Tag: dennis miller

Koan by Esa Peuha as Anonymous [Comp02]

IFDB page: Koan
Final placement: 35th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

In 1998, there was In The Spotlight, a tiny but enjoyable game whose entire purpose was to embody one clever puzzle. Then, last year, there was Schroedinger’s Cat, a less enjoyable (though competently produced) game whose sole reason for existence was to embody a completely baffling puzzle. Now we have Koan, a fairly irritating and badly programmed game that embodies one more-or-less nonsensical puzzle. Clearly, we’re on a downward slope here.

I don’t have any particular objection to the genre of one-puzzle games; as I said, I liked In The Spotlight well enough. However, when the entire game is a tiny environment based around one puzzle, that puzzle had better be well-implemented. As you might have guessed, this is not the case in Koan. Even setting aside the fact that most of the writing is nothing but placeholders (like the room whose description consists only of “This is the middle location in this game.”), there are several fundamental problems with the puzzle as it is coded. Example: you have to retrieve a clay pot from a high place, and there are several objects in the game that may help you retrieve it without damaging it. However, before I even saw any of those objects, the first thing I did was this:

>x pot
This clay pot has a severe fracture. Other than that, the only
noticable feature is the writing that says, "When intact, this pot
will break the stone slab."

So the pot already has a severe fracture? Kind of takes away my motivation to try not to damage it. There’s nothing around to fix it with, either, which really makes me wonder how I’m supposed to make it intact. This is not the way to do a one-puzzle game. Also: noticeable.

As for the solution, I can’t say it really made much sense to me. From the game’s title, I take it that this puzzle and its answer are supposed to represent some kind of deep spiritual truth. Now granted, I’m not a Buddhist, but I failed to find any meaning in this game beyond “Well, that was surreal.” I dunno, maybe somebody else found it profound. To paraphrase Dennis Miller: of course, that’s just my opinion — I could be unenlightened.

Rating: 3.0

Invasion of the Angora-Fetish Transvestites from the Graveyards of Jupiter by Morten Rasmussen [Comp01]

IFDB page: Invasion of the Angora-fetish Transvestites from the Graveyards of Jupiter
Final placement: 44th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Note: This review contains one exasperated, Dennis-Miller-channeling expletive.

One of the first things that happens when Invasion (this year’s entrant in the traditional comp sub-contest of “I-have-a-longer-sillier-name-than-you”) begins is that it plays a song with a creeping bass line and a Shirley-Manson-like female vocalist. “Hey,” I thought, pleased, “that sounds a lot like Garbage!” Little did I suspect how closely that comment would come to resemble my assessment of the game as a whole. Invasion claims to be “an interactive tribute to everything Ed Wood“, the famously awful director of such cinematic nadirs as Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda. This, you might think, would give it some wiggle room in the quality arena. It turns out, though, that there’s “entertainingly bad” and then there’s just “bad”, and sad to say, Invasion falls into the latter category. I played it for about 45 spleen-piercing minutes before finally giving up in a raging tide of annoyance, frustration, and sheer exhaustion. With my last shred of curiosity, I glanced at the walkthrough and discovered — Good Lord! — that the game is huge, and that there are tons of things I didn’t even find. I can’t imagine the sort of person it would take to find all these things and play this game through to completion.

Whoa there, Paul. Aren’t you being a little harsh? Well, in a sense, yes. This game obviously wasn’t put together overnight. For one thing, it’s a Windows executable, and anybody who’s tried an MS visual language knows that those forms are fiddly to arrange. It’s got its own parser (of sorts), a hit points system, timekeeping, and lots of other stuff. So it clearly was the product of some effort. In another sense, though, I don’t think my view is that harsh at all. This game is loaded with bad, irritating, horrible factors, things that you can’t help but suspect were put in there on purpose to annoy you. Little details like, oh, capitalization, punctuation, putting spaces between words, blank lines between text blocks, printing the contents of a room with the room description, and other such niceties are handled… shall we say… capriciously. I’d give an example but, unsurprisingly, the game provides no scripting function, and randomly clears the output window every so often, making even my Isolato Incident method quite impossible to carry out. More aggravation: image windows pop up every so often, which can’t be controlled from the keyboard — a special trip to the mouse is required to shut these down.

But this is all cosmetic, right? Sure, so far. Oh but don’t worry, there’s lots more. The game occurs in real time, and NPCs flit in and out of rooms like angry insects, sometimes changing locations as much as, oh I don’t know, once every two to three seconds, which makes it darn tough to actually interact with them, since by the time you’re finished typing the command, they’re gone. Not that they’re worth much when they stick around, as they tend to spit out uninformative, unpunctuated, and often just plain uninteresting phrases, on the rare occasion that they have any responses implemented at all. The game also throws random information at you without explaining it in the slightest. For example, at some point, you’ll see a flash of light in the sky and the game will print “** Quest : killer on the loose **”. Huh? Whaddaya mean, “Quest”? What am I supposed to be doing? How do quests work in this game? Who’s giving me a quest, and how does a flash of light tell me that there’s a killer on the loose anyway? Should you fail to figure it out within some set amount of time or moves, the game abruptly ends. Sometimes the parser ignores input altogether; a command like “drop all but nutribar” will drop everything… including the nutribar. And there’s only one savegame allowed. And there’s a money system that is seriously whacked. And… ah, fuck it. Who wants pie?

Rating: 1.8

Sins Against Mimesis by Adam Thornton as “One of the Bruces” [Comp97]

IFDB page: Sins Against Mimesis
Final placement: 9th place (of 34) in the 1997 Interactive Fiction Competition

Few things are more unfunny than an in-joke that you’re not in on. On the other hand, an in-joke that you are in on can be hysterical, as it provides not just the pleasure of humor but also the feeling of community that comes from shared experience. Sins Against Mimesis is definitely a very in-jokey game, and consequently not for everyone. However, having been a longtime (since 1994) lurker and sometime participant in the rec.*.int-fiction newsgroups, I was part of the audience at which the game was aimed, and I have to admit that I found a lot of the in-jokes really funny. In fact, one of the most fun parts of the game was to play name-that-reference — kind of the IF equivalent of listening to a World Party album or a Dennis Miller routine. Of course, the nature of the game (and the fact that it was written pseudonymously) also invites us to play guess-the-author. I’m casting my vote for Russ Bryan. I’m not sure why — something about the style just struck me as a little familiar and rang that particular bell in my head. Or maybe it’s just a masochistic desire to humiliate myself publicly by venturing an incorrect guess. I’ll find out soon enough, I suppose.

If you haven’t played much IF, and in fact even if you haven’t spent much time on the IF newsgroups, most of this game is going to mean very little to you. Even its title is an allusion: to Crimes Against Mimesis, a well-crafted series of articles posted to the newsgroups by Roger Giner-Sorolla (whatever happened to him, anyway?) a year or so ago. The rest of the game continues in that vein. The opening paragraph alludes to Jigsaw. The score of the initial part of the game is kept in IF disks which magically pop into the player’s inventory every time a correct move is made. In some ways, this familiar, almost conspiratorial approach is a weakness. Certainly in the context of the competition it won’t endear Sins to any judge who stands on the outside of the privileged circle at which the game aims itself. Even for an insider, the constant barrage of “if you’re one of us, you’ll know what I mean” references can start to feel a little cloying. However, the game is cleanly coded and competently written, and on the first time through I found it quite entertaining.

There aren’t many games which I would highly recommend to one group of people and discourage others from playing, but Sins is one of them. If you’re an raif and rgif regular, I think you’ll find Sins quite funny and entertaining. If not, forget it. It’s bound to be more baffling and irritating than anything else.

Prose: The prose is generally somewhere between functionally good and rather well done, with occasional moments of brilliant hilarity. The best one has to be when the game is in “lewd” mode and the player amorously approaches the plant: “Your embrace becomes hot and heavy and you surrender to the delights of floral sex.” An LGOP reference and an extremely bad pun at once! Can it get any better?

Plot: The plot is based around several clever tricks which are quite funny at the time, but aren’t worth repeating. If you’ve already played, you know what they are, and if you haven’t played yet I won’t give away the jokes. Like the rest of Sins, the plot is funny the first time through but won’t wear well.

Puzzles: Actually, this was the weakest part of the game. Many of the puzzles can be solved by performing extremely basic actions, which of course hardly makes them puzzles at all. Others, however, depend either on extremely specific (and not well-clued) actions or on deducing something about the surroundings which is not included in object or room descriptions. For a game so adamantly self-aware, it’s ironic that Sins falls into some of the most basic blunders of puzzle design.

Technical (writing): I found no mechanical errors in Sins‘ writing.

Technical (coding): I found no bugs either.

OVERALL: An 8.3