Comp04, >INVENTORY, Page 2

Bellclap by Tommy Herbert [Comp04]

IFDB page: Bellclap
Final placement: 17th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

When I wrote LASH, I was interested in the concept of separating the player from the PC. Thus, instead of the traditional IF second-person voice, it used first person, and made “me” refer to the player while “you” referred to the PC. Now, Bellclap goes one more step by separating the player, the PC, and the parser. In this game, you (the player) are apparently some sort of god, and you’re answering the prayers of a supplicant (the title character and PC.) However, the two of you are working through an intermediary — it’s never made quite clear what or who this is, but there’s definitely some kind of third party relaying your commands to the PC and reporting the resulting actions back to you. It’s the parser personified, basically, as some kind of angel or holy spirit, though its diction is more that of a bureaucratic functionary.

The game speaks mostly in the third person, because it’s mostly relaying information about the PC, but the parser speaks in first person when referring to itself, and in the second person when referring to the godlike being at the controls. For example:

>x me He can't see you, sir. You're in light inaccessible, hid from his eyes.

Unless that instruction was intended for me, in which case you're looking radiant, sir, radiant.

>x bellclap He is dressed in a tunic, sheepskin coat and sandals, and he has a bag in which he carries food and tools for the maintenance of walls, fences and thatch.

>x you He can't see me, sir. I'm more a sort of guiding voice.

I thought this was a really fun experiment, and Bellclap carried it off quite well. It seems clear that a fair amount of work and thought went into overhauling the standard Inform libraries to reflect this unique split consciousness, and the result felt seamless to me. Sadly, the game was quite short — just a few puzzles strung together, really — and therefore it didn’t explore the gimmick nearly as much as it could have. Also, I’m not sure that making the player an omnipotent being was the best course, as the most obvious solution to pretty much all the problems would have been to just exercise some divine power over them. The game declares these sorts of actions verboten for no apparent reason other than that they’re not implemented.

Consequently, I was left feeling not very godly, even though some of the PC’s actions result in supernatural events. Actually, the scenario put me in mind of the M*A*S*H episode where Father Mulcahy is stuck in a remote location with a wounded man and must perform a tracheotomy, while Radar relays Hawkeye’s radioed instructions on how to do so. That scenario had a tension that Bellclap lacks, not just because of the urgency and life-or-death nature of the operation, but because the knowledgeable party was powerless to exercise that knowledge directly, and the person who was capable of action was crippled by inexperience, while both had to deal with the comically squeamish middleman.

In Bellclap, there’s no clear reason why the knowledgeable party should be powerless — just the opposite, in fact, since the game clearly establishes him as all-powerful. For people exploring this structure for IF in the future, I think a stronger design would exploit rather than undermine the difficulty inherent in the separation of commander, relayer, and actor.

As for the rest of the game, it’s pretty good, though as I said, there’s really not too much to it. The prose strikes a strange pseudo-Victorian tone that works despite itself, and occasionally gets off some excellent jokes, such as when I tried to make Bellclap go up from a roof:

>u But gravity, sir. Gravity. They're your physical laws, not mine.

I also really enjoyed the response to JUMP: “Bellclap wants to know how high.” The writing was blessedly error-free, but the coding was just a little weaker. Most of the game was quite solid, but I encountered a couple of situations that the game mishandles. The worst offender is a puzzle that requires a container to be filled with liquid, but doesn’t properly recognize the word FILL. Instead, the game wants a command syntax along the lines of PUT LIQUID IN CONTAINER, which is both anti-intuitive and anti-mimetic.

Speaking of puzzles, I thought these were pretty good too — most of the solutions were quite unexpected, but they made sense in retrospect. Bellclap gave me the strange sensation of solving puzzles even though I had no idea why the solution would work, which I suppose is as close as I’ll ever get to omniscience. I was sorry when the game ended so soon, and I’m certainly looking forward to future works by this author.

Rating: 7.8

Mingsheng by Deane Saunders [Comp04]

IFDB page: Mingsheng
Final placement: 7th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Less than plot or character, Mingsheng is about a place and a mood. The mood-setting begins before the game even starts, with the inclusion of a nicely-formatted PDF feelie, replete with Chinese characters and martial arts diagrams. This document explains that the game is based on a myth about the origins of Taiji, or as I’ve always known it, T’ai Chi — thus all the Chinese martial arts stuff. I appreciated the care that was put into this accessory, and I also liked the fact that the same information was available in a PDF, as a text file, and within the game. It made me grin when I realized that somebody had trumped me in the “ABOUT text in multiple spots” department.

The Chinese feel continues in the formatting of the game, which includes the option of Unicode Chinese characters as “flavor text”. These characters appear mostly in room titles, and apparently just repeat the room name in Chinese, so if you miss them, all you’re missing is a mood enhancer. And a lucky thing, too, because they require a font that supports Chinese characters. The author suggests a font called Simsun, which I don’t have installed on my PC. I would have appreciated a pointer to where I could download a compatible font; instead, I floundered for a while, combing the unhelpful results of googling on “simsun font” and finally giving up. [Note: After the comp, the author provided a link.] The game gives the option of transliterating the Chinese characters (complete with numerical tone markers), but it’s really not the same.

Past the meta-game stuff, the game sets a lovely tone with its room and object descriptions. Mingsheng calls on some lovely imagery — the tableau of perfectly still lake and crane, the worn-down pagoda, the six-thousand-step staircase carved into mountain rock. A particular favorite of mine is the path flanked by animal statues, statues that are implemented several levels deep. The game did an excellent job of making me feel like I was wandering through an Asian painting, enmeshed within a mythical realm.

As I said, tone is the game’s emphasis, and there’s not much of a story to go along with it. A plot summary would be something like “guy solves a bunch of puzzles and along the way attains enlightenment.” Many of those puzzles are pretty straightforward. That’s not a criticism — I’m a fan of straightforward puzzles. Struggling too long at any particular obstacle would likely break the mood that Mingsheng works so hard to set. There was one puzzle, though, that annoyed me in a way I don’t remember having seen before in IF. Actually, it wasn’t so much the puzzle that bothered me as the implementation of the solution.

The conceit is that the PC must learn something by observation before being allowed to pass a particular barrier. Several puzzles must be solved in order to set up the situation where the PC is able to observe and learn. However, once I’d accomplished this, I figured I’d learned what I needed to know, and headed straight to the barrier, which was only two moves away. However, when I tried to pass it, I couldn’t. I was flummoxed, feeling sure that I’d seen what I needed to see. However, as I wandered around trying to figure out what I’d missed, the game kept popping up messages every turn or two along the lines of “Now that you think of it, you realize X.” After no less than four of these messages, they finally stopped, and when I went back to the barrier, I was able to cross it.

I found this technique irritating. Not only would an “all-at-once” realization be a bit more dramatic, it would also be a major improvement from a gameplay standpoint. I don’t want to have to wait for the PC to catch up with me when I figure something out, and wandering around or typing “Z.Z.Z.Z.” while I’m waiting is mighty dull. Another puzzle quibble: there’s an object that requires “a great deal of force” to be applied to it. The solution to this puzzle is cool, and I liked it very much. However, there’s an alternate solution which the game actually implements, but doesn’t seem to want to count as enough force, when it should be easily the match of the working solution. This alternate path should either be included fully or not at all.

Small criticisms aside, I thought Mingsheng was well worth my time, especially for what time it took — the game is pretty short, and when I finished, I felt like I hadn’t actually done that much. Alongside the brevity, though, there’s something else that made it feel not quite complete. Actually, though I rarely say this, I think this is a game that could be greatly improved with the inclusion of some quality graphics. Certainly some visual depictions of key locations, a la Trading Punches, could have helped deepen the mood and setting even further. However, the place they’d really be useful is when the game gets to describing actual martial arts poses. For instance, after a certain point in the game the PC gains the ability to practice stances (which are named after elements) by typing the name of the stance, like so:

>earth You are not in combat at the moment, but you rehearse the stance anyway.

You quickly get into the earth stance:

You balance your weight evenly upon both legs, both slightly bent to keep your stance grounded. Your right hand is held out in front of you, fingers open, palm facing directly forward. Your left hand is also held palm open, but at your side - facing forwards at a slight downward angle.

Now, I can carefully read through this description, act it out a little bit, and get a pretty clear mental picture, but I have to really stop and work at it. However, if a diagram of the stance had been included, I’d understand it much more quickly, and the flow of the game would continue far more smoothly. This isn’t a complaint, but rather a hopeful suggestion. Even without graphics, Mingsheng draws some lovely pictures.

Rating: 8.3

The Orion Agenda by Ryan Weisenberger [Comp04]

IFDB page: The Orion Agenda
Final placement: 6th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

I’m greatly heartened to see how many games in this comp have done a thorough job of implementing all first-level nouns (that is, all the nouns found in object and room descriptions.) This sort of thing was pretty much absent in the Infocom era, and now it’s practically de rigueur, which I think is definitely a change for the better. It’s much easier to get immersed in a world where the objects are solid and observable rather than just a two-dimensional mirage.

By that measure, The Orion Agenda is implemented quite well. All nouns are well-covered, sometimes to a surprising degree. For instance, the intro uses a typically offhand-sounding SF metaphor when it says, “the fog comes rolling over my memory like a morning on Tantus 7.” Later on in the game, you find a reference source in which you can look up further information on Tantus 7 and its famous fogs, even though the planet plays no other role in the game beyond that initial metaphor. I love this kind of thing. A virtual world just feels so much more real when such care has been put into connecting its people, places, and things, and I’m thrilled to see that comprehensive coverage of the nouns is turning into an IF standard.

Now, it’s time to move on to the next level: verbs. Here, I’m sorry to say, TOA fares less well. Several times throughout the game, I was stymied by actions whose concepts had only been implemented in one way, even though there were other equally reasonable ways to express them. For example:

>thank rebecca [That's not a verb I recognise.]

>rebecca, thanks "You're welcome!" she says.

This is shallow implementation. Too shallow. Even more vexing, these problems were generally connected to puzzles, which made for problems that were maybe not quite guess-the-verb, but at least guess-the-syntax. The particular danger about this kind of shallowness is that when the first construction I use gets rejected, I tend to decide that the concept isn’t useful within the game (since it apparently hasn’t been implemented, see), and my chances of solving the puzzle on my own drop precipitously.

The worst instance of this in TOA was in the climactic scene, which calls for a particular command construction that, for whatever reason, is counter to the standard established by Infocom. Because I was using that old syntax, and because the game failed to recognize that the problem was with syntax rather than with content, I was actually typing the correct solution and was told that it was wrong. I hate that.

These kinds of verb and syntax problems are easily remedied with a round or two of testing and careful attention to the various ways people try to express what they want to do, and I’m hopeful that TOA undergoes this treatment, because the game is well worth experiencing. It’s got a fun potboiler story, though its plot twist is heavily clued and rather predictable to begin with, so I was a little chagrined when the game pretended that I hadn’t put the pieces together until the climactic scene. The writing is mostly strong, transparent prose, with only the occasional gaffe drawing attention. Probably the main quibble I have with it is that it chooses to call natives of Orion “Orionions”, which to my ear is an exceedingly awkward construction. “Orionese”, “Orionites”, or even “Orioners” would have been much better.

I also enjoyed the flashback structure of the narrative — it did an excellent job of bringing a lot of emphasis and drama to the endgame. However, one way that the structure worked at cross purposes to the game is that there’s a set of optional… not puzzles, exactly, but story enhancement challenges. Basically, if you’re particularly nice to a certain NPC, you might get a slightly better winning ending. However, the initial scene gave me reason to distrust that NPC, and consequently I was only as friendly to her as seemed appropriate for the PC’s professional demeanor. When the game later upbraided me for not being nice enough, I felt a little jerked around.

Shoot. This is turning out to be one of those reviews where I genuinely enjoy the game, but I can’t stop pointing out things that bugged me. So let me list a couple more and then I’m done, I promise. First, I’m not sure that it served any useful purpose to tell the story in a first-person voice. It seems to me that there are plenty of good reasons to break from the traditional IF convention of second-person voice, but this game didn’t have any of them. The PC was pretty conventional, with nothing unusual about his point of view, and the game itself didn’t use the distancing effect of first-person to any interesting purpose, so in the end it was just jarring.

Secondly, some parts of the milieu seemed a bit derivative or lazily imagined to me. For instance, the game describes the PC’s employer thus: SciCorps: The galaxy-spanning mega-corporation that is in charge of secretly monitoring promising new alien species that dot our corner of the universe, all in the hopes of one day inviting them to join the League of Sentient Systems. So wait, I’m confused. SciCorps is a “mega-corporation,” yet its interest in alien species is not as markets, product producers, or servicers, but rather to act on behalf of some governmental-sounding body? So is it a corporation or an extension of some kind of galaxy government? If it isn’t seeking profit, what does the word “corporation” even mean in this context?

Maybe they’re fulfilling a government contract or something, but that’s far from clear, especially when this “first contact” stuff sounds like their main function. Another example is the translator earpiece that somehow also translates the things you speak as well. Even the main philosophy of SciCorps seems like a warmed-over version of Star Trek’s Prime Directive.

Okay, I promised I’d stop and now I’m stopping. Despite my litany of complaints, I had a good time playing The Orion Agenda. Many of its problems are easily fixable, and I really hope that the game sees a post-competition edition. I recommend the game, but I’d recommend waiting a while for that post-comp release first.

Rating: 8.4

Magocracy by A. Joseph Rheaume [Comp04]

IFDB page: Magocracy
Final placement: 18th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

I don’t struggle with drugs, alcohol, overeating, gambling, or any of the other myriad addictions that flesh is heir to, except one: computer games. Specifically, computerized role-playing games, or CRPGs. Other kinds of games, IF included, don’t have this effect on me, but when it comes to CRPGs, something in my brain just craves more, more, more. I have to keep it in check, and when I notice myself playing to the exclusion of anything productive, I have to stop for a while. Even two years after buying the superhero CRPG Freedom Force, the desire to play it still gnaws at me all the time, though of course I’m now playing a heavily modded version, so it hasn’t been the exact same thing over and over again.

In recognition of this addiction, I’ve steered well clear of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs. In fact, I’m aware of the existence of an excellent superhero MMORPG (City of Heroes) in the same way that an alcoholic is aware of an open bottle of gin across the room. I’m not alone in my predicament — there’s a good reason why EverQuest was quickly nicknamed EverCrack.

But what is that reason? Why do CRPGs have such a potent effect on me when things like IF, Minesweeper, and arcade games don’t? For me, I think the answer boils down to infinite variety, gradual advancement, and creative outlet. When an IF game is over, it’s over — some games have limited replayability value, but for the most part, the story is the story. CRPGs, on the other hand, introduce a sufficient number of random and strategic elements that even within the broad outlines of a plot, I can have a very different experience each time through the game. That variety encourages repetition, because I never get to feel “finished.”

Secondly, CRPGs allow the PC to grow in power and prestige, with more and more options available as the game goes on, and I think this feature taps into something deep in the wiring of my brain. Maybe it’s just the human drive to accumulate power, or maybe it’s the little charge of victory, similar to what a gambling addict feels after a win. There’s something overwhelmingly seductive about the feeling of progress, especially when that progress is clearly marked with symbols like “level.” The feeling of “leveling up” feeds an ancient part of my nature, which is no doubt why levels are designed into many arcade games.

Finally, unlike many other kinds of games, CRPGs offer a great deal of creative outlet, from the makeup of your character to the way you handle the game world’s obstacles. In a CRPG with a sufficient degree of simulationism, there can be dozens or even hundreds of ways to address any given threat or roadblock, and it’s hard (for me) to be satisfied with trying just one, even after I’m successful. With these three features, CRPGs have sunk their hooks into me quite deeply.

Which brings me, finally, to Magocracy. The readme for this game states upfront that it “is not like most Interactive Fiction games,” and that’s true — it’s really more CRPG than IF, and it deploys some of the aspects of the CRPG pretty effectively. It provides quite a bit of variety, though it’s not quite infinite, and some of the typical CRPG elements are missing. There are no randomly generated monsters, for instance — just predetermined monsters and adversaries who wander randomly around the map and engage the PC in combat. However, even this amount of randomness is sufficient to vary the experience of Magocracy significantly from one session to the next, and the variety works in its favor.

Secondly, though the game doesn’t use traditional levels, it definitely provides powerful markers of advancement. Upon conquering an enemy, the PC usually stands to gain better protection, increased abilities, new attacks, and sometimes even a superpower or two. Every time I upgraded my weapon or learned a new spell, the addict part of my brain was panting, “yeah, yeah.” As for creative outlet, that’s probably where Magocracy is weakest. Many aspects of the experience are predetermined, including the PC’s character and initial abilities, and consequently, the game won’t stand up to all that many replays. However, there is some room for cleverness when it comes to the fighting, particularly once the PC has gained some power.

Perhaps luckily for me, Magocracy also contains some flaws. The worst of these is a design that sometimes drains all the fun out of the game. There are a number of situations that put the PC into an inescapable bind, and most of these aren’t immediately obvious as dead ends. Consequently, I was several times forced to restore back to an earlier point, even after having achieved some key victories. The frustration of these setbacks well outweighs the buzz of gradual advancement, and in fact makes me want to quit playing rather than try to get all my victories back. I would have greatly appreciated a more IF-like way to get out of the traps through nothing but my own cleverness. Instead, I finally had to break out the hints, only to learn that the game had screwed me and I needed to restore. There’s at least one sudden-death ending, too, though this isn’t nearly as bad since I could just UNDO. In fact, the turn-based nature of IF and the availability of UNDO made combat cheats too easy, though after a number of random deaths I felt a lot more justified.

There are also a number of minor bugs and mechanical errors in the game — nothing show-stopping, but always distracting. Along the same lines, Magocracy sometimes fails to properly account for some of the secondary properties of its various items and spells. For instance, at one point I was protected with a shield of light, but when I found myself in a dark place, I still couldn’t see. Last of all, the game doesn’t seem to have a proper ending. After I gained all the points, it printed out some denouement text and THE END, after which it displayed “[TADS-1003: numeric value required]” and went back to the prompt, leaving me to wander around the castle as if I’d just finished Myst. Overall, Magocracy is a pretty fair text CRPG, and I had a good time with it, but I don’t see myself becoming addicted to it anytime soon. Which reminds me, I was going to customize a Freedom Force mission to pit the X-Men against the Brood…

Rating: 8.3

Blink by Ian Waddell [Comp04]

IFDB page: Blink
Final placement: 21st place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Blink claims to have multiple paths. According to its ABOUT text, there are “several instances throughout the game where you can quickly switch to a different path by saying something different or doing something else.” This is simply not true, at least not as I understand and define the idea of multiple paths. Yes, there are a couple of conversations whose outcomes can be altered by various menu choices. However, none of these alterations have any impact whatsoever on the story, which is quite linear. There aren’t even any points where the game offers more than one goal at a time — everything is very much on rails, and any deviations from the path result in either gentle rebukes from the parser or a little bit of scenery description.

I know this, because after one trip through the game, I went through it five more times looking for the alleged paths, only to find myself always in the same sequence of scenes, each of which has only one exit. Finally I ran it through TXD and looked at all the game text, and sure enough, I’d pretty much seen the whole thing. The experience led me to think about what we mean by “multiple paths.” In a sense, there are multiple paths through even the tiniest IF game. Even in an Inform shell game, you can, say, SING and then PRAY, or PRAY and then SING. Strictly speaking, these are two different paths. However, since both of them simply result in default parser responses, neither of which affect the game world or the PC, they are functionally equivalent. That’s the way Blink is — sure, there are different ways to go through it, but none of those differences are significant. The game’s story, and its ending, are identical no matter what you do, and thus I would contend that it only has one meaningful path.

Even that path is a short one — Blink is a small game, and that’s another one of its problems. Not that smallness is a problem in IF per se, of course, but Blink‘s main project seems to be to provoke an emotional response in the player, and it’s just too bare to provide the necessary connection. The specifics are too spoilery, but at its base, the game presents a PC who is confronted with the specter of loss, and thus must reevaluate some of his past decisions. However, when we barely know any of these characters, all they can be is unadorned archetypes, and those aren’t enough to create character identification. Plenty of affecting stories boil down to something like “boy meets girl, boy loses girl”, but if the actual story is just those six words, then it’s not going to affect anyone. Of course, Blink isn’t this extreme, but it’s still insufficient in the end, and consequently its methods feel hamfisted and overbearing.

Additionally, there are a few places in the game that are hampered by awkward diction or bad coding, and in a game this size, those problems loom large. For instance, there’s a conversation that starts with a question, and then when you try to TALK TO the character, the parser tells you that you have nothing to say, even as the conversation continues. An example of the diction problems is the creek is described as the “epicentre of the entire forest.” Aside from the peculiarly British spelling from what is clearly an American PC, “epicenter” is a term that refers specifically to the center of an earthquake’s shock waves — it’s not just a synonym for “center.”

Still, there are things to like about Blink. The implementation is thorough, with all first-level verbs implemented carefully. The plot’s rails are constructed well — that is, whenever the game prevents the PC from taking a divergent path, it generally provides a pretty good reason. The story coheres well enough, and I liked the fact that the PC begins geriatric, and then progresses backwards through his life via flashback. In fact, there are the seeds of an excellent game in Blink. If it really had offered multiple paths, it could have been a compelling presentation of difficult choices, a la Tapestry. Even if it had remained on rails but its story and characters had been better fleshed out, it might have made a pretty moving character study. In its current state, though it’s nicely implemented and it hangs together okay, it feels falsely advertised, and there’s just not enough meat on its bones.

Rating: 5.5

The Big Scoop by Johan Berntsson [Comp04]

IFDB page: The Big Scoop
Final placement: 13th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

And so the Great Conversation System Experiments continue. The Big Scoop has found a way to combine the open-ended ASK X ABOUT Y system with the focus of Emily Short‘s topic-based systems — the game still uses the ASK ABOUT command diction, but there’s also a TOPICS verb available, which tells you most of the topics you can plug into the formula. As a bonus, it also tells you what you can plug into TELL ABOUT. This system intrigued me, but I ended up feeling a little disappointed with it.

At first, I was excited by the prospect of not having to play hunt-the-noun, but my reaction upon seeing a list of nouns to try was that I needed to try them all. Immersion drained quickly as an exchange between two characters turned into an administrative task, and not a very rewarding one at that, since the NPC generally only had a line or two at most about any given topic. Moreover, Scoop was implemented deeply enough that the list included most of the verbs I would have thought of, but I never needed to try to think of them, which lessened my engagement with the game.

In a way, Scoop‘s system is the worst of both worlds. It retains the cumbersome ASK ABOUT form but removes all of the feeling of mystery and possibility that comes along with thinking of new things to ask about; it provides Short’s unwieldy TOPICS list, but loses all her handy abbreviations and her menu options for conversational gambits. In addition, the list sometimes shows topics that the PC has no way of knowing about yet, which effectively constitute plot spoilers. So in the end, I found Scoop‘s conversation system to be a failed experiment, albeit a noble one.

Happily, there’s better news about the rest of the game. The Big Scoop has an engaging story that starts off with a dramatic situation that could have come right from a Hollywood thriller. The PC awakens, disheveled and disoriented, in a friend’s apartment. Stumbling into the kitchen, she finds her friend’s dead body, and a voice on her cellphone says that the police are on their way; she’s about to be framed for murder.

It’s not easy to escape from this grim situation, but when she does, the perspective shifts: now the PC is a reporter investigating the murder, and it becomes clear that the first scene was simply a swollen prologue. This structure worked well for me — the urgency of the initial scene carried over nicely into the rest of the game, and having played the victim of the framing, I never had any doubts that she was innocent, which helped me buy into the reporter’s quest to clear the victim’s name.

In addition to a good story and an inventive structure, Scoop also sports some wonderfully deep implementation. It provides descriptions for most all first-level objects, and it frequently surprised me with what verbs those objects could handle. For instance, when the PC awakens in room with a red stain on the carpet, I tried something a little unusual:

>smell stain The sweet smell makes you feel sick.

The game was completely prepared for that command, and used the results to further the prologue’s ominous mood. Bravo. Finally, Scoop does some nice work with NPC interaction. This is perhaps no surprise from the author of The Temple, a Comp02 game whose best feature was its main NPC, who behaved like an actual person and worked as a team with the PC. The NPC in this game fills a similar role, and the added bonus is that since she serves as the PC in the prologue, her character comes that much more alive.

Sadly, there are a few things that mar the experience, the first of which is Scoop‘s sometimes wobbly English. This game was apparently simultaneously developed in Swedish, and there are some rough patches in the translation:

>ask cop about blood "He bleed over the whole place," the policeman says grumpily.

Like most of the English errors in Scoop, this one could be down to a simple typo, which makes it much stronger than The Temple was, not to mention far better than some of the translated games I’ve already played in this comp. However, the accumulation of these blunders, along with telltale missteps like calling an office break room a “breakout area,” make the writing feel just a bit off-kilter.

Similarly, though the game has clearly been extensively tested, I still found a few bugs and missing verbs. The worst one, unsurprisingly, involves an object that functions as a rope — the game has difficulty keeping track of just where this object resides once it’s been tied to one thing. Finally, Scoop suffers from an occasional lack of clarity. The most glaring example is in the game’s climactic scene, in which something critical happens that is never actually described, and must instead be inferred from subsequent events. It seems clear that this lacuna isn’t part of some artistic effect, but is rather just an oversight, and quite a severe one at that. Still, the good far outweighs the bad in this game — it tried something new in its conversation system, and it kept me interested with a compelling story and canny puzzles. I enjoyed my time with it.

Rating: 8.7

Trading Punches by Mike Snyder as Sidney Merk [Comp04]

IFDB page: Trading Punches
Final placement: 10th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Trading Punches is a lovely piece of work, with a good story and a fine design. It’s also got some flaws, so let me tackle those first, and then I’ll move on to the loveliness. The first problem I had with the game may be more just an idiosyncratic reaction: I found much of its prose rough going. It’s not that the writing was error-laden or terribly awkward — it’s just that I kept finding myself wanting to skim over it, and having to concentrate to actually read it. The problem was most severe in long room descriptions and infodumps, of which the game has many. I’m not sure whether the prose was just too dense for me, or whether it was some question of style, or what. I know that’s an unhelpful reaction, but it was my reaction nonetheless.

One definite problem with the style is that the game goes way overboard on a particular gimmick for making things sound SFnal: word-mating. Thus, the PC wanders around a landscape of “mossgrass” and “elmpines”, watching the “peacrows” and then later drinking some “brandyrum” and “whiskeygin”. Yeesh! A little of this strategy goes a long way, and Trading Punches had way more than a little; it sounded pretty silly in short order. Finally, though the game was obviously tested, a few significant bugs made it into this version. For one thing, certain commands, like “score”, draw no response at all from the game. Even more seriously, there’s a class of locations with one exit that consistently thrusts the player into a formless void from which there is no escape. At first, I thought this effect might be intentional, but further experimentation demonstrated that it’s almost certainly accidental.

So yes, Trading Punches has some problems, but I still ended my play session feeling very happy with it. Why? Well, for starters, I enjoyed the story quite a bit, and aside from the excessive word-mating, the setting felt nicely realized as well. In general, the plot and the game-world felt reminiscent of the work of Orson Scott Card, which I like very much. I don’t know if the author of Trading Punches is familiar with Card, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that influence on this game. It’s got plenty of Card’s hallmarks: bitter rivalry within a family, affecting the larger world and universe on a grand scale; a gifted protagonist with a strong moral center who has a significant impact by helping (or trying to help) others; and strong familial bonds offsetting the deep familial schisms elsewhere.

The aliens in the game feel original and well-imagined, and lend themselves to symbolic use as well. I also appreciated the design of the game — its central story of sibling rivalry is told through chapters that don’t hammer the point too hard, but still make it quite clear how the enmity grows between the two brothers. By skipping forward in time to the most important incidents in their relationship, the game develops the character of both the PC and his brother quite satisfyingly. Situating the chapters within a frame story works very well to knit the disparate pieces, and the game does an excellent job of weaving revelations about the frame story into the content of the chapters and vice versa. Unfortunately, two hours wasn’t quite enough time for me to get through it, partly because of my denseness around one of the puzzles. However, a glance at the walkthrough shows that I was most of the way through, and I felt regret at having to stop the game and write this review, which is clear evidence that the story had me hooked.

Even aside from the story and the design (and its bugs and prose tics notwithstanding), Trading Punches boasts an impressive amount of craft. Especially noteworthy are the game’s cool multimedia components. Each chapter (and each return to the frame story) begins with a full-screen graphic. These graphics are quite lovely, and do an excellent job of establishing the landscape. I found this especially helpful as I struggled with the dense prose’s attempts at scene-setting. The illustrations look as though they were created in some kind of graphics rendering software, and consequently have a bit of a Myst-like feel to them, which is a good thing.

Also effective is the game’s music, a synthesized soundtrack which loops constantly in the background. The music is generally quite effective at enhancing the mood of a particular scene, though some of the musical pieces don’t have enough melody or complexity to withstand the constant looping. No matter how good an eight-bar tune is, it’s bound to get a little grating on the hundredth repetition. The game itself is quite solid, too — it’s clear that a whole lot of effort went into this project. Aside from the few bugs I mentioned in the first paragraph, I found the code pleasantly error-free, and the same goes for the writing. The puzzles worked well for me, and the game did an excellent job of providing cues to help me know what I ought to try next. One item in particular was not only quite well-implemented, but also provided an excellent emotional through-line for the story.

Trading Punches still has a few details to clean up, and the word-mating has to go, but I’d recommend it without hesitation, especially to fans of dramatic fantasy games like Worlds Apart.

Rating: 9.2

The Realm by Michael Sheldon [Comp04]

IFDB page: The Realm
Final placement: 27th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

The Realm feels like an old-school IF throwback. I mean, for one thing, it’s about a knight on a quest to obtain the head of a dragon. It’s set in the usual faux-medieval milieu — a castle, a king, a tavern, and so forth. There are the typical old-school IF anachronisms, such as a monk who gets a “Habits’R’Us” catalog, and library with a book by Charles Perrault, who lived several centuries after any knights were running around any castles. Then there are the mimesis-breaking in-game instructions, in the form of a pamphlet object that teaches players about the basic commands of IF.

Oh, and let’s not forget the red herrings. The Realm delights in offering tons of puzzling objects and blocked directions that serve no purpose in the game but to send the player spinning off on futile chases. Most of the puzzles consist of giving an NPC something they want, and getting something in return from them, so I suppose a few red herrings are probably necessary to keep player interest alive.

Still, the old school has its charms. Once you stop expecting an interesting story or a logically consistent world, The Realm can be a pleasant place to spend an hour or two. It attends to some implementation details well; animals can be petted and doors can be knocked on, which I greatly appreciate. A couple of the NPCs have some funny shtick, and the ending was fun, if a bit predictable. The red herrings can get a little frustrating — I often found myself thinking of alternate solutions that would work perfectly with the game objects, but that weren’t implemented because those objects were meant only to mislead.

On the other hand, according to the walkthrough, one puzzle has a very entertaining alternate solution that never even occurred to me. The description is never going to win any writing awards, but it’s not overly confusing either. There was one really annoying “guess the noun” puzzle, but the rest were okay, though not terribly inventive. I guess it sounds like I’m damning the game with faint praise, and maybe I am — the sum of my feelings about The Realm are that it was inoffensive and enjoyable enough, which is not exactly an enthusiastic endorsement. Then again, in the IF Comp, “inoffensive and enjoyable enough” can be a very good thing, since plenty of comp games fail to achieve one or both of those marks.

What did bring the game down was the too-frequent clumsiness of its prose. Comma splices seem to be a particular problem, as in the second sentence of the game’s introduction:

Realizing this you become suddenly very alert, rushing on your clothes you spring to your feet.

These two sentences are fused like tragically conjoined twins, so let’s try a little surgery. The first thing that needs to happen is that the comma should be replaced with a period. However, even on their own, each clause would have some problems. The comma after “alert”, whose job we just outsourced, should migrate over to the end of “this”, since “realizing this” and “you suddenly become alert” are two separate pieces of verbal logic.

As for the second clause, “rushing on your clothes” brings to mind running a naked 100-yard dash on a track made of trousers. The problem is the preposition: you may rush into your clothes, but you don’t rush on them. In addition, “rushing” isn’t the most felicitous verb to use there — perhaps “hurrying” instead. That second clause could also take a lesson from what we did to the first, separating the sequential logical pieces with a comma. So, as they come out of anesthesia, here are our newly split twins:

Realizing this, you become suddenly very alert. Hurrying into your clothes, you spring to your feet.

I’m happy to announce that the operation was a success. The patients will live, although it may not be a very normal life — they’re too similar and too close together, leading to a choppy flow. Still, they can’t help it — they are twins, after all. There were a few little problems in the code, too — the occasional hiccuped bit of text and so forth. Ironing out these kinds of problems will help The Realm be the best old-school throwback it can be.

Rating: 6.3

Who Created That Monster? by N.B. Horvath [Comp04]

IFDB page: Who Created That Monster?
Final placement: 25th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Who Created That Monster seems to want to be several different things all at once, but it doesn’t really succeed at any of them. At first, I thought the game would be some kind of trenchant political satire or commentary. After all, it’s set in Iraq, 22 years in the future — what better premise to examine the complex situation in Iraq today? Indeed, there are some moments that seem to be clearly satirical, such as this statement by an American TV commentator in the game:

“For the longest time, the Arab world insisted on calling America ‘The Great Satan.’ What’s really insulting about that is the way it lumps the entire United States together into one monolithic entity. In reality the US is a nation of 400 million people, with a wide variety of ethnicities and points of view. Keep that in mind, Arab world.”

That’s certainly satire, and not the most subtle satire at that. But aside from a few moments like these, the game seems oddly reluctant to actually adopt a point of view. I kept waiting for some kind of twist that never came.

For instance, throughout the game, the PC finds himself confronted by terrorists, and he must kill them or be killed by them. These threats are announced with the sentence, “A terrorist enters the area,” as if the PC can immediately identify an “evildoer” by sight, even in a world where everyone, including investigative reporters, carries around an assault rifle. I kept expecting some revelation from the game — maybe the PC accidentally kills someone he thinks is a terrorist but who is actually a national leader, or maybe someone identifies the PC as a terrorist and starts taking pot shots at him — something to break down the PC’s painfully simplistic and artificial point-of-view. But no. The terrorists are never developed into anything but simple wandering monsters. They might as well be orcs.

So okay, forget political commentary. Maybe WCTM is just supposed to be an exciting science fiction thriller. Here, too, it misses the mark, this time due to its unenthusiastic writing. Here’s a perfect emblem:

>x mysterious note It looks like an ordinary mysterious note to me.

Yawn. If the game can’t be bothered to provide some detail about the objects in its world, how am I supposed to become immersed in that world? Granted, there are some nice touches, like the surveillance spheres that float everywhere, or the occasional holographic advertisements that pop up in front of the PC’s eyes. These fillips are sf clichés by now, but they still provide a nice futuristic feel.

Then again, some of what might be intended as science-fictional is so underexplained as to appear magical. For instance, when you shoot a terrorist, it vanishes “in a puff of smoke.” Now, this might be the result of some kind of advanced disintegrator bullet technology or something, but even if it is, the game never mentions that. Instead, the result is more or less equivalent to what happens to the troll in Zork (albeit less compellingly described), which only adds to the feeling that the terrorists are lazily imagined wandering monsters.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the game is the way that it occasionally decorates the action with a blurb about the past or future history of Iraq. Even these, though, suffer from prosaism:

*** 1920 . The history of Iraq begins when British mandate is declared. ***

What? This statement makes it sound like the British issued a mandate in 1920 stating “Today the history of Iraq shall begin!” We need a little more.

The satirical and speculative elements fall away from WCTM like flakes of dry skin, leaving only a bog-standard IF “collect the gems” game. Sadly, even this falls prey to some truly bizarre design decisions. For instance, there are four different buildings in the game, all of which have the same basement. Not just four identical locations — one location, to which the DOWN command leads from all four buildings. No explanation whatsoever is offered for this behavior, but it’s not a bug. In fact, one of the puzzles hinges on this extremely strange geography.

In another spot, the game is terribly heavy-handed with its cueing, robbing players of the opportunity to put the pieces together themselves. Finally, WCTM seems to have trouble keeping track of what and where its objects are. A manila dossier becomes, in some scenes, a green dossier. A building is reported as being to the southwest when it’s actually to the northwest. Between its bugginess, its bizarre design, and its apparent unwillingness to put much craft into its world-building or its futurism, WCTM ends up being a pretty dull game.

Rating: 4.6

Goose, Egg, Badger by Brian Rapp [Comp04]

IFDB page: Goose, Egg, Badger
Final placement: 12th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

One of my favorite things about interactive fiction is its ability to surprise me. Not only can IF deliver all of the surprises available to static fiction — plot twists, unexpected turns of phrase, and so forth — but it can also delight me by understanding a command that I never thought it would, or by altering its internal objects in a way that casts new light on the story, and sometimes on the medium itself. Goose, Egg, Badger offers both kinds of surprises in abundance. The former are difficult to talk about, since I don’t want to reveal any spoilers, so let me focus on the latter for a bit.

GEB kept on thrilling me with all the things it understood. Over and over, I’d try a kooky verb and find that the game handled it with a response that was usually funny and occasionally even useful. It’s clear to me that a whole lot of effort was poured into expanding Inform‘s standard library of verbs, and the result is a parser that kept making me smile and say, “Wow!” In addition, many standard Inform library responses have been replaced with whimsical substitutes, to great effect.

Besides the good parsing, GEB introduces a handy goal-tracking device, similar to the to-do list from Shade: throughout the game, an “urge” remains in the PC’s inventory. Examining the urge will give a clue as to what the player’s current goal ought to be. The innovation works well in this game, though I found it to be slightly buggy — on occasion, it seemed to be urging me to do something I’d already done. In addition, its contents are sometimes too vague. This problem may be unavoidable when some of the puzzles involve performing a wholly unexpected actions rather than combining mundane actions to achieve a desired result, but I found it sometimes vexing nonetheless.

In fact, the main problem I had with GEB was that while its implementation is terrifically robust, I often found its writing a little insufficient. One stylistic choice that didn’t work too well for me is that GEB changes all room descriptions after the first visit. This approach can work well to help characterize a PC who is very familiar with her surroundings, as is the PC of GEB, but I found myself floundering without exit lists, and frequently checked the scrollback because of the nagging feeling I’d missed something. Even with a PC who knows the lay of the land, a game’s room descriptions should still meet the minimum standards for IF: mention of all important nouns and exits.

Similarly, if you embed clues in your prose, that prose should be repeatable without too much trouble. This is one of those rules to which there are a bunch of exceptions, but I what I found in GEB is that occasionally an important bit of information is smuggled inside a description that prints once and once only; when the hints intimated that I should have seized upon this clue, I felt a little indignant. One other area in which the game is a little under-described is in its depiction of certain NPC actions. In particular, there’s an NPC who follows the PC around, but this action is never mentioned by the game beyond the fact that if you do a second LOOK in the current room, you’ll find that the NPC is there with you. This should have been made a little clearer.

This obliqueness affects some of the puzzles — in fact, there’s one object on which the game offers so little information, it’s a bit of a puzzle just to figure out what the object is. Despite this, many of the puzzles are quite nice indeed. There some arbitrariness here and there, and every so often a situation will come clear out of left field, but I can’t deny that I thoroughly enjoyed winding my way through the game. GEB rewards experimentation, and thanks to the deep implementation, there are a lot of things to try, some of which may succeed in totally unforeseen ways.

In addition, the writing does an excellent job of balancing humor and scattered surreality — I particularly enjoyed that the ape in the game has a theme song, and that the SING command prompts the PC to sing that theme song. Best of all, though, is the extremely clever conceptual gimmick at the heart of the game. It was subtle enough that I got through and enjoyed the whole game without recognizing it, but interesting enough that once I figured it out, it opened up new vistas for me. I definitely recommend playing this game, and I recommend not typing SECRETS until you’ve played through once. Then play it again — if you’re like me, you’ll be too entertained not to.

Rating: 8.8