Tag: infocom

About the Infocom >RESTART Reviews

>INVENTORY started as a pandemic project. I’d known for a long time that I wanted to get my many comp reviews, and various others, off of my student website, but it wasn’t until the spring of 2020 that I found myself with the time and motivation to get this site started. My son Dante was 14 at the time, and all these new reviews, brought into the light, piqued his interest.

So he started reading, and learning about the 1990s IF cast of characters — Graham, Zarf, Rybread, and so forth. He also learned about IF history as it stood up to that point, and in particular how Infocom loomed large for all of us at that time. We’d talked about Infocom before — in fact, when he was five we played Zork together for about 45 minutes, resulting in much cuteness.

Meanwhile, revisiting those old reviews started to give me a hankering to spend some time in the Infocom worlds again. So I decided to replay some Infocom games, and Dante decided he’d like to join in. Because we (and a whole lot of IF-ers) started with Zork, I thought that’s where we could restart. I listed out what I think of as the 9 Zorkian Infocom games:

  • Zork I
  • Zork II
  • Zork III
  • Beyond Zork
  • Zork Zero
  • Enchanter
  • Sorcerer
  • Spellbreaker
  • Wishbringer

Then, to make it a nice even list of 10 games, I added Moonmist, more or less at random. It was a game I’d never finished, it seemed like it was going to be on the easier side, and it had a little historical significance, apparently, for being one of the first games featuring a lesbian character. Dante is an LGBTQ+ activist, so I liked that connection, though as it turns out the depiction is very slight indeed.

Even before I embarked on this replay project, Dante had been exploring newer corners of the IF world — Lock & Key, Counterfeit Monkey, Steph Cherrywell’s games, and some others. So he was familiar with the basic idiom and mechanisms of these games. Essentially, he was right about where I was at his age in 1984, except that his primary text game experiences had been with 21st-century interactive fiction. Plus, he’d been playing video games of all sorts pretty much since he could talk, as opposed to me whose only other video gaming came at the pizza parlor, skating rink, or occasional arcade. Oh, and those friends’ houses lucky enough to contain an Atari 2600.

A vintage Infocom advertisement, with an image of a brain and the caption "We unleash teh world's most powerful graphics technology".

So our Infocom odyssey was a combination of me revisiting childhood memories, with dim recollections of puzzles and landscapes, and him seeing these vintage games through fresh eyes, his expectations shaped by a far more evolved version of text games and computer games in general. I’m still the faster typist between us, so I sat at the keyboard and read aloud, while he directed the action. We transcripted all our interactions, so that I could remember how they went when I wrote the reviews. We also used the invaluable Trizbort to map our progress, generally starting out with the automapping and then inevitably abandonding that when some mazy thing confused its relatively simple algorithm.

If I remembered a puzzle’s solution, I’d try to keep my trap shut and give him the pleasure of solving it for himself, though sometimes if we crossed the line between fun flailing and ragequit flailing, I might drop a subtle hint. More often than not, I didn’t remember the puzzle either, so we could genuinely collaborate on solving it. When we got really stymied we’d turn to the invaluable .z5 Invisiclues at the Infocom Documentation Project, but that wasn’t terribly often.

So as I write about these games, I’m writing about that experience. I’m not trying to write the definitive history of an Infocom game — for my money Jimmy Maher has got that territory 100% nailed down. Instead, I’m presenting an idiosyncratic and personal account of how Dante and I experienced those games — how I felt upon returning to those oft-trod trails and how Dante’s insights illuminated them for me like a trusty brass lantern.

We started Zork I on August 5, 2020, and finished Moonmist on December 20. Given sufficient time and interest, there may be more to come! Note that all of these reviews will be spoiler-laden — they aren’t written to promote a game but rather to analyze an experience, so I won’t shy away from getting specific.

The Beetmonger’s Journal by Scott Starkey as Aubrey Foil [Comp01]

IFDB page: The Beetmonger’s Journal
Final placement: 5th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

When I wrote LASH, one of the things I had some fun with was splitting up the functions that we traditionally assign to the PC. The conceit of the game was that the player was controlling a robot via the IF interface; the robot reported its experiences in a first person, present tense voice, resulting in exchanges like this:

>x me
I cannot see you. We are only connected by a satellite link.

The Beetmonger’s Journal takes this sort of complexity one step further. The game begins, told in the first person voice by the Dr. Watson-ish assistant to Victor Lapot, famous archaeologist. However, unlike Infocom’s Sherlock, where Watson actually was the PC and Holmes just tagged along, in this game it is Lapot whose actions are controlled by the player, even as the results continue to be reported by the assistant in a third person past tense voice, resulting in exchanges like this:

>x me
Lapot looked over in my direction. I stood close by, available to
offer my assistance in any way possible. Just in case, I kept my
possessions handy: a shovel, a pick-axe, a canteen, a steno notebook,
a pencil, a package of "gorp", a 50' length of rope, a compass, a
pistol, and a clean pair of undies.

I thought this response in particular was lots of fun — not only did it immediately make clear that the voice of the parser and the object of the commands were two different characters, but it also subtly provided a pretext for compass-based movement, lent plausibility to the two characters as a legitimate archaeological expedition, and poked a bit of fun at the voluminous inventories of typical IF PCs. And to put the cherry on top, the Watson character’s name was Aubrey Foil — the same as the author’s comp pseudonym, thus reeling the various character layers neatly back into the matrix of a memoir written by a famous scientist’s close companion.

Even better, a little ways in, the game does a POV shift that adds yet another narrative and character layer, and this shift is handled as neatly as can be. The background color changes, the tone of the writing alters a little, and little touches like an epigram, a printed date, and and a cleared screen smooth the transition handily. The voice remains third person past tense, but the parser’s voice and the object of commands have dovetailed back into one character, a different character from the two introduced in the frame story. Then, at intervals, we get glimpses of what’s happening in that frame story, and those bits are literally enclosed in a frame, backgrounded with the appropriate color from that narrative layer.

I have to say, I was quite impressed with all this POV manipulation — I think it was the best part of the whole game. I got excited just thinking about the possibilities for parallel action and dramatic irony that this technique opens up. This particular game doesn’t take much advantage of these possibilities, but it does a fine job of breaking new ground on the trail blazed by games like Being Andrew Plotkin. There were some other nicely programmed conveniences as well. For instance, one puzzle involves an action that the player will have to repeat several times throughout the game; The Beetmonger’s Journal implements this by requiring that the proper action be entered the first couple of times, then handles it automatically from that point forward. This sort of sophistication requires extra work from the programmer, but it really pays off in the player’s experience, and this game extends that kind of thoughtfulness to the player throughout.

Amidst this smooth coding, there were a few flaws. Typos, factual errors, and formatting problems were infrequent, but far from absent. In addition, there were a few places in which the game sported outright bugs. The most glaring problem, however, was with a puzzle. It’s not a puzzle everyone will encounter, because at a crucial decision point the game bifurcates into two separate plot paths, and this puzzle is only on one of those paths. However, that was the path I chose, and this puzzle tripped me up enough that I was forced to go to the walkthrough, which is unfortunate, given how smoothly the game had delivered hints up to that point.

Basically, there are two problems with this puzzle — I’ll discuss them in fairly vague terms to avoid spoilage. First, the clue for the puzzle seems to be embedded in an environmental “atmosphere” message that only prints randomly. This setup has the dual disadvantage of fading into insignificance after several instances and possibly not printing when the player most needs to see it. A crucial clue whose absence will stop the player from progressing probably shouldn’t be random. The other problem is that the correct response to this clue entails the use of a verb that’s both logically unlikely and undemonstrated anywhere else in the game. Consequently, even if I had seen the clue when I most needed it, I’m not sure it would have occurred to me to use the necessary verb — I just would never have thought it would work, because it’s rather unusual and because it’s a bit implausible.

These problems are a bit of a letdown within a game containing so many excellent portions, but they don’t detract enough to take away the essential fun of being enveloped by all those wonderful layers.

Rating: 8.8

Ad Verbum by Nick Montfort [Comp00]

IFDB page: Ad Verbum
Final placement: 4th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Among Infocom enthusiasts, the game Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head Or Tail Of It doesn’t tend to get singled out for a lot of praise. It has its fans, sure, but rarely receives the hosannas granted to such works as Trinity, A Mind Forever Voyaging, or even Planetfall. Its detractors, on the other hand, can be extremely vocal and emphatic. Ironically, though, the thing its critics decry is in fact the game’s greatest strength: it is a near-total break from IF convention, setting aside adventuring and role-playing to focus instead on wordplay, puns, and cliches. A typical Nord and Bert puzzle asks you to type a spoonerism, cliche, or bad old joke into the command line, which the game will then recognize and advance the story for you.

Naturally, if you despise puns, or if you don’t know a lot of cliches, or if you don’t enjoy wordplay, Nord and Bert isn’t the game for you. Because I love language and have a pretty firm command of English idioms, I loved Nord and Bert, though I certainly found myself relying on the hints at a few points. Still, it’s not surprising that fans of Trinity-style IF find themselves caught short when playing the game — it’s nothing like any other Infocom game, or really any other piece of IF. Until now. Ad Verbum is very much in the spirit of Nord and Bert, but instead of focusing on English idioms, it focuses on the words themselves, having a ball with all manner of challenging restrictions on expression.

For example, there’s a room where every single word starts with “S”. I’m not kidding — every single word. Don’t believe me? Here’s the room description:

Sloppy Salon
Simple social space, sadly spoiled. Some skewed situation's sequel,
surely. Seemingly, slovenly students sojourned -- scraping,
scratching, scuffing surfaces.

Stuff: ... stainless steel stapler... sizable sofa.

Now, I’ve seen some amazing room descriptions in my years of playing IF, but this one just blows my mind. I can’t believe the sheer linguistic bravado of it. Not only that, the author performs a similar feat in four other rooms, one for the letter “E”, one for “N”, one for “W”, and another for “S”. Not only that, each room has customized library responses consisting of only words beginning with the appropriate letter. In these rooms, as you might gather, the game will only accept input beginning with the appropriate words — the challenge is to come up with words that tell the parser what you want to do while staying within the linguistic restriction. Keep a thesaurus handy while playing this game.

Just for these rooms alone, the game is a towering achievement. To come up with not just a room description, but actual library responses that make sense for all commands, in such a restricted form, is incredible. Beyond this, though, is the achievement in parsing — I shudder to think what this game’s code must look like. And those four rooms are just one part of the whole thing. Ad Verbum overflows with linguistic challenges of this nature, and I had a hell of a lot of fun playing it.

At least, I had fun until the time I typed in an answer that should have worked under the game’s rules, but which the game didn’t recognize. And there we have the danger of this kind of game. Its wordplay challenges are so mind-wrenching that when I do come up with an answer that works, the game had better accept that answer, or I’ll get frustrated very quickly. Up until about halfway through Ad Verbum, I found that it was very well prepared to handle anything I threw at it. However, as I moved to other puzzles, it started to reject perfectly valid commands, which caused me to lose faith in the game with distressing speed, despite how impressed I had been with it up until then. After that frustrating period, I turned to the help and didn’t try very hard to solve the rest of the puzzles, which is a shame because some of them were really excellent puzzles.

The problem is that because Ad Verbum requires such specific input, when it isn’t prepared to handle what little input is valid under its rules, it seems much more broken than does a typical IF puzzle when it rejects alternate solutions. I can’t say I blame it — frankly, I’m astonished by how well coded it is already, even despite what it still lacks — but that didn’t make my experience any more fun when the game was rejecting correct answers. Ad Verbum sets itself a highly bizarre challenge, bravely taking up the mantle of Nord and Bert. When it succeeds, it provides immense intellectual pleasure. When it fails, it generates great frustration, and helps me understand just a little bit more of what those Nord and Bert bashers are on about.

Rating: 8.6

[Postscript from 2020: Ad Verbum won the XYZZY Award for Best Puzzles, in a ceremony held on ifMUD. In accepting the award, Montfort gave the most astounding acceptance speech I’ve ever seen. I reproduce it here in full, from its archive on Montfort’s site:

Ahem, awesome! Author accepts an appealing award affably.

As author’s actions affirm, alphabetical arrangements always amused author. Assembling assorted arbitrary ASCII, ad absurdo, as adventure and acquisition, appeared attractive.

And accordingly, author attacked adventure, abandoning ars amatoria, abandoning athletic activity, appearing agonizingly antisocial. After arduous attempts and assays, author actualized adventure.

Accolade and adventurer appreciation authentically affects author.

Acknowledgement appears appropriate: author appreciates all assistance and aid, awfully. An acolyte (“alone,” as acolyte’s appellation asserts) accoutered abundant authentication aid, assuredly above average.

Author asserts again: acclaim’s absolutely appreciated. Adieu!]

Return To Zork: Another Story by Stefano Canelli [Comp00]

IFDB page: Return To Zork: Another Story
Final placement: 26th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

The IF competition sure puts me in some weird situations. I never thought I’d play through an actual game based on an Infocom sample transcript, but I did it in 1998, when I played David Ledgard’s Space Station. I never thought I’d read a mocked-up transcript of a fake game, then play a game actually implemented from that gag transcript, but J. Robinson Wheeler’s Four In One proved me wrong that same year. Now I’ve encountered what may be the weirdest situation yet: I just played a text remake of Return To Zork.

For those of you who didn’t play RTZ, it was Activision’s first graphical adventure to use the Zork license they had inherited from their purchase of Infocom. It was, in my opinion, pretty weak. It had a fairly cool interface, as graphic adventures go, and some nice features (like the various bits that took notes for you or recorded people’s speeches), but it was cursed with an incomprehensible plot, highly annoying puzzles, and absolutely execrable voice acting. Most of all, it just didn’t feel very Zorky, at least not to me. The cleverness was missing, and the splendor was, too.

For me, it’s completely baffling that somebody would want to actually remake this game. In fact, RTZAS isn’t just a remake — call it a “remake-plus”. It takes much of the original structure from RTZ, alters some things, and adds a bunch more. It’s kind of like if somebody was such a fan of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier that they wrote an entirely new novelization of it, changing a few bits around and adding whole new scenes and subplots. Well, of course the other difference is that RTZAS was produced with permission of the license holder, yet another example of Activision’s openness to the fan community. You can bet you wouldn’t see Paramount behaving so freely with the Star Trek license.

When I played RTZAS, I couldn’t help but be haunted by sounds and images from the original RTZ, bad voice-acting and all. This mental baggage already biased me against the game, sorry to say, and RTZAS‘s many, many problems did nothing to redeem it. First of all, as far as I could tell, the game makes no effort to clarify RTZ‘s tangled plot, and in fact snarls it further with the addition of new locations, characters, and subplots. Moreover, there are a number of bugs, though none very catastrophic.

The biggest problem of all, however, is the language. The English in this game is very deeply warped — almost every sentence features at least one bizarre error in spelling, grammar, or diction, sometimes so much so that it’s hard to tell what the hell the game is talking about. For example, here’s a sentence from the first room description: “The rocky underfoot descends ruggedly towards east in direction of a building that appears to be a lighthouse.” Sometimes RTZAS feels like the offspring of an unholy union between Return to Zork and For A Change, just because the game’s writing is so far from standard English. Much of it feels like it’s been run through a translator program like Babelfish, with typically hilarious results. For instance, at one point you find an old mill that the game refers to as “delicious.” Delicious? All I can guess is that some word like “adorable” was intended, but something got very, very lost in the translation.

Still, all that aside, I have to hand it to RTZAS: this game is obviously a labor of love. A great deal of care has been put into describing lots of objects, creating alternate solutions to puzzles, and lovingly recreating many of the scenes from RTZ. It also mercifully leaves out some of the very worst scenes from that game (“Want some rye? ‘Course you do!”), which I certainly appreciated. It seems like a very odd thing to want to bring into the world, but RTZAS could be a fairly worthwhile game after its writing has undergone a major overhaul and it’s been debugged more thoroughly. Nonetheless, even if it was at this point, it wouldn’t really be an appropriate competition game. This thing is huge! I played for 2 hours and didn’t even get halfway through, I don’t think. As it stands, it’s not only huge but very badly executed. And I just finished 2 hours with it. Maybe I will have that rye, after all.

Rating: 3.4

YAGWAD by John Kean as Digby McWiggle [Comp00]

IFDB page: Yes, Another Game with a Dragon!
Final placement: 9th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Two years ago, the author whose rather silly nom de plume is “Digby McWiggle” submitted his first competition game, Downtown Tokyo. Present Day. That game was a prospective entry in Adam Cadre’s ChickenComp, but it wasn’t finished by the deadline, and therefore ended up an entry in Comp98 instead. I wonder if the same thing happened with this game, because it certainly would have fit the parameters for David Cornelson’s DragonComp. You see, YAGWAD stands for “Yes, Another Game With A Dragon!”, and the cheeky spirit of that title permeates the whole game, to wonderful effect. YAGWAD has lots of spots that are very funny, and the whole thing takes a playful poke at fantasy conventions.

Sure, fantasy conventions have been tweaked a lot at this point, but YAGWAD still manages a certain freshness, as well as a few artful nods to funny fantasies like The Princess Bride. It seems the King (who, speaking of The Princess Bride, is burdened with a comic lisp) has had his daughter abducted by a ferocious dragon, and is offering sparkling rewards to anybody who can retrieve her. Naturally, every strapping adventurer in the province is instantly on the case. Then there’s you: neither strapping nor adventurer (in fact, more of a portly, sloppy drunk), you still decide to undertake the quest.

From this premise, YAGWAD unfolds into an excellent melange of puzzles in the best Infocom style. In fact, with the exception of various Briticisms in spelling and grammar, YAGWAD feels like it could have been written by an Infocom Implementor — it’s not as lengthy as the typical Zork game, but definitely partakes of the same general feel. For example, at one point in your adventures, you may come across a massive set of reference books called the “Encyclopedia Gigantica” — in the tradition of the Encyclopedia Frobozzica, this reference provides a great deal of humor, both in its actual entries and in the references to it scattered throughout the game.

Also, as often happens to me with Infocom games, I found several of the puzzles in YAGWAD rather difficult. In this case, though, I think that might be mainly because of the time limit. I was quite keenly aware of the game’s size, which is not insignificant — I’d have to be about three times the puzzle-solver I am to be able to finish this in under two hours without hints — and therefore was less restrained about consulting the hints than I would have been. If the competition is over (which of course it will be by the time anybody reads this review) and you haven’t played YAGWAD yet, let me urge you not to use the hints. For one thing, the adaptive hint system is somewhat flawed, and it sometimes fails to give hints for puzzles that you may be facing. For another thing, pretty much all of the puzzles are clever and fair, notwithstanding my inability to solve them.

In fact, one of the biggest problems I had is that there’s one particular puzzle which must be solved before a number of others, and I was stymied on this puzzle purely because of my own thickheadedness. When I finally consulted the walkthrough, I looked at the answer and thought “but I did that!” In fact, I hadn’t. I went back to an earlier save point and tried it, just so I’d know I wasn’t crazy. Turns out I am crazy — it worked at that point and at all other points. I was completely convinced I’d tried it, but I must not have. This happens to me sometimes in IF, and I sure do feel dumb when I encounter it.

To make matters worse, I had an unfortunate difficulty creating a transcript of the game, so I can’t go back to my old game session and find out what it was that I really did that made me think I had already tried that solution. Guess it’ll remain a mystery forever. In any case, there are one or two puzzles that just graze the “read-the-author’s-mind” category, but even those have solutions that are fair and logical, if not particularly easy to think of spontaneously. The writing in YAGWAD is technically excellent, and I didn’t find a single bug in the code, either. Like I said, if Infocom was a British company, they might easily have produced this game. I mean that compliment as strongly as it sounds. Anybody who likes Infocom-style IF ought to give this game a try. Even those of you who shudder at the thought of Yet Another Game With A Dragon. (And you know who you are.)

Rating: 8.8

VOID: CORPORATION by Jonathan Lim [Comp00]

IFDB page: Void: Corporation
Final placement: 41st place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

I like cyberpunk, though I prefer it in small doses. I’d never go on a cyberpunk reading jag, but I thoroughly enjoy the occasional William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, or Pat Cadigan novel. I also think that IF in the cyberpunk vein could be really cool — after all, if cyberpunk has one defining characteristic, it’s a certain atmosphere, and atmosphere is something that IF does very well. There is a danger, however: with IF conventions having been shaped out of a stock fantasy/D&D tradition in games like Adventure and Zork, the temptation might exist to just slap a cyberpunk sheen on standard fantasy tropes and call it good, when good is something it very probably wouldn’t be.

It’s exactly this trap into which VOID: CORPORATION falls. Instead of a shiny silver key to open a locked door, we find a “silver slab” imprinted with microcircuitry. A pistol instead of a sword, a cube with liquid metal software instead of a spell scroll, et cetera. And instead of wandering kobolds and bugbears and such, we get wandering FMI (Federal Military Intelligence) agents and “cyberpunks.” (It works much better as a label for a genre rather than for a group of people, by the way.)

Let’s talk a little bit more about those wandering monsters. Ask any Quake or Half-Life player this question: “How would it be if every time you fragged something, you dropped your weapon, and had to explicitly pick it up again before you could frag something else?” I think we both know that their answer would certainly be some variation on “It would SUCK! A lot!” Yet this is exactly how things work in V:C. At the beginning of the game, we are told this about the PC: “more people have died at his hands than braincells at a ‘Silver’ party.” Unfortunately, the guy seems to be more butterfingers than trigger-finger. Even worse, the game doesn’t even tell you that you’ve dropped your weapon — it was quite a surprise the first time I tried to shoot somebody and was told, “You don’t see any gun here.” Strange enough that the game seems to want to emulate the random-stream-of-bad-guys dynamic of action games, despite the fact that typing “kill cyberpunk” carries absolutely none of the visceral thrill of an FPS frag. But for god’s sake, why why why would this trained professional killer drop his weapon after every single kill? (Nevermind the fact that these kills happen on crowded streets and shops where nobody seems to bat an eye at gunplay.)

Adding to the irritation is the fact that certain monsters can only be killed by certain specific weapons, even though both weapons are basically guns. For example, if you try to kill a “mean-looking cyberpunk” with your shotgun, you are told “You strike at the cyberpunk with the shotgun, but your weapon bounces off it harmlessly”, almost as if you tried to clobber the guy with the stock rather than the far-less-strenuous effort of pulling the trigger. Yet a pistol takes him out without fuss? What could the difference possibly be? This bizarre behavior, coupled with the fact that every dead bad guy disappears in “a cloud of red smoke” made me feel sure that at some point the game would have the PC “discover” that he’s in a VR scenario. But no, that never happened, and the only explanation I’m left with is that some serious slippage into fantasy has occurred in these portions of the game.

Some of this behavior may be due to the fact that the game is written in AGT. I haven’t played many AGT games, since most of them seem to have came out between the fall of Infocom and the release of Lost Treasures, which is a period during which I had given IF up for dead. However, I have vague recollections of people asserting that the wandering monster stuff is default behavior in AGT, and that it has to be explicitly removed for a game not to have it. Or maybe I’m thinking of GAGS or something — they all sort of blend together for me.

In any case, there are problems in this game that definitely cannot be blamed on AGT. For example, one of the critical puzzles in the game depends on the PC going in a direction that is not indicated as available in the room description. This, mind you, when every single possible exit is listed in every other room description. Hasn’t the UN passed a resolution or something against games behaving like this? In fairness to the game, it’s true that a hint toward this action is given at one point, but in fairness to me, the descriptions do little to indicate in what location the hint is applicable, and in any case that’s still no excuse for leaving an exit unlisted when all others are. This is definitely the worst offender among the puzzles, but every aspect of Void, from the design to the writing to the plot to the coding, is tarnished with flaws. Some of these aspects have a genuine spark of excitement, or at least the possibility of such, but in the end, VOID: CORPORATION is a game that promises far more than it delivers.

Rating: 4.4

About my 2000 IF Competition Reviews

By 2000, the Comp had become the center of the IF community, for good and for ill. The good: artistic achievement continued to explode outward in every dimension. Comp00 delivered a bumper crop of stunners. I rated 7 (of 51) games a 9.0 or above, more 9.x scores than I’ve given any set of comp entries before or since. Those games came up with delightful variations on the Infocom themes, haunting new versions of old cliches like the one-room game, and writing that was simply fantastic. October of 2000 was an awesome time to be an interactive fiction fan, as your hard drive could suddenly fill up with one incredible experience after another.

Even the games that weren’t roaring successes were often bold experiments. This was the year of the breathtaking attempt, like Ad Verbum‘s astonishing linguistic gymnastics, Being Andrew Plotkin‘s POV shenanigans, or, gods help us, a full text adventure recreation of, and expansion on, Return To Zork. There was comedy (very hard to do well in IF), there was dada, there was brilliant subversion. There was even a game that tried to reverse the roles of the player and the writer! This year also saw the first comp entries by future winners (and all-around rock stars) Emily Short and Jon Ingold.

Basically, because the IF Comp had acquired a reputation for producing excellent games, it garnered a lot of attention, and because it garnered a lot of attention, people kept funneling their best work toward it. This attention economy had a dark side, though, which is that people also began to exploit the focus and feedback that the Comp generated. We’d seen some of this before, but the trend really accelerated in 2000, as people threw in “games” that were really more like pamphlets, or protests, or proselytization.

Combine with this the fact that there were no less than fifty-three games entered, to be judged over a six-week period. I reviewed 51 of those games, skipping over Happy Ever After and Infil-Traitor, which had known bugs required recompilation before the games were viable.

Consequently, my patience strained and then snapped when I was presented with games that weren’t really games at all, but rather (as I viewed them) abuses of my time, purchased with the general good will of the IF Competition’s overall reputation. In addition, I had (and have) zero time for obnoxious snipes at development systems or community members, disguised as comedy. Homebrewed games continued to bedevil me, and there was a new development system on the scene (ADRIFT) whose UI was cool, but whose parser was not up to snuff. And oy, do I ever want people to learn the difference between its and it’s.

Deadline misery was entirely self-created, though. Looking back, I’m rather astonished that I played 51 games and wrote 51 reviews in the course of six weeks. It’s easy to see why I stopped doing that once I became a parent. It’s harder to see how I ever did it at all.

I originally posted my reviews for the 2000 IF Competition games on November 16, 2000.

Strangers In The Night by Rich Pizor [Comp99]

IFDB page: Strangers in the Night
Final placement: 20th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Strangers In The Night starts out with a cool premise: You are a vampire, and you awaken with a terrible thirst for blood. You must feed on at least three different victims (draining each only a little, so as not to arouse undue attention.) However, it’s the summer solstice, the shortest night of the year, [The longest day, and therefore the shortest night. Thanks to Daphne Brinkerhoff for helping me through my apparently immense confusion on this issue. –Paul] and so you have only a limited time to slake your desires. Done well, this could be a sort of undead Varicella, where with every iteration of the game you figure out more and more about how to satisfy your needs. Unfortunately, Strangers In The Night turns out to be more of an undead Fifteen. You wander around an extremely minimally described cityscape (most rooms have no description at all) solving rudimentary puzzles, most of which just amount to unlocking a door, then walking in and typing “BITE “. What little writing is present has some nicely gothic moments — I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the PC’s apartment. On the other hand, it is also riddled with a goodly number of errors, including two in the first two sentences. Misspellings, plural/possessive errors, awkward phrasings — they’re all there.

Compounding this problem is a generous serving of bugs. The game credits no beta testers, and the lack of testing definitely shows. Some locations (restaurants and the like) are described as closed when they definitely (at least, according to the information you get from the doorman) should be open. My first time through the game I failed to find any victims before the sun came up, mostly because I was exploring the gridlike map to see if it was really as empty as it seemed, and as the sunrise approached the game started giving me warnings. This is great, although giving them EVERY SINGLE TURN NO MATTER WHAT I DO might be considered a little excessive. In addition, the warnings describe the sky getting pinker, etc., even when I’m inside locations like a dank night club or my own windowless apartment. Anyway, heeding the warnings I returned to my apartment and got back in bed, but when the sun came up, the game told me I was trapped where I didn’t belong. It then helpfully chided me “Pity you never made it home.” In addition, there are lots of spots where the game displays the default response abutting a specialized response. If this were an Inform game, I’d say the problem is a lack of “rtrue”s. I don’t know what causes it in TADS, but I suspect it’s something roughly equivalent. Here’s an example:

>ask bouncer about bouncer
You have no interest in or use for the bouncerThe bouncer is in a rather
public place; that kind of interaction isn't advisable.Surely, you can't
think the bouncer knows anything about it!

After hitting a long stretch of bugs and writing errors, the novelty of the premise wears off pretty quickly.

It’s that much more frustrating, really, because an IF game from the point of view of a vampire is just a really cool idea waiting to be done well. It just seems that nobody quite gets to it. Infocom had one in the planning stages before they folded. (It was to be written by Plundered Hearts author Amy Briggs). A guy named Sam Hulick made a big announcement that he was going to write one — even got a piece of it included as an example in the Inform manual — but it never materialized. Now there’s Strangers In The Night, which definitely has some nice conceptual elements but whose execution (no pun intended) is sorely lacking. The vampire PC is so rife with possibilities — it can have unusual goals and vulnerabilities, as demonstrated in this game. It can have unique modes of travel. It can allow the author to play with all sorts of interesting questions of moral ambiguity and complicity within the player/PC relationship. Even better, it gives the writer access to a wealth of popular and canonical allusions, and allows the kind of rich gothic writing practiced by Anne Rice and any number of Victorian writers. Frankly, I think it would be awesome. Hey, all you IF writers out there: write that great vampire game! I know it doesn’t exist yet, but I very much want it to, because Strangers In The Night really got me itching to play it.

[I just reread this and something in the back of my mind said “Horror of Rylvania.” I haven’t played that game yet, and the only review I’ve ever seen was very brief. Somebody care to review it for SPAG so I know if it’s what I’m looking for?]

Rating: 3.5

About my 1999 IF Competition reviews

Photopia was a meteorite. It landed, and changed everything. I would argue that it was Adam Cadre’s 1998 comp-winner that moved interactive fiction out of Infocom’s shadow once and for all. In a swift, brilliant stroke, it proved that IF could be popular and artistically successful without puzzles, without linear time, and to some extent without meaningful choices. Assumptions molded by IF’s commercial history melted away in Photopia‘s light.

That change had a huge effect on the 1999 competition games. In my reviews I found myself referencing Photopia the way I used to reference Infocom, as a benchmark that set expectations for both authors and players. That year’s comp was full of Photopia-alikes, most of them pretty unfortunate. It’s a bit reminiscent of how in the comics world, the excellent landmarks of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns set off a 15-year wave of “grim and gritty” superheroes, from authors and editors who thought those books were successful because they were dark rather than just both dark and successful.

Photopia was also a high-profile breaker of formal boundaries in IF, but it was far from the only one. 1999’s comp saw formal experimentation blossoming in lots of really interesting ways, and in reviewing the games I found myself evolving a terminology for how to talk about aspects of IF that the games were teaching me to understand. For instance, this year is where I started talking about levels of nouns. Quoting from my review of Hunter, In Darkness: “In this terminology, first-level nouns are those nouns that are mentioned in room descriptions. Second-level nouns are those nouns mentioned in the descriptions of the first-level nouns. Third-level nouns are in the second-level noun descriptions, and so on. The deeper these levels go, the more detailed and immersive the textual world.”

Unfortunately, this year also saw a wave of buggier, more broken games. Where Comp98 had 27 games, Comp99 had 37, and much of the difference was made up by substandard clunkers that were turned in before they were ready for public consumption. My opinions about this got shriller and shriller the more of these games I had to endure.

I was fully invested in contributing to the world of IF criticism at this time, so much so that I had become the editor of the SPAG webzine shortly before the 1999 competition. I’d continue in that role for about six years, collecting reviews and essays, and publishing issues more or less quarterly. My biggest annual IF effort and commitment, though, remained the competition. I wrote these 37 reviews in the space of six weeks, and although there was a fair amount of chaff, finding a great game still thrilled me like nothing else.

I originally posted my reviews for the 1999 IF Competition games on November 16, 1999.

The Plant by Michael J. Roberts [Comp98]

IFDB page: The Plant
Final placement: 3rd place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

You know, by the time I get finished writing these reviews, I’m pretty tired. It takes a lot of energy to put out twenty or thirty thousand words about competition entries, and even though my reviews are shorter than last year’s, and there are fewer games involved, they were also written in a much more compressed judging period, so my exhaustion level is about the same. However, every year I’ve been reviewing the competition games I’ve gotten a little reward in the final game of the batch. In 1996, I was playing the games in order of filename, so the last game I played was Tapestry, an excellent piece of work by Dan Ravipinto which ended up taking second in the competition as a whole. Last year I let Lucian Smith’s Comp97 order my choices randomly, and ironically the last game on the list ended up being Smith’s own The Edifice. And true to form, that was another excellent game to finish on, and it ended up winning all the marbles in the 1997 comp. So it was with both trepidation and eagerness that I broached the final game of this year’s batch, The Plant. When I saw it was by Michael J. Roberts, the legendary implementor of both TADS and HTML-TADS, my anticipation was increased even further. I’ve never played one of Roberts’ games, having been an Inform initiate when I started programming, and having entered the IF scene just shortly before Roberts’ departure. And after this buildup, I’m pleased to say that The Plant completely lives up to my mini-tradition of grand finales. It was a great game to end the competition with — the reward I was hoping for, so that this review wouldn’t be too hard to write.

Probably the thing I liked the most about The Plant was its puzzles. I know there were several other games this year that were focused on puzzles, and some of the puzzles in those games were excellent. However, I liked The Plant‘s puzzles better precisely because the game wasn’t focused on puzzles. Instead, its puzzles were very well integrated into its story, so solving the puzzles really propelled the narrative. It’s much more interesting to solve a puzzle when it opens the door to the next piece of the story, rather than being just one of a roomful of puzzles that you have to solve to escape that room. The Plant was probably the only game in this year’s competition to give me a feeling similar to what I have when I play Infocom games. I love that feeling of uncovering an exciting story by cleverly putting pieces together, using items in unexpected ways, or doing the right thing at just the right time. And the game’s story is definitely an exciting one. It begins as you are stranded on an abandoned side-road with your boss, marooned by his unreliable car. It’s up to you to find a phone or a service station and get moving again, but when you go looking you may find more than you bargained for. I won’t give too much away about the secrets that are eventually revealed, but the game definitely packs plenty of surprises. The pacing is excellent — I only felt completely stuck once. I turned to the walkthrough to solve the problem, just because I wanted to finish as much of the game as I could in the two-hour time limit, but if you’re playing The Plant for the first time, let me urge you not to check the walkthrough unless you’re completely stuck. All the puzzles are completely logical, none of them require reading the designer’s mind, and many of them are quite satisfying to solve, requiring several steps or clever combinations of objects, or both.

Now, the story itself does have some flaws. There are some parts that felt quite implausible to me, and from time to time the fact that your boss follows you around in your travels doing the same two or three things all the time starts to feel a little artificial. In addition, there are one or two minor spelling errors in the game. Outside of this, the plotting and writing are quite good. The Plant‘s prose often conveyed a very vivid sense of the visual. I drive by a plant like this about twice a month, and the game’s descriptions of it, how its completely industrial and utilitarian networks of pipes and lights can seem almost like an abstract fairyland when glimpsed from afar, are right on the mark. I could really visualize most of the places in the game, and the mental pictures the game’s text creates are quite dramatic and compelling. In addition, the game uses a few small touches here and there which utilize the power of HTML TADS. No pictures or sound, but a few well-placed hyperlinks in the help text and one or two spots with specially formatted text really make the game look sharp, and add to the very visual quality of the prose. If you sometimes start to feel a little impatient with all the growing that the medium of interactive fiction is doing, and long for a good old-fashioned Infocom-style thrill ride, check out The Plant. I think it may be just what you’re looking for.

Rating: 9.0