SURREAL by Matthew Lowe [Comp01]

IFDB page: SURREAL
Final placement: 45th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

The author’s notes for SURREAL contain the following statements: “I am currently fourteen years old and I enjoy playing text adventures.”; “SURREAL is the first text adventure I have ever written so I hope that it’s alright.”; “I hope you like it.” So now I’m in a bit of a pickle. I didn’t like the game, because it had lots and lots of problems. But I hardly want to crush a first-time author, especially somebody so young who enjoys text adventures not as nostalgia, but on their own merits.

So this seems like a good time to reiterate my general reviewing philosophy: basically, I’m here to help. I never want my reviews to come across as nasty jabs, and if they do, it’s because of my own deficiencies as a writer and critic. Instead, I hope that these reviews offer worthwhile feedback to authors, and that they communicate some of my ideas and knowledge about IF. The point is not to smack somebody down for writing a bad game, but rather to report on my experience with that game so that the author’s next game can be better. Now, that being said: SURREAL was not a strong game.

Let’s talk first about the writing. It’s pretty apparent that the game’s landscapes are inspired by the Myst series, and that’s not always such a bad thing. There are moments throughout where a vivid picture arises from a paragraph, or even a sentence. However, grammar is a serious problem through the entire game. Poor grammar is a writer’s bane, because as a rule, it impedes the communicative arts; the prose in this game is no exception to that rule. Take these sentences, for instance:

You are standing in the fresh outdoor air again, a spray of salty water hits you in the face. The weather has taken a turn for the worse as dark clouds roll across the sky like and army of black horses marching to war.

The first sentence is a run-on, meaning that it’s really two sentences held loosely together by a comma. What this does to me as a reader is basically to pull the rug out from under me. I read the first part of the sentence, then hit the comma, which signals to me that I’m about to read something related to the first clause, probably either a dependent clause or an appositive. Instead, I get hit with another independent clause, and consequently I have to stop and try to figure out what the connection is. A moment later, I realize that there is no connection, because it’s just a run-on. But by then it’s too late — I’ve already been thrown out of the prose. All this happens very quickly, but the result is devastating to the story’s power, because it makes me remember that I’m reading words on a screen rather than inhabiting a surreal world.

The second sentence has a more obvious problem: instead of “like an army of black horses”, it says “like and army of black horses.” Typos like this are similar to heavy static on a TV screen. If we’re looking closely, we can see what’s supposed to be there, but after a while, it hardly seems worth the effort. Words are the game’s only conduit to our minds, and if the words don’t make sense, the game doesn’t either. There are also several NFIEs, but I have taken a deep, cleansing breath and promised not to rant about those.

Implementation is also a serious issue. The game is apparently programmed in GAGS, a precursor to AGT. Now, why in 2001 someone would want to use such a primitive development tool is a complete mystery to me. Even if one is too intimidated to broach something like Inform, TADS, or Hugo, there are plenty of newbie-friendly languages that are far more robust than GAGS. That choice of tool alone limits the game’s audience severely, since it’s only playable via MS-DOS, and even among DOS users, there are plenty of people who are unwilling to put up with a rudimentary parser and absent features from a modern text adventure.

On top of that, some of the most important items in the game are unimplemented, even with a “That’s just scenery” sort of description. No matter how much one loves text adventures, parser-wrestling is just not fun, and tools like GAGS make for lots of parser-wrestling. There is promise in a game like SURREAL, but it’s a promise largely unfulfilled. My advice to the author is to learn a high-level IF language (it’s not that hard, really!), review basic grammar, employ proofreaders and beta testers… and write again!

Rating: 2.5

The Chasing by Anssi Räisänen [Comp01]

IFDB page: The Chasing
Final placement: 14th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

When I finished The Chasing, I knew that it was a competently produced text adventure, and that there wasn’t much with which I could find fault in it. Yet, for all this, when I thought about a rating, I ended up feeling like it should rate somewhere in the high 7s. This isn’t terrible, but neither is it stellar, and yet the feeling persisted. Why? The writing, after all, was nothing exceptional, but it was at least error-free. After playing so many games in this comp that seem unable to employ basic English, having a game in which I could only find one error (and that a misspelling of a rather uncommon word) is nothing to take for granted.

There were even some nice details thrown in, such as the fact that the various estates throughout the game often have charming names such as “Bluebells” or “Valleyside” rather than just being called “Large House” or “<npc>’s House”. The nice thing about this choice is that it works subtly toward enhancing the character of the PC, a wealthy landowner whose relationships with his equally privileged neighbors are friendly and congenial. The idea that the PC knew immediately the affectionate designations that the neighbors had for their houses granted authenticity to his friendships with them, and made the landscape feel more inhabited as well. Still, for each detail like this, there were plenty of descriptions that remained mired in the pedestrian, like so:

Road.
The road goes on to the northwest and to the south. Gualtier's house
is to the east.

Descriptions like this are obvious placeholders, just marking distance between the areas in which the game is really interested, and even in those latter areas, description often feels perfunctory rather than immersive. There’s nothing in particular wrong with such writing, but it doesn’t do much to spark enthusiasm either.

The same might be said for the plot. The Chasing‘s premise is that your seven prize horses have escaped to various corners of the valley in which you live, and you must spend the day rounding them up. The PC takes this rather shocking lack of basic stable management in stride, emitting “a short amused laugh” and thinking, “Looks like it is going to be a chasing-day today…” In fact, the latter comment seems to imply that this is not the first time such an escape has happened, which in real life would be even more likely to irk the horses’ owner. However, instead of immediately firing the stable staff, the PC instead casually makes a walking-tour of the valley, chatting with neighbors and solving various problems for the valley’s denizens.

Of course, this being a text adventure, those problems take the form of puzzles, and after every puzzle, one more horse is found. Only one of the puzzles actually involves looking for a horse; the others are totally unrelated, but end in a sentence reading “Now that you have solved Bob’s problem, you happen to notice your horse grazing happily just north of here,” or something to that effect. This, obviously, feels rather contrived, and is made more so by the fact that the horses all have names like Patience, Serenity, Unhesitancy (unhesitancy?) and such, and the solution to each puzzle gets reflected in the name of the horse that is the reward for that puzzle. In other words, you find Patience (the horse) after solving a puzzle by being patient, etc. It’s a cute conceit, and that’s all. After puzzles (none of which are brain-breakers) are solved, the game ends, without ever having given much offense nor granted much excitement.

The game’s implementation follows this theme. On the one hand, it’s quite thorough in most places. Most first-level nouns are described, or at least implemented with a “that’s just scenery” message, and a number of second-level nouns are treated as well, especially in the “thicket” puzzle, probably the best puzzle in the game. NPCs, on the other hand, are numerous but very shallow. Basically, they exist only to give tasks to the player, and refuse to answer most queries, no matter how basic. In fact, the npc implementation is so shallow that even the one topic that most will react to (“horses”) lacks a singular synonym (that is, NPCs will tell you about “horses”, but not about “horse”.) In addition, there are a few objects in the game which simply provoke nothing whatever in the way of description, like so:

> x house

>

See what I mean? Every aspect of The Chasing has its good points, and all of it is competent, if undistinguished. You aren’t likely to remember it long after you’ve finished, but it does make for an agreeable afternoon’s diversion.

Rating: 7.7

A Night Guest by Valentine Kopteltsev as Dr. Inkalot [Comp01]

IFDB page: A Night Guest
Final placement: 16th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Here’s a new approach to interactive poetry: write the poem in advance, and then create the game as a sort of adaptation of the poem. I’m reading lots of Dickinson these days, and that’s what I tend to think of when I think about poetry — short, rather abstract verses, capturing an image or making an observation in compact, dense language. This sort of poem would be ill suited to the adaptation approach, but there are other poetic traditions, one of which is the grand narrative poem, as practiced by Renaissance poets like Spenser, as well as Pope, Tennyson, and more modern versifiers such as, well, Dr. Seuss. This sort of poem tells a story, and presumably that story can be adapted to an interactive form using the same techniques one might use to adapt a prose story.

Of course, the danger of adapting any story is that it’s difficult to inject interactivity into an already extant plot structure, since plots are full of dependencies that are weakened every time a choice is given to the player. Consequently, the temptation is to give the interactive form nearly as rigid a structure as the non-interactive one, and that’s certainly what happens here. Because the game has the poem preconceived, the player has no choice but to follow its path. Consequently, what passes for interactivity is a series of one-choice nodes, where the player keeps trying various things until she hits upon what the game wants her to type. When the magic command is found, the game rewards the player by displaying the next section of verse.

The verse itself is more or less doggerel, a mock epic in Seussian meter, though without the nonsense words or moral messages we tend to associate with Dr. Seuss. The story it tells is a brief one, almost like a fable, except that its rogue hero is never redeemed, and the moral is muddy at best. Still, not every poem needs to be sublime, nor every story uplifting, and the poem (as a poem) had its pleasures. There were some rather clever rhymes, and some nice bits of characterization. The meter mostly kept a pleasant, singsong pace, though there were times it stumbled quite badly, usually on the last line of a stanza.

The illustrations, similarly, were not of the highest quality but some of the better ones definitely made a positive contribution towards enhancing the game’s mood. One well-used feature was the way the game changed to centered text and a monospace font when displaying the poem, but stuck with left-aligned proportional text for the actual interaction. This formatting choice set off the poem nicely, though it did emphasize the schism between poem and game, thus making it plain just how much the latter was grafted onto the former.

That’s basically the problem with A Night Guest. It’s an amusing poem (what there is of it, anyway — the whole thing is quite short), but it’s very clear that the game was built around the poem rather than vice versa. Thus, it feels rather like reading a book that forces you to say a magic word before you can turn the page. The “puzzles” (really just figuring out how to respond to the game’s cues) don’t add much, and I was left with the feeling that the whole thing would have been much more pleasant had it been just an illustrated chapbook rather than a narrative poem pretending to be interactive. Of course, I recognize how amazingly difficult it would be to create a game that actually expressed itself in verse but was a game first and foremost. No doubt that’s why it hasn’t been done yet.

Rating: 5.3

Jump by Chris Mudd [Comp01]

IFDB page: Jump
Final placement: 41st place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Jump puts me in mind of something Orson Scott Card said in a 1997 interview. In talking about how he started as a playwright before becoming a novelist, Card says, “By the time I turned to fiction, I had already cleared many of the first hurdles (I had written my suicide story, my perversion story, etc., and had moved beyond them, as every good writer eventually must).” What we don’t know from this quote is just what happened to that suicide story. Given that he was writing plays for BYU at the time, it’s not such a stretch to imagine that Card’s suicide story was enacted onstage for whatever audience might show up to student productions. After playing this game, I have a notion of how that audience might have felt.

Jump is a suicide story. To me, this was clear just from the title and blurb in Comp01, but no matter who you are, you’ll know it’s a suicide story before game’s first prompt, given that it opens with a suicide scene. Suicide stories in IF are an even trickier proposition than in static fiction (a term I dislike, by the way, but can’t think of a better alternative at the moment), because it’s one thing to watch someone kill themselves, and quite another to direct their actions towards that goal. Jump stops just short of In The End, since it doesn’t actually demand that the player type KILL MYSELF at the prompt, but it’s just as obvious that’s what’s going to happen, and the inevitable is just as… inevitable.

There’s a bit of window dressing that attempts to explain the suicide, but really, it’s just that: window dressing. They’re all the sort of movie-of-the-week elements you’d expect: adolescent protagonist; a suicide pact at school; dialogue that’s waaay over the top; alcoholism, battering, and probably child molestation in the protagonist’s home. These things feel pasted on — I never had the sense at any point that any of the characters were anything but cardboard cutouts. Details, characterization, and plot are so sparsely provided that it’s very difficult to really care about who these people are and what happens to them. It’s all overwith rather quickly anyway, so we barely get a chance to meet the characters, much less identify with them.

There are also religious overtones that ring false. Part of this is because of the general shallowness of the piece — it’s hard to get into the protagonist’s mindset when we get so little insight into her. Reading Christian scripture as advocating suicide is so far from typical that it really demands some explanation, and the game provides very little. The other part of the problem is implementation, as seen here:

>x picture
His eyes look skyward. His arms are spread. His legs are together.
Blood oozes from his feet and hands.

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

Well now, wait a sec. If that isn’t Jesus, then just who is it in the picture with the bloody hands and feet? I’m reminded of another quote, this time from Homer Simpson, after being called “wicked” for skipping church:

Kids, let me tell you about another so-called [makes quotation marks with fingers] “wicked” guy. He had long hair and some wild ideas. He didn’t always do what other people thought was right. And that man’s name was… I forget. But the point is… I forget that, too. Marge, you know what I’m talking about. He used to drive that blue car?

Anyway, my point is… wait, what was my point? Oh, right: the story begins, there’s a suicide, the story ends. Doesn’t take too long. Doesn’t accomplish too much. But if, as Card implies, the suicide story is a hurdle, consider it cleared.

Rating: 3.1

The Newcomer by Jason Love [Comp01]

IFDB page: The Newcomer
Final placement: 49th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

This is a joke game, right? Please say it’s a joke game. I mean, just add a few misspellings, subtract the setting, shake well, and you’ve got Comp00ter Game. I’m not kidding. Look, here’s one of the room descriptions: “$$$”. Or how about this dazzling piece of interaction:

>s
You can't, since the iron door is in the way.

>x iron door
You can't see any such thing.

I think that was in Comp00ter Game.

Oh, but the game isn’t unwinnable. As I found out from the newsgroup, there’s a Rybread-style solution available if one performs actions that make pretty much no sense in the context of what story there is.

The sad thing is, I don’t think it’s a joke. Or if it is a joke, it’s subtler and even less funny than Comp00ter Game and Asendent. But if it’s not a joke, how could anybody think this game is ready to be played? No, it has to be a joke. A lame, unfunny joke, but a joke nonetheless. It is a joke. Isn’t it?

Rating: 1.4

Moments Out Of Time by L. Ross Raszewski [Comp01]

IFDB page: Moments Out Of Time
Final placement: 2nd place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

I found myself both rationally and irrationally annoyed with this game. Let me start with the irrational, since it’s least defensible. Near as I can tell, there is no interpreter that can utilize all the effects of which the game is capable. As an author and a member of the IF community, I understand the reason for this perfectly. The way that things seem to go is that specifications get created for interpreters, zcode formats, multimedia package formats, and suchlike, but they don’t ever tend to get implemented. Why? Because there are no games that use these extended capabilities, so what’s the rush? But of course there are no games, because why produce games with unusable features?

These gears turn each other forever, getting nowhere, and Moments Out Of Time is intended as a crowbar stuck between the gears; from that perspective I applaud it. Hopefully this game will act as a prod (well, maybe a shove) to interpreter authors, and someday there will be an interpreter that can play it. In the meantime, though, from a player’s perspective, it’s a little irritating. It’s rather like being handed a book and told “Oh, some of the pages have illustrations, but you won’t be able to see them without some special perspect-o-vision glasses. But, uh, those glasses don’t currently exist. They might someday, though!” Sure, I’ll still read the book, but it’s a drag to feel like I’m missing the full experience. I understand the reasoning, but still feel irrationally annoyed at being presented with a thing that doesn’t completely work, and that irritation probably colored my experience with the rest of the game.

Of course, there were a number of completely legitimate reasons to be annoyed with this game. For one thing, it is that judges’ bane, the Way-Too-Big Comp Game. Two hours is a completely inappropriate amount of time for evaluating this game. It took me 45 minutes just to read the various manuals and introductory materials, for heaven’s sake. Before I’d even started the game proper, I’d already used up about a third of my judging time. Then there’s the fact that the game offers a zillion different tools, but only allows a few per game session — sure, it’s great for replay value, but how much replaying am I going to do in two hours? Oh, and how about this: even after reading the massive manuals, there were still parts of the interface that were totally unexplained. Here’s a hint for anyone struggling with the conversation portion: don’t use ASK, TELL, or NPC, . Instead, just type the answer at the command line. If you don’t know the answer, type DONE. I figured this out by pure guessing, thereby using more precious time.

Also aggravating was that the game implements the square bracket (“[“) for making notes at the prompt. Okay, that’s not aggravating, that’s cool. What’s aggravating is that 1) You have to type a space after the bracket in order for the game to handle it properly, and 2) Making bracketed notes takes game time, one turn per note! This wouldn’t be so bad, except that there are a number of time limits worked into the game, so making the comment command non-meta effectively penalizes the player for using the game’s built-in notation system. Finally, despite the fact that Moments boasts an amazing amount of technical polish, it suffers in several places from what I can only call lazy implementation. You may find a book which can’t be referred to as “book”. You may be told something by the narrative voice that you couldn’t possibly know, given that it’s happening hundreds of miles away. You may find (details changed to prevent spoilage) a hidden cache in the floorboards, but when you “examine cache”, you will be told “You can’t, because the floorboards is closed.” Oh they is, is they?

Okay, enough spleen-venting. It’s just too bad, because there are the bones of an amazing game here. The plot revolves around a future time-travel agency, and the world-building evident in the details of this is just wonderful. Also, some of the things that make it inappropriate for the competition don’t necessarily make it a bad game. Quite the contrary, in fact — the number of options available makes for an incredibly rich gameworld. I kept wondering what would have happened had I chosen a different array of technology at the beginning, while still quite awed by the capabilities of what I had chosen. I feel I barely scratched the surface of the story, and the scenario was interesting enough that I’m quite curious to see all the things I missed.

The writing did a nice job at establishing a consistent tone, and provided plenty of amusing juxtapositions as the future character examines technology that is primitive to him/her. I saw the beginnings of a number of intriguing puzzles, though there’s an overwhelming array of keys and locked doors, and the game’s auto-unlock feature appeared to me to be broken.

All in all, a very worthy effort, but I wish it wasn’t a competition game. Releasing this game outside the competition would have accrued several benefits. It would have allowed more time to fix those nasty details of implementation and documentation. Players could have approached it as something they could spend a significant amount of time on, rather than having to rush through it to see as much as possible while not giving short shrift to the other 51 games awaiting their attention. And it wouldn’t have been presented for formal judging in a not-completely-functional state. Would have, would have, would have. If only real time travel were possible.

Rating: 5.6

The Cruise by Norman Perlmutter [Comp01]

IFDB page: The Cruise
Final placement: 27th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

The Cruise is, by all appearances, its author’s first game. Everybody’s a rookie once, and the slack that people are inclined to give to somebody’s debut outing can cover a multitude of sins. Alas, however: not this many. Let me quickly cover what was good about the game. Its cruise-ship setting made for a fun exploration of an environment I’m not likely to inhabit anytime soon, thus utilizing one of the great strengths of IF.

It had some funny moments. In one of my favorites, the humor was mixed with pain, like so: there was a starvation time limit. That’s bad. The food is in a dining room, which isn’t too hard to find. That’s good. I wasn’t interested in finding the food my first time out, and I died before I came across the dining room. That’s bad. However, I got lots of lighthearted warnings before I died, and when I died, it wasn’t of starvation, but of a giant, suddenly-appearing sign reading YOU LOSE. That’s good, or at least, it’s funny. The toppings contain Potassium Benzoate. That’s bad. (Sorry… Simpsons reflex.)

Finally, the puzzles were relatively easy, which reduced the impact of the game’s other annoyances. Well, I should say that the majority of the puzzles were easy, and the Last Lousy Eleven Points puzzle would have been easy were it not so horribly bugged.

And that brings us to the rest of the review. The following is intended in the spirit of constructive criticism — all the game’s problems are quite fixable, and should be fixed. This experience can be an educational one. Now then. There were major formatting problems. For instance, about 10 or 20 commands in, I did something that caused the game to print in italics. Fair enough. Except it then printed everything in italics FOR THE ENTIRE REST OF THE GAME SESSION. Not even restarting or restoring fixed this problem — it took actually shutting down and relaunching the interpreter. Bad, bad, bad — I’m sure it was just a missing tag somewhere, but it drastically affected my play experience. The lesson: details count.

Another problem, which I’m not sure whether to classify as a formatting error or an outright bug, is that about two-thirds of the way through, the game started printing a lowercase “x” after nearly everything it did. For instance:

>wear detector
(First taking the evil detector)
Taken. Okay, you're now wearing the evil detector.

It's time for dinner. You should go to the dining room soon. x

>n
South Residential Hallway
The hall continues to the east and west. To the south is the
door to your room. The stairway area is to the north.
x

>close door
Closed. x

That is bad. Annoying, distracting, inexplicable — bad. It should have been caught in playtesting. I note that 75% of the playtesters share a last name with the author. Nothing wrong with that — my sister helped me test my game too. But perhaps they were inclined to be a little more lenient in the interest of familial affection or something? Something good to keep in mind when collecting beta-testers is to try to assemble a team that contains both IF novices and IF veterans. The former can bring a fresh approach to conventions you might take for granted, while the latter can bring a greater rigor to their testing regime, because they know what can go wrong.

An IF veteran would certainly have caught the game’s most egregious guess-the-verb problem: at a climactic point, you must go up. I tried it in good faith. I typed “U”. Repeatedly. The only response I ever got was “You can’t go that way.x”. The hints were no help, since all they said to do was go up. Ah, but wait. I tried “GO UP” and guess what? It worked. Of course, it should have worked. But “U” also should have worked.

Alongside guess-the-verb, there were bizarre and arbitrary limits ingrained into the game’s structure. I’ve already mentioned the starvation problem. There was also a pointless, irritating inventory limit. Give me a knapsack or something, for god’s sake. Worst of all, the game precludes you from reaching your final goal until you have spent two days (game-time) on the ship. Thus, if you solve the main puzzles within the space of a game-time afternoon (as I did), you end up wandering around aimlessly for a long time, unable to obtain crucial items and completely unaware that the game is planning to give you the vital tidbit in another day and a half. This is completely arbitrary, and very, very bad.

So one final lesson before I call it quits: don’t built arbitrary waiting periods into your game unless they’re very short and the player has plenty to do in the meantime. If players are wandering aimlessly, or performing dull, repetitive actions in order to progress the plot, the game has failed them. I’m realizing that my own games (especially my competition entry from this year) are not blameless in this arena; that’s why it’s so useful to write reviews. Authors, especially the author of the game in question, can learn a lot from critical analysis of a misguided game. For the game’s players, on the other hand, the fun is rather more scarce.

Rating: 3.8

The Coast House by Stephen Newton and Dan Newton [Comp01]

IFDB page: The Coast House
Final placement: 15th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

As if to taunt me, here comes a game with a NASTY FOUL IT’S/ITS ERROR in its Comp01 blurb, before I’ve even started the game. Then I fire up the game, and there’s one in the first room description! NFIEs are as numerous as cockroaches in this game, and just about as welcome. Am I more sensitive to this now than I was in previous years? Well, maybe, but only in the same way that being kicked repeatedly in the head makes one more sensitive to pain. I refuse to teach the lesson over and over, though, so if you’re not sure when to use the apostrophe and when not to, direct your attention here:

The first is my most recent explanation of the subject, and the others were found by taking 5 seconds to type “its/it’s” into a search engine. There are a bunch more where those came from. Print them out. Post them at your desk. Tattoo them on your body. Rid the world of this horrible curse.

Thank you for allowing me that rant. Moving on. NFIEs weren’t the only area in which this game’s proofreading was overly careless. Punctuation was a particular weakness. My current theory is that the keyboard on which The Coast House was typed had a sticky period key, because the game is littered with text like this: “Grandma’s headstone.. chipped with age…” There are multiple periods at the ends of sentences. There are multiple periods in room names. Ellipsises range anywhere from two to four dots (though some of the two-dot ones may have been intended as periods — rather difficult to tell.)

There are also a number of typos and grammar errors strewn throughout the game, and one very strange bug, in which looking under a particular item yields this: “You find !” Well, okay. There’s that exclamation point I’ve been searching for everywhere. Maybe I can use it to knock out some of these extra periods! Sadly, the exclamation point never made it into my inventory, so I was unable to wield it after all.

Okay, now that I’ve spent two paragraphs moaning about The Coast House‘s cosmetic errors, allow me to remedy things somewhat by talking about the ways in which I really liked the game. The setting is a tiny South Texas town in the sweltering summer heat, and the game brings this setting to life marvelously. Room and object descriptions engage all the senses, and appeal to memory as well, since the PC spent his childhood summers in this town. Many first-level nouns are described, and with similar skill.

In addition, most of the game’s puzzles emerge organically from the setting, thus enhancing the game’s world even as they moderate the story’s pace. All these factors worked together to produce a marvelously rich, immersive gameworld, which made the story-jarring grammar errors all the more frustrating. (Oh right, I was going to stop complaining about that. Ahem.) There was also a healthy dose of humor in the game. Many responses to nonsensical or useless actions were implemented as enjoyable wisecracks. For example, at the northern edge of town, the room description tells us:

The road travels off some distance to the north, with not a whole lot
between where you stand and Houston some 300 miles away.

The response to “N” from here is, “Houston is a pretty far walk. Probably better to stay in town.” Hee hee. The plot itself begins as a standard inheritance narrative and then deepens a bit, to the benefit of the game. All in all, a fairly solid piece of work if not for the simple lack of basic proofreading. Somebody needs to pick this game up and beat the errors out of it like dust out of an old rug. Once this happens, The Coast House will become a nicely atmospheric piece of IF.

Rating: 7.2

Timeout by Stephen Hilderbrand [Comp01]

IFDB page: Timeout
Final placement: 35th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

I’m in a dilemma about this game. I played through once, found some things to enjoy about it, and reached an ending that was pretty clearly not optimal. Not having a clear idea about how to reach the optimal ending, and running short on time, I pulled out the walkthrough, and it showed me something about a particular item that I hadn’t really understood (due to the game’s vague description of that item): it had a subcomponent that could be examined to yield more information. However, when I did so, the interpreter crashed with a fatal text buffer overflow error.

Now, I’ve developed a pretty strict rule about unfinishable games — I give them a 1, write a short review explaining the problem, and move on. The question is: does Timeout fit that category or not? I did finish it, so in a sense it’s not really unfinishable, but on the other hand, it seems impossible to reach a more optimal ending. What to do?

Here’s what I’m deciding. I won’t give the game a 1. I was able to play through successfully (well, for one value of the word “successfully”, anyway), and that’s worth something. That first experience had some good points — there were some funny spots in the writing, and some sort of fun cut scenes. On the other hand, it was mostly a negative experience. Timeout‘s implementation is maddeningly shallow, leading to lots of encounters like this:

You can see a trash can (which is closed) here.

>open can
That's not something you can open.

Or this:

A steel door is set in the north wall, and a passageway heads west,
back to the hallway.

>x steel door
You can't see any such thing.

>n
The door is locked.

>unlock door
You can't see any such thing.

Trying to get immersed in such a world is like trying to scuba dive in a puddle.

There were other problems too, including a NASTY FOUL IT’S/ITS ERROR, which is becoming my version of the Olympics’ “mandatory deduction” items. And then the fatal crash. All this comes together to make a game that’s not really worth my time in its competition version.

Rating: 3.0

Film At Eleven by Bowen Greenwood [Comp01]

IFDB page: Film at Eleven
Final placement: 10th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Like a miniature version of Dangerous Curves, this game takes us into a town where trouble’s brewing at City Hall, NPCs abound, and it’ll take a little trickery to crack the case before time runs out. Of course, there are significant differences. Instead of a downtrodden private eye, the PC here is the rather incongruously named Betty Byline, a television reporter on her first big assignment. The character’s name is strange, not just because television reporters don’t really have bylines, but because it signals a sort of cartoony, Archie-comics wholesomeness that’s notably missing from the rest of the game. It’s not as if the mayor is named Vinnie Veto and the bartender Sammy Scotchensoda. Thus, Betty finds herself a silly-name character somewhat misplaced in a more realistic world.

Another difference from Dangerous Curves is that the setting isn’t 1940s Los Angeles but rather a tiny little burg with the ill-chosen name of Pleasantville. The name will inevitably conjure up images of the 1998 Tobey Maguire/Reese Witherspoon movie, but it’s unrelated — pretty much everything’s already in color, making those images an unwelcome distraction. The game tells us that Pleasantville is a small town, and it ain’t kidding; pretty much everything significant in the town gets encompassed in a little over a dozen locations. This is appropriate, though, given that Film At Eleven is a competition game. In fact, the similarity to Dangerous Curves had me worried for a minute there, given that you could spend two hours in that game and not even come close to seeing all the locations. Instead, the smalltown setting makes the game’s scope perfect for the 2-hour rule of the competition.

Something else that helped me reach a solution in under two hours was the game’s generosity of design. There’s a time limit, but it’s not terribly tight — I had no trouble getting to the solution well before time ran out. Of course, this may be due to the fact that the puzzles weren’t terribly difficult, being mostly of the “give x to y” or “show x to y” variety. I don’t say this as a criticism — I’m all for easy puzzles. They keep me moving through the story while providing reasonable pacing, and help me to feel that I’m letting the PC be moderately clever without my having to be Sherlock Holmes (or Peter Wimsey, to reflect my current reading jag).

They especially help in competition games, where I don’t really have the luxury of spending a week letting the puzzles percolate. I didn’t have to refer to the walkthrough in order to complete this game, and that’s a refreshing change. However, I did look at the walkthrough after I’d finished, and discovered that to its credit, Film At Eleven provides multiple solutions to several of its problems. Such flexible design does quite a bit to enhance the pleasure of the IF experience.

That pleasure wasn’t completely unmitigated, sad to say. Aside from the poor naming choices I discussed above, the game is also lightly laced with misspellings and formatting errors. Quotes occasionally appear without quotation marks, linebreaks sometimes went missing, and spaces between words are MIA once in a while as well.

Moreover, several of the puzzles turned on the fact that the NPCs were unrealistically unobservant. For instance, I found myself able to smuggle rather large items through rooms occupied by people who might reasonably have had something to say about the theft. Even when a puzzle wasn’t at stake, I found it rather frustrating when I’d show an important item to someone who should have been surprised to see it, and they’d nonchalantly shrug their shoulders. Still, these quibbles aside, this was a solid game, and I enjoyed it very much. Betty Byline’s adventures gave me a pleasant evening’s diversion, and I felt a rush of vicarious triumph when I’d finally helped her reach that first big scoop of her career.

Rating: 8.9