Comp00, >INVENTORY, Page 5

Little Billy by Okey Ikeako [Comp00]

IFDB page: Little Billy
Final placement: 50th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

And here I thought Desert Heat had a paucity of choices! OK, here’s something I never wondered about: What if you took Life On Beal Street and gave it a really snazzy interface, one that eliminated all that tedious typing “1” to continue and instead replaced it with an attractive “click here to continue”? What would you have? I never wondered about it, but now I have the answer: You’d still have Life On Beal Street. Little Billy follows this inglorious model — it’s not interactive fiction at all. There’s a “click here to continue” prompt (or, at times, a differently worded but functionally identical prompt) that basically just lets you turn the pages in a linear story. Even the two opportunities you get to make a decision don’t influence the narrative in the slightest — one is a dead-end road that shunts back into the main story, and the other makes cosmetic, inconsequential changes that dissolve after a couple of paragraphs.

But maybe if the story and writing were really great, the lack of interactivity wouldn’t stick out so much? Maybe, but we’ll never know. The author warns us at the very beginning. “The author of this game has no writing talent whatsoever”, he says, and oh-so-cleverly punches up the “click here to continue” prompt with an “at your own risk!” Heed this warning. The plot is utterly standard, and the writing doesn’t do much to sell it. What’s more, the final sentence throws everything into total confusion, in a bad way. This sentence is supposed to be a grim epilogue, I think, but it appears to use the wrong name, which turns it into more of a hilarious head-scratcher. If it wasn’t using the wrong name, it’s just a head-scratcher without being hilarious, so I’m rooting for the former case.

The interface is fairly snazzy, though it’s clearly adapted from another game. There’s a picture of an ancient-looking water jug at the start of the game that has absolutely nothing to do with anything that happens in the story. Each character, amusingly enough, has a hit-point counter, even though there isn’t a shred of combat or anything approaching combat in Little Billy. Well, actually there is, but it happens offstage — Billy must have gotten the drop on his combatants, because he’s obviously just a 1st level Schoolkid (chaotic good, of course) with a mere 10 hit points. His dad, on the other hand, has a whopping 54 hit points, which must make him a 6th or 7th level Cleric. He apparently got all his combat experience beating Little Billy to within a hit point of his life. Oh well, enough silliness. Making up stuff like that was the most fun I had with the game, but I can have that kind of fun without any comp game at all.

Rating: 2.5

Desert Heat by Papillon [Comp00]

IFDB page: Desert Heat
Final placement: 28th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Playing Desert Heat made me realize something. In the first five years of the IF Competition, I don’t think a single “true” Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style branching narrative has been entered. Sure, we had Human Resources Stories, but despite its title, that game had no story — it was just a weird quiz. We also had Life On Beal Street, but that game didn’t really offer any choices, unless you count “quit” and “don’t quit” as legitimate story branches, which I don’t. So along comes Desert Heat, a true CYOA story, forcing me to decide what I think about such a format for a comp game.

Here’s what I ended up with: I have nothing against CYOA; in fact I like it, and nurture fond childhood memories of CYOA books by the likes of Edward Packard, R.A. Montgomery, and the amusingly pen-named D. Terman [Which turns out not to be a pen name at all. Guy was actually named Douglas Terman. — 2020 Paul]. However, in an interactive fiction competition where its competitors boast full-blown parsers, maps, and the like, it just doesn’t feel very interactive. Desert Heat does an excellent job of presenting its milieu, but I kept wishing for many more choices than the story offers.

Perhaps part of the problem is that the game’s narrative doesn’t actually offer that many real options. Most of the branches aren’t branches at all. Instead, they generally do one of three things: one, they reveal themselves to be dead ends, forcing you back to a previous node; two, they only offer the illusion of choice, because every option leads to the same node; or three, they result in an abrupt ending. Endings are plentiful in Desert Heat, but branches aren’t, and that probably accentuated the feeling of restriction I was already experiencing as a result of dropping from the wide-open ambiance of a text adventure into the more streamlined mode of CYOA. Consequently, I found that I was having less fun with Desert Heat than I had with the good parser games I’ve played so far, though to be fair I did find it more fun than the bad parser games, so format isn’t the only thing at work here.

The other unique thing about DH is its genre. It calls itself “A Romance Of Sorts”, and because I’m not a reader of romances, I couldn’t say how closely it hews to the conventions of that genre. I can say that it was written well, proofread well, and programmed well (though the programming chores are obviously more minimal when it comes to CYOA, and the author apparently had help from Mark Musante’s CYOA library for TADS). The Arabic, desert milieu is one I haven’t seen very often at all in IF (the only other one I can bring to mind is a section of TimeQuest), and it feels fresh and interesting. The characters are believable, the intrigue plausible, and there are even some quite subtle moments of humor. (Read the descriptions closely if you ask one of the characters to dance.)

As the author’s warning suggests, there are some sexual scenes available, and in fact the options to include or exclude these scenes represent some of the most significant choices available in the game. Again, I’m not sure what the conventions of the genre are when it comes to this kind of scene — some of them made me a little queasy, but I only encountered these when I was systematically going through the game looking for text I had missed (the inclusion of “undo” was much appreciated.) They didn’t appear in my first few plays through the game, which probably says something about how I tend to play a character.

In the end, while I appreciated Desert Heat for its experimentation with an untried format for comp games, and while I enjoyed its presentation of an unusual setting, I just couldn’t get very into the story. This is no doubt partly just because romances like this aren’t really my cup of tea — I’d never seek one out for pleasure reading. Also, there are some continuity slips in the game, highlighting the fact that although CYOA takes the burden out of coding, it places much more stringent demands on plotting — characters shouldn’t seem surprised to discover something that was already revealed in a previous node, or by contrast claim knowledge of something that hasn’t been revealed yet in this particular narrative trajectory, and those things sometimes happen in Desert Heat.

In the final analysis, it was probably a combination of factors that made me say, “Nice try, but it didn’t really work for me.” I still think a CYOA could work in the comp, but the lesson of Desert Heat is that such a game would not only have to be well-written and very well-plotted, but also wide enough and with enough available choices to provide a feeling of freedom at least somewhat comparable with parser games.

Rating: 5.4

Marooned by Bruce Davis [Comp00]

IFDB page: Marooned
Final placement: 45th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Marooned was the first ADRIFT game I’ve ever played. Anytime I review a game whose system is new to me, that review can’t help but be partly about the system as well as the game itself, since it’s often difficult to disentangle who is responsible for what in the overall playing experience. Unfortunately, what with all the growling on the newsgroups from ADRIFT advocates who feel their system isn’t getting a fair shake, it’s a little tough to advance an opinion on it — anything less than unadulterated praise runs the risk of getting me labeled a “snob” or an “elitist” or something. Nonetheless, I shall brave the waters, and try to discuss the entire experience of playing Marooned, starting with the things for which I suspect ADRIFT was responsible, then moving on to those things that I’m guessing were done by the game’s author. In the interest of diverting the WOAA (Wrath of ADRIFT Advocates), I’ll even begin with the things I liked about the interface.

The ADRIFT runtime has a clean environment with two windows: one for the command line and one for the game text. The overall presentation was attractive and aesthetic, though the text window used a few too many newlines for my taste. One particularly interesting feature is that clicking on any word in the text window will insert that word into the command line. I’m too much of a typist to be messing with the mouse in that fashion, but I can see where it could be a really cool feature, especially after one got used to it. (I was so unused to it at first, unaware of it in fact, that when I clicked back onto the interpreter window after doing something in another window, I accidentally clicked on a command word and couldn’t figure out why the game seemed to be executing commands without my typing them!) A similar convenience is the “auto-complete” option, which allows you to just type a couple of letters from any dictionary word and attempts to guess what you mean, Microsoft-style. This option was a little wonky at times — for example, you find a “dented gas can” at one point which the game will auto-complete if you start typing “gas”, but not if you start with “dented” or “can”. Still, quirkiness aside, this was a great time saver, because it also shows you right away which nouns in the descriptions haven’t been implemented.

Some other cool options are available from the menu bar, most notably an excellent automapper, which operates in a separate window but creates a lovely map of the game’s landscape. This is an innovation for which many people have been clamoring, and it was especially welcome in this game, where many of the locations have the exact same name. There’s also a “control panel” which can execute common commands for you, even a “goto” command which gives you a listbox of discovered locations and sends you there via the best path. Finally, I must mention that I appreciated the inclusion of “Verbose” as a menu option, something I can just leave turned on for all games rather than having to explicitly request it each time.

OK, so there are a substantial number of things I liked about the ADRIFT interface. Sadly, there are also a number of things I really hated. First and foremost is the problem of the parser. ADRIFT’s parser violates all three of the current tenets in Paul’s Parser Manifesto (which I made up in response to another nonstandard parser, the one in last year’s homebrew game Lunatix.) Those tenets are as follows:

Parsers must not pretend to understand more than they do.
Parsers must not give smarmy, unhelpful error messages.
Parsers must not ask questions without being prepared to receive an answer.

Well, I’m not actually sure it breaks #3 — I got too angry to try it. The exchange went something like this (I’ve inserted prompts before my commands for clarity’s sake — ADRIFT doesn’t put command prompts in its text):

> look in it (the first aid kit) This is a standard issue first aid kit. The first aid kit is open. Inside the first aid kit is a small bottle. > x bottle This is a small bottle for pills. The bottle is closed. > open bottle You open the small bottle. > look in it (the small bottle) This is a small bottle for pills. The bottle is open. > x bottle This is a small bottle for pills. The bottle is open. > look in bottle This is a small bottle for pills. The bottle is open. > empty bottle I don't understand what you want me to do with the small bottle. > get all from bottle You are not holding a small bottle. > get it (the small bottle) You are not holding a first aid kit. > get kit Take what? > ^%$# you! [Expletive removed to protect the easily offended] I really don't think there's any need for language like that!

Frustrating exchanges like this were not uncommon, but even more infuriating were ADRIFT’s violations of tenet #2. Probably the worst offender was this one:

>undo I can't undo your blundering.

Let me tell you an easy way to get me angry fast: give me an insulting message in response to a reasonable command. This one broke all previous speed records. Finally, there were the violations of tenet #1, most obvious when you type “x [anything the parser doesn’t understand]” — instead of telling you it didn’t understand you, it just says “Nothing special.” I hope that Santa will still bring me presents this year despite the fact that I couldn’t resist typing “x adrift.”

All these parser problems more than blew away any pleasure I derived from ADRIFT’s other innovations, because the parser is more important than the nifty features. Let me say that one more time, and listen up, system authors: THE PARSER IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE NIFTY FEATURES. Further crippling the ADRIFT experience was the sublimely aggravating policy that there is no scripting option as such — only a menu command that will record a transcript of the game thus far, a command that is naturally unavailable after a game ends! Who uses scripting, you ask? I do — I use it to write reviews.

Because I didn’t find my way around this misfeature until I’d been playing Marooned for an hour or so, it’s difficult for me to assess my experience with much accuracy, except to say this: Marooned is not the game I’d use to champion ADRIFT. To the problems in ADRIFT’s parser, this game adds its own irritations. For one thing, there’s a starvation puzzle. Game designers, please quit it with the starvation puzzles. Like mazes, they were interesting long ago, but no longer. They’re not clever, they’re not challenging, and they’re not fun — they just suck. This one was especially offensive because none of the food you find actually staves off starvation, and a couple of perfectly legitimate food items aren’t edible, according to the game.

Compounding this problem is the fact that there are tons of red herrings in the game, which means that you waste your time trying to figure out how to use something that’s actually useless, and consequently you keep dying over, and over, and over again. Dull, dull, dull, and ultimately rage-inducing. The premise of the game was fine, but it’s hampered by severe design problems, as well as the more fundamental weaknesses of the ADRIFT interface. All in all, I’d rather play Guess the Verb again.

Rating: 3.6

Nevermore by Nate Cull [Comp00]

IFDB page: Nevermore
Final placement: 7th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Nevermore calls itself “An Interactive Gothic”, and lives up to its billing with aplomb. A loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”, Nevermore builds on the foreboding and melancholy of Poe’s poem, injecting elements of alchemy, forbidden magic, and thematic whispers of Shelley’s Frankenstein. You play the speaker of the poem, a dejected wretch pining for his lost love, “a maiden whom the angels named Lenore.” The difference between the PC and the protagonist of Poe’s verse is that this PC is willing to challenge Death itself to retrieve Lenore, and has the mystic lore, the alchemical elements, and the dread hubris to bring about her resurrection. I thought this was a fabulous premise, and the game succeeds admirably at delivering that frisson that is an indispensable part of eighteenth and nineteenth century gothic literature. To Poe’s already powerful imagery, Nevermore adds the illicit thrill of cocaine and opium, the dark power of occult magic, and the appropriate hints of colonialism and oppression. For me, the combination worked very well at evoking the rich purple feel of novels like Frankenstein, The Monk, and the template gothic novel, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto.

The game’s writing and coding don’t let it down either. In fact, in some spots the detail is so rich that it feels like almost every noun mentioned in any room description or object description is accounted for with a description of its own. Nevermore uses Inform‘s “box quote” feature to bring up excerpts from the poem at various appropriate points in the plot, and this device adds considerably to the game’s atmosphere. Also adding to that atmosphere is the writing style of the various books discovered by the PC. These books, while not burdened with Middle English spellings like the alchemical quotes in Christminster, do an outstanding job of conveying the spooky and arcane feel that such forbidden texts should have. All in all, Nevermore builds a magnificent gothic atmosphere with a combination of well-judged plot, good writing, and bug-free code.

What a pity, then, that it all comes crashing to Earth, victim of its horrendously flawed design. For one thing, the game features the equivalent of a starvation puzzle in its first few moves. This puzzle is no less forgiving, and perhaps even stricter, than the one that used to be a standard feature of TADS games (check out something like Deep Space Drifter if you don’t know what I’m referring to.) What’s more, the “starvation” problem (it’s not really starvation, but it might as well be — it’s a timed necessity for action that kills you off if not appeased) continues to occur throughout the game, cropping up every twenty moves or so. Even if starvation puzzles didn’t bother me, this one’s fuse is way too short.

Beyond that annoyance is the far greater problem of the game’s main puzzle. This puzzle involves following a highly complex alchemical ritual, requiring dozens of steps and fairly precise actions. Multi-step puzzles in and of themselves aren’t a problem, and certainly it makes sense within the context of the plot that the PC’s actions should involve complicated magical rituals, but the way this puzzle is implemented is deeply problematic. Nevermind the fact that one particular object is required for at least four of the steps, one of which destroys it. Nevermind the fact that the instructions for the ritual are couched in highly figurative language, language that is open to multiple interpretations. Let’s even forget about the fact that some of the necessary steps aren’t particularly discernible without glimpsing into the author’s mind — the thing that sent me over the edge about this puzzle is the fact that its instructions (the figurative, abstract ones) are spread over six different books, books which only reveal their contents randomly.

That’s right, each book contains between four and ten critical pieces of information, but each time you type “READ BOOK” you get a random selection of one of those pieces. Consequently, not only can you never be sure if you’ve obtained all the information you need, you have to perform the same command over and over again, wading through dull repetitions of already-printed information in the hopes that you’ll turn up something new. Once I figured out what was going on, I turned to the hints and never looked back. This tactic allowed me to get through the game (though even that required several restarts, due to the “destroyed object” problem), but the fun had long since drained from the experience. Nevermore is IF with marvelous writing and a chilling gothic atmosphere, but until its fundamental design problems are repaired, it will remain as lifeless as Poe’s lost Lenore.

Rating: 7.4

Metamorphoses by Emily Short [Comp00]

IFDB page: Metamorphoses
Final placement: 2nd place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

When I first played Myst, I wasn’t so much impressed by its storyline and puzzles as I was by its images. The gorgeously rendered locations, where each object seems freighted with meaning; the arcane and elegantly wrought machinery with its delicate gears and imposing levers; the transformations that could be brought about when various changes were enacted — I found them all quite arresting. Metamorphoses brought me back to that feeling of pleasure and awe, and it did so without the use of any graphics whatsoever. The game’s prose is crisp and powerful, conveying its Myst-like landscape of glass trees, heavy steel cranks, and shimmering water with clean, charged phrases.

The game never specifies exactly where it is set, except to make clear that its world is separate from the ordinary one, and that the PC has been sent there through the use of some sort of magic. The objects and locations therein are described economically but evocatively, like so:

Tower of Stars You stand among cogs and gears, many with teeth longer than your forearm; the outer ring of the floor is wholly occupied with these. But above is a spangled darkness full of music. The moon turns slowly overhead, and the constellations wheel round the pole-star; off to the east is the dimmest hint of warmth, but the sun itself is nowhere to be seen.

At its best (and it usually is), Metamorphoses delivers the transcendent grandeur of graphical powerhouses like Myst, and tinges it with an emotional weight that only text can achieve.

As to what is actually happening in this breathtaking landscape, well that isn’t so clear, or at least it wasn’t to me. You play some kind of servant, a girl apparently (since you’re wearing a dress.) Your fealty is to a Master who doesn’t appear to treat you well, and it is he who has sent you to this mystical landscape in pursuit of some unspecified magical objects. Even this much is based on some guesses and intuitive leaps — the game makes little effort to provide clear exposition of character and plot, leaving players to fill in many of the voluminous gaps for themselves.

I found the overall effect to be rather emotionally distancing. Perhaps I struggled to connect to the character because the flashbacks and other characterization elements are presented in such an abstract manner, or perhaps it was due to the rather spartan, forbidding images of the landscape itself, some of which contain dark hints of hellish abuse in the PC’s past. Perhaps it was even due to the austerity of the prose itself, whose sharp images and clipped diction were magnificent at conveying vivid scenes, but which stumbled rather more when describing the fuzzier and more complex realm of emotions. No doubt the real cause is some combination of these factors, but whatever the reason, I found that I enjoyed the game more when I set aside its plot and focused my attention on its lovely images and excellent design.

That design is perhaps the best thing about Metamorphoses. There are puzzles, yes, but almost every puzzle seems to have alternate solutions, and even better, these alternate solutions make perfect sense within the game’s magical logic. Moreover, Metamorphoses provides much space for play and experimentation, especially through the use of a couple of devices that can effect startling and fascinating transformations on most of the objects in the game. The potential of these devices is so vast, and their effects implemented so thoroughly, that I could easily have spent the two hour judging period just playing with them and experimenting with the results.

In fact, the game is coded so well that for a moment it gave me a flash of that wonderful sense I used to get when I first started playing interactive fiction, the sense that here is a world where anything can happen, and anything I try can elicit a magical, transformative response. Of course, that feeling breaks down quickly and inevitably when something I attempt isn’t accounted for, but just for that moment of wonder it gave me, I won’t forget Metamorphoses for a very long time.

Rating: 9.3

The Big Mama by Brendan Barnwell [Comp00]

IFDB page: The Big Mama
Final placement: 20th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

The Big Mama is an ambitious work with an intriguing structure and a strong sense of place. Somehow, though, it just didn’t work for me, and I think there are a few reasons why. For one thing, the protagonist has the same first name as me, which produced a strange experience that I don’t think any other piece of IF has given me. It’s an odd feeling to have the PC introduce himself as “Paul” and be addressed as such in a game that hasn’t asked for my name explicitly. I suppose that I wouldn’t find this offputting in and of itself if the PC was a character I could relate to. Unfortunately, he isn’t — I found him pretentious and grandiose. One of the most prominent examples of this pretentiousness is the PC’s insistence on constantly referring to the ocean as “the big mama” — one or two references of this sort would be fine, but when the game hammers at it over and over again, flying into rhapsodic soliloquies about how “It’s like some caring, artistic superior being has crafted this little coastline as an experiment in environmental beauty,” I start to get the feeling it’s trying to impress me with how deep and soulful the PC is, and I wasn’t that impressed.

Those kinds of details tend to make me roll my eyes a bit, and they’re everywhere in the game. Another example is the room description in which the PC reacts to a sign reading “Private beach: next 1.5 miles” by snorting “Stupid imperial measurement!” This is the sort of behavior trait that would annoy me if I found it in a real person — it strikes me as contrariness for the sake of it rather than for any rational reason, and when it’s divorced from any explanatory context, as it is with this PC, my initial response remains as my lasting impression. Meanwhile, the game is not only ascribing all these traits to me in the second person voice, it’s actually using my name to do so. Weird.

Oddly, the game’s very open-ended structure only served to underscore this feeling for me. At one point (when you type “score”), the author himself intrudes to insist that “it’s all up to you.” In fact, however, it isn’t. If you try to swim in the ocean, for instance, you are told “You’re a stand-on-the-shore-and-watch-the-waves-roll-in kind of guy, not a frolic-in-the-crashing-surf kind of guy.” When this happens, the game forcefully reminds me that despite its proclamations of freedom, the PC is never going to act like anything but the rather pompous character I was trying to steer away from. I can understand that there need to be some limits on what’s implemented in a game, but I’d rather not hear any claims like “it’s all up to you” unless those limits are very wide indeed.

That complaint aside, however, TBM‘s structure is absorbing. The game sports at least 39 endings (at every ending you reach, you are told “You have reached ending #[whatever]”, though the game rather coyly avers that “The total number of endings is a secret.” Anyway, I got to ending number 39, so I know that there are at least that many.) I played through the game about 20 times, and was impressed by the number of possible branches to take, though again I still felt disappointingly straitjacketed by the character’s consistency. If I had liked the character, I think would have spent even more time chasing down the various possibilities.

The writing in the game was well proofread — I think I only found one error (an it’s/its mixup) — and it was very effective at producing a strong sense of place for me. TBM provides quite a few vivid details for its beach setting, and when I closed my eyes after playing the game for an hour or so, I nearly felt transported. The actual style of the prose, on the other hand, felt just a little over-the-top to me at times, but this may have been a further outgrowth of my reaction to the PC’s perspective. In addition, TBM suffers unfairly in my mind because I can’t help comparing it to Sunset Over Savannah, one of the best-written IF games out there and certainly the best one to be set on a beach. I think another thing that deflated the power of the writing for me was that the game begins with a series of “light-hearted” admonishments by way of introduction, and I found this sequence irritatingly precious. That’s pretty much the story with me and TBM — there’s nothing wrong with it, particularly, but it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

Rating: 7.2

[Postscript from 2020: This game inspired one of my all-time favorite reviews ever written for a piece of IF, Adam Cadre’s review from rec.games.int-fiction, which I subsequently reprinted in SPAG. The whole thing still sends me into fits of helpless laughter. Also, the big mama.]

Dinner With Andre by Liza Daly [Comp00]

IFDB page: Dinner With Andre
Final placement: 18th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

When I first opened Dinner With Andre, I was enchanted. The game is real-world IF of a genre I’ve never quite seen before — “date IF”, I suppose. You play a woman who’s offered to buy dinner for a co-worker, hoping to get to know him. The opening scene is of a swank restaurant, where you’re just coming to the end of a wonderful dinner with your date and wondering what the rest of the evening has in store. He excuses himself for a moment, and when you reach for the check, you get a very unpleasant surprise: dinner was much, much more expensive than you thought, and your credit card isn’t going to cover it. Unfortunately, it’s the only form of payment you’ve got with you. I thought this was a terrific premise, and just a few minutes into the game I was grinning with excitement at the prospect of seeing how the rest of the plot played out.

A half-hour later, I was ready to shove my head through my monitor. I tried everything I could think of to solve that first puzzle, and was rebuffed by the game at every turn. Several of the things I tried (like “call mom on cell phone”) were actually implemented, which was a pleasant surprise, but most of my ideas weren’t implemented, which was no surprise at all considering how desperate some of them were (like “write IOU”). I’m always reluctant to turn to the hints in a game that’s clearly well-written and bug-free, and DWA definitely fits that description. However, I really can’t afford to buy a new monitor, so I swallowed my pride and checked the hints. It’s rather difficult to discuss without revealing spoilers, but my feeling when I read the solution was, “but I tried that and was told it doesn’t work!” Turns out I had already had the right idea, but hadn’t expressed it in quite the way the game wanted.

This experience of being alternately thrilled and frustrated was emblematic of my entire encounter with the game. DWA has lots of wonderful moments, and several of its responses made me laugh out loud, but I found myself thoroughly stymied in most of my attempts to get through the plot. By the end, I was relying solely on the hints to wade through the game. I don’t think the problems are terribly deep-rooted, mainly a lack of gentle nudges in the text and a need for alternate phrasings in several parts. Unfortunately, due to the extreme difficulty I had with the first puzzle, I was much more ready to reach for the hints at each successive stuck point.

Once I lost my inhibitions about using the hints, I found I enjoyed the game quite a bit more. Disaster after disaster happens to the PC, and her reactions force her into several very funny situations, situations which require further wacky contortions to escape. In fact, I’m realizing as I write this that the genre of DWA isn’t “date IF” — it’s “situation comedy IF”. Now, I mean that in the kindest sense (that is, the Seinfeld sense rather than the Major Dad sense), but I think that this insight gets to the heart of why I had trouble with the game. Solving the game’s puzzles requires coming up with the funny response that the game had in mind, and using a less funny but still sensible response, or even a different funny response that the game hadn’t envisioned, puts the player at a rather unhelpful dead end.

Thus, in the first puzzle I had figured out what I wanted to do, but hadn’t come up with the particular funny way of doing this thing that the game was looking for, and therefore I found myself going in ever more frustrating circles. Therefore, if you’re anything like me, you probably shouldn’t be afraid to turn to the hints in DWA, but once you do, you’ll have a pretty good time. If only we could say that about all our disastrous dates.

Rating: 7.6

Transfer by Tod Levi [Comp00]

IFDB page: Transfer
Final placement: 5th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

What is it about isolated research complexes? Is it that their combination of solitude and high-tech niftiness is particularly well-suited to IF? Do their deeply buried labs and living quarters provide plenty of fodder for interesting room descriptions while furnishing a very logical justification for a paucity of objects? Does something about all that Big Science that inevitably goes catastrophically awry appeal to writers in a computer game genre that is generally thought to be long since technically outmoded? Whatever the reason behind their mystique, isolated research complexes have appeared in every IF competition since C.E. Forman blazed the trail with his 1996 comp game Delusions, a game so good that perhaps it can take credit on its own for inspiring the trend. From Babel to Unholy Grail to Four Seconds, it’s just not an IF competition without a game about an isolated research complex where Dangerous Experiments go Horribly Wrong. Despite its rather pedestrian title, Transfer is a captivating thriller in exactly this mode.

The game’s central conceit is a machine that allows “Entity Transfer” — an exchange of minds between animals and humans. Naturally, the genius Professor who built this machine has been mysteriously put out of commission, and you as the PC can’t be sure who to trust among the various colleagues and security agents who roam the complex in the wake of this disaster. The game never makes your quest explicit, but it’s clear enough that you are charged with clearing up the mystery and flushing out the culprit behind this obvious Foul Play. The transfer machine allows the author to once again exercise the skills that he demonstrated in last year’s cat-perspective game A Day For Soft Food, this time thrusting the PC into a whole menagerie of animal points-of-view — this device is not only lots of fun, it serves as a vehicle for some very clever and original (if at times somewhat implausible) puzzles. These puzzles are also quite well integrated into the game’s plot, a plot which I found quite gripping.

In fact, the strength of the story serves ironically to highlight the game’s major flaw, which is the unrealistic behavior of its NPCs. These NPCs are well-characterized, but implemented much too shallowly. I know this because I was so into the story that I found it extremely frustrating when I wasn’t able to progress in the plot even after telling an NPC about some stunningly important clue, or showing them some highly significant objects I’d acquired. In fact, there are times in Transfer when something obviously alarming is going on, but the NPCs ignore it completely, going robotically about their daily rounds despite my best efforts to draw their attention. Because the rest of the work was so involving, the characters’ unresponsiveness became a real point of frustration for me. Other than this weakness, the game appears to be quite well-tested — I found only a couple of small, isolated bugs and spelling errors, and on the flip side noticed several spots where the game’s code revealed outstanding craftsmanship in its handling of subtle details. I wasn’t able to finish the game in the two hours allotted judging time, but assuming I survive the process of grading another 50 games, I eagerly anticipate returning to reach the ending of Transfer — if the rest of the game is any indication, the payoff should be worthwhile indeed.

Rating: 8.8

Guess The Verb! by Leonard Richardson [Comp00]

IFDB page: Guess The Verb!
Final placement: 11th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: Guess the Verb is fun. In fact, I’ll go even better than that: Guess the Verb is great! I was quite worried when I saw the game’s title, fearing that I faced another Annoyotron, or at best a riff on the Textfire game Verb!. What I got instead was a highly enjoyable comp game that I’m eagerly looking forward to revisiting after the judging period is over. What a bargain! For one thing, the game is just screamingly funny. In fact, even the meta-game materials are hilarious. Not two minutes after loading up GTV I was giggling like a loon. My wife walked past and asked, “Good game?” “I haven’t even started the game yet!” I replied. “I’m just reading the instructions!” Those instructions are not to be missed, and they set the tone wonderfully for the rest of the game, a riotous spoof on IF that skewers everything from pretentious authors and critics (like myself) to overly literal parsers to shopworn genre conventions.

Here’s what’s even better: even though GTV is a spoof, it is simultaneously a really fun game. The first puzzle, for example, makes terrific mockery of IF parsers, but it is also at the same time a clever, original, and completely fair puzzle, one which gave me that invaluable “Aha!” feeling once I had figured it out. Examples of this kind of dual excellence abound throughout the game, and there are so many examples I loved that it’s hard to pick one, so I’ll just select this room description from early on in the game:

The Midway The lights and noise of the midway seem hollow and dull compared to the aura of excitement you felt at the verb guessing booth. You survey the sights around you as though through different eyes: the merry-go-round, the concession stand--they seem so pedestrian now. You feel a strange attraction pulling you back towards the southwest, as though a ham-handed author were trying to place hints into the room description that the game would progress a lot faster if you went back to the verb guessing booth already.

This is a lovely parody on the tendency of IF authors to give rather clumsy hints in the midst of otherwise banal descriptions of objects and rooms, in hopes of giving the player a friendly shove in the right direction. But even as GTV lampoons the silliness of that technique, at the same time it enacts that very technique and achieves the hoped-for effect. Stuff like that makes me smile very, very widely.

Another great feature of this game is its impressive replayability. The plot branches randomly into five small scenarios, and I don’t think that all five scenarios are reachable in a single play session, at least not without very copious amounts of UNDOing, and perhaps not even then. Each scenario is well worth visiting, even the briefer ones, so there’s a reason for replay right there. Not only that, the game is just stuffed full of Easter eggs. I played for two hours, got to the end, and was rewarded with a long list of amusing things to do, things that I’m just itching to go back and try, especially knowing how many of the game’s jokes truly were amusing. In fact, even when some of the scenarios get cut off, GTV sometimes compensates you with additional items that can be used in a bunch of entertaining ways.

This game wasn’t perfect — mercifully, I found no coding errors, but there were there were a few typos here and there, and the very beginning of the game is lumbered with a misfeature that forces you to enter some very specific information before you can get to a standard prompt that allows you to restore, script, restart, etc. Those quibbles aside, however, I can say without reservation that this is by far the best game of Guess the Verb I have ever played or could ever hope to play.

Rating: 9.7

Aftermath by Graham Somerville [Comp00]

IFDB page: Aftermath
Final placement: 37th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Sometimes a comp game can be summed up in one word. Of course, that never stops me from going ahead and writing three paragraphs about it anyway, explaining why that word fits, but for those with a distaste for verbosity, that one word can be a handy precis. Aftermath is such a game, and the word, I’m sorry to say, is “dismal.” The game’s topic is war, and not the glory of triumph in battle or the allure of military machinery, but the dismal, dismal existence of lone soldiers on frost-covered battlefields, struggling out from under heaps of bodies and fighting off the human vultures who scavenge through the corpses’ belongings.

This topic, by itself, is quite a downer, but still could be the basis of an excellent game. Unfortunately, Aftermath‘s dismal characteristics don’t stop there. The writing is dismal, the grammar is dismal, the spelling is dismal, the coding is dismal, and the puzzles are beyond dismal. Run-on sentences and other grammar bungles are everywhere, programming errors are legion, and there are as many spelling mistakes as dead bodies. (And with this game, that’s really saying something.) In fact, after I finished the game (with an inexplicable 120 out of 100 points) and received the ending message, I found myself still at the prompt. When I typed “L”, the game said “It looks like an ordinary to me.” I still had all my possessions (including “a apple”), but was trapped in a bizarre post-game limbo. It was almost as hard to figure out as some of the game’s puzzles.

Oy, those puzzles! From the very beginning of the game, I quickly determined that guessing the verb, as well as the noun, was going to be necessary in numerous cases. On top of that, several times very particular objects (or sub-objects) must be examined before the game will reveal things that, by all rights, should be dead obvious (pardon the pun) to the PC. Sadly, that’s not even the worst of it. There’s one puzzle in particular that made me say to my monitor, “How in the hell was I supposed to know to do that?” My monitor never answers me when I ask it that kind of stuff — probably for the best, since it’s not the kind of question that really has a good answer. I’d be quite surprised to learn of anyone who solved all the puzzles in Aftermath without the walkthrough, because not only do they require reading the author’s mind, but they occasionally fly in the face of all logic and sense as well.

The real shame is that an IF game in the war genre could be so good, and Aftermath falls so short of its potential. Heaven knows there’s a ton of inherent drama in war, drama that works from Henry V to Platoon have mined to spectacular effect. What’s more, it’s the kind of genre we don’t see very often in IF, which tends to be more or less dominated by science fictional and fantastic themes (a trend to which I’ve made my share of contributions.) Once and Future starts out in a war, but quickly shifts into Arthurian Fantasy mode. Remembrance delves into WWI, but in a way that could hardly be called interactive. In fact, the only memorable IF game in the war genre I’ve played is Persistence of Memory, which leaves great swaths of territory still untouched.

Aftermath, unhappily, can only manage to come up with gratuitous gore and relentless dreariness, sprinkled throughout with wince-worthy histrionics and unintentionally funny English and TADS errors. It’s all the more disappointing, because the game could have been so moving. Aftermath has a very solid theme, and its basic plot engine, the idea of a character who is the sole survivor of a battle and is obsessed with building a monument to the dead, could have made for a dynamite story. Aftermath isn’t that story, though. Instead its only success, as well as its disappointing failure, lies in the fact that it is just so dismal.

Rating: 3.1