Comp99, >INVENTORY, Page 4

Six Stories by Neil K. Guy [Comp99]

IFDB page: Six Stories
Final placement: 3rd place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Six Stories bills itself as “multimedia interactive fiction”, and the billing is no exaggeration. Last year’s Arrival began to take advantage of the graphics and sound capabilities of HTML TADS, and Six Stories takes that development the next step. The game includes photographs (both of scenery and objects), graphical backgrounds, and voice-over narration. Inclusion of multimedia elements always makes me a little nervous, because it’s an ambitious decision that, it seems to me, takes a great risk of making the work look amateurish. Nonetheless, Six Stories‘ multimedia components combine to fashion an IF experience that is atmospheric and powerful in ways heretofore untouched by text adventures. Particularly impressive is the introduction, which is a knockout. The game begins as you are driving your small car over treacherous roads through the mountains of southern British Columbia. Without warning, a blizzard overtakes you. The blinding headlights of an oncoming truck stab through the darkness, and you dim your brights in courtesy. The truck roars by, and when you pull the lever to turn the brights back on, the lever comes off in your hand, extinguishing all light. Your car veers out of control and plows into the snowbank by the side of the road. You turn the key to restart the stalled engine — no response. Even all by itself, this is a terrifically arresting concept with which to begin a story. When the game delivers it on a dark background, a voice-over narrating as the screen displays slides of the car, the road, and the crash, the experience feels like it could be part of any commercial adventure game released today.

It’s not perfect, of course. The voice-over feels a little rushed, and the narrator’s Canadian accent is sometimes a bit distracting. In general, it’s clear that the voice-over portions of the game, while quite good for amateur work, were clearly done by amateurs rather than professional actors. On the other hand, the photography (at least to my untrained eye) looked quite accomplished, and the other graphical elements, such as the backgrounds and the status line, were very well chosen. For a game that isn’t a product of a mainstream company, Six Stories‘ graphics and sound maintain a remarkably high level of quality. In particular, some of the photos accompanying the game’s eponymous “stories” were just gorgeous. Multimedia represents a daunting challenge to the prospective IF developer, because it adds whole new layers of artistic forms, each of which could sink the game if it’s not up to snuff. IF writers already face the difficult demands of combining quality writing and design with good programming; as difficult as it is to both write well and program well, how much more difficult then to be also a good photographer, a good actor, a good sound technician, and to be skilled with all the software necessary to get these things in digital forms? I can’t imagine we’ll see too many multimedia text games that approach the level of Six Stories, simply because not only must it have been a hell of a lot of work to take all the pictures, record all the sounds, do the appropriate tweaking with Photoshop, SoundEdit, etc., and write the code that gets all these things going together, but I can’t see many developers doing all these things as well as Guy manages to do them.

All this fulminating about the multimedia aspects of the game probably makes it sound like I’m trying to avoid talking about the writing. Rest assured I’m not. Six Stories is a rather brief piece of work, but it is very well-written. The descriptions are moody and memorable, and the stories it tells create a wonderful air of folk tale while at the same time maintaining a refreshing originality. The game’s one puzzle is very clever, though one part of it did feel like a bit of a “guess-the-verb” to me. Here’s a hint: if you’re stuck, you’re probably not being specific enough about a particular action. The whole thing feels more or less like an excuse to put together some impressive visuals and oral storytelling, but the result is no less moving for all that it seems rather arbitrary. Six Stories is one of the biggest downloads of the competition (it may be the biggest — I haven’t checked), but it’s worth every second.

Rating: 9.3

Calliope by Jason McIntosh [Comp99]

IFDB page: Calliope
Final placement: 23rd place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

I had a sinking feeling when I read the “info” text for Calliope. Some dreaded phrases were dropped: “My prime goal in writing Calliope was to get comfortable with the Inform language…”, “…autobiographical portrait of myself confusedly hacking away at a going-nowhere Inform program…” The whole thing sounded uncomfortably like it was describing a combination of my two least favorite competition entry genres, the “I wrote this game to learn Inform” game and the “this is an IF version of my house” game. Previous entries of this nature have, on the whole, not been stellar, so after I read the description of Calliope, my expectations were decidedly low. But I guess that’s the beauty of the Low Expectation Theory, isn’t it? Because once I expected Calliope to stink, I discovered that it’s not such a bad little game after all. Sure, it’s a trifle, but that’s OK. It’s done reasonably well, is not redolent with references only the author could understand, and its idea is (I can’t believe I’m saying this) actually pretty clever. Yes, despite the fact that you begin the game sitting at your desk, in your apartment, on your chair, staring at your computer and your proposed competition entry therein, Calliope turns out to be pretty fun rather than really boring. It seems that exhaustion is approaching for you, the prospective author, and that your previous efforts whacking away at that competition entry have been rather uninspired. But the Muse (the game’s title is a whopping hint) can strike at unexpected times…

One of the things that makes the game an unexpected pleasure to play is that unlike most of its learning Inform/house simulation brethren, it is relatively free of errors in both coding and writing. The prose is nothing special, but it did give me a vivid picture of the setting, through little details like your desk showing its age “by the camouflage patterns of divers dark beverage stains covering… its cheap white Formica surface…” “Divers” looked like a typo to me, but something in the dim recesses of my brain is suggesting that it may just be a culturally specific spelling of “diverse.” Actually, what it really looks like is a Renaissance spelling, but since my wife is a grad student in Renaissance lit., the boundaries tend to blur for me. The game’s one puzzle makes sense and is well-clued, and its multiple endings are enough fun that I went back and played through all of them. Many first games feel like prologue, and Calliope is no exception. Where it differs from the pack, though, is that the prologue it provides is promising and exciting. I’d be very interested in seeing a full-length game (or even a full-length competition entry) by the author based on the ideas presented in Calliope. Heck, I wouldn’t mind seeing three such games. Jason McIntosh shows enough promise in Calliope that his next release should be highly anticipated.

Of course, none of this means that the game is worth keeping long. You’ll probably spend a few minutes noodling around, a few more solving the puzzle, and the rest of your time will go to replaying through to see the various endings. Perhaps if you’re really dedicated, you’ll try out the author’s suggestions (provided in the walkthrough) for all the various ways to lose the game. The whole thing shouldn’t take much more than a half-hour, after which Calliope goes into the recycle bin. These “short-short” games are becoming a more and more prominent competition trend. They make sure to meet the “two-hour” rule by ducking far under it — so far, in fact, that you can exhaust most of their options in a quarter of that time. The first time I remember seeing a comp entry of this ilk was Jay Goemmer’s E-MAILBOX in 1997, which consisted of about four moves and no puzzles. The trend continued in ’98 with games like In the Spotlight and Downtown Tokyo. Present Day. Now it’s so prevalent that out of the six comp games I’ve played so far, three are of the “short-short” variety. Of course, this may just be the vagaries of Comp99’s randomizer, but I suspect it goes a little deeper than that. Tiny games like this allow an author to get exposure and experience without making a huge time investment. They create an evolving example which pushes the author’s developing knowledge in an IF language, both by providing a space to try out examples and by nudging research into the manual to implement that latest and greatest idea. Perhaps most important of all, tiny IF makes for one more line in that all-important “Things I’ve finished” list. Thankfully for its audience, Calliope does it right.

Rating: 6.8

Pass The Banana by Admiral Jota [Comp99]

IFDB page: Pass the Banana
Final placement: 33rd place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Ooooo-kaaaaay. This must be what Sins Against Mimesis felt like to people who hadn’t read the IF newsgroups. Pass the Banana, near as I can tell, is a little collection of in-jokes originating on ifMUD. I’m basing this conclusion on the fact that the one location in the game is an Adventurer’s Lounge. I certainly recognize that from ifMUD. The three characters in the game are a giant flaming head, a monkey, and Melvin the Robot. These ring faint bells for me. I think I’ve seen some of those things on ifMUD once or twice. The nine objects were all, well, bananas. I’ve never seen any bananas on ifMUD, but hey, where there’s a monkey… I’m not a very frequent visitor to the MUD, though, so my associations with these things are very tenuous indeed. You start out the game with nine bananas, and the object seems to be to get rid of them all. As the title suggests, you can’t just drop them or throw them — you have to pass them to the other characters in the room. So I passed all my bananas and won the game with a rank of “Master of All Bananas”. I even managed to get that Last Lousy Point, one of the few things in the game whose joke made sense to me.

The game, for what it is, is well-implemented. There are a number of funny responses which require no inside knowledge to enjoy. For example, the room description mentions that seating is plentiful, but when you try to sit down, the game tells you “It may be plentiful, but it’s also only scenery.” Once the bananas get going, there are a myriad of random responses for each character, including an array of each for passing, receiving, and attempting to eat bananas, as well as whiling away the time. I found no bugs, at least not as far as I could tell, though in a situation like this it’s difficult to tell what a bug is. For example, this sentence kept popping up: “The giant flaming head 712 looks bored.” Now, that looks to me like some garbage numbers in the middle of the sentence, but then again the whole scenario is pretty meaningless to me, so for all I know 712 could be a reference to yet another ifMUD joke. Ho ho ho. I can say for certain that I saw no grammar or spelling errors in the game.

I did my riff on in-jokes when I wrote my review of Sins Against Mimesis in ’97, so I won’t revisit it in depth now. Basically, the good thing about in-jokes is that they strengthen the sense of community that comes from shared reference points. The bad thing is that, to an outsider to that community, the in-jokes feel like closed gates, whose guards snicker, “We know something you don’t know!” It was interesting to experience an in-jokey IF game from the perspective of the outsider, especially since I’m someone who considers myself a member of the IF community. The experience underscored my growing understanding of the effects that the ifMUD has had. The MUD has done a lot to bring the community together, including providing realtime hosting for the XYZZY awards and the Implementor’s Lunches. However, it has also attracted a subgroup of IF devotees, people who apparently hang out on the MUD for great swaths of time and discuss whatever comes to mind. This group has developed its own dynamic, its own references, and in some cases even its own cant. It’s not a group I ever see myself being a part of, since I don’t have a great deal of spare time as it is, and that which I devote to IF goes to SPAG or my own work in progress (or to writing long, boring reviews of tiny little comp games). Plus, the lure of hanging out on the MUD is so seductive that I know I can’t let myself get hooked, lest it become a huge suckhole of my time. So I guess I’m not going to get those in-jokes anytime soon. Perhaps someone could offer translation services, or provide a key with the explanations (such as they are) behind ifMUD in-jokes? If this doesn’t happen, I guess I’m doomed to further confusion, as mysterious missives continue to emanate from the Adventurer’s Lounge.

Rating: 2.5

[Postscript from 2020: Mike Roberts (the creator of TADS) wrote a hilarious review of this game for SPAG, including the memorable line, “Other games in this year’s competition might have more plot, more puzzles, or more elaborate settings, but none have more bananas.”]

A Day For Soft Food by Tod Levi [Comp99]

IFDB page: A Day for Soft Food
Final placement: 4th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Well, I suppose it was inevitable. Ever since the 1996 competition entry Ralph, which was narrated from the point of view of a family dog, the idea has been just sitting out there, waiting to be used. Actually, I’m surprised it took this long. But it’s finally here: a game written from the point of view of a family cat. As far as the writing goes, Soft Food actually does its job rather well. Its mood is quite different from that of Ralph — there is no jokey blundering about, no excretion gags. Instead, the tone is serious, even formal, as befits the dignified feline. Descriptions are well-turned; your owner is “the Provider”, the sofa is a “lumpy mountain”, cars are “glinting beasts.” The game also provides responses to most logical kitty verbs like “meow”, “purr”, and “jump on “. Unfortunately, the response to “purr” is “You’re not especially happy” — the game’s protagonist is not a contented cat. Its owner is suffering from an illness, and has been surly and unhelpful. The food bowl is empty, and the world outside deadly with oncoming traffic and a powerful Rival. Sickness, injury, and even death have roles in this game. The writing does a fairly good job of conveying the seriousness of this cat’s world, and the starkness of the dilemmas it faces.

I’m sorry to say that the coding is not quite so strong. I stumbled across a number of outright bugs in my two hours with the game. For example, you can get inside an open cupboard, and when you try to close it, the game responds “You lack the dexterity.” Fair enough, but when you try to leave, the game protests “You can’t get out of the closed cupboard.” Look around, and the room description has somehow evaporated, leaving just “The cupboard.” Another problem occurs with a pile of similar objects, from which you may take one and drop it anywhere in the game. However, if you return to the pile and take another, you’ll find that the one you dropped has disappeared, which stretches the bounds of plausibility. Moreover, there are a number of commands in the game (for example, “examine me”) to which the parser does not respond at all.

These are all fairly basic errors, nothing fatal, and I expect that they will be cleaned up in the next release of Soft Food. However, the problem that will be more difficult to fix is that of the puzzles. My Lord, these puzzles are difficult. They’re not so much “guess-the-verb” — I rarely found myself in a situation where I knew what to do but just couldn’t figure out how to phrase it. Instead, I found that most of the time I hadn’t the faintest idea of what to do, and the game kept ending in unpleasant ways as I stumbled about trying to figure out the solution. One puzzle in particular rivaled the Babel fish in complexity, but where the latter puzzle was enjoyable because of the absurdity of necessary actions piling atop one another, this game’s equivalent seemed frustratingly arbitrary, and the game’s serious tone did little to make the puzzle’s fiendishness more bearable. A disturbingly high percentage of the puzzles felt like members of the “guess-what-I’m-thinking” genre. I’m willing to concede that perhaps I wasn’t in a properly feline state of mind for them, and certainly I’ll admit that I’m not the world’s greatest puzzle solver, but I don’t think that’s sufficient to explain the problem. I think they’re just way too hard, and that the writing isn’t specific enough to give the player all the nudges necessary to solve them. It’s a good lesson in puzzle design though — if lots of players experience the same frustration I did, Soft Food will give designers an example of what to avoid in gonzo puzzle-crafting. I may even be able to use the lesson myself. See, I have a great idea for the 2000 comp: you play this pet goldfish…

Rating: 6.4

Life On Beal Street by Ian Finley as Anonymous [Comp99]

IFDB page: Life on Beal Street
Final placement: 26th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

One of the things I love about the IF competition is that its emphasis on shorter lengths of work allows and encourages experimentation. Life on Beal Street, if nothing else, is certainly an interesting experiment. It’s a different kind of computer-aided fiction, one in which the computer starts with a preset opening paragraph, then randomly chooses a second paragraph from a set of five available, then a third from a different set of five, and so on until it randomly chooses an ending. Together, these paragraphs make up a narrative arc whose plot couldn’t be simpler (protagonist walks down a street and arrives at a house) and the majority of whose action takes place inside the PC’s head. This action always follows the same pattern — start walking, think about person X, think about person Y, think about yourself, arrive at your destination and see what happens. The player’s role is to prompt the computer to make its next random selection, ostensibly by choosing to continue walking down the street.

The game’s greatest asset is that all of the paragraphs in the various sets are written very well indeed. The author does an excellent job of capturing that feeling of reverie, of walking down a street while thinking intensely about one’s own life, the very features of the street triggering and shaping the direction of the thoughts. The descriptions of the characters on whom the protagonist ruminates, and what those descriptions imply about the PC itself, are evocative and well-judged. Moreover, the delicate balancing act of providing an ungendered PC, onto which the player can project his or her own gender and sexual orientation, is done very well here, especially considering the fact that the game deals directly with interpersonal and even sexual subject matter. At its best, Life on Beal Street provides a sort of kaleidoscopic effect after a few playings, giving us a glimpse of the myriad ways in which we might understand our own lives, ourselves, and our relationships with others. There are some flaws, of course. I wish the game hadn’t chosen “Beal” as the name of its street, as it is distractingly reminiscent of the famous Beale Street in Memphis. I would have had similar problems with “Life on Rudeo Drive” or “Life on Madeson Avenue”. Also, there is one point where the computer unexpectedly says “* NO CHOICES DEFINED *”, though as far as I could tell there were as many (or as few) choices defined as ever.

And in fact, that brings up the game’s largest flaw of all. It isn’t, in any meaningful sense, interactive fiction. Yes, the author works hard to emphasize that the choice between continuing to walk the street and turning back is a real one, just like those we make in everyday life. This is true enough in itself, but as a claim for interactivity, it’s a crock. What it amounts to, more or less, is a choice between reading the next paragraph and quitting the game. These limited options make Life on Beal Street no more interactive than a book. There is one more possibility, which is the opportunity to say “no” to a chosen paragraph and have the computer spit out a new one, but that turns to be the equivalent of continuing to draw paragraphs from a hat until you realize that the hat is empty. Thus, in the final analysis the appeal of Life on Beal Street is quite fleeting. There’s a wonderful sense of openness and excitement in the first few plays, one which quickly contracts as paragraphs start to repeat, and finally shuts down entirely as you search through the whole thing brute-force to find any text you haven’t yet seen. Once you’ve done this, the game becomes just an interesting novelty whose possibilities have been exhausted. It’s definitely worth the download, but don’t expect to keep it long.

Rating: 6.1

Spodgeville Murphy and the Jewelled Eye Of Wossname by David Fillmore [Comp99]

IFDB page: Spodgeville Murphy and the Jewelled Eye Of Wossname
Final placement: 25th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

The 1996 IF competition was won by a Graham Nelson game with the highly improbable name The Meteor, the Stone, and a Long Glass of Sherbet. Since then, every year we’ve had at least one entrant with a long, silly name. In 1997, there was The Obscene Quest of Dr. Aardvarkbarf and Phred Phontious and the Quest for Pizza. In 1998, we had I Didn’t Know You Could Yodel. And this year, David Fillmore brings us Spodgeville Murphy and the Jewelled Eye of Wossname. Is there a causal relationship here? Probably not. More likely, a long and goofy title allows the author to set up some basic expectations about the work at hand. In essence, titles like this say: “Check me out! Boy, am I wacky! Prepare to be taken on a zany and madcap adventure through an absurd universe!” However, the comparison with Meteor is instructive in the following way: having set up the above expectation, Nelson subverted it by using a silly and comedic scenario (riding an elephant next to an aristocratic airhead) as the entry point into what became a rather atmospheric and austere cave adventure. The surprise value of this shift lent strength to the sense of wonder that the game worked to impart. His successors, on the other hand, have struggled vainly to live up to the wacky promise of their titles, providing a few funny moments along the way but generally falling far short of the joy of coherent absurdity. Wossname, sadly, is no exception.

The game certainly does have its funny moments. Its introduction effectively parodies the genre of Enchanter, Beyond Zork, and Path to Fortune with lines like this: “Another champion must be sought; an idiot unskilled in anything but adventuring…” The title page pulled off a good joke by presenting the game with a dramatic flourish, crowned with a grand-looking box quote from Shakespeare, a quote which turned out to have no relevance at all to the game, and very little meaning in general. (“It is an old coat.”) Finally, typing “Zork” leads to one of the best easter eggs I’ve ever found in a competition game. Go on, try it — I won’t spoil it by trying to describe it. But for every funny moment, there were several more that just fell flat. The “full” score listing might have been funnier if not for the fact that last year’s Enlightenment did the same thing with much more panache. Several allusions to various sources (the Zork games, Indiana Jones) were so obvious as to belie any cleverness. Lots of other attempted jokes were just, well, not that funny, and little is more tedious than unsuccessful attempts at humor (as anybody who has watched a lame sitcom can tell you.)

Adding to this tedium is the fact that the game is plagued with a number of errors, both in writing and coding. Now, the writing errors were much less frequent, and many had to do with formatting — strange line breaks, random strings of spaces and the like. Misspellings and grammar errors were relatively few, though at one point the game does manage to misspell the name of its own main character. Coding errors, however, were abundant. For example, every time you climb a particular object the game dutifully reports that you clamber onto it, reprints the room description with additional information now available to you, then inexplicably protests that you’re already on the object. At another time, the ceiling falls in, but this cataclysmic event has absolutely no effect on anything sitting on the ground. “Drop all” just doesn’t seem to work. Most egregious, though, is the fact that the final puzzle hinges on an item which, as far as I can determine, is never mentioned in any description. I only found it accidentally, through the fact that the parser includes scenery objects in its response to commands like “get all”. I felt clever for solving the puzzle by tricking the parser, but it didn’t make me any more impressed with the game. What’s more, I spent the half-hour before that floundering around in circles, trying to figure out what in the hell I could possibly be missing. Normally I ascribe this sort of thing to lack of beta-testing, but the credits indicate that no less than seven people tested the game, so I don’t know. Perhaps the time it took them to read the title preempted their ability to test the whole game?

Rating: 5.2

For A Change by Dan Schmidt [Comp99]

IFDB page: For A Change
Final placement: 2nd place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

I had to take a long break and read some regular English before I could start to write this review. If I hadn’t, no doubt my sentences would have sounded something like this: “The game approaches jigsaw, laying out words and concepts end to end, but skew. It moves whirling, lifting gazes into a rarefied and unknown sphere.” Even now, my language feels highly self-conscious, like a drunk trying to walk a straight line. I’m in this discomfiting circumstance because For A Change put my head into a very weird space through its use of words. The entire game uses an English that, while it makes sense, is just a few degrees off-center. For example, one location is described thus:

In the Shade The land increases towards your head to the south, and decreases away from your feet to the north. Mobiles lead accordingly in both directions. The High Wall may also be approached to the east. A long walk to the west is a tower, dwarfing your form, and dwarfed in turn by the wall.

Out of context, it seems almost incomprehensible, but once you’ve been playing the game for a while, you realize that all it means is that you’re standing on sloping ground which rises to the south, alongside a north-south road. At first, I found this linguistic displacement affected and annoying, but as it became more transparent to me, it acquired an intoxicatingly immersive effect. It was like watching a foreign film with subtitles — by about halfway through, the mechanical nature of the device was submerged and I felt fully involved in the milieu.

For me though, there was a downside to this approach. After I had finished the game, I marveled at the cleverness of its linguistic contrivance, and the consistency with which it was implemented, but the pleasure was solely on a cerebral level. Even though the experience of playing the game was interesting, I never cared very much about the story, I think because I found it too difficult to make an emotional commitment to a setting and character that were so completely alien. Consequently, I ended up observing myself a lot, which is a very distanced, passive way to go through something like interactive fiction. Then again, I’m not a person who gets passionate about abstract painting or experimental fiction like that of William Burroughs, so my lack of reaction to the game may be due more to my own idiosyncrasies than any particular flaw in the work.

The other thing I found interesting about For A Change is that it is the product of Dan Schmidt, who, though he doesn’t tend to shout about it, was a member of the team that produced Ultima Underworld I and II. To the best of my knowledge, this marks the first time that a competition entry has been authored by someone from the professional computer game designing community. Well, actually I suppose that’s not quite true — I know Andrew Plotkin contributed to at least one professional game for the Mac. Still, I found it fascinating, and very encouraging, that a writer of such high-profile games entered the competition, and that he did it with a game that is so thoroughly uncommercial. What’s more, the things that make For A Change special are only possible because it is a text game; even if by some bizarre circumstance a software company wanted to put out a graphical version of the game, that version simply could not capture the very specific flavor that For A Change achieved with its distinctive use of words. How fascinating it might be, then, to see the IF competition become a place where game-writing pros came to fulfill their most unrestrained artistic ambitions, creating pieces of text which would never see the light of their day jobs.

Rating: 8.0

About my 1999 IF Competition reviews

Photopia was a meteorite. It landed, and changed everything. I would argue that it was Adam Cadre’s 1998 comp-winner that moved interactive fiction out of Infocom’s shadow once and for all. In a swift, brilliant stroke, it proved that IF could be popular and artistically successful without puzzles, without linear time, and to some extent without meaningful choices. Assumptions molded by IF’s commercial history melted away in Photopia‘s light.

That change had a huge effect on the 1999 competition games. In my reviews I found myself referencing Photopia the way I used to reference Infocom, as a benchmark that set expectations for both authors and players. That year’s comp was full of Photopia-alikes, most of them pretty unfortunate. It’s a bit reminiscent of how in the comics world, the excellent landmarks of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns set off a 15-year wave of “grim and gritty” superheroes, from authors and editors who thought those books were successful because they were dark rather than just both dark and successful.

Photopia was also a high-profile breaker of formal boundaries in IF, but it was far from the only one. 1999’s comp saw formal experimentation blossoming in lots of really interesting ways, and in reviewing the games I found myself evolving a terminology for how to talk about aspects of IF that the games were teaching me to understand. For instance, this year is where I started talking about levels of nouns. Quoting from my review of Hunter, In Darkness: “In this terminology, first-level nouns are those nouns that are mentioned in room descriptions. Second-level nouns are those nouns mentioned in the descriptions of the first-level nouns. Third-level nouns are in the second-level noun descriptions, and so on. The deeper these levels go, the more detailed and immersive the textual world.”

Unfortunately, this year also saw a wave of buggier, more broken games. Where Comp98 had 27 games, Comp99 had 37, and much of the difference was made up by substandard clunkers that were turned in before they were ready for public consumption. My opinions about this got shriller and shriller the more of these games I had to endure.

I was fully invested in contributing to the world of IF criticism at this time, so much so that I had become the editor of the SPAG webzine shortly before the 1999 competition. I’d continue in that role for about six years, collecting reviews and essays, and publishing issues more or less quarterly. My biggest annual IF effort and commitment, though, remained the competition. I wrote these 37 reviews in the space of six weeks, and although there was a fair amount of chaff, finding a great game still thrilled me like nothing else.

I originally posted my reviews for the 1999 IF Competition games on November 16, 1999.