run-on sentences and the odd comma splice. It also surrounds
   words with single quotes to emphasize them, which is really
   what italics are for.

   ADRIFT's non-parser gets in the way a lot more in this game
   than it did in the other entries; it mistook "cigar case"
   for "cigar", and some sentence-structure issues showed up
   with a vengeance:

     > GIVE GOODSON LETTER

     Donald Goodson doesn't seem interested in the letter.

     > GIVE LETTER TO GOODSON

     Donald grabs the letter and says "Thanks." He hands you a
     ruby and then goes out onto the Boat Deck.

   If a system is supposed to be easy for novice programmers to
   use, this kind of thing shouldn't even be possible.

   The setting is very large, but the map that came with the
   game helped a lot. This was a nicely staged adventure.

   Score: 7
     _______________________________________________________

Hello sword: the Journey

  by Andrea Rezzonico

   From the ABOUT menu:

     I'm not very familiar with the English language, but in
     spite of this I want to realize an English version of my
     game, to allow you English players to play with "Hello
     sword"... I'm absolutely acquainted with the great number
     of errors and incomprehensible expressions that crowded
     this adventure (by the way, I ask you to signal them to
     me), but I hope you at least appreciate the huge effort I
     made for you.

   I could almost just end the review right there; I should
   note, though, that the errors here are so legion and so
   deep-seated that it isn't a matter of sending corrections,
   but a matter of having a native speaker rewrite each and
   every sentence. As an example of just how much change is
   required, here's another quote from the instructions:

     However the level, don't worry: in this adventure you are
     a greenhorns and you'll cast only spells for greenhorns;
     it's opportune instead to underline that the mana points
     are rechargeable (even if slowly, so or you utilize it
     with prudence or you have to wait a lot of time before
     resuming to cast another spells) and that's advisable
     don't impart any commands while you're pronouncing magic
     wordings, otherwise your concentration will be
     interrupted.

   This could perhaps become:

     Disregard spell levels; in this adventure, you're a
     novice sorceror and as such will only cast novice spells.
     Mana points recharge with time, but rather slowly. Use
     magic sparingly or you'll have to wait a long time before
     you can cast again. Attempting to take other actions
     while casting a spell will break your concentration,
     disrupting the spell.

   As you can see, the changes here are sufficiently vast that
   any editor is going to effectively become a co-author.

   The game often pauses to wait for you to press a key; it
   does this with great frequency, and often in the middle of
   sentences. I can't really approve of this technique.

   Playing the game itself involves either straightforward
   actions, exhausting conversation trees, or entering
   precisely phrased, uncued commands. As a result, the only
   parts that are even remotely playable are the parts where
   you aren't really doing anything.

   Score: 2
     _______________________________________________________

Sabotage on the Century Cauldron

  by Thomas de Graaff

   Your initial goal here is to do millions of dollars of
   damage and put hundreds of lives, including your own, at
   risk, so that you may rescue your dog. This is not a game
   that has a very serious attitude towards anyone's life,
   including yours; it also attempts slapstick at various
   points.

   The plot here could, in theory, be salvaged, and there are
   some puzzles that might be usable too. However, about half
   the code is missing. There's a button that, when you push
   it, gives you the response "THIS IS WHERE THE BUTTON
   ACTUALLY DOES WHAT IT IS SUPPOSED TO DO." Then there's this:

     > OPEN DESK

     Hey, you're talking to me, an ordinary computer! I have
     learnt that a desk has a drawer which can be opened, so
     please don't confuse me by trying to open the desk
     itself.

     Yes, I know it sounds silly as hell, but you have no
     choice but to comply with my demands, because nobody or
     nothing is more stubborn than a computer!

   Please don't blame the computer for your own programming
   laziness, please. I don't know the precise number for TADS,
   but in Inform, making OPEN DESK transform itself into OPEN
   DRAWER is one line of code with four words in it.

   On the things I liked: There was an actual backstory. NPCs
   do things on their own (this was good and bad; the bad came
   from the fact that no attempt was made to ensure that the PC
   wouldn't get unavoidably trapped -- implementing a HIDE verb
   might solve that neatly). The "reverse grue" effect; if an
   area is full of monsters, sticking a giant beacon on
   yourself in the form of a flashlight is not the best idea.

   The flaws in the plot can be summed up by the following line
   from the walkthrough, edited to remove spoilers: "Of course,
   you are not supposed think X, but the story won't evolve
   unless you do X."

   For this to be a game that isn't an insult to the player, it
   needs to, at minimum, have its objects implemented properly,
   have the inane asides the player removed, and have its plot
   streamlined or cued so that the game will advance properly
   without having to consult a walkthrough.

   Score: 3
     _______________________________________________________

Vespers

  by Jason Devlin

   This is a fiendishly clever game. It looks, on the surface,
   to be mostly puzzleless; a tale of a hopeless monastery
   falling to the plague, and of the Father's attempt to keep
   things together. The coding and the writing are both
   excellent and there's not a lot to say about them. In fact,
   if at all possible, if you haven't played it yet, do so
   before reading the rest of this review. Some of the things I
   want to complain about may be considered spoilers.

   I only really have two complaints, and they're part of the
   game design. The first is the use of box quotes. This is
   clever, but the cleverness isn't apparent until too late.
   They have three purposes -- setting the mood, representing
   the PC's mental instability (which other characters remark
   on later), and representing the PC's darker urges and
   temptations. The problem is, these latter two purposes
   aren't properly explained until far too late in the game, if
   at all. And at that point, the player has already forgotten
   about the quotes.

   Second, there is a certain action that is heavily prompted
   that will lock the player out of the "Good" ending -- and
   under most circumstances the nature of the player's error
   will be explained in great detail in the endgame. This is a
   fantastic piece of game design. The part that's not so great
   is that very similar actions are mandatory in order to win
   at all on the "Good" ending, and -- despite the fact that
   the game insists it's not being a theological treatise -- it
   does give a bit of an impression that it's not fully playing
   by its own rules.

   These are only quibbles, though. Vespers is one of the gems
   of the comp.

   Score: 9
     _______________________________________________________

Xen: The Contest

  by Xentor

   This is another game, like Internal Vigilance, that has the
   potential for excellence but doesn't reach it due to serious
   flaws. They're less coding flaws and more design flaws this
   time, but that doesn't make them irreparable.

   The plot is kind of split-personality by design; about half
   the game is micro-detailed play of college life, which is
   about as much fun as it sounds (which is to say, not very).
   The other half is bits of weirdness that blow up into a
   full-scale science fiction plot. I can't say that the first
   half should be eliminated in favor of more development of
   the second, because a major theme is the unpleasant position
   of the PC in having the SF plot forced upon him against his
   will. Without the "mundane life" to compare against, this
   doesn't work.

   The writing ranges from servicable to good, and the coding
   is mostly acceptable. I can't wear my backpack or open my
   wallet, and the contents of my wallet (which are important
   for dealing with daily life) don't directly show up in my
   inventory, but those are about the only complaints I can
   make at the low level.

   At the higher level, the emphasis *is* wrong on the two plots.
   Most of the actual interaction is in the mundane section,
   and this required a great deal of mapmaking, consulting, and
   careful reading just to go through my daily life. This is OK
   for the "first day at school" part, but much of this should
   probably have been handled via cutscenes or single commands
   later. (BUY LUNCH would have been nice, as would GO TO
   [building].) After all, mundanity isn't much fun, especially
   when there's also an epic plot to deal with.

   Most of the science-fiction plot was handled through
   extremely long cutscenes, many of which were conversations.
   I recognize that a certain degree of plot railroading is
   necessary here (especially since one of the themes is that
   you're being manipulated by events and beings beyond your
   ken), but, at minimum, these sequences should turn into
   conversation menus to keep the player involved.

   On the other hand, some sections that were interactive
   arguably should have been forced-command or cutscenes -- I'm
   thinking in particular of the parts where the PC panics or
   otherwise goes nuts.

   This isn't a great game as it is, though I think it could
   easily become one. However, it's still good enough on its
   own to be worth checking out.

   Score: 6
     _______________________________________________________

The Sword of Malice

  by Anthony Panuccio

   This is a fairly generic fantasy adventure in which one
   seeks to forge Soul Edge, er, that is, the Sword of Malice,
   to turn the tide in a generic war between two generic ancient
   adversaries.

   This is, perhaps, not entirely fair, since there was enough
   worldbuilding done for me to be irritated by the PC's
   nation, the Sekoniun. Unlike their rivals the Altari, I
   think the problem I had with them is that their names are
   actually too close to English -- I'd have preferred an
   Anglicized "Sekonian" for the adjective, with "Sekonians" as
   the plural. It should also always be capitalized, even as an
   adjective, since it is being loaned into English here. From
   a consistent-history standpoint it might also be good to
   have the Altari and the Sekoniun share facets of their
   language, since, if I read the backstory aright, the two
   nations are ethnically pretty closely related.

   I liked the potions (and would have liked to have been able
   to take a bunch with me, or at least interact with them
   individually), and the intended puzzle mix was well-chosen
   as well. Multiple solutions are implemented too, which is
   nice.

   Many of the puzzles need a bit more work to truly be up to
   snuff, however. (This is ignoring the fact that there are
   many places where you can trip up and lock yourself out of
   getting treasures that you need to win; I think that's
   intentional.)

   First and most blatantly, getting the Power of the Sekoniun
   shouldn't require the command that it does. Not only is the
   command uncued, the reply to the command indicates that the
   result seems to be triggered by physical contact, and as
   such it should probably be triggered by SEARCHing it as
   well. Worse, LOOKing UNDER it gives a reply indicating that
   you lift the object in question, and this it doesn't produce
   the effect either. That really makes no sense. Since the
   Power is necessary to get all the backstory and have full
   motion through the story, it should be easier to trigger it.

   The other problem is with the columns/lights puzzle; it
   needs to be made a bit more complex to pose any challenge.
   As it stands I solved it by accident merely by collecting
   the information as to what the buttons did, which I must
   admit wasn't very satisfying.

   This isn't even trying to be a great game, but it's not bad,
   and with just a bit more polish it would be quite solid
   indeed.

   Score: 5