agt, >INVENTORY

Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis by Adam Thornton [IF-Review]

[I originally reviewed this game for Mark Musante’s site IF-Review, in 2012. Mark is the source for editor’s notes in the text.]

IFDB Page: Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis

File Under: Classic Knob

Note: Due to the nature of the game being reviewed, this review contains what the MPAA would probably call “pervasive language and strong sexual content.” Also, mild spoilers, both for this game and for Nabokov’s Lolita.

From the “sentences I never thought I’d write” department: I don’t think I’m well-educated enough to fully appreciate this Stiffy Makane game. With Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis (MMA), Adam Thornton brings us what might be one of the most erudite and wide-ranging IF games ever, and what is certainly the most erudite and wide-ranging IF porn parody ever. Thornton has been talking about Mentula Macanus for quite a long time now — since 2001 at least, when he released his previous foray into Stiffiana, Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country (SM:TUC). Hell, maybe longer, given that Google’s Usenet archive search leaves much to be desired. It always sounded to me like a gag — I mean really, a Stiffy Makane game all in Latin? Not even the guy who created an elaborate and technically accomplished science fiction Stiffy parody, complete with graphics and sound, would undertake such a thing, right?

Right. He didn’t. Instead, he spent a decade crafting an enormous, sprawling classical epic, with an expanded mission. Where SM:TUC was a gleeful takedown of so-called “Adult” IF, MMA sets its sights on a bigger target: IF itself. With tremendous innovation, technical polish, and abundant humor, Thornton upends the medium with a work that’s simultaneously traditionalist and transgressive, a layered and richly allusive delivery system for some highly demented and depraved content. It’s a hugely impressive achievement, and I can’t imagine anyone else pulling it off. I can’t imagine anyone else even trying.

But before I dive deeper, let me offer a little background, for those who need it and haven’t quit reading already. Way back in 1997, those innocent days when AGT didn’t yet signify “America’s Got Talent”, a guy named Mark Ryan unleashed upon the world a game called The Incredible Erotic Adventures of Stiffy Makane, which he apparently wrote in BASIC in the eighth grade, then inexplicably ported to AGT and uploaded to the IF Archive. Adam Thornton played it, and wrote a funny review, in which he called it “easily the most amusingly horrible work of IF I’ve ever seen.” (By the way, anybody who wants to witness how delightful the IF newsgroups were back in the days before their troll-induced decline could do worse than to read the ensuing thread. The Graham Nelson comment in particular made me laugh out loud.) This review pointed out the terrible writing, the repellent ending, the freaky non-sequiturs, the risible implementation (including, famously, the ability to DROP PENIS), and so forth. It helped propel the game to “legendarily bad” status, but even so, Stiffy would likely have been soon forgotten if not for what happened next.

Exactly one year and one day after the review, a pseudonym-cloaked Thornton and a still-anonymous co-author released a MST-ing of the game (remember Mystery Science Theater 3000?). A few years later, Adam entered the 2001 IF Comp with Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country, a game which, as I said in my review at the time, “[makes] its PC the object as well as the subject of penetration (and penetration by a moose, no less.)” At this point, Stiffy and his stiffy had entered into the community lexicon as a shared in-joke, with Adam always in the vanguard. In fact, at this point, I’d say that Adam Thornton has made a career out of Stiffy Makane, which sounds much less promising than it’s actually turned out to be. Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis is the zenith of that career.

ERUDITION

From the beginning, the game lets us know the territory it intends to cover. A rotating dedication name-checks people from the world of literature, like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, as well as people from the IF world like Robb Sherwin and Graham Nelson. Then follows a bit of untranslated Italian — Thornton quoting Eliot quoting Pound quoting Dante. After that, the game throws you into a scenario in which you battle “the Gostak chief”, which will certainly remind some of us of Carl Muckenhoupt’s game The Gostak, which itself grew from a seed planted by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, in their book The Meaning Of Meaning. Confused yet? MMA has a helpful bibliographic referencing system to help you along:

>X CHIEF The Gostak chief [reference 2] [reference 3] is a giant of a man, with lank, thinning blond hair [reference 4]. He carries an enormous mace, which he wields as if it weighed nothing at all.

The Gostak chief aims a vicious blow at your head. You twist away desperately, skidding on the wet flagstones. The mace smashes into the stone, throwing a shower of sparks.

>REF 2 [Reference 2]: Ogden, C.K. and Ian Richards. The Meaning of Meaning, (citation unknown).

>REF 3 [Reference 3]: Muckenhaupt, Carl. The Gostak, passim.

>REF 4 [Reference 4]: Wolfe, Gene. The Sword of the Lictor, Chapter XXXVII, Terminus Est.

As if that weren’t enough, the game provides a parallel system of footnotes to complement its references, like so:

Curia Interior The Curia is still under reconstruction; renovations won't be completed for quite some time [footnote 1]. For the time being, the Senate still meets over at Pompey's porch. Frankly, this place is basically just a construction site. Steps to the Forum lead down to the south.

An olive-colored velvet bag rests empty on the ground here.

[To look up a footnote, use FOOTNOTE number-of-footnote]

>NOTE 1 [To disable poncy footnotes, you can type PONCY OFF]

[Footnote 1]: The Curia Hostilia burned in 52 BC; Julius Caesar started its renovation, but the Curia Julia (named in his honor) was not completed until 29 BC during the reign of Augustus. I hope you now feel better-educated.

Keep in mind: this is a porn parody IF based on a character created by a horny 14-year-old [ed. note: That phrase seems redundant somehow.]. It keeps a sense of humor about itself, but at the same time, there’s a clear delight in classical history and the ancient world. Observe:

Cocceio's Cave Cocceio's Cave runs arrow-straight from the town of Cumae, to the west, to the shore of Lake Avernus, to the east. It is a kilometer long and wide enough for two wagons to pass one another. It has recently been excavated on Caesar's orders [footnote 9], but it also makes for a very convenient road for petitioners seeking the Sybil. Regularly spaced torches light your way.

>NOTE 9 [Footnote 9]: Lake Avernus is a volcanic crater filled with water, which makes it an ideal protected harbor. Julius Caesar began construction of the port here, connecting Avernus to Lake Lucrino with a canal and thence to the sea. Cocceio's Cave was excavated to allow easy access by chariot to the war fleet housed in Avernus. The port (Portus Julius) became fully operational in Octavian's reign. Thus, it is probably slightly ahistorical to have Cocceio's Cave in this story, as it is likely an Augustan, not a Julian work; nevertheless, it's not badly out of place, and it's a really nifty Roman military construction, so in it stays.

The game’s erudition extends beyond Roman history and modernist poets. For instance, at one point there’s a hotel register you can examine, which yields entries like “Johnny Randall, Ramble” and “Harry Bumper, Sheridan.” Those entries don’t have a footnote or reference citation, but by that point I knew that there were very few arbitrary choices in the game, so I googled them. Turns out they’re from Nabokov’s Lolita — Humbert Humbert uses various false names in hotel registries as he searches for Lolita in the latter part of the book. Over and over, MMA rewards research and demonstrates an impressive range of literary reference. In fact, I’d say this game sent me to Google more than any other IF game I’ve ever played. Sometimes even that was fruitless, as in the time when Stiffy (under my control) attempted to venture into avian bestiality, making amorous advances toward a duck named Anas:

>FUCK DUCK (Anas) You, sir, are no Henry Miller [footnote 24].

>NOTE 24 [Footnote 24]: Hey, you know, it's kind of odd that "Anas" is so close to "Anaïs", isn't it? D'ya think?....nah, couldn't be.

Did Miller have some kind of sexual inclination toward waterfowl? Even Google couldn’t tell me, unless perhaps my Google-fu wasn’t up to par, which is always a possibility. I know that Miller had a passionate sexual relationship with Anaïs Nin, but whether the game’s Miller reference extended beyond the superficial similarity of names, I couldn’t tell. Again, that nagging feeling: I may have a Master’s degree in English Literature, but I don’t think I’m well-read enough for this Stiffy Makane game.

MMA‘s breadth of IF reference is equally impressive. Besides the fact that it expends herculean effort to expand the mythos of an otherwise extremely minor IF character, and the aforementioned Gostak shout-out, MMA touches on everything from Adventure to Scott Adams to Infocom to Losing Your Grip to Kallisti. In fact, at one point it even scores a two-for-one by including Madame Sosostris, who figures prominently in both Eliot’s The Waste Land and Graham Nelson’s Curses. Nelson, another IF author with an Eliot fixation, comes up again in a late-game scene, one that I thought really encapsulated MMA‘s humor:

Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter noon [reference 30]. A graveyard, of sorts, is to the south. A rather fetching garden lies to the west. A low, blocky palace, built of obsidian, looms to the east. A plaza stretches to the north under the towering bulk of an obelisk.

Identical men in dark suits and bowler hats scurry to and fro.

>REF 30 [Reference 30]: Eliot, T.S.. The Waste Land, III.208.

>X MEN Each identical man (for they are all men) wears an identical dark suit and an identical bowler hat, carries an identical black umbrella [reference 31], and, incongruously, sports an identical nametag proclaiming, in bright red letters, "HELLO MY NAME IS GRAHAM." I had not thought death had undone so many [reference 32].

>REF 31 [Reference 31]: Rowson, Martin. The Waste Land, I.31.

>REF 32 [Reference 32]: Eliot, T.S.. The Waste Land, I.63.

>FUCK MEN You see no Nelson's Column here.

A barrelful of Eliot references, several of which (the Unreal City, the bowler-hatted army) overlap again with Curses, collides with a British geographical/historical reference which also serves as a hilarious anatomical double-entendre about a founding father of modern IF. Deep respect jumps into bed with profound irreverence, and the result is quite satisfying. That’s Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis.

NEW MISSION

Thornton’s 2001 Stiffy game (SM:TUC) was deeply, rightly scornful of its main character. As in the game that spawned him, Stiffy was an projection of a boneheaded eighth-grade boy’s sexual mentality, albeit this time seen from a more adult perspective: unsatisfying as a lover, profoundly clueless, misogynist, and homophobic. His ideal sexual encounter is with a Holodeck robot — “jump through some hoops, get to fuck the girl. If only real life were so easy!” — and even she is less than enthusiastic about the experience. SM:TUC demolishes the ludicrous tropes of terrible “adult” IF in part by demonstrating that mechanical sex is the opposite of eroticism.

MMA is a different story. The Stiffy of MMA doesn’t have a trace of homophobia, and is enthusiastically omnisexual (within limits, and even those are played for laughs.) He’s still an eager lover, but this time he’s a good one, as we can tell by the reaction of his partners. His encounters often have a joke at their center (as when Stiffy fucks some version of Archimedes, who teaches him the true meaning of “Archimedes’ Screw” and who exclaims, “My lever’s big enough. Just give me a place to stand and I’ll rock your world!”), but the joke isn’t at Stiffy’s expense. The descriptions embrace sensuality, in direct contrast to SM:TUC‘s anti-erotic prose.

What changed? The mission changed, that’s what. AIF was always an easy target, albeit a fun one, and between his review of the original Ryan game, his MSTing of same, and SM:TUC, Thornton seems to have said his piece about it. Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis moves on to satirizing IF in general, especially the classic Infocom style. The game’s writing and design echoes this style — for all its transgressiveness, MMA‘s puzzles and prose are often quite traditionalist. Descriptions are generally concise, even terse, and there’s no attempt whatsoever to sidestep the artificiality of IF puzzles awkwardly grafted to a big long quest plot. There are no mazes, dragons, hunger puzzles, or other such tired figures, but there are heaping helpings of item-fetching, locked-door NPCs, and actual locked doors. The game is unapologetically an epic, old-fashioned puzzlefest, albeit one with a few differences.

Just the carnality itself is a major difference, really. Infocom was writing for a mass market which included children, so their games were necessarily quite chaste, even when they were trying to be otherwise. Credit to them for attempting something a little racy with Leather Goddesses of Phobos, but compared to MMA, even the “lewd” mode in Leather Goddesses of Phobos is ridiculously tame. Thornton’s game is IF sex comedy with the restraints taken off, and it works. It’s genuinely funny and sometimes even genuinely sexy.

It also uses its taboo subject matter to hilarious effect, blending perversity into IF as skillfully as I’ve ever seen. Take the puzzles, for instance. In 2002, I released a game called Another Earth, Another Sky, in which you play a super-strong PC and the solution to many puzzles is some variation of SMASH [object]. I thought of that game a lot when playing MMA, in which you play a super-virile PC, and the solution to many puzzles is some variation of FUCK [NPC]. The number of times that Stiffy’s stiffy is in some way the solution to a puzzle is both a great running gag and a great subversion of standard-issue IF object and NPC interactions. (MMA‘s version of the common light-source puzzle is particularly memorable.)

Sometimes, instead, the penis is the puzzle rather than the answer, as in the episode when Stiffy gets the clap and has to seek out a cure. The solution involves a regular IF activity — a mini-quest to seek out a medicinal herb and bring it back to the local doctor — but the context is something you don’t see in many other games. Not only that, the actual resolution of the quest turns IF convention its ear too, as we discover that the herb isn’t the cure at all, but simply serves to distract while the doctor administers a much more violent and unpleasant remedy.

Sex and gross-outs aside, MMA also provides a few great anti-puzzles, in which the obvious action is the correct one, but the game manages to make you think otherwise with persuasive writing. Take, for example, this bridge across a chasm:

A rickety footbridge — really, little more than flimsy-looking boards laid across twisted vines — spans the canyon to the west, swaying sickeningly in the breeze.

Makes you want to look for another way across the chasm, doesn’t it? I certainly did, based on my memories of a thousand other rickety IF bridges. They always collapse — that’s why they’re described as rickety. Plus, I’d already died many a death in MMA getting to this point. So I found a place to jump across the chasm, and failed. I failed tantalizingly, and thought I might succeed with a different approach. Nope. After a few more attempts, I returned to the bridge and decided to cross it, hoping I might get a clue from the inevitable death message. Instead, Stiffy crossed it. The end. The anticlimax was hilarious, and I loved the way the game played a joke on me by exploiting my IF experience. I realized later that I was also holding a set of instructions which explicitly told me to cross the bridge, but it had been so long since I’d looked at those, I forgot all about them. D’oh!

Alongside these are more typical IF puzzles, ranging from the simple (follow a recipe and get the desired result) to the rather clever (dress up as a prophet to fool a god into taking you into a new location.) MMA skewers IF, to be sure, but it isn’t just taking the piss — it’s a genuinely fun IF game on its own merits.

INNOVATION

Along with its transgressions and subversions, MMA brings a number of excellent IF innovations to the table. One of my favorites is how it handles repeated questions to an NPC. One of the weaknesses of the ASK/TELL conversation system (which MMA uses) can be a tendency toward repetition. The first time you ASK MIKE ABOUT FISH, Mike should tell you about the fish. But what happens if you repeat the command? Lots of games just would repeat Mike’s dialogue, which makes the NPC obviously robotic. However, that robotic behavior serves a gameplay purpose — if the player forgets some crucial nugget of information, the ability to retrieve that information shouldn’t be sacrificed in the name of character realism, or else you’re just trading one annoyance for another. In addition, topics sometimes have aliases, so the player may not even realizing that from the game’s point of view, she’s asking the same question twice. MMA comes up with a solution to this conundrum which I thought was rather ingenious:

>ASK SYBIL ABOUT FUTURE "To seize the Golden Banana is a mighty deed, but the Son of Aeneas must look to the Son of Abraham to release it from its sheath."

>ASK SYBIL ABOUT BANANA The Cumaean Sybil has already told you that you will need the help of a Jew to unsheath [sic] the Golden Banana.

By having the parser intervene when a question is repeated, the player gets the needed information without the NPC having to behave like a tape recorder.

MMA also innovates at the design level, with an intricate story structure surrounded by a clever series of framing layers. It’s not uncommon for an IF game (or a traditional story) to start in the middle of some action, advance to a point where it looks pretty bad for the hero, and then flash back to tell the story leading up to that point. It’s quite a bit more unusual for the hero’s death to actually occur. Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis solves this dilemma brilliantly, with a perfect marriage of its classicism and its game-nerd geekery. Not to mention that the response to “X ME” in this section is one of the funniest parodies I’ve seen of a standard Inform library message.

On top of this, there’s still another layer of narrative complexity, as seen in a section where the available range of action has drastically narrowed to only two possible commands, and very boring ones at that. Just when I was thinking “man, fast forward,” this happened:

[Here the original text is badly damaged and illegible for many pages. What we can piece together from the extant fragments of this section and the remainder of the work, however, is that Stiffy somehow becomes accepted as one of the Vikings. He wins his toga and the Banana back, acquires the honorific "Sven Stiffy" for his deeds, and meets up with a Druid leading a Pictish revolt. A brief and curious fragment from this last section survives.]

Thus the action shifts out of the previous trap, and MMA piles on yet another inventive application of scholarly mechanics to gameplay mechanics, letting us know that not only does the game have narrative layers in itself, there’s also a metanarrative outside of the story, in which the whole of MMA is in fact some kind of ancient text in translation, which has not survived in its entirety. Employing this device not only allows Thornton to skip past some of the boring or illogical sections (always with a comic purpose) and also reinforces the erudite side of MMA‘s ongoing juxtaposition.

These layers are great for comedy, but I think my favorite comedic innovation in MMA is its running gag of warned deaths. Insta-death is all over the place in IF, especially old-school IF, but MMA takes an approach which allows the whole thing to be a lot funnier: every time the player enters a command which will lead to instant death, the game issues a warning first. Then, if the action is repeated, the game delivers the insta-death:

>PUT PENIS IN OPENING It is pitch black in there. Your cock is likely to be eaten by a grue [reference 6].

>PUT PENIS IN OPENING Chomp! A grue bites your dick completely off, as was foretold.

*** You have been emasculated by a grue ***

There are dozens of these scattered throughout the game, leading to all manner of horrendous demises. Instant IF death is annoying (though UNDO mitigates it a lot), but I thought this was wonderful. Every time I saw one of these warnings, I gave a little tiny cheer inside, because I knew that the next thing I would get to do is steer Stiffy into another hilarious Wile E. Coyote calamity. The more of these there were, the funnier it got, as is the nature of the running gag. (The other great running gag: the game’s responses to failed attempts to fuck people. Or things.)

Also funny and clever was the CAST command, which lets us know the models for various characters in the game. These models spring from reality (Ron Jeremy as Stiffy), literature (Baldanders from Gene Wolfe as the Gostak chieftain), TV (Dr. Nick Riviera from The Simpsons as the aforementioned clap-curer), and Dungeons & Dragons (Froghemoth makes an appearance.) I particularly enjoyed seeing Thornton’s dogs expressing their separate personalities as the heads of Cerberus.

Finally, I have to mention the ending. I won’t give too much away, except to say that it’s one of the more entertaining ways I’ve ever had the plot shouted at me while tied to a chair. A fitting topper to this epic and bizarre game, it partakes of the epic and the bizarre on a grand scale, justifying the game’s subtitle and winding up with an excellent closing joke.

IMPLEMENTATION

Of course, smart references and clever ideas only get you so far — it’s in the execution that an IF game is made or broken. It should probably come as no surprise at this point in the review that I found Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis to be outstanding in this department as well. The game isn’t completely bug-free — it would be very surprising indeed to find a game of this size that had no bugs or errors whatsoever — but it credits multiple rounds of testers, and their efforts shine through. The writing is similarly error-free. It rarely aspires to poetry, but it excels at finding that perfect word to make a graphic detail really vivid, whether you’re being splattered with filth in the sewers of Ostia or inhaling the mephitic vapors of a pit that leads to Hades.

Many many actions are accounted for with proper verbs and witty responses. Most first-level objects are described, albeit sometimes rather curtly. There are many fun surprises embedded for the curious to find, including one of the better XYZZY easter eggs I’ve seen in a while. (Actually, come to think of it, that only seemed like an Easter egg — it’s actually necessary to solve a puzzle.) There’s even the occasional spate of runic and/or Greek writing mixed in with the prose, thanks to Inform libraries written by Thornton himself.

MMA also pays good attention to detail and logic within the confines of its model world. For instance, Stiffy is often obliged to disrobe, whether for the purpose of solving a puzzle or just for a pleasant diversion to pass the time. Either way, it’s easy to forget to put his toga back on him, but invariably the other characters in the game notice when Stiffy is parading around naked, and usually have some witty remark to make about it.

Finally, in case I haven’t made this clear, Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis is quite the extensive game. Every time I thought it was ending, it would instead open up a new vista of plot and setting, with more surprises and more hilarity. In addition to being long, it’s quite deep as well. I noticed this particularly in the Great Library of Alexandria, in which you can learn not just the key fact that helps the plot along, but all about much of the game world and even the greater historical context of its setting.

Glancing at the source code (which Thornton includes in the game package), I can see that there are many more responses I never even uncovered. The expansiveness of the game gives it great access to callbacks, both comedy kind and the IF kind (returning to a location or situation after time has passed and things have changed.) MMA wears its influences on its long, long sleeves, and by the end, it can count itself as an influence. It’s a bit like the question Stephen Colbert asked when he interviewed the band Rush: “You’re known for some long songs. Have you ever written a song so epic, that you were being influenced by your own song, because it happened so much earlier in your career?” This is a game that took a decade to produce, and it’s clear the time wasn’t wasted.

Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis was the perfect finish to my mini-journey of reviewing all the 2011 XYZZY Best Game nominees. I rolled the dice and reviewed those games in random order, but the sequence turned out just right. Zombie Exodus was an oddball nominee, unfinished and not my cup of tea, while Six was an utterly charming comp entry. Cryptozookeeper beat them both with music, graphics, spectacular writing, and an epic scope. It took home the XYZZY award, and it deserves all the recognition it’s gotten, but for my money Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis has the edge over even Cryptozookeeper. Its careful coding, clever design, thematic boldness and overflowing intelligence have made it my favorite game of the bunch. I look forward eagerly to whatever Adam Thornton has cooking for 2021.

Curse of Manorland by James King [Comp03]

IFDB page: Curse of Manorland
Final placement: 28th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

So here we are in 2003 and people are still writing games in AGT. Even more disheartening, they’re still writing terrible games in AGT. Most bad comp games at least have the virtue of being short, but not this one — it’s huge, and unrelentingly bad all the way through. Now look, I want to offer constructive criticism, although with a game like this it’s hard to imagine that any suggestions will be implemented, since quality doesn’t exactly seem to be valued. Nevertheless, in lieu of a detailed review, here are ten ways to improve Curse Of Manorland:

10) Don’t use AGT. There are better tools out there now.

9) Settle on a point of view. In the beginning section, I had this exchange:

Chrissy's room Your room is covered in rock posters but has Rupert the bear bed sheets there is a full length closet mirror on the east wall. On the south is a window. The carpet is bright pink

> x sheets I loved Rupert - it was my favourite show when I was little - I want to get Buffy now - she's such a strong character.

Thus, in just a few lines, I got third person (“Chrissy’s room”), second person (“Your room”), and first person (“I loved Rupert”). Pick one.

8) Puzzles need to make sense. I can’t imagine anyone (except maybe the author) ever getting through this game without the walkthrough. Actually, I didn’t even get through it with the walkthrough, since the walkthrough failed to specify the exact moves for the nonsensical maze, and the game itself was (unsurprisingly) no help. I was using that walkthrough from the very first puzzle, a puzzle whose solution makes absolutely no sense at all.

7) Sentences get to have both a subject and a verb. If one of those is missing, then what you have is a sentence fragment. These are fine, in certain circumstances, but avoid them until you’ve mastered writing regular sentences.

6) While we’re at it, both fragments and real sentences end in periods, not commas, and certainly not just nothing. This is unacceptable:

> x window A white painted window,

It’s especially unacceptable when we need to know that this window is the size of a mattress. Actually, that comma is sort of an exception — the vast majority of stand-alone sentences in the game have no terminal punctuation whatsoever.

5) If the player is supposed to interact with some object, the game should maybe mention that object. It’s pretty hard to come up with “TIE ROPE TO TREE” when there’s nothing about any tree in the room description.

4) Error messages must not lie. If you’re looking for “CHOP TREE WITH AXE” and I type “CHOP TREE”, do not reply “Don’t know how to chop here…” That doesn’t tell me to try another syntax. Instead, it tells me to forget the chopping idea altogether. The game lied to me like that over and over again.

3) For heaven’s sake, do not put random messages in the game that prevent commands from being carried out without saying so. And certainly do not litter the game with them for hundreds of moves before a solution is available.

2) Please, forget the inventory limit. And please please please, if you’re going to make me drop stuff, let that stuff not disappear.

1) Spell-check. Beta-test. Have your prose proofread by someone fluent in English. Don’t enter long and/or terrible games in the IF competition. Give us a break, huh?

Rating: 2.0

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

Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country by Adam Thornton as One Of The Bruces [Comp01]

IFDB page: Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country
Final placement: 30th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Note: If you’re offended by obscenity, profanity, depravity, and what have you, please don’t read this review. In fact, if you are such a person, please avoid any further encounters with anything that has the word “Stiffy” in the title, up to and including this review and (for God’s sake) this game.

The original Stiffy Makane, a game authored by Mark Ryan and occasionally known by its full title, The Incredible Erotic Adventures of Stiffy Makane, earned its place in the annals of… er, in the history of IF by being fairly vile in subject, extremely terrible in execution, and very (unintentionally) funny. It became the standard by which all other awful, poorly implemented, ridiculously puerile “adult” IF is measured. It even inspired a MSTing co-authored by one “Drunken Bastard” who, one gathers, may go by a number of other aliases as well.

In short, this was not a game crying out for a sequel. Yet, here we have it. SMTUC is extremely vile in subject, fairly good in execution, and very (intentionally) funny, which makes it a real treat for anybody who can stomach an extremely vile game for the sake of humor. For those of you in this category, I’m loath to spoil any of the game’s wonderful, awful surprises, and I encourage you to heartily ignore any whispers of “moose cock” and suchlike that you may hear around the less reputable corners of the newsgroups. At least, ignore them until you play the game, and then don’t hesitate to join in. For those of you not in this category: listen, I already warned you once, so just stop reading already!

SMTUC opened my eyes to several things that I could have happily lived my entire life without seeing, and put several images in my head that will no doubt haunt me to my grave, but it was a good time for all that. For one thing, it lovingly parodies not only the original Stiffy (not a tough target), but also an entire subgenre of games, the redheaded stepchild of IF: “X Trek” (also not a tough target, but what the hey.) These would be pornographic pieces of IF, mostly written in AGT, devoted to detailing the sexual adventures of Star Trek characters. Such things, I’m told, exist — I’ve never sought or played one, due no doubt to my timid and puritan spirit.

In fact, there’s even an entire newsgroup devoted to them, alt.games.xtrek. I’ve never visited (see above for reasons), but rumors have filtered down to me that it’s become a hotbed… er, a haven for attempts to write legitimate IF erotica, a form of which I have never seen a successful example, though I’ll grant I haven’t looked very… er, searched with much diligence. SMTUC is not an attempt at erotica, but rather a gleeful poke (okay, I can’t keep avoiding it — double entendres ahoy from this point forward) at “adult” IF as it stands. There’s the requisite Horny Chick, whose uniform is just ever so “hot and chafey”, and who, when coaxed out of it, is more than happy to perform the most obliging acts on the PC. One of my favorite lines of hers:

>feed rohypnol to terri "No thanks, I already took some."

There’s the aptly named Hot Chick, whose function the game makes clear:

The Hot Chick here is, as you have come to realize after innumerable runs through the holodeck, the reward for your puzzle. The logic is simple and always the same: jump through some hoops, get to fuck the girl. If only real life were so easy!

Indeed. Up to this point, the game is a standard, serviceable parody of AIF, with a few gleeful jabs at people on the periphery of the r*if community, such as Espen Aarseth, Chris Crawford, and Brandon Van Every. I’m not sure which I liked more, the IF-related parodies or the AIF-related ones.

However. The game does continue beyond this point, and it’s here where we really cross the boundary into “the undiscovered” (at least by Stiffy, anyway.) I hate to spoil anything (and the following will be a medium-level plot spoiler, for those of you who care), but it’s essential to the point I want to make that following these two fairly standard AIF bangs, Stiffy fucks (and is fucked by) a giant, hairy, male Space Moose. This Moose is Stiffy’s mentor in the brave new world of homoeroticism, and thanks to the adroit manipulations of a not-at-all-neutral author, Stiffy has no choice but to enjoy it.

And so we come to the thing I liked best about SMTUC: the game’s (brace yourself) feminism. Yes, we get two scenes of the standard AIF objectification of female sexuality, though even these are subverted somewhat, given that one of the “women” is actually a rather unenthusiastic robotic hologram, and the other expresses strong dissatisfaction with the experience (“Barcelona sighs deeply, pushes you out into the hallway and snarls, ”Scuse me. I gotta go tickle the Elmo. Bye now.'”) After this, though, the Moose makes Stiffy his bitch, and suddenly the predatory PC gets scored upon rather than scoring. (Well, he still scores — one point, to be precise — but you know what I mean.)

By upending the traditionally male exercise of porno IF and making its PC the object as well as the subject of penetration (and penetration by a moose, no less), SMTUC takes a sly swipe at what’s really offensive about most AIF: the fact that it takes one of our most intimate, personal human behaviors, and reduces it to an exercise in hoop-jumping, involving thoroughly dehumanized players. Honestly, I have no idea whether this was at all Adam’s (oh sorry, “Bruce’s”) intention, but that’s how it struck me. Is it some kind of revolution or great step forward? Nah, but it was fun to see (and hear, and read about) Stiffy hoisted, as the saying goes, by his own petard.

[Oh, I’m out of paragraphs and forgot to mention the music and graphics. So: Yay music! Yay graphics! (Well, except for one particular graphic that, however appropriate it may have been, I just can’t say yay to. You know the one.)]

Rating: 9.2

VOID: CORPORATION by Jonathan Lim [Comp00]

IFDB page: Void: Corporation
Final placement: 41st place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

I like cyberpunk, though I prefer it in small doses. I’d never go on a cyberpunk reading jag, but I thoroughly enjoy the occasional William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, or Pat Cadigan novel. I also think that IF in the cyberpunk vein could be really cool — after all, if cyberpunk has one defining characteristic, it’s a certain atmosphere, and atmosphere is something that IF does very well. There is a danger, however: with IF conventions having been shaped out of a stock fantasy/D&D tradition in games like Adventure and Zork, the temptation might exist to just slap a cyberpunk sheen on standard fantasy tropes and call it good, when good is something it very probably wouldn’t be.

It’s exactly this trap into which VOID: CORPORATION falls. Instead of a shiny silver key to open a locked door, we find a “silver slab” imprinted with microcircuitry. A pistol instead of a sword, a cube with liquid metal software instead of a spell scroll, et cetera. And instead of wandering kobolds and bugbears and such, we get wandering FMI (Federal Military Intelligence) agents and “cyberpunks.” (It works much better as a label for a genre rather than for a group of people, by the way.)

Let’s talk a little bit more about those wandering monsters. Ask any Quake or Half-Life player this question: “How would it be if every time you fragged something, you dropped your weapon, and had to explicitly pick it up again before you could frag something else?” I think we both know that their answer would certainly be some variation on “It would SUCK! A lot!” Yet this is exactly how things work in V:C. At the beginning of the game, we are told this about the PC: “more people have died at his hands than braincells at a ‘Silver’ party.” Unfortunately, the guy seems to be more butterfingers than trigger-finger. Even worse, the game doesn’t even tell you that you’ve dropped your weapon — it was quite a surprise the first time I tried to shoot somebody and was told, “You don’t see any gun here.” Strange enough that the game seems to want to emulate the random-stream-of-bad-guys dynamic of action games, despite the fact that typing “kill cyberpunk” carries absolutely none of the visceral thrill of an FPS frag. But for god’s sake, why why why would this trained professional killer drop his weapon after every single kill? (Nevermind the fact that these kills happen on crowded streets and shops where nobody seems to bat an eye at gunplay.)

Adding to the irritation is the fact that certain monsters can only be killed by certain specific weapons, even though both weapons are basically guns. For example, if you try to kill a “mean-looking cyberpunk” with your shotgun, you are told “You strike at the cyberpunk with the shotgun, but your weapon bounces off it harmlessly”, almost as if you tried to clobber the guy with the stock rather than the far-less-strenuous effort of pulling the trigger. Yet a pistol takes him out without fuss? What could the difference possibly be? This bizarre behavior, coupled with the fact that every dead bad guy disappears in “a cloud of red smoke” made me feel sure that at some point the game would have the PC “discover” that he’s in a VR scenario. But no, that never happened, and the only explanation I’m left with is that some serious slippage into fantasy has occurred in these portions of the game.

Some of this behavior may be due to the fact that the game is written in AGT. I haven’t played many AGT games, since most of them seem to have came out between the fall of Infocom and the release of Lost Treasures, which is a period during which I had given IF up for dead. However, I have vague recollections of people asserting that the wandering monster stuff is default behavior in AGT, and that it has to be explicitly removed for a game not to have it. Or maybe I’m thinking of GAGS or something — they all sort of blend together for me.

In any case, there are problems in this game that definitely cannot be blamed on AGT. For example, one of the critical puzzles in the game depends on the PC going in a direction that is not indicated as available in the room description. This, mind you, when every single possible exit is listed in every other room description. Hasn’t the UN passed a resolution or something against games behaving like this? In fairness to the game, it’s true that a hint toward this action is given at one point, but in fairness to me, the descriptions do little to indicate in what location the hint is applicable, and in any case that’s still no excuse for leaving an exit unlisted when all others are. This is definitely the worst offender among the puzzles, but every aspect of Void, from the design to the writing to the plot to the coding, is tarnished with flaws. Some of these aspects have a genuine spark of excitement, or at least the possibility of such, but in the end, VOID: CORPORATION is a game that promises far more than it delivers.

Rating: 4.4

CASK by Harry M. Hardjono [Comp97]

IFDB page: CASK
Final placement: 31st place (of 34) in the 1997 Interactive Fiction Competition

Well, a game subtitled “my first stab at Interactive Fiction” doesn’t inspire much confidence. CASK is another one of those “I wrote this game to learn Inform” games that seem to be so popular this year. None of the other languages, even AGT, have inspired this particular genre of competition entry this year (with the possible exception of Mikko Vuorinen’s Leaves, written in ALAN), and I think it’s worth ruminating on the reasons for that. Inform is a sophisticated system, and there certainly have been no dearth of complaints on the IF newsgroups about how difficult it is to write programs with its C-like, object-oriented structures. Nonetheless, many people (including some of the people complaining on the newsgroups) have been able to use Inform well enough that they felt the results of even their first efforts were worthy for submission to the competition.

I think that part of the reason for this is that Inform’s libraries are comprehensive and detailed enough that even the barest shell .z5 game seems rich with possibility — dozens of verbs are implemented and ready to use, and creating simple rooms and objects is quite easy. The depth to which the Inform libraries are crafted allows even a designer’s first efforts to seem, at first blush, on a par with simpler Infocom adventures. Moreover, Inform enjoys a special place in the ftp.gmd.de hierarchy: besides being lumped in with all the good, bad, and indifferent systems in if-archive/programming, it also resides in if-archive/infocom/compilers. Consequently, anyone who came to IF by way of Infocom can stumble upon it in their first visit to the archive, simply through connecting to the most familiar word and then saying “Wow, the Infocom compiler is here?” I know that’s how it happened for me. Inform’s .z5 format is a nice piece of wish-fulfillment for all of us who wish that we could still get a job at Infocom. So just because Inform is granted this privileged association with Infocom, does that mean that a certain set of its users feel that their first efforts are on Infocom’s level, without a substantial amount of effort on the part of the author? Perhaps, but all these pieces combined don’t explain the trend I’ve seen this year. I’m not sure what the rest of the explanation is, but I do know this: I hope the trend won’t last. It doesn’t add a lot of quality interactive fiction to the archive, just a lot of shoddy Inform examples.

Which brings me up to CASK. The idea here is that you’re trapped in the basement of a winery, abducted for no apparent reason by your new employers. You must use your wits and the objects about you to make your escape. However, the real truth is that you’re trapped in a below-average interactive fiction game, which was entered in the contest for no apparent reason by its author. You must decipher vague prose, evade coding bugs, and defy logic to escape. Luckily, it doesn’t take too much time as long as you have help. Bring your walkthrough! CASK helped its author learn Inform. Let’s see that knowledge applied to the creation of a quality IF game.

Prose: There were a number of areas in which the vagueness of the prose contributed rather unfairly to the difficulty of the puzzles. [SPOILERS AHEAD] For example, at one point in the game you find a rusty saw, whose description reads “It is a rusty saw.” (Oooh! Now I understand! Glad I examined that!) When you try to cut something with the saw, the game tells you “You cut your fingers on the saw. Ouch!” Now, I’m no genius, but I do know which end of a saw to hold. It’s the handle, right? There’s nothing in the description suggesting that this saw doesn’t have a handle, so how would I cut my fingers? Is the handle sharp? Turns out you have to wrap a cloth around the saw then cut a hole with it. Though it seems to me a saw with a cloth wrapped around it isn’t going to have much cutting power. [SPOILERS END] Dealing with prose like this makes me feel like the character is supposed to be woozy and probably blind and pretty clueless as well. I hope the effect is unintentional.

Plot: Oh, I’m sorry. I gave away the plot earlier. You have to escape from a basement.

Puzzles: There are really only a few puzzles in this very short game, several of which involve having a switch in the right position (though figuring out which position is right is largely a matter of guesswork. Luckily the switch has only two positions, so even the brute-force solution doesn’t take long). There’s also a bit of outfox-the-parser, some find-the-bug, and a good deal of figure-out-what-the-hell-the-prose-means.

Technical (writing): The writing featured several entertaining errors. In one room (of the three total in the game) you can see that the room “has relatively few noteworthy” aside from “an old heavy machinery”.

Technical (coding): This game could definitely have used a great deal more testing. Object descriptions repeat when they shouldn’t, and some trapped responses behave in bizarre ways.

OVERALL: A 3.1

E-MAILBOX by Jay Goemmer [Comp97]

IFDB page: E-Mailbox
Final placement: 27th place (of 34) in the 1997 Interactive Fiction Competition

Well, if there’s a prize for shortest competition game, E-MAILBOX will win it hands down. Clocking in at just under ten minutes, it barely gets off the ground before telling you either that you’ve won or that you’ve just met your death by having your body’s cells torn apart from one another. Not much of a menu, but at least either way the end comes quickly. The game purports to be “A true story based on actual events that occurred to a real individual,” but is written in a broad, exaggerated tone that is probably meant to be burlesque. It’s funny, in a limited kind of way, but it’s hard for the game to do very much when it ends so quickly.

One thing that it does do well is proves that an AGT game can hold its own in a modern competition. E-MAILBOX is short, yes, but it’s fun while it lasts. I used Robert Masenten’s AGiliTy interpreter for the first time, and found that it produced output that was well-formatted, easy-to-read, and even sometimes (gasp!) aesthetically pleasing. The game achieves a few nice special effects — nothing that couldn’t have been done with Inform or TADS (I don’t know enough about Hugo to say one way or the other) but nothing to sneeze at either — and generally works imaginatively with the text format. Of course, one wonders whether E-MAILBOX was kept so short in order to disguise the limitations of its programming system. There is virtually no navigation within the game, and the very linear design prevents most parser experimentation. Thanks to the handy AGT counter, I know that E-MAILBOX has a grand total of 4 locations, some of which only respond to one command. This game is a brief bit of fun, but the jury’s still out on whether AGT can match up to more modern systems when it comes to more substantial works.

There are some interactive fiction games that are epic, and may take even a great player a three-day weekend to complete (without looking at any hints, of course). Then there are those which could take up a day or two, and those (many of the competition games, for instance) which might fill a long lunch break. Play E-MAILBOX over a 15 minute coffee break. You’ll have some fun and still have time for a brisk walk.

Prose: I found the prose in E-MAILBOX to be pretty over-the-top. As I say, I think it was intended as burlesque, but its outrageousness seems forced. It comes across as the prose of a voice which is promising, but has not quite fully matured. It’s not exactly the sophomoric arrogance of something like Zero Sum Game — more an overly sincere zaniness.

Plot: The plot is so short and simple that it’s hard to tell much without giving away the ending. Basically, it centers around trying to send an email message. (See, I told you: short and simple.)

Puzzles: Well, I never found anything that I thought really qualified as a puzzle. The actions necessary are either entirely obvious, or entirely obscure but well-prompted by the parser.

Technical (writing): I found no errors in E-MAILBOX‘s writing.

Technical (coding): As I said above, the game does a nice job for something so short. The author makes an AGT game fun to play, which in my experience is no small feat. A well-implemented piece of work, short work though it may be.

OVERALL: A 5.8

My First Stupid Game by Dan McPherson [Comp96]

IFDB page: My First Stupid Game
Final placement: 26th place (of 26) in the 1996 Interactive Fiction Competition

Let’s see: boring, juvenile, bad coding, irritating descriptions, dumb goals. That pretty much covers it. Basically everything about the game was at a pre-adolescent level, from the obsession with Barney the dinosaur to the fact that urinating was the game’s primary objective. It’s games like this that give AGT such a rotten reputation.

Prose: The author wisely didn’t write very much, so there isn’t that much to slam. The middle-school level of diction (“piss”, “eyeballs oozing gore,” etc.) was extremely annoying.

Difficulty: Thankfully little. The less time spent in this game the better.

Technical (coding): How about a turkey sandwich you can’t call “turkey”? How about a wooden door you can’t call “wooden”? How about a snide rejection to “get all”?

Technical (writing): Remarkably, I noticed no errors. Perhaps when this writer has something to say he’ll be able to do a creditable job of it.

Plot: I can’t see any such thing.

Puzzles: The main puzzle is “Why did he enter this in the competition?” That one is pretty hard to solve. The rest were complete clichés. Feed a hungry monster. Unlock a door. Overcome the time limit with which the game started. I can’t decide which is worse.

OVERALL — A 1.6