Tag: australia

Six by Wade Clarke [IF-Review]

[I originally reviewed this game for Mark Musante’s site IF-Review, in 2012.]

IFDB Page: Six

Delicious Icing, Even Better Cake

Six was the second step of my Best Game XYZZY 2011 journey, after Zombie Exodus, and the two games couldn’t have been more different. Where Zombie Exodus is a choose-your-own-adventure style web game, Six employs the parser, and not only that, puts the interface to use in a variety of minigames as well. Where Zombie Exodus has some shaky writing, Six is impeccably written, and not only that, it’s extraordinarily well-executed and professional on every level. And where Zombie Exodus is a horrifying gorefest, Six is utterly innocent and charming, charming, charming. I don’t think I’ve ever been so charmed by an IF game.

Heck, I was charmed before I even started playing! The game comes with a beautiful PDF manual to gently introduce new IF players to the form. It’s got a cute little map of the landscape that fits in perfectly with the tone of the game as well as eliminating any need for the player to make a map. (This document is also available inside the game by typing MAP, a typically smooth implementation detail.) After presenting an adorable frontispiece and a sprightly theme song, it takes first-time players through a breezy but concise configuration process to ensure that the player’s interpreter is prepared to handle everything that Six has to offer.

What does Six have to offer? Well, there’s an impressive library of sound effects, from rushing wind to crunching leaves to giggling children. There’s an original soundtrack of playful electronica. There are a few very cute illustrations, as already mentioned. That’s the multimedia piece of it, but in a text game, multimedia is icing on the cake. All the multimedia in the world can’t make a bad text game fun to play. Lucky for us, Six isn’t just icing — the birthday cake is great too.

That’s right, I said birthday cake. In Six, you play Harriet Leitner, a little girl celebrating her sixth birthday alongside her twin sister Demi. As a part of your birthday party, your parents have taken you and your friends to a park, where you’re playing Hide And Seek Tip. The “tip” part is to specify that this particular Hide And Seek variant incorporates a tagging aspect — once you find somebody, you have to tag (or “tip”) them in order to score a point. As Harriet, you play the searcher — once you find and tip all six of your friends playing the game, you win!

If the nomenclature strikes you as a little odd, you must not be Australian. The game is set in Australia and written by an Australian author — its small incorporations of Australian culture add to its appeal. As is typical of this game, everything that might confuse a first-time player is explained very smoothly. For instance, an entry in the HELP menu helps explain the occasional reference to “fairy bread” you might come across:

Fairy bread is white bread spread with margarine, covered in hundreds and thousands and cut into triangles. (If you don’t know what hundreds and thousands are, they might be called “sprinkles” where you live.) Fairy bread is commonly served at children’s parties.

Every aspect of the game is handled with extraordinary clarity and attention to detail. There’s text to handle first-time players and text to handle experienced players. There’s an explanation of all the game-specific commands, both within the game’s help menu and in the PDF manual. There’s the command HANDY, which lists out all the game-specific commands outside of the help menu. There’s a clever and useful innovation for player convenience: hitting Enter at the prompt repeats the last command. There’s the status line, which lists exits in ALL CAPS if the location they lead to hasn’t been explored, and in lower case when the location is familiar.

There’s an intelligent “can’t go” message, which recognizes which areas have been explored and which haven’t, like so: “You can’t go that way. It looks like you can go north, south (to the edge of the park), west or up (to the treehouse).” Those exits are also available via the EXITS command. There’s a compass rose on the status line to help players unfamiliar with navigating by compass directions, but which can be hidden by the command COMPASS OFF. The status line itself can be altered to have a different background color, or to hide the exits list. On and on it goes, and every time I found something new to provide options or clear the way for players, I got more and more impressed.

Then, partway through, the game delivered a wonderful, delightful surprise that just knocked me out. I won’t spoil it in this review — I’ll just reproduce the note I wrote to myself: “[AWESOME AWESOME A W E S O M E. Oh my god. What fun.]” As happy as I was with the game before this happened, I was more than twice as happy afterward. If I talk about it anymore, though, I’m bound to give it away, and it’s something you should really find for yourself, so let me change the subject.

I mentioned minigames earlier. At various points, the interface announces that it’s going to change, such as when you find your friend Marion, who is dressed as a pirate and challenges you to a duel. At that point, the game plays a short duel theme and announces in blue text:

<< In the duel, you should use these special commands: >>

ZAP - Type this to try to zap Marion with your wand. If you hit her, you win!
DODGE - Type this to try to run or jump out of the way of one of Marion's attacks.
BLOCK - Type this to try to block one of Marion's attacks with your wand.

If you want to let Marion make the next move, you can try to WAIT.

If you want to see these special commands again, type SPECIAL.

You can also use regular commands during this duel if you think they will help, though most of the time, they won't!

<< Press SPACE to begin the duel when you're ready >>

Thus does Six take minigames, long a staple in other video game genres, and integrate them effortlessly into interactive fiction. The game’s interaction simplifies down to a few commands, but still keeps the parser’s sense of expanded possibility available. When appropriate, the game also handles the case where an intuitive command for the minigame overlaps with a standard IF command, by offering the player a choice of how to configure the command set. That kind of exquisite implementation came as no surprise once I encountered it — I knew by then that I could trust the game to handle everything this way. For me, these subgames worked beautifully, and I’d love to see the idea taken up in future games.

With all of this customization and special effects, it’s amazing I didn’t find more bugs in the game. Of course, I did have the advantage of playing release 3 — I’m not sure what the experience was like for comp players, since I’ve tried to avoid reading reviews in order to prevent preconceptions. It couldn’t have been all that bad, as it came in second. (And boy, am I looking forward to playing the piece that voters thought was even better than this.) However, the one bug I found was a doozy: after playing the game for a couple of hours, then saving and coming back, I found I was unable to load my saved game. I’d type RESTORE and get a pop-up message box reading “Reference to nonexistent Glk object.” Given the catastrophic nature of this error, it’s hard to say at what layer it’s even occurring — game, interpreter, or Inform. Six pushes at the technical edges of IF, so perhaps it’s no surprise that it generates more opportunities for platforms to encounter conditions for which they are unprepared.

Rereading this review, I’m realizing that I might have made Six sound cutesy or cloying. It isn’t. The game presents its PC’s perspective in a very matter-of-fact way, with very little adult sentimentality attached. The NPCs are well-drawn too, feeling like real children rather than hasty stereotypes. I thought the dialog rang especially true — as the parent of a six-year-old myself, I recognized the mix of quirkiness and practicality in the game’s characters from my observations of the kids around me.

For nine straight years, I reviewed every game in the IF competition. My ratings added a decimal place to the comp’s typical 1 to 10 ratings, for a little finer calibration. In that time, I never gave any game a 10.0, because I never found the perfect game. However, I did award two games a 9.9: Adam Cadre’s Photopia and Ian Finley’s Exhibition. If I were still doing those ratings today, Six would earn my third 9.9. It’s that good.

Murder at the Aero Club by Penny Wyatt [Comp04]

IFDB page: Murder at the Aero Club
Final placement: 16th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

My first clue was a line in the banner: “(With apologies to all real-life characters and Government organisations upon which this is based!)” Do I detect a faint scent of “in-joke game”? Of course, the dead giveaway came when I encountered a character with the same name as the author. So assuming that “Penny Wyatt” isn’t a pseudonym, or that it’s the pseudonym of somebody who really does belong to an Australian aero club, I’m going to venture the hypothesis that this is one of those games where the author implements some familiar setting and characters, drapes a little concept around them, and then releases it to the world. It’s a close cousin of the “implement your house” and “implement your job” games: the “implement your hangout” game.

The vast majority of the time, games like this are vastly entertaining to the lucky few who are acquainted with the people and places represented, and irritatingly baffling to the rest of us. Murder At The Aero Club is no exception, though its competent prose and the presence of an actual story (albeit minimal) render it a cut above many. One of the problems with games like this is that they assume too much. Because the setting is so familiar to the author, a kind of unconscious shorthand sets in, a failure to fully describe the world. Perhaps it’s difficult to take an authorial approach to things that are right next to you, especially if you’re trying to fictionalize them just a little.

Certainly, unconscious assumptions would help clarify why so few first-level nouns are implemented. Take, for instance, the first room description:

Car park
You are standing beside your car, parked in a small gravel parking area. Light streams onto the ground in patches, mottled by the shade of the gum trees high above. Surrounding you is an assortment of vehicles. A gravel path leads north to the front door of the clubhouse, while to the west stands a large maintenance workshop.

Here are the things I tried to examine: workshop, clubhouse, path, gravel, vehicles, trees, lot, and car. Here’s what was implemented: vehicles and car. The rest told me “You can’t see any such thing,” which seems awfully contradictory to what’s just been described to me. It’s very difficult to get a great mental picture of my surroundings when they seem so hastily sketched. Still, vehicles and car are at least something. Here’s what the game tells me about the vehicles:

The vehicles appear to belong to the various members of the flying club. Among the ones you can see from your position are a gleaming green Porsche, a dirty ute, a formidable-looking motorbike, and a dust-covered van. Many of the vehicles have “I Love Aircraft Noise” stickers attached to their windows. There’s also your little car, of course. It’s looking a little worse for wear after the gruelling eight-hour drive to get here.

You know what the game told me when I tried to examine the Porsche, the ute, the motorbike, and the van? Yeah, that’s right. I couldn’t see any such thing. The premise of the game is that you play a detective sent to investigate a murder at an amateur aviation club deep in the outback, but it’s hard to feel like a detective when you can’t even see huge objects all around you. Heck, I don’t even know what a “ute” is (aside from an Indian tribe and a joke from My Cousin Vinny), and I would have really appreciated a little description, but it wasn’t to be.

See, for this game’s real audience — the people it depicts and the people who know them — a description of those cars isn’t necessary, because those people already know what the cars look like. The PC is an outsider to the situation, and the game’s inattention to world-building certainly helped me identify with that excluded feeling, but I wasn’t even able to do the basic sorts of examinations a detective would do, which in the end wasn’t much fun, and didn’t really make much sense.

Plenty of things about the game don’t make a lot of sense, actually. The solution requires some pretty non-intuitive actions, though because the game is so sparsely implemented that I was still able to guess what it wanted me to do much of the time. It also introduces random, crazy crap from time to time, like the character who is seemingly able to drink jet fuel. When a game sticks with an otherwise realistic milieu and then throws in something like this, I just roll my eyes and disengage. If the game doesn’t care about its own world’s consistency, why should I?

However, there are things to like about MATAC. The detective PC carries a notebook to which the game automatically appends any relevant information that the PC encounters. This device is both useful and well-implemented. (Shades of Madame L’Estrange And The Troubled Spirit, another game set in Australia with an investigative PC who carries an automagically-growing notebook.) The prose is clean and clear, and the game is free of horrible bugs. Mind you, there are still plenty of run-of-the-mill bugs — discoveries that can be repeated ad infinitum, dialogue that repeats weirdly, and so forth. I’d guess that MATAC is untested or minimally tested. Still, if you’re a member of the club it parodies, you’ll probably have a great time with it. If you aren’t, I’m afraid I can’t recommend it.

Rating: 6.0