Misc, >INVENTORY

Really Late Reviews #2: Riven [misc]

[I wrote a few reviews of graphic adventure games in 2001, and Stephen Granade hosted them on the About.com interactive fiction site he ran at the time. I called them Really Late Reviews because, well, I wrote them long after the games in question had been released. About.com has gone so far down the Internet memory hole that I can no longer retrieve those reviews in the context of the site, so I’m taking their dates from the original text files on my hard drive. That means this review of Riven was written on April 23, 2001.]

As I continue my project of trying to play and review the tall pile of game CDs sitting next to my computer, I start to get an idea of how the pile got so tall in the first place. I finished the first review (of The Space Bar) late in January 2001, and now I find myself in April only just finishing the second. Somehow real life keeps getting in the way. Well, that and writing text games. Let this be a lesson to you, kids. (Though just what the lesson is, I’m not sure.)

The idea behind these “Really Late Reviews” isn’t to help people decide whether or not to buy a particular game — in the vast majority of cases, the games probably aren’t available anymore except through auction sites and dusty bargain bins. Even Riven, one of the biggest hits ever, is no longer in print, though it’s not too hard to find. Instead, these reviews try to focus on what does and doesn’t work in a specific game with an eye towards good and bad design decisions in general for adventure games.

The scrutiny is perhaps especially appropriate in this case, since Myst and Riven were such humongous hits that they had to be doing something right for somebody. The fact that they’ve both received such tremendous backlash from some hardcore adventure gamers is, to me, just more evidence of this fact. The tone of many of those complaints always reminded me of the irritation felt by longtime fans of groups like U2 and Nirvana after those groups got big, annoyance that their hip and private playground had suddenly been invaded by the unwashed masses.

It’s not that I thought that all the criticisms of Myst were baseless — on the contrary, I was just as annoyed by its anticlimactic ending and its sometimes pointless puzzles as anybody. But the vehemence of those objections always felt a bit out of place to me. I will say, though, that I’ve always been struck by the irony of Myst‘s emphasis on books, and the same is true for Riven. Here we have the adventure games that, more than any single other, took players’ hands off the keyboard and placed emphasis totally on mouse interaction, yet their central metaphor is of books as transportation devices.

In fact, when one of those books opens and we see that the pages are in fact blank, and in place of the text is an animated graphic, we might realize that there, conveniently displayed before us, is the Myst aesthetic: gorgeous art on the simplest background, divorced from (con)text as much as possible. For an old text adventurer like me, there was something amusing about the fact that the games had such a worshipful attitude towards books and pages, while eschewing actual words almost completely. I say almost because the games can’t quite manage to avoid presenting text, and consequently end up hitting players with giant swaths of it at once. But more about that later.

Of course, the point has been made before that this very ejection of text in favor of art was one of the keys to Myst‘s success, and it’s a point I find persuasive. I know that while playing Riven, I enjoyed how easy it was to find one breathtaking vista after another, even before any puzzles had been solved, with only a few mouse-clicks. That simplicity is a solid virtue, and the fact that almost anybody could figure out the interface within 60 seconds had to have helped the game’s popularity. Simplicity and dazzle are a powerful combination, and Riven has both in spades — it’s no wonder that so many other games have copied its interface.

But as easy as that interface was to use, I found it frustrating at points. For one thing, the fact that Riven‘s graphics were so detailed, with so many subtle areas of light and shadow, meant that in any given screen, there were several features that might yield results when clicked upon. Consequently, I found myself doing a lot of random clicking in a great many places. It’s not that this approach is difficult, but it does get rather tedious, especially when only one out of oh, say 75 of those clicks actually accomplished anything. Another problem with the Riven hunt-the-hotspot interface is that for unspecified areas of many screens, clicking would actually advance the PC forward, while clicking elsewhere would have no effect. Numerous were the times when I’d have to backtrack because I’d moved forward without wanting to.

The answer to these problems would have been just a little more cursor differentiation. Riven already has this feature for some areas. For example, when the cursor would turn into finger pointing right, clicking would turn the PC 90 degrees to the right. When the cursor becomes a grabbing hand, you know it’s possible to click and drag the feature beneath it. If only it had lit up on other (non-draggable) hotspots and evinced some difference between forward motion and no effect, I could have been saved a lot of pointless clicking. These features seem so obvious that I wondered whether they had been omitted in the name of making the game more challenging. If so, they certainly served their purpose, but increased challenge of that sort doesn’t make a game any more fun, just more numbing.

But even when I’d feel myself sliding into a stupor from all the fruitless clicking, Riven would always reawaken me with its phenomenal art. This game is known for its graphics, and rightly so — even its fiercest critics may allow that it’s “pretty.” I’ll say more than that: it’s stunning. The level of detail in rocks, plants, and skies made them feel indelibly real, and the effect was aided by all the tiny touches that were put in just to enhance the game’s feeling of presence. In a forest, tiny fireflies (or are they dust motes) swirl around you, for no other reason than to deepen the aura of enchantment. Water shimmers and refracts brighter and darker colors up at you, creating a remarkably mimetic effect.

From time to time you’ll see other people, always shying away from you and warning their companions of your presence like timid prairie dogs. The other thing that just knocked me out about some of the graphics in Riven was their choice of colors and level of color saturation. When an elevator descends from the ceiling, it isn’t just gold, it’s GOLD. When the pathway from that elevator leads to a huge viewport on the ocean, it’s hard not to be awed by the intense BLUEness of that panorama.

Riven‘s puzzles partook of a similar intensity and attention to detail, and there were plenty of neat ones. I won’t discuss them in too much detail, since I don’t want to spoil the game for those who might still seek it out, but I will say that the game often rewards sophisticated spatial thinking, and that the solutions often require bringing together disparate pieces of information in crafty and revelatory ways.

In fact, my main criticism of the puzzles is that sometimes they go one step too far in this direction. In one instance, several things clicked together at once in my brain and I realized that I had figured out a puzzle that was cunning and delicious, but when I went to solve it, I found it unyielding. Turns out that the game had established a pattern of clues in four out of five sub-parts of the puzzle, but had broken that pattern in the fifth part, presumably to make things more challenging. My frustration arose from the fact that where I had once felt clever for teasing out the underlying motif, I now felt cheated out of the solution I’d earned, for no compelling reason. The pattern-matching was a bit of a stretch already, and when the pattern was arbitrarily broken, the puzzle started to feel a little unfair to me. Other problems occurred in one or two combination locks whose solutions didn’t quite make enough sense, including one in particular that I had to try over and over until it worked, even though previous attempts with the same combination had failed.

This last may have been a technical problem, and if so, it was one of the few bugs I encountered in Riven. There were little problems here and there, usually having to do with the cursor changing shape erroneously, sometimes making me wonder if I was missing additional screens because of an error in the navigation routines. Besides the art, the game’s other really outstanding technical achievement was in its sound. I recently bought a new computer with a powerful soundcard and speaker set, and Riven took the fullest advantage of these. The music was understated and evocative, and the foreground sound effects achieved a remarkable level of verisimilitude. But even when these weren’t playing, the game kept up a steady stream of ambient background noises — chirping birds and insects in a forest, lapping waves at the seashore, echoing droplets of water underground, and so on.

These sounds blended seamlessly into each other and did a lovely job of completing the sense-picture started by the graphics. On the other hand, a five-second foreground sound effect that’s enchanting the first time through becomes really annoying the fifth time. Riven provided the option to skip transition animations, thank goodness, but omitted any such feature for sound effects, with the result that I sometimes had to stop a quick run through already-explored areas just so I could let a sound play yet again.

However, this interruption wasn’t as inconvenient as the numerous occasions when Riven would ask me to swap among its five CDs. I have two CD-ROM drives in my current machine, and I still felt like I was constantly disk-swapping, especially as I got further into the game and was doing a lot of hopping from one area to another. I’ve read that a Riven DVD was released which eliminates this problem, and if you’re still looking for the game, I’d highly recommend pursuing this option — the game casts such a lovely spell that I wanted it broken as little as possible.

Prisons are a recurring motif in Riven. In fact, at the beginning of the game you’re given a “prison book” that you’re supposed to use to capture the Bad Guy, but as soon as you’re transported into the game, you find yourself in an actual prison (you know, with bars), where the book gets stolen from you. On the way to retrieving it, you’ll explore a number of different cages and cells, and in fact you’ll be imprisoned yourself when the book is returned to you. All this incarceration felt like an appropriate theme, because it nicely symbolized my relationship to the plot.

I think it’s fair to say that Riven‘s story is very poorly paced. At the beginning of the game you’re given a number of teasers (and references that seem inexplicable if you haven’t played Myst and/or read the tie-in novels recently, which was exactly my situation) and then thrown immediately into the standard lovely-but-abandoned landscape. From there, it’ll be a loooong time until you get more story. Oh sure, there’ll be hints and evocative little clues of what’s going on, but I found myself wishing for more narrative throughout the game, instead of the endless wandering, button-pushing, and lever-throwing that I got instead. This feeling was not alleviated when I finally stumbled across one of the game’s several plot-advancing journals. These journals are uniformly massive, page after page of spidery handwritten text that provides plenty of plot detail and background information (more than enough, in fact) along with some well-placed puzzle hints.

The problem with these things is that they take a long time to read, and whenever I’d find one I’d sigh, realizing that my next half-hour or so would be spent slogging through a sea of text. Trapped in this stumbling rhythm, I began to feel like a starving detainee (albeit one with a very large cell in which to pace), begging piteously for a few more scraps of plot, please, and instead given massive meals every six days.

In the end, I decided that I wasn’t playing Riven for its story, and allowed myself to sink more deeply into its lovely graphics, sounds, and puzzles like a warm bath. I came out feeling refreshed and contented, more or less happy for the time I’d spent with the game.

Really Late Reviews #1: The Space Bar [misc]

For several years now, I’ve had a growing pile of commercial adventure game CDs sitting next to my computer. For one reason or another, I haven’t gotten around to playing them, but when the millennium turned, I decided I was going to change all that. I’m playing through them now, and for each one I play, I’m hoping to write a review. These reviews won’t be aimed at helping people decide whether or not to buy the games — they’re mostly out of print now, so the point is pretty moot. (Although many of them could no doubt be obtained through eBay or bargain bins.) Instead, I want these “Really Late Reviews” to be meditations on what works and what doesn’t in graphical adventure games, as illustrated by the successes and failures of each work under scrutiny.

The game on top of the pile was The Space Bar, Steve Meretzky‘s first post-Legend foray into graphical adventures. Meretzky has a good name among text adventure enthusiasts like me for having written landmark Infocom games like Planetfall and A Mind Forever Voyaging. I wasn’t as fond of his later works for Legend Entertainment, the Spellcasting series, because what clever writing and puzzles they did contain were submerged in a sea of juvenile, sexist humor, but they were commercial hits and plenty of people enjoyed them. After he left Legend, he founded a company called Boffo Games, Inc., and created The Space Bar, a large adventure game that was to be Boffo’s flagship product. Despite good reviews, the game sunk, and so did Boffo. Maybe this postmortem will provide a little perspective on just where TSB went wrong.

The game puts you in the role of Alias Node, a human detective on the seedy world of Armpit VI, investigating a robbery and murder whose culprit has been traced to a dive called The Thirsty Tentacle. The bar, like the rest of the galaxy, is populated by aliens of various races, but very few other humans. Your job is to interview these aliens, looking for clues about the identity of the killer, and using your special ability of “Empathy Telepathy” to enter their memories and guide those flashbacks to discover vital bits of information. In effect, these flashbacks serve as mini-adventure games in themselves, and the bulk of TSB is spent navigating the memories of various aliens, with occasional excursions back into the Thirsty Tentacle to meet other aliens and, finally, to catch the criminal.

The aliens are definitely the best part of the game, springing as they did from the imagination of Ron Cobb, the same guy who designed the eye-popping oddities that populate the Star Wars cantina scene. Copious background information on each alien species enlivens the game, and deepens the experience of otherness that permeates the flashbacks. Visually, too, the game does a terrific job with the aliens, and here we see one of the great strengths of graphical games. Text is wonderful for evoking interior worlds, but for the presentation of bizarre shapes and structures, it’s hard to beat good graphics. For example, a text game might tell you that Sraffans have hourglass-shaped pupils, but it would be hard put to present the labyrinthine network of veins surrounding the pupil, or to take your perspective inside those eyeballs as the flashback begins. TSB uses graphics in some clever ways throughout the game, including a freaky perspective from within the compound eyes of an insectoid race.

So The Space Bar is clever, and visually engaging. It also has its fair share of funny moments, thanks to Meretzky, who’s much funnier when he’s not aiming at 13-year-olds. Unfortunately, fun as it is to look at, it’s often not much fun to play. In struggling through the game, I found myself thinking quite a bit about the problems of translating text-game writing experience to the creation of graphical games, and wondering if TSB‘s many flaws stemmed from those problems.

Take, for example, the game’s interface. If you don’t have a parser and prompt, something must obviously take their place, and in this case it was the standard 360-degree panning worldview (with a bit of up/down axis as well), augmented by a multi-purpose onscreen device called the PDA: a combination map, inventory, system command portal, voice-mail receptor, and information storehouse. The idea of the PDA is a sensible one, but its implementation in TSB was extremely clumsy. Rather than occupying a stable portion of the screen, it rises up to half-obscure the main window whenever you click on it, spending the rest of its time half-visible, with half its features unavailable.

One of the most important of these unavailable features is the voice-mail indicator, which blinks when Alias receives a message. Because the light is obscured from view except when the PDA is fully visible, you end up receiving messages and not knowing it for dozens of turns, until the little voice inside your PDA says “Have you noticed your message light is blinking?” Why no I hadn’t, probably because I CAN’T SEE IT! It’s silly that the blinking light is hidden, but even the hidden light is a better solution than the one the game adopts occasionally, which is to have the PDA suddenly rise up and stop all action as a message comes in and is played.

When this happens (and it’s usually at the worst times), the player has to wait for the game to speak its message before continuing on with any actions, and therein lies another significant difference between graphical and text adventures. Text adventures print all their output, which takes pretty much no time at all. Graphical adventures have voice-acting, which means that to receive the dialogue, the player has to wait as long as it takes for that dialogue to be spoken… every single time. The voice acting in TSB is excellent, so it’s a pleasure to hear the dialogue in real time when you’re hearing it initially, but when you already know what’s going to be said, even the best voice acting can become tedious indeed. TSB often provides the option of hitting Esc to halt these sequences, but all too often Esc doesn’t have an effect, and you’re left drumming your fingers while a phrase plays for the tenth time.

Even worse, when realtime voices are overlaid on turn-based gaming, the resulting timing confusion can turn an extremely simple puzzle into a maddeningly difficult one. For example, in one of the flashbacks, you’re waiting for your name to be called before you can leave a particular room. However, there are about 10 voice phrases that play before that happens, each of which is around 30-45 seconds long. The phrases play one per turn, so if you perform actions which advance the turn counter (examining things, inventory management, etc.) and space them less than 30 seconds apart, the phrases pile up and play one after the other. When this happens, you’ll hear your name called, and try to leave the room, but the turn when you were supposed to do that has long passed, so the game goes on to say “Oh, too bad you didn’t leave the room — you lose” as you’re frantically clicking away. Doctors recommend against this sort of game design, as it leads to many cases of heads embedded in monitors.

Another sin of sound design which TSB commits over and over is having background noises drown out crucial information. For example, there’s a scene where you’re performing your actions while a thunderstorm rages in the background. In a text adventure, the scene would look like this:

> EXAMINE WATERFALL The water sounds funny -- there might be something behind it.

KER-POW! Deafening thunder shakes the ground where you stand.

In The Space Bar, you click on the “Examine Waterfall” icon, and what you hear is the flashback character’s voice: “The water sounds funny. There mi– KER-POW! –it.” Then the sound you hear is yourself growling, as you realize that the game has stupidly and randomly allowed a background sound to prevent you from learning information that, as the character, you should theoretically already know. In other words, an actual sound has obscured a symbolic sound, the latter of which is only meant to represent the character’s interior dialogue. This happens over and over again, in several flashbacks, and each time it does, you have to repeat the action and hope you get lucky enough to hear the information you’re supposed to have.

That same thunderstorm flashback also features another one of TSB‘s biggest gaffes: the realtime puzzle. There’s a chase sequence in this flashback in which you have to make the correct series of clicks and rotations, in an extremely limited period of time, and if you don’t the flashback ends unsuccessfully. Maddeningly enough, this is exactly the time when your PDA chooses to rise up and halt all action until it finishes playing the incoming message. Because restoring from a failed flashback is blindingly dull [you have to listen to the failure message in real time, then get past the transition animation, then trigger the flashback again, then another transition animation, then the beginning-of-flashback animation, and only then can you restore your game], the punishment for failure is quite steep.

Add to this the fact that the processor load in that flashback makes cursor movement jerky, and panning unreliable, and you have one annoying roadblock. Now, I’m not of the school of thought that believes adventure games should never ever have realtime action portions, though I do believe it’s a bad idea to throw one arcade sequence into an otherwise traditional adventure game (which is exactly what The Space Bar does.) I enjoy both adventure gaming and twitch gaming, and don’t mind seeing the two mixed, but they have to be done well — if I fail, I want it to be because of slow reflexes, not a slow processor. My P-166 seems pretty pokey these days, but in 1997, when The Space Bar came out, it was well above the game’s minimum requirements.

Still, I gritted my teeth through many attempts at this puzzle before finally, gratefully getting past it. In a text adventure, that realtime puzzle would probably still be annoying, but because the processor demands of text are minimal, the computer’s speed would very likely not be the bottleneck that impedes completion of the puzzle.

Another side effect of the increased complexity of sounds, images, and animations in a graphical adventure game is their increased size and consequent separation onto multiple disks. The Space Bar comes on three CDs, two of which contain flashback material and the other one of which contains all the sequences within the bar itself. As a result, every time a flashback begins or ends, you have to switch CDs. I needn’t point out that a text adventure is highly unlikely to fill more than one CD and therefore to require such constant switching, but I will note that the drudgery of such switches imposes unnatural limits on both design and playing.

Because I was trying to minimize CD switching, I stayed within each flashback and tried to solve them in their entirety one at a time, instead of hopping from one to the next anytime I got stuck, as I probably would have in a text game. In effect, the disk switching became another of the game’s many resource management problems, but one of its least enjoyable. The best of these puzzles take advantage of the potential of graphics to easily demonstrate spatial relationships, and end up achieving effects that would be extremely difficult in a text game. The worst of them work through the game’s regular interface, and the presence of graphics and sound slows down the solving process to no real benefit. Elements that slow the process of solving a puzzle by means of arbitrary and pointless delays make that puzzle much less fun. Text has an advantage here, because its elements very rarely cause time delays.

Another advantage of text is its ability to clearly separate objects. For instance, in one of the game’s flashbacks, you stand before a house. There’s a boat locker in front of the house, from which you must obtain a vital object. The problem is that the locker blends in a bit with the house itself, and both the house and the locker are clickable objects. Consequently, you can click on several features of the house, all of which the game will process as the house itself. The only exception to this is the locker, but when the windows, the roof, the chimney, and the pipes are all called “House”, why would a player think that the little brown square representing the locker is anything but another unimplemented house feature? What’s more, you can get irretrievably stuck in the flashback and not know why — I had to look at a walkthrough, and when I did I said, “What locker?” In a text adventure, this simply wouldn’t be an issue, because objects don’t overlap:

Beside the House Be it ever so humble, this is your home. The roof, windows, chimney, and pipes may all be a bit ramshackle, but they're all yours.

There is a boat locker in front of the house.

There’s no chance you could miss the boat locker (as I did playing TSB), because the interface never obscures it.

Reading through this review, I’m worried that it sounds like I’m railing against graphic adventures in general, and arguing that text is always better. I hope it doesn’t sound like that, because I don’t believe that. For one thing, The Space Bar has several problems that are equally possible in text adventures (an extremely irritating maze, several bugs, one of which almost kept me from finishing the game.) For another, I don’t think that superiority and inferiority enter into the equation at all — I just think that text adventures and graphic adventures are distinctly different forms, kind of like (to employ a tired analogy) novels and films. The skill sets required to create each of them overlap a bit, but not nearly as much as you might guess. Playing The Space Bar felt reminiscent of watching a film directed by a really good novelist who knows very little about moviemaking. You can see what was intended, and if you look harder, you can see why for the most part it all falls horribly flat.

Letter to the Author: Dangerous Curves [misc]

[I beta-tested Dangerous Curves, a mystery game released in 2000. I didn’t review it, since reviewing a game I’ve beta-tested always seemed sketchy to me. However, I did write a long letter to its author, Irene Callaci. With her permission, I reprinted that letter on my website, and now I’m moving it here. Note that it includes SPOILERS. This letter is dated April 28, 2000.]

Dear Irene —

First of all, let me tell you about me and mystery games. The first mystery game I ever played was Infocom‘s Suspect, fondly bought for me as a birthday gift or something. I loved walking around the mansion, talking to the various characters, and searching all the furniture. I filled up notebooks with every utterance I could squeeze out of the characters, with lists organized by room of the items therein, with chronologies of what happened when. I waited in every single location for the entire duration of the game to see what happens. If I walked into that mansion today, I could probably navigate it entirely from memory.

The problem is this: I got absolutely nowhere at actually solving the murder. I couldn’t figure out what was significant in some places, but more importantly I just couldn’t figure out how to establish motive, method, or opportunity, let alone all three. I started to get more and more frustrated with the whole thing.

After a long, long time of this, I broke down and bought the Invisiclues. When I finally found the solution, I didn’t have a feeling of “Why didn’t I think of that?” Instead, I felt, “How in the hell was I supposed to think of that?” Since then, my track record with mysteries has been unimpressive. I did OK with Ballyhoo, but that was really more of a puzzlefest with a mystery plot tacked on at the beginning and end. I was hopeless with Deadline. I couldn’t get anywhere in Moonmist, though that may have been due more to the bugginess of the game than to my particular denseness. Even The Witness, which everybody on the IF newsgroups seems to think is a cakewalk, was totally impenetrable for me. I had only the vaguest suspicion who did it, and not the faintest clue how to prove it.

There haven’t been that many amateur attempts at mystery games, and what few there are I haven’t played, so I can’t say how well I’ve done in the post-Infocom world of mystery games. I will note, however, that I am an equally poor detective when I read mystery fiction. I basically never figure out who the murderer is ahead of the detective. Well, there was one period where I was reading a lot of Agatha Christie, and figured out that the murderer is always the least likely person. I was able to guess with a pretty good degree of accuracy using this method, but I still had to wait til the end of the book to find out just how the crime was committed.

Now let me tell you why Dangerous Curves is easily, far and away, my favorite mystery game of all time. I haven’t got this figured out exactly, but I think it has to do with the fact that the game steps outside of all the paradigms for mystery IF that I’ve seen up til now. In Infocom’s traditional mysteries, you had to establish motive, method, and opportunity. This was sometimes accomplished through the use of highly unlikely actions like TELL THE DETECTIVE ABOUT THE WEATHER, actions which required you to put together all the pieces in just the way a good mystery reader would do, and just the way that I completely suck at. I could never come up with these actions, and so I remained stuck forever, or until I looked at the hints, whichever came first. (You can probably guess what came first every time.)

Dangerous Curves doesn’t require this kind of reasoning. It allows for it, but doesn’t require it. With the help of devices like the full score listing, Frank Thibodeaux’s gentle prodding, and the anonymous tipster, I was able to put together all the pieces and, for the first time ever in a mystery IF game, feel like I was solving the crime. Let me tell you, this was a great feeling. I think one of DC’s great strengths is that while it allows for the kind of player that was great at Infocom’s mystery games, it also allows for players like me. None of the devices I listed above are required for a winning session with the game, but they sure helped me feel like I was having fun rather than banging my head against a wall. That kind of fun is a new experience for me in mystery games.

There are lots of other factors that added to my enjoyment of the game. One of the strongest of these was the outstanding writing. Even if I hadn’t been able to get anywhere in the game, I would have had a good time playing it, just because the writing was so much fun to read. It caught the perfect balance between noir and humor, similar to the balance achieved by Columbo back when it was a regular TV show. All of the historical details were just excellent, and most of the one-liners were actually funny, rather than coming off as lame pastiches of Raymond Chandler. There was also a very satisfying attention to the rhythms and musicality of language in many of the game’s longer passages. For example, from the opening text:

Her eyes watch yours as she fans the money out on the desktop. “I never mix business with pleasure. Do you?”

Not often. Not lately. “Not me,” you assure her. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Now that’s just a really well-written passage. Not only is it funny, and not only does it tell us a great deal about the character in a very few words, but it also rings with a great rhythm, like a good swing song, a rhythm that would make it enjoyable to read even if it made no sense at all.

Coming in close behind the writing is the game’s remarkable technical sophistication and depth of implementation. I loved knowing that I could go to the Wednesday mass and watch the churchgoers, reading lots of great text that had nothing at all to do with solving the case. It was just there to make the fictional world feel more real, and it worked beautifully. When I wrote one of these detailed responses to Suzanne after testing Worlds Apart, I told her that the source of that game’s power to immerse players came from the combination of two factors: range of interaction and rich detail. DC employs this same potent combo, and it works just as well. The more actions that got a non-default response from the parser, the more places I could go, the more people I could meet, the more things I could ask them about, and the more syntactical combinations that the parser understood, the more deeply immersed I felt in Dangerous Curves‘ Los Angeles.

A little more about that last item: I was just astonished at how much work you’d put into the parser for DC. At least two or three times per session, I would try something non-standard and find to my surprise that the parser understood it. This is the kind of improvement, I know from experience, that takes a huge amount of time and energy, but you can never be sure how many people will even find it, let alone use it, benefit from it, or comment on it. Well, I just want to tell you that I found it, and I loved it. The same goes for all the other technical feats you accomplished to make life easier for the player: the status line compass rose, the convenient handling of opening/closing and locking doors, the money that worked so well I hardly needed to worry about it at all. You took a lot of the tedious details of IF off my hands so that I could spend more time enjoying the story and the writing. Great move. In fact, during the next game I played after DC, I found myself grumbling, “Where’s my compass rose?” Your game was so good, it spoiled me!

I know we all like positive feedback, and there’s certainly plenty to give, but I do want to make this review a little more useful to you than just simple egofood, so I’ll briefly touch on a few of the game’s weaker points. I found that some actions were insufficiently clued, or at least they wouldn’t have ever occurred to me without the anonymous tipster. One example of this is giving the donut to the cop. Because so many locations in the game are implemented as one-room spots, even though they might realistically have other places to explore (for example, the Tribune, the library, or Rosie’s), I wasn’t expecting that I would be able to actually visit prisoners in the police station.

Moreover, though I could easily come up with the idea of giving the donut to the cop once I knew he wanted something, I wouldn’t have otherwise expected to be able to take it out of Rosie’s, since so many other things at Lenny’s and Rosie’s are forced to stay inside their respective locations. Of course, it’s logical that I could walk out with a donut as opposed to a beer or a blue plate special, but I sort of lumped it in with everything else. Another action I wouldn’t have come up with on my own was to get the bank teller drunk. I never saw any indication from him that he had anything worthwhile to say, nor much evidence that he was the kind of vulnerable lush who could be easily plied with alcohol to spill his secrets. Considering how little room you have left, I’m not sure what you could do to remedy these problems, and because you have the anonymous tipster in there, they’re not significant problems anyway, but I thought I’d just let you know about my experience.

The other problem is one that I’m not sure how you could solve no matter how much room you had, which is that the characters were so well-drawn that I frequently found myself straining against the interface because I wanted to tell them more. It’s really frustrating to have to try TELL JESSICA ABOUT CARLOTTA when what I really want to say is “I broke into a real estate office and learned that the Mayor’s wife owns a huge amount of property along the proposed highway site, and that’s why Vickstrom was so hot on the freeway project, and no doubt why he had your husband killed.” Unfortunately, the solution to this problem is outside of the current grasp of IF in general, not just Dangerous Curves. The fact that your game made me feel the absence of such an interface that keenly is a great credit to your writing and characterization skills, not to mention the depth of immersion you achieve in your fictional world.

Playing Dangerous Curves has been one of my favorite IF experiences in a long, long time. Thank you for that, and for the correspondence, which I’ve also enjoyed very much. Good luck with your game and your life, and keep in touch.

Letter to the Author: Worlds Apart [misc]

[I beta-tested Worlds Apart, a fantasy game released in 1999. I didn’t review it, since reviewing a game I’ve beta-tested always seemed sketchy to me. However, I did write a long letter to its author, Suzanne Britton. With her permission, I reprinted that letter on my website, and now I’m moving it here. Note that it includes SPOILERS. This letter is dated May 19, 1999.]

Dear Suzanne —

In an earlier conversation, I referred to the style of Worlds Apart as “High Fantasy.” That’s not quite right; I was reaching for a term, and the one I came up with is inadequate because the fact is that WA doesn’t perfectly fit genre conventions. In fact, it comes closer to one of those grand, sweeping alternate-world SF stories, right down to the richly detailed biology, geography, and sociology of the invented planets. But it feels like fantasy. Orson Scott Card once wrote that the essential difference between fantasy and science fiction is that “fantasy has trees, science fiction has rivets.” Worlds Apart definitely has trees.

Moreover, it has telepathy, which certainly leaves it out of the “hard SF” category. It presents itself in a somewhat formal, elevated tone — no slangy streetwise speakers or clever cyberpunk cant to be found anywhere — and the concerns of the narrator are definitely emotional concerns. Despite the fact that this is IF, she’s not solving some Asimovian logic problem or saving the universe with a sparkling piece of technology. She’s not conquering a new frontier or establishing a planetary Empire; she’s not fighting insectoid invaders or solving virtual-reality mysteries. Instead, her frontier is inside herself. Her explorations, and her triumphs, feel more like poetry than adventure yarn. The “magical” items in the story have a strong metaphoric quality, and her encounters (especially with Saal) vibrate with mythic resonances. Small wonder that when the lazy librarian inside my brain reached for a shelf to put this on, it was closer to the Fantasy section than it was to SF.

But it is SF, albeit “soft” SF, where psychic powers and dragons can mix with other planets and evolved humans. The amount of world-building that WA displays is breathtaking. I know you’ve mentioned (and I’ve read on your web page) that for you, the Higher World is not exactly a product of the imagination. It’s been your companion through life and its visions are delivered to you rather than being crafted by you. But whatever its source, the level of detail in Worlds Apart was very impressive to me as a reader. It spoke of a careful, meticulous, thoughtful working-out of all the various aspects of an alternate world, even if that’s not exactly where it came from.

I spent a few years of my life studying literary theory, and I walked away from it believing that what the author intended for a work, and how exactly that work was created, is less important than the messages that the work itself delivers. What WA delivers is a kind of escape, a journey into a universe where my gills allow me to stay underwater indefinitely, where I can ride on dragonsback to the moon, and where I can reach out with my sixth sense to find out what other people are really feeling. Whether this world is really real to you or just made-up is immaterial to me, because you give me so many details and present the setting with such confidence that it feels real to me too, even though I’ve never had a vision in my life.

The fact that Worlds Apart is IF adds greatly to this sense of immersion. I think you’ve discovered (or deepened, anyway) a very potent combination: rich detail and interaction. In static fiction, a vivid setting greatly enhances a reader’s suspension of disbelief, and in IF the ability to command a character and actually explore this setting reinforces the escapist impulse from another direction. By combining these two to such a high degree, you’ve created a work that is very immersive indeed.

This combination is all the more precious for being so rare. Both world-building and the implementation of meaningful interaction are incredibly time-consuming pastimes. The fact that Worlds Apart has so much of both makes it a very special story. I really enjoyed testing it, and hope that my own work can live up to its high standard. My aims are somewhat different, but you have definitely set the bar for detail and richness.

I will probably take you up on your offer to betatest LASH, but it will be awhile. After testing Worlds Apart I was moved to play LASH in the same (testing) mindset, and in the process I found any number of things that I now want to improve or change. I think that the experience of testing Worlds Apart has not only made me a better tester, but a better author as well. Thanks for giving me that experience. Best of luck with the game, and in your life as well. Keep in touch.

WackyComp reviews [misc]

[I posted this in April of 1999, and it pretty much explains itself. I will note, though, that I was partly wrong in my conjecture of who wrote the games. Lelah Conrad was indeed one of the authors, submitting Knot To Be Undone as “Jess Kiddon”. The other author was Stephen Griffiths, who wrote Skipping Breakfast as “Dunnin Haste”.]

Last year, Lucian Smith had this idea. He thought it would be cool to have a “mini-comp”, where a bunch of people wrote games based on the same initial premise. There would be no prizes, but there would be voting, and rankings. So he announced his idea (actually, in the announcement, he attributes the idea to “someone on the ifMUD“, but in the absence of that anonymous genius, I’m giving Lucian the credit) on rec.arts.int-fiction, and generated quite a bit of enthusiasm.

Unfortunately, when he announced the premise and the rules around it, they were so amazingly specific, picky, and difficult to achieve, that he only ended up getting four entries, some of those after his deadline. If the voting or the rankings ever happened, I never saw it. He tried to scale back expectations by announcing a “micro-comp” (“Submit one or two scenes from a mini-comp entry!”), but by then it was too late: apparently the contingent of possible entrants wanted their mini-comps to really be mini. The main result of Lucian’s backpedaling was to produce a proliferation of goofy “meta-comp” ideas, each of which seemed to somehow incorporate all the others that preceded it.

Into this morass waded Adam Cadre, who had a simpler idea: write a short game that involves, in some way, a chicken crossing a road. It was dubbed the Chicken Comp, and it was a big success, garnering 19 entries, most of which were good, and many of which were wonderfully, hilariously funny. I still crack up anytime I recall Rob Noyes’ The Lesson of the Chicken, with its memorable piece of monologue, “Ah, Wang Chung. Everybody will have fun tonight.” The chicken-comp games were the highlight of the summer, and set the stage nicely for the established IF comp in the fall. There was still no official competition between the games except, as Cadre put it, the inevitable “discussion of which ones r001 and which suck.”

So along comes spring 99, and suddenly mini-comps are popping up like mushrooms. There was the Xcomp, for paranormal games, the I-Comp, for games without an inventory, and even the execrable Roadkill Comp, for games that involve dead animals. Most of the spring mini-comps garnered responses which made Lucian’s mini-comp look swamped in comparison, and David Glasser’s WackyComp was no exception. The WackyComp stipulated short games, each based on one of a list of quasi-aphorisms. The list’s contents don’t matter, because there were only two games submitted, both ALAN entries that based themselves on the first choice: “No knot unties itself.” I’ve tended mainly to review competition games, not spending much time on mini-comps, but the author of one of the WackyComp games asked me to take a look at the two entrants and provide a little feedback, so here it is:

The shorter of the two entries is by “Jess Kiddon” (another of the WackyComp’s conditions was that its authors don’t use their real names on their submissions), titled Knot to be Undone. The title is one of the game’s many puns on the word “knot.” This is not to suggest that the game is a huge mass of puns — it’s not a huge mass of anything. I’d be shocked if anyone spent more than 10 minutes solving this game. There is virtually nothing to do except for the actions to win the game.

You play Weava Knottersdaughter, professional knotter, though really what this means is that you’re a professional detangler — the “knot shop” where you work offers a knot-untying service. Anyway, in walks “the Body Adventura”, a stock adventurer type whose cryptic name, as far as I can determine, is a really strained pun on the name of Minnesota’s governor. He’s gotten himself stuck in a knot and your job is to untangle him, or better yet keep him entangled and somehow become the Body Adventura yourself. Luckily, this is no trouble, and then the game ends. That’s it. This is about as “mini” as a game can get, and still be considered interactive fiction. For what it is, it’s fine, but rather unsatisfying, kind of like eating just one potato chip.

A rather more substantial entry is Skipping Breakfast, by “Dunnin Haste.” In this game you’re a rabbit (though this is not immediately clear unless you examine yourself), who is tied to a tree and about to become a wolf’s breakfast. The wolf is off gathering more wood for the campfire over which he plans to cook you, so now’s the time to make your escape. Unfortunately, there’s the small matter of the knotted rope which binds you to the tree — you can’t untie it, and it won’t untie itself. Or will it?

This game’s puzzles are fun and rather clever, despite the fact that there’s a bit of “guess-the-noun”, and that the conversation syntax is sometimes too restrictive. The writing is charming, and the nature of the puzzles is quite well-integrated with the game’s fairy-tale atmosphere. Though it’s not quite as bare-bones as Knot, Breakfast is still a very brief game, with three points to be scored, relatively few objects, and only one location. That’s OK, though. It was fun while it lasted.

Both games are written and coded pretty well — I found neither bugs nor spelling/grammar errors in either one, though in both there was a real paucity of synonyms. Moreover, they both adhere faithfully to the concept behind the WackyComp, and work creatively within its confines. Neither succumbs to cliché, and both were fun. My main complaint is that each one (though Knot more than Breakfast) is over almost before it begins, but I suppose that’s the nature of mini-comps. Perhaps these tiny games could become preludes to fuller versions — I wouldn’t mind playing the sequel to either.

It’s also nice to see the ALAN language gaining some devotees, and perhaps one of these authors (whose identities are pretty clear from their choice of language and their postings before the WackyComp — nice job Mikko and Lelah) will be the one to write a major game which really shows off the language’s capabilities. It seems to be the pattern that IF languages only gain a significant following once a really well-done game has been completed in the language, like Inform‘s Curses or TADS‘ Unnkulia series. Now that’s a knot that won’t untie itself, but the nimble fingers of the WackyComp authors may be just the ones to unravel it.

SmoochieComp reviews [misc]

[Also in 2001, I was asked to judge a minicomp organized by Emily Short. It was a SmoochieComp, themed around love and romance. Like PrologueComp, I’ve added names where authors submitted pseudonymously. Unlike PrologueComp, the entrants were proper games, albeit small ones.]

These SmoochieComp reviews are written in a similar style to my reviews of games from the Fall Competition, but their ratings are structured a little differently. Since the SmoochieComp doesn’t ask participants to rate the games on a scale of 1 to 10, I decided instead on a scale of one to five smooches, similar to the star scale used by many movie reviewers. Turns out most games huddled around the middle of that spectrum — the lowest rating I gave was two smooches, and the highest rating was four smooches. Still, the quality index was satisfyingly high, especially for a mini-comp, since these often tend to generate games that are playable in ten minutes and feel like they were written in thirty.

As I did for the Comp00 games I played, I’ve held onto the transcripts from my interaction with all SmoochieComp games (except Bantam, whose environment didn’t allow scripting.) I’ll happily send the appropriate transcripts to any author who emails me a request. I’ll probably delete all of these around March 15, so don’t delay.

Finally, these reviews are presented in the order in which I played the games. I ran a little randomizer to determine what this order would be, and strangely, what it came up with differed very little from alphabetical order, Oh well, that’s randomness for you.

And now, on with the reviews…

1981 by Adam Cadre as A.D. McMlxxxi

Urgh. This game puts me in a tough spot. It’s a small piece, with an important twist, and it’s very difficult to talk about without spoilers. In fact, most of the things I can think of to say about it necessarily involve spoiling the surprise. However, I am committed to writing this entire review without giving away the secret — we’ll see how it goes. 1981 puts you in the shoes of an apparently lovelorn young man who has cashed in some stock money to travel to the college town where the girl of his dreams resides. At the outset of the game, you stand outside her dormitory, decked out in new jacket and new boots, clutching a sheaf of poems you’ve written for her and trying to get up the nerve to walk up to her door. At this point, the game teeters on a fine line, and the player can’t be sure whether it’s going to tip towards a cute story of shy college sweethearts or towards a Moment-of-Hope-like tale of unrequited affection.

As soon as you go to the door or read the poems, 1981 careens over the precipice into a tale that not only deals with unrequited affection, but the darker themes of obsession and even insanity. The game gets these themes across in lots of different ways, from the subtle to the blatant. For the latter, we have the poems, which teem with disturbing images and buckets of adolescent angst. Lines like “Regardless of the laughter of children/ I cannot continue to pretend/ I cannot continue to live” sound like a teenager trying to imitate The Cure, but other poems mention psychiatric visits and murder, clueing us in that something that something more serious than pimply puppy love is at stake here. On the more subtle side, there’s the first room description:

New Haven, Connecticut New Haven. The worst place on earth. The town is dirty and industrial, the students are sloppy, everything is horribly expensive. And you had to cash in $3600 of your stock to get here. But it was necessary. Four years at this place is enough to ravage anyone. You have to rescue her, your first true love.

Her dormitory lies to the north.

The game’s encapsulation of all New Haven into a few desultory, derogatory sentences demonstrates the PC’s creepily jealous disdain for the world surrounding his would-be lover, and his contrasting focus on her dorm building reveals his single-minded obsession.

From this point forward, 1981 straitjackets the player into its plot, offering no choices at any point, or at least not any which allow any alteration of the storyline. This lack of interactivity gets particularly chafing when the PC is such a disturbed and disturbing individual, but the PC’s nature also offers a rational justification for such linearity. If Alex in Rameses suffered from Social Anxiety Disorder, the PC in 1981 is in the grips of full-blown psychosis. The writing and pacing of the game, as well as the elements it includes, deftly outline the boundaries of this illness, and the effect is chilling. By putting the player into such a twisted mind, 1981 sheds valuable light on its subject; standing beneath that light is a deeply uncomfortable experience — even more uncomfortable than trying to write an entire review of the game without giving away its secret.

Rating: Four smooches

August by Matt Fendalheen

In the “about” text for August, the author claims that he learned Inform and coded the game in the space of seven days. Usually this is the sort of thing I dread hearing at the outset of a game, since it almost always signals that the experience I’m about to have is will be an unpleasant one. Indeed, the game’s own notes profess it to be “a horrid, malformed, wretched, crud-eating wreck of a failure.” With this kind of pep talk, it was hard to keep my hopes high, but when I started playing, I was pleasantly surprised. The game is written in a florid High Fantasy tone, but the writing worked for me, and I found it rich and involving rather than overblown and annoying. In addition, I came across no outright bugs in the coding, which was a relief. Finally, the character interaction… well, I’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s just say that if the author learned Inform and wrote this game in seven days, it must have been one hell of a week. Then again, perhaps those claims were just meant to keep my expectations low so that I would find the game’s achievements all the more impressive. If so, it worked. Hooray for the Low Expectation Theory.

The game’s story is of a warrior lord, Hakuin Ikthanadar, returned home from a great victory in which he killed the most dangerous enemy of the realm. He is attending the annual Feast of August in order to fulfill a promise he made to his beloved Rosalyn, and as the game begins we find him searching the revel for signs of her. As time progresses, August deftly unfolds more information about the victory, the enemy, the feast, and Rosalyn herself, mixing flashback, dialogue, and description to weave its story. I was pretty impressed with the way this was done, and the most impressive part was the centerpiece of the game, an extended conversation with a key figure in the plot.

The game uses the standard ASK/TELL conversation model, and the instructions warn that subjects should be limited to one word — “ASK CATHBAD ABOUT UNDERWEAR will get you somewhere… while ASK CATHBAD ABOUT HIS UNDERWEAR will not.” I was ready for this to feel pretty restrictive, especially when the questions I had were very difficult to encapsulate in just one word. However, I frequently had the uncanny sensation that even though my language was amputated, the game was able to figure out exactly what I meant. For example, I wanted to ask the person why she had come to the feast, but all I could type was ASK HER ABOUT WHY. Imagine my pleasure when the game displayed this text:

You extend your arm, keeping her distant in the motion of the dance.
“Why did you come here?” you ask. “I doubt you were invited.” Or welcome.
“I go where I will.” she states, lifting her chin defiantly. “If these perfumed cattle object to my presence, they can leave.” She swings about, pulls herself close to you again.

Even better, when she returned the question, I was able to TELL HER ABOUT ROSALYN, and the game understood exactly what I meant. I’m not sure whether the game’s ability to predict what I was thinking came from its precise coding or its precise writing, but every time it happened, I was made very happy.

Sadly, for every time something like that made me happy, there were two times that the game disappointed me. None of them were crashing disappointments, but each one made it a little easier to believe that the game really was done in a week. Something is described as happening to the east when I know it’s actually to the west. Something is mentioned about the PC’s right hand that is really about his left hand. Its/it’s errors. Sometimes August can’t even seem to make up its mind about how the names of its own characters and places are supposed to be spelled. Basically, the game just needs a good round or two of proofreading and betatesting, because even though it’s solid at its core, its surface is badly lacking in polish. In the author’s lengthy introduction, he implies that he’s ready to write this game off as a failure and move on to his next piece of work. I hope he reconsiders, at least enough to clean up the basic errors in August, because once it’s been refined a little, this will be an enjoyable work of IF with some extremely satisfying moments.

Rating: three and a half smooches

Even Bantams Get The Blues by Eric Mayer

If there was some kind of meta-competition for writing games that fit into as many parameters as possible from past mini-comps and themed releases, Even Bantams Get The Blues would make a perfect entrant. This is a Frogger-style game about a lovesick chicken (with no inventory) who must cross a road to find emotional release. See what I mean? It’s got the chicken from the ChickenComp, the Frogger theme from the IF Arcade, and of course a bit of romantic backstory so that it actually fits into the SmoochieComp. I’m not sure if the lack of inventory was an intentional reference to that mini-comp, but the chicken certainly isn’t carrying anything (well, not really, anyway). All it needs is a toaster, a dinosaur, a dragon, and some aliens to complete the picture. Ironically, the romantic element feels pretty tacked-on, so the game’s least significant element is the one that pertains to the comp in which it was actually entered, but hey, I’m not complaining.

Unlike the other two SmoochieComp games I’ve played so far (1981 and August), this one is pretty lightweight (or should I say bantamweight?) There is very little freedom available, even less than in the original Frogger, really — this chicken can’t even change direction. The game only allows travel to the north, so cars and trucks can’t be dodged by backpedaling or sidestepping. Then again, the Frogger element is completely deterministic, so winning is still pretty easy once you’ve recognized the pattern.

However, there are some pleasures to be found beyond the simple task of conquering the road-crossing ordeal. For one thing, Bantam offers a LITERARY mode alongside its default ARCADE mode. This mode offers plenty of fun little Easter eggs; for example, if you type “X ROAD” in ARCADE mode, you get an extremely terse key to the game’s ASCII graphics:

A road ... trucks == cars +.

However, in LITERARY mode, “X ROAD” yields this:

The four lane highway. before you is a breathtaking sight, a vast smooth expanse of night-black asphalt, flecked in spots with some trace of mineral that sparkles with a star-like effulgence in the brilliant sunlight blasting down from the cloudless blue dome of the overarching heavens.

And it goes on like that for an extremely long paragraph. Actually, I should say that there are Easter eggs to be found in both modes, and part of the fun is seeing the differences between them — the sensation reminded me a bit of the differences between the two modes of alien speech in Stephen Granade’s Arrival. The game also suggests that there are several ways to win besides crossing the road, though I didn’t find any of them. (I did find some amusing ways to lose, though.) Bantam probably won’t occupy your attention for too long, but it’s good fun while it lasts, and if you’ve enjoyed a mini-comp in the past few years, it’s probably got something to appeal to you.

Rating: three smooches

Pytho’s Mask by Emily Short

Believe it or not, here’s another large, impressive Inform game that the author claims was written in a week. Like August, the other game in this category, Pytho’s Mask takes place in a fictional kingdom, at a large gathering whose purpose is to celebrate a cyclical occurrence. The party in Pytho’s Mask is called The Celebration of the Night of the Comet, and the astral event it marks occurs only once every hundred years. When it does, the forces of stability in the kingdom are at their weakest. This concept is of a piece with the astronomical imagery used throughout the game: the king represents the Sun, and he is served by a Moon Minister and an Earth Minister. What’s more, he is currently being eclipsed by a mysterious illness that could allow insurgent forces to exploit his Comet-induced vulnerability. The PC is charged with investigating the illness and protecting the king.

The setup worked wonderfully for me, and the writing was, predictably, a pleasure to read, infused as it was with Short’s gift for evoking dazzling scenes through terse, elliptical language. The use of such fundamental symbols as the Earth and the Moon felt a bit reminiscent of books like Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, and as in that book, the imagery helped give the setting a magical feel without explicitly invoking any particular supernatural occurrences.

The other important thing about Pytho’s Mask is its experimental conversation system. The game eschews the ASK/TELL interface that Short employed so effectively in Galatea, opting instead to offer a menu-based system… with a twist or two. The first innovation is that all of the menu options reside in the status line, and all players need do at the prompt is to type the letter (A, B, C, D, etc.) corresponding to their selected menu item. This removal of menus from the main window makes the transcript read a bit more like a dialog, though it does divorce the entries at the prompt from all context. The other unique aspect of the conversation system is that if none of the menu options offered seem right, the topic can be changed. As the game explains it:

So for instance if your options listed at the moment are all vapid remarks about fashion and you would rather say, “Pass the Stilton, please,” you might try >TOPIC CHEESE. >TOPIC does not cost a turn to use, so you can explore a number of topics if you’re looking for something specific to say.

The great strength of this system is that it combines the freedom and openness of the ASK/TELL system with the more realistic dialogues permitted by menu-based systems. This combination makes it powerful, but as Spider-Man says, with great power comes great responsibility, and this game doesn’t always live up to its responsibilities. Several times, I found myself presented with options that seemed inappropriate, if not downright nonsensical, and from time to time the replies fit this description as well. Moreover, there were instances when the conversational menus didn’t seem to keep up with the plot; when I encountered the masked man after he had already confessed his identity to me, one of my options was “Are you going to tell me who you really are?” “Not yet,” he said. Indecisive fellow.

A number of little warts like this tarnish what would otherwise be an outstanding game. Some, such as those described above, were continuity problems, while others came down to a lack of robustness in the interface. The worst of these was an unfortunate guess-the-syntax problem at a critical moment, which rather wrecked my immersion in the game’s climax. Finally, Pytho’s Mask occasionally shares a problem which plagued Short’s acclaimed comp game, Metamorphoses: there are a couple of moments where the game executes a series of unprompted “hit any key” pauses, and since I’m usually already typing the next action, I would end up startled to discover that reams of text were flowing by me unexpectedly.

Still, these blemishes are probably attributable to the fact that the game was done in a week, and even with them, Pytho’s Mask is immersive and highly entertaining. There are a couple of wonderful swashbuckling moments, and the PC’s propensity for sneaking around, bribing servants, pumping NPCs for information, and getting into romantic entanglements made for an immensely enjoyable playing experience overall. If you’re the impatient type, it won’t be a big problem for you to dive into Pytho’s Mask as it stands. However, if you’re a fan of Emily Short, or if you want the best playing experience possible, I’d advise you to wait. Short has an excellent reputation for fixing bugs and adding improvements to her games, and once this one has received that treatment, it will be a terrific slice of romantic adventure.

Rating: four smooches

Sparrow’s Song by J.D. Berry

What becomes apparent is that J.D. Berry has a talent for creating fictional universes. Sparrow’s Song is the third game he’s entered in a competition, and it’s the third time he’s given us a fresh, interesting setting, replete with its own culture, people, and idiosyncrasies. His Comp99 entry, Jacks Or Better To Murder, Aces To Win, revolved around a rigidly hierarchical religion of Berry’s devising, one in which Machiavellian scheming was the norm and the highly-ranked PC was always on guard against assassination attempts. The Djinni Chronicles, from Comp00, contained an intricate magic system to explain the motivations and capabilities of magical spirits summoned from bottles, lamps, and suchlike.

Now we get Sparrow’s Song, with another new set of characters and situations. Some of the stuff is fairly standard-issue fantasy: the PC is Baron of a sorta-medieval keep, and in his travels may encounter nymphs, rocs, or the occasional pegasus. However, the predictable elements are spiced with some intriguing personal relationships and a refreshing lack of ethereal elevation in the dialogue. Take, for example, your servant’s response when asked about a treaty:

“Where’s you head today, Kellen? The Ronqons? You know, the giants that live in those mountains over there? The giants who have strangled overland trade for the past, oh, 500 years? Yeah, those. If you agreed to their terms of peace, you were supposed to have that treaty to them today. I guess it’s water under the bridge now, Baron von Pocket Veto.”

The game is entirely unafraid of such anachronisms, and as a result much of the dialogue (typos aside) escapes the stale feeling of some fantasy games. On a similar note, did I mention that this game can be really funny? This game can be really funny.

In case you’re worried that there isn’t some funky new system to experiment with, never fear. It’s just that this time the system isn’t part of the setting, it’s part of the interface. That’s right, it’s yet another new approach to conversation. Similar to Pytho’s Mask, this game’s system allows the player to choose the topic of conversation, in this case by typing the topic followed by a question mark, such as “love?” However, Sparrow’s Song streamlines the idea somewhat, eliminating the element of multiple-choice lists, and instead simply taking the topic and running with it. Topics aren’t addressed to any particular person; rather, conversation is directed at whoever happens to share a location with you. Handily, the game makes sure that you’re never with more than one conversation-worthy entity at a time. There are also plenty of times when the game will simply reject a suggested subject, saying something like “You’re not so dense as to bring up THAT topic.”

Finally, the verb “TOPICS” is provided, which will always bring up one to three possible topics, and also functions as a kind of just- barely-a-hint-system. Sometimes this scheme worked perfectly, especially when an NPC mentioned a topic I’d never heard of (like “Ronqons”) and I was able to say “Ronqons?” at the prompt. That interaction felt much more natural than most NPC conversation in IF, mainly because I was able to type exactly what I would have said if I were really in the situation. The rest of the time, it alternated between feeling like an abbreviated ask/tell system (where I’m able to just type “TREATY?” instead of “ASK ARCTOS ABOUT TREATY”) and feeling like a more focused version of the Lomalow “ask me something twelve times to hear all I have to say about it” system. The pleasant writing relieved the tedium of these latter moments somewhat, but only somewhat. On the whole, the conversation system felt like a noble experiment that garnered mixed results.

The same can be said of the story in general. The initial hook is great: you awake to find a sparrow sitting at your windowsill. After regarding you for a few moments, the sparrow begins to sing, and in that magical song it communicates to you that there is someone who loves you, and that she sent this sparrow to reveal her feelings. The song touches something pure and deep inside you, and you find yourself instantly in love with the person who sent the sparrow, pledged to finding her and beginning a life together. From this promising beginning, the game fans out to encompass several different NPCs, each of whom can help you in varying ways, many of which overlap or constitute decision points. One thing that’s clear is that there are multiple paths through the game, and perhaps multiple endings as well.

I was only able to complete one path, since the other two I found both led to a puzzle I was unable to vanquish, so I only found one ending. That one felt rather abrupt and unsatisfying to me — it failed to tie up several loose ends from the plot, and it also seemed to leave the protagonists in a rather precarious situation, with not much hint of how they would move beyond it into some kind of peaceful denouement. I wonder if Berry simply ran out of time to implement the more gradual buildup he might have been planning, and was forced instead to tack on a quick-and-dirty closure. Whatever the reason, my relationship with Sparrow’s Song felt, in the end, like a love affair that began tenderly and showed great potential, but finished bittersweet.

Rating: three and a half smooches

Dead of Winter by Gunther Schmidl as Christina Pagniacci

Dead of Winter is a tiny game, an interactive vignette, really. The basic plot is that a mysterious being known as The Ice Queen has kidnapped your boyfriend Saul, and you want to get him back from her. She sends you on a quest that encompasses maybe half a dozen locations, and when you return, you find out whether or not your efforts were successful. There are a few decision points along the way, but it wasn’t particularly clear to me how the decisions related to which ending I got. Some paths where I made what would seem to me to be some wrong choices ended up with what appeared to be a winning ending, while the path that seemed most right led straight to an ending that felt quite suboptimal. Then again, even the “winning” ending had a sneaky little twist at the end, so it’s hard to say which ending is really the better one. The twist had some punch to it, but felt a little overly familiar at this point, similar devices having been used in other recent games. Also, it was a little confusing that the twist was only used in one of the endings, since it tries to impose a retroactive perspective shift on the entire game.

There were a number of pleasant things about Dead of Winter. It was entirely free of bugs, as near as I could tell, which is always a big plus. In addition, the writing was grammatically correct, something that makes a game feel more immersive to me. Finally, the game employs some special effects with timed display and colors in its title sequence. These effects definitely help to set the mood — I first started playing in WinFrotz, but quickly switched to DOS Frotz and was happy I did, since the black and grey color scheme selected by the game deepened the general atmosphere of chill and desperation.

Dead of Winter is over almost as soon as it begins, so perhaps it’s understandable that I didn’t feel particularly grabbed by it. It’s a sketch rather than a full painting — sparse descriptions, short plot, few objects and unresponsive NPCs. On the whole, it felt like a first attempt at writing IF, and assuming that the author’s name isn’t a pseudonym, a first game is probably what it is. As such, it’s not an unsuccessful effort. When I reached the end, I didn’t want my ten minutes back. In fact, I was looking forward to the author’s next effort, with hopes that it has a little more meat on its bones.

Rating: three smooches

Second Honeymoon by Roger Ostrander

Here is a SmoochieComp game that doesn’t implement the verb “kiss.” That about sums up Second Honeymoon, a well-intentioned effort that fails due to sparseness of implementation, dull design, and multiple errors. For a sample, consider this excerpt from the game’s opening text:

You’re a successful computer programmer, enjoying his fifteenth year of marriage to a wonderful woman. […] You announced your plans to your surprised wife two days ago: a secluded lakeshore cabin, away from the hectic rural life you usually lead.

Unless the PC is a programmer for a big farming outfit, or is telecommuting somehow, I’m thinkin’ that last sentence wants to be about his hectic urban life. Stuff like this is scattered throughout the game. There’s a room description that mentions an exit to the north, but attempts to go that way meet with no success. Conversely, there’s a room whose description never mentions the important fact that there’s an exit to the east. I only found it due to my obsessive-compulsive playing style, which entails trying every single direction in every single room (a style, I might add, that evolved as a response to games such as this one.)

It’s not that this is a terrible game. It’s sweet, and has its heart in the right place. But after playing all the other games in the SmoochieComp, I’ve come to expect a little higher standard of writing and coding, and I’m looking for a plot a little more interesting than the one this game gave me. Basically, the idea in Second Honeymoon is that you’re getting ready for a vacation with your wife, and you need to go around the house and get some various items to take with you, like your camera, your swimsuit, etc. Visiting some places, or performing some actions, will remind you of other items you need. When you’re finished packing, you win. Probably the neatest part of the game is that it maintains a dynamic packing list that keeps track of items added and items fetched. It’s similar to the list carried by the PC in the first part of Firebird, though a bit less slickly implemented.

If you’re beginning to think that Second Honeymoon is one of those games that asks you to wander around a suburban house (the layout of which is very probably modeled on the author’s own home) and do fairly quotidian things, give yourself a gold star. There’s really only one puzzle to solve, and that one so trivial that it shouldn’t slow down anybody who’s ever actually lived in a suburban house. Really, pretty much all of the items you’re looking for will be just laying around on the floor waiting for you when you enter the right room. Then all you do is scoop them up and give them to your wife, who serves as this game’s equivalent of the Zork trophy case. That’s about all she does, too — asking her questions or trying to be affectionate with her will get you nowhere. If what I’ve described sounds like your cup of tea, give Second Honeymoon a shot. If not, why not put some effort into your real-life relationships?

Rating: two smooches

PrologueComp reviews [misc]

[In 2001, I was asked to be a judge for a minicomp called PrologueComp, whose concept was that the entrants wouldn’t write games — just the text lead-ins that open games. The entries were limited to 2001 characters, either ASCII or HTML. There were 23 entries, and I didn’t review them all — just the ones I was assigned. I made an ordered shortlist to rank the pieces against each other. Also, there are a few “editorial” interjections by David Myers, who ran the comp. For this reprint, I’ve also added author attributions, which were absent in my original text (since I didn’t know who the authors were!)]

A couple of comments:

Spoilers — it’s hard to worry about spoilers for something that takes two minutes to read, but I’ll try.
Quality level was really pleasantly high. Short list decisions weren’t easy.

[Editor’s note: Paul’s shortlist rankings are at the end of this document.]

Comments for COMPULSION by Aris Katsaris

When all I’m reading is a prologue, you don’t have much time to hook me; you’d better do it fast. One of the best techniques for this is to float an intriguing idea, something I want to investigate further. That’s just the approach taken by Compulsion, and it works beautifully. The genre is science fiction, which is perfect for the kind of “big idea” hook used here. Some kind of mind-control technology has been introduced into the military of the 24th century, and we see the societal debate about it through a series of box quotes. Normally I’m not a big fan of one box quote after another, especially at the beginning of a game, but this game doesn’t overdo the technique (there are three), and the last one provides a nice punch to lead into the main character’s POV. Once we get there, we get terse, driving sentences and fragments, setting up an urgent situation very nicely. There are stumbles here and there — a general is named “Ira Asimov”, evoking Isaac Asimov to no focused purpose, and some of the punctuation is absent or misplaced (“Less than a hundred of them you are betting.”) [Editor’s note – likely due to the fact that the author used all 2001 of his bits], but overall this is a very strong beginning.

Comments for HOWL by Randall Gee

It’s funny, but in a very compressed format like this, tiny things start to seem really significant. Take, for example, formatting. When I read monospaced text on a computer screen, I prefer for it to be left-aligned, and for the paragraphs to be separated by blank lines. When it’s indented, as it is in Howl, I find it all runs together and feels more difficult to read. But even if it were reformatted, I don’t think Howl would do much for me, despite my abiding interest in wolves and werewolves. The conversation that opens the story feels stilted and cliched, and the punch that the last sentence was supposed to deliver fell flat for me, perhaps in part because I had begun to skim over the irritating formatting at that point. The sentences in the opening room description are almost insistently flat, which deflates whatever emotional impact the beginning might have had. If I encountered this opening in an actual game, I’d certainly keep playing, but with the hope that things would improve.

Comments for UNFERTH by Jamie Murray

When I was teaching writing, I found that there were certain styles I could recognize from miles away. One of these was the “I have swallowed a thesaurus” style, where things were never pretty but “resplendent”, and “brobdignagian” instead of big. Another was “adjective-o-rama”, where no noun was happy without some intensifying descriptor. Usually these styles were the outgrowth of some well-meaning teacher’s advice about word choice or vivid description, taken to an extreme. With clauses like “sooty cobbles and their hobbling troupes of leprous pigeons,” Unferth appears to suffer from both syndromes. The ironic thing is that although these techniques are presumably meant to make the writing more vivid and intense, they actually result in prose that is murkier (due to inappropriate adjectives — can raindrops really be “laurel-tinted?”) and choppier (due to the necessity of consulting a dictionary for every third sentence.) I have a healthy vocabulary, but even after reading the Unferth prologue several times I have only the vaguest idea of what’s going on, and I’m not particularly inclined to investigate further.

Comments for TROUBLE IN PARADISE by Sean T. Barrett

This prologue starts out in the hard-boiled mystery mode, with the detective talking to the femme fatale, and is so reminiscent of the opening to Dangerous Curves that it’s hard to avoid comparison to that game. Trouble doesn’t have nearly the panache with words that marked DC, and consequently I was feeling a little let down by it. What it does have, however, is a little surprise, a genre-blending trick that makes the whole thing seems much fresher. This surprise is handled well; it’s obvious enough by the end of the prologue, but on rereading it’s clear that the hints were there all along. However, by the time the story is rolling, it’s actually someone besides the PC who is performing immediate action — the prologue doesn’t suggest anything in particular for the PC to do as the game begins. Perhaps this might have been more effective if recast from the point-of-view of Raphael, the henchman. Nonetheless, I’d look forward to playing this game further, if only to see more of the fun surprises that happen when genres collide.

Comments for THE MADNESS OF CROWDS by Top Changwatchai

In my notes on Compulsion, I remarked that the dictates of this competition leave precious little time to get the reader interested. Compulsion overcomes the problem with a Big Idea, and uses the natural genre of that technique, science fiction. TMOC uses a related trick: the Big Question. And wisely, the prologue embeds that technique in its home genre, the mystery. TMOC‘s application of the technique isn’t quite as skillful as that in Compulsion — there isn’t quite the sense of immediacy — but it was plenty good enough to get me very interested. There were a few things I wasn’t crazy about, like the abundance of InterCapped company names (“CreAgent”, “ComTrust”, etc.) and the inconsistent line spacing, [Editor’s note – I believe the author was going for a larger break right before and right after the title block, but could not properly simulate this because he’d run out of his 2001 bytes that way] but these were offset by some clever choices. Starting in the POV of the murder victim and jumping to the detective as our PC sets up a lovely bit of dramatic tension, albeit of a type that is rather difficult to handle in interactive fiction. In fact, I’d be curious to see how an actual game would handle giving crucial information to the player that the PC lacks. Perhaps this could only be a prologue, but even at that, it’s quite a good one.

Comments for WITHOUT WINGS by Robert Masella

Something that I’ve found interesting about the entries in this competition is how much they vary in their “IFness.” Some, like Compulsion, feel as if they had to have been lifted from an IF game — they give us the traditional intro, banner, initial room description, and prompt. In fact, Compulsion uses the additional convention of box quotes to reinforce the feeling that we’re definitely dealing with computer-assisted prose here. I tend to find these prologues the more compelling of the lot — they really give me the feeling that a piece of interactive fiction is beginning, and trigger those mechanisms in my brain that slide into identification with the PC and immersion in the game world. Then there are those prologues, like Unferth and The Madness of Crowds, that give us intro and banner, but no room description. These types of prologues stand or fall on the setup of their initial questions and on the quality of their writing, because by omitting the initial room description and prompt, they force us to imagine just where the game places us to begin with. And then, at the other end of the spectrum, there are prologues like this one, which are indistinguishable from the first few paragraphs of a short story, albeit one written in the second-person voice. This approach is hardest of all to pull off, and Without Wings just doesn’t make it. The setup needed to be extremely interesting in order to give me that IF hook, and the cliched parade of mental patients, full moon, drifting mist, and chittering horrors had me detaching right away. I guess it’s a combination of factors: the genre’s not particularly my cup of tea, this particular instance of it didn’t feel fresh, and the feeble, possibly-deluded PC was difficult to identify with. I probably wouldn’t read a short story that began like this, and what’s here just doesn’t feel much like a game.

Comments for PASSING ON by Ulrich Schreitmueller

Wow! This one was easily the biggest knockout of the samples I was assigned. For one thing, it’s one of the few entries that uses the HTML format of the contest to its advantage — the black background and the varying shades of text work to excellent effect. The faded grey text is perfect for the modernist technique of presenting suggestive, evocative word-fragments to evoke a dreamlike and semi-conscious state, while the brighter white text takes a more straightforward narrative tone. The interplay between the two sets up a highly compelling scenario, an immediate task to accomplish, and moves us smoothly into the first room description. That room description is excellent, using several senses (including the non-physical) to create a place that isn’t really a place, but rather a mental state. And then that final sentence — both chilling and exhilarating, not to mention an excellent spur to action. I also appreciated that the subtitle “A Prologue”, which is not only literally true for this entry, but feels like it would be perfectly appropriate even if this really were the beginning of a game. All in all, a bravura performance in a tiny space. Well done!

Comments for FADE OUT by Marc Valhara

A while ago (hell, I don’t know — maybe it was several years ago), somebody floated the idea of an IF game formatted like a screenplay. At the time, I remember being less than enthusiastic about the idea — I wasn’t sure just what advantage the format would bring. Now, as proof of concept, we’ve got Fade Out, which might be the prologue to that hypothetical game. To be honest, it still seems like a stylistic gimmick to me, but gimmicks have their place. Based on my extremely limited knowledge of screenplay convention, this one seems to deviate a little in some specifics, but that’s probably not such a bad thing, given the screen constraints that real IF would be working under. The one advantage conferred by the screenplay format is that it provides a legitimate excuse for such plodding text as “A wooden deck is to the north. A hallway is to the east, and a kitchen is to the west.” Many IF writers have puzzled over how to include such necessary information without its clunkiness detracting from their other writing, and this format provides just such a mechanism. Aside from that, though, it didn’t feel any more vivid than regular prose written in a “cinematic” style. The story itself provides an interesting beginning, and definitely made me want to keep playing, although I’d still view the screenplay gimmick with skepticism.

Comments for “untitled – judged as heidger.html” by Scott Forbes

Like Without Wings, this entry provides neither banner nor room description, giving us instead three basic paragraphs of fairly generic setup. The premise in this entry doesn’t really give any indication as to where the game is going, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in a real IF game. However, this is not a real IF game, just a three-paragraph prologue, and in these circumstances, leaving the PC’s situation so dull and open does little to draw me in. Sure, it’s clear enough that something’s going to happen, but the range of things that could happen is so vast that until something more specific comes along, there isn’t much drama there. In fact, if I were a betting man, I’d venture that this is the actual prologue to somebody’s WIP, snipped and entered into this comp on a whim, and its failure in this context serves to prove that not all good prologues stand on their own. Sometimes, a prologue just does some basic work of setting up a character and situation, and it’s the first section of the game that actually gets the ball rolling. (I’m chuckling now, thinking of what the beginning of LASH would look like if entered into this comp — very short, and very dull.) That’s a perfectly acceptable way of structuring an IF game, but it doesn’t have much to offer as a set piece on its own.

[Editor’s long note – Actually, it is possible that I was thinking about LASH subconsciously when designing this contest, and so I want to correct Paul’s modesty. In part, I was envisioning the question of what makes some comp entries irresistible and others easily avoided. The conclusion I came to was that sometimes the prologue determines whether the player is hooked or not. I recall thinking beyond just prologues and further about games where there is not much prologue material, but there is a readme.txt or an ANNOUNCE on usenet which tells what the setting/motivation of the game are going to be. ::These comments were written before the announcement that we may, in fact, soon witness TrailerComp.::

This is rarer with comp games, which don’t often have such extra material that doesn’t reside directly in the game file. More generally, that would be termed “feelies”, though the term has gotten pretty loose from the original intent, which generally used to mean pictures or other non-text material that accompanied and buttressed the game, rather than introducing it. My memory may be failing me, but I seem to recall LASH having either a readme.txt or a usenet ANNOUNCE which greatly piqued my interest about the game concept. Frankly, without that prologue-ish material, I don’t know if I would have played LASH.

Below is the actual LASH startup text (as opposed to the readme/ANNOUNCE), for readers wondering about what Paul meant by “very short, very dull”:

LASH -- Local Asynchronous Satellite Hookup An interactive utility for communicating with your MULE robot New users should type "HELP". Release 11 / Serial number 000806 / Inform v6.15 Library 6/7

DISCONNECTED Type "CONNECT" to link to your MULE robot. Type "HELP" for help.

>

Author’s own words: “Not exactly the world’s most gripping prologue.” ]

[Paul’s note from 2024: I think David is thinking of the announcement I posted to rec.games.int-fiction when I released the game.]

Comments for THE BOOK OF THE DEAD by Greg Ewing

This prologue does an excellent job of suggesting what the game will probably be like, and this works both for it and against it. On the plus side, the setup is quite clever and original — I’m strongly intrigued by the idea of “an interactive foray into the myths and legends of Ancient Egypt,” and would be quite excited to play such a thing. The notion that the action will begin after the PC dies is a nifty one — I’ve never played Perdition’s Flames, so I’m not sure how closely this game might parallel it, but I was always tickled by the idea of starting with “*** You have died ***”. On the less positive side, however, what seems clear is that at the beginning of this game, you’ll be forced to select a limited number of resources from some larger group of them, and which resources you select will determine your success later on in the game. I hate when games do this, because there is really no way of knowing which resources will be needed until you run into the puzzles. Saying “you will have to choose wisely” implies a level of context that is simply not available to me at the beginning of a game — in situations like this, I invariably find that what seemed like wise choices at the time turn out to be woefully insufficient, and that short of reading the author’s mind, I had no way of anticipating the problem. So I’d play on with hope of seeing more of this game’s interesting setting, but dreading its structure all the while.

Comments for CATHARSIS by Kevin F. Doughty

I found this prologue pretty unsatisfying, though it might work if it was attached to an actual game. On its own, though, it just doesn’t give me enough information to go on. Part of the problem is that it’s disjointed — it hardly gets started with its narrative voice before it’s interrupting itself with a journal excerpt. Then the journal excerpt stops, and we get a title and room description. Consequently, instead of a smooth introduction, this prologue feels as if it can’t make up its mind what approach it wants to take. Another factor is the absence of any substantive information about the character and setting. We can piece together that the PC is a traveler, and that the world is dark, maybe post-apocalyptic, but that’s about it. When I read “The children here are still burning things,” the implication of the “here” was that the PC was from somewhere else, but the prologue never tells us where that is, or where “here” is. What’s more, it never tells me who I am, how I ended up in my current situation, or why I should care about it, instead dumping me unceremoniously into a cellar. Again, this might work in a real game, where this information could be gradually revealed, but in this format, that information is not forthcoming. Also, what does catharsis have to do with anything? There’s no evidence that the PC is in any particular pain, and we’ve seen no other characters, so it would seem there’s not much of an opportunity for catharsis to occur. Finally, there’s the writing, which had several nice moments but overall felt rather awkward and affected. When I see a phrase like “this state of existence cruelly named ‘survival'” in a character’s journal, I can accept it as an example of that character’s melodrama and inarticulateness. But when the narrative voice itself is using clumsy phrases like “heightened the impact of its meaning”, I have to believe that there is a general problem with the writing. I’d keep playing this game, but I’d expect it to be the product of a beginning writer, and hope to find some gems in among the problems.

Comments for YOU: TENSE, ILL by Alexandre Owen Muñiz

There was a bit of debate among the judges as to what the title of this entry actually is, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s You: Tense, Ill. I love this title, because it does so many different things in such a tiny space. It reinforces the information in the introductory paragraphs about how the PC has been damaged by its foray through a dishwasher. It serves as a diagnostic report on the PC’s initial condition. And finally, the pun on “utensil” cracks me up, and lets me know that this game is going to approach its subject matter with a healthy dose of humor. [Editor’s note: you could be right. However, when I asked the entrant to view his entry to make sure that I’d gotten the display ok, he did not comment on my choice to list it on the main page as “A Gardenburger of Forking Paths”] The “forking paths” pun and the play on Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” serve a similar purpose, and I enjoyed them quite a bit. The premise at work here is clever and interesting — I adore the notion of aliens observing us by taking the shapes of ordinary objects. What’s clear, though, is that this is no ordinary PC, and that its range of action is going to be extremely limited, to say the least. The prologue does a wonderful job of letting us know what must be done, but the PC is so unusual that I’d venture the traditional IF interface would need to be adapted in order to accommodate it. It’s not the prologue’s job to explain these interface changes, but I was a little dismayed by not seeing a “first-time players should type HELP” sort of message. You can be sure that “help”, “info”, and “about” would be the first few things I’d try anyway, and that if those weren’t productive, I’d be completely at sea about where to even begin this game. In those circumstances, my glee at the good stuff this prologue does would probably turn into irritation at the more important things it doesn’t do.

Comments for THIRTEEN CARDS, WELL SUITED by Denis Hirschfeldt

Here’s another prologue that presents us with a highly unusual PC, and only provides the barest of hints as to that PC’s nature. Setups like this make me nervous, because I worry that I’ll lack the context necessary to enjoy the game. Having an unusual PC is well and good, but when that PC has special powers, unusual modes of action, and highly unusual goals and viewpoints — all of which this PC seems to have — then I want the game to give me enough context or instruction about these things so that my first hundred moves don’t consist of blindly flailing about, hoping to hit on information that the PC already knows. This prologue doesn’t give me much indication that the information is forthcoming, which is worrisome. It does have two great strengths, though: its writing and its level of intrigue. By the time I got to the end of this prologue, I really wanted more, and that’s a good thing. I found the viewpoint character highly intriguing, and the hints of the major conflict were delivered in a very compelling manner. The prose itself was excellent — “From within the fire” provided a wonderful “whoa!” moment, and the details are well-chosen. Some of the sentences, especially the first, are so dense and elliptical that they recall Emily Short, which is pretty much always a good thing. If this were a story, I’d be hooked. As an IF game, it’s got me both hooked and worried that the crucial exposition won’t come soon enough, if at all.

Short list rankings:

1. Passing On
2. You: Tense, Ill
3. Compulsion
4. Thirteen Cards, Well Suited
5. The Madness of Crowds
6. Trouble in Paradise
7. The Book Of The Dead
8. Catharsis

The Act of Misdirection by Callico Harrison [misc]

[I reviewed this game ahead of its release in 2004, at the request of the author.]

IFDB page: The Act of Misdirection

The Act Of Misdirection is not a competition game, and in today’s IF community, that alone is enough to make it remarkable. For a first-time author to release a comp-sized game (or maybe even any game) outside the competition is an even gutsier move, since she risks the product of all her hard work sinking without a trace. So when Callico Harrison asked me if I’d like to write a review that she could release simultaneously with her first game, I felt strongly in favor of the idea.

Imagine my pleasure when I started playing and discovered that this a very strong game indeed. It’s intriguing, skillfully crafted, and if it were entered in the competition it would surely place in the top ten, perhaps even the top three. Not only is it written with flair and diligently coded, it also makes some impressive inroads into one of my favorite areas of modern IF development: player-friendly design. Many areas of the game are constructed to allow the player to discover the story for himself, but also to notice if the player seems to be struggling, and to offer gentle nudges in the right direction without recourse to some kind of external hint system.

Nowhere is this excellent design more evident than in the game’s first scene. The setting is the brightly lit boards of London’s Carthaginian Stage in 1896. The house is packed with “the city’s gents and ladies” who wait breathlessly “in anticipation of something magical.” The protagonist is a magician, equipped with nothing but a bare baize table, a handkerchief, and a debonair top hat.

The game places you in this nerve-wracking situation, and lets you take it from there; what follows is one of the most charming interactive fiction scenes I’ve ever played. There’s nothing quite so gratifying in IF as attempting a non-standard action or phrasing that makes sense in context and finding that the game anticipates and handles it. To find that this action is the exact right choice is an unparalleled pleasure, and it’s a pleasure that the game’s magic act offers over and over.

Whether Misdirection craftily led me into the right actions or simply anticipated a wide range of options I don’t know, and in the moment of playing I didn’t care — all I knew was that as the act unfolded, I felt myself both the magician and the audience, both directing the action and dazzled by the exciting spectacle before me. The experience isn’t perfect, mind. There were plenty of times when I tried something that wasn’t implemented, and there was even the occasional novice glitch, like the following:

>show 9 of hearts to audience You can only do that to something animate.

>show nine of hearts (to the audience) "Any card you choose is here, friends. The Nine of Hearts?" With a quick ruffle the card is produced and shown to all.

Still, the game achieves a much higher percentage of implemented actions than usual, and it’s enough to make the magician’s routine very memorable. Just as important, when I couldn’t think of the right thing to do, I never felt stuck, because eventually the game would step in and give me a gentle push in the right direction. Parser responses are written with delightful cleverness, usually pointing subtly towards a more productive action if the player has guessed wrong.

For this first scene alone, The Act Of Misdirection would be well worth playing, but the game goes on from there, its story expanding and its mystery deepening. One of the story’s main themes is surprise, and this manifests itself both in plot and in design, so it wouldn’t do to give away any more secrets. I’ll just settle for saying that although the game’s helpful design philosophy continues throughout, it becomes more and more puzzling as it reveals itself, winding up in a great enigma.

I hope that the mysterious nature of the plot prompts a great deal of discussion, because, ironically enough, the game’s willingness to help players through its puzzles removes one of the most prominent spurs to public discussion that past games like The Mulldoon Legacy and my own LASH have used to prompt public posting. Without hint requests to drive up the number of posts on rec.games.int-fiction, The Act Of Misdirection must rely on community support and enthusiasm. For that reason and for the others I’ve just detailed, I urge you to play this game, and to post your reaction on the newsgroups. If this game gets the attention it deserves, it’ll be a lock for several 2004 XYZZY nominations. I’ve tried to do my part to get it that attention — the rest is up to you.

You have: A lamp (providing illumination) [Misc]

[I originally posted this on my other blog, >SUPERVERBOSE, way back in 2010 when it was on livejournal. GET LAMP is no longer for sale, so I’ve removed the ordering links, and updated some of the other links, but have otherwise left the text alone.]

I’ve written before about GET LAMP, the text adventure documentary. Back in March, I got to watch an hour-long mix of it at PAX East. Now, the full film is available on DVD, so I get to write about it again. Let me get right to the point: if you love text games, or you want to know more about them, you should watch this movie. Stephen Granade called it “funny, affecting, and informative, which isn’t a bad trifecta to hit.” I can’t think of a better description, though of course that won’t stop me from spending the next few paragraphs trying.

True, it’s pricey ($40 plus $5 shipping domestically, $9 internationally.) Director Jason Scott released the movie under a Creative Commons license, so it’s not illegal to torrent it, but of course, buying it is the more right thing to do. There’s no studio backing Jason — he produced this movie as a labor of love, and both the labor and the love shine through luminously. More about that in a bit. In order to make the DVD package attractive, he’s packed it with all sorts of fun goodies: nifty art, tons of featurettes, a DVD-ROM full of text games, three different commentary tracks, and a gorgeous individually numbered collectible coin. It’s a remarkably well-wrought product, especially considering that, again, this is the output of one guy. Plus, I’m in it, so, y’know, what’s not to love? 🙂

GET LAMP is very clearly a loving tribute to text games. Because I am passionate about the form myself, and because of my personal involvement with the film, I cannot judge it objectively. In any case, I’ve already written about what makes the movie good according to me, and all that still holds true. In fact, it’s better than the movie I saw at PAX — not only is it fuller, but the pieces I didn’t like in the hour-long mix have either been excised or fixed.

So this isn’t a review, but rather an appreciation, a recommendation, and a gleeful celebration of this cool thing that now exists in the world. There are a lot of fun layers to the whole thing. For instance, in the spirit of the “Have you tried…?” section that often appears at the end of text game hint manuals, there’s a whole game to be played with the movie itself: almost every shot has a lamp in it; collect them all like trophies. Even cooler, the movie itself is interactive. After the initial 25 minutes or so, you are presented with a menu of options for what piece of the movie you want to view next. Fair warning, though: if your DVD player is sorta lame like mine, you may be better served by just watching the non-interactive version. In fact, even in that one I keep getting kicked out to the top menu, and have to make my way through the film via clever use of the chapter forward button on my DVD remote. Hey, it’s a movie that’s also a puzzle!

I’m surprised how little that glitch bothers me. I think I know the reason why: every time I see this movie, or any piece of it, I come away feeling energized and inspired. That’s a big payoff, well worth a little remote-fiddling. I love GET LAMP, and I’m proud to have been a part of it. In fact, Laura and I have a date to watch it this weekend, so she can learn more about this crazy text adventure thing that has taken so much of her husband’s time over the last 15 years. That alone is a wonderful gift. The obsessive viewing of each commentary track, though — that’s just for me.

PAX East Part 4: Saturday They’ll All Be Back Again [Misc]

[I originally posted this on my other blog, >SUPERVERBOSE, way back when it was on livejournal. It’s the fifth in a series of posts about my visit to PAX East 2010, which was life-altering in a good way. I’ve cleaned up the text ever-so-slightly and the links ever so much more.]
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Compared to Friday, Saturday was pretty low-key. Then again, it’s not fair to compare anything to Friday. I let my exhausted self sleep in, then showered, packed up, etc. I met my friend Ruth Atherton for lunch, along with her partner Yigal and their adorable boy Natan. I’ve known Ruth since our freshman year of college at NYU — over 20 years ago now! — and it was wonderful to spend some time with her again.

Ruth dropped me at the Hilton, and I stopped into the IF Suite, where the PAX SpeedIF efforts were well underway. I opted out, given that 1) I didn’t bring my laptop to the suite, 2) it’s been years since I actually wrote any IF code, and 3) I didn’t want to spend my PAX time heads-down coding anyway. So it was off to the convention center, where I undertook my next mission: a present for Dante! I checked out a Boston souvenir store in the Prudential Center and picked up a cute little Boston ball, to use as a backup if I couldn’t find anything in PAX itself. But I did — his own bag of dice. He’s often wanting to play with my dice, so now he’s got his own. (He was quite delighted with these gifts when I brought them home, and as he often does, he immediately turned it around on me. “Pretend that you are Dante and I am Daddy! Dante, I brought you some presents! A Boston ball, and your very own bag of dice!”)

After a quick trip to Trader Joe’s for some trail mix and water, I took the time to explore the rest of PAX, but between the incredible crowds and my own lack of motivation, I didn’t really hook into anything. I wasn’t up for boardgaming with strangers, nor did I fancy standing in line for a chance at console, PC, or handheld games. And of course the panels were out of the question — you had to arrive at least 30 minutes early to have a crack at getting into any panel, and none of the panels at that time were terribly interesting to me anyway.

So back to the IF suite I went. I hung out and chatted with various people, and even skipped dinner so that I could spend more time in the ambiance. (That’s where the trail mix comes in.) There were a few people I missed — I would have loved to hang out with Stephen and Rob a bit more, for instance — but I really enjoyed the various people I talked to. I think part of the connection-missing may have had to do with the fact that while I have a cell phone, it is a creaky 2005 pay-as-you-go model with no internet access and the clunkiest of texting capabilities. Normally, this does not bother me at all, but sometimes during PAX weekend I felt like an timebound mortal in a Kage Baker Company novel, looking on in blissful ignorance while all around me the immortals communicate telepathically. It probably also wouldn’t hurt to hang out on ifMUD more than once every two years.

All part of the thawing process, I suppose. While I wasn’t musing on that, I also kept an eye out for newbies and visitors. I hooked several people up with IF swag and talked to them about the medium and the community, which felt great. Extended social exertion like that is a bit out of my comfort zone — I’m an introvert by nature — but I liked helping with the IF outreach mission.

That mission was the subject of the informal panel at 7:00. That panel featured Andrew Plotkin, Jason McIntosh (aka jmac), Chris Dahlen (gaming journalist), and John Bardinelli (of JayIsGames). It was moderated, in an endearingly prolix style, by Harry Kaplan. (I should mention here that Harry was quite helpful in getting me connected with the pre-PAX discussion, and was particularly welcoming to me in the suite. Also, he’s apparently the cousin of Paul Fishkin, who founded Stevie Nicks’ record company! Remote brush with fame!) Harry would make a discursive, intentionally provocative statement, and ask the panel to respond, offering the lead to a different panelist for each question. The discussion often expanded beyond the panel and into the room, which was great, because the room was packed (seriously, packed) with very smart people.

I am terrible at reconstructing discussions, so I’m not going to try to do it here. Much. I will say that I was particularly struck by the way Emily framed the problem of IF’s learning curve. The parser, she said, makes a false promise, strongly implying by its openness that it is able to handle anything the player throws at it, which is simply not true. Lots of people would like to see IF respond by expanding the range of actions and phrasings that the parser can understand, but Emily disagrees. She could do a much better job than I of articulating this, and probably does so somewhere, but essentially she argues that expanding the parser is a blind alley, because it never eliminates the false promise issue, and creates a ridiculous implementation headache. Even if the game could legitimately understand a much wider range of commands, coding meaningful responses to that radically expanded command set is a misuse of our energies. Instead, she suggests that we embrace IFese while finding ways to help games gently nudge players in the right direction when it seems that they’re struggling to speak IFese to the parser. She did some work toward this in City Of Secrets, and Aaron Reed apparently does even more in Blue Lacuna. She points to Façade as a cautionary example of what happens when you try to go the other direction.

After the panel, there was a bit more chatter, and then it was time to for SpeedIF contestants to turn in their games. I had no laptop, but Juhana Leinonen very kindly let me use his to play Sarah Morayati’s Queuelty, which I found quite enjoyable.

More chatting, more hanging out, but eventually, sadly, it was time for me to go. There would be more events on Sunday, but my flight left early Sunday morning — I hadn’t wanted to take undue advantage of Laura’s generosity with the childcare, so I kept my trip to two days. I’m sorry to have missed Sunday, though. From what I read [in a livejournal that has since been deleted and purged, even from the Wayback Machine — 2022 PO], it was great.

The rest is uninteresting travel details, except for this revelation, which traveled home with me: it has become painfully, unmistakably clear that working every night and weekend is ruining my life and blocking me from doing the things that actually make me happy. The truth is that nobody ever told me to do that (well, with some exceptions) — it’s just that I’m so overwhelmed all the time, so behind all the time, that I feel like I have to do that in order to have a remote chance of success at work. But keeping my head above water there has come at the cost of drowning the parts of myself I treasure more. So I’m going to stop doing that.

I’m going to try, anyway. It’s rather shockingly hard to draw firm boundaries around work when they’ve been obliterated for so long. I’m taking it one day at a time. I’m on Day 6 now, and even in the last week I’ve been able to produce these blog entries, which would have seemed ridiculously out of reach a few weeks ago. That makes me happier than I’ve been in quite a while.