Tag: graphics

Trading Punches by Mike Snyder as Sidney Merk [Comp04]

IFDB page: Trading Punches
Final placement: 10th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Trading Punches is a lovely piece of work, with a good story and a fine design. It’s also got some flaws, so let me tackle those first, and then I’ll move on to the loveliness. The first problem I had with the game may be more just an idiosyncratic reaction: I found much of its prose rough going. It’s not that the writing was error-laden or terribly awkward — it’s just that I kept finding myself wanting to skim over it, and having to concentrate to actually read it. The problem was most severe in long room descriptions and infodumps, of which the game has many. I’m not sure whether the prose was just too dense for me, or whether it was some question of style, or what. I know that’s an unhelpful reaction, but it was my reaction nonetheless.

One definite problem with the style is that the game goes way overboard on a particular gimmick for making things sound SFnal: word-mating. Thus, the PC wanders around a landscape of “mossgrass” and “elmpines”, watching the “peacrows” and then later drinking some “brandyrum” and “whiskeygin”. Yeesh! A little of this strategy goes a long way, and Trading Punches had way more than a little; it sounded pretty silly in short order. Finally, though the game was obviously tested, a few significant bugs made it into this version. For one thing, certain commands, like “score”, draw no response at all from the game. Even more seriously, there’s a class of locations with one exit that consistently thrusts the player into a formless void from which there is no escape. At first, I thought this effect might be intentional, but further experimentation demonstrated that it’s almost certainly accidental.

So yes, Trading Punches has some problems, but I still ended my play session feeling very happy with it. Why? Well, for starters, I enjoyed the story quite a bit, and aside from the excessive word-mating, the setting felt nicely realized as well. In general, the plot and the game-world felt reminiscent of the work of Orson Scott Card, which I like very much. I don’t know if the author of Trading Punches is familiar with Card, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that influence on this game. It’s got plenty of Card’s hallmarks: bitter rivalry within a family, affecting the larger world and universe on a grand scale; a gifted protagonist with a strong moral center who has a significant impact by helping (or trying to help) others; and strong familial bonds offsetting the deep familial schisms elsewhere.

The aliens in the game feel original and well-imagined, and lend themselves to symbolic use as well. I also appreciated the design of the game — its central story of sibling rivalry is told through chapters that don’t hammer the point too hard, but still make it quite clear how the enmity grows between the two brothers. By skipping forward in time to the most important incidents in their relationship, the game develops the character of both the PC and his brother quite satisfyingly. Situating the chapters within a frame story works very well to knit the disparate pieces, and the game does an excellent job of weaving revelations about the frame story into the content of the chapters and vice versa. Unfortunately, two hours wasn’t quite enough time for me to get through it, partly because of my denseness around one of the puzzles. However, a glance at the walkthrough shows that I was most of the way through, and I felt regret at having to stop the game and write this review, which is clear evidence that the story had me hooked.

Even aside from the story and the design (and its bugs and prose tics notwithstanding), Trading Punches boasts an impressive amount of craft. Especially noteworthy are the game’s cool multimedia components. Each chapter (and each return to the frame story) begins with a full-screen graphic. These graphics are quite lovely, and do an excellent job of establishing the landscape. I found this especially helpful as I struggled with the dense prose’s attempts at scene-setting. The illustrations look as though they were created in some kind of graphics rendering software, and consequently have a bit of a Myst-like feel to them, which is a good thing.

Also effective is the game’s music, a synthesized soundtrack which loops constantly in the background. The music is generally quite effective at enhancing the mood of a particular scene, though some of the musical pieces don’t have enough melody or complexity to withstand the constant looping. No matter how good an eight-bar tune is, it’s bound to get a little grating on the hundredth repetition. The game itself is quite solid, too — it’s clear that a whole lot of effort went into this project. Aside from the few bugs I mentioned in the first paragraph, I found the code pleasantly error-free, and the same goes for the writing. The puzzles worked well for me, and the game did an excellent job of providing cues to help me know what I ought to try next. One item in particular was not only quite well-implemented, but also provided an excellent emotional through-line for the story.

Trading Punches still has a few details to clean up, and the word-mating has to go, but I’d recommend it without hesitation, especially to fans of dramatic fantasy games like Worlds Apart.

Rating: 9.2

Sweet Dreams by Papillon [Comp03]

IFDB page: Sweet Dreams
Final placement: 20th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

Ooh, it’s always so exciting to start into a new bunch of competition games, and what a start this was! Sweet Dreams has to be one of the more surprising comp games I’ve ever seen, because it’s not a text adventure. Instead, it’s more or less in the style of early LucasArts games like Maniac Mansion or the first Monkey Island — a fully graphical experience whose pixelated protagonist wanders around the landscape, picking up and using items, solving puzzles, and chatting with NPCs via a “TALK TO” sort of system. Over the years I’ve heard rumblings about work on a LucasArts type of engine for amateur games, and I’m not sure if this is the product of that effort or something Papillon did all on her own, but whatever the source, the product is fairly impressive.

I thought the graphics were pretty attractive in a low-res way, the music enhanced the setting nicely (although it tended to halt and restart abruptly rather than fading out and back in when it looped), and the interface was intuitive enough that I was able to use it right away without much attention to the instructions. Aside from a couple of irritating technical glitches (about which more later), I’d be very excited indeed to see more games of this type and quality. In fact, there was one moment, when I maneuvered the PC to a bookshelf and took down a book to read, that I got a jolt to my spine, feeling magically transported to those happy days I spent playing LucasArts’ Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, pulling down one hilarious joke after another from its bookshelves. That is, until I started reading the books in Sweet Dreams, which mostly tended to be something like this:

The Human Battery: How the power of positive thinking can be put to
work not only to cure disease but also to solve the energy crisis.

Or they were about fairies, or crystals, or the zodiac… et cetera. And there we have the factor that’s going to limit the appeal of this game. The characters, plot, and setting are all feather-light and sweet verging well into treacly. It’s set in an adorable little cottage, with adorable portraits of fairies and unicorns hanging on the wall, and serving as a tiny private boarding school to four adorable little girls. Actually, these girls are supposedly adolescents, but they look all of eight years old, save for the bizarre breastlike protrusions that they display in profile. The story involves giving your wonderful best friend a beautiful present for her sixteenth birthday, then making a magical journey into an enchanted land of dreams filled with colorful flowers and friendly animals and… well, some people are bound to find the whole thing just unbearably twee. I have a pretty high sugar tolerance myself, and was able to swing with the tone and enjoy it for the most part, but even I felt myself on the edge of diabetes too often. On the other hand, it would certainly make a great game for kids, so long as a couple of its major technical problems got resolved.

Primary among these problems is the main character’s unfortunate tendency to get stuck while exploring narrower parts of the geography. The first time it happened, I spent a frustrating five minutes trying to get her to budge from behind the piano, until I finally realized that the secret was to try to maneuver her using the arrow keys instead of the mouse. Three directions would fail, but one would get her to run in a tiny circle, and if I interrupted this circle fast enough, I could break her out of her self-imposed cage. This running-in-circles thing is something she does a lot, usually when you’re trying to maneuver her close to a boundary, and when it happens she seems more like a trapped insect than a charming little girl.

These boundary difficulties exacerbated the other problem with the game engine: its insistence on the PC being right next to an object before she can interact with it. Sure, it makes perfect sense that you can’t pull a book from the shelf if you’re across the room from it, but I’d have much preferred it if any command to interact with an object on screen was treated as meaning “walk over to the object and then…”, so that I could avoid the numerous times the game told me “You’re not close enough to it.” As for the rest of the game, I’d say it was above average. There were a couple of very satisfying puzzles, a couple of so-so ones, and a couple that just seemed arbitrary. The one I had the most difficult time with was one that exposes the limitations of graphical games — it was relying on somewhat subtle color shading differences, and my laptop monitor wasn’t making a clear enough distinction between them. The story was, of course, cute, and despite the rather cloying nature of the game as a whole, I ended up mostly enjoying it. Once it gets a bit more technical polish, and so long as you don’t mind a very high sweetness level, Sweet Dreams will make an outstanding piece of amateur graphical IF.

Rating: 8.2

Carma by Marnie Parker [Comp01]

IFDB page: Carma
Final placement: 16th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Gotta love those juxtapositions. Right after I write a review where I spend an entire paragraph being a Grammar Cop, including several sentences about a comma splice, I fire up Carma. This game depicts the clashes between a wanna-be writer and the punctuation that said writer has heinously abused throughout his/her career. In fact, the primary complainant is an outraged comma, and that comma’s chief grievance is, you guessed it, splices. What can I say? It’s my kind of game. Even better, it’s done quite well, on the whole.

Carma uses the graphics and sound capabilities of Glulx to delightful effect, especially in its charming illustrations of punctuation marks dressed up to suit various occasions. One of my favorite scenes occurs when you ask the comma about splices. Suddenly, the scene dissolves, to reform as the archetypal spaghetti western town. Ennio Morricone’s theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly wafts over the speakers. We see graphics of a variety of punctuation marks, dressed up as stereotypical Western characters, and the comma (in cowboy hat and serape, naturally) marches towards you, ready for a duel to the death. It’s hilarious. The graphics in Carma are very well done indeed, and the music is pleasant, effective, and not overused.

Even aside from these, there are some significant programming achievements in Carma. Animations show up here and there, never to excess but adding pleasure with their presence. In fact, one of the best of these comes with instant replay and reverse replay capabilities, so that it can be savored over and over. Finally, in the most impressive piece of implementation, the game offers a punctuation test, in which the player can deposit punctuation marks into various unpunctuated sentences via the mouse. The game even gives a little giggle when you arrange a sentence into its most clever or unusual variant. Of course, the game fails to take account of all correct variants, which diminishes the joy somewhat.

There are other implementation problems as well. In one of the only sections of the game containing significant interaction, guess-the-verb problems are rampant. In another section, my attempts at interaction ended up freezing the game completely. To its credit, Carma warned me that there might be problems with what I was attempting to do, but this is rather cold comfort in the face of a crashing game. Features so problematic that they cause fatal crashes are features that should not be offered.

As I implied above, Carma is not a very interactive work of IF. Great swaths of it consist mainly of hitting the space bar to allow the graphics to advance to their next frame, or to prompt the next piece of text. In fairness, the game is upfront about this, even going so far as to issue a stern warning before the first prompt: “This is not a ‘game,’ so you will enjoy it more if you don’t approach it as a game.” People looking for a great deal of interactivity should look elsewhere.

In addition, as the presence of scare quotes in the above warning suggests, one of the great ironies of Carma is that it is itself quite imperfect when it comes to punctuation. Aside from the fact that the punctuation test excludes valid variants, there are also occasional howlers in there like “People v.s. Wanna-Be Writer.” Fortunately, Carma‘s cheerful and self-deprecating attitude saves it from looking too ridiculous by these errors, and even if it is more of a show than a game, it’s a show well worth watching. You might even learn, something. 🙂

Rating: 8.9

Lunatix: The Insanity Circle by Mike Snyder [Comp99]

IFDB page: Lunatix – The Insanity Circle
Final placement: 12th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Early on in Lunatix, I typed “X TUKE.” The game responded, “It looks just like you might have expected.” Of course, there’s no “tuke” in the game — I meant to type “tile” but my right hand had strayed a bit from its accustomed spot on the keyboard. I’m glad it happened, though, because the incident taught me something important about Lunatix: its parser pretends to understand more than it does. In my book, this is a big no-no. In fact, if I ever write a Parser Manifesto, my first principle will be, “Parsers must not pretend to understand more than they do.” Even a fairly innocuous violation of this rule, Inform’s famous “You can’t see any such thing,” has caused no end of debate on raif. When a game pretends to understand more than it does, you can never really be sure when you’re encountering a bug, because bugginess has been built directly into the interface.

What’s more, it’s a cop-out. Instead of doing the often tedious work of creating descriptions for the available objects, the game elides the absence of these descriptions by acting like it recognizes them when it doesn’t. As a player, I find this pallid deception infuriating. Unfortunately, Lunatix‘s parser does something even more infuriating, which has led to the formation of the second principle in my hypothetical Parser Manifesto: “Parsers must not give smarmy, unhelpful error messages.” My encounter with Lunatix was filled with exchanges like this (the words after the ellipses are my input):

...FILL WATER GUN
Your logic, although interesting, is flawed.
...TURN ON FAUCET
That's a pretty crazy idea, but it didn't work.

These kinds of responses make me want to scream obscenities at the game, and sometimes I did, along with feeble protests like “No it isn’t! Wanting to fill a water gun with water is not flawed logic! Turning on a faucet isn’t a crazy idea!” Then I remembered that talking to yourself is a sign of impending mental collapse, so I stopped. But my blood pressure stayed high.

The problem with this kind of message is that the game is willfully occluding its own shortcomings at the player’s expense. Error messages that insult the player, when in fact it is the parser that has failed, piss me off. I’d so much rather see the game say “I don’t know that verb” or “You can’t fill that” — that way I know exactly what hasn’t been implemented, and that knowledge will be useful to me throughout the game. Instead, Lunatix sneers at me and acts like its flaws are my fault.

Which brings me to the third principle of my Parser Manifesto: “Parsers must not ask questions without being prepared to receive an answer.” I had lots of exchanges with the game that went like this:

...POUR CPU
What are you trying to pour out?
...CUP
In a perfect world, that might have worked.
...POUR CUP
You empty the cup's contents onto the floor.

OK, so I made a typo in my first command, and the game asked me a disambiguating question. Fair enough. But wait! Further evidence reveals that the question only appeared to be for disambiguation. Actually, the parser wasn’t asking me a question at all, but giving me a message along the lines of “I only understood you as far as wanting to pour.” By phrasing that message as a question, Lunatix tricks me into thinking it is following the standard set by every other major parser: ask the player a question and process the answer. Instead, it’s only prepared to follow through with the first half of that standard, and gives me a snippy error message in the bargain. Grrr.

These kinds of problems have been more or less eliminated in the default library parsers used by most major IF tools, but Lunatix doesn’t use one of those parsers. Instead, it is a “homebrewed” creation written in (from what I can glean from the readme) QBasic, and presenting a radically different interface than most IF games do. The game splits the screen into four windows: the top half of the screen is split vertically between a square graphics window (displaying a picture of the current room) and a square text window, which always displays the textual description of the current room. Taking up most of the bottom half of the screen is a rectangular text window, which displays the game’s responses to the player’s input. Below that, a frame around a one line text field, is a window for the player’s input. It’s a bit reminiscent of the Legend interface, except instead of a compass rose and clickable command menus, there’s just a room description next to the graphic.

The graphics themselves are grainy and pixellated (or at least, they were on the two monitors I used to play the game), but still manage to be appropriately atmospheric at times, and even rather attractive once in a while. More importantly, they add significant content to the game — there are some objects that would be difficult to envision when described in text, but the presence of the graphic clarifies the setting a great deal. The window with the textual room description was nice, too, as it allowed systematic examination of the first-level nouns without having to periodically “LOOK” to remember what those nouns are. Of course, the game doesn’t actually implement most of these nouns, but that’s not the window’s fault.

The only difficulty I had with this window is that it didn’t always automatically update when something drastic had changed about the room, unless I explicitly typed “L” again. Thus, after solving a puzzle I might see a picture of a normal hallway, while the description alongside it raved about the giant squid blocking my path. In addition, lots of keen features were implemented in the interface, like command recall with the up-arrow, splash screens at the beginning and end of the game, a weirdly pulsating cursor, and nifty sound effects. So I can say with certainty that Lunatix is the most technically competent homebrewed game in the competition, perhaps even the most technically competent homebrewed game in the history of the competition. Unfortunately, all the snazzy windowing and gee-whiz effects in the world don’t really make up for its substandard parser.

The other part of the game’s core, its story, is OK. It’s one of those IF scenarios whose premise rationalizes why it is full of patently ridiculous things. In this case, you’re the unscrupulous director of an insane asylum and you’ve been given a drug which replicates insanity. This is a cozy explanation for why nothing you see really makes any sense, and seems to be just a setup for lots of different code and one-use-object puzzles. These puzzles are mostly OK, too. They’re more or less logical (within the confines of the completely nonsensical story) and, with one or two exceptions, pitched at the right level of difficulty. There is one real howler towards the end which makes almost no sense but will be deeply appreciated by fans of The Penguin on the old Adam West Batman show.

So in other words, the story and puzzles aren’t great, but they aren’t terrible either. Unfortunately, the combination of fair-to-middling plot with really-irritating parser makes the game less fun to play than it should be. See, (he said, mounting his soapbox) an IF game is a fusion of parser and story. The beauty of the modern IF languages is that they have freed designers from most of the hassle of worrying about the parser, allowing them to focus the bulk of their creative energy on the story. When a game eschews these time-tested solutions, it doesn’t just double its work, but increases it exponentially. Lunatix, strong as it is, isn’t quite up to the task.

Rating: 7.1

The Arrival by Stephen Granade as Samantha Clark [Comp98]

IFDB page: Arrival, or Attack of the B-Movie Clichés
Final placement: 4th place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

The Arrival is the first HTML-TADS game I’ve ever played, certainly the first competition game ever to include pictures and sound. I was quite curious as to how these elements would be handled, and maybe even a little apprehensive. I wasn’t sure that a lone hobbyist could create visual and musical elements that wouldn’t detract from a game more than they added to it. But Arrival dispelled those fears, handling both pictures and sound brilliantly. The game’s ingenious strategy is to cast an 8-year-old as its main character, which makes the fact that most of the graphics are really just crayon drawings not only acceptable, but completely appropriate. Just for good measure, the game chooses “Attack of the B-Movie Clichés” as its theme and subtitle, thereby making the cheese factor of the special effects (which is pretty high) actually enhance the game rather than embarrass it. The pictures are delightful — the crayon drawings evoke a great sense of childhood and wonder while continuing the humorous feel of the whole game. The spaceship (two pie plates taped together) and the aliens (in the author’s words “the finest crayons and modelling clay $2.83 could buy”) are a scream — I laughed out loud every time I saw them. The game also includes a couple of very well-done non-crayon graphics, one an excellent faux movie poster and the other a dead-on parody of a web page, both of which I found very funny. The sounds, though sparse, are equally good — the sound of the alien spaceship crash-landing startled the heck out of me. I’m not used to my text adventures making noise! But a moment later I was laughing, because the noise was just so fittingly silly.

However, all the funny pictures and sounds in the world couldn’t make Arrival a good game if it wasn’t, at its core, a well-written text adventure. Luckily for us, it is. The game is full of cleverly written, funny moments, and has layers of detail I didn’t even recognize until I read the postscript of amusing things to do. The aliens, who bicker like a couple of married retirees touring the U.S. in their motor home, are great characters. Each is given a distinct personality, and in fact a distinct typeface, the green alien speaking in green text while the purple alien has text to match as well. If you hang around the aliens you will hear quite a bit of funny dialogue, and if you manage to switch their universal translator from archaic into modern mode, you can hear all the same dialogue, just as funny, rewritten into valley-speak. The game has lots of detail which doesn’t figure in the main plot but creates a wonderfully silly atmosphere and provides lots of jokes. For example, on board the ship is an examination room, where by flipping switches, pulling levers, or turning knobs you can cause all sorts of machinery to pop from the walls and perform its function on the gleaming metal table, everything from laser beams to buzz saws to Saran Wrap. In addition, Arrival is one of the better games I’ve seen this year at unexpectedly understanding input and giving snarky responses to strange commands, which has been one of my favorite things about text adventures ever since I first played Zork. Even if you can’t (or don’t want to) run the HTML part of HTML TADS, it would still be well worth your time to seek out The Arrival.

However, don’t be afraid to rely on hints. I had played for an hour and hadn’t scored a single point when I took my first look at them. Now, once I got some hints I determined that the puzzles did in fact make perfect sense — they weren’t of the “read the author’s mind” variety and I would probably have come to solve them on my own. Perhaps the presence of pictures, sound, and hyperlinks threw me out of my IF mindset enough that I was struggling more than I should have with the puzzles. That’s probably a part of it, but I think another factor was that all the details in the game ended up becoming a big pile of red herrings for me. There are quite a few items and places which have no real use beyond being jokes, and I found it quite easy to get sidetracked into trying to solve puzzles that didn’t exist. It’s not that I don’t think those pieces should be in the game; I actually find it refreshing to play a game where not every item is part of a key or a lock, and even as it caused me to spin my wheels in terms of game progress, it helped me ferret out a lot of the little jokes hidden under the surface of various game items. However, if you’re the kind of player who gets easily frustrated when your score doesn’t steadily increase, don’t be afraid to rely on a hint here and there. Just remember to replay the game after you’re done so that you can see what you missed. Besides, that pie-plate spaceship is worth a second look.

Rating: 9.6

Downtown Tokyo. Present Day. by John Kean as Digby McWiggle [Comp98]

IFDB page: Downtown Tokyo, Present Day
Final placement: 10th place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

Another very short (Textfire-length) game, Tokyo was originally intended for submission to Adam Cadre’s Chicken-Comp, but the author didn’t finish it in time. All the better for us, because the game is funny and entertaining, and still finds a little time to be innovative as well. With a game this short, it’s hard not to give away plot spoilers in any extended discussion, but I’ll try to be as discreet as I can. I’ll only say as much as this: Tokyo is a very funny spoof on a beloved Japanese film genre (and it’s not martial arts movies), one which often features the city of Tokyo (or the rubble thereof) as a setting. Considering this was originally intended to be a Chicken-Comp game, you can probably imagine how it works. There are several reasons why Tokyo is fun, not the least of which is the writing. Random description “events”, while having no effect on the main storyline, give the chaotic scenes an antic charm, and the depictions of movie clichés should bring a knowing smile to the face of any film buff.

One interesting experiment in Tokyo is its use of a split PC. In other words, the player actually controls the actions of two characters, both a rather anonymous individual watching a movie and the hero of that movie. This is an imaginative idea, and it sometimes works very well. At its best, Tokyo evokes the kind of split consciousness that actually happens while watching a movie. We are present, in the theater, there with the plush seats, the popcorn, and the people around us. But once we become immersed in the movie, we are inside of it as well. We forget about the theater and become part of the story, at least until the baby behind us starts crying, or the teenagers in the front make a wisecrack. However, the game is not always at its best. The split focus creates some confusion as to how commands will be interpreted — you can never be sure whether your command will be executed by the viewer or the hero. This generally doesn’t cause a problem, but it might have worked better if the transitions were smooth and complete, and the only interruptions happened outside of the player’s control. In addition, the standard library has been mostly unmodified, so that its messages remain mostly in the second person voice. When that’s the voice of the entire game, this is not a problem, but Tokyo asks second person POV to take on the special duty of signaling that the viewer, rather than the hero, is reacting. Consequently, messages like “You can’t see any such thing” (rather than “Our hero can’t see any such thing”) can create a little confusion.

Finally, I can’t review Tokyo without mentioning its graphics. No, it’s not a z6 game, but Tokyo has some surprises up its sleeve. Finding them provides some of the funniest moments of the game. Tokyo does a great many things well, and is one of the better short-short games I’ve played. Again, it’s a bit disappointing when a game this enjoyable ends so soon — I think this concept had quite a bit more mileage in it than was used by the author. Still, I enjoyed it while it lasted — it won’t entertain you as long as the average summer blockbuster movie, but it will probably entertain you more.

Rating: 7.9