Tag: invasion of the angora-fetish transvestites from the graveyards of jupiter

The Last Just Cause by Jeremy Carey-Dressler as Noob [Comp01]

IFDB page: The Last Just Cause
Final placement: 50th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Hoo boy. I’m not sure how to approach this one. OK, let me start here. If I had downloaded this game by itself from, I don’t know, download.com or something, I think I would have approached it differently. I might have taken, for example, its more or less complete lack of a parser more in stride. However, this is my 20th text adventure in 17 days, and all the others — even the homebrewed Windows ones — at least made some pretense at approaching the ability to understand basic language input. Consequently, I approached TLJC like another text adventure. It isn’t. This game doesn’t even come close to the level of understanding displayed by even something like Angora Fetish. I typed “x lantern”, and here’s what happened:

You have used 0 turns... What do you want to do next? x lantern


That might be foolish, try something else...

Your HP is 104 percent. You're in room 1. Your MP is 44.
You have used 1 turns... What do you want to do next?

That might be foolish, try something else...

Your HP is 104 percent. You're in room 1. Your MP is 44.
You have used 2 turns... What do you want to do next?

What I determined, after a bit more confused thrashing about, is that the game only understands one word at a time, and that its vocabulary is limited to a couple dozen words. After being immersed in modern, sophisticated text adventures, this game suddenly made me feel like I had time-warped back to 1982, and that one of my 12-year-old colleagues had just unveiled their rockin’ new game to me.

I just keep coming back to it: programming an IF game from scratch may make for a better (or at least more educational) experience for the programmer, but it almost always provides a much worse experience for the player. Not that this game would necessarily have benefited greatly from being written in an advanced IF language. Its shape is extremely simplistic, it has very little story, its writing lacks coherency (as well as a number of other virtues), and… well, I could go on, but what’s the point?

TLJC (which, by the way, never mentions causes of any kind, be they just or unjust) has the feel of a bad early-eighties console game, with very primitive action, only a few items, and rooms that vary for appearances’ sake only, with no regard whatsoever to creating a believable or even consistent gameworld. It also falls into what I’m beginning to recognize as a standard trap of beginning IF authors: mocking the player for no good reason. The very first room gives us this:

You are in a cave... Now that you have light, you see there is a
spider on your leg you go screaming like a little child!

Okay, setting aside the egregious punctuation problems for just a second, I still have to ask just what this wants to accomplish. Is the game giving me some bit of characterization about the PC? Is it trying to establish that the narrative voice will be a harsh, unfriendly Hans-and-Franz kind of presence, mocking the little girlyman throughout the game? Nah, it’s just there — it seems to be little more than free association.

TLJC is one of those games that it’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying who isn’t the author. It doesn’t offer good writing. It doesn’t offer interesting technical achievements. Lord knows it doesn’t offer fun gameplay, instead serving up mind-numbing tedium of battle after battle with one (undescribed and made-up) monster, all of which feel like waiting around while various dicerolls happen without you. (Although I did greatly enjoy when the game asked if I wanted to use the “lighting” spell, and upon my assent cried “I call upon the Power of lighting!” That’ll make an excellent line for turning on lamps.)

Its puzzles (such as they are) make very little sense. Oh, there is an implementation of blackjack that felt like it had received the most care and interest of any feature in the game. I guess that goes to show that as sheer programming exercises go, it’s probably better to make card games than interactive fiction. It’s hard enough to make good IF even when you have every advanced tool in the world on your side. It’s a problem that encompasses design ability, writing ability, and programming ability too. With a card game, the first is taken care of, and the second is irrelevant, so it’s only the third that gets challenged. I think I’d have a lot more fun playing a first-time programmer’s version of blackjack than I would playing their homebrewed IF. That was certainly the case this time.

Rating: 2.4

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 1.8