Tag: broken english

Beyond by Roberto Grassi, Paolo Lucchesi, and Alessandro Peretti [Comp05]

IFDB page: Beyond
Final placement: Tied for 2nd place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Here we are again: I couldn’t finish this game in two hours. I found it quite absorbing, and with 20 minutes left, I really debated whether to turn to the walkthrough or just play out my 20 minutes with a bit less dawdling around examining things, getting as far as I could. I picked the latter, but with 5 minutes left, I really wanted to know how the story turned out. So I peeked at the walkthrough, hoping to speed through to the end. NOPE! Turns out I was midway through chapter 4 of 7 (plus an epilogue) — just about halfway through, I reckon.

Back in the day I used to penalize games like this in my ratings, hoping to discourage people from this behavior. But it’s not like whatever I put here will deter people in, like, Comp06. Plus, as Michael Coyne taught me, authors have a strong motivation to enter their too-long games in the comp, and nothing I did as a reviewer could have changed that motivation anyway. And I’m obviously not trying to go through all these Comp05 games in six weeks — I started on these almost three years ago! So while I am still stopping after two hours to write a review, I’m not going to specifically take points off anymore, except to the extent that having to stop prematurely affected my enjoyment of the game. Heck, in some games stopping after two hours feels like a gift.

Stopping Beyond was disappointing, though, because I was deeply involved with its story, being pulled along at multiple levels. At the higher level, there’s a frame story, in which the PC is the spirit of an unborn child, exploring the reason why it wasn’t born. I was very wary when I encountered this premise, fearing that it would veer into an anti-choice polemic, but I needn’t have worried. Instead this concept brings us into a compelling murder mystery, in which we play a detective looking into the murder of a pregnant woman.

Really, I shouldn’t call the unborn spirit piece a frame story, because it returns after every chapter, in interludes where we see the murder scene as a ghost, or experience a bit of what life might have been like had the mother lived, or watch different scenarios of how that night might have gone, from a godlike remove. In the prologue, the game makes clear that the PC (and thereby the player) cannot affect her fate. She will never be born, and can only learn the circumstances surrounding that fact.

Thus the game takes place under a heavy layer of inevitability, similar to Photopia — a game to which Beyond pays a neat, subtle tribute by replicating one room and item description. And yet, also like Photopia, Beyond weaves a deeply compelling story around this unavoidable death. As the detective, we’re able to investigate the scene of the crime, talk to a wide variety of connected characters, and make clever observations that lead us closer and closer to solving the crime.

As any good mystery should, the plot takes several unexpected turns, and who knows how many more were in store, given that I was only halfway through the story when I reached my time limit? Not only is the plot well-crafted, but the presentation of the game is excellent as well. The whole thing renders in tan text on a black background, setting a nicely somber mood, and fantastic illustrations appear throughout the traversal, in that same color scheme. These illustrations might appear at the top of the text window, or on either side, and the game handles their appearance, persistence, and disappearance very smoothly, in a way that always enhances the story and never disrupts it.

The one Achilles heel in Beyond, I’m sorry to say, is that the game sometimes demonstrates a rather shaky command of English. Every so often there’s a mention of a baby “wrapped in white clothings”, or a character who says, “I have took the water”, or a phrase like, “I feel like I’m bringed away.” All things considered the errors aren’t overwhelming — certainly not the trainwreck that some broken English comp games turn out to be — but enough to throw me out of the story when they happen.

Nevertheless, this bothered me much less than it might have, and that’s down to the overall outstanding craft that was put into the game. It was one of those that I wish I could give more time, and maybe someday I will, but for now, I leave the story unfinished, but with admiration.

Rating: 9.3

Dreary Lands by Paul Lee [Comp05]

IFDB page: Dreary Lands
Final placement: 29th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

There are lots of different ways to write a bad comp game. There’s the Rybread special — terrible spelling and coding in a bizarre world. There’s the dreaded bad homebrew. There’s the obnoxious bad “joke” game where the joke is on you for playing. There’s the promising but badly unfinished (or broken) game. There’s the “here’s my apartment” (or house, or school, or aero club) game. There’s the simpleminded bad religious evangelism game. There’s the “first game” that seems intent on making a bad first impression. There’s the game with puzzles so broken they can’t be solved without a walkthrough. There’s the exasperating “I’ve never heard of spellcheck and can’t write in English” game. And of course, there are the games that check more than one of these boxes. I’ve played all the flavors, many times over, but sometimes I get fooled as to which is which. Dreary Lands, for example, looks at first like it’s going to be a surreal Rybread whirlwind, but turns out to be a first game not only broken in English and puzzles but also seemingly attempting some clumsy evangelism as well.

Sure, the writing is bad, and I mean awful. Here’s a sampler, in response to the command “CLIMB TREE”:

You lock your legs about the wet distusting trunk; but it is far to slippery to get a hold on, and you fall backwards into the marsh, getting soked in the vile mire a bit more than you’d have thought acceptable.

When I first started playing this game, I was noting all the blatant writing errors — in this case “distusting”, “to slippery”, and “soked”. I had to stop almost immediately because those errors are constant. Even where we get past spelling/typo issues, there are questions like, “exactly how much ‘soking’ in the vile mire would I have found acceptable?” Some games with terrible writing feel like they’re produced by someone for whom English is a second (or later) language. Dreary Lands didn’t really feel like that to me — it has more of a “very young writer who has a lot to learn about proofreading” vibe, combined with a generous helping of “can’t really express myself articulately yet.”

The coding errors aren’t quite so constant, but when they happen, oh boy are there some doozies. Here’s my favorite:

You can also see (which is currently burning., (which is currently burning., (which is currently burning., (which is currently burning., (which is currently burning. and (which is currently burning. here.

I have no idea what is supposed to be happening here, nor what went wrong to turn it into what it has become, but wow. I know I just used a “literally” joke in my last review, but it is hard to avoid thinking of this as the flaming wreckage of some poor attempt at Inform code. What’s definitely true about it, though, is that it presents a puzzle that’s pretty much unsolvable without the walkthrough, concealing as it does an object crucial to that solution.

I used the walkthrough to get out of that jam, and then tried to continue on my own but almost immediately became ensnared in other illogical object behaviors, so between the writing and the coding I decided to just type straight from the walkthrough the rest of the way. Even then, I had to restore from an earlier point because somehow I’d gotten the game into an untenable state. With the help of the walkthrough, though, I was able to finish the game, which is how I figured out it was trying to be sneaky evangelism.

Mind you, I understand that all games evangelize something, consciously or not, and usually a whole raft of things. This game, for instance, argues against the value of comprehensible writing, promotes D&D-style medieval cliches like walking around with a sword, shield, and bow, and makes the case that games should be entered in the comp whether they work or not. But alongside all that, it starts to introduce religious imagery that by the end shows a clear proselytization agenda. When it turns out you’re fighting a fallen angel (rebelling against both Satan and God) and that your sword-strike against it gets a little boost, “Footprints in the Sand”-style, by “two more hands, large and mighty, cupped around your own”, it seems pretty clear that the game is arguing for the Christian beliefs.

And just like Jarod on his Journey, its alignment with those beliefs lets it feel super-smug towards the rest of the world, so that the PC can wander out into traffic and then shake his head at “the poor frenzied soul driving the pickup” that nearly ran him down. Tsk tsk mister driver, can’t you see I’m elevated? But this game to me was more like that pickup driver, “a big middle finger… shoved toward you,” and after its absolutely dismal presentation its smugness is deeply, deeply misplaced.

Rating: 2.9

Chronicle Play Torn by Penczer Atilla as “Algol” [Comp04]

IFDB page: Chronicle Play Torn
Final placement: 22nd place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

The readme for Chronicle Play Torn issues a warning:

Now a few comments about the dark side of the game: its testing was done in a hurry, it is very likely that you will find irritating bugs in the prose, and the working of the game.

I’m somewhat innocent in the former one; I’m from the non english speaker part of the world, and thus writing prose for me is like walking without light in an Infocom product: I never know, when does a grue find me (and if it does, I don’t even notice it).

This warning encapsulates both what’s good and what’s bad about the game. As even the readme demonstrates, the author’s English is far from perfect, and can frequently be a major roadblock to understanding. Even the title shows this — it feels like three words randomly drawn from a magnetic poetry set. In addition, the rushed testing job shows; CPT isn’t a relentless bugfest, but its code has some serious issues. However, like the readme, the project as a whole is well-intentioned, good-natured, and more fun than I expected it to be, given its acknowledged flaws.

I do want to talk a little more about the idea expressed above, that authors who don’t speak English natively are “innocent” when it comes to problems in their prose. Sorry, but no, they aren’t. I grant that English is a difficult language. I grant that the IF audience is tiny already, and that the majority of it communicates in English, making the choice of writing IF in one’s native language so audience-limiting as to feel like no choice at all. I grant that the majority of IF tools and parsers are in English. I grant that if I tried to write a game in Hungarian or Russian or Swedish or even Spanish, the language I studied in high school and college, the results would be far worse than even the worst translated game in this comp. I grant all these things.

But ultimately, the fact remains that whatever the circumstances, good games have good prose. When you write a story, you are responsible for every word in it. Who would try to write a novel in a language in which they weren’t fluent? What publisher would take it? Just because you’re writing an IF game doesn’t mean that you’re any less responsible for your words, no matter how strong the coding is, and no matter how tough you find English. In the end, I want to read good stories, not understandable excuses. Native speaker or not, if the prose in your game is littered with problems, your game will suck. Period. By the way, it did occur to me that the author may not have understood the connotation (or even denotation) of “innocent” when making the claim above. However, if that’s true, it only underscores my point, which seems well worth making in a competition where a full 15% of the games I’ve played thus far suffer from some amount of broken English.

So, that point made, how’s the rest of the game? Well, mixed. On the negative side, my game experience was diminished greatly by the presence of a bug so severe that it crashed the entire interpreter, which is an IF experience I haven’t had for a while. I checked it out, and the bug is reproducible — I think the game is trying to dynamically create objects that it hasn’t properly set up. There were some other bugs too, though none as bad as that one. In addition, I found the game too long for the competition; by the time my two hours had run out, I’d estimate I was about 75% done. Of course, having to keep restarting my interpreter didn’t help matters in that department.

In the positive column, CPT features some entertaining imagery, including a few parts that capture the Lovecraft feel quite well. Also, the game’s story is fun, kind of a jumped-up version of Uncle Zebulon’s Will. The hint system is very helpful, but most of the puzzles are crafted sensibly enough that I didn’t need it often, though I did turn to it as I was running out of time, or when I found the game’s prose just too impenetrable. Finally, what I appreciated the most about CPT is that its heart really seems to be in the right place. Despite its serious problems, it’s written out of a deep affection for both its medium and its themes, and while I can’t recommend the game, I applaud the effort, and I hope that the author improves it and continues to write more.

Rating: 4.4

A Light’s Tale by Zach Flynn as “vbnz” [Comp04]

IFDB page: A Light’s Tale
Final placement: 32nd place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Well. This one has many problems. Many serious problems. Let’s start with the writing. I’m guessing that this game is the work of a non-native English speaker. Something like “your mind… flys far, far away” could just be a typo, but when the game describes a dump as “full of unnumbered amounts of trash,” I begin to get the strong feeling that the translating dictionary has come calling. The prose is just littered with writing errors, many of which are too simple to be blamed on translation. For instance, a death message:

The guard calls out: “What are you doing there?” He runs over and sticks a bullet in your side you die.

Maybe the bizarre diction “sticks a bullet in your side” could be explained by translation, but there’s no such excuse for failing to provide either a conjunction or a full stop before “you die.” Also, the game is just littered with redundancy. Whether it’s describing the dump as “[an] extremely dirty, messed-up dump,” or calling the PC “a rather overweight chubby character” or naming an NPC “the big, large rather muscular mouse,” Light’s Tale hates to say once what it could say twice instead.

However, as problematic as the writing is, the coding is worse. Take that big, large mouse, for instance. He’s got one of the most ungainly short names I’ve ever seen in an IF object:

>give mirror to george
The big, large rather muscular mouse who looks to be a pretty good mechanic, for the right price rejects the offer.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure his short name is “the big, large rather muscular mouse who looks to be a pretty good mechanic, for the right price.” Implementing an object in this way demonstrates a basic lack of understanding of how an IF engine works. Sometimes there are even full stops embedded in object names. Here’s another problem: the game completely chokes on any attempt to show anything to anyone. The command always results in “[TADS-1014: ‘abort’ statement executed]”. Another pervasive issue is the game’s recurring failure to mark dialogue with quotation marks, resulting in exchanges like this:

>ask bruno about bar
Why would I want to talk to you?

Well, because you’re the parser. You’ve been talking to me the whole game. Oh, unless that’s Bruno talking, in which case there really ought to be some quotation marks. Sorry, but that’s just plain careless. Even the hints are buggy; they keep referring to somebody named “Robert”, when nobody of that name resides within the game. Thank goodness for the walkthrough, or I’d have gotten absolutely nowhere with A Light’s Tale.

Which, saving the worst for last, brings us to the design. Over and over, I found myself resorting to the walkthrough, a refugee from the game’s bizarre assumptions. Light’s Tale is certainly one of those games that assumes you’re going to traverse it in the same order that the walkthrough does. Routinely, the game would refer to objects I didn’t have, or kill me immediately after rewarding me for solving a puzzle. There are far too many “read the author’s mind” puzzles, including a real doozy at the end.

The game starts out as science fiction (the intro mentions a starship, anyway) for no apparent reason — it would play out exactly the same way if the setting were an airplane, or a steamship, or just about anywhere, really. There are talking animals throughout the game (unless the animal descriptions were meant as metaphor, but I don’t think they were), including in scenes advertised as “the real world at last.” The parser keeps referring to itself as “I” and “me”, and then suddenly becomes a character in the game, personifying itself as some kind of freaky supervillain.

Let me tell you, it’s a weird, wild ride. Some parts approach Rybread-level peculiarity. There were parts that I enjoyed, and there were many more parts that had me cursing heartily. It may be worth a trip through with the walkthrough close at hand, but not if you care about strong writing or strong coding, and even if you don’t, you shouldn’t really expect to understand it too well.

Rating: 4.7

Ramon and Jonathan by Daniele A. Gewurz [Comp02]

IFDB page: Ramon and Jonathan
Final placement: 36th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

Since classical times, stories have opened “in medias res.” This phrase, Latin for “in the middle of things”, refers to a narrative that begins during some crucial piece of action, filling in the background and the preceding events sometime later. Ramon and Jonathan fulfills the former part of this bargain, but never the latter. The game drops us into some sort of science-fictional scenario where some (maybe) criminals are being exonerated, or extradited, or something, and suggests that we’re not happy with the situation. Then there’s an unintuitive door-opening puzzle, a bit of quick noun-guessing with an NPC, and then it’s over. We never learn the backstory behind who did what to whom and why, who lives on what planet and how they got there, or who any of these characters even are.

Because the first (and really only) puzzle didn’t make any sense to me, I turned to the walkthrough in record time, but even after I had walked through the game, I still didn’t really get it. As I always say in these situations, that may be because I’m dense, but egomaniac that I am, I’m more inclined to believe that the game did an insufficient job of explaining itself.

Not helping matters was the fact that the prose is written in not-quite-fluent English. It’s not terrible, mind you — many of the sentences pass muster without a problem, but those that don’t are really jarring. For instance:

>x people
The audience has been waiting for years this moment, and is mostly
greatly disappointed for the two "hangmen" to have been virtually
cleared. Everybody rumble and yell.

The first sentence is almost up to snuff, if only “years” and “for” exchanged places — it would still sound awkward and clunky after that, but would at least be grammatically correct. The second sentence sounds stereotypically, almost laughably wrong, as if it were written for a Bronson Pinchot character.

You know, I’ve said this before: I don’t care whether English is your first language or not, but I do care about fluency and readability. If you can’t write fluent English, either don’t write a text adventure in English or make sure to have your text adventure thoroughly proofed and corrected before inflicting it on the world. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but if you want to produce something good, you simply must make sure the writing works.

It’s also a good idea to fully implement everything you put in your game. Ramon and Jonathan, short though it is, is poorly equipped to handle any deviation from its plotline. Anything outside the bounds of the walkthrough is handled in one of two ways. The first method is simply to end the game. This happened to me on my first half-dozen playthroughs — either because I walked in a disallowed direction or because I failed to solve the timed puzzle, the game abruptly kicked me to the curb and told me to restore or restart. Restarting wasn’t terrible, because I’d invariably just played a few moves anyway, but the frequency of the situation made it clear that there wasn’t much room to wander.

The other, much worse method that the game uses to handle players that leave the path is to simply do nothing. At one point, I wandered into a room with no less than five NPCs, all of whom may as well have been statues for all that they responded to me. Eventually I figured out I must be doing something wrong because my current situation was so amazingly dull. This does not make for a fun game — utter boredom shouldn’t be the tool that forces players to comply with the plot. So finally, I restarted, hit the walkthrough, made the required twenty moves, and the game ended. Or rather, if an ending implies that everything has been tied up and some sort of dramatic conclusion has been reached, it’s probably more accurate to say the game stopped.

Rating: 4.3

Shattered Memory by Akbarr [Comp01]

IFDB page: Shattered Memory
Final placement: DISQUALIFIED from the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition for not being an original work — it’s a translation of the Spanish language game Olvido Mortal.

The basic idea behind Shattered Memory is a sound one. The game starts off with an amnesiac PC waking up to an unfamiliar situation, and although this is one of the most hackneyed tricks in IF, the game comes up with a unique reason for it, which counts for a lot. The point of the whole exercise, predictably, is to find out why your memories are gone, and then resolve your situation once that reason is uncovered. Towards this end, the game provides a couple of special verbs: RECALL and SUMMARY. RECALL by itself may bring back some sort of recollection, but it may not; more often, RECALL <topic> is what’s necessary.

Even then, the things you can recall are few and far between (as it should be for an amnesiac), though sometimes you can remember more about the same topic once you’ve found out more on other fronts. SUMMARY provides a rundown of the various things you’ve been able to recall, and may provide some clues on its own. So as amnesia games go, this one isn’t too bad, doling out information at a reasonable pace and providing an interesting enough reason for the lack of memory. The game also provides a fairly useful conversation system, with SPEAK TO <npc> prompting a menu-based discussion while ASK <npc> ABOUT <topic> behaves in the expected way. A more problematic element is SAY TO NPC “<anything>”, which seems built for guess-the-magic-phrase puzzles, and indeed becomes just that at one or two points in the game. Still, so far so good, more or less.

The problem here, and it’s a considerable problem, is the writing. The prose feels like a bad translation from some other language, or perhaps like a writing sample from someone for whom English isn’t a first language. For example, after addressing an NPC with the SPEAK TO verb and selecting “Ask her if she knows you” from the menu, the game puts these words in the PC’s mouth: “Excuse me… Do you casually know who am I?” In one memory, he says, “I go down for having breakfast, Carmen is at the kitchen.” One half-expects the PC to whip out a phrasebook and carefully enunciate, “My hovercraft is full of eels.”

Unfortunately, everybody (including the game’s narrative voice) speaks in this sort of broken English. The game is reluctant to let you leave a queue because “you don’t know how important is what you are waiting for,” and says that you see “wealthy people together to beggars” in that queue. A guard asks, “do you think you’ve always acted the better you could?” In my favorite example, that same guard chides you, “If you had any good reason to leave yor place, you should have said it to me firstly.” He’s not yor frend!

There are probably people for whom mangled syntax, crippled spelling, and broken grammar don’t ruin a game, but I don’t think I’ll ever be one of them. In my opinion, if you’re not fluent in the language you’re using, you must have someone who is fluent proofread your game before you release it. You must fix all the errors that person finds, no matter how many there are. You wouldn’t expect a publisher to disseminate a novel, short story, or essay written so poorly, so why is it reasonable to expect gamers to enjoy a game with equally weak English? It’s basic logic: if an IF game is equal parts prose and programming, both must be bug-free before the game can be any good.

Rating: 4.6

Lovesong by Mihalis “DarkAng3l” Georgostathis [Comp01]

IFDB page: Lovesong
Final placement: 48th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

This game was my first introduction to the Quest development system, and I wish I could say I was impressed. I mean that. I’m all for people using their skills to create IF stuff that’s new, cool, and functional. What I can’t get very enthusiastic about, though, is people using their skills to create IF stuff that isn’t as good as stuff that already exists. Sure, Quest looks nice and everything. But unless the author of Lovesong broke or disabled something, its parser is less sophisticated than, say, that of the first Monkey Island game. Based on the help text, the parser seems to understand 19 verbs. Counting synonyms. And 9 of those are directional commands. And another one was (I think) added by the game’s author.

Such simplicity allows the game to be almost completely mouse-driven (or it would if the mouse support didn’t break halfway through), but really… what’s the point of that? It’s one thing to present a mouse interface in a graphic adventure, but a text adventure? Why? Legend tried it, but I can’t imagine that many people actually played all (or even most) of any Legend text game using the mouse alone. I guess it cuts down on guess-the-verb, but really, is the gain worth the price?

It seems to me that what Quest allows people to do is to create text games with the interface of a graphical game. To my mind, that’s a pointless endeavor — it deprives text games of one of their major strengths, and adopts a “hands-off-the-keyboard” aesthetic from graphical games that has a stultifying effect on game design. The worst of both worlds. No doubt Quest has some features unused by Lovesong, and those may go some distance toward making it useful. But ultimately, I don’t think that any nifty features are going to make a big difference. You know why? Sure you do: THE PARSER IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE NIFTY FEATURES. Same old song.

Of course, no matter what development system had been used to write this game, Lovesong would still be deeply troubled. The big problem here is English. Apparently, English is not the author’s first language. As the game’s author bio asserts, “Please forgive me, but me English are not fluent enough. I pray that some mistakes won’t ruin your gaming experience.” Well… sorry, but it’s really hard to enjoy a text game written in broken English. (Unless the English is broken on purpose, a la Gostak or For A Change, but that’s a different matter entirely.)

In fact, I have to wonder: if someone isn’t fluent in English, but wants to create a game, should that game really be a text adventure in English? I’ll probably get flamed for that, and really, I don’t mean to be some kind of Guardian of IF Purity, but a text adventure is a piece of prose, just like a novel, short story, or poem. If you’re not fluent in a language, how can you possibly craft a good piece of prose in that language?

Maybe it can be done, but Lovesong isn’t it. Its plot is sorta sweet, but the whole thing is so hampered by the twin burdens of its straitjacketed development system and its badly mangled writing that there’s not much opportunity to enjoy anything else about the game. In addition, it has its own implementation problems, though it’s always hard to tell what’s the game’s fault and what’s the system’s fault. Several times, the game just had no response at all to a command. About halfway through, the mouse buttons stopped working. Towards the end, the “save” command stopped working. Oh well — at least I can now say I’ve tried a Quest game.

Rating: 2.1