Tag: life on beal street

Little Billy by Okey Ikeako [Comp00]

IFDB page: Little Billy
Final placement: 50th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

And here I thought Desert Heat had a paucity of choices! OK, here’s something I never wondered about: What if you took Life On Beal Street and gave it a really snazzy interface, one that eliminated all that tedious typing “1” to continue and instead replaced it with an attractive “click here to continue”? What would you have? I never wondered about it, but now I have the answer: You’d still have Life On Beal Street. Little Billy follows this inglorious model — it’s not interactive fiction at all. There’s a “click here to continue” prompt (or, at times, a differently worded but functionally identical prompt) that basically just lets you turn the pages in a linear story. Even the two opportunities you get to make a decision don’t influence the narrative in the slightest — one is a dead-end road that shunts back into the main story, and the other makes cosmetic, inconsequential changes that dissolve after a couple of paragraphs.

But maybe if the story and writing were really great, the lack of interactivity wouldn’t stick out so much? Maybe, but we’ll never know. The author warns us at the very beginning. “The author of this game has no writing talent whatsoever”, he says, and oh-so-cleverly punches up the “click here to continue” prompt with an “at your own risk!” Heed this warning. The plot is utterly standard, and the writing doesn’t do much to sell it. What’s more, the final sentence throws everything into total confusion, in a bad way. This sentence is supposed to be a grim epilogue, I think, but it appears to use the wrong name, which turns it into more of a hilarious head-scratcher. If it wasn’t using the wrong name, it’s just a head-scratcher without being hilarious, so I’m rooting for the former case.

The interface is fairly snazzy, though it’s clearly adapted from another game. There’s a picture of an ancient-looking water jug at the start of the game that has absolutely nothing to do with anything that happens in the story. Each character, amusingly enough, has a hit-point counter, even though there isn’t a shred of combat or anything approaching combat in Little Billy. Well, actually there is, but it happens offstage — Billy must have gotten the drop on his combatants, because he’s obviously just a 1st level Schoolkid (chaotic good, of course) with a mere 10 hit points. His dad, on the other hand, has a whopping 54 hit points, which must make him a 6th or 7th level Cleric. He apparently got all his combat experience beating Little Billy to within a hit point of his life. Oh well, enough silliness. Making up stuff like that was the most fun I had with the game, but I can have that kind of fun without any comp game at all.

Rating: 2.5

Desert Heat by Papillon [Comp00]

IFDB page: Desert Heat
Final placement: 28th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Playing Desert Heat made me realize something. In the first five years of the IF Competition, I don’t think a single “true” Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style branching narrative has been entered. Sure, we had Human Resources Stories, but despite its title, that game had no story — it was just a weird quiz. We also had Life On Beal Street, but that game didn’t really offer any choices, unless you count “quit” and “don’t quit” as legitimate story branches, which I don’t. So along comes Desert Heat, a true CYOA story, forcing me to decide what I think about such a format for a comp game.

Here’s what I ended up with: I have nothing against CYOA; in fact I like it, and nurture fond childhood memories of CYOA books by the likes of Edward Packard, R.A. Montgomery, and the amusingly pen-named D. Terman [Which turns out not to be a pen name at all. Guy was actually named Douglas Terman. — 2020 Paul]. However, in an interactive fiction competition where its competitors boast full-blown parsers, maps, and the like, it just doesn’t feel very interactive. Desert Heat does an excellent job of presenting its milieu, but I kept wishing for many more choices than the story offers.

Perhaps part of the problem is that the game’s narrative doesn’t actually offer that many real options. Most of the branches aren’t branches at all. Instead, they generally do one of three things: one, they reveal themselves to be dead ends, forcing you back to a previous node; two, they only offer the illusion of choice, because every option leads to the same node; or three, they result in an abrupt ending. Endings are plentiful in Desert Heat, but branches aren’t, and that probably accentuated the feeling of restriction I was already experiencing as a result of dropping from the wide-open ambiance of a text adventure into the more streamlined mode of CYOA. Consequently, I found that I was having less fun with Desert Heat than I had with the good parser games I’ve played so far, though to be fair I did find it more fun than the bad parser games, so format isn’t the only thing at work here.

The other unique thing about DH is its genre. It calls itself “A Romance Of Sorts”, and because I’m not a reader of romances, I couldn’t say how closely it hews to the conventions of that genre. I can say that it was written well, proofread well, and programmed well (though the programming chores are obviously more minimal when it comes to CYOA, and the author apparently had help from Mark Musante’s CYOA library for TADS). The Arabic, desert milieu is one I haven’t seen very often at all in IF (the only other one I can bring to mind is a section of TimeQuest), and it feels fresh and interesting. The characters are believable, the intrigue plausible, and there are even some quite subtle moments of humor. (Read the descriptions closely if you ask one of the characters to dance.)

As the author’s warning suggests, there are some sexual scenes available, and in fact the options to include or exclude these scenes represent some of the most significant choices available in the game. Again, I’m not sure what the conventions of the genre are when it comes to this kind of scene — some of them made me a little queasy, but I only encountered these when I was systematically going through the game looking for text I had missed (the inclusion of “undo” was much appreciated.) They didn’t appear in my first few plays through the game, which probably says something about how I tend to play a character.

In the end, while I appreciated Desert Heat for its experimentation with an untried format for comp games, and while I enjoyed its presentation of an unusual setting, I just couldn’t get very into the story. This is no doubt partly just because romances like this aren’t really my cup of tea — I’d never seek one out for pleasure reading. Also, there are some continuity slips in the game, highlighting the fact that although CYOA takes the burden out of coding, it places much more stringent demands on plotting — characters shouldn’t seem surprised to discover something that was already revealed in a previous node, or by contrast claim knowledge of something that hasn’t been revealed yet in this particular narrative trajectory, and those things sometimes happen in Desert Heat.

In the final analysis, it was probably a combination of factors that made me say, “Nice try, but it didn’t really work for me.” I still think a CYOA could work in the comp, but the lesson of Desert Heat is that such a game would not only have to be well-written and very well-plotted, but also wide enough and with enough available choices to provide a feeling of freedom at least somewhat comparable with parser games.

Rating: 5.4

Only After Dark by Gunther Schmidl as Anonymous [Comp99]

IFDB page: Only After Dark
Final placement: 17th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Seems like just a few reviews ago I was positing that the trend of the 1999 competition is non-interactive games, those games which give you only one choice of how to proceed, whether subtly or overtly. And now, as if only to vindicate my trendspotting ability, here comes Only After Dark. This game moves along like a teenager learning to drive a stick shift — lurching forward, then halting, then lurching forward again. The lurches are at points where the game shoves you into the plot without giving you much choice in the matter, and the halts are when it waits for you to find the one and only way out of the situation it just forced you into. Now, to be fair, I should say that the game is a little more interactive than, say, Life on Beal Street or A Moment of Hope. It does have a parser. There are no moments (at least, not as far as I could tell, anyway) when it just flat-out ignores what you type. However, there are several scenes where the game absolutely will not let you do anything but what the rigidly linear plot calls for.

Actually, this description fits almost every moment in the game — the advancement of the plot is enforced by meeting any deviation with either an abrupt ending to the game (usually via the death of the PC) or with some variant of “You can’t do that.” For example, there is one scene where the PC is in jail. The plot calls for him to go to sleep. Therefore, there is absolutely nothing you can do but go to sleep. Every other attempt at action is blocked, and the game gives intermittent hints along the lines of “There’s nothing else to do but go to sleep.” Mess around long enough, and the game puts the PC to sleep by force. Now, my question is this: if all I was going to be allowed to do is sleep, why even give me a prompt at all? Why not just say “You’re hustled into a jail cell, and although you attempt to escape, your attempts are thwarted. Deciding there’s nothing to do but sleep, you settle down into the uncomfortable bed, awakening the next day to a very strange scene…” Sometimes there’s a perfectly reasonable answer to this question, something along the lines of wanting the player to identify with the PC’s sense of imprisonment. But when every scene plays like this, and the game forces the player into really stupid decisions because it has made no provision for alternatives, the whole story starts to feel like a prison.

The other way in which the game enforces its plot is to present the player with situations in which there is one correct move, and any other action leads to death. Again, this sort of thing has its place as a technique, and can often be effective when used wisely. However, its vulnerability is that it tempts the designer toward guess-the-verb situations and save-and-restore puzzles — sometimes even both at once. Just as vexing is the fact that dying over and over again fails to be entertaining rather quickly. Only After Dark, sadly, neither resists the temptation nor finds a way around the boredom. Take the initial puzzle, for example. I won’t give away the situation or the solution, but the structure is this: the PC’s life is in danger. There’s only one thing he can do to save himself. If he doesn’t do that one thing he will die. You have one move to make the correct choice. The action is vaguely clued before the choice must be made, but I still ended up with a dozen death messages before I hit on the solution, simply because there is so little time to solve the puzzle. Reading the same death message ten times is pretty dull. Later on, there’s a puzzle in which a certain verb must be used, and the only way I could determine to figure out what that verb ought to be was to closely scrutinize the death message that comes from using the wrong verb. This is the worst of both worlds in IF puzzles.

All this bitching probably does very little to explain why I gave Only After Dark a higher rating than some of the other non-interactive entries in this year’s comp, so let me try to clear that up. First of all, the writing and coding were error-free, which I am really appreciating recently. Yes, the game may railroad you through the plot, but at least it does so correctly. Also, the subject of the game is lycanthropy, which is a fascination of mine. I really enjoyed the malleable aspect of the PC, and while this isn’t the ideal werewolf game, it’s a much better werewolf game than, say, Strangers In The Night was a vampire game. I thought the milieu was interesting, if a little confusing, and there were some nice little touches, like the game’s occasional use of color. Perhaps the only reason it was so linear was to fit the short format of the competition. If that’s so, I dearly hope that an expanded version is forthcoming. I would really like to play a game set in the Only After Dark universe, written and coded as well as the competition entry but offering the player an actual choice once in a while.

Rating: 6.3

A Moment of Hope by Simmon Keith [Comp99]

IFDB page: A Moment Of Hope
Final placement: 18th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Remember how one-room puzzlefests were the big trend of the 1998 competition? Well, I think I’m getting a handle on what it is for ’99: non-interactive fiction. It’s the legacy of Photopia, I suppose. But how little we knew, when we played that one short, brilliant Red Planet section of Photopia where every chosen direction advances the plot, that in a year we’d be playing entire games that operate like that. So far I’ve seen Halothane, which enforces its plot fairly rigidly; Remembrance, which limits the player’s options severely by restricting them to a very short menu; and Life on Beal Street, which is no more interactive than a book. Perhaps the worst offender yet, though, is A Moment of Hope. At least Beal and Remembrance didn’t pretend to be anything but linear roads with no detours available. At least Halothane allowed some freedom of action. Because A Moment of Hope is a TADS game with the appearance of an unrestricted parser, it gives a very believable facade of interactivity, when in fact it’s anything but. Here’s a sample from towards the end of the game:

>SLEEP
You flip your pillow upside down, and hope you can go to sleep.

>GET UP
Turning to your other side, you give it another try.

>GO GET A SANDWICH
You kick at the tangled blanket, convinced it's what is preventing your
slumber.

>IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT I TYPE, DOES IT?
In a valiant attempt to block out the sun, you vainly cover your head
with your pillow and try to relax. ...It doesn't work.

>BITE ME
You finally decide to give in. It's time to get up.

This is the most drastically non-interactive section of the game, but every section of it crowds that side of the continuum. There is only one exit from each location — even if others are described, the game forbids travel in all but one direction. When the game wants you to, for example, read an email, any other command is met with something along the lines of “Not right now, you’re busy.” Adding to the aggravation, sometimes commands have to be repeated multiple times in order to get the parser to accept them. At one point you have to repeat a command eight times in order for it to actually work.

Let’s take a moment to think about this. It seems clear that what the game wants to do is to tell me a specific story. It seems equally clear that the game isn’t much interested in what I want to do. Why, then, was this written as interactive fiction and entered into the IF competition? To really delve into the reasons would be an essay in itself, but one that comes to mind is, as I said earlier, Photopia. After all, the big winner from last year was a game that heavily emphasized the “fiction” side of the IF equation, so that must be the way to win competitions, right? Well, not necessarily. Even setting aside the fact that the three previous competitions were won by games with prominent and interesting puzzles (Edifice, Meteor, Weather/Zebulon), there’s also the fact that Photopia restricted interactivity strategically rather than just doing it indiscriminately. To take one small example, think about the Red Planet section of Photopia compared to the section of A Moment of Hope I’ve quoted above. [PHOTOPIA SPOILERS AHEAD] The Red Planet section of Photopia is part of a story being told to a small child. Even though the player may not know it at the time, the responses of the parser are really Alley’s responses, and the player’s input really Wendy’s participation in the story. This fact constitutes a sensible, cogent reason why every direction taken advances that section’s plot: Alley is telling a story to a small child, and using a clever technique to move the story along so that Wendy won’t find herself pointlessly wandering around the landscape. No such fictional level is present in A Moment of Hope. The game’s responses and player’s input are no more or less than they seem, and as such, when the game uses Alley’s trick on the player it seems rather condescending. After all, we’re not small children with five-minute attention spans. A range of choices and a landscape to traverse won’t lose us.

The game doesn’t take that risk, though, perhaps because its main character is so unsympathetic that it can’t afford to allow any player input that might make him less pathetic. The basic plot here is that an incredibly insecure guy has gotten an email from a matchmaking website. The site has matched him up with somebody he really likes, but how serious is she about him? The game is unrelenting with the constant reminders of just how strung out this guy is. Especially in the first section, almost every single turn yields multiple messages about the PC’s deep, deep depression. No wonder, then, that the game wants to restrict player action. What if a player came along who wanted to make the choice to just forget about this girl and call a friend instead? What if a player wanted to just turn off the computer (the computer in the game, I mean) and read a good book? Hell, what if a player wanted to at least make the damn bed? Nope, wouldn’t fit the story. Wouldn’t fit the character. So it’s not allowed. But a player can’t help wondering: what am I doing in this short story? It’s written well, with no mechanical errors (or coding errors), but if A Moment of Hope were straight fiction, I wouldn’t much want to read it. But I did read this game. Come to think of it, because it was a competition entry, the whole group of judges was a bit of a captive audience, wasn’t it? Hmmm, maybe the choice to write the story as IF rather than straight fiction isn’t so mysterious after all…

Rating: 3.8

Life On Beal Street by Ian Finley as Anonymous [Comp99]

IFDB page: Life on Beal Street
Final placement: 26th place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

One of the things I love about the IF competition is that its emphasis on shorter lengths of work allows and encourages experimentation. Life on Beal Street, if nothing else, is certainly an interesting experiment. It’s a different kind of computer-aided fiction, one in which the computer starts with a preset opening paragraph, then randomly chooses a second paragraph from a set of five available, then a third from a different set of five, and so on until it randomly chooses an ending. Together, these paragraphs make up a narrative arc whose plot couldn’t be simpler (protagonist walks down a street and arrives at a house) and the majority of whose action takes place inside the PC’s head. This action always follows the same pattern — start walking, think about person X, think about person Y, think about yourself, arrive at your destination and see what happens. The player’s role is to prompt the computer to make its next random selection, ostensibly by choosing to continue walking down the street.

The game’s greatest asset is that all of the paragraphs in the various sets are written very well indeed. The author does an excellent job of capturing that feeling of reverie, of walking down a street while thinking intensely about one’s own life, the very features of the street triggering and shaping the direction of the thoughts. The descriptions of the characters on whom the protagonist ruminates, and what those descriptions imply about the PC itself, are evocative and well-judged. Moreover, the delicate balancing act of providing an ungendered PC, onto which the player can project his or her own gender and sexual orientation, is done very well here, especially considering the fact that the game deals directly with interpersonal and even sexual subject matter. At its best, Life on Beal Street provides a sort of kaleidoscopic effect after a few playings, giving us a glimpse of the myriad ways in which we might understand our own lives, ourselves, and our relationships with others. There are some flaws, of course. I wish the game hadn’t chosen “Beal” as the name of its street, as it is distractingly reminiscent of the famous Beale Street in Memphis. I would have had similar problems with “Life on Rudeo Drive” or “Life on Madeson Avenue”. Also, there is one point where the computer unexpectedly says “* NO CHOICES DEFINED *”, though as far as I could tell there were as many (or as few) choices defined as ever.

And in fact, that brings up the game’s largest flaw of all. It isn’t, in any meaningful sense, interactive fiction. Yes, the author works hard to emphasize that the choice between continuing to walk the street and turning back is a real one, just like those we make in everyday life. This is true enough in itself, but as a claim for interactivity, it’s a crock. What it amounts to, more or less, is a choice between reading the next paragraph and quitting the game. These limited options make Life on Beal Street no more interactive than a book. There is one more possibility, which is the opportunity to say “no” to a chosen paragraph and have the computer spit out a new one, but that turns to be the equivalent of continuing to draw paragraphs from a hat until you realize that the hat is empty. Thus, in the final analysis the appeal of Life on Beal Street is quite fleeting. There’s a wonderful sense of openness and excitement in the first few plays, one which quickly contracts as paragraphs start to repeat, and finally shuts down entirely as you search through the whole thing brute-force to find any text you haven’t yet seen. Once you’ve done this, the game becomes just an interesting novelty whose possibilities have been exhausted. It’s definitely worth the download, but don’t expect to keep it long.

Rating: 6.1