Trading Punches by Mike Snyder as Sidney Merk [Comp04]

IFDB page: Trading Punches
Final placement: 10th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Trading Punches is a lovely piece of work, with a good story and a fine design. It’s also got some flaws, so let me tackle those first, and then I’ll move on to the loveliness. The first problem I had with the game may be more just an idiosyncratic reaction: I found much of its prose rough going. It’s not that the writing was error-laden or terribly awkward — it’s just that I kept finding myself wanting to skim over it, and having to concentrate to actually read it. The problem was most severe in long room descriptions and infodumps, of which the game has many. I’m not sure whether the prose was just too dense for me, or whether it was some question of style, or what. I know that’s an unhelpful reaction, but it was my reaction nonetheless.

One definite problem with the style is that the game goes way overboard on a particular gimmick for making things sound SFnal: word-mating. Thus, the PC wanders around a landscape of “mossgrass” and “elmpines”, watching the “peacrows” and then later drinking some “brandyrum” and “whiskeygin”. Yeesh! A little of this strategy goes a long way, and Trading Punches had way more than a little; it sounded pretty silly in short order. Finally, though the game was obviously tested, a few significant bugs made it into this version. For one thing, certain commands, like “score”, draw no response at all from the game. Even more seriously, there’s a class of locations with one exit that consistently thrusts the player into a formless void from which there is no escape. At first, I thought this effect might be intentional, but further experimentation demonstrated that it’s almost certainly accidental.

So yes, Trading Punches has some problems, but I still ended my play session feeling very happy with it. Why? Well, for starters, I enjoyed the story quite a bit, and aside from the excessive word-mating, the setting felt nicely realized as well. In general, the plot and the game-world felt reminiscent of the work of Orson Scott Card, which I like very much. I don’t know if the author of Trading Punches is familiar with Card, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that influence on this game. It’s got plenty of Card’s hallmarks: bitter rivalry within a family, affecting the larger world and universe on a grand scale; a gifted protagonist with a strong moral center who has a significant impact by helping (or trying to help) others; and strong familial bonds offsetting the deep familial schisms elsewhere.

The aliens in the game feel original and well-imagined, and lend themselves to symbolic use as well. I also appreciated the design of the game — its central story of sibling rivalry is told through chapters that don’t hammer the point too hard, but still make it quite clear how the enmity grows between the two brothers. By skipping forward in time to the most important incidents in their relationship, the game develops the character of both the PC and his brother quite satisfyingly. Situating the chapters within a frame story works very well to knit the disparate pieces, and the game does an excellent job of weaving revelations about the frame story into the content of the chapters and vice versa. Unfortunately, two hours wasn’t quite enough time for me to get through it, partly because of my denseness around one of the puzzles. However, a glance at the walkthrough shows that I was most of the way through, and I felt regret at having to stop the game and write this review, which is clear evidence that the story had me hooked.

Even aside from the story and the design (and its bugs and prose tics notwithstanding), Trading Punches boasts an impressive amount of craft. Especially noteworthy are the game’s cool multimedia components. Each chapter (and each return to the frame story) begins with a full-screen graphic. These graphics are quite lovely, and do an excellent job of establishing the landscape. I found this especially helpful as I struggled with the dense prose’s attempts at scene-setting. The illustrations look as though they were created in some kind of graphics rendering software, and consequently have a bit of a Myst-like feel to them, which is a good thing.

Also effective is the game’s music, a synthesized soundtrack which loops constantly in the background. The music is generally quite effective at enhancing the mood of a particular scene, though some of the musical pieces don’t have enough melody or complexity to withstand the constant looping. No matter how good an eight-bar tune is, it’s bound to get a little grating on the hundredth repetition. The game itself is quite solid, too — it’s clear that a whole lot of effort went into this project. Aside from the few bugs I mentioned in the first paragraph, I found the code pleasantly error-free, and the same goes for the writing. The puzzles worked well for me, and the game did an excellent job of providing cues to help me know what I ought to try next. One item in particular was not only quite well-implemented, but also provided an excellent emotional through-line for the story.

Trading Punches still has a few details to clean up, and the word-mating has to go, but I’d recommend it without hesitation, especially to fans of dramatic fantasy games like Worlds Apart.

Rating: 9.2

Out of the Study by Anssi Raisanen [Comp02]

IFDB page: Out of the Study
Final placement: 24th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

A few years ago, I made up some vocabulary to describe a common aspect of IF. I’m not really sure if anybody else uses it, but I’ve found it immensely handy. The vocabulary is this: I call a noun that appears in a room description a “first-level noun.” These nouns either will or won’t have descriptions implemented, and the more of them that are described, the better, in my opinion. Nouns that appear in the descriptions of first-level nouns I call second-level nouns. Nouns from second-level descriptions are third-level, and so on. The deeper these levels go, the more complete and immersive the interactive environment, as we’ve seen in previous games like Hunter, In Darkness and Worlds Apart. Out Of The Study puts this technique to some of the best use I’ve ever seen, going very deep indeed with its levels of description:

> x family photo In the photo you see the professor together with his family.


> x family

The professor is standing in the photo with his wife and five

children.
> x children

The photo is really rather old as the children in it are still very

young. You know that none of them lives at home anymore. On the left

there are twin boys, looking to be of the age at which they have just

started going to school. In the middle, the youngest child, just a

baby, is sitting in her mother's lap. It seems to be hardly one year

old: you cannot tell if it's a boy or a girl, even from the clothes.

[...]
> x baby

The baby, whose sex you are not able to tell, is dressed in a pink

overall.

> x overall It is just an ordinary babies' outfit.

Given that OOTS is a one-room game, this depth of implementation goes a very long way towards making the environment feel real and interactive. Intriguingly, the point of this depth isn’t just to increase immersion; it’s actually an element of the game’s puzzles, and clues are often buried several levels deep. Enlightenment, from Comp98, explored this technique a little, but OOTS takes it much further.

This game’s puzzles are definitely its best feature. Like many one-room games, it has only a modicum of plot — you’re a thief who has been trapped inside the place you’re robbing, and you must investigate the environment to figure out how to escape. To do so, you have to figure out the mindset of the room’s occupant, and all the regular puzzles are subsections of that overriding goal. The design is generally sound, and I appreciated the fact that the environment was so richly implemented, but it would have been a lot more fun were it not so buggy. There’s a bit of an insect theme in this game, but actual game bugs are not welcome no matter how many metalevels of irony they provide.

Some of the problems may have been due to the ALAN parser; for instance, I found I couldn’t refer to objects by their adjectives, as in the following example where both a “torn photograph” and a “family photograph” are in scope:

> x photograph [It is not clear which photograph you mean.]

> x torn [You must supply a noun.]

Being able to refer to an object by any of its name words is a behavior I’ve come to love in IF, and I missed it a great deal during this game. Other things were clearly the game’s fault. For instance, “examine” and “read” were implemented as different verbs, but their implementation was not well-tested, resulting in exchanges like this:

> read books There is nothing written on the books.

Hope you didn’t pay too much for those books, professor — they aren’t worth the paper they aren’t written on.

Between the game’s bugs, its quirks, and its lack of a walkthrough, I came thisclose to just abandoning it altogether. Happily, some folks over at ifMUD helped me get unstuck so I could reach the ending. Unhappily, that ending is a bit of a disappointment. OOTS succumbs to the temptation to tack on a rather cutesy “twist” ending, but my reaction to it was neither “awwwww” nor “whoa!”, but rather “huh?”

In my view, all that ending does is to make hash of everything that came before, as well as to make the player’s labors seem rather fruitless. I don’t even think it can be justified as bringing some sort of justice to the thief, because it’s unclear how much reality has actually shifted, or how much we are to assume about the game as a whole. There are some good puzzles and a very well-crafted setting here, and with a round or two more of testing and a better ending, OOTS could be a pretty good piece of IF.

Rating: 7.0

Unnkulia X by Valentine Kopteltsev [Comp00]

IFDB page: Unnkulia X
Final placement: 27th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

In the beginning, there was the 1995 IF competition. This competition had but One Rule: all entries must be winnable in two hours or less. The competition has gotten grander and more complex since then, but it has remained a competition for short games, not Curses-length epics. Somewhere along the way, though, the One Rule got mutated a little. I quote from this year’s rules: “Judges must base their judgement of each game on at most the first two hours of play… Authors may write a game of any length they desire, but should keep this rule in mind when determining the length of their entry.” This rule has been in this form, more or less, since 1998. Still, the competition has remained oriented towards short games.

There are some obvious reasons for this. For one thing, it takes less time to write a short game. The more objects, locations, NPCs, plot points, and such you cram into your game, the more work your game will be to produce, at least if you want to maintain a reasonable level of quality. I would argue, however, that there are other reasons to keep long games out of the competition. From a judging standpoint, I don’t feel comfortable evaluating a game unless I’m reasonably confident that I’ve seen most or all of it. If A Mind Forever Voyaging, for instance, were to be entered in an IF competition, I know for certain that I wouldn’t have an accurate picture of it after only 2 hours of play. I felt differently about Zork III before and after the Royal Puzzle. I could go on, but you get the idea. Consequently, the ratings given to a large game don’t really reflect the game as a whole, just its beginning sections. Also, it’s really comparing apples to oranges to put something like Worlds Apart up against something like, say, Winter Wonderland. Even if two games have a similar tone, or similar puzzles, or a whole raft of other similarities, length does matter. Ahem.

Nowadays though, the competition has become, to use a worn-out but apt phrase, a victim of its own success. Authors enter anything they write into the competition just because it’s so high-profile and receives so much ink (or electrons, or whatever.) They figure that even in the worst case, they’ll get a whole bunch of people playing and writing about their game, so why not enter it? I feel a rant coming on about this. The first part of my rant is directed at authors. Look, people, entering a game that is too long (or too buggy, or too poorly proofread, or otherwise inappropriate for the competition) is an abuse of the judges’ time. The feedback and recognition you get this way are ill-gotten.

Moreover, I would contend that especially in the case of overlong games, you’re not really benefiting that much, because whatever recognition and feedback you get are only based on the first two hours, not your game as a whole. You created an entire game, but if it’s just one of fifty entries, and it’s quickly apparent that two hours ain’t gonna cover it, not by a long stretch, how many of those players do you think will return to your game? How many people will see and give you feedback about the other three-fourths of the game that they didn’t get to during the comp? How much are you really benefiting from all that comp attention?

And while I’m on the topic, let’s move to the second part of my rant, which is directed to the community at large. Listen, I love the competition. It’s one of my favorite things about the IF community. But let’s face the problems that it has. The magnetism of the competition, the idea that it’s the best place for every game, is something we all need to work harder to address. Do your part. Release a long game (or a short one) outside of the competition. Write a review of a non-comp game for SPAG or XYZZYNews. Participate in things like the IF Review Conspiracy and the IF Book Club. Most importantly, post post POST about non-comp games. Make a commitment to post a reaction to any non-comp game you play. It doesn’t have to be a review. It doesn’t have to be thorough. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be smart. It just has to be done, because if it doesn’t get done, the authors who don’t abuse the competition will end up losing out, and that’s not right. So please — do it. Your efforts will benefit yourself and everybody else in the IF community.

Just to be democratic, the third part of my rant is addressed to myself, and people like me, people who write long, thorough reviews of every comp game. We are part of the problem. I recognize that consistency is important to us, and that’s why we devote more or less the same amount of space to each comp game. However, there can and should be limits. Don’t even play games that have catastrophic bugs, let alone review them. Any attention those games get contributes to the perception that it’s better to release a buggy game in the comp than a polished game in the Spring. We must work to prove that this perception is fallacious and untrue. As for overlong games, review them if you feel you must, but don’t feel obligated to spend much of the review talking about the game itself — spend it instead on some adjacent topic like the problem of inappropriate games in the competition.

I mean, for god’s sake, Unnkulia X is 865K! The thing is only 45K smaller than Once and Future! It’s freaking huge! Yes, it’s fairly well done, implemented with care and only a few lapses in English. (There’s a lot of unfamiliar diction, which I assume is attributable to the author’s first language being something other than English, but most of these alien word choices are rather refreshing instead of jarring.) Of course, I only got 60 points out of 300 after two hours, so these assessments are based on what I have to assume is the first fifth or so of the game. If it were the whole game, I’d probably give it about a 9. Considering it’s a fifth of the game, I think that works out to about a…

Rating: 1.8