June 2021, >INVENTORY

A Light’s Tale by Zach Flynn as “vbnz” [Comp04]

IFDB page: A Light’s Tale
Final placement: 32nd place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Well. This one has many problems. Many serious problems. Let’s start with the writing. I’m guessing that this game is the work of a non-native English speaker. Something like “your mind… flys far, far away” could just be a typo, but when the game describes a dump as “full of unnumbered amounts of trash,” I begin to get the strong feeling that the translating dictionary has come calling. The prose is just littered with writing errors, many of which are too simple to be blamed on translation. For instance, a death message:

The guard calls out: “What are you doing there?” He runs over and sticks a bullet in your side you die.

Maybe the bizarre diction “sticks a bullet in your side” could be explained by translation, but there’s no such excuse for failing to provide either a conjunction or a full stop before “you die.” Also, the game is just littered with redundancy. Whether it’s describing the dump as “[an] extremely dirty, messed-up dump,” or calling the PC “a rather overweight chubby character” or naming an NPC “the big, large rather muscular mouse,” Light’s Tale hates to say once what it could say twice instead.

However, as problematic as the writing is, the coding is worse. Take that big, large mouse, for instance. He’s got one of the most ungainly short names I’ve ever seen in an IF object:

>give mirror to george The big, large rather muscular mouse who looks to be a pretty good mechanic, for the right price rejects the offer.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure his short name is “the big, large rather muscular mouse who looks to be a pretty good mechanic, for the right price.” Implementing an object in this way demonstrates a basic lack of understanding of how an IF engine works. Sometimes there are even full stops embedded in object names. Here’s another problem: the game completely chokes on any attempt to show anything to anyone. The command always results in “[TADS-1014: ‘abort’ statement executed]”. Another pervasive issue is the game’s recurring failure to mark dialogue with quotation marks, resulting in exchanges like this:

>ask bruno about bar Why would I want to talk to you?

Well, because you’re the parser. You’ve been talking to me the whole game. Oh, unless that’s Bruno talking, in which case there really ought to be some quotation marks. Sorry, but that’s just plain careless. Even the hints are buggy; they keep referring to somebody named “Robert”, when nobody of that name resides within the game. Thank goodness for the walkthrough, or I’d have gotten absolutely nowhere with A Light’s Tale.

Which, saving the worst for last, brings us to the design. Over and over, I found myself resorting to the walkthrough, a refugee from the game’s bizarre assumptions. Light’s Tale is certainly one of those games that assumes you’re going to traverse it in the same order that the walkthrough does. Routinely, the game would refer to objects I didn’t have, or kill me immediately after rewarding me for solving a puzzle. There are far too many “read the author’s mind” puzzles, including a real doozy at the end.

The game starts out as science fiction (the intro mentions a starship, anyway) for no apparent reason — it would play out exactly the same way if the setting were an airplane, or a steamship, or just about anywhere, really. There are talking animals throughout the game (unless the animal descriptions were meant as metaphor, but I don’t think they were), including in scenes advertised as “the real world at last.” The parser keeps referring to itself as “I” and “me”, and then suddenly becomes a character in the game, personifying itself as some kind of freaky supervillain.

Let me tell you, it’s a weird, wild ride. Some parts approach Rybread-level peculiarity. There were parts that I enjoyed, and there were many more parts that had me cursing heartily. It may be worth a trip through with the walkthrough close at hand, but not if you care about strong writing or strong coding, and even if you don’t, you shouldn’t really expect to understand it too well.

Rating: 4.7

Kurusu City by Kevin Venzke [Comp04]

IFDB page: Kurusu City
Final placement: 20th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

When I noticed the Japanese (or at least Japanese-sounding) names in Kurusu City, I wondered if this was maybe one of those IF games that’s heavily influenced by anime and manga, like The PK Girl from a couple of years ago. One look at the PC’s identification card removed all doubt:

>x id
   Huge eyes, rather angular features, and messy hair stare at you
   blankly from a faded image.  Text to the left and below reads:

      MIKI MAEDA
      49 BUECHE APTS

   Age:  15 Sex:  F Hair:  BRN Height:  5'0"

A five-foot-tall, fifteen-year-old girl with huge eyes and angular features? That’s anime, alright. The only piece missing was for her hair to be purple or blue or some color like that, but a purple-haired character comes along later to supply that element. Also like The PK Girl, there’s a distinctly odd quality to the PC’s point of view, but where in The PK Girl that element was sexism, here it’s just sex. There’s this weird, lascivious edge to much of the text, particularly in descriptions of the NPCs. Examine an NPC and you’re likely to hear that she (they’re pretty much all female) is “curvy” or is “wearing a tight pair of blue jeans.” At one point while interacting with an NPC, the PC feels “rattled and uncomfortable” due to the NPC’s “unbridled femininity.”

So the PC is an adolescent and a budding lesbian, who often thinks of others in terms of their sexuality. Fair enough, but the game doesn’t stop there. At one point, I happened into an instant-death ending that involved a horrifying and completely unexpected incestuous rape. The game’s ongoing fascination with the PC as a sexual subject (or object) felt rather distracting, and frequently a little creepy.

The main story winds around the game’s setting, a future (or alternate) world where robots govern humanity. For instance, when the PC decides to skip school, she finds that robot enforcers have been sent to fetch her back. Her goal is to take down the robocracy once and for all, and to do so she must wander around and talk to a lot of sparsely implemented NPCs. Actually, I have no earthly idea how she’s supposed to do it, because after an hour spent solving a couple of puzzles and restarting a whole lotta times, I found myself totally stuck. I turned to the hints, doling them out to myself slowly, but failed to progress further.

Finally, I looked at the entire hints file (it’s rot13 encoded), but still found no joy. The hints seemed to assume that I’d seen things that either I’d never seen or was too dull-witted to recognize. A scan of the newsgroups reminded me that this was the game where the author had released a better set of hints after the September 30th deadline had passed. Well, I guess I’m a bit of a comp stickler, because I think that’s cheating, or at least finessing the rules. My feeling is that you’re judged on what you submit as of the comp deadline. Whatever you release afterwards, whether it be hints, a patch that fixes a game-killing bug, or what have you, is not eligible for consideration, at least not by this judge.

So I continued to muddle through, and with about 20 minutes remaining found something that broke the game wide open for me. Unfortunately, at that point I only had 20 minutes left, so I wasn’t really able to see a huge amount of new material. My advice to struggling players is to revisit all locations frequently — though most of them remain completely static, at least one can change significantly during your absence.

Besides helpful hints, a few other things seem missing from the game. At one point, I examined a game object and was told “(This is the comic book that was mistakenly included in your game package.)” Actually, I think what you mean there is “mistakenly not included.” It may have been intended as a joke all along, a satire of Infocom‘s in-game feelie object messages, but if so, it’s too weak to really work.

There are a couple of other elements that might be intentional but come off as bugs. For instance, at one point I suddenly got a huge boost to my score and found myself with “a score of 27 points out of a possible 7.” The resultant rank was “Nice Sister”, which matched the action that had given me the huge score boost, but if this is a joke, it’s done so confusingly that not only is it not funny, it actually seems like a mistake.

I seem to have spent most of my review commenting on how strange and/or incomplete Kurusu City felt to me, so let me finish up by pointing out some well-done parts. There’s a nice feature in the game’s inventory code which prints out the results of an X ME before printing the inventory on the first time it’s used. Subsequently, it just prints the inventory. I thought this worked so well that I’d like to see it become an IF standard. Also, there’s a game-within-a-game that serves as an entertaining satire of the medium itself. There’s a nice multi-stage puzzle involving gaining a credential, and I found the story interesting enough that I felt sorry when time ran out. Mostly, though, my reaction to Kurusu City was a puzzled shrug.

Rating: 7.2

I Must Play by Geoff Fortytwo [Comp04]

IFDB page: I Must Play
Final placement: 14th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Once upon a time, that time being 1997, C.E. Forman wrote a comp game called Sylenius Mysterium. It was set at night, in a near-deserted mall, with an arcade and a game store. The teenage PC starts out with $20 in his inventory, and while a storm rages outside, he finds his way to a particular arcade game. When he plays it, he suddenly finds himself inside the game! Now, seven years later, we’ve got I Must Play. This game is set at night, in a near-deserted arcade. The 8-year-old PC starts out with $20 in his inventory, and while a storm rages outside, he finds his way to a room full of arcade games. When he plays them, he suddenly finds himself inside the games!

Happily, the project of I Must Play is a bit less literal-minded than that of Sylenius Mysterium. While the latter was built around a real-time prose implementation of a side-scrolling arcade game, requiring the player to type commands like JUMP as obstacles approached, IMP instead creates prose versions of classic arcade games, in a similar manner to some of the games in the IF Arcade project from 2001. Still, the parallels are startling. Given that one of the things Forman blew his top about before leaving the IF community was Babel‘s alleged resemblance to his own game Delusions, I can only imagine how he’d have reacted to IMP.

In any case, the prose arcade environments in IMP serve as simple puzzles, leading to a slightly more complicated endgame, one which is also an arcade re-creation but which uses a few connected simple puzzles rather than just one. These are well-done for what they are, and while I wasn’t impressed with the quality of the writing, neither was I annoyed. I had a fine time with the game until I hit a particular puzzle, one which placed the PC in a political environment. To avoid the spoiler, I’ll just say that in order to win this puzzle, I had to do something that is anathema to my beliefs. I did it, but it turned me off immensely, and I cruised through the rest of the game without engagement.

Yes, I know it’s just a game. Yes, I’m aware that it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and may not have been trying to advance a political agenda. Yes, I’m sure that I’m reacting more strongly than I would have if my blood pressure hadn’t just been raised by the presidential debates. Still, what’s true for me is that I felt herded by the game into a reprehensible action. This has happened in good IF before — a classic example is in Trinity — but in those instances, the action is meant to be symbolic, to lend power to the themes of the story. In IMP, the action seems to be more or less an arbitrary puzzle-piece, serving no thematic or emotional purpose. It felt starkly out of place in what otherwise seemed to be a fairly lighthearted endeavor, rather like getting a relaxing massage and then having the masseuse suddenly wrench your little finger backwards for no apparent reason.

Part of what felt offensive to me about the scene was its terribly simplistic nature. I don’t mind art that takes positions opposite to my own nearly so much when those positions seem to be thoughtful and well-argued, or at the very least entertaining and/or funny. What I got in IMP was a gross oversimplification, a caricature really, of both the issue in question and of politics in general, one that lacked any redeeming humor, flair, or cleverness. Now, I will say that I remembered partway through the puzzle that the game’s perspective character is an 8-year-old, and when I kept that in mind, the simplistic presentation bothered me a whole lot less. However, there are some parts of that puzzle that feel dumbed-down even for a third-grader, and other parts that felt too politically opinionated for a child.

The whole thing left a bitter taste in my mouth. In short, the game had me, and then — via a short series of aggravating scenes and statements — it lost me. I’m sure that won’t be true for everybody. People who share the beliefs portrayed in that scene will have a much easier time navigating it (though I imagine that even some of them will still be less than pleased with its primitive formulations), and some people who share my beliefs will be dispassionate enough about them that the scene won’t bother them. It’s not that the game is super-fantastic aside from that, but until it rubbed me the wrong way, it was a pleasant enough diversion. For me, though, even though I finished IMP, I didn’t end up getting a lot of pleasure out of it.

Rating: 7.3

[Postscript from 2021: This review ended up rather controversial, despite the many qualifiers I placed around my reaction. “It’s a friggin game, for pete’s sake” was the emblematic response. So I wrote a subsequent post explaining my response to the issue at hand in much more detail. The issue was gun control, and although I didn’t love being embroiled in a debate about my review, I did enjoy that the subthread got called “I Must Gunplay.”]

All Things Devours by Toby Ord as “half sick of shadows” [Comp04]

IFDB page: All Things Devours
Final placement: 3rd place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

I must admit, I got a little nervous when I saw this game’s title, which appears at first blush to be grammatically incorrect. As it turns out, the title isn’t in error — it’s excerpted from one of the riddle-poems in The Hobbit, the one that begins “This thing all things devours.” I still think that it’s a weak title — the entire line would be much better — but I was relieved to know I was in the hands of a competent writer. In fact, my fears about the entire game were groundless; it’s very good. It has a plot, but by the author’s own admission, ATD is much more game than story, an intricate puzzle-box, with a couple of puzzles I found very satisfying indeed.

The setup is complex, requiring the same sort of lateral thinking as that featured in Sorcerer‘s famous time-travel puzzle. Due to its convoluted nature, the game had to be quite a chore to implement, and while its coding isn’t perfect, I was impressed with how thoroughly and skillfully it covered a very wide range of permutations. Moreover, ATD does a wonderful job of automating mundane actions, the very thing I was moaning about in my review of The Great Xavio. I can’t tell you how pleased I was to see something like this:

>n (first opening the door to the Deutsch lab) (first unlocking the door to the Deutsch lab)

The Deutsch Laboratory

Every first-level object interaction I tried was handled gracefully, and the automation even did one or two cool tricks to keep track of player knowledge. Anyway, I’m about to raise a couple of points criticizing ATD, so I want to make it clear that I really did like the game. I liked it a lot.

That being said, there are a couple of flaws I’d like to discuss. The first is that I don’t think this game plays fair with the concept of the accretive PC. If you don’t recognize the term, that’s because I recently made it up, while reviewing Adam Cadre’s Lock & Key for IF-Review. In that review, I made the case that games like Lock & Key and Varicella have a unique sort of PC, one whose knowledge and/or cunning must by acquired by the player herself in order to successfully complete the game. Primo Varicella, for instance, has a devious plan to take over the regency. At the beginning of any session with Varicella, the PC knows what this plan is, but the player may or may not. It’s only through experiencing multiple iterations of the game, and thereby learning all the things that Primo already knows, that the player can hope to embody Primo successfully enough to win the game.

I call this sort of PC “accretive” because the player’s accreting knowledge allows the PC to become more and more himself on each playthrough, and once the player’s ingenuity matches that of the PC, she can successfully complete a game. When that happens, it’s as if the real story is finally revealed, and all those other failed attempts exist only in shadowy parallel universes. In my opinion, this sort of game is a brilliant refutation of the idea that IF games should be winnable without experience of “past lives.” After all, if the PC’s knowledge must match the player’s at the outset of the game, the PC must know very little, which is why we see so many amnesiac PCs in IF. An accretive PC allows the player to catch up with the PC through the device of past lives, and as long as the PC is established as already having all the knowledge that the player is able to gain, it all works swimmingly.

At first, ATD appears to be exactly this sort of game. It certainly requires quite a few iterations to win (or even to understand, really), and the PC is shown to have much more specific knowledge of the surrounding area and of her specific task than a player will on the first time through. However, partway through, something happens that the game clearly specifies as a surprise to the PC, something not included in her original plan. Consequently, she has to think on her feet in order to recover and still succeed at her goal. The only problem is, she can’t reasonably do that without knowledge of past lives.

A successful traversal of ATD requires not only knowledge of the circumstances and the setting, but advance knowledge of something that the game itself definitively states that the PC does not know in advance. Here, I cry foul. I’m not complaining that the game is unfair — it does an admirable job of warning players upfront that it’s going to be unfair, and I’m fine with that. However, it’s constructed in such a way that its story cannot make sense. The puzzles still work, but the unbelievability of the PC’s actions causes the story essentially to self-destruct.

There’s another problem too, one that causes the logic of the central puzzle to fall apart. Unfortunately, it’s terribly difficult to discuss without revealing spoilers. About the best I can muster at the moment is that if I follow the solution as laid out in the walkthrough, it seems to me that one of the central problems presented by the game remains unsolved, though the game does not acknowledge that this is the case. Because I was crafting my puzzle solutions to avoid this unsolved state (and having a hell of a time solving the puzzle as a result), I was rather flummoxed when I finally broke down and looked at the walkthrough. It was unsatisfying to end the game feeling as if it hadn’t played by its own rules.

Now, as I said initially, the environment in this game is really quite complex, and it’s possible (likely, even) that my objections stem from a careless or incomplete understanding of how the game is actually working. If that’s the case, I look forward to withdrawing my complaints once somebody explains how I’m being dense. Even if not, the game is eminently worth playing just for its clever premise and a couple of excellent puzzles. It may play a bit fast and loose with its concept, and its ending may be a bit anticlimactic, but I highly recommend it nonetheless.

Rating: 9.0

Getting Back to Sleep by Patrick Evans as “IceDragon” [Comp04]

IFDB page: Getting Back to Sleep
Final placement: 33rd place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Oh boy. Its time for one of my least favorite comp traditions: the homebrewed game. Traditionally, these games have parsers which lack the amenities provided by any major IF development system, and Getting Back To Sleep is no exception. What does it lack? Well, SAVE and RESTORE, for starters. Oh, and SCRIPT, which means that you’ll be seeing no quotes from the game in this review. Rather than making notes at the prompt as I usually do, I had to keep switching to a separate file to keep my notes, and felt slightly annoyed each time.

Let’s see, what else? UNDO, OOPS, and lots of other modern features, and by “modern” I mean “standard as of 1985 or so.” Those weren’t there. Nor was VERBOSE mode, which sucked for me, since I always play in VERBOSE mode. Instead, I had to keep typing L every time I wanted to look at the room description. Except that L doesn’t work either! Yeah, you have to type out LOOK each time. You also can’t abbreviate INVENTORY to I, though at least you can abbreviate to INV. Why one abbreviation is present and not the other continues to mystify me.

Here’s a good one: the parser is case-sensitive. It understands “look” but not “Look.” For a long, scary moment, I thought there was no way to see room descriptions a second time. The parser also breaks my Third Law of Parsing, which is “Parsers must not ask questions without being prepared to receive an answer.” GBTS is guilty of asking questions that look like disambiguation (“What do you want to get?”) without being able to handle a one-word answer at the next prompt.

It’s not that I think creating a homebrewed system would be easy. I’m sure it’s a hell of a lot of work. But why you’d put in all that work, coding (according to the readme) over 10,000 lines of C# in a state-of-the-art programming environment, to create something that wouldn’t have even passed muster as a text adventure twenty years ago… that escapes me. I could see trying it if that was your only choice, but there are multiple very good IF development environments, all of which produce output that’s playable on way more platforms than GBTS is, all of which offer all the features I described in my first paragraph “right out of the box”, and all of which are completely FREE!

It kind of feels like building your own piano while Steinways are being given away around the corner. It’d be one thing if your piano was going to be just as good as the free ones, but when yours has only 20 keys, no pedals, no black keys, and is wildly out of tune, how can you expect your performances to be any good? One of the sadder parts is that the readme proudly states that this homebrewed system has “the flexibility and freedom to accomplish what no other interactive fiction system can do: the game lives in real time.” Well, I can’t speak for TADS or Hugo, but Inform most certainly can do that. Hell, ZIL could do it. Border Zone had it in 1987.

Of course, GBTS would have its problems even if it were created with an IF development tool. It’s one of those games where you might see shelves full of stuff, and X SHELVES would give you a dull description about the stuff being a lot of supplies and junk. X SUPPLIES gives you the same description and X JUNK isn’t even implemented, so you move on, only to find out later (from the walkthrough) that SEARCH SHELVES would give you a special key for one of the game’s many locked doors. Many many first-level objects are unimplemented. Its/it’s errors infest the prose. There’s a sorta-maze, with a randomly appearing object that is vital for solving a puzzle. There’s tons of stuff like that. The story itself is fine, though highly derivative of Planetfall. But the game is an experience to be missed.

Rating: 3.2

The Great Xavio by Reese Warner [Comp04]

IFDB page: The Great Xavio
Final placement: 11th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

I had a lovely time during my first half-hour with The Great Xavio. Similar to Infocom’s Sherlock, you play the “man of action” assistant to a prodigious but inscrutable thinker. In this case, you’re a graduate student named Hagerston, in unending thrall (the way only a graduate student can be) to your adviser, an odd duck named Dr. Rex Excalibur Todd. Dr. Todd is a logician, obsessed with debunking anyone who challenges the reign of empiricism, and that’s why he’s dragged you out of bed at 3 AM, to the hotel housing sensational magician The Great Xavio — your job is to prove that Xavio is a fraud.

These characters apparently feature in some short stories and a novel penned by this game’s author, and Dr. Todd in particular is obviously the product of tremendous affection. The premise provides plenty of room for exploration, and Dr. Todd’s constant presence at the PC’s elbow gives the game many opportunities for humorous metacommentary and the occasional helpful hint. There were a few irritating defects here and there, but after the first 30 minutes, I was enthusiastically looking forward to the rest of my time with Xavio.

Unfortunately, after that things began to unravel a bit, and oddly enough the unraveling started with a key and a locked door, a situation that replicated exactly what I’d discussed in my editorial for SPAG #34. It occurs as the PC is trying to get into a hotel room, a room to which he holds the key. I’d like to quote the exchange exactly, but it would be too much of a spoiler to do so, so here’s a slightly altered version of it:

>e You can't, since the room door is in the way.

>open door (the room door) The door is locked. However, next to it there is a slot for your room key that might do something.

The elevator doors close

>unlock door (the elevator door) Unlocking generally requires a key of some sort.

>unlock door with key (the elevator door with the room key) That doesn't seem to be something you can unlock.

>put key in slot The light above the slot flashes green, and you hear the door's lock click.

>e You can't, since the room door is in the way.

>open door (the room door) You open the room door.

>e Inside The Hotel Room

This was an incredibly aggravating interaction, made more so by the game’s sudden substitution of the elevator door as the default object for “door”, and because I kept needing to visit the room, it kept happening until I trained myself to behave as the game wanted me to. In my editorial, I argued that things like opening and unlocking a door to which you have the key should be handled automatically by the game, rather than forcing the player to manually go through all the fiddly steps of door and lock management. This argument brought several responses, which rightly pointed out that if that strategy is carried to its logical extreme, the game could just automatically do everything for the player — a game like this is more properly called a “book.”

Instead, the game should keep an internal model of the PC’s knowledge and intentions; it should automate fiddly steps only when they match the set of actions that the player knows how to do and clearly intends to do. Within that structure, I’d like to offer a further refinement to my argument: IF games should automate actions which require little to no thought on the part of the PC. Any of us who have spent time using hotel keys as described above know that it quickly becomes second nature. We don’t need to think through every step — rather, we form the intention of entering the room and habit takes care of the rest. I would so much rather have seen this:

>e You swipe the room key through the slot; its light flashes green and you hear the door's lock click. Opening the door, you step inside.

Inside The Hotel Room

See, there’s nothing fun about typing out PUT KEY IN SLOT and OPEN DOOR a bunch of times, and it actually weakens mimesis to force players through such menial moves, especially after the first time. I still grant that there can be plenty of good reasons to break this rule — in fact, I force a very similar card-swipe at the beginning of the first Earth And Sky episode. In that instance, I chose to do so for purposes of pacing and dramatic tension, but if the PC had to go through the door more than once, automating that passage would be the right thing to do.

I seem to have spent a lot of time discussing a small piece of this game, but that piece was emblematic of my experience with Xavio. Despite all the game’s appealing traits — its engaging characters, its friendly design, its entertaining story — I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. I ended up feeling like I’d played the beta version of something with great potential rather than something that was already great on its own. Erratic newlines and shaky punctuation contributed to my impression that the game wasn’t well tested, and so did basic mistakes like embedding dialogue into room descriptions so that it repeats every time you look at the room. In addition, there were some issues that may have been intentional, but were functionally bugs. For example, inside that hotel room with the difficult door, there’s a window on the north wall (again slightly altered to avoid spoilers):

>x window The hotel's old enough that it's a window you can actually open.

>look through window You look out the window. There's a thin ledge, just barely possible as a space to stand if what you saw wasn't a mirage. Looking out further to the northwest you can see a few cars crossing the Golden Gate bridge.

>x ledge You can't see any such thing.

>open window Nothing like a breath of fresh air.

>n You can't go that way.

>enter window That's not something you can enter.

>go out the window You can't see any such thing.

So you tell me there’s a window, and that I can open it. You tell me there’s a ledge outside the window. Then you let me open the window… but don’t implement actually going out the window? What was the point of describing the ledge and making the window openable in the first place? Even worse, just typing OUT puts me back out in the hallway, where once again I have to go through that exasperating rigmarole with the key. Whether or not that was the intended implementation, I call it a big fat bug.

The game credits testers, but I can’t tell whether any of them are members of the IF community. If not, that may be part of the problem — it’s important to have at least one person in your pool of testers who is conversant with the basic standards of modern IF. They’ll notice things that novice testers will miss. To sum up in one word what this game lacks: polish. It just needs to be tightened up — formatting errors fixed, typos eliminated, underimplemented areas enhanced. Once that happens, the peculiar charm of Hagerston and Todd will be able to shine through unimpeded.

Rating: 6.7

Sting of the Wasp by Jason Devlin [Comp04]

IFDB page: Sting of the Wasp
Final placement: 4th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Assuming that “Jason Devlin” isn’t a pseudonym for an experienced author, we have a very satisfactory debut on our hands. Sting Of The Wasp brings one of the year’s nastier PCs in the person of wealthy socialite Julia Hawthorne. In the grand tradition of Primo Varicella, Julia is a vain, preening snob who looks with utter disdain at almost everything around her, including the country club in which the game is set. However, unlike Primo, her schemes don’t run to power grabs — instead, she just wants to find out who took a photo of her in a compromising position with the local golf pro.

It seems that Julia’s wealth comes by virtue (a term probably misapplied here) of her marriage, and because wealth is the most important thing to her, she must guard that marriage zealously. Such guardianship doesn’t appear to include the actual avoidance of adultery, but it certainly encompasses heroic efforts to destroy any evidence of those indiscretions. SOTW is one of those games that let you gleefully and maliciously wreak havoc on a wide variety of places and characters, all in the service of advancing a thoroughly rotten character. As I said, the most prominent example of this sort of game is Varicella, but this game is Varicella played purely for laughs — very few darker undertones burden the spree of unrestrained villainy.

There are a few things that SOTW does particularly well. One is dialogue; the country club is populated with a wide variety of rivals who come in various shades of shrewish and desperate, and Julia’s exchanges with these characters often made me laugh out loud. Many of their remarks come at Julia’s expense — her affairs are an open secret at the club, and they provide the perfect fodder for nasty remarks, such as when Julia happens upon an NPC in the garden:

As she sees you enter, she looks up and grins impishly. “Oh, Julia,” she says, closing her book for a moment. “I’m surprised to see you here. I thought you preferred to do your hoeing in the basement.”

In addition, the NPCs have some great incidental business, and provide the game lots of opportunities to replace standard library responses with something more fun. One of my favorites was this replacement for “You can’t go that way.”:

“Oh dear,” Cissy says as you bump into a low wall. “Julia, you really should try some Ginkgo biloba. I’ve been taken it for months now and I hardly ever crash into walls anymore.”

Okay, so it has a pretty egregious grammar error. I still laughed. The parser, too, gets off plenty of zingers:

>search beverly You're not a lady cop, and this isn't Cinemax After Dark.

Okay, enough quoting. My point is that SOTW is a funny game, and it’s worth playing just for the humor. Moreover, many of its puzzles are logical and seamlessly blended with the game-world, and its story moves smoothly and sensibly to a dynamic climax. The game makes especially good use of triggers to move the action along. Unfortunately, there are some flaws to contend with as well. For one thing, while the humor is marvelous, there are a number of places where the prose stumbles due to awkwardness or simple mechanical errors. For example:

>read board Although seemingly impossible, somehow this cork bulletin board, with its oak border and brass inlay, manages to appear elegant. I guess all it takes to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear is money. A fact illustrated by many of Pine Meadows's patrons. On the bulletin board is an announcement.

First there’s a misplaced modifier, attaching impossibility to the cork bulletin board itself rather than its elegance. Next, there’s a voice mixup, as the parser suddenly takes on an identity and asserts itself with “I guess.” If Julia is “you”, who is the “I” speaking in this scenario? Finally, a sentence fragment brings up the rear. A significant number of these problems mark Sting Of The Wasp as the work of a beginning writer.

In addition, while the game is clearly tested and for the most part bug-free, there are still some glitches in implementation. A waiter hands you a glass that never appears. A description mentions exits southeast and south, when in fact they’re south and southwest, respectively. The game would benefit vastly from the attention of a skilled editor and from one more round of testing. These things aren’t too hard to do, and once they’re done, SOTW‘s nasty pleasures will be even sharper than they are now.

Rating: 8.5

Typo by Peter Seebach and Kevin Lynn [Comp04]

IFDB page: Typo!
Final placement: 19th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

The heart of Typo is the Frobozz Magic– er, Flavorplex Psychic Typo Error Correction System, which in turn is apparently a jazzed-up name for Cedric Knight’s mistype.h library extension. This innovation provides an extra level of player-friendliness by trying to catch unparseable misspellings and typographical errors and making a reasonable guess as to what the player intended, like so:

>push apadiing [Flavorplex Psychic Typo Correction has divined that you want to "push padding"]. Your entire hand disappears momentarily into the padding. Now THAT'S soft!

This works, I’m guessing, by comparing the player’s input to a list of dictionary words, then using some set of algorithms to decide what in its list is the closest match to whatever the player typed. This is a cool idea, and frequently it works very well indeed. However, a utility like this is only as good as the dictionary it’s using, and if the game is underimplemented, typo correction can suddenly start wildly misinterpreting commands. Pushed further, its responses veer into the comical:

>x skyline As you look out at the cityscape, your attention is drawn to a funny little pizza delivery car as it cruises slowly along the street.

>x car [Flavorplex Psychic Typo Correction has divined that you want to "x cart"]. You can't see any such thing.

>[boy that can get irritating fast] [Flavorplex Psychic Typo Correction has divined that you want to "buy that an get irritating east"]. You can't see any such thing.

The goofier moments reminded me of that Simpsons episode where Dolph makes a note on his Apple Newton to beat up Martin, which the PDA translates as “eat up Martha.” More seriously, the whole enterprise reminded me that everyone who writes software, including IF, must make decisions about interface. There’s been a trend in the last ten years or so, particularly noticeable (to me) in Microsoft products, towards interfaces that take a paternalistic attitude towards the user. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about anything complicated,” they say, “I know what you really meant to do.” The problem, of course, is that at least half the time the “friendly” interface guesses wrong about what the user wants, and thus ends up thwarting good work rather than facilitating it.

I’ve no doubt that these sorts of interfaces arise due to a great deal of feedback from people who want their computers to be simpler to operate. However, for both naive and sophisticated users, it’s very frustrating when the computer thinks it knows better than you do. That’s why it’s critical that when you introduce a feature that overrides or embellishes literal user input, you provide a way to turn it off. In addition, such features are usually much better if they are customizable. A perfect example is the spell-checker whose dictionary can be expanded by the user — if I can teach the software more about what I want to do with it, I can better enable it to help correct only actual errors. So if anybody is thinking of using this system in another game, remember to implement every noun you mention and to give me some control over how and whether the typo system operates.

As for the game itself, it’s nothing too remarkable. Typo deploys the old reliable IF trick of literalizing some aspect of the medium, in this case the typo correction system. The PC is cast as a tester working for Flavorplex to iron out the bugs in its typo corrector. There’s one substantial puzzle, a Rube Goldberg device for which the PC receives a set of instructions, but which is constructed so straightforwardly that I never needed to consult them. There’s also one big plot twist, which in a more substantial game would move the action from prologue into the story proper, but which in this game serves only as an odd, abrupt, and unsatisfying ending. But Typo isn’t too interested in telling a story — instead, it just wants us to think about the implications of machines that make decisions on behalf of their users. For me, the game accomplished that goal.

Rating: 7.2

Blue Sky by Hans Fugal [Comp04]

IFDB page: Blue Sky
Final placement: 26th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

At this point in the development of interactive fiction, we’ve seen a lot of genres tried. However, there’s one kind of writing for which this medium is very well suited, but which has been attempted very seldom: travel writing. In many ways, it’s a natural fit — IF can’t help but put a great deal of emphasis on setting, and one of the best parts of a deep, detailed, and well-written text game is the strong feeling of location it provides. The best travel writing gives us a sense of having visited a place unfamiliar to us, and done properly, interactive travel writing could intensify this feeling even further.

I think that this is the sort of game that Blue Sky wants to be — it casts the player as a tourist in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the majority of the action consists of wandering around a replica of that city’s plaza, searching for a moving target. It seems to me that the point of the game is to be a virtual visit to that site, and that we’re supposed to come away from it enchanted with what a lovely place Santa Fe is. Unfortunately, Blue Sky is both too poorly written and too sparsely implemented to accomplish this goal. I’ve actually been to Santa Fe, and liked it very much, but instead of bringing back good memories of visits I’ve made, Blue Sky brought back bad memories of past IF games.

At times, the game reminded me of The Big Mama in its rapturous insistence on how beautiful everything is:

The St. Francis Cathedral was designed by Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy in the Romanesque style. The cathedral, which was dedicated in 1884, took fifteen years to complete. It stands majestically against the backdrop of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, and you almost feel like you can see the twin steeples that were never completed in the clouds set in the deep blue sky.

In fact, though it’s quite a small game, the word “beautiful” shows up in no less than seven different places. Instead of describing just what’s so beautiful about them, the game flatly labels its items as such and expects that to be sufficient, which it isn’t. Then again, sometimes the writing is so perfunctory that it can’t even be bothered to try communicating anything special about the setting:

Cathedral Place and East Water Street East Water Street ends here from the west and Cathedral place continues southeast into the business district of Santa Fe. La Fonda occupies the block to the west on the north side of the street.

Setting aside the fact that much of this prose is in dire need of commas, it also doesn’t do a whole lot to conjure anything specific about Santa Fe. Instead, it feels just one step above the bare grid of a city presented by Strangers In The Night.

The plot, such as it is, involves trying to catch up with your tour group as you glimpse them traveling from one landmark to the next, but the majority of the game involves wandering around and around a dozen or so of these underdescribed locations. Most of these locations not only offer very little in the way of writing, there’s not much to do in them either. After a while, I felt like I was playing Aunt Nancy’s House, except that instead of a house, there was a town.

Blue Sky compounds this problem with implementation that’s far too sparse. Take this interaction, for instance:

Inside the Loretto Chapel The inside of this chapel is indeed beautiful. Your eyes scan over the altar, the wooden benches, and then fall upon the miraculous staircase.

>x altar That's not something you need to refer to in the course of this game.

>x benches That's not something you need to refer to in the course of this game.

>x staircase This 'miraculous' staircase leads to the choir loft. Legend has it that the staircase, built without nails or support beams, was constructed by a carpenter who mysteriously appeared, completed the job then disappeared without pay or leaving his name.

There are three items mentioned. Two are unimplemented. The third has a description that reappears verbatim in the description of the chapel’s exterior. Can you blame me if I’m not feeling transported? Over and over, the game missed opportunities to provide immersion, instead providing descriptions that were sketchy when they weren’t absent entirely. For instance, the initial room description mentions how the PC’s inn has a “beautiful wood facade”, but the inn itself is described thus: “This is your hotel.”

One of the keys to immersion in IF is detail, and Blue Sky falls well short of the mark. I don’t mean to be too harsh — the game is obviously well-intentioned, and with a substantial overhaul of its writing and a considerably increased depth of implementation, it could become a lovely evocation of Santa Fe. Until then, if you’re looking for travel IF that really works, go back and play She’s Got A Thing For A Spring.

Rating: 4.1

About my 2004 IF Competition Reviews

2004 was a year of endings for me, in terms of my IF hobby. First, to my great relief, I was able to complete the final game in my Earth and Sky trilogy, and what would turn out to be my final competition entry. To my great amazement, that game ended up winning the 2004 competition, which was a fantastic way to go out.

In addition, 2004 was the final year where I attempted to review all the comp games, or at least all the comp games that weren’t written by known newsgroup trolls. There were a few different reasons for this, as I explained in a “postscript” post on rec.games.int-fiction. Those included some amount of burnout on my part, and my growing sense of guilt about the part I played in making the competition such a black hole at the center of the IF community’s galaxy. I alluded much more blithely to what was really the central fact behind it all: my life was changing. In November of 2004, I knew that my wife was pregnant, and that our child was expected in June of 2005. Reasonably, I didn’t see myself devoting 6 weeks in November of that year to hardcore IF playing and reviewing.

I don’t think I realized at the time just how much being a parent would completely consume my time and energy. I certainly didn’t realize at the time that I would also be starting a new job immediately after Dante was born. When I wrote that postscript, I expected that I’d still be playing and reviewing longer games even after leaving the comp crunch. Well, some of that happened, but for the most part, not so much. Dante’s birth marked my exit, more or less, from the IF community. I handed off SPAG to new editor Jimmy Maher, more or less withdrew from the newsgroups, and pretty much checked out of IF, at least until the 2010 PAX East convention where Jason Scott screened an early cut of Get Lamp.

Even after that, right up to now, my involvement has been sporadic. I don’t expect that to change anytime soon, though populating this blog has been a wonderful way to revisit those IF-heavy years of my life, and to spur me towards more reviewing ideas, such as the Infocom >RESTART project. More about that, and the future of the blog, after this last batch of comp reviews.

Comp04 was a great one to go out on, and not just because I won. There were some games I really loved, including the time-travel mindbender All Things Devours, the sci-fi drama Trading Punches, and my favorite of the year, a trippy psychological journey called Blue Chairs, whose protagonist happens to be named… Dante. Blue Chairs, incidentally, was written by Chris Klimas, who would go on to create Twine and therefore have the biggest impact on the competition since Whizzard himself.

That’s all in the future, at least the future of the guy who published these reviews on November 16, 2004 — one last big comp hurrah.