Tag: ifcomp

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.

Some notes on IF Competition reviews

From 1996 to 2004, I reviewed almost every game submitted to the IF Competition. There were a few exceptions, though:

  • My own games, for obvious reasons.
  • The games for which I was a beta tester: Mother Loose and All Roads. Both of these games were excellent, but I didn’t review them since I felt like I’d influenced them.
  • The 1996 game Promoted!, which required the OS/2 operating system to run. (Though it has since been ported to Inform.)
  • The 2000 games Infil-Traitor and Happy Ever After, which had known bugs that required recompilation before the games were viable. I’m a bit persnickety about playing games in the state in which they were submitted on the deadline day, and I viewed those games as ineligible based on their initial brokenness.
  • The 2001 game Begegnung Am Fluss, which was in German.
  • Games written by newsgroup trolls (defined by me as people who have made multiple, unprovoked, personal attacks on newsgroup regulars), which I didn’t have the ability or inclination to review fairly.

Everything else, though, will be showing up here. I’m going to add every review as its own post, even though that will sometimes make for some pretty short posts, especially for reviews from the earlier years, before I came into my full superverbosity. My reason for this is that I’d like to be able to link directly to a review, rather than an anchor tag on a page full of reviews. I’m planning to add pages here that index all the games both by comp year and overall, and it will be way easier if each review is self-contained.

I’m also going to be leaning heavily on the wonderful Interactive Fiction Database, which contains a comprehensive catalog of interactive fiction works. For each game, I’ll provide a link to its IFDB page, and anytime I reference a game I’ll link to IFDB, just as I have above. I would love it if these posts can bring attention to some of the wonderful IF of the past. (Or even some of the dire IF of the past, if that’s for some reason what you fancy.)

Like much of >INVENTORY, my approach will be a bit experimental, and I expect to learn and iterate as I go. At the very least, I want to indicate which year’s comp contained the game, who wrote it, how it placed, and what score I gave it. A note about my scoring — although competition scores are always submitted as integers from 1 to 10, my own reviews add one decimal place to that score, because I often found that I wanted to express a bit more nuance. A high 7 feels different (to me) from a low 7… y’know? For the purposes of my submitted scores, I’d always round up on .5, so for example that lowest possible 7 would be 6.5, and the highest possible 7 would be 7.4. I also made it my practice to stop playing after two hours, whether I was finished or not, and base my score and review on that two-hour (or less) experience.

One last thing — from 1997 onwards, the competition game package came with a tiny little program that would provide you with a list of the games in randomized order. Like most judges, I can’t help but be influenced by the order in which I experience things, and playing the 1996 games in alphabetical order by title may have unfairly influenced some scores. Consequently, I always played the games thenceforward in a random order to eliminate that bias.

I will be posting my comp game reviews in the order I played them. As time went on, that sequence became a journey in itself, and reviews of later games would be influenced by reviews of earlier games. Never fear, the site will be searchable, and I’ll provide pages which list the games alphabetically.

Introducing >INVENTORY

I started writing reviews of interactive fiction games in 1996. I think it’s only old people who start stories with, “In those days…”, but apparently the shoe fits, so in those days, the IF community was small, cohesive, and centered in a couple of Usenet newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction. For those who weren’t there, newsgroups were essentially discussion forums, consisting wholly of text — posts and threads. “Arts” was about creating IF, and “games” was about playing it. (“Rec” meant “recreation” — there were various top-level hierarchies that… you know what, it doesn’t matter.)

The text-only medium of newsgroups was perfect for text adventure aficionados, and while they thrived, those groups were the fertile soil from which sprung many of the pillars that support even today’s IF scene: Inform, TADS, the IF Archive, and most importantly for my purposes, the Interactive Fiction Competition.

The comp, as it was affectionately known, started in 1995 as a way to spur the creation of more short IF — see in those days most authors were trying to ape Infocom by writing long, puzzly games that would have fit nicely onto store shelves in 1985. The comp changed that, dramatically. Kevin Wilson, founder of the comp, gave it just one rule: every game had to be winnable in under two hours. The first year saw 12 games entered. The next year: 26. And it took off from there.

Opening screen of Andrew Plotkin's A Change In The Weather
A Change In The Weather, winner of the first IFComp, Inform division

I was on fire for IF in those days. I couldn’t get enough of the newsgroups, the games, the languages. I spent my nights immersed in learning Inform, creating little worlds and gleefully walking around in them. The competition was the perfect opportunity for me to actually finish one of these virtual puzzleboxes and send it out into the world in hopes of feedback. That first attempt was called Wearing The Claw, and while I find it rather cringey to look back on now, it did at least land in the upper half of the 1996 comp — 8th place. And boy did I get a lot of feedback on it!

In those days, you see, there was a strong culture of feedback in place, and the comp helped that culture grow explosively. Tons of people would review the comp games, and as an author, you could get a cornucopia of input that would help you understand where you went right this time and how to do better next time. It was invaluable, and I wanted to be part of it, so I reviewed every 1996 comp game.

Then I reviewed every comp game (with a few exceptions) every year all the way up through 2004, which not coincidentally was the year before my son was born. I also wrote reviews of various other IF and IF-adjacent games, and spent several years editing a text adventure webzine called SPAG.

For a couple of decades now, those reviews and writings have been housed on the personal web site I created back in the 90s with my trusty copy of HTML For Dummies. However, my crystal ball tells me that this web site’s days may be numbered. It lives on a legacy server at the University of Colorado (where I still work), and nobody is super excited about hosting old student websites from the 20th century anymore. Plus, those old reviews are absolutely festooned with dead links and ugly typography.

Enter >INVENTORY. This blog will eventually house all my writing about IF, including every comp review, every IF-Review entry, every XYZZY Awards solicited review, and everything else I can think of. >SUPERVERBOSE will remain my primary blog, and new writing about IF will go there as well as here, but >INVENTORY, as its name suggests, will house the exhaustive trove that currently lives on my old web site.

As time permits, I’ll be transferring comp reviews into this blog, where they can be searched, indexed, googled, and so forth. Once that project is done, I’ll start on all the other IFfy stuff I’ve written over the years. It’s quite possible I’ll append some of it with reflections or current thoughts as the mood strikes me.

In my first innocent post to rec.games.int-fiction, I called myself “a major devotee of IF.” While many other passions have laid their claims upon my time, that fire still smolders inside me, and I look forward eagerly to revisiting the many happy hours I spent with IF games and IF arts. As with everything I write, I hope it proves enjoyable and/or useful to somebody else out there too.