Month: September 2020

Beat The Devil by Robert M. Camisa [Comp99]

IFDB page: Beat The Devil
Final placement: 9th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

If you grew up in suburban America in the 1980s or 90s, what would be your vision of Hell? Where would you least like to spend eternity? Where does it already feel like an eternity when you’re there? That’s right: a shopping mall! In Robert Camisa’s Beat The Devil, Lucifer is building an addition to Hell, and you’re his betatester. He overheard you mumbling about how you’d sell your soul for a chance with the object of your affections, and, being surfeited with souls already (“Washington and Hollywood provide me with all the souls I’ll ever need to buy.”), makes you this alternate offer: wander through this Stygian mall and defeat the incarnations of the seven deadly sins, and that date is yours.

It’s a fun concept, and Beat The Devil gives it an energetic, cartoonish implementation. There are a number of funny spots, though the humor tends to lean a little too far in the direction of over-the-top junior high style exaggeration. For example, to make fun of stores whose decor is all white, there’s a store in the Hell-mall whose shelves are so white that they’re blinding. There are a number of choices like that, which puts the humor at the lowest common denominator. Still, on the whole the game remains pretty funny, just because by being such a detailed working-out of its concepts, it manages to satirize both malls and typical depictions of Hell.

The game is clearly the product of a novice IF author, and while the writing and coding are both fairly good, each has a number of errors easily identifiable as beginner’s mistakes. On the writing side, there are a number of punctuation problems: sentences missing periods, contractions missing apostrophes, quotes missing quotation marks and the like. The grammar and spelling are better, though an occasional glitch will slip through on those as well from time to time.

On the coding side, there are a few little oversights such as some objects missing short_names, disambiguation problems caused by objects whose names are too short, and a number of unimplemented first-level nouns. More interesting is another slip-up. Searching the shelves in one store yields this:

Yada yada..blow dust..yada yada..small white packet.. yada yada...
again with the no gold or jewels. Sigh.

The description didn’t make much sense to me until I reached another store, searched its shelves, and found this description:

You blow dust off the shelf, almost choking yourself from the resultant
cloud, but you uncover a pair of pliers, which you pocket. Personally,
I'dve preferred gold or jewels, but beggars can't be choosers.

Clearly, the game assumed I would search the shelves in the opposite order that I did. This is an easy mistake to make, especially if you’re concentrating on making sure your game is winnable by focusing on a particular walkthrough path. Vexingly, it’s also the sort of thing that your betatesters won’t always find — if they go through the game in the same order that you envisioned, no problems will be apparent. Writing text that is dependent on some other text already having been displayed is very tempting in IF, but you have to be careful that you take account of what happens if that text hasn’t yet been seen.

These are minor mistakes, and can be cleaned up easily in a subsequent release of the game. They don’t much interfere with enjoyment. The same could be said of the puzzles. While there are a couple of sticky spots, most of the puzzles are either pretty obvious or rather clever. The “obvious” part of that evaluation may sound like an insult, but I don’t intend it as one. I’m a fan of obvious puzzles — they’re a lot better than “guess-what-the-author-is-thinking” puzzles, and in an author’s first game you’re more likely to find the latter than the former. The clever ones include a nifty device reminiscent of the “T” remover in Leather Goddesses.

The one real clunker is flawed in a way that, again, marks it as a beginner’s error. There’s an object in the game that will destroy anything put into it. When you try to put anything into it, you’ll see a funny default message about how destroying something you may need later is a dumb thing to do, and the game won’t let you do it. However, there is one object you must destroy in such a way in order to win the game. Based on the default message, there’s no way of knowing that the destroyer will react differently to one particular thing. This isn’t a problem with the puzzle so much as the way it is implemented — it’s like a hungry troll saying “I don’t want to eat!” when offered the wrong kind of food, rather than saying “I don’t want to eat that!” If the default message were worded slightly differently, the player could twig to the fact that although the attempted action is wrong, a similar one might be right. This is the sort of thing you learn with experience, either of writing a lot of IF or playing a lot of it, or both. Beat The Devil is an auspicious start, and I look forward to the author’s next game.

Rating: 7.5

King Arthur’s Night Out by Mikko Vuorinen [Comp99]

IFDB page: King Arthur’s Night Out
Final placement: 22nd place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

This game depicts King Arthur in a way I’ve never seen him before. Instead of tragic hero, noble warrior, or eager wizard’s apprentice, it’s King Arthur as… henpecked husband? Yes, you as King Arthur just want to head to the pub for a pint or two with “Lance” and the boys, but your wife, the uncharacteristically shrewish Guinevere, wants you to stay home while she sits on the bed, knitting. The puzzle, then, is how to get out without her knowing. It seems to me that this plot could have easily taken place in a suburban house rather than Camelot. Yes, Excalibur makes an appearance, but even with that addition the game is still a rather pedestrian affair with a superficial sheen of Arthurian trappings laid on. I’m not convinced that this sheen improves the game. There’s an element of the unexpected, I suppose, in seeing Arthur cast in such a strange way, but the surprise does little to illuminate either the Arthurian mythos or the game itself. In addition, the henpecked husband stereotype has never been one that I’ve found all that compelling, so mixing it in with the legend of King Arthur shatters the power of the legend while doing little to enliven the stereotype.

King Arthur’s Night Out suffers in several places from “guess-the-verb” weaknesses. There is an item that, when SEARCHed, will yield an important discovery. However, if you look in, shake, push, open, or examine it, you won’t find a thing. In another spot, you must retrieve an item from underneath something else. However, you can’t crawl under this thing, nor lift it, nor just get the item from underneath it. The puzzle has a logical solution, but because such a specific wording was required, I didn’t find that solution until I checked the walkthrough. I felt annoyed when I discovered the answer, because it was no more complicated that the things I had been trying, things which got no response. How was I supposed to know that this particular method had been implemented, I wondered, when 5 others weren’t? I think my experience contains a lesson for me as an author — puzzles shouldn’t consist of hunting around for the one method which the author anticipated. The author should anticipate three or four methods of solving a puzzle, and implement them all, either as alternate solutions or as dead ends which will help point the player toward the correct method.

Having griped about that, I will say that the game was coded quite well overall. Many actions were accounted for, especially in areas which weren’t puzzles. I found no bugs in playing the game, and only a very few errors in the prose mechanics. I still didn’t have a particularly great time playing the game, but a large portion of that reaction is due to the fact that I didn’t find the premise very interesting. Perhaps people who enjoy broad domestic farce would like it more. In addition, if a second edition of the game emerges that implements the puzzles a little more robustly, King Arthur’s Night Out will be a solidly coded, if a little bit odd, piece of interactive fiction.

Rating: 7.2

Four Seconds by Jason Reigstad [Comp99]

IFDB page: Four Seconds
Final placement: 15th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Maybe I’m just getting cranky, but I really feel that this year’s competition games are a lot buggier, on average, than in previous years. It’s drained some of the fun out of the competition for me — I’ve begun to dread starting a new entry rather than eagerly anticipate it. For each unknown game, I start to wonder whether it will be just another bugfest that I’ll sincerely try to play for 30 minutes to an hour, getting more and more frustrated with its constant errors before turning to the walkthrough. That’s not normally my approach, but this year’s games have changed my usual attitude.

Four Seconds is a case in point. It is very, very buggy, and heavily burdened with grammar and spelling errors as well. If you don’t use the walkthrough, you will find lots of bugs. In fact, there are even a few bugs in the walkthrough itself. If you type “info” or “about” in the game, you’ll find an apology from the author for the bugginess of the game. This is something for which I have zero patience. If you know your game is buggy, fix it. Fix it before you ask people to play it. Don’t waste my time.

It’s baffling to me that buggy games like this get entered, especially considering the fact that this year Lucian Smith and Liza Daly went to the trouble of actually setting up a betatesters clearinghouse on the web. Testers were available, so why weren’t they used? All I can conclude is that the authors who submitted buggy games just don’t care that much about the players’ experience. This disregard leaves the player little motivation to care about the game’s rating, and it gives me as a reviewer very little motivation to put any time or energy into giving useful feedback. In addition, playing a game so crammed with bugs feels like another version of non-interactivity, since there’s almost nothing to see outside the bounds of the path dictated by the walkthrough.

So here’s the deal with Four Seconds: it’s not worth the download. Not only is its plot a b-movie rehash of much better games (mayhem at an isolated science complex a la Delusions or Babel), but it’s pretty much unplayable. Tons of commands get no response at all from the parser. Many more get responses that make no sense. Those pieces of prose that do emerge, whether arrived at by use of the walkthrough or just dumb luck, lack the most basic proofreading. I spent an hour of my life that could have gone to something much more fulfilling on playing Four Seconds. I wish I had spent 59 minutes and 56 seconds less.

Rating: 2.7

Lomalow by Brendan Barnwell [Comp99]

IFDB page: Lomalow
Final placement: 21st place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Ever feel like you’re first reader for the slushpile? I get that feeling sometimes as I near the end of a long list of competition entries, and I definitely had it playing Lomalow. It’s sentences like this that produce such a feeling: “The sheer mountain cliffs end abruptly at and are ended abrutply at by a dense forest of tall evergreens.” Huh? The author announces at the outset that the game’s only puzzle is “how to get to read all the text that you possibly can.” The implication is that reading the text is its own reward. This is a nice concept, but works better when the text is actually well written. There’s a fair amount of prose in this game, and seeing it can be rewarding, but often not for the reason the author intended. For instance, at one point, a wind howling above the pit you’re in is compared to “a giant child puffing across the top of a Coke bottle.” This comparison may have been intended to inspire awe, but for me it was a very comic image. Somehow the idea of a kid blowing on a Coke bottle failed to evoke the fury of nature.

My favorite passage, though, was a room description, and I can’t resist quoting it in full:

Waterfall
This area seems to be filled with abrupt ends. To the east,
the mountain ends abruptly at the forest you came from, and vice versa.
The forest also ends abruptly at the cliff which you are standing on.
It's about ten feet wide and ends abruptly in midair. Far above, a
riverbed abruptly ends at the abrupt end of the mountain, generating an
incredibly long but relatively narrow waterfall. From the roar that
emanates from below, you presume that this waterfall ends abruptly at
some flat surface, creating high-intensity sound waves which end
abruptly at your ears, which end abruptly at the side of your head,
which ends abrutply at your shoulders, and so on and so forth.

By the time I got to the end of this passage, I almost fell out of my chair I was laughing so hard. The problem is, I’m not at all certain it was meant to be funny. The contrast suggests to me that the game’s prose has escaped its control — the same word is repeated 10 times in 6 sentences, sounding sillier each time (it doesn’t help that the final occurrence is misspelled) and jarring badly with the overall tone of the story.

The mounting ridiculousness of the repetition in the above passage is echoed by the repetitive nature of the game itself. Lomalow is designed so that the only way to win is to ask the two characters the same questions over and over and over again. A typical interaction might be to type “ASK WOMAN ABOUT BOOK.” She will give a very short answer, trailing off with an ellipsis. Then, the player must type “G” again and again until the old woman starts to repeat herself. After that, the player must repeat the process with a different noun substituted in place of “book.” Then, repeat all of the above with the game’s other character, an old man.

After going through the cycles a few dozen times, the whole thing starts to seem really funny. I kept imagining what life would be like if all conversations had to be carried out this way. I’d have to ask my wife about the store 29 times to get the entire shopping list down. You’d have to ask the cop about the ticket 8 times before finally receiving it. When the final climactic scene came, my main emotion was relief that the characters could bring themselves to utter more than a few sentences at a time without being prompted. Relief was followed closely by amusement when the old man screamed at me, “We’re magic BIRDS, aren’t we? What do BIRDS do, guy?” Of course, it took me a while to get to this scene, because I kept running out of nouns to substitute in the conversations.

I turned to the hint system for help, but all it tended to give me were cryptic suggestions along the lines of “Don’t be dense. You’ve already seen 14220. Why haven’t you talked to the old woman about it?” My suspicion is that these odd messages are the result of a bug in the hint system caused by having Inform print an object’s number rather than its name. The numbers may have been intentional, but if so, the decision to use them makes the hint system pretty useless.

So Lomalow is a very flawed game, hampered by its overblown prose and its numbingly iterative design. That’s what I have to say as a critic. Now, here’s what I have to say as an author. The thing I liked about Lomalow, and the thing that kept it from becoming a purely irritating experience, was the obvious sincerity that was driving it. Yes, it’s the product of a novice writer. But every writer is a novice at some point, and I’m quite certain that almost every respected writer (of interactive fiction and regular fiction too) started out writing passages that were just as silly as, if not sillier than, the ones I quoted in my first paragraph. It’s a necessary thing, and I know from my own experience that fear of looking foolish in public can hold a writer back from going through that stage. Since it’s a stage that is almost always one of the first steps on the path to real skill, the fear stops many writers from reaching their true potential.

So even though, from a critical standpoint, I can’t see Lomalow as a success, I applaud its author for having the courage to overcome that paralyzing fear. I could see the promise of improvement shining through much of the text, and the game’s very existence suggests that the author is committed to pursuing that promise. These thoughts allowed me to play through Lomalow with a smile rather than a grimace.

Rating: 5.0

Thorfinn’s Realm by Roy Main and Robert Hall [Comp99]

IFDB page: Thorfinn’s Realm
Final placement: 28th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

For someone who has always loved playing IF, the first few attempts at programming it can be a giddy thrill. The smallest achievements can provide boundless amusement: “Look! I made some rooms that link together in crazy ways!” That’s why many IF authors, especially those who started programming IF during their adolescence (or even before) go through a stage of writing games that do all kinds of really crazy, annoying things. These games are usually brimming with smarmy, smart-assed responses to various fairly ordinary commands, because smart-assed responses are one of the easiest, most fun things for a novice to program. The games often do really annoying things, from a gameplay standpoint, just because those are things their author has just figured out how to do. Mazes are common, as are insta-death puzzles, silly objects/rooms, in-jokes, and self-referential appearances by the author.

Design isn’t a big consideration, and for that matter neither are consistency, logic, realism, or correct grammar and spelling. All these things take a lot of patience, and the fledgling IF author is way too eager to write the next snarky response to bother with them. Of course, many of these early efforts never see the light of day, something for which their authors find themselves very grateful five or ten years down the line. But some find their way out. Some authors even take the trouble of porting their old efforts so that the games can reach new audiences (Andrew Plotkin‘s Inhumane is a case in point). I don’t know whether Thorfinn’s Realm is the product of novice programmers (or a port of such.) It may not really belong to this category of game, but it certainly feels like it does. It’s a game that does many things wrong, and has lots of irritating misfeatures and errors, but is still endearing nonetheless for its abundant energy and enthusiasm.

The plot is a goofy contrivance for a treasure hunt, something about time-traveling back to the 10th century to join a time-travelers club. Of course, the introduction is careful to explain, the club has gone ahead of you to set up a few “surprises”, a rationalization which serves to explain any strange anachronisms you might find, such as oh, say, flashlight batteries lying around. Hung on this framework is a string of lots of the most irritating puzzles/features from the earliest IF games.

There’s a 4 item inventory limit. This limit can be contravened with a rucksack later in the game, but even the rucksack has a limit. There’s a maze, almost at the very beginning of the game. There’s a “replace the light source” puzzle, which basically entails saving and restoring to replay the first 200 moves over and over until you’ve found the aforementioned flashlight batteries. At times I felt like I was having an extended flashback to the early 80s — I’m thankful there was no starvation puzzle or I might have permanently lost my mind.

Along the way there are a host of misspellings, objects missing descriptions, lapses of logic, and lots and lots of smarmy parser rejoinders. Take, for instance, the following:

>EXAMINE LOGS
Captain's log, stardate 950 AD. Some idiot is poking around in a fireplace.

I can almost picture the programmers chortling with glee, savoring the oh-so-clever wordplay and hoping some suckers examine the logs in the fireplace so that they can be the target of that zinger. The player who finds it, on the other hand, grimaces for a moment and then moves on (or at least that’s what I did). Who had more fun in this scenario? Thorfinn’s Realm is full of moments like these, things that are aggravating for the player but which were presumably fun for the authors to create.

Now, let me back off a few steps. First of all, I recognize that I’m setting up a strawman in the above paragraph. It is certainly possible that the scenario I describe above is very far from the truth, and that the authors genuinely thought that the in-jokes, self-references, light source puzzle, etc. etc. would really be fun for the player. Not probable, I admit, but possible. Secondly, I can’t stay mad at Thorfinn’s Realm for long, despite its many flaws. For one thing, in spite of its cracked design and sometimes wobbly English, the game is coded pretty competently. I found very few bugs, aside from the occasional elided description, and lots of verbs and nouns are accounted for in the parser.

But more importantly, there’s just such a verve to the whole thing. It’s a quality much more difficult to put into words than the game’s problems are. Something about the gestalt of the whole package — puzzles, setting, prose, and the rest — conveys an infectious enthusiasm for the medium of interactive fiction. Come to think of it, that’s another quality that Thorfinn’s Realm shares with the earliest IF, but a good quality. Those early games had many characteristics whose passing is unlamented, but they also had the bright-eyed excitement of explorers mapping uncharted territory. In capturing the feel of the early days of IF, Thorfinn’s Realm finds not just its curse, but its blessing as well.

Rating: 6.4

Music Education by Bill Linney [Comp99]

IFDB page: Music Education
Final placement: 24th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

In Music Education, you play a college student majoring in music. The game takes place in and around a college music building, and many of the characters and puzzles involve music in one way or another. The specificity of this premise helps the game feel a little less like a generic college romp, but does not help it to transcend the genre of games which feel more or less like implementations of somebody’s (usually the author’s) fairly quotidian life. These are the kind of games that are much more fun to write than to play. Aspiring writers are given the advice that they should write what they know, and try to write for themselves, creating works that they themselves want to read. This is good advice, but I think that when it is applied to interactive fiction, it often leads to games which are more or less an interactive version of somebody’s apartment, or house, or campus. These can be fun to play, but only if the main attraction isn’t the game’s similarity to the author’s real life.

For example, A Bear’s Night Out may have been set in an implemented version of the author’s house, but the main attraction of the game isn’t the fact that you get to walk around a virtual replica of a typical house. Instead, there are specific, interesting elements to the game that put the house in the background rather than the foreground. In Music Education, the college music building occupies the foreground, and one suspects that the most fun thing about it for the author is its resemblance to that author’s lived reality. This is a type of fun in which very few players can share. I may be way off base here. Perhaps the whole building is imaginary, and the game’s scenario has no bearing on the author’s life. If so, the game fails to make the fictional scenario compelling enough to hold the player’s interest. This lack of zing arises in part from the sheer ordinariness of the scenario (with occasional lurches into absurd death scenes), but also from its curious goallessness.

The game begins at a parking meter, so it’s reasonable to think that the goal of the game is to feed the meter. However, even after you do this, the game is not won, and there are many more points to be scored. There’s no real plot to the game, so it’s difficult for players to understand just what they’re supposed to be trying to accomplish in order to win the game. There are no overt indications of exactly what the puzzles are, let alone how they ought to be solved. Consequently, I spent a good deal of time wandering around the game just doing the obvious thing with the few objects to hand, without ever understanding the purpose of such actions. After I ran out of ideas, I consulted the walkthrough and discovered that a couple of highly unlikely (though, in retrospect, more or less logical) actions are necessary to complete the game.

I still didn’t understand why any of those actions were necessary until I had performed them, and I think I’ve figured out the problem. Most of the puzzles consist of bringing things to various characters, or creating a situation that the character desires. However, the characters never give any indication as to what they want, so it’s very difficult to know what you’re supposed to be doing for them. This is why such “locked-door” characters in IF normally say things like, “Boy, I sure could go for some ice cream right now!” It’s a way of feeding the player specific information about the key to unlock the NPC’s puzzle without that NPC needing to break character. In Music Education there is one character whom you can ask about the other characters, but again there’s no motivation to do this other than trying to figure out what the goal of the game is, and even when you do ask, the character only answers on a few topics. This setup breaks mimesis, since there’s no intrinsic, character-based reason to ask such questions; the game becomes less about a music student and more about a confused player trying to figure out what the game is looking for.

Luckily, there’s an easy fix to this: just enhance the characters so that it’s easier to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing for them. This could mean tweaking their responses to various questions, or giving them a response to “hello”, or giving them opening text for when they first meet the player, or some combination of the above. Granted, “I really want a…” statements can feel rather artificial when written poorly, but wandering around wondering what to do in a simple environment feels much more artificial. Music Education is a game whose writing and coding are relatively free from errors, but whose drive is deflated by the banality of its setting and some relatively basic omissions of puzzle design. Once the latter of these problems is fixed, the former will cease to have as much effect.

Rating: 6.1

Skyranch by Jack Driscoll [Comp99]

IFDB page: Skyranch
Final placement: 37th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

In my head, I’ve started this review a dozen different ways and discarded them all. The unused versions were rejected for being too caustic, too angry, or too harsh. During this current attempt, I will try to keep a leash on these energies, though they’re chomping at the bit (if I may mix my animal metaphors.) I want for these reviews to be helpful, not hurtful, and I want to keep my criticisms constructive. In that spirit, I offer a couple of changes that could (and should) be made to make Skyranch a playable game:

The game should be reprogrammed until it meets a minimum level of coding quality. I would put this minimum level right around the functionality provided by, for example, an Inform shell game (i.e. the bare-bones version of the library before the game author has added any real code.) To detail all, or even many, of the ways in which Skyranch fails to meet this standard would take more time than I want to devote to this game. One example: the game should recognize verbs like “ask” and “examine”. The game’s error messages should be helpful, rather than flippant parser responses like “What?” or “So… what are you saying?” Many authors meet this minimum standard by using a text adventure creation tool such as Inform, TADS, Hugo, ALAN, etc. to create their game. This isn’t strictly necessary, of course, but if a game is programmed from scratch, it had better be at least as good as one that was created with such a tool.

The prose should be rewritten until it consists of correct English sentences. The current writing in the game is pretty abysmal. Mistakes are so legion that the text is often confusing, sometimes completely incomprehensible. Until a text game is written in English, it won’t be any fun for me to play, because English is the only language I read fluently.

Until these two basic conditions are met, Skyranch won’t even be worth discussing, let alone playing.

Rating: 0.9

Guard Duty by Jason F. Finx [Comp99]

IFDB page: Guard Duty
Final placement: 36th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Wow, now that’s really too bad. As with The Water Bird, I knew that there was a fatal bug in Guard Duty before I started playing it. I didn’t know what that bug was. Turns out the game crashes as soon as you take inventory. This crash occurs with both Frotz and Jzip. It doesn’t occur with Evin Robertson’s Nitfol interpreter, though that interpreter will spit a lot of errors at you during crash-worthy occasions unless you turn on its “ignore” function. So that gave me a decision to make. Do I rate the game based on its ability to function under my traditional interpreters of choice, or do I download a new interpreter, set it to ignore all errors, and play through the game (or as much as can be played) that way?

I chose the former. Here is my reasoning: I try to judge all the competition games on a level playing field, as much as possible. When I played The Water Bird, I played the version that I downloaded on October 1, fatal bug included. If the author had released a bugfix version, I wouldn’t have used it, because one part of the challenge of the competition, as I see it, is to release the best game possible by the assigned deadline. If I play a version that comes out after the deadline, that version would have an advantage over all the other games whose authors could have fixed post-deadline bugs, but who didn’t do so because they’re following the rules.

A similar logic applies to interpreter-specific bugs. To my way of thinking, a bug that shows up in any interpreter (as long as it’s not the interpreter’s fault) is a bug that ought to be factored into the game’s rating. Even if it’s possible to jigger an interpreter so that it will look like the bug doesn’t exist, that doesn’t mean that the bug is gone. Part of an author’s job is to test the game thoroughly enough that its bugs get fixed before the game is released. If this doesn’t happen, the bug should be factored into the game’s rating. I already wrote my screed on how games that haven’t been bug-checked or proofread shouldn’t be entered into the competition, and there’s no point repeating it here. It’s really too bad, though, because like The Water Bird, Guard Duty showed a lot of potential before it crashed and burned.

Unlike the bug in The Water Bird, however, Guard Duty‘s bug is of a nature that I felt it made the whole game unplayable, not just a portion of it. For that reason, I didn’t feel justified in giving the game any rating higher than 1. I hope that in remembering Guard Duty, authors will think twice about entering a game into the competition before it’s ready. It’s really not worth it.

Rating: 1.2

The HEBGB Horror! by Eric Mayer [Comp99]

IFDB page: The HeBGB Horror
Final placement: 16th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Patti Smith. The Talking Heads. Blondie. Television. The Ramones. While the Sex Pistols and the Clash were spitting in the face of the bloated English rock establishment, the artists named above were leading a concurrent American punk revolution in New York City. The nerve center of the movement was a club called CBGB (standing, ironically, for Country, Blue Grass, and Blues), where all of these artists got their start before being launched on the national stage. This is the scene to which Eric Mayer pays loving tribute in his competition entry, an ALAN game called The HeBGB Horror!. You play Phil Howard, a musician dreaming of hitting the big time in NYC. You’re down to your last few bucks, and ready to take the bus back home, when you spy a chance to see the reunion of legendary (fictional) punk band The Laughing Kats at their famous stomping grounds, HeBGB. It sounds great, so why can’t you shake this feeling of nameless dread? The game combines the trappings of the Seventies New York punk rock scene with the sort of Lovecraftian pastiche that seems to have become all the rage in IF since the success of Anchorhead.

I’m an avid rock music fan, so the former theme grabbed me immediately. The Lovecraft stuff, on the other hand, gets old pretty fast. Mayer obviously knows and loves the music, and the emphasis is on the New York punk scene — these themes could have sustained a game easily on their own. As I played through The HeBGB Horror!, I found myself really enjoying the punk parts, and wishing that the various “eldritch horrors” and such could have been edited out. I’m not sure how much the game wanted to parody CBGB, or how much of an homage it intended for the Lovecraft bits to be, but I think it may have achieved the opposite of its ambition, as the music parts felt mainly like homage, while the Lovecraftiana, with its various generic rats, tentacles, and gibbering masses, felt more like a parody.

But hey, as the game itself reminds us at several points, it’s only a “three-chord” effort. Indeed, one of the most endearing things about HeBGB is the way it evokes the D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) spirit of punk, making a joyous noise even though it’s no virtuoso. The author reinforces this viewpoint by cautioning us in the credits that HeBGB “does not represent the real capabilities of the Alan Language but does demonstrate Alan’s amazing ability to allow someone who has never done an iota of computer programming of any kind to produce SOMETHING within a few weeks!” This is a very nice thing to say about a programming language, and in fact HeBGB is quite playable despite a lack of programming polish.

However, there are a number of things missing from the game that the average game programmer shouldn’t have to worry about at all. For example, the game offers no “undo” function, nor an “oops” verb. Some simple things run contrary to convention, such as a “” prompt that accepts only the Enter key, rather than the space bar or any random keypress. Some fairly basic verbs are missing, such as “throw”. I attribute these flaws to deficiencies in the ALAN libraries (or perhaps, in some cases, the ARUN interpreter) rather than a failing on the author’s part. It’s unreasonable to expect every game author to program conveniences like “undo” on their own. That’s what libraries are for, and by being such a complete game in lots of other ways, HeBGB demonstrates the limitations of ALAN — not the language, but the default shell given to potential authors.

What the author can control he provides quite well. Despite a few spelling and formatting difficulties, the prose in HeBGB (especially when it’s not doing a Lovecraft parody) combines a snappy sense of humor with strong descriptions. The plot is clever, allowing a good deal of exploration while never opening so wide that the story feels aimless. There are a number of good things about the design, including the fact that the game is carefully structured in such a way as to allow players a second or third chance to obtain items that they may have failed to notice or pick up the first time around. These chances are always well-integrated within the game, and feel natural rather than gratuitous. This design choice allows HeBGB to close off early sections of the map once their purpose is served while avoiding the trap of making the game unsolvable once those sections are unavailable to the player.

The puzzles, for the most part, are quite good, maintaining a high level of originality and (with one exception) escaping “guess-the-verb” syndrome. The one qualm I did have about the puzzles is that at several points, you must return to apparently unfruitful locations to obtain an object that wasn’t there before. The reasons given for the appearances of the objects certainly make sense, but from a gameplay standpoint it’s not very logical for a player to assume that visiting and revisiting empty locations will be rewarded. Moreover, some of the actions required to make the object appear in the empty location don’t seem to have very much causal influence. In other words, the action which puts the object in the formerly empty spot gives players little reason to guess that visiting that spot again will be worthwhile. These quibbles aside, I enjoyed HeBGB quite a bit, and while I was wishing for the conveniences granted by more sophisticated libraries, the roughness of the game was in keeping with its topic, and that resonance lent it an unexpected charm.

Rating: 7.7

Jacks Or Better To Murder, Aces To Win by J.D. Berry [Comp99]

IFDB page: Jacks or Better to Murder, Aces to Win
Final placement: 10th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Jacks or Better to Murder, Aces to Win is a great title. Based on that title, I expected the game to be a dark detective story in the Raymond Chandler mode. I thought perhaps there’d be a gambler who owed money to the mob, or shady dealings at a poker game, or a crime ring run out of a casino, or something to do with playing cards. This, however, turned out not to be the case. Instead, the game centers on an arcane hierarchical religion, which is never named. The head of this religion is called The Power, and divine authority spreads downward from there, pyramid-fashion, following the letters of the alphabet. The highest lieutenants are called “A”s, the next step down “B”s, and so on all the way down to E. Apparently these church officials spend most of their time engaged in Machiavellian scheming of how to claw their way up the stack, and to prevent threats from those below them. The PC is an A, an old hand at all the tricks and conniving that are necessary to survive in this structure, and therefore almost preternaturally aware of life-threatening situations. As the game begins, the old A believes that an assassination plot is afoot — as the game puts it, “You have the feeling you are being set up and that your chair should have a bull’s-eye painted on it.” It’s not the game I expected, but it’s an interesting premise nonetheless.

The results are mixed. The prose can get rather florid — long, long sentences one after another — but is mostly pretty good, and it can in fact be argued that the prose style matches the baroque structure it describes. I have more conflicted feelings about the design. In an earlier review, one where I was complaining about scenes that only make one option available, I asked “Why even give me a prompt at all?” It appears that Jacks is the answer to my question. At a number of junctures in the game, it only takes a very minor action, such as moving in a particular direction, to impel the PC to perform a long sequence of actions, all of which are out of the player’s control. In a way, this is fine, since most of the actions performed would be very difficult to communicate to an IF parser, not to mention difficult to guess. However, this design choice once again tips the balance away from interactivity. Every time the PC makes a bunch of independent choices, I feel more and more like I’m not really involved in the story, like I’m just there to hold up the cue cards so that the plot can continue.

Still, of all the minimally interactive games I’ve played in this year’s competition thus far, Jacks is one of the most successful. It’s worth examining the game more closely to find out why. For one thing, the milieu is involving enough that just seeing the plot unfold is interesting. This gives Jacks a leg up on games that are set in a cardboard cutout genre world, or whose plots are a string of nonsensical non sequiturs — even though I didn’t have much influence on the plot, I was interested in it. Another factor which helps to counterbalance Jacks‘ lack of interactivity is the fact that it doesn’t make its puzzles too difficult, and it allows for multiple solutions at the most important juncture.

When there is only one way to advance through the game, the action (and the fun) grinds to a halt pretty quickly if that route is difficult to find. Jacks never falls into this trap, instead opening the next scene from fairly minor actions on the part of the player (usually involving examining everything or doing the obvious thing with the few items to hand.) Moreover, at the one juncture where the action might be difficult to guess, the author wisely provides for a number of actions that will resolve the situation, and gives each one its own lengthy text. In fact, I was interested enough in the situation at that after I finished the game I consulted the walkthrough and tried out the alternate solutions. For each action, I was rewarded with a different series of clever machinations on the part of the PC.

Oh! How could I forget? Jacks also features a really cool technical feat, which makes for some very funny moments in the beginning of the game. In the opening scene, an E is making a lengthy speech that uses lots of words, and says basically nothing. The game accomplishes this effect through the use of a random doubletalk generator. Each turn, the E comes out with randomly generated phrases, all of which perfectly mimic the kind of empty speech that often fills long orations. A sample: “One part of the whole must be that you should sing each song as if it will personally show others each other.” The mechanism for this doubletalk generator is complex and masterful — frankly, it’s worth the download time just to see this thing in action. And you’ll have no trouble lingering in the first section, since the author has provided a number of things which must be examined before the action can continue. Jacks is another fairly non-interactive entry into this year’s competition, but through technical innovation, fresh milieu, and shrewd design, it partly makes up for what it lacks in gameplay.

Rating: 7.3