Tag: tads

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

Pass The Banana by Admiral Jota [Comp99]

IFDB page: Pass the Banana
Final placement: 33rd place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

Ooooo-kaaaaay. This must be what Sins Against Mimesis felt like to people who hadn’t read the IF newsgroups. Pass the Banana, near as I can tell, is a little collection of in-jokes originating on ifMUD. I’m basing this conclusion on the fact that the one location in the game is an Adventurer’s Lounge. I certainly recognize that from ifMUD. The three characters in the game are a giant flaming head, a monkey, and Melvin the Robot. These ring faint bells for me. I think I’ve seen some of those things on ifMUD once or twice. The nine objects were all, well, bananas. I’ve never seen any bananas on ifMUD, but hey, where there’s a monkey… I’m not a very frequent visitor to the MUD, though, so my associations with these things are very tenuous indeed. You start out the game with nine bananas, and the object seems to be to get rid of them all. As the title suggests, you can’t just drop them or throw them — you have to pass them to the other characters in the room. So I passed all my bananas and won the game with a rank of “Master of All Bananas”. I even managed to get that Last Lousy Point, one of the few things in the game whose joke made sense to me.

The game, for what it is, is well-implemented. There are a number of funny responses which require no inside knowledge to enjoy. For example, the room description mentions that seating is plentiful, but when you try to sit down, the game tells you “It may be plentiful, but it’s also only scenery.” Once the bananas get going, there are a myriad of random responses for each character, including an array of each for passing, receiving, and attempting to eat bananas, as well as whiling away the time. I found no bugs, at least not as far as I could tell, though in a situation like this it’s difficult to tell what a bug is. For example, this sentence kept popping up: “The giant flaming head 712 looks bored.” Now, that looks to me like some garbage numbers in the middle of the sentence, but then again the whole scenario is pretty meaningless to me, so for all I know 712 could be a reference to yet another ifMUD joke. Ho ho ho. I can say for certain that I saw no grammar or spelling errors in the game.

I did my riff on in-jokes when I wrote my review of Sins Against Mimesis in ’97, so I won’t revisit it in depth now. Basically, the good thing about in-jokes is that they strengthen the sense of community that comes from shared reference points. The bad thing is that, to an outsider to that community, the in-jokes feel like closed gates, whose guards snicker, “We know something you don’t know!” It was interesting to experience an in-jokey IF game from the perspective of the outsider, especially since I’m someone who considers myself a member of the IF community. The experience underscored my growing understanding of the effects that the ifMUD has had. The MUD has done a lot to bring the community together, including providing realtime hosting for the XYZZY awards and the Implementor’s Lunches. However, it has also attracted a subgroup of IF devotees, people who apparently hang out on the MUD for great swaths of time and discuss whatever comes to mind. This group has developed its own dynamic, its own references, and in some cases even its own cant. It’s not a group I ever see myself being a part of, since I don’t have a great deal of spare time as it is, and that which I devote to IF goes to SPAG or my own work in progress (or to writing long, boring reviews of tiny little comp games). Plus, the lure of hanging out on the MUD is so seductive that I know I can’t let myself get hooked, lest it become a huge suckhole of my time. So I guess I’m not going to get those in-jokes anytime soon. Perhaps someone could offer translation services, or provide a key with the explanations (such as they are) behind ifMUD in-jokes? If this doesn’t happen, I guess I’m doomed to further confusion, as mysterious missives continue to emanate from the Adventurer’s Lounge.

Rating: 2.5

[Postscript from 2020: Mike Roberts (the creator of TADS) wrote a hilarious review of this game for SPAG, including the memorable line, “Other games in this year’s competition might have more plot, more puzzles, or more elaborate settings, but none have more bananas.”]

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

The Commute by Kevin Copeland [Comp98]

IFDB page: The Commute
Final placement: 26th place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

Imagine if this was your day: You start out in your kitchen, where you drink your coffee and eat your toast. Then you try to figure out the layout of your two-room house (the two rooms are a kitchen and a hallway). All the while you’re experiencing one epiphany after another about how much you love your life, except for having to go to work. Then you get your motorcycle helmet (which you think of as a “helmut”) and your keys and head off to your important meeting on your motorcycle. Unfortunately, you get a flat tire almost immediately. Then you wait around while your hands get busy and fix the flat, a process which takes 30 seconds (I think you worked in an Indy 500 pit crew before you got your office job.) Then you get another flat tire, which you fix in an amazing 14 seconds. You get 8 more flat tires in the space of 6 minutes. Then you decide to make up for lost time by driving “just above the speed limit,” and wouldn’t you know, you get pulled over. The cop notices that you don’t have your wallet, and kindly sends you home to fetch it. The drive home takes 7 seconds, and you drive your motorcycle through the house, because you have no idea how to get off of it. You haven’t a clue where your wallet is, and when you try to get it, you think to yourself “I may not need that. I may, in fact, have it already.” So you drive back out of the house and onto the road, but the same cop finds you, and sends you back home again, because you of course do need your wallet and don’t have it already. But something about your hallway just makes you think otherwise. So back you go, and the cop pulls you over 5 more times before you decide to point your bike at an embankment and end your “leisurely drive” by smashing into the concrete at 98 miles an hour. OK, so maybe that last part doesn’t happen, but you sure wish it could.

This is the experience simulated by The Commute, an incredibly frustrating DOS game. The first difficulty I had was with the interface, which looks like a traditional parser, but isn’t. A typical interaction with it goes something like this:

What shall I do? > GET ALL
I'm sorry, I don't quite understand (my mind is elsewhere).

What shall I do? > X FLOWERS
I'm sorry, I don't quite understand (my mind is elsewhere).

What shall I do? > EAT
I'm sorry, I don't quite understand (my mind is elsewhere).

It goes on, but you get the idea. Traditional commands, abbreviations, and disambiguation are replaced by the same markedly unhelpful error message. What’s worse, sometimes it pretends to understand things it doesn’t. For example, in the Hall you can say “GET KEYS AND HELMUT” (yes, the game forces you to misspell the word “helmet”,) and the parser will respond “Yes, I’ll need these.” Fair enough. But when you get out to your bike and try to “WEAR HELMUT”, it says “I’m sorry, I don’t have that here.” Turns out the parser only pretended to put it in your inventory — all you really picked up were the keys. Other times, it seems to willfully misunderstand you. My favorite example is when I typed “GET OFF BIKE” and Commute responded “I’m assuming you want me to get on the bike. OK, I’m on!” The game is full to brimming with this kind of frustrating stuff — it’s clear that the lack of an interactive fiction tool like Inform or TADS really hurt this game, much more than it hurt the other DOS game in the competition, I Didn’t Know You Could Yodel.

OK, so it had a lousy parser. This can be overcome, right? What I couldn’t overcome, at least without a walkthrough, was the “road from hell”, where every few seconds you either get pulled over or get a flat tire. At first, this was very frustrating. Then it just became funny. The point of the game seems to be that going to work sucks. This is a point on which I didn’t need much convincing, but if I got pulled over 6 times and got 8 flat tires on the way to work, I would be thinking that LIFE sucks, work or no work. Especially since all I get at home is a partner who keeps urging me to get out of the house, which I don’t mind doing since I can’t even go back to bed, seeing as how I don’t have one. Finally I consulted the walkthrough and found out how to get past the road from hell. Turns out some rather non-intuitive commands are necessary. For example, not to spoil it or anything, but the command to find your wallet is “HUG DAUGHTER.” Why didn’t I think of that? Unfortunately, even with those gentle nudges (OK, violent shoves), I got to work and couldn’t open the gate because I didn’t have a parking pass, even though the pass was in the wallet I had with me. Once I figured out that I just couldn’t see the pass because the only place I know how to look in a wallet is in a hallway, I deleted the game. My life has sucked much less ever since.

Rating: 2.0

About my 1998 IF Competition reviews

When the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition came around, the indie IF scene in rec.*.int-fiction was well-established, and me in it. By that time, I’d written a game, written lots of reviews, and become a regular in newsgroup conversations. The groups themselves had established clear dynamics, with authorities, troublemakers, helpers, jesters, you name it. The community even pulled together a massive April Fool’s joke called Textfire, a fake IF sampler from a fake IF company. Comp98, though, brought us all up to a new level.

It kind of blows my mind to reread my reviews from that year, knowing the future as I do now. I’d love to tell my 1998 self that decades on, I’d hike in the Grand Canyon with one of the authors, see the sights of Austin with another, collaborate on a game with a third (for a company created by a fourth), and so on. I have relationships with some of these folks going way back to those formative days, thanks especially to the IFMud, founded the year prior. One Comp98 author even became a professional game designer, scooping up a bunch of BAFTA awards a few years ago.

The competition itself had by this time evolved its own set of tropes. Rybread Celsius was one of these, a surprisingly beloved figure with a cult following I never quite grasped. Another was the prevalence of Inform, followed closely by TADS, alongside the “first attempt” and homebrew games that appeared in every comp. The competition itself had become an institution by this point, inspiring lots of mini-comps throughout the year — Chicken-comp, the IF Fan Fest, etc — and these in turn fed into the main competition.

My own reviewing style reached maturity this year, settling into the format I kept for the rest of my comp reviews: basically three paragraphs and a score. Sometimes more, if the mood struck, but my comp reviews had evolved from basically filling out a form to writing a little mini-essay about each game. I more or less took my Comp97 review format, got rid of all the bold headings, and massaged those categories (plot, puzzles, prose, technical writing/coding) into the rest of the review. The artificiality of the headings still sticks around to some extent — sometimes I can see myself going out of my way to cover each base — but my voice was getting more natural the more I wrote.

I also evolved in my approach to spoilers. Where tons of my Comp97 reviews had spoilers in them, always flagged with big capital letters, I managed to mostly avoid them in the Comp98 reviews. There are a couple of exceptions, where a point I was making really demanded a concrete and accurate example, but more often I’d file the serial numbers off the game’s specifics so that I could provide an example that fulfilled the spirit of my point without giving away any of the goods.

Finally, I worked to keep in the front of my consciousness the fact that this is an all-volunteer endeavor, done by enthusiasts who should be rewarded for their enthusiasm wherever possible. I tried to find something to appreciate even in games I really hated, or at least offer some constructive criticism for how the next one could be better. It didn’t stop the occasional flame, but that was reserved for when I felt like a game really should have known better.

I originally posted my reviews for the 1998 IF Competition games on November 16, 1998.

Poor Zefron’s Almanac by Carl Klutzke [Comp97]

IFDB page: Poor Zefron’s Almanac
Final placement: 7th place (of 34) in the 1997 Interactive Fiction Competition

Right about the time that Poor Zefron’s Almanac (hereafter called PZA) starts feeling like another humdrum sword-and-sorcery game, it executes a nice surprising twist. To say too much more would be to give the game away, but the fact that the author bills PZA as “an interactive cross-genre romp” is a clue toward its direction. This twist made the game refreshing and fun again, especially after the frustration it caused me when I began playing it. More on that later. PZA does several things very well, one of which is its eponymous book, a tome owned by your wizardly master Zefron and left behind after his mysterious disappearance. This almanac contains a feature unique to all the CONSULTable items in IFdom (as far as I know): it can be BROWSEd. Browsing the almanac brings forth a random entry from within its pages; not only is it great fun to read these random entries, it also gives a sense of how thoroughly the almanac has been implemented. This device would be most welcome in other IF… how I’d love to browse the Encyclopedia Frobozzica or the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! Just having the book at hand lent a sense of scope and excitement to PZA.

Unfortunately, my first 45 minutes or so of playing this game were extremely frustrating. PZA suffers from a couple of serious design flaws, the gravest of which is its repeated violation of the Fifth Right (from Graham Nelson’s “Player’s Bill of Rights”): not to have the game closed off without warning. Because of a fairly flexible (but extremely temporary) magic spell that becomes available at the very beginning of the game, I found myself repeatedly stranded, unable to proceed and forced to RESTART. This happened again later on in the game — I committed a perfectly logical action and found out hundreds of turns later that this action had closed off the endgame. This is a frustrating experience, and one that could easily have been avoided with a few minor changes to the game’s structure, changes which would not have had any discernible effect on puzzles or plot. In addition, there are a few areas in which the player character can be killed without warning, always an unwelcome design choice. PZA is (as far as I know) Carl Klutzke’s first game, so chalk these flaws up to education. I look forward to playing another Klutzke game as well-implemented as PZA, but designed more thoughtfully.

One nice element of PZA was its facility with IF homage. The game’s “cluple” spell not only had a name that sounded straight out of Enchanter, it was virtually identical to that series’ “snavig” spell. The almanac itself (as well as a number of other features) was a skillful allusion to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Finally, the XYZZY command response is one of the more clever I’ve seen in a while. Clearly PZA‘s author is a devotee of the old games, and his devotion shows in his work. I am hopeful that his next piece of IF will live up to his worthy aspirations.

Prose: The prose in PZA is generally very good. Rooms, objects, and random events are described concisely but with attention to detail. Some of the locations are rather sparsely treated (for example, the town consists of one location), but such skimping is always done in service of the plot, and more detail would serve to distract rather than to enrich.

Plot: This is definitely the strongest point of PZA. The game starts out with an engaging hook, and after the twist I was definitely enjoying the direction of the story quite a bit. In addition, the author has manipulated the scoring system in such a way as to give the feeling of multiple endings. Granted, many of those endings amount to one version or another of “*** You have died ***”, but not all of them. There are more and less successful solutions to the story, and they are integrated so naturally into the endgame text that they almost escape notice. One of the nicest implementations of multiple endings in the competition.

Puzzles: Here there were problems. What happens to PZA is that its individual problems are well-considered, and their solutions are perfectly logical. However, when the actions that comprise those solutions are attempted in other areas of the game, they all too often drive the narrative into a blind alley from which there is no escape. It’s one of the hardest balancing acts in interactive fiction: how to have sensible puzzles logically integrated into the game, without making the narrative too linear, which in their elements create no dead ends for the player. PZA doesn’t pull it off.

Technical (writing): I found no technical errors in the writing.

Technical (coding): Once I played PZA on WinTADS, I had no problems with it. I started out trying to use it on my old DOS version of TR, and before I could even get one command out it was giving me TADS “Out of Memory” errors. Whether this is a bug in the program of the interpreter, I don’t know enough about TADS to say.

OVERALL: An 8.0

E-MAILBOX by Jay Goemmer [Comp97]

IFDB page: E-Mailbox
Final placement: 27th place (of 34) in the 1997 Interactive Fiction Competition

Well, if there’s a prize for shortest competition game, E-MAILBOX will win it hands down. Clocking in at just under ten minutes, it barely gets off the ground before telling you either that you’ve won or that you’ve just met your death by having your body’s cells torn apart from one another. Not much of a menu, but at least either way the end comes quickly. The game purports to be “A true story based on actual events that occurred to a real individual,” but is written in a broad, exaggerated tone that is probably meant to be burlesque. It’s funny, in a limited kind of way, but it’s hard for the game to do very much when it ends so quickly.

One thing that it does do well is proves that an AGT game can hold its own in a modern competition. E-MAILBOX is short, yes, but it’s fun while it lasts. I used Robert Masenten’s AGiliTy interpreter for the first time, and found that it produced output that was well-formatted, easy-to-read, and even sometimes (gasp!) aesthetically pleasing. The game achieves a few nice special effects — nothing that couldn’t have been done with Inform or TADS (I don’t know enough about Hugo to say one way or the other) but nothing to sneeze at either — and generally works imaginatively with the text format. Of course, one wonders whether E-MAILBOX was kept so short in order to disguise the limitations of its programming system. There is virtually no navigation within the game, and the very linear design prevents most parser experimentation. Thanks to the handy AGT counter, I know that E-MAILBOX has a grand total of 4 locations, some of which only respond to one command. This game is a brief bit of fun, but the jury’s still out on whether AGT can match up to more modern systems when it comes to more substantial works.

There are some interactive fiction games that are epic, and may take even a great player a three-day weekend to complete (without looking at any hints, of course). Then there are those which could take up a day or two, and those (many of the competition games, for instance) which might fill a long lunch break. Play E-MAILBOX over a 15 minute coffee break. You’ll have some fun and still have time for a brisk walk.

Prose: I found the prose in E-MAILBOX to be pretty over-the-top. As I say, I think it was intended as burlesque, but its outrageousness seems forced. It comes across as the prose of a voice which is promising, but has not quite fully matured. It’s not exactly the sophomoric arrogance of something like Zero Sum Game — more an overly sincere zaniness.

Plot: The plot is so short and simple that it’s hard to tell much without giving away the ending. Basically, it centers around trying to send an email message. (See, I told you: short and simple.)

Puzzles: Well, I never found anything that I thought really qualified as a puzzle. The actions necessary are either entirely obvious, or entirely obscure but well-prompted by the parser.

Technical (writing): I found no errors in E-MAILBOX‘s writing.

Technical (coding): As I said above, the game does a nice job for something so short. The author makes an AGT game fun to play, which in my experience is no small feat. A well-implemented piece of work, short work though it may be.

OVERALL: A 5.8

The Land Beyond The Picket Fence by Martin Oehm [Comp96]

IFDB page: The Land Beyond the Picket Fence
Final placement: 14th place (of 26) in the 1996 Interactive Fiction Competition

Picket is a gently whimsical fantasy without much of a plot, whose main interesting feature is its interface. I haven’t played much DOS executable IF before (Inform, TADS, and Infocom games seem to monopolize my time), and it was an interesting experience to play a piece of IF in different colors from my normal white letters on blue background. The different colors of background and text lent a distinctive mood to the piece, and the effectiveness of this technique makes me realize some of the special effects we sacrifice in the name of platform independence. A small sacrifice, perhaps, but a pity nonetheless. As to the content of the game, it was basically average — nothing too irritating or pointless, but nothing astounding or groundbreaking either. It provided a pleasant hour’s entertainment, with a few jarring moments where the prose deviated from standard English. All in all, an enjoyable if unspectacular game.

Prose: There were a few moments in the prose where it was clear that the writer did not speak English as a first language, but the fact that those moments were noticeable as exceptions to the general trend means that overall the writer did a fine job of writing in an unfamiliar language. The descriptions were sometimes a little thin, especially with the game’s two NPCs, but in general the fairytale fantasy mood was well-evoked by the writing.

Difficulty: I found this game’s difficulty to be pitched a bit below average. I never needed to look at the hints, and felt that I progressed through the narrative at a satisfactory pace. I finished the game in a little under an hour, which may mean that it was a little too easy if a two-hour playing time was intended (I’m certainly not the quickest IF player, as earlier reviews may indicate). However, I never felt disappointed with anything being “too easy” — easier than usual, perhaps, but never to an annoying degree.

Technical (coding): There were a few coding problems, and in fact one fatal bug which first made some of my possessions disappear after a restore and then kicked me out of the game altogether. Also, some fairly common verbs (“throw”, and the “character, command” mode of interaction) were not implemented, which was a little disappointing. Aside from these problems, the coding was smooth and relatively bug-free.

Technical (writing): As I mentioned above, there were a few instances of awkward grammar which indicated that the writer was not quite comfortable enough with English to sound like a native writer. The problems were relatively infrequent, and had less to do with spelling or grammar errors than with awkward or unusual constructions.

Plot: Well, the only plot here was a basic “find the object” quest, though cast in much less epic/heroic terms than usual, which was refreshing. There wasn’t much of a sense of unfolding narrative, and many objects were either totally unexplained (the key to the gnome’s treasure room tied around a swan’s neck with a red ribbon? How did that happen?) or so convenient as to be ridiculous (how handy that the scientist just happens to have a powerful fungicide that can kill the problematic mushrooms!), causing the game to feel less like a plotted story than an excuse for stringing puzzles together.

Puzzles: The puzzles were rather average pieces, some quite derivative (the “key tied around an inaccessible animal’s neck” is of course a direct crib from Zork II.) The ordinariness of the puzzles contributed to the game’s low level of difficulty — they weren’t too difficult to solve, because they seemed quite familiar, and those that weren’t derivative were of the “just-happen-to-have-the-perfect-item” type.

OVERALL — A 6.7

Kissing The Buddha’s Feet by Leon Lin as Anonymous [Comp96]

IFDB page: Kissing The Buddha’s Feet
Final placement: 5th place (of 26) in the 1996 Interactive Fiction Competition

When I first started this game I had that familiar “Oh no, not another one of these” feeling. But the more I played Buddha, the better I liked it. Nine times out of ten, college humor comes off as sophomoric in-jokes liberally mixed with gross-outs — this time was the tenth. Several moments in the game almost made me laugh out loud, and I related very well (perhaps a bit too well) to the game’s main character. This game also makes hilarious use of TADS‘ capability for dynamic object creation, as the cellophane, snack food wrappers, and crumpled up notepapers continue to pile around the hero’s ears. The characters were stereotypes, but they were written so well that they evoked the reality behind the generalization rather than the typical flatness of a stock type. Finally, a good word for the puzzles — not only were they clever, interlaced, and often the type to give one the “aha!” feeling as the pieces suddenly fall perfectly into place, they were also very well integrated into the story, and cleverly supported by the premise. The genre of Kissing The Buddha’s Feet may be clichéd, but it’s the kind of game that reminds one why people attempt the college genre in the first place.

Prose: Only once in a while did the use of ridiculous levels of exaggeration slip into the annoying; much more often it was pitched just at that level where one can enjoy the joke without endangering the suspension of disbelief. The writing is lively and its level of detail greatly increases the game’s immersiveness.

Difficulty: The game’s difficulty was just right for me. I never felt so stuck that the pleasure of working on the puzzles ceased to become fun — but it was always a little work to figure those puzzles out. I also enjoyed the feeling of never quite knowing when a puzzle would be solved, and the fact that as soon as you took care of one problem another one, gopherlike, would pop up somewhere else.

Technical (coding): Some really masterful strokes, such as all the wrappers and papers that pile up around the house. Most commands well anticipated, and in fact I look forward to returning to the game after the competition has ended and trying all of the “amusing” pieces. Only once in a great while was a logical action not anticipated in the coding (examples are putting the towel back on its rack and trying to unplug the TV while wearing the catcher’s mitt.)

Technical (writing): Grammar and spelling were both well in hand. The anonymous author is obviously a skilled writer, and I look forward eagerly to his or her next game.

Plot: Well, there wasn’t really much of a story to go through, but I never felt the lack of it. In short, the premise was clever and substantial enough to make me feel as though I really was living through a hilarious night of hell, even though I was really just solving puzzles one after another.

Puzzles: Though it’s hard to pick a favorite, I think this was the best aspect of Buddha. As I mentioned earlier, the puzzles were clever, pitched at just the right level of difficulty, and very well integrated into the overall plot. Some favorites are how to put Bob out of commission and then neutralize his snoring, as well as the problem of Alice and her radio.

OVERALL — a 9.4

Alien Abduction? by Charles Gerlach [Comp96]

IFDB page: Alien Abduction?
Final placement: 9th place (of 26) in the 1996 Interactive Fiction Competition

Really provocative premise. Loved the Twilight Zone feel of things, and finding out more about character’s (and character’s father’s) past worked quite effectively. On the downside, some fairly significant omissions (including an axe but not implementing “chop” or “cut”, making a puzzle where a significant portion keeps responding “that’s not important” [this is the spring arm on the contraption & the axe], having the laughable response “It’s not effective to attack with the axe.”)

Prose: Generally effective, and sometimes quite chilling. A bit of awkwardness shows through at times, but never enough to jar.

Difficulty: Except for one major “guess the verb” puzzle (the springarm), this was pretty straightforward. The most difficult part for me (aside from the springarm) was figuring out to get a “real” axe first.

Technical (coding): Some errors including no response to putting things in cylinder, TADS errors on taking shapes. Much was anticipated, but some significant things were not. Could use another round of beta testing.

Technical (writing): Virtually no spelling or grammar errors jumped out. Well-proofed work.

Plot: Outstanding. With the exception of a somewhat disappointing ending (though justifiable — I just crave closure), AA gave a hint of how truly chilling suspense-oriented IF can be. The premise, the way information was slowly released, the drama & emotional intensity were really all quite strong. This was definitely the most enjoyable aspect of the game.

Puzzles: One or two quite clever (the duck), most well-oriented to moving the plot along. The “aliens testing your mental capacity” was an excellent pretense for puzzles. Hints were generally quite well-done, and with the exception of the springarm thing, puzzles were overall pretty good.

OVERALL — a 7.8