Tag: chronicle play torn

Hello Sword by Andrea Rezzonico [Comp05]

IFDB page: Hello Sword
Final placement: 30th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

There are two separate Hello Sword games in the Comp05 download: hs_ita and hs_eng, which apparently signify the Italian and English versions of the game. Yet, when I fired up hs_eng, the first full screen of text was a quote box, all in Italian. I thought maybe I’d accidentally clicked the wrong file, but then the quote got translated into English… sort of. Here’s the “translated” version:

And me, I’m who live at this point on my counted days,
who have dull dreams, who have fear, also I…
And me, I’m who go away just with these hands
to dyke the limits between the truth and the unreality…

To “dyke the limits”? Uh-oh. Then we get some introductory text that’s all, “You hasn’t the will-power”, and “today is one of the most hottest day of the month”, and “Altough that”, and “The guilty of all?”, and “read the note that Julius leaved.” Yeah, it’s immediately apparent that this review will be getting the “broken english” tag.

The English is so broken, in fact, that I quickly began thinking that maybe I could approach the game like For A Change — something whose language is so barely comprehensible that it melts your brain a little bit, but whose askew diction can be fun in itself. And there are moments where that is true! There’s a room description that includes the sentence, “A little square from that branch off four roads, which conduct to the four cardinal ways.” That feels a little bit like the “mobiles” of For A Change. Or how about this one?

Independence Street
In this street there are a lot of buildings, that – though impede the transit of the wind – almost guarantee a little shade. In this road, in addiction to the great number of houses, there are also a pub when you often spend your evenings and a stationer’s shop where you bought pens and pencils in times of low school.

“The transit of the wind” and “times of low school” are almost poetic in their brokenness. On the other hand, “in addiction to the great number” could work wonderfully if the substitution actually added anything, but alas, it remains only comical and sad. And that’s where my sympathetic strategy breaks down. See, Dan Schmidt knew exactly what he was doing when he broke the English of For A Change, and the linguistic changes worked towards the game’s overall artistic goals. Not so here. Instead, the author pleads innocence in the INFO text, similar to Chronicle Play Torn:

I’m absolutely acquainted with the great number of errors and incomprehensible expressions that crowded this adventure (by the way, I ask you to signal them to me), but I hope you at least appreciate the huge effort I made for you.

Sorry, but: NOPE! I sure don’t, because that effort did not result in anything good. As I said in the CPT review, I want to read good stories, not understandable excuses. And here’s the other problem: even setting aside the many, many, many language problems (the “signaling” of which would comprise hours and hours of work), this is not just a game in broken English. It’s a broken game in broken English.

There are guess-the-verb situations, pretty much impossible to pass without a walkthrough. (A better-written game might have laden the prose with clues that would trigger the correct verb, but this is not that game.) There are far-fetched solutions that the game itself keeps trying to discourage until they work. There’s the old Hitchhiker’s Guide trick of descriptions lying to you until you interrogate them repeatedly.

And finally — well, not finally, more like halfway through, but it works like a finale — the walkthrough itself fails. Even typing in commands literally from the walkthrough, even correcting those walkthrough commands that the game itself can’t parse (like “south-west”), I came upon a situation where the PC got thrown in jail and my game ended no matter what. And when that happened, dear reader, I was done.

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