leather goddesses of phobos

Dinner Bell by Jenni Polodna [XYZZY]

[I originally reviewed this game for the XYZZY Awards, as part of a project to review all the 2012 nominees for Best Writing.]

IFDB page: Dinner Bell

Well, I can see why this one was nominated. It’s hilarious! Now, there’s always a danger to analyzing humor, as frog-lover E.B. White once remarked. But presumably everybody reading this has already gotten to enjoy the game’s jokes, so let the batrachian carnage begin!

One technique that Dinner Bell uses to great effect is piling on the wacky, with jokes, funny concepts, and surprises sometimes stacked up several layers deep in a given turn. For instance, along with the player’s score increasing, the game goes out of its way to congratulate the player every time a food gets bagged. That’s kinda funny. The congratulation repeats exactly each time. That wouldn’t necessarily be funny, unless the method of congratulation is something ridiculous, that would seem increasingly ridiculous the more it was repeated. And, in fact, the method of congratulation is a pat on the head, which fits the bill perfectly. The pat is delivered by a head-patting robot. That’s really funny. The head-patting robot is named Pat. That’s not only funny, it actually sets the player up to type something funny, which of course gets a funny response:

>PAT PAT You pat the head-patting robot on his little robot head. He seems confused by this bizarre shift in circumstances.

A closely related move is to make a joke, feint away from it, and then return to it with a slightly different riff, like so:

>X BEER This beer is big, and brown, and furry, with claws on the ends of its powerful arms and legs. Wait, I'm thinking of a bear. This beer is a bit on the hoppy side, with woodsy undertones. Like a bunny.

It’s funny enough for the narrator to start describing a bear rather than a bear, then to catch itself, especially since “big” and “brown” could reasonably describe a beer, but “furry” throws us right off the map. Lots of writers would stop after “Wait, I’m thinking of a bear,” or would perhaps give a perfunctory description afterwards, which would amount to more or less “You see nothing special about the beer.” Polodna makes us think she’s doing that, though with a funnier version that slightly skewers beer connoisseurs. Then, the knockout punch: “Like a bunny” not only returns us to the kooky hilarity of mistaking beer for a woodland animal, but it recontextualizes “hoppy” (hoppy! how perfect is that?) and “woodsy” from the straight-seeming description that precedes it. That panache makes a good joke into a great joke.

However, amidst the jokes, there’s a thin layer of creepy, which puts the horror in “Horror/Comedy.” The game is still about 95% comedy and 5% horror, but that’s enough to keep us off balance. The eerie bits provide a background for the jokes, so that the sheen of desperation adds to their humor, and their humor illuminates the desperate moments, allowing them to take us by surprise:

>X BELL When the bell goes ding, it is time to eat. It is time to eat when the bell goes ding. You cannot eat until the bell goes ding. Bell : ding :: time : eat. You understand this with every fibre of your being. Sometimes (actually, most of the time) it's all you understand anymore.

The repetition is funny, as is the inappropriate use of analogy notation. However, “it’s all you understand anymore” is an unexpected shot of pathos, playing the PC’s dilemma straight. The picture of a prisoner, starved and experimented upon, gives an uncomfortable edge to our laughter at the jokes preceding and following it.

So Dinner Bell often serves us multiple layers at once, a few of which may be a little unsettling. However, the layering also happens across the playthrough, getting good mileage out of the comedy callback. For instance, when we first examine the oven:

>X OVEN This oven's designer got tired of trying to remember if they'd left the oven on, so they invented an oven you can't turn off. Its internal temperature is a constant 400 degrees Fahrenheit. You know this because you are omniscient all of a sudden, but only as regards this oven and the names of everyone in New Jersey.

The oven is closed. This fact is clearly visible to everyone, but you used your omniscience to discern it anyway, because why not.

The oven you can’t turn off gets a rueful grin from IF designers who know how nice it is to be able to take shortcuts around the fiddlier parts of world modeling, but it’s “you are omniscient all of a sudden” that gets the biggest laugh. We’ve all seen descriptions that introduce or draw upon knowledge that the PC couldn’t reasonably have, and lampshading it here is a great gag. As is typical for this game, that gag is topped by a couple more, building on the omniscience concept first by applying it to an unexpected context, and then by incongruously using a superpower to do something very ordinary.

That’s all terrific, but it gets even better late in the game:

>X CAKEBOT Cakebot is the most sophisticated AI in, not just the building, but the tri-state area containing the building, and all people ever do is put cakes on his head. You know this because he complains to the oven sometimes, so it falls within the limits of your omniscience.

(You also know that the oven feels no sympathy whatsoever. The oven wishes people would put cakes on its head. The oven would consider that a lovely break from the daily indignities it suffers.)

This callback to the omniscience joke does the work that a callback should, playing on our familiarity with the concept to give us the feeling that the game is making a private joke with us, leveraging the relationship it’s built to intensify the comedy. On top of that, it re-lampshades the omniscience concept, and suddenly imparts comically doleful personalities to the both the Cakebot and the oven, a la Marvin the Paranoid Android. So of course, the whole thing gets paid off here:

>PUT CAKE ON OVEN You put the cake on the oven, and the oven sighs contentedly. This is the happiest day of its life.

That’s a beautifully constructed joke, and it’s not the only one. I particularly enjoyed the gag can of snakes that turned out to have peanut brittle inside. That’s a very clever reversal. (Not to mention that it prompted me to revisit Paul F. Tompkins’ Peanut Brittle bit, the definitive comedy statement on gag peanut brittle cans.)

One more favorite: the Shiptogar easter egg. So the Shiptogar itself is awesomely absurd, and its presence reaffirms that this game is about the jokes, not the puzzles. It’s perfectly fun turning the ship in a bottle into a bottle of vinegar. However, the Shiptogar really comes into its own elsewhere:

>X SINK Closer examination reveals this to be merely a child's drawing of a sink. The drain has been hastily rendered in blue crayon, and near it a posse of scrubbing bubbles is fighting a dinosaur.

>X BUBBLES You're not sure who you'd put money on in this battle. The dinosaur can breathe fire, but the scrubbing bubbles have the power of friendship.

>SPRAY SINK You spray the sink liberally with Shiptogar, and get the weird sense that something almost imperceptible and incredibly unimportant has changed.

>X BUBBLES You're not sure who you'd put money on in this battle. The dinosaur can breathe fire, but the scrubbing bubbles have the power of friendvinegar. Wait, friendvinegar? Never mind, you're putting fifty bucks on that dinosaur, then.

Like every bit of prose in Dinner Bell, these responses are funny and silly, but the situation itself is 100% prime IF humor, similar to the linguistic deformations of Nord And Bert, Ad Verbum, and the Leather Goddesses Of Phobos T-Remover. It’s the kind of joke that plays to IF’s strengths pulling off deftly what would be impossible in film and rather more tedious in straight prose.

Dinner Bell‘s help text says, “most of this game’s entertainment dollar value lies in examining things and reading the dumb jokes.” That sells it a bit short — there’s lots of humor to be found beyond object descriptions, and the jokes are pretty smart. What’s true, though, is that this game is not about plot, setting, character, or puzzles. It’s about the jokes, and lucky for us, they’re excellent. This riotous game deserves every writing accolade it gets.

Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis by Adam Thornton [IF-Review]

[I originally reviewed this game for Mark Musante’s site IF-Review, in 2012. Mark is the source for editor’s notes in the text.]

IFDB Page: Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis

File Under: Classic Knob

Note: Due to the nature of the game being reviewed, this review contains what the MPAA would probably call “pervasive language and strong sexual content.” Also, mild spoilers, both for this game and for Nabokov’s Lolita.

From the “sentences I never thought I’d write” department: I don’t think I’m well-educated enough to fully appreciate this Stiffy Makane game. With Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis (MMA), Adam Thornton brings us what might be one of the most erudite and wide-ranging IF games ever, and what is certainly the most erudite and wide-ranging IF porn parody ever. Thornton has been talking about Mentula Macanus for quite a long time now — since 2001 at least, when he released his previous foray into Stiffiana, Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country (SM:TUC). Hell, maybe longer, given that Google’s Usenet archive search leaves much to be desired. It always sounded to me like a gag — I mean really, a Stiffy Makane game all in Latin? Not even the guy who created an elaborate and technically accomplished science fiction Stiffy parody, complete with graphics and sound, would undertake such a thing, right?

Right. He didn’t. Instead, he spent a decade crafting an enormous, sprawling classical epic, with an expanded mission. Where SM:TUC was a gleeful takedown of so-called “Adult” IF, MMA sets its sights on a bigger target: IF itself. With tremendous innovation, technical polish, and abundant humor, Thornton upends the medium with a work that’s simultaneously traditionalist and transgressive, a layered and richly allusive delivery system for some highly demented and depraved content. It’s a hugely impressive achievement, and I can’t imagine anyone else pulling it off. I can’t imagine anyone else even trying.

But before I dive deeper, let me offer a little background, for those who need it and haven’t quit reading already. Way back in 1997, those innocent days when AGT didn’t yet signify “America’s Got Talent”, a guy named Mark Ryan unleashed upon the world a game called The Incredible Erotic Adventures of Stiffy Makane, which he apparently wrote in BASIC in the eighth grade, then inexplicably ported to AGT and uploaded to the IF Archive. Adam Thornton played it, and wrote a funny review, in which he called it “easily the most amusingly horrible work of IF I’ve ever seen.” (By the way, anybody who wants to witness how delightful the IF newsgroups were back in the days before their troll-induced decline could do worse than to read the ensuing thread. The Graham Nelson comment in particular made me laugh out loud.) This review pointed out the terrible writing, the repellent ending, the freaky non-sequiturs, the risible implementation (including, famously, the ability to DROP PENIS), and so forth. It helped propel the game to “legendarily bad” status, but even so, Stiffy would likely have been soon forgotten if not for what happened next.

Exactly one year and one day after the review, a pseudonym-cloaked Thornton and a still-anonymous co-author released a MST-ing of the game (remember Mystery Science Theater 3000?). A few years later, Adam entered the 2001 IF Comp with Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country, a game which, as I said in my review at the time, “[makes] its PC the object as well as the subject of penetration (and penetration by a moose, no less.)” At this point, Stiffy and his stiffy had entered into the community lexicon as a shared in-joke, with Adam always in the vanguard. In fact, at this point, I’d say that Adam Thornton has made a career out of Stiffy Makane, which sounds much less promising than it’s actually turned out to be. Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis is the zenith of that career.

ERUDITION

From the beginning, the game lets us know the territory it intends to cover. A rotating dedication name-checks people from the world of literature, like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, as well as people from the IF world like Robb Sherwin and Graham Nelson. Then follows a bit of untranslated Italian — Thornton quoting Eliot quoting Pound quoting Dante. After that, the game throws you into a scenario in which you battle “the Gostak chief”, which will certainly remind some of us of Carl Muckenhoupt’s game The Gostak, which itself grew from a seed planted by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, in their book The Meaning Of Meaning. Confused yet? MMA has a helpful bibliographic referencing system to help you along:

>X CHIEF The Gostak chief [reference 2] [reference 3] is a giant of a man, with lank, thinning blond hair [reference 4]. He carries an enormous mace, which he wields as if it weighed nothing at all.

The Gostak chief aims a vicious blow at your head. You twist away desperately, skidding on the wet flagstones. The mace smashes into the stone, throwing a shower of sparks.

>REF 2 [Reference 2]: Ogden, C.K. and Ian Richards. The Meaning of Meaning, (citation unknown).

>REF 3 [Reference 3]: Muckenhaupt, Carl. The Gostak, passim.

>REF 4 [Reference 4]: Wolfe, Gene. The Sword of the Lictor, Chapter XXXVII, Terminus Est.

As if that weren’t enough, the game provides a parallel system of footnotes to complement its references, like so:

Curia Interior The Curia is still under reconstruction; renovations won't be completed for quite some time [footnote 1]. For the time being, the Senate still meets over at Pompey's porch. Frankly, this place is basically just a construction site. Steps to the Forum lead down to the south.

An olive-colored velvet bag rests empty on the ground here.

[To look up a footnote, use FOOTNOTE number-of-footnote]

>NOTE 1 [To disable poncy footnotes, you can type PONCY OFF]

[Footnote 1]: The Curia Hostilia burned in 52 BC; Julius Caesar started its renovation, but the Curia Julia (named in his honor) was not completed until 29 BC during the reign of Augustus. I hope you now feel better-educated.

Keep in mind: this is a porn parody IF based on a character created by a horny 14-year-old [ed. note: That phrase seems redundant somehow.]. It keeps a sense of humor about itself, but at the same time, there’s a clear delight in classical history and the ancient world. Observe:

Cocceio's Cave Cocceio's Cave runs arrow-straight from the town of Cumae, to the west, to the shore of Lake Avernus, to the east. It is a kilometer long and wide enough for two wagons to pass one another. It has recently been excavated on Caesar's orders [footnote 9], but it also makes for a very convenient road for petitioners seeking the Sybil. Regularly spaced torches light your way.

>NOTE 9 [Footnote 9]: Lake Avernus is a volcanic crater filled with water, which makes it an ideal protected harbor. Julius Caesar began construction of the port here, connecting Avernus to Lake Lucrino with a canal and thence to the sea. Cocceio's Cave was excavated to allow easy access by chariot to the war fleet housed in Avernus. The port (Portus Julius) became fully operational in Octavian's reign. Thus, it is probably slightly ahistorical to have Cocceio's Cave in this story, as it is likely an Augustan, not a Julian work; nevertheless, it's not badly out of place, and it's a really nifty Roman military construction, so in it stays.

The game’s erudition extends beyond Roman history and modernist poets. For instance, at one point there’s a hotel register you can examine, which yields entries like “Johnny Randall, Ramble” and “Harry Bumper, Sheridan.” Those entries don’t have a footnote or reference citation, but by that point I knew that there were very few arbitrary choices in the game, so I googled them. Turns out they’re from Nabokov’s Lolita — Humbert Humbert uses various false names in hotel registries as he searches for Lolita in the latter part of the book. Over and over, MMA rewards research and demonstrates an impressive range of literary reference. In fact, I’d say this game sent me to Google more than any other IF game I’ve ever played. Sometimes even that was fruitless, as in the time when Stiffy (under my control) attempted to venture into avian bestiality, making amorous advances toward a duck named Anas:

>FUCK DUCK (Anas) You, sir, are no Henry Miller [footnote 24].

>NOTE 24 [Footnote 24]: Hey, you know, it's kind of odd that "Anas" is so close to "Anaïs", isn't it? D'ya think?....nah, couldn't be.

Did Miller have some kind of sexual inclination toward waterfowl? Even Google couldn’t tell me, unless perhaps my Google-fu wasn’t up to par, which is always a possibility. I know that Miller had a passionate sexual relationship with Anaïs Nin, but whether the game’s Miller reference extended beyond the superficial similarity of names, I couldn’t tell. Again, that nagging feeling: I may have a Master’s degree in English Literature, but I don’t think I’m well-read enough for this Stiffy Makane game.

MMA‘s breadth of IF reference is equally impressive. Besides the fact that it expends herculean effort to expand the mythos of an otherwise extremely minor IF character, and the aforementioned Gostak shout-out, MMA touches on everything from Adventure to Scott Adams to Infocom to Losing Your Grip to Kallisti. In fact, at one point it even scores a two-for-one by including Madame Sosostris, who figures prominently in both Eliot’s The Waste Land and Graham Nelson’s Curses. Nelson, another IF author with an Eliot fixation, comes up again in a late-game scene, one that I thought really encapsulated MMA‘s humor:

Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter noon [reference 30]. A graveyard, of sorts, is to the south. A rather fetching garden lies to the west. A low, blocky palace, built of obsidian, looms to the east. A plaza stretches to the north under the towering bulk of an obelisk.

Identical men in dark suits and bowler hats scurry to and fro.

>REF 30 [Reference 30]: Eliot, T.S.. The Waste Land, III.208.

>X MEN Each identical man (for they are all men) wears an identical dark suit and an identical bowler hat, carries an identical black umbrella [reference 31], and, incongruously, sports an identical nametag proclaiming, in bright red letters, "HELLO MY NAME IS GRAHAM." I had not thought death had undone so many [reference 32].

>REF 31 [Reference 31]: Rowson, Martin. The Waste Land, I.31.

>REF 32 [Reference 32]: Eliot, T.S.. The Waste Land, I.63.

>FUCK MEN You see no Nelson's Column here.

A barrelful of Eliot references, several of which (the Unreal City, the bowler-hatted army) overlap again with Curses, collides with a British geographical/historical reference which also serves as a hilarious anatomical double-entendre about a founding father of modern IF. Deep respect jumps into bed with profound irreverence, and the result is quite satisfying. That’s Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis.

NEW MISSION

Thornton’s 2001 Stiffy game (SM:TUC) was deeply, rightly scornful of its main character. As in the game that spawned him, Stiffy was an projection of a boneheaded eighth-grade boy’s sexual mentality, albeit this time seen from a more adult perspective: unsatisfying as a lover, profoundly clueless, misogynist, and homophobic. His ideal sexual encounter is with a Holodeck robot — “jump through some hoops, get to fuck the girl. If only real life were so easy!” — and even she is less than enthusiastic about the experience. SM:TUC demolishes the ludicrous tropes of terrible “adult” IF in part by demonstrating that mechanical sex is the opposite of eroticism.

MMA is a different story. The Stiffy of MMA doesn’t have a trace of homophobia, and is enthusiastically omnisexual (within limits, and even those are played for laughs.) He’s still an eager lover, but this time he’s a good one, as we can tell by the reaction of his partners. His encounters often have a joke at their center (as when Stiffy fucks some version of Archimedes, who teaches him the true meaning of “Archimedes’ Screw” and who exclaims, “My lever’s big enough. Just give me a place to stand and I’ll rock your world!”), but the joke isn’t at Stiffy’s expense. The descriptions embrace sensuality, in direct contrast to SM:TUC‘s anti-erotic prose.

What changed? The mission changed, that’s what. AIF was always an easy target, albeit a fun one, and between his review of the original Ryan game, his MSTing of same, and SM:TUC, Thornton seems to have said his piece about it. Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis moves on to satirizing IF in general, especially the classic Infocom style. The game’s writing and design echoes this style — for all its transgressiveness, MMA‘s puzzles and prose are often quite traditionalist. Descriptions are generally concise, even terse, and there’s no attempt whatsoever to sidestep the artificiality of IF puzzles awkwardly grafted to a big long quest plot. There are no mazes, dragons, hunger puzzles, or other such tired figures, but there are heaping helpings of item-fetching, locked-door NPCs, and actual locked doors. The game is unapologetically an epic, old-fashioned puzzlefest, albeit one with a few differences.

Just the carnality itself is a major difference, really. Infocom was writing for a mass market which included children, so their games were necessarily quite chaste, even when they were trying to be otherwise. Credit to them for attempting something a little racy with Leather Goddesses of Phobos, but compared to MMA, even the “lewd” mode in Leather Goddesses of Phobos is ridiculously tame. Thornton’s game is IF sex comedy with the restraints taken off, and it works. It’s genuinely funny and sometimes even genuinely sexy.

It also uses its taboo subject matter to hilarious effect, blending perversity into IF as skillfully as I’ve ever seen. Take the puzzles, for instance. In 2002, I released a game called Another Earth, Another Sky, in which you play a super-strong PC and the solution to many puzzles is some variation of SMASH [object]. I thought of that game a lot when playing MMA, in which you play a super-virile PC, and the solution to many puzzles is some variation of FUCK [NPC]. The number of times that Stiffy’s stiffy is in some way the solution to a puzzle is both a great running gag and a great subversion of standard-issue IF object and NPC interactions. (MMA‘s version of the common light-source puzzle is particularly memorable.)

Sometimes, instead, the penis is the puzzle rather than the answer, as in the episode when Stiffy gets the clap and has to seek out a cure. The solution involves a regular IF activity — a mini-quest to seek out a medicinal herb and bring it back to the local doctor — but the context is something you don’t see in many other games. Not only that, the actual resolution of the quest turns IF convention its ear too, as we discover that the herb isn’t the cure at all, but simply serves to distract while the doctor administers a much more violent and unpleasant remedy.

Sex and gross-outs aside, MMA also provides a few great anti-puzzles, in which the obvious action is the correct one, but the game manages to make you think otherwise with persuasive writing. Take, for example, this bridge across a chasm:

A rickety footbridge — really, little more than flimsy-looking boards laid across twisted vines — spans the canyon to the west, swaying sickeningly in the breeze.

Makes you want to look for another way across the chasm, doesn’t it? I certainly did, based on my memories of a thousand other rickety IF bridges. They always collapse — that’s why they’re described as rickety. Plus, I’d already died many a death in MMA getting to this point. So I found a place to jump across the chasm, and failed. I failed tantalizingly, and thought I might succeed with a different approach. Nope. After a few more attempts, I returned to the bridge and decided to cross it, hoping I might get a clue from the inevitable death message. Instead, Stiffy crossed it. The end. The anticlimax was hilarious, and I loved the way the game played a joke on me by exploiting my IF experience. I realized later that I was also holding a set of instructions which explicitly told me to cross the bridge, but it had been so long since I’d looked at those, I forgot all about them. D’oh!

Alongside these are more typical IF puzzles, ranging from the simple (follow a recipe and get the desired result) to the rather clever (dress up as a prophet to fool a god into taking you into a new location.) MMA skewers IF, to be sure, but it isn’t just taking the piss — it’s a genuinely fun IF game on its own merits.

INNOVATION

Along with its transgressions and subversions, MMA brings a number of excellent IF innovations to the table. One of my favorites is how it handles repeated questions to an NPC. One of the weaknesses of the ASK/TELL conversation system (which MMA uses) can be a tendency toward repetition. The first time you ASK MIKE ABOUT FISH, Mike should tell you about the fish. But what happens if you repeat the command? Lots of games just would repeat Mike’s dialogue, which makes the NPC obviously robotic. However, that robotic behavior serves a gameplay purpose — if the player forgets some crucial nugget of information, the ability to retrieve that information shouldn’t be sacrificed in the name of character realism, or else you’re just trading one annoyance for another. In addition, topics sometimes have aliases, so the player may not even realizing that from the game’s point of view, she’s asking the same question twice. MMA comes up with a solution to this conundrum which I thought was rather ingenious:

>ASK SYBIL ABOUT FUTURE "To seize the Golden Banana is a mighty deed, but the Son of Aeneas must look to the Son of Abraham to release it from its sheath."

>ASK SYBIL ABOUT BANANA The Cumaean Sybil has already told you that you will need the help of a Jew to unsheath [sic] the Golden Banana.

By having the parser intervene when a question is repeated, the player gets the needed information without the NPC having to behave like a tape recorder.

MMA also innovates at the design level, with an intricate story structure surrounded by a clever series of framing layers. It’s not uncommon for an IF game (or a traditional story) to start in the middle of some action, advance to a point where it looks pretty bad for the hero, and then flash back to tell the story leading up to that point. It’s quite a bit more unusual for the hero’s death to actually occur. Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis solves this dilemma brilliantly, with a perfect marriage of its classicism and its game-nerd geekery. Not to mention that the response to “X ME” in this section is one of the funniest parodies I’ve seen of a standard Inform library message.

On top of this, there’s still another layer of narrative complexity, as seen in a section where the available range of action has drastically narrowed to only two possible commands, and very boring ones at that. Just when I was thinking “man, fast forward,” this happened:

[Here the original text is badly damaged and illegible for many pages. What we can piece together from the extant fragments of this section and the remainder of the work, however, is that Stiffy somehow becomes accepted as one of the Vikings. He wins his toga and the Banana back, acquires the honorific "Sven Stiffy" for his deeds, and meets up with a Druid leading a Pictish revolt. A brief and curious fragment from this last section survives.]

Thus the action shifts out of the previous trap, and MMA piles on yet another inventive application of scholarly mechanics to gameplay mechanics, letting us know that not only does the game have narrative layers in itself, there’s also a metanarrative outside of the story, in which the whole of MMA is in fact some kind of ancient text in translation, which has not survived in its entirety. Employing this device not only allows Thornton to skip past some of the boring or illogical sections (always with a comic purpose) and also reinforces the erudite side of MMA‘s ongoing juxtaposition.

These layers are great for comedy, but I think my favorite comedic innovation in MMA is its running gag of warned deaths. Insta-death is all over the place in IF, especially old-school IF, but MMA takes an approach which allows the whole thing to be a lot funnier: every time the player enters a command which will lead to instant death, the game issues a warning first. Then, if the action is repeated, the game delivers the insta-death:

>PUT PENIS IN OPENING It is pitch black in there. Your cock is likely to be eaten by a grue [reference 6].

>PUT PENIS IN OPENING Chomp! A grue bites your dick completely off, as was foretold.

*** You have been emasculated by a grue ***

There are dozens of these scattered throughout the game, leading to all manner of horrendous demises. Instant IF death is annoying (though UNDO mitigates it a lot), but I thought this was wonderful. Every time I saw one of these warnings, I gave a little tiny cheer inside, because I knew that the next thing I would get to do is steer Stiffy into another hilarious Wile E. Coyote calamity. The more of these there were, the funnier it got, as is the nature of the running gag. (The other great running gag: the game’s responses to failed attempts to fuck people. Or things.)

Also funny and clever was the CAST command, which lets us know the models for various characters in the game. These models spring from reality (Ron Jeremy as Stiffy), literature (Baldanders from Gene Wolfe as the Gostak chieftain), TV (Dr. Nick Riviera from The Simpsons as the aforementioned clap-curer), and Dungeons & Dragons (Froghemoth makes an appearance.) I particularly enjoyed seeing Thornton’s dogs expressing their separate personalities as the heads of Cerberus.

Finally, I have to mention the ending. I won’t give too much away, except to say that it’s one of the more entertaining ways I’ve ever had the plot shouted at me while tied to a chair. A fitting topper to this epic and bizarre game, it partakes of the epic and the bizarre on a grand scale, justifying the game’s subtitle and winding up with an excellent closing joke.

IMPLEMENTATION

Of course, smart references and clever ideas only get you so far — it’s in the execution that an IF game is made or broken. It should probably come as no surprise at this point in the review that I found Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis to be outstanding in this department as well. The game isn’t completely bug-free — it would be very surprising indeed to find a game of this size that had no bugs or errors whatsoever — but it credits multiple rounds of testers, and their efforts shine through. The writing is similarly error-free. It rarely aspires to poetry, but it excels at finding that perfect word to make a graphic detail really vivid, whether you’re being splattered with filth in the sewers of Ostia or inhaling the mephitic vapors of a pit that leads to Hades.

Many many actions are accounted for with proper verbs and witty responses. Most first-level objects are described, albeit sometimes rather curtly. There are many fun surprises embedded for the curious to find, including one of the better XYZZY easter eggs I’ve seen in a while. (Actually, come to think of it, that only seemed like an Easter egg — it’s actually necessary to solve a puzzle.) There’s even the occasional spate of runic and/or Greek writing mixed in with the prose, thanks to Inform libraries written by Thornton himself.

MMA also pays good attention to detail and logic within the confines of its model world. For instance, Stiffy is often obliged to disrobe, whether for the purpose of solving a puzzle or just for a pleasant diversion to pass the time. Either way, it’s easy to forget to put his toga back on him, but invariably the other characters in the game notice when Stiffy is parading around naked, and usually have some witty remark to make about it.

Finally, in case I haven’t made this clear, Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis is quite the extensive game. Every time I thought it was ending, it would instead open up a new vista of plot and setting, with more surprises and more hilarity. In addition to being long, it’s quite deep as well. I noticed this particularly in the Great Library of Alexandria, in which you can learn not just the key fact that helps the plot along, but all about much of the game world and even the greater historical context of its setting.

Glancing at the source code (which Thornton includes in the game package), I can see that there are many more responses I never even uncovered. The expansiveness of the game gives it great access to callbacks, both comedy kind and the IF kind (returning to a location or situation after time has passed and things have changed.) MMA wears its influences on its long, long sleeves, and by the end, it can count itself as an influence. It’s a bit like the question Stephen Colbert asked when he interviewed the band Rush: “You’re known for some long songs. Have you ever written a song so epic, that you were being influenced by your own song, because it happened so much earlier in your career?” This is a game that took a decade to produce, and it’s clear the time wasn’t wasted.

Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis was the perfect finish to my mini-journey of reviewing all the 2011 XYZZY Best Game nominees. I rolled the dice and reviewed those games in random order, but the sequence turned out just right. Zombie Exodus was an oddball nominee, unfinished and not my cup of tea, while Six was an utterly charming comp entry. Cryptozookeeper beat them both with music, graphics, spectacular writing, and an epic scope. It took home the XYZZY award, and it deserves all the recognition it’s gotten, but for my money Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis has the edge over even Cryptozookeeper. Its careful coding, clever design, thematic boldness and overflowing intelligence have made it my favorite game of the bunch. I look forward eagerly to whatever Adam Thornton has cooking for 2021.

Beat The Devil by Robert M. Camisa [Comp99]

IFDB page: Beat The Devil
Final placement: 9th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

If you grew up in suburban America in the 1980s or 90s, what would be your vision of Hell? Where would you least like to spend eternity? Where does it already feel like an eternity when you’re there? That’s right: a shopping mall! In Robert Camisa’s Beat The Devil, Lucifer is building an addition to Hell, and you’re his betatester. He overheard you mumbling about how you’d sell your soul for a chance with the object of your affections, and, being surfeited with souls already (“Washington and Hollywood provide me with all the souls I’ll ever need to buy.”), makes you this alternate offer: wander through this Stygian mall and defeat the incarnations of the seven deadly sins, and that date is yours.

It’s a fun concept, and Beat The Devil gives it an energetic, cartoonish implementation. There are a number of funny spots, though the humor tends to lean a little too far in the direction of over-the-top junior high style exaggeration. For example, to make fun of stores whose decor is all white, there’s a store in the Hell-mall whose shelves are so white that they’re blinding. There are a number of choices like that, which puts the humor at the lowest common denominator. Still, on the whole the game remains pretty funny, just because by being such a detailed working-out of its concepts, it manages to satirize both malls and typical depictions of Hell.

The game is clearly the product of a novice IF author, and while the writing and coding are both fairly good, each has a number of errors easily identifiable as beginner’s mistakes. On the writing side, there are a number of punctuation problems: sentences missing periods, contractions missing apostrophes, quotes missing quotation marks and the like. The grammar and spelling are better, though an occasional glitch will slip through on those as well from time to time.

On the coding side, there are a few little oversights such as some objects missing short_names, disambiguation problems caused by objects whose names are too short, and a number of unimplemented first-level nouns. More interesting is another slip-up. Searching the shelves in one store yields this:

Yada yada..blow dust..yada yada..small white packet.. yada yada... again with the no gold or jewels. Sigh.

The description didn’t make much sense to me until I reached another store, searched its shelves, and found this description:

You blow dust off the shelf, almost choking yourself from the resultant cloud, but you uncover a pair of pliers, which you pocket. Personally, I'dve preferred gold or jewels, but beggars can't be choosers.

Clearly, the game assumed I would search the shelves in the opposite order that I did. This is an easy mistake to make, especially if you’re concentrating on making sure your game is winnable by focusing on a particular walkthrough path. Vexingly, it’s also the sort of thing that your betatesters won’t always find — if they go through the game in the same order that you envisioned, no problems will be apparent. Writing text that is dependent on some other text already having been displayed is very tempting in IF, but you have to be careful that you take account of what happens if that text hasn’t yet been seen.

These are minor mistakes, and can be cleaned up easily in a subsequent release of the game. They don’t much interfere with enjoyment. The same could be said of the puzzles. While there are a couple of sticky spots, most of the puzzles are either pretty obvious or rather clever. The “obvious” part of that evaluation may sound like an insult, but I don’t intend it as one. I’m a fan of obvious puzzles — they’re a lot better than “guess-what-the-author-is-thinking” puzzles, and in an author’s first game you’re more likely to find the latter than the former. The clever ones include a nifty device reminiscent of the “T” remover in Leather Goddesses.

The one real clunker is flawed in a way that, again, marks it as a beginner’s error. There’s an object in the game that will destroy anything put into it. When you try to put anything into it, you’ll see a funny default message about how destroying something you may need later is a dumb thing to do, and the game won’t let you do it. However, there is one object you must destroy in such a way in order to win the game. Based on the default message, there’s no way of knowing that the destroyer will react differently to one particular thing. This isn’t a problem with the puzzle so much as the way it is implemented — it’s like a hungry troll saying “I don’t want to eat!” when offered the wrong kind of food, rather than saying “I don’t want to eat that!” If the default message were worded slightly differently, the player could twig to the fact that although the attempted action is wrong, a similar one might be right. This is the sort of thing you learn with experience, either of writing a lot of IF or playing a lot of it, or both. Beat The Devil is an auspicious start, and I look forward to the author’s next game.

Rating: 7.5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technical (coding): I found no bugs either.

OVERALL: An 8.3