Month: January 2021

Moments Out Of Time by L. Ross Raszewski [Comp01]

IFDB page: Moments Out Of Time
Final placement: 2nd place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

I found myself both rationally and irrationally annoyed with this game. Let me start with the irrational, since it’s least defensible. Near as I can tell, there is no interpreter that can utilize all the effects of which the game is capable. As an author and a member of the IF community, I understand the reason for this perfectly. The way that things seem to go is that specifications get created for interpreters, zcode formats, multimedia package formats, and suchlike, but they don’t ever tend to get implemented. Why? Because there are no games that use these extended capabilities, so what’s the rush? But of course there are no games, because why produce games with unusable features?

These gears turn each other forever, getting nowhere, and Moments Out Of Time is intended as a crowbar stuck between the gears; from that perspective I applaud it. Hopefully this game will act as a prod (well, maybe a shove) to interpreter authors, and someday there will be an interpreter that can play it. In the meantime, though, from a player’s perspective, it’s a little irritating. It’s rather like being handed a book and told “Oh, some of the pages have illustrations, but you won’t be able to see them without some special perspect-o-vision glasses. But, uh, those glasses don’t currently exist. They might someday, though!” Sure, I’ll still read the book, but it’s a drag to feel like I’m missing the full experience. I understand the reasoning, but still feel irrationally annoyed at being presented with a thing that doesn’t completely work, and that irritation probably colored my experience with the rest of the game.

Of course, there were a number of completely legitimate reasons to be annoyed with this game. For one thing, it is that judges’ bane, the Way-Too-Big Comp Game. Two hours is a completely inappropriate amount of time for evaluating this game. It took me 45 minutes just to read the various manuals and introductory materials, for heaven’s sake. Before I’d even started the game proper, I’d already used up about a third of my judging time. Then there’s the fact that the game offers a zillion different tools, but only allows a few per game session — sure, it’s great for replay value, but how much replaying am I going to do in two hours? Oh, and how about this: even after reading the massive manuals, there were still parts of the interface that were totally unexplained. Here’s a hint for anyone struggling with the conversation portion: don’t use ASK, TELL, or NPC, . Instead, just type the answer at the command line. If you don’t know the answer, type DONE. I figured this out by pure guessing, thereby using more precious time.

Also aggravating was that the game implements the square bracket (“[“) for making notes at the prompt. Okay, that’s not aggravating, that’s cool. What’s aggravating is that 1) You have to type a space after the bracket in order for the game to handle it properly, and 2) Making bracketed notes takes game time, one turn per note! This wouldn’t be so bad, except that there are a number of time limits worked into the game, so making the comment command non-meta effectively penalizes the player for using the game’s built-in notation system. Finally, despite the fact that Moments boasts an amazing amount of technical polish, it suffers in several places from what I can only call lazy implementation. You may find a book which can’t be referred to as “book”. You may be told something by the narrative voice that you couldn’t possibly know, given that it’s happening hundreds of miles away. You may find (details changed to prevent spoilage) a hidden cache in the floorboards, but when you “examine cache”, you will be told “You can’t, because the floorboards is closed.” Oh they is, is they?

Okay, enough spleen-venting. It’s just too bad, because there are the bones of an amazing game here. The plot revolves around a future time-travel agency, and the world-building evident in the details of this is just wonderful. Also, some of the things that make it inappropriate for the competition don’t necessarily make it a bad game. Quite the contrary, in fact — the number of options available makes for an incredibly rich gameworld. I kept wondering what would have happened had I chosen a different array of technology at the beginning, while still quite awed by the capabilities of what I had chosen. I feel I barely scratched the surface of the story, and the scenario was interesting enough that I’m quite curious to see all the things I missed.

The writing did a nice job at establishing a consistent tone, and provided plenty of amusing juxtapositions as the future character examines technology that is primitive to him/her. I saw the beginnings of a number of intriguing puzzles, though there’s an overwhelming array of keys and locked doors, and the game’s auto-unlock feature appeared to me to be broken.

All in all, a very worthy effort, but I wish it wasn’t a competition game. Releasing this game outside the competition would have accrued several benefits. It would have allowed more time to fix those nasty details of implementation and documentation. Players could have approached it as something they could spend a significant amount of time on, rather than having to rush through it to see as much as possible while not giving short shrift to the other 51 games awaiting their attention. And it wouldn’t have been presented for formal judging in a not-completely-functional state. Would have, would have, would have. If only real time travel were possible.

Rating: 5.6

The Cruise by Norman Perlmutter [Comp01]

IFDB page: The Cruise
Final placement: 27th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

The Cruise is, by all appearances, its author’s first game. Everybody’s a rookie once, and the slack that people are inclined to give to somebody’s debut outing can cover a multitude of sins. Alas, however: not this many. Let me quickly cover what was good about the game. Its cruise-ship setting made for a fun exploration of an environment I’m not likely to inhabit anytime soon, thus utilizing one of the great strengths of IF.

It had some funny moments. In one of my favorites, the humor was mixed with pain, like so: there was a starvation time limit. That’s bad. The food is in a dining room, which isn’t too hard to find. That’s good. I wasn’t interested in finding the food my first time out, and I died before I came across the dining room. That’s bad. However, I got lots of lighthearted warnings before I died, and when I died, it wasn’t of starvation, but of a giant, suddenly-appearing sign reading YOU LOSE. That’s good, or at least, it’s funny. The toppings contain Potassium Benzoate. That’s bad. (Sorry… Simpsons reflex.)

Finally, the puzzles were relatively easy, which reduced the impact of the game’s other annoyances. Well, I should say that the majority of the puzzles were easy, and the Last Lousy Eleven Points puzzle would have been easy were it not so horribly bugged.

And that brings us to the rest of the review. The following is intended in the spirit of constructive criticism — all the game’s problems are quite fixable, and should be fixed. This experience can be an educational one. Now then. There were major formatting problems. For instance, about 10 or 20 commands in, I did something that caused the game to print in italics. Fair enough. Except it then printed everything in italics FOR THE ENTIRE REST OF THE GAME SESSION. Not even restarting or restoring fixed this problem — it took actually shutting down and relaunching the interpreter. Bad, bad, bad — I’m sure it was just a missing tag somewhere, but it drastically affected my play experience. The lesson: details count.

Another problem, which I’m not sure whether to classify as a formatting error or an outright bug, is that about two-thirds of the way through, the game started printing a lowercase “x” after nearly everything it did. For instance:

>wear detector
(First taking the evil detector)
Taken. Okay, you're now wearing the evil detector.

It's time for dinner. You should go to the dining room soon. x

>n
South Residential Hallway
The hall continues to the east and west. To the south is the
door to your room. The stairway area is to the north.
x

>close door
Closed. x

That is bad. Annoying, distracting, inexplicable — bad. It should have been caught in playtesting. I note that 75% of the playtesters share a last name with the author. Nothing wrong with that — my sister helped me test my game too. But perhaps they were inclined to be a little more lenient in the interest of familial affection or something? Something good to keep in mind when collecting beta-testers is to try to assemble a team that contains both IF novices and IF veterans. The former can bring a fresh approach to conventions you might take for granted, while the latter can bring a greater rigor to their testing regime, because they know what can go wrong.

An IF veteran would certainly have caught the game’s most egregious guess-the-verb problem: at a climactic point, you must go up. I tried it in good faith. I typed “U”. Repeatedly. The only response I ever got was “You can’t go that way.x”. The hints were no help, since all they said to do was go up. Ah, but wait. I tried “GO UP” and guess what? It worked. Of course, it should have worked. But “U” also should have worked.

Alongside guess-the-verb, there were bizarre and arbitrary limits ingrained into the game’s structure. I’ve already mentioned the starvation problem. There was also a pointless, irritating inventory limit. Give me a knapsack or something, for god’s sake. Worst of all, the game precludes you from reaching your final goal until you have spent two days (game-time) on the ship. Thus, if you solve the main puzzles within the space of a game-time afternoon (as I did), you end up wandering around aimlessly for a long time, unable to obtain crucial items and completely unaware that the game is planning to give you the vital tidbit in another day and a half. This is completely arbitrary, and very, very bad.

So one final lesson before I call it quits: don’t built arbitrary waiting periods into your game unless they’re very short and the player has plenty to do in the meantime. If players are wandering aimlessly, or performing dull, repetitive actions in order to progress the plot, the game has failed them. I’m realizing that my own games (especially my competition entry from this year) are not blameless in this arena; that’s why it’s so useful to write reviews. Authors, especially the author of the game in question, can learn a lot from critical analysis of a misguided game. For the game’s players, on the other hand, the fun is rather more scarce.

Rating: 3.8

The Coast House by Stephen Newton and Dan Newton [Comp01]

IFDB page: The Coast House
Final placement: 15th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

As if to taunt me, here comes a game with a NASTY FOUL IT’S/ITS ERROR in its Comp01 blurb, before I’ve even started the game. Then I fire up the game, and there’s one in the first room description! NFIEs are as numerous as cockroaches in this game, and just about as welcome. Am I more sensitive to this now than I was in previous years? Well, maybe, but only in the same way that being kicked repeatedly in the head makes one more sensitive to pain. I refuse to teach the lesson over and over, though, so if you’re not sure when to use the apostrophe and when not to, direct your attention here:

The first is my most recent explanation of the subject, and the others were found by taking 5 seconds to type “its/it’s” into a search engine. There are a bunch more where those came from. Print them out. Post them at your desk. Tattoo them on your body. Rid the world of this horrible curse.

Thank you for allowing me that rant. Moving on. NFIEs weren’t the only area in which this game’s proofreading was overly careless. Punctuation was a particular weakness. My current theory is that the keyboard on which The Coast House was typed had a sticky period key, because the game is littered with text like this: “Grandma’s headstone.. chipped with age…” There are multiple periods at the ends of sentences. There are multiple periods in room names. Ellipsises range anywhere from two to four dots (though some of the two-dot ones may have been intended as periods — rather difficult to tell.)

There are also a number of typos and grammar errors strewn throughout the game, and one very strange bug, in which looking under a particular item yields this: “You find !” Well, okay. There’s that exclamation point I’ve been searching for everywhere. Maybe I can use it to knock out some of these extra periods! Sadly, the exclamation point never made it into my inventory, so I was unable to wield it after all.

Okay, now that I’ve spent two paragraphs moaning about The Coast House‘s cosmetic errors, allow me to remedy things somewhat by talking about the ways in which I really liked the game. The setting is a tiny South Texas town in the sweltering summer heat, and the game brings this setting to life marvelously. Room and object descriptions engage all the senses, and appeal to memory as well, since the PC spent his childhood summers in this town. Many first-level nouns are described, and with similar skill.

In addition, most of the game’s puzzles emerge organically from the setting, thus enhancing the game’s world even as they moderate the story’s pace. All these factors worked together to produce a marvelously rich, immersive gameworld, which made the story-jarring grammar errors all the more frustrating. (Oh right, I was going to stop complaining about that. Ahem.) There was also a healthy dose of humor in the game. Many responses to nonsensical or useless actions were implemented as enjoyable wisecracks. For example, at the northern edge of town, the room description tells us:

The road travels off some distance to the north, with not a whole lot
between where you stand and Houston some 300 miles away.

The response to “N” from here is, “Houston is a pretty far walk. Probably better to stay in town.” Hee hee. The plot itself begins as a standard inheritance narrative and then deepens a bit, to the benefit of the game. All in all, a fairly solid piece of work if not for the simple lack of basic proofreading. Somebody needs to pick this game up and beat the errors out of it like dust out of an old rug. Once this happens, The Coast House will become a nicely atmospheric piece of IF.

Rating: 7.2

Timeout by Stephen Hilderbrand [Comp01]

IFDB page: Timeout
Final placement: 35th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

I’m in a dilemma about this game. I played through once, found some things to enjoy about it, and reached an ending that was pretty clearly not optimal. Not having a clear idea about how to reach the optimal ending, and running short on time, I pulled out the walkthrough, and it showed me something about a particular item that I hadn’t really understood (due to the game’s vague description of that item): it had a subcomponent that could be examined to yield more information. However, when I did so, the interpreter crashed with a fatal text buffer overflow error.

Now, I’ve developed a pretty strict rule about unfinishable games — I give them a 1, write a short review explaining the problem, and move on. The question is: does Timeout fit that category or not? I did finish it, so in a sense it’s not really unfinishable, but on the other hand, it seems impossible to reach a more optimal ending. What to do?

Here’s what I’m deciding. I won’t give the game a 1. I was able to play through successfully (well, for one value of the word “successfully”, anyway), and that’s worth something. That first experience had some good points — there were some funny spots in the writing, and some sort of fun cut scenes. On the other hand, it was mostly a negative experience. Timeout‘s implementation is maddeningly shallow, leading to lots of encounters like this:

You can see a trash can (which is closed) here.

>open can
That's not something you can open.

Or this:

A steel door is set in the north wall, and a passageway heads west,
back to the hallway.

>x steel door
You can't see any such thing.

>n
The door is locked.

>unlock door
You can't see any such thing.

Trying to get immersed in such a world is like trying to scuba dive in a puddle.

There were other problems too, including a NASTY FOUL IT’S/ITS ERROR, which is becoming my version of the Olympics’ “mandatory deduction” items. And then the fatal crash. All this comes together to make a game that’s not really worth my time in its competition version.

Rating: 3.0

Film At Eleven by Bowen Greenwood [Comp01]

IFDB page: Film at Eleven
Final placement: 10th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Like a miniature version of Dangerous Curves, this game takes us into a town where trouble’s brewing at City Hall, NPCs abound, and it’ll take a little trickery to crack the case before time runs out. Of course, there are significant differences. Instead of a downtrodden private eye, the PC here is the rather incongruously named Betty Byline, a television reporter on her first big assignment. The character’s name is strange, not just because television reporters don’t really have bylines, but because it signals a sort of cartoony, Archie-comics wholesomeness that’s notably missing from the rest of the game. It’s not as if the mayor is named Vinnie Veto and the bartender Sammy Scotchensoda. Thus, Betty finds herself a silly-name character somewhat misplaced in a more realistic world.

Another difference from Dangerous Curves is that the setting isn’t 1940s Los Angeles but rather a tiny little burg with the ill-chosen name of Pleasantville. The name will inevitably conjure up images of the 1998 Tobey Maguire/Reese Witherspoon movie, but it’s unrelated — pretty much everything’s already in color, making those images an unwelcome distraction. The game tells us that Pleasantville is a small town, and it ain’t kidding; pretty much everything significant in the town gets encompassed in a little over a dozen locations. This is appropriate, though, given that Film At Eleven is a competition game. In fact, the similarity to Dangerous Curves had me worried for a minute there, given that you could spend two hours in that game and not even come close to seeing all the locations. Instead, the smalltown setting makes the game’s scope perfect for the 2-hour rule of the competition.

Something else that helped me reach a solution in under two hours was the game’s generosity of design. There’s a time limit, but it’s not terribly tight — I had no trouble getting to the solution well before time ran out. Of course, this may be due to the fact that the puzzles weren’t terribly difficult, being mostly of the “give x to y” or “show x to y” variety. I don’t say this as a criticism — I’m all for easy puzzles. They keep me moving through the story while providing reasonable pacing, and help me to feel that I’m letting the PC be moderately clever without my having to be Sherlock Holmes (or Peter Wimsey, to reflect my current reading jag).

They especially help in competition games, where I don’t really have the luxury of spending a week letting the puzzles percolate. I didn’t have to refer to the walkthrough in order to complete this game, and that’s a refreshing change. However, I did look at the walkthrough after I’d finished, and discovered that to its credit, Film At Eleven provides multiple solutions to several of its problems. Such flexible design does quite a bit to enhance the pleasure of the IF experience.

That pleasure wasn’t completely unmitigated, sad to say. Aside from the poor naming choices I discussed above, the game is also lightly laced with misspellings and formatting errors. Quotes occasionally appear without quotation marks, linebreaks sometimes went missing, and spaces between words are MIA once in a while as well.

Moreover, several of the puzzles turned on the fact that the NPCs were unrealistically unobservant. For instance, I found myself able to smuggle rather large items through rooms occupied by people who might reasonably have had something to say about the theft. Even when a puzzle wasn’t at stake, I found it rather frustrating when I’d show an important item to someone who should have been surprised to see it, and they’d nonchalantly shrug their shoulders. Still, these quibbles aside, this was a solid game, and I enjoyed it very much. Betty Byline’s adventures gave me a pleasant evening’s diversion, and I felt a rush of vicarious triumph when I’d finally helped her reach that first big scoop of her career.

Rating: 8.9

The Evil Sorcerer by Gren Remoz [Comp01]

IFDB page: The Evil Sorcerer
Final placement: 20th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

It’s a little ominous when a game has multiple errors in its first paragraph, and that’s exactly what happens in The Evil Sorcerer:

Well George, you've finally done it. You've drank so much you have no
idea where you are. It doesn't take much of a survey to realize you
are lying in some else's bed, in someone else's home.

“You’ve drank”? “Some else’s bed”? Obviously not the product of solid proofreading, these paragraphs warned me to be ready for the worst. What I found sometimes confirmed those expectations, but happily, sometimes fell short of them. (Or exceeded them, depending on how you look at it.) The Evil Sorcerer is a fairly routine adventure, in which the PC gets transported to a Magical Land, recruited to fight a Malign Presence, dispatched to collect a bunch of Enchanted Ingredients for an Occult Recipe, and finally finds himself in a Climactic Battle (which, in my play session anyway, turned out to be rather anticlimactic.)

Really, there’s nothing wrong with any of these elements, but without some freshening influence, a game composed of them can start to feel a little humdrum. There were hints here and there that things might turn out to be not quite what they seem, or that there might be a compelling twist or two in the plot, but as it turns out… nope. After my first 15 minutes with the game, I felt like I could already see the ending coming up Fifth Avenue, and when it arrived, it brought no surprise and little joy.

Compounding the game’s predictability was its bugginess. Mind you, compared to some comp games I’ve played, Evil Sorcerer‘s implementation was rather solid, but there were definitely areas where it stumbled. For one thing, the first paragraph wasn’t the only place where the prose was error-prone. Many of the writing errors were simply typos, but grammar problems were present too, including the NASTY FOUL IT’S/ITS ERROR. That last one always gets my inner grammarian up in arms. Mistakes weren’t everywhere, but they were still far too common.

Alongside the hampered prose were a few of programming problems, including one doozy of a crash, which brought down the whole interpreter. Besides these categories, there were a number of outright logic errors, resulting in nonsensical output. For example, the PC would suddenly gain a piece of knowledge with no apparent explanation for having acquired it. Sometimes object descriptions would offer information that the PC couldn’t possibly have (like what’s on each side of a coin, even though the coin has never been picked up). And perhaps my favorite one of all, the PC finds a coin and when he asks an NPC about it, she replies:

"My people's currency. One marc is worth 216 arc. One armarc is worth
about 216 marc. The arc is worth about $3.33 US."

So… there’s an exchange rate? You had to use a special potion and cast a little spell to take just one person to this wacky homeland, and yet you’re still able to take your arcs to the bank and change them for dollars?

Somehow, the whole thing seemed to be the product of some fairly surface thinking. As a result, I never felt particularly immersed in the game. It’s not that it was terribly offensive or outright bad, but its various problems and its by-the-numbers nature kept me at arm’s length. Given that these were more or less the exact criticisms leveled at my first game, I understand very well how they can happen, and I’m optimistic that the author’s next work can build on this game’s strengths while addressing its weaknesses.

Rating: 5.3

Colours by J. Robinson Wheeler as Anonymous [Comp01]

IFDB page: Colours
Final placement: 32nd place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Colours comes out of an IF impulse I’m starting to recognize. The game has no interest whatsoever in story or characters, and instead uses the tools of IF to build a large, complicated, inhabitable puzzle. If Games Magazine had an interactive edition, this game might be included. I think it shares a kinship with games like Ad Verbum, or the less satisfying Schroedinger’s Cat, but I’m not sure what to call games like these — perhaps “plotless IF”, since they’re so unconcerned with telling a story.

I don’t think that quite covers it, though. Even the venerable Zork series could be considered plotless IF, given that its PC is a complete cipher, and that the game’s skeleton mainly exists to support a variety of clever puzzles, but I don’t think it’s in quite the same species as something like Colours. For one thing, one of the pleasures of Zork (and its imitators) is the wonderful landscape descriptions provided throughout. That’s in stark contrast to this game, where most of the rooms (at one point or another), are described along these lines:

Clear Room
The walls of this room are made of a sheer, shiny substance that is
neither wood nor metal nor plaster nor plastic. They have become
completely transparent. Exits lead north, east, south and west.

There’s a kind of purity to this aesthetic that Zork doesn’t even approach. It’s as if the game wants to provide the barest possible structure on which to hang its puzzles, and the puzzles themselves tend to be rather abstract exercises in pattern-matching. There’s another difference too: Colours (and games of its ilk) offers a cohesiveness that’s absent from more freewheeling games like Zork. The entire gameworld hews to a unified set of rules, and the puzzles tend to be variations on a theme — in the case of this game, that theme is (you guessed it) colors. (Well, there’s also a word theme, but that’s subservient.) This is the sort of genre to which Colours belongs, but I really need to come up with a name for it so that I don’t have to spend a paragraph each time I find one. Suggestions welcome.

Because I come to IF looking to be immersed in a story and a setting, These Sorts Of Games aren’t exactly my cup of tea, but I can still enjoy them when they’re done well. Once I recognize that the crossword has utterly defeated the narrative (in Graham Nelson’s terms) and adjust my expectations accordingly, I’m ready to indulge in the pleasure of pure puzzle-solving. Of course, what that means is that an entirely different set of expectations falls into place. Games whose sole purpose is their puzzles had better provide interesting challenges, problem-free implementation, and clear solutions in case I get badly stuck.

On many counts, Colours doesn’t disappoint. I found its puzzles entertaining for the most part, and found no errors in its prose. On the other hand, I also encountered one serious flaw that drastically reduced my enjoyment of the game. Without giving too much away, the problem is that there are some game states where crucial items appear to have vanished, when in fact they are present but totally undescribed. This sort of environment manipulation is a big no-no in IF — I’m relying on the text to present an accurate picture of the world, especially in pure puzzle games (hmmm, “pure puzzle games”… might work.) When it doesn’t, an element critical to pleasure in puzzling has disappeared.

I went through Colours twice, because due to the apparent absence of vital items, I thought the game had closed itself off without warning. When I encountered the same problem a second time, I trundled desperately over to ifMUD, where someone kindly told me that the items really are there, contrary to what the descriptions might have me believe. As a result of these travails, my experience in playing the game went from being a fun cerebral exercise to being an exercise in frustration.

The other area in which Colours didn’t quite come up to snuff was in the solutions it provided. Two bits of help accompanied the game: some vague hints appear when the player types HELP, and then a complete walkthrough exists as a separate text file. The problem is that the HELP text gives suggestions that are just flat wrong. In fact, for those who haven’t yet played the game, here’s my advice: ignore what the help text tells you to start with. You don’t yet have to tools to deal with that. Instead, start with exploration, and with a close look at the text on the game’s accompanying jpg image.

Then there’s the walkthrough, which is very helpful on some points, and not at all helpful on others. The walkthrough’s approach is to explicate the concepts behind the game, and to tell how to accomplish the puzzle goals, but not to provide a step- by-step solution. Consequently, due to the “hidden items” problem described above, I found myself staring at the walkthrough and thinking, “but how am I supposed to do that?” I certainly understand the impulse not to just lay everything flat in the walkthrough — I didn’t even provide a walkthrough with my own comp entry, a decision I’m beginning to fret about now — but the danger in not laying out a stepwise answer is that if there are problems in the game itself, the walkthrough becomes pretty useless. Luckily, this problem probably won’t be very hard to fix, and if Colours sees a post-comp release, it will probably end up as an enjoyable puzzle-box for those who like that kind of thing. In its present incarnation, however, I found that its charm faded quickly into confusion.

Rating: 6.5

Best of Three by Emily Short [Comp01]

IFDB page: Best of Three
Final placement: 7th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

It’s a common conceit in romance novels: Girl meets Boy; Girl takes an Immediate Dislike to Boy because he’s aggressive, arrogant, insufferable, etc.; under Girl’s influence, Boy sheds his Gruff Exterior; Girl falls for Boy and they end up Happy Together. I love Pride and Prejudice as much as the next Jane Austen fan, but I’ve always had a few problems with this structure, since it seems to reinforce the idea that jerky guys are really sweethearts underneath, so long as they meet a sufficiently [sweet/nurturing/independent/fiery] woman — these fantasies rarely come true in real life, despite the people who go through their lives trying to make that story happen to them. Maybe having the Girl fall for somebody who was kind from the beginning might make for a duller story, but it’d be a less pernicious story, too.

No doubt these objections all arise from my own High School Issues, but this is the mindset I brought to Best Of Three. In this case, we see the Boy being an ass at the very beginning of the story, only to learn later that he was the Girl’s high school crush, both of them now having graduated and, theoretically, put the past behind them. The game consists mostly of an extended conversation between these two, with the Girl as the PC, and although the text kept prompting me to feel charitable and affectionate feelings towards the Boy, it was a hard role to step into. It probably didn’t help that I found the Boy himself to be a rather pretentious, pompous git, and I distrusted him, even after he apologized, even after he revealed his own demons to me, and even after his Gruff Exterior was history. What the experience reminded me is that in IF, things the player actually experiences happening to the PC are orders of magnitude more powerful then things the player is told that the PC is feeling.

Of course, the beauty of IF, especially that written by Emily Short, is that there really are choices available. In a romance novel, the Girl has no choice but to tread the path that has been prescribed for her by the author, but IF offers the dizzying freedom to say exactly what we wish we could say to the story’s haughty twit, or at least to find a closer approximation to it. The first time I played through this game, I meekly obeyed its prodding, making nice with the Boy and moving to rekindle the romance between the characters. Even then, I found myself having the PC speak much more bluntly and honestly than she was comfortable with, and the Boy reacted with predictable standoffishness. Still, at the end, the spark had been fanned, but the result felt strangely hollow to me.

So I restarted the game — it doesn’t take long, perhaps 45 minutes at most — this time ignoring its tenderhearted hints and pulling out the reactions I had wanted to take the first time around. In a testament to Emily Short’s formidable skills as a designer, the game handled this direction with considerable grace and flexibility, despite its being against the fairly obvious grain of the text. I arrived at an ending that the game clearly didn’t view as optimal, but that, thanks to some exquisite writing, felt far more satisfying to me, and even let the PC off the hook somewhat in its final words.

Having had both of these experiences made me appreciate the game much more than I would have had I not replayed, and there is much to appreciate here. The game’s goal — to create a conversation that feels authentic, and that moves the player, the PC, and the NPC to new emotional states — is an ambitious one, but one well worth chasing. On several levels, the game succeeds. At many points, the conversation does indeed feel authentic, and it’s clear that the underlying code is quite sophisticated; I noticed, for example, that the NPC would observe and comment when I’d change the subject, or be taken aback if I said something he wasn’t expecting.

There are still a few bugs in the system. Some of the same problems I noticed in Pytho’s Mask were present here as well: there were times when the conversational options didn’t seem to fit the situation, for example replies offered when no question had been asked; there were times when the game didn’t respond to a command at all, just printing a blank line; there were times when the NPC responded to my change of subject, then brought the conversation back to his own interests, resulting in a seeming non sequitur (well okay, maybe that’s a good simulation of real life. 🙂 ) Still, glitches aside, the conversation felt real more often than it felt artificial, and that is a significant achievement. The writing is superior throughout, and achieves pure brilliance on occasion. I may have had some issues with the storyline, and I may have encountered some bugs, but I enjoyed Best Of Three very much nonetheless.

Rating: 8.8

The Last Just Cause by Jeremy Carey-Dressler as Noob [Comp01]

IFDB page: The Last Just Cause
Final placement: 50th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Hoo boy. I’m not sure how to approach this one. OK, let me start here. If I had downloaded this game by itself from, I don’t know, download.com or something, I think I would have approached it differently. I might have taken, for example, its more or less complete lack of a parser more in stride. However, this is my 20th text adventure in 17 days, and all the others — even the homebrewed Windows ones — at least made some pretense at approaching the ability to understand basic language input. Consequently, I approached TLJC like another text adventure. It isn’t. This game doesn’t even come close to the level of understanding displayed by even something like Angora Fetish. I typed “x lantern”, and here’s what happened:

You have used 0 turns... What do you want to do next? x lantern


That might be foolish, try something else...

Your HP is 104 percent. You're in room 1. Your MP is 44.
You have used 1 turns... What do you want to do next?

That might be foolish, try something else...

Your HP is 104 percent. You're in room 1. Your MP is 44.
You have used 2 turns... What do you want to do next?

What I determined, after a bit more confused thrashing about, is that the game only understands one word at a time, and that its vocabulary is limited to a couple dozen words. After being immersed in modern, sophisticated text adventures, this game suddenly made me feel like I had time-warped back to 1982, and that one of my 12-year-old colleagues had just unveiled their rockin’ new game to me.

I just keep coming back to it: programming an IF game from scratch may make for a better (or at least more educational) experience for the programmer, but it almost always provides a much worse experience for the player. Not that this game would necessarily have benefited greatly from being written in an advanced IF language. Its shape is extremely simplistic, it has very little story, its writing lacks coherency (as well as a number of other virtues), and… well, I could go on, but what’s the point?

TLJC (which, by the way, never mentions causes of any kind, be they just or unjust) has the feel of a bad early-eighties console game, with very primitive action, only a few items, and rooms that vary for appearances’ sake only, with no regard whatsoever to creating a believable or even consistent gameworld. It also falls into what I’m beginning to recognize as a standard trap of beginning IF authors: mocking the player for no good reason. The very first room gives us this:

You are in a cave... Now that you have light, you see there is a
spider on your leg you go screaming like a little child!

Okay, setting aside the egregious punctuation problems for just a second, I still have to ask just what this wants to accomplish. Is the game giving me some bit of characterization about the PC? Is it trying to establish that the narrative voice will be a harsh, unfriendly Hans-and-Franz kind of presence, mocking the little girlyman throughout the game? Nah, it’s just there — it seems to be little more than free association.

TLJC is one of those games that it’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying who isn’t the author. It doesn’t offer good writing. It doesn’t offer interesting technical achievements. Lord knows it doesn’t offer fun gameplay, instead serving up mind-numbing tedium of battle after battle with one (undescribed and made-up) monster, all of which feel like waiting around while various dicerolls happen without you. (Although I did greatly enjoy when the game asked if I wanted to use the “lighting” spell, and upon my assent cried “I call upon the Power of lighting!” That’ll make an excellent line for turning on lamps.)

Its puzzles (such as they are) make very little sense. Oh, there is an implementation of blackjack that felt like it had received the most care and interest of any feature in the game. I guess that goes to show that as sheer programming exercises go, it’s probably better to make card games than interactive fiction. It’s hard enough to make good IF even when you have every advanced tool in the world on your side. It’s a problem that encompasses design ability, writing ability, and programming ability too. With a card game, the first is taken care of, and the second is irrelevant, so it’s only the third that gets challenged. I think I’d have a lot more fun playing a first-time programmer’s version of blackjack than I would playing their homebrewed IF. That was certainly the case this time.

Rating: 2.4

Kallisti by James Mitchelhill [Comp01]

IFDB page: Kallisti
Final placement: 31st place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

The universe has a hell of a sense of humor. How else to explain the fact that right after I finish IF’s broadest sex parody, Comp01 feeds me this game, the centerpiece of which is a serious attempt at explicit IF erotica? I can’t say what the experience would have been like had I not just played Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country, but I’ve no doubt it would have felt at least a little different. Then again, the game’s own warning signals were enough to notify me that I wouldn’t necessarily be emotionally invested in the seduction it describes.

Kallisti introduces us to Katie, elaborately and repeatedly making the point that she’s a virgin — “the flower of her youth, her purity, remained unbroken.” Then we meet Gustav, who takes one look at Katie and decides “I will have you.” This charming fellow is the PC, and it doesn’t say much for Katie’s good sense that she’s (apparently) immediately attracted to him. I was creeped out before the first move, very scared that I was about to find myself in an interactive rape fantasy. It didn’t turn out to be that, not exactly, but I had a hard time swallowing the idea that any moderately intelligent woman could be seduced by lines like these:

"...I came to this gray city around a month ago. There really was
nowhere else to go. All roads lead here. All roads led to this
moment, here with you. I do not usually work as a printer, but there
was little else I could find at short notice and besides, my funds
are limited presently. I'm talking to you because you interest me."

Yet, we are told, Katie is interested… very interested. We know this not so much from observing her actions, but from being flat-out told by the narrative voice: “She had been ready to leave before she found Gustav here and now her heart beat faster than she would admit.”

The term I know for this type of writing is “head-hopping”, and it’s not generally spoken in complimentary tones. What happens is that the narrative voice appears, for the majority of the game, to be a tight third-person rendition of Gustav’s point-of-view. However, every so often, we find it disconcertingly reporting on something happening inside Katie’s head, yanking us out of the POV we thought we were inhabiting. This sort of problem is why the omniscient third-person voice is so hard to write.

In interactive fiction, the problem is seriously compounded by the fact that as readers, we can’t help but inhabit the viewpoint character. If Gustav is the PC, I expect the game’s voice, be it in first, second, or third person, to report on the information available to Gustav. When it steps outside Gustav’s experience, especially if it doesn’t signal in any way that a transition is occurring, I feel like the storytelling voice is cheating, feeding me information I have no legitimate way of knowing. It pulls me out of whatever character identification I might have been experiencing, and thereby distances me from the story.

I can accept this sort of thing in an introduction, before the story has really started, but once I start typing in commands, I am that character, more or less. Of course, in cases where the character is repugnant, I’ve already distanced myself anyway, and I found Gustav repugnant from the get-go. The head-hopping destroyed any remaining link between me and the PC.

Of course, as the game progressed, it became clear to me that I didn’t mind being unlinked from the PC. But when an interactive story reaches this point, it’s hard for me not to ask myself why I’m still playing. I don’t like the character, I don’t care about the story, so what’s keeping me here? Sometimes, really well-done writing, puzzles, or programming will do it. This game, unfortunately, had a number of bugs (though they weren’t of the catastrophic variety — mostly just input that the game failed to process in any way, even to give an error message), and I found myself unable to connect with its prose most of the time.

There were some fine images (I particularly liked the moment when Katie’s smile is described as “brittle as leaves”), but too much of it felt self-consciously poetic, reaching for profundity it didn’t quite grasp. What kept me in the game instead were glimpses. At times during the conversation scene, I felt a flash of really deep immersion, that feeling that the game will understand anything I type, where the interface melted away and it felt like a conversation. Even during the sex scene, there were a couple of points where the implementation was deep enough that even though I never lost awareness that I was just typing commands into a keyboard, I felt like the PC would understand most any instruction I gave him.

The feelings never lasted long, always shattering at the next error message (or even worse, absence of any message at all), but they were thrilling when they happened. There’s been a good start towards something here, and I hope to see it built upon in the future.

Rating: 6.7