Got ID? by Marc Valhara [Comp00]

IFDB page: Got ID?
Final placement: 29th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Note: There are a couple of obscenities in this review.

I am being tested. That has to be it. How else to explain the fact that immediately after playing 1-2-3…, a game that practically dares you to stop playing and pummels you mercilessly with ghastly, brutal descriptions if you don’t, I end up with this game? This game comes across like a schoolyard bully, one who not only wants your lunch money but who wants to make sure you know that you’re weak and ugly, too. It misses no chance to sneer at and belittle both the player and the PC.

Get this: you play a high school kid, and your goal in the game is to buy beer with a fake ID so that you can bring it to the party at the house of the most popular girl in school, so that maybe she’ll let you sit at the lunch table with her cool clique for the rest of the year. Talk about a concept that I could not relate to — when I was in high school, sitting with the so-called “popular” kids would have been my idea of a punishment, not a reward. Combine this with the fact that from the first sentence, the game makes clear that the PC is less a character than a laundry list of faults: fat, ugly, stupid, deceitful, shallow, etc. etc. Take, for example, this description of the shirt you’re wearing:

Glittery, sparkly, metallic-looking fabrics are all the rage this
season. Unfortunately, they're also extremely expensive. To
compromise, you've glued tinfoil to the front of your tee shirt.

So the game sticks you in this role, and wastes no opportunity to remind you that the character you’re playing is pretty much a waste of oxygen. Then, on top of all that, the game is designed to fling taunts at the player as well. For example, if you do the most obvious thing at the beginning of the game, in fact the thing that is necessary to continue the story, a little sign appears. The game won’t let you alone till you read the sign, reminding you of its presence every turn. What does the sign say? The sign says YOU SUCK. See what I mean about bullying? I half-expected it to print “An asshole says what?”

Now, let me back off a step or two. It’s true that the game is an insult machine, and that I did not enjoy the abuse it heaped on me. However, it may have chosen this approach as a part of its overall tone, which attempts to be a kind of gonzo, over-the-top parody. A parody of what, I’m not sure, since the game seems to hold pretty much everything and everyone in contempt. Perhaps it wants to be a kind of dark, cutting satire — certainly the reference to Jonathan Swift embedded in one of the locations would suggest that it aspires to that kind of humor, but the difference is that “A Modest Proposal” had a point to make, and this game does not, or if it does, the point gets buried under an avalanche of condescension.

However, it wasn’t unremittingly awful. I laughed at a few points. I can envision somebody who might even enjoy this kind of tone, and for that person, the insults would probably fit right in, and might even be funny rather than annoying. I have a small suspicion that this game was written by the same person who wrote Stupid Kittens — they share a few things, like their in-your-face tone and their fascination with dead cats and with refuting cutesiness (oooh, real tough target.) This game feels like what Stupid Kittens might be like if it was more interested in being like a traditional IF game than in being a dadaist excursion. It didn’t appeal to me at all, but perhaps it might appeal to somebody.

After all, it’s not as if the game is badly implemented. All the words seem to be spelled correctly. Its grammar betrays no glaring errors. It’ll insult you, but at least it will do so correctly. Similarly, with the exception of one major bug, its implementation is tested and clean. The puzzles, while rather arcane, all make some kind of sense within the extremely exaggerated world of the game. Of course, that doesn’t make their content any more appealing. In fact, one major portion of the game is unpleasantly reminiscent of I Didn’t Know You Could Yodel — will IF authors never cease to be fascinated with flushing toilets?

Excremental obsessions aside, I found I had a more difficult time than usual with the puzzles in the game, and I think it was because I found the insults so offputting that my travels through the game became more and more desultory. In addition, the hints weren’t as much help as they might have been because, like the rest of the game, they’re working hard to make you feel like an idiot. They mix in fictional and factual hints pretty much indiscriminately, and they don’t give you any hints as to which is which. Between these two factors, I hadn’t solved the game when, after about 110 minutes of play, something happened that forced me to go back to a very early restore. Faced with the prospect of playing through the whole tedious thing again, I declined. I had been itching for a reason to quit anyway, and relished the fact that it was finally my turn to tell the game to go fuck itself.

Rating: 3.9

1-2-3… by Chris Mudd [Comp00]

IFDB page: 1-2-3…
Final placement: 42nd place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

For the past few years, each competition has had one game that I found unremittingly unpleasant, a horrible experience from start to finish. Last year, it was Chicks Dig Jerks, with its pounding misogyny and seething nests of bugs. The year before that, it was Cattus Atrox, whose relentless but shallow horror and totally logic-free plot I found impossible to stomach. I was beginning to think that I’d make it through 2000 without such an experience, but no such luck: 1-2-3… wins the prize for Most Repellent Comp Game, hands down.

It doesn’t suffer from bugs, though — it doesn’t really get the chance, because it is as linear as a short story. Basically, the game is one long string of guess-the-noun or guess-the-verb puzzles. In fact, for most of the game, each move is in itself one of these types of puzzles, since the game will allow no other action than the one it’s waiting for you to guess. The most freedom it ever allows you is when it spreads seven or eight guess-the-noun puzzles in front of you, which you can do in any order, but all of which must be done before the story can proceed.

Actually, I use the word “puzzle” but that’s being rather generous. Really, the situation I mention above is that you have a couple of NPCs, both of whom must be ASKed ABOUT three magic topics each before the game will continue. These NPCs are so minimally implemented (as is pretty much everything in the game) that they only answer to those three topics — all others will provoke one of three random default responses. As if this extremely minimalist implementation didn’t make guessing the noun difficult enough, the topics you’re expected to type in sometimes verge on the ridiculous. If a character doesn’t respond to ASK HIM ABOUT ADVICE, why would I expect him to respond to ASK HIM ABOUT WHAT HE WOULD DO?

Of course, the game gives me an unsubtle shove in the right direction by having the character say, “Do you want to know what I would do?” But this is a pretty desultory form of interactivity. The game may as well just tell you what your next command should be, since it has no plans to respond to anything else anyway. If you think that’s interactivity, you probably also think ventriloquists’ dummies come up with their own punch lines.

Non-interactivity is annoying enough, but consider the context: 1-2-3… is about a serial killer. It puts you in the role of this serial killer. It won’t let the game continue until a murder is committed, then another, then another, and these murders can be triggered by rather innocuous (if unintuitive) commands. Now how much does it suck to have no choices?

The killings are horrific, misogynist gorefests, with nauseating specifics lovingly enshrined in detailed descriptions, capped by attempts at psychological pathos that would be laughable if they didn’t follow such revolting excesses. The first murder scene made me feel literally sick to my stomach, and I seriously considered quitting the game there and then, abstaining from rating and reviewing it. I’m still not sure why I didn’t do that — perhaps some overactive sense of fair play among the comp entries, perhaps a misplaced hope that the game would produce some artistic justification for its ultraviolence. In the end, I had such a horrible experience playing 1-2-3… that I almost wish I hadn’t played it, but since I did, I want at least to give others the warning I didn’t get.

Thankfully, the game doesn’t keep you in the serial killer’s role throughout. You are privy to a couple of other viewpoints, most prominently the police detective whose mission is to find and apprehend the killer. Unfortunately, the scenes from the detective’s POV are no more interactive than those from the killer’s. You must follow, more or less lockstep, exactly what the game has in mind for you, if you want to finish the story.

Is 1-2-3… a psych experiment of its own, a kind of test to see how much gag-inducing content a player can take before switching off the computer and (to steal a line from Robb Sherwin) switching her hobby to “Scattergories”? Is it the IF version of Lisa Simpson testing to see how many times Bart will grab for the electrified cupcake? Maybe it is, and if so I certainly seem to have failed the test, because I played through to the end. But my emotional engagement with the game had ended long before that, having suffered multiple stab wounds from the vicious, senseless violence that permeates the game. I was taking every one of the game’s cues, typing in what it told me to and letting the text scroll by in the vain hopes of some Rameses-like epiphany. None was forthcoming. Now excuse me — I have to go take a shower.

Rating: 2.5

At Wit’s End by Mike Sousa [Comp00]

IFDB page: At Wit’s End
Final placement: 17th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

“Expect the unexpected” may be a cliché, but there are a few things for which it is the perfect description. At Wit’s End is one of these things. This game’s plot has more twists and turns than a mountain road, and most of these surprises consist of various misfortunes for the hapless PC. In some games (e.g. Bureaucracy), I think this kind of plot could be intensely aggravating, but in this one, I thought it worked beautifully — each new twist injected drama and suspense into the situation, but the combined weight of all of them gave the story a comic feel which counterbalanced nicely against all the cliffhanging turmoil.

Of course, since the surprises are half the fun of AWE, I certainly won’t give them away here, but suffice it to say that the game strings together one fairly plausible situation after another, ending up with a string of bad luck that’s so unlikely it’s funny, even though it’s hard to laugh while you’re frantically trying to think your way out of the latest mess. In fact, the one thing I was worried about during my initial time with the game was that the whole thing would be too linear: “something bad happens — solve it. OK, something else bad happens — solve that…” for 10 or 15 bad things in a row. Luckily, after an admittedly lengthy opening sequence of linear puzzles, the game wisely broadens into a more traditional middle section, where several puzzles must be solved in order to bring about one overall result.

Speaking of puzzles, most of them worked quite well for me. Certainly the opening sequence presented situations that were quite logical — I found I sometimes needed to think a bit before I could come up with the right answer, but when I did come up with it, it felt right and made sense. Because of the tightly timed nature of some of these puzzles, I did come up against the death/failure message a bit more often than I’d have liked, but this is more my own fault than the game’s.

AWE isn’t one of those games that give you one move to figure out the right action and kill you if you don’t do it; some of the puzzles have four- or five-move time limits, but these limits make sense in the context of the puzzle situation, and they did succeed in creating a strong sense of urgency in me, whereas shorter time limits tend just to annoy me. There’s a time limit for the midgame, too, but it’s quite generous, and I found that it wasn’t necessary to motivate me — I was already frantic from the initial string of puzzles. I think this is a smart design choice on the game’s part, one that lent a sense of tension to a midsection that might otherwise have sagged. Rather than feeling a letdown at having to explore and put together multi-step processes, I continued to feel on edge, as befit the character’s situation.

Unfortunately, these multi-step processes comprise the game’s one significant flaw. Sometimes, in its fervor to crank up the puzzle intensity along with the story intensity, the game overloads certain puzzles, thrusting them into the Babelfishy realm of the ridiculous. One puzzle in particular, probably the most byzantine of them all, really strained the bounds of believability for me. It’s one thing to have a plot where misfortune piles upon misfortune, but when consistent, ongoing bad luck is a key feature of a puzzle, it’s hard not to feel that the game has unfairly stacked the deck against you.

I guess the lesson is that, for me anyway, when rotten luck is part of the plot, it still feels like the game is playing fair, because really bad days happen, but when the rotten luck is part of a puzzle (especially the kind of rotten luck that makes you think “but that wouldn’t really happen!”), it feels like the game is cheating. This quibble aside, AWE is an excellent piece of work. The writing, though nothing special, is serviceable, and the coding is really outstanding. The game notices and comments on lots of little things, which really deepens immersion, as does AWE‘s thorough implementation of all first-level nouns. The best part, though, is the plot. At Wit’s End has one of my favorite plots of any competition game from this year, one that kept surprising me even after I had figured out to expect the unexpected.

Rating: 8.8

Castle Amnos: The First Legend by John Evans [Comp00]

IFDB page: Castle Amnos
Final placement: 30th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Today is November 7th. It’s 11:30pm, Colorado time. I’m writing this review on my creaky but trusty 386 laptop, the television on in front of me (muted) so that I can continue to keep tabs on the US presidential election, which is still in a dead heat after seesawing all night long. It was, to say the least, a bad day to play Castle Amnos. Not that I didn’t have the time — I played my first hour over my lunch break at work, then did another hour after the commute home, dinner, watching election returns, and being at least somewhat present in my marriage (oh yeah, that). Then a quick shower to clear my head, and I’m ready to review.

With most comp games, this time investment would have been sufficient. Not with this one, though. For one thing, Castle Amnos is big. I didn’t expect this, since the game file size is 122K, but that’ll teach me to rely on file sizes — turns out you can squeeze in quite a few rooms, objects, and puzzles when you implement hardly any first-level nouns, code minimal responses for reasonable object actions, and only give your NPCs the bare minimum necessary for them to participate in their puzzles. Consequently, even when I reached the end of my two hours, I had no sense of closure at all — I doubt I’d even seen a third of the game.

What’s more, there are several mazelike sections in the game, and a few others where the geography is quite non-intuitive. I had made maps of these during my first-hour session, but I forgot and left them at work, and I’d be damned if I was going to draw them again. I have a pretty good memory for IF geography, so this didn’t cripple me in my second hour, but it did slow me down. I wonder how many comp judges’ experience is like mine: fragmented, squeezed in at the edges of our lives. I wonder how many others felt frustrated at playing a game that clearly didn’t fit into those small spaces we can create for it.

This is my 42nd game of this comp, and usually by this point I’m ready to name a trend for the year. Last year it was non-interactive games. The year before that, one-room games. This year, though there are some rather surprising similarities — two games prominently featuring peyote (?), several pointless joke games, far too many starvation puzzles — I’m not sure I can put my finger on one overall trend among the games for the entire comp, except that their index of quality has tended to be higher. I have, however, noticed a personal trend: I’m getting more and more impatient with games that, in my opinion, don’t belong in the IF competition.

Mostly, these are games that are so large, it’s really unlikely that most players will see anything like a majority of the game in two hours’ playing time. It’s discouraging to make a sincere effort to play a huge number of games in a six-week timespan, only to discover that several of those games simply cannot be played to any satisfactory conclusion in the two hours allotted. It makes me want to just avoid playing anything over a certain file size, but even that strategy would fail: My Angel is almost twice the size of this game, but it’s easily finishable in two hours. Amnos, on the other hand, is anything but.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but I will say this: Authors, I implore you. Please think carefully about whether your game can be played in two hours. If, realistically, it cannot, I urge you not to enter it in the competition. I know about the feedback problem — people are working on it. In the meantime, isn’t it better to have your game played all the way through by 50 appreciative people than to have its first 25% played, then the whole thing dropped, by 200 people who are terribly pressed for time?

Okay, I realize that I’ve gotten on my comp soapbox and delivered very little useful feedback about the game itself. To remedy that: Castle Amnos appears to have some very interesting ideas at its core. I found sections, and resonances, that intrigued me a lot. I obviously wasn’t able to get far enough in the game to get any sort of resolution on what had been set up, so I don’t know if the payoff fulfills the promise of that setup, but if it does, I think it’ll be an interesting game.

It is, however, hampered by several problematic design decisions which are a bit of a throwback to the earlier days of IF. There’s a more or less pointless inventory limit, which forces you to keep all your objects in one central location and trundle back and forth between it and whatever puzzle you happen to be working on. There is a room somewhat reminiscent of the Round Room in Zork II, only about twice as aggravating because you have to perform an action before the randomizer will run again each time, and it opens on fewer options, making repetition more necessary. It appears to be somewhat circumnavigable, but only somewhat. Then again, who knows whether there isn’t some later section of the game that makes that room behave in a deterministic fashion? Certainly not me.

In addition to these problems, there are (as I mentioned earlier) several mazelike sections of the game. To me, that kind of thing is just no fun. Mileage, I’m sure, varies. All this is not to say that it’s a bad game. It is implemented minimally, but competently. I don’t think I found any major bugs, though the game’s fascination with non-standard geography and randomness sometimes made it difficult to tell what was a bug and what wasn’t. The prose, like the code, is sparse but error-free. Perhaps, if I was able to play it all the way through, I’d even think that Amnos is a really good game, or at least a draft of something on the way to becoming a really good game. With what I was able to see, though, all I was able to tell was that its entry as a competition game impaired my ability to enjoy it.

Rating: 5.7

The Djinni Chronicles by J.D. Berry [Comp00]

IFDB page: The Djinni Chronicles
Final placement: 14th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

A favorite trick in Interactive Fiction, especially short works like those that appear in the comp, is to make the PC some kind of unusual or non-human creature. We’ve seen it with animals, as in Ralph and A Day For Soft Food. We’ve seen it with monsters, as in Strangers In The Night or Only After Dark. We’ve seen it with children, as in The Arrival and On The Farm. A Bear’s Night Out did it with a plush toy. In the freaky realms of Rybread, we’ve even seen it with things like car dashboards.

When the game is written competently and sufficiently debugged, this trick often works remarkably well, even better than its static fiction equivalent might. Why is that? I think it’s because IF has an advantage over static fiction in the area of character identification. When you’re reading a book, you may read third-, first-, or even second-person accounts of a particular entity’s exploits, and with sufficiently effective writing and characterization, you may even identify with that entity quite strongly despite its non-human traits, but no matter what you are still watching that entity from a distance. IF, however, literalizes the process of identification one step further. Not only does the prose put you in someone else’s head, you actually have to guide the choices of that someone.

I’d submit that when a reader is compelled to guide a character’s actions, especially if there are puzzles involved, that reader will try to think like that character would think. When this happens, the identification process has reached a place where static fiction can rarely take it.

It is exactly this place that The Djinni Chronicles limns with skill and imagination. The game puts the player in charge of a succession of spirits, each of whom has a unique method of interacting with humans and the physical world. These spirits perceive reality quite differently from corporeal beings like ourselves, and the game leaves it to the player to figure out just what those differences are. Luckily, it provides enough clues (and sometimes even outright explanations) that if you’re paying attention, you should be able to get the basic gist of how the system of djinni magic works.

This system is ingenious in several ways. First, it is quite alien from conventional portraits, which only makes sense, since those portraits have always been from the point of view of the summoner rather than the summoned. Second, despite its unfamiliarity, it makes perfect sense, or at least it did to me, as a plausible explanation for spirit magic. It uses the logic of “undercurrents”, in the game’s terminology, to explain things like why a djinn’s blessing can so often be accompanied by a curse — humans always ascribe a malevolent motive to such curses, but the game suggests that this may be just because we’ve never known the djinn’s side of the story. Finally, the system works well on a gaming level — Djinni Chronicles tells an interesting story that fits many folktale motifs, but doesn’t forget to be a computer game at the same time.

If it sounds like I was impressed by the game’s magic system, that’s because I was. To my mind, it did an excellent job of combining story and game into a seamless unit, providing fertile ground for puzzles that always made sense within the context of the story. Best of all, the system really made me feel like I understood what it was like to be a magically summoned spirit, and also why it is so difficult for humans to understand why such spirits so often bring more misery than happiness to their human summoners. The writing helped further this character identification, such as in this passage:

Vault Entry Room
The location of my summoner was a room between the surface of the
world [physically west] and a complex of vaults [physically east].

The room was a trap for physical beings. On one side of the room, a
portcullis barred the way to the outside. To the other were the
vaults for storage. A patterned stone wall blocked their unauthorized
access.

This description does a lovely job of tracing the outlines of a location, because the spirit wouldn’t care about the details, while still giving its human reader a fair impression of the location’s real purpose. The game also indulges in judicious use of made-up synonyms for familiar concepts, thereby deepening our sense that the djinn population sees what we see, but through very different eyes.

I mentioned that the puzzles are integrated well into the story — they are also pitched at just the right difficulty level, or at least they were for me. I often found I had to think carefully, to think like the djinn I was directing, and that when I did so, I was properly rewarded. This experience added further to my sense of immersion in the PCs, since I never had to break the spell by consulting the walkthrough.

The game wasn’t perfect — a few typos lurk here and there, a section of verse has badly broken meter that jars against the elegance of the spirit world, and the routine that causes death when a certain point score drops too low is always one turn behind. Overall though, Djinni Chronicles puts a new spin on a well-loved IF gimmick, and makes it work like a charm.

Rating: 9.4

My Angel by Jon Ingold [Comp00]

IFDB page: My Angel
Final placement: 6th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Interactive Fiction is a new enough medium that at least once a year, usually more, a work appears that approaches the form in a way that has never yet been attempted. The IF competition, with its emphasis on short works, has become a haven for this kind of experimentation, and this year is no exception. The most interesting experiment I’ve come across thus far is this game, My Angel. My Angel‘s experiment is to offer the player a “NOVEL” mode, one which actually fulfills both senses of the word: not only does it more closely resemble a prose novel than does any other IF, it is also something that has never quite been seen before.

In NOVEL mode, all input and stock parser responses appear in a two-line status window above the main game text window. In the lower panel, story-related output appears in neatly formatted paragraphs. Because this format can sometimes be hard to follow (it’s difficult to tell where the last output leaves off and the new one begins), the game thoughtfully provides an ALTERNATE command, which prints every other piece of output (more or less) in bold text. I’ve sometimes thought about how IF might be done in this format, but could never quite get past certain mental stumbling blocks: the possibility of repetition, the need for stock responses, and the problem of sequiturs.

My Angel applies a number of ingenious solutions to these problems. First, it adopts the already rather oblique tone of literary fantasy — this particular prose style suffers from a dearth of sequiturs anyway, so the sudden shifts of focus brought about by a flailing player become less obvious. In addition, the game takes stock responses such as “I don’t know the word <whatever>” or “You can’t see that here” and shifts them to the status line, not allowing them to interrupt the flow of the story. It’s also, as far as I can determine, not above simply ignoring the player’s input and continuing with the story, though this doesn’t happen often, and it’s rather difficult to tell for certain when it has happened, because there’s sometimes a significant (but not complete) disconnect between the player’s input and the game’s responses. Finally, My Angel restricts the player’s choice of verbs (though not drastically) in order to reduce the combinatorial explosion of necessary text.

As for repetition, well, My Angel didn’t quite lick that one. I still encountered several instances where the game repeated the same output two or more times in a row. You wouldn’t see this kind of sequence in any but the most avant-garde literary novel, so its appearance detracted from the game’s illusion of an unfolding prose story. For the most part, however, My Angel succeeds admirably in maintaining that illusion. Its writing is mostly quite good, and the intersection between its writing and its coding sometimes verges on the brilliant, not just for NOVEL mode itself but for the way that it deftly picks up on a player’s command and weaves it into the ongoing narrative.

The narrative itself, on the other hand, is a bit confusing, or at least it was to me. Ironically, I think the story’s problem may be one of too much novelty. We are presented with an unfamiliar world, one which appears to be more or less the generic medieval pastoral setting of copious genre fantasy, but which occasionally hints at mysterious magics, the logic of which we are left to figure out. Complicating the situation is the fact that these magics are the sort that are only visible to one person, and therefore we can never be entirely certain that they aren’t simply the delusion of the viewpoint character. That character shares a very unusual relationship with another character, one which (again) isn’t clearly spelled out.

Finally, these two are embroiled in a specific plot, one which begins entirely in medias res, leaving us to piece together the backstory through flashbacks that sometimes obscure more than they reveal. Between trying to decipher the setting, the plot, the characters, the backstory, and the sometimes impenetrable prose style, I frequently found myself feeling very much at sea in the story, lacking adequate purchase in any sort of familiar concept. When the climactic moment came, it didn’t have much of an effect on me, because I never quite understood what exactly underlay the climax’s emotional thrust.

On the other hand, the parts that I did understand, I found quite evocative. There are a number of very arresting images in the game, some wonderful turns of phrase, and the central relationship is a fascinating one. Even better, there are a few lovely puzzles. These puzzles are the best kind — unique and interesting, but of a piece with the story rather than simply tacked on. NOVEL mode makes them feel even more integrated, creating as it does the appearance of an unbroken flow of text.

I encountered one or two grammatical errors while traversing the story, and the occasions when it appeared to be ignoring my input annoyed me somewhat, but overall I came away feeling impressed as hell with My Angel. It’s a daring experiment, executed with grace and care, and it provided me not only with some vivid impressions of setting and story, but with a good deal of food for thought about the possible future directions of IF.

Rating: 8.6

Cracking The Code by Gunther Schmidl as Anonymous [Comp00]

IFDB page: Breaking The Code
Final placement: 53rd place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Thank god for Stephen Granade. Without him, not only would I think that Cracking the Code is completely pointless, I’d also be totally confused as to what it’s even about. However, thanks to a handy post he wrote on his About.com IF site, I’ve been educated on the controversy surrounding the DeCSS code for decrypting DVD output.

For those of you not in the know, apparently eight big movie studios won a lawsuit against a hacker newsletter for posting code known as DeCSS, code that allows you to decrypt the data on a DVD. This code allows you to write your own DVD player without paying royalties, and to copy the information on a DVD. The law that supported the suit is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which forbids dissemination of information about how to bypass copyright security. According to the judge, you can’t post the code or even link to the code.

Lots of people are up in arms about this perceived restriction of free speech. Somebody even wrote a very funny song about it, with the code in the lyrics — the argument goes like this: if the US First Amendment protects freedom of expression, doesn’t that take precedence over the courts’ suggestion that the code is illegal under the DMCA? And if so, isn’t it legal to spread the decryption code via a legally protected form, such as songwriting?

I suppose the argument goes the same way for this “game”. Really, though, this piece of work does virtually nothing to wrap any kind of creative content around the DeCSS code. It’s more or less an unadorned room with a stub description, containing two pieces of paper that have the code written on them. That’s it. Other than what I just mentioned, it’s an Inform shell game. Minimalist, yes. Entertaining, no.

It’s hard to even call CTC subversive, as it is so clearly uninterested in IF and therefore fails to subvert IF in any interesting way. In my opinion, it also doesn’t do much for making the First Amendment case. I mean, at least the song had a tune, and some lyrics outside the code, and whatnot. CTC, on the other hand, offers nothing at all in the way of IF. It’ll come in handy, though, when I decide to write my own DVD player. That’s on my list right behind sewing my own clothes and authoring an IF game with a homebrew parser.

Rating: 1.2

A Crimson Spring by Robb Sherwin [Comp00]

IFDB page: A Crimson Spring
Final placement: 23rd place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

One thing that can fairly be said about A Crimson Spring is that it is one dark piece of work. It starts out with a funeral, and in the course of its plot will describe twisted psychotics, brutal beatings, murder, and rape, along with a generous helping of menacing, intimidation, and vile ideas. It’s about superheroes, but not your Saturday morning SuperFriends kind of superheroes, nor even your angsty Stan Lee/Chris Claremont kind of superheroes.

No, these are superheroes in more of a Frank Miller vein, tortured vigilantes who stalk through horrific corridors of urban decay, beating the living crap out of evildoers and anybody who looks at them funny. Though Miller is clearly their main predecessor, they’re also a bit reminiscent of the out-of-control metahumans in Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come, with elements of the anger and psychoses that bubble under Alan Moore’s Watchmen.

They even bear a passing resemblance to the characters from Sherwin’s own Chicks Dig Jerks, at least in the way that they tend to investigate crimes by cruising bars looking for trouble. In addition, they’re also likely to have somewhat more disturbing powers, especially the villains, such as AIDS Archer, who shoots disease-tipped arrows at the good guys, and Mucous Man, who suffocates his victims under lots and lots of snot.

As I’ve said in the past, I love superheroes, but this particular subgenre of them is not my favorite. The whole grim-and-gritty trend in superhero comics, which probably reached its peak towards the end of the Reagan years, was always rather unappealing to me. I found its insistence on the world’s rottenness to be just as monotonous and unrealistic as the post-Code, whitewashed Batman and Robin’s world of silly villains and cardboard heroes. Miller’s Daredevil and Punisher, and Claremont/Goodwin’s Wolverine were fine when they were the darker exceptions to the nobler rule of costumed crusaders, but when nearly every superhero suddenly became a clench-jawed desperado struggling against a poisoned culture by any means necessary, the whole thing started to seem more and more silly. [Pssst! Paul! Stop lecturing about comics and get back to the game! (The what? Oh yes, that.)]

Ahem. As I was saying, A Crimson Spring is one dark piece of work. It even displays its text as faded letters on a pitch black background. In addition, even besides the fact that its particular flavor of superherodom is not to my taste, it misses some pretty important opportunities. For instance, although the PC wears a mask and has a code name (Holy Avenger), he doesn’t have any superpowers. What does he have? A lead pipe. He’s surrounded by people who can fly, or are super-strong, or have unbreakable skin, or can morph themselves into other stuff, but his main skills are talking smack and whacking people with a big metal club. Oh, he’s got a perfect immune system, too, which doesn’t seem to me like a great superpower (“I’m Never-Get-Sick Man!”), though I have to admit it does come in handy against guys like AIDS Archer. I found myself wishing that I could play one of the real superheroes instead of this smart-aleck “detective” with the pipe in his hand. Hell, even Batman had a utility belt.

On the other hand, perhaps playing a character I liked more would have made it even more frustrating when I encountered one of the game’s many bugs. The bugs in ACS come in two varieties. One of these is the “huh?” bug, which happens when the game makes a reference to somebody or something you’ve never heard of before, and acts as if you of course know what it’s talking about. For instance, at one point the PC is asked (in reference to a villain), “Have you seen him since the incident on the bridge?” I read this and thought, “incident on the bridge?” The game had described no such incident.

Perhaps things like this were its way of building character by mentioning past “offstage” events (though some of the “huh?” references seemed clearly oriented towards things that were supposed to have happened in the plot, but didn’t, at least not to me), but even if this is the case, the game should throw in a sentence or two explaining the reference. I suspect that this kind of bug emerges when a game is written around a walkthrough and fails to account for the many paths that can be taken through the plot. Granted, this is one of the more difficult challenges in writing IF, but it is a challenge that must be met, or else the story deflates very rapidly.

The other type of bug is of the more traditional variety, the inability to refer to an important object or the nonsensical response to a reasonable command. Both types of bugs appear with depressing regularity in ACS, and they utterly defeat any sense of immersion that the game’s other nifty features strive to create. Among these features were a cool soundtrack of gritty indie rock and hand-drawn illustrations of various scenes and characters. The latter, while not exactly George Pérez, were obviously the product of quite a bit of labor, and managed to give a nice visual sense to the colorful characters. I wish, though, that the time had instead gone into debugging — I would have enjoyed the game lots more had it been bug-free, even without its illustrations. A Crimson Spring puts you behind the mask of a dark superhero on a mission of justice, but in the end, it only defeats itself.

Rating: 6.1

And The Waves Choke The Wind by Gunther Schmidl [Comp00]

IFDB page: And the Waves Choke the Wind
Final placement: 16th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

ATWCTW is, as far as I can remember, the first competition game that shares its fictional “universe” with a previous competition game. Last year’s Only After Dark featured the same protagonist, namely one Ranil Kuami, dreadlocked seventeenth-century sailor and ex-slave, a man who has the misfortune to run into one horrific situation after another. When I reviewed OAD I said, in the course of lamenting what I saw as the game’s excessive linearity, “I would really like to play a game set in the Only After Dark universe, written and coded as well as the competition entry but offering the player an actual choice once in a while.” This year, I got my wish.

Well, sort of. Apparently, the version of ATWCTW that was entered in the comp this year, despite the fact that it’s 173K and in .z8 format (a combination I confess I don’t quite understand), is actually only a preview of the real ATWCTW, which I assume is forthcoming sometime. Still, even though it ends rather abruptly, as many adventure game demos do, this version is a substantial chunk of adventuring all on its own.

For one thing, it has clearly been coded with a great deal of care. ATWCTW feels almost like a commercial graphic adventure game in terms of the number of features it offers for players. In fact, I rather got the feeling that in some spots it wished it was a commercial graphic adventure game. For instance, the game features cutscenes in several spots, all of which are nicely formatted and can be replayed at any point. It calls these cutscenes “movies”, which of course they aren’t — they’re all text. The choice of words made me wonder if ATWCTW wished it had the resources to become a graphical adventure game.

I’m glad it isn’t. Although the game might gain something from a transition into graphical mode, I think it would lose some things as well, such as the excellent options it offers at the text prompt. ATWCTW gathers nifty features from lots of previous IF games and offers them all. NOTE displays the game’s occasional footnotes. HINT offers context- sensitive hints. (Well actually, it doesn’t, apparently because this is just a preview. The game promises that this command will be available in the full version.) MOVIES brings up a list of cutscenes shown already, any of which can be replayed on command. WHAT IS and WHO IS are available, though they generally don’t offer much (with some important exceptions.) EXITS prints a list of exits from the current location.

Sure, all of these could be worked into a graphical game, but even beyond this, there’s that great sense of openness that a text parser offers. Granted, there are plenty of verbs the game doesn’t recognize, but there are lots that it does recognize, and I found, especially in the first puzzle, that most of the things I thought of doing, the game was equipped to handle.

That first scene is right out of a pulp adventure, and I had a great time solving the puzzle just the same way as any swashbuckling hero would have. Moreover, because of the particular genre of the game (the ever-popular Lovecraftian horror), text has some important advantages over graphics. A good description of horrific sights that defy the laws of nature will always be more powerful than a good movie of the same thing, both because good descriptions can involve all the senses, and because the imagination can encapsulate the idea of a sanity-shattering thing without having to constrain it to any specific visual image.

With all this going for it, I’m sorry to say that ATWCTW doesn’t quite reach its full potential. My experience may have been worse than many others’, because I played the game on my creaky old 386 laptop using DOS Frotz in monochrome mode (the machine doesn’t have a color screen.) About two-thirds of the way through the game, the entire thing apparently broke — I could see the bold header for the room description, but all other text was invisible. Experimentation demonstrated that the prompt was still there, so I restored and tried a different route into the scene, with the same result. Finally, I quit the game and looked at the transcript I had made, learning that text had in fact printed, but I couldn’t see it.

Playing a hunch, I started up the game in color mode, and discovered that not only was I now able to see the broken scene (albeit faintly), there were lots of other things I had missed in monochrome mode as well, because the game presents them in color. However, unlike other color games (such as Varicella), ATWCTW failed to test for color usage or even to warn me that it planned to use color. This failure was disappointing, especially given the level of quality attained by the rest of the game.

There were a few other flaws, such as the occasional awkwardness of the game’s prose: “And suddenly, as if a fog lifted from your eyes, you are totally clear.” The word “clear” here might be trying to convey alertness, wakefulness, visibility, invisibility, sobriety, comprehension, or a number of other things. As it is, however, the meaning is (pardon the pun) unclear. In addition, the plot up to this point still doesn’t offer that many options, its geography quite linear and many of its events quite unavoidable. Still, the preview of ATWCTW is an enticing peek at a game that shows every indication of being a major work. If its main objective was to get me interested in the full version, mission accomplished.

Rating: 8.5

Prodly The Puffin by Craig Timpany and Jim Crawford [Comp00]

IFDB page: Prodly The Puffin
Final placement: 35th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Prodly The Puffin is, according to the authors, “a second-generation parody of a cartoon that has long faded into obscurity.” That is to say, it’s a parody of a parody of something that no longer exists. Actually, to be precise, it’s an IF adaptation of a parody of a parody of something that no longer exists. What this means, as I learned in the course of playing the game, is that unless you have quite a bit of context, the whole thing is going to seem totally incomprehensible.

To their credit, the authors seem aware of this, having some fun with players’ confusion in the hint system and even quoting the sentiments of a certain Sage of IF about wandering around in somebody’s “ill-conceived, cobbled-together, inside-joke universe.” They also provide a brief explanation of the game’s cast of characters and include a comprehensive menu-based hint system. In addition, the game offers a second, less direct hint system: you can “ASK ME ABOUT” most any subject and receive a response that might be helpful. Of course, Prodly being what it is, the response probably won’t be helpful, since chances are it won’t make any more sense than anything else does.

After the game is over, the authors reveal not only their actual names, but also the URLs for their web comic Prodly The Puffin, and for Pokey The Penguin, the web comic that theirs spoofs. Curious, I visited the Pokey site, and actually thought it was hilarious, in a very bizarre kind of way. The Pokey comic is one of those strange web artifacts that is unbelievably bad that it’s actually really funny. It looks like it was done by a third grader using Microsoft Paint, and is littered with scribbles, crossed out words, and weird unidentifiable things.

Its plots (such as they are) tend to veer in bizarre, arbitrary directions and end quite abruptly. Its dialogue is written in all caps, and sometimes uses point sizes (or strikethrough) for emphasis. Nonetheless, I found its unexpectedness was excellent humor fodder, and some of the dialogue was so random that it actually made me laugh out loud. (Little Girl: “POKEY THESE ARE PLUMS! I WANTED ORANGES!” Pokey: “THAT IS THE PRICE OF LOVE”.)

Prodly The Puffin, the web comic, is the authors’ parody of Pokey, and I found it less interesting, mainly because Pokey itself is so off-the-wall that it’s difficult to parody. Prodly ends up being less funny because it’s more polished and self-aware. However, I feel quite sure that I would have enjoyed the game quite a bit more if I had seen both Pokey and Prodly before I started playing. When I encountered Prodly and the other cast members of the IF game, they just seemed totally baffling and in-jokey to me. Now that I have the context of the web comics… well, ok, they still seem totally baffling and in-jokey, but at least now I have visuals to go along with them.

Consequently, I’d urge anyone who wants to play this game but hasn’t done so yet to check out the web sites I mention above before playing. It’s not that they’ll give you a fighting chance of understanding what’s going on, because understanding what’s going on is not what Prodly (the game) is about. It’s more of an attempt to capture the completely bizarre style of Pokey, its careening plots and desperate lack of quality. How successful it is I’m not sure, because I played the game before I knew anything about the web comic, and therefore experienced it all without being able to understand its point.

Because of this circumstance, I didn’t have much fun. The whole thing just kind of went past me, capital letters, outrageous violence, and all. Since I rate the games based on how much fun I had experiencing them, Prodly unfortunately can’t rate very highly. However, I am grateful to it. It pointed me to Pokey, and Pokey has been cracking me up all day.

Rating: 2.8