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SPAG Issue 24
___. .___ _ ___.
/ _| | \ / \ / ._|
\ \ | o_/ | | | |_.
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The |___/ociety for the |_|romotion of |_|_|dventure \___|ames.
ISSUE # 24
Edited by Paul O'Brian (obrian SP@G colorado.edu)
March 24, 2001
SPAG Website: http://www.sparkynet.com/spag
SPAG #24 is copyright (c) 2001 by Paul O'Brian.
Authors of reviews and articles retain the rights to their contributions.
All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine
with the traditional 'at' sign.
REVIEWS IN THIS ISSUE -----------------------------------------------------
The Abbey
Above and Beyond!
Dangerous Curves
FailSafe
Fear
Gateway 2: Homeworld
Humbug
Inform School
Jacaranda Jim
The Mulldoon Legacy
The Pyramids of Mars
Small World
T-Zero
SPECIFICS
=========
Heroine's Mantle
The Tempest
EDITORIAL------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm a movie fan, even though I never seem to see as many films as I mean
to. (Come to think of it, I never play as many IF games as I want to
either. Clearly, I need to acquire more leisure time, preferably by
becoming independently wealthy. But I digress.) One movie event I always
try *not* to miss is the Academy Awards -- even though the show is
always long, and sometimes marred by painfully awful production numbers,
I'm a sucker for the suspense and drama of the award presentations, and
I love seeing dedicated artists honored by their peers. So I'll be
tuning in this Sunday, and this time I'll identify with the nervous
honorees just a little bit more, because I recently took part in IF's
own version of the Oscars: the XYZZY awards. My 2000 game LASH was
nominated in four categories, and although it won none, the experience
was a fantastic one nonetheless. In fact, even though there is a
competitive part of me that is disappointed at the losses (and
determined to do better next time!), I treasure the experience of *not*
winning, because it set me thinking about a few important points.
First of all, cliche though it may be, it really *is* an honor just to
be nominated. The company LASH kept in each of its categories was both
awesome and humbling. For the XYZZY voters to assert that it deserved a
place with those games was terrifically gratifying. What's more, some of
my favorite games of 2000, games like Kaged and Dangerous Curves,
somehow received no XYZZY nominations at all. In light of that, I'm
thankful that LASH was recognized as much as it was.
Secondly, there's the fact that each winner was absolutely deserving.
It'd be one thing if LASH lost to something on the level of Detective,
or Space Aliens Laughed At My Cardigan. But it's hard to complain about
the winners when among those winners were such amazing pieces of work as
Shade, Rameses, My Angel, and Being Andrew Plotkin. In fact, it was such
a strong year for IF that with just one exception, each category was won
by a different game. What a great time to be an IF fan.
And that brings me to the third, and most important point: I don't write
IF to win prizes. I write IF because I love it, and I feel pretty safe
in saying that's true for most other authors as well. It's easy to get
caught up in competitiveness, especially when our community gives so
much focus to competitions and awards, but in the end, IF is a labor
of love for all of us. It's as true for me in my role of game author as
it is for my role of SPAG editor, and it's certainly true for all the
SPAG contributors, who won't see any money *or* prizes for their
efforts. After all, there's no XYZZY award for Best Reviewer. But maybe
there should be... nah.
NEWS ----------------------------------------------------------------------
AND THE XYZZY GOES TO...
Last year I mentioned that there was a bit of a ping-pong match going
between Adam Cadre and Andrew Plotkin for the Best Game XYZZY, Cadre
having won in 1999 and 1997 while Plotkin won in 1996 and 1998. This
year, the alternation was finally broken... sort of. J. Robinson Wheeler
took home the Best Game award, but with a game whose title just happens
to mention a very familiar name. Clearly, it's time for someone to start
work on "I Shot Adam Cadre" -- just be sure to release it in 2001! Full
results of the 2000 XYZZY awards follow:
* Best game: Being Andrew Plotkin, by J. Robinson Wheeler
* Best writing: Metamorphoses, by Emily Short
* Best story: My Angel, Jon Ingold
* Best setting: Shade, by Andrew Plotkin
* Best puzzles: Ad Verbum, by Nick Montfort
* Best NPCs: Being Andrew Plotkin, by J. Robinson Wheeler
* Best individual puzzle: Rematch (the whole game), by Andrew Pontious
* Best individual NPC: Galatea, in Galatea, by Emily Short
* Best individual PC: Rameses, by Stephen Bond
* Best use of medium: Shrapnel, by Adam Cadre
NEW GAMES
We seem to be in a bit of a drought at the moment, though it gives me
pause to think that I now consider a period in which over 20 games are
released (tiny though some may be) a drought. Still, aside from the
entries in the IF Arcade and SmoochieComp, the only major new release
has been Textfire Golf, by one "J.T. Adams." The real author has never
made any official announcement (that I've seen) stepping out from behind
this pseudonym, but he's been loose enough about the secret, unlike
some of the Arcade and SmoochieComp authors, that I feel comfortable
naming him here.
* IF Arcade by various authors
* Textfire Golf by J.T. Adams, aka Adam Cadre
* SmoochieComp games by various authors
* Late SmoochieComp games, including:
-- Nothing More, Nothing Less by Giles Duchesne
-- Tale of the Kissing Bandit by Cary Valentino, aka J. Robinson
Wheeler
-- Voices by Aris Katsaris
TELNET TO MY HEART
Some mad fiend in New Mexico has been slowly working toward the goal of
making all the IF the world has ever known available on his BBS via
telnet. The address is chungkuo.org, and going there can give you a
taste of Level 9, Magnetic Scrolls, or Infocom games you might otherwise
never be able to try, not to mention the copious amounts of freeware IF
available in its archives. One word of warning: ChungKuo uses a lot of
fancy-schmancy colors and stuff in its communications, so you'll
probably need to find a good Telnet client, or try using their Java
client at http://chungkuo.org. If you're using a client, try a black
background for everything -- otherwise, you may be surprised at what
you're not seeing!
SMALL TIME TERPS
If you own a PsionS5, Revo, Mako, or some other palmtop computer using
the EPOC operating system, prepare to enter palmtop IF heaven. In
addition to the Frotz interpreter that's been available for that
platform for some time, there have just emerged Hugo, Level 9, TADS, and
Magnetic Scrolls interpreters for EPOC. To find them, surf on over to
http://www.shoresystems.net/palmtime.
LAST TRAIN TO ZORKSVILLE
For those of you who haven't yet obtained a Masterpieces of Infocom CD,
currently the only legal way to own most Infocom games, you have one
more chance. The folks at http://www.lacegem.com/ have stockpiled a
bunch of them, and are selling them off for between 25 and 28 English
pounds apiece. Sure, it's more than Masterpieces originally sold for,
but considering how many games you get and how much *they* each
originally sold for, it's still a bargain. According to the emails the
lacegem.com folks have sent me, they still have "several hundred in
stock." Then again, I just checked the Activision website, and they
appear to be selling physical versions of Masterpieces again for 15
dollars American. So take your pick, but don't miss these classic games.
(Man, I sound like a used car salesman. They really are good games,
though.)
O REVIEWERS, WHERE ART THOU?
Several of you are in this issue, but many more are not! A healthy SPAG
means a SPAG with reviews from a broad range of people. Why not write
just one and see how you like it? If you're wondering just what games
need reviewing, consult the handy list below, which as always is listed
alphabetically, not in terms of preference:
SPAG 10 MOST WANTED LIST
========================
1. Acheton
2. Busted!
3. Dr. Dumont's Wild P.A.R.T.I.
4. Heroine's Mantle (a non-spoilery review, that is, unlike the SPAG
Specifics review that appears in this issue.)
5. Hollywood Hijinx
6. IF Arcade games (any, some, or all!)
7. Letters From Home
8. SmoochieComp games (any, some, or all!)
9. Textfire Golf
10. Westfront PC
KEY TO SCORES AND REVIEWS--------------------------------------------------
Consider the following review header:
NAME: Cutthroats
AUTHOR: Infocom
EMAIL: ???
DATE: September 1984
PARSER: Infocom Standard
SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
AVAILABILITY: LTOI 2
URL: Not available.
When submitting reviews: Try to fill in as much of this info as you can.
If you choose, you may also provide scores for the games you review, as
explained in the SPAG FAQ. The scores will be used in the ratings
section. Authors may not rate or review their own games.
More elaborate descriptions of the rating and scoring systems may be found
in the FAQ and in issue #9 of SPAG, which should be available at:
ftp://ftp.gmd.de:/if-archive/magazines/SPAG/
and at http://www.sparkynet.com/spag
REVIEWS -------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Cedric Knight <ADDRESS REMOVED>
TITLE: The Abbey
AUTHOR: Art LaFrana
EMAIL: lafrana SP@G genesis.mcs.com ?
DATE: 1993
PARSER: Not bad
SUPPORTS/PLATFORM: MS-DOS
AVAILABILITY: Shareware, $10
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/pc/abbey.zip
VERSION: 1.0
You are a 14th century scholar sent, by no less a personage than the
Pope himself, to recover ten treasures after a fire at the Abbey of
Montglane. This old-time DOS adventures deserves a SPAG review for its
attempts to bring the medieval thriller genre to IF, and for its good
puzzles, plot, and imagery. This imagery is achieved despite
descriptions which are not surprisingly economic considering that parser
and world are condensed into a 51K executable. Theres a sense of
incredulity at certain points as the plot develops, but the denouement
is satisfying, providing revelation and resolution of what has gone
before. Some pieces recur from LaFranas earlier and rougher "Hampton
Manor", but these are merely in-jokes, and not distracting.
Your score proceeds through a series of ranks, which also neatly split
the game into seven sections, which although set in the same environment
involve different puzzles of increasing complexity. One logical but
complex puzzle (perhaps the most complex) eventually results in apparent
bloodshed when you dispatch the only NPC of any significance, but since
the first time you encounter him hes likely to kill you, it might
reasonably be considered self-defence.
The parser is claimed to be better than that in "Hampton Manor", and is
certainly adequate, but there are still verb problems. As in the
previous game, "move" is more effective than "search", contrary to
widespread IF convention, and one puzzle early in the game is
effectively impossible for non-US English speakers. I do not consider
revealing unintentional difficulties to be spoilers, and as this is not
the only game with this problem it is worth mentioning. The verb in
question is "pry" which as far as I know isnt used in the intended
sense outside North America. So here is an appeal to library designers
to include "pry" as a standard verb synonymous with "prise", "jemmy",
"prize", "jimmy", "jimmi", "lever" and "force".
The games later stages are genuinely demanding, including one puzzle
involving not just a bit of arithmetic but also close observation of
scenery. One problem with this is that by the time you get to this stage
you may well have forgotten a clue. Worth trying, and, if the author is
still collecting it, also worth the registration fee.
PLOT: Fantastical (1.4) ATMOSPHERE: Suitably creepy (1.4)
WRITING: Evocative (1.3) GAMEPLAY: Guess the verb (1)
VARIETY: Unique structure (1.7)
OVERALL: 6.8
CHARACTERS: Sparse (0.6) PUZZLES: Tricky (1.4)
DIFFICULTY: Hard
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: Robin Adams <robinadams SP@G ukonline.co.uk>
NAME: Above and Beyond!
AUTHOR: Michael J. Sousa
EMAIL: msousa SP@G efortress.com
DATE: January 2000
PARSER: TADS standard
SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/above.gam
VERSION: 1.2
Michael says that this game is the first he has written with TADS, but
he doesn't make it clear whether it is his first IF game ever, or not.
If it is, it is extremely good for a first game; and even if it is not,
it's not a bad little game by any means.
You play Alex, a programmer newly hired for a software company whose
name is never revealed. As you pull into the parking lot for your first
day, you realise you've left your ID card at home. Just in case you
think the company will be understanding, as you approach the main doors,
you witness a man named Bill being fired for losing his ID. And so your
first problem is neatly set: how to get inside.
As you snoop around outside the building trying to work this out, you
overhear a conversation between two FBI agents who are investigating a
series of abductions among the employees of the company. Once inside the
building, investigating these disappearances forms the main plot of the
game.
This is not a Deadline-style detective game, though; while there are one
or two clues to find or conversations to overhear, most of the problems
are of the traditional kind: obtaining objects, getting through locked
doors, and all the other activities we IF-ers love so much.
These puzzles aren't very many - it's a relatively short game - but most
of them are very well polished. As it should be, it is often easy to see
what you are supposed to do, but difficult to see how you should do it.
They are all perfectly logical and very satisfying to solve, with one
exception. (The exception is how to open the prison cell door. I had to
resort to the walkthrough for that, and even now, I'm not sure how it
was supposed to work.)
One problem - how to get past Greg and Ed the guards - reminded me very
much of the Babel fish problem in Hitchhiker's (and, despite some
people's opinions, that is a good thing). You find the first part of the
solution, and a second obstacle is revealed. Beat that, and a third is
found; and so on, until you get all parts in place and watch it unfold
like clockwork. Great fun.
Throughout the game, Michael shows a good instinct for how much of a
clue to give the player when you get the answer to a problem `almost
right'. If you are wearing an incomplete disguise, for example, you will
be told which part you are missing - but not where or how to get it, of
course.
There is also a very sparse HINT function. It hardly ever gives the
complete solution to a problem; most of the time it simply tells you
which problem you should be tackling next, sometimes it gives the broad
outline of the solution.
This is also the first game I have played with a WINNABLE command, which
shows whether or not the game has been put into an unwinnable state.
This is, in my opinion, a great thing, and I'm glad to hear it's
becoming quite common.
I should mention that the game is extremely linear. There is never a
choice as to which problem to solve next - even on occasions when it
would have been easy to do so. There is always something that means you
can't get into a necessary area until you've solved the previous
problem. This didn't bother me too much, as it fit into the general
spirit of the game. You'll know whether it will bother you or not.
My main complaint is that the descriptions are so dull. Except for a few
pieces of humour (which stick out like sore thumbs), we are told the
absolute bare minimum about each room or object. Here are a few samples:
Front of Building
You're standing in front of the building of your new company. It's
a two story building that is shaped like an inverted V. The entrance
is marked by two large glass doors. To the east is the parking lot.
Paths also lead north and south.
Parking Lot
You're in the middle of a fairly large parking lot, standing
beside your car. To the west is the front of the building.
Copy Room
You've made your way into a small room used to store day-to-day
office equipment. Various pieces of equipment line the wall.
>X SHREDDER
The shredder is sitting on a small table at the far end of the room.
It is currently turned on.
>X PEN
It's an ordinary pen.
And so forth. There's nothing wrong with a few descriptions like this -
after all, Zork's "South of House" was hardly the most interesting
location ever. But I could have chosen any room or object in this game
at all; I honestly can't think of a single exception. Each one is a
basic description, then a list of the things you need to know to solve
the game. Taken all together, it makes the world seem very, well, grey.
This is particularly true once you get inside your office. According to
the comments in the credits, the game had a maze at some point in its
history which was later taken out. I'm willing to bet that the maze was
the office, which consists of about 30 cubicles and offices, and the
hallways between. Michael has straightened it out, making it much easier
to navigate, but has kept the hallways' and cubicles' descriptions
identical except for the name of the occupant.
Michael claims the game is based very closely around the office where he
actually works. If this is true, he must be one of the most bored people
on Earth. Not only are the rooms so monotone, but his colleagues are all
clones. Meet one of them for the first time, and he or she will rise,
read your name tag, shake hands, and introduce themselves. Examine them,
and you will either see:
He's your average looking male.
or:
She's your average looking female.
They spend their day alternating between `trying to get some work done',
and talking on the phone. They refuse to talk about each other. It would
have been wonderful if the kidnappings turned out to be some sinister
force replacing people with these soulless androids, but sadly this
turns out not to be the case.
This especially hits you because you are set tasks where the only point
seems to be `See if you can find your way from here to this cubicle' -
another remnant of the maze, I imagine. Mazes are dull, but at least
there would have been a bit of challenge. As it is, these treks are
simply tedious.
I think I've concentrated too much on the bad points of this game -
mainly because the good points are the puzzles, and I can't describe
them too much without giving things away. Don't come to this game for
good writing, characterisation, or a good story - the plot is quite
simplistic. Do come for some very well designed puzzles, and a
satisfying little game that will keep you occupied for two or three
days.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: Cedric Knight <ADDRESS REMOVED>
Intrigued by the sole 8.7 score given to this game and a request for
reviews, I downloaded the TADS file and started playing. This was
immediately after finishing "Little Blue Men", to which this new game
has some similarities, such as being set in a dull and frustrating
office. However, whereas "Little Blue Men" was tightly constructed, this
new game seems to sprawl a little, and consequently you find yourself
wandering through many locations that are essentially the same; its
good to keep a map because many have the same brief description.
The premise seems straightforward. You are Alex (a nicely genderless
name, but why are all the managers men?), a programmer starting the
first day of work at a new company. The first problem of the game is
that you have no ID card to gain entry to the building. The first
problem *with* the game is that that shouldnt be a problem: for
example, why cant you simply talk to the receptionist? This kind of
contrivance sticks out a little, and the game continues in this manner
for a while, with linear but frequently unlikely puzzle solutions. Of
course, all adventures have necessary objects just lying around to some
degree, but in Above and Beyond! this arbitrariness is quite
conspicuous. I also had to resort to using HINT occasionally to
double-check I was doing the right thing. (Despite what the author says
about being sparse, these HINTS are about right, subject to the two
criticisms here. The game also provides a useful WINNABLE command to
check the current position is worthy of saving and that you havent left
any important items behind.)
The story develops mostly by eavesdropping, which lends the game an
atmosphere reminiscent of a David Mamet thriller, as well as giving a
good opportunity for humour. You can also tell some of the authors
interests by references to Page and Plant plus a few IT-based jokes. The
plot can be neatly divided into three. The introductory section concerns
getting access to the building, and is fairly obvious; I was lucky to
find a slightly concealed object first time off, and only had slight
problems with wanting to use "drop" instead of "put". The second section
involved a light satire of office work, and seemed reasonably intuitive
until some shenanigans with "Bob", where the player has to do a lot of
waiting and it doesnt seem the puzzle solution is going to get you
anywhere. Ideally in IF, I would say that the complexity of the problem
should be proportionate to the importance the player is likely to give
it. At this one point, I admit to looking up someones else solution,
but after that it was plain sailing. The final section begins with a
nice puzzle which involves dying several times to deduce the complete
solution, and then again seemed to me to go off at a tangent, with the
solution just out of reach because one useful object has a second, more
obscure role. From then on, the game decides you dont need any more
hints, and a rapid climax was for me let down by a final confrontation
with the villain of the piece which lacked credibility.
The game makes up for the formulaic and functional plot in the
non-player characters, of whom there are around 30. The office workers
are, the author claims, based on real people, but seem to be cut from
the same cloth (or class), with superficial details differing in the way
the author satirise their frequently bovine mannerisms. My favourite
among these is Brian the Guardian of the Library: "Brian is having an
in-depth conversation on the pro's and con's of formulating a policy of
systematically assigning street names to all city streets using the GPS
as a guide. This could, and probably will, take a while." The NPCs
activities may noticeably depend on quite unrelated actions by you, but
this does not seriously detract from the game.
The writing is literate, but Varicella it is not, unfortunately.
"Walking the plank" makes you "giggle to yourself thinking you're on a
pirate ship" which I only criticise of because its the kind of thing I
might write. I only found one or two typos ("compliment" where it should
be "complement") or minor programming errors.
In conclusion, the good puzzles and characters are let down slightly by
the plot, and while not worthy of the high score previously given, is a
commendable first effort.
PLOT: Disappointing (0.9) ATMOSPHERE: Good, filmic (1.3)
WRITING: Serviceable (1.1) GAMEPLAY: Repetitious (1.1)
VARIETY: Nice set pieces (1.3)
OVERALL: 5.7
CHARACTERS: Entertaining (1.3) PUZZLES: Mostly good (1.2)
DIFFICULTY: Mostly middling-to-easy
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: David Myers <dmyers SP@G ic.sunysb.edu>
NAME: Dangerous Curves
AUTHOR: Irene Callaci
EMAIL: icallaci SP@G csupomona.edu
DATE: June 2000
PARSER: Inform
SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
AVAILABILITY: GMD
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/curves.z8
VERSION: Release 8
This game's been on my mind a while. I just can't shake it. She's
like a five-martini hangover that just won't go away.
For just about any subgenre of IF, in general, if you wait long enough
you will eventually see a game that "nails" the subgenre. For those of
you groaning, I assure you that (1) this review is not entirely ranting
if-crit, and (2) not a total slobber-fest proclamation that Dangerous
Curves is the best detective IF ever made. But let's face it, sometimes
a game comes along which makes it really hard for others to stake a
claim in the same subgenre for years afterward. And so, when I started
playing D.C., a significant question in my mind was "Has the private
detective storyline (as IF) been beaten to death (long) before Dangerous
Curves came along?" The short transcript to this question (in a more
polite form, perhaps) might be:
> Is this the game that "nails shut" mystery IF for at least
> the next few years?
Not quite.
> Well, does this game add anything to that subgenre that
> feels really fresh?
Here and there, yes.
> Does D.C. at least provide a satisfying reward as a
> competent, mainstream stab at a subgenre that some
> might say is already fairly well populated?
Absolutely! I can't say so loudly enough. A perfect example to typify my
case is the description for one of the prime female characters and
suspects:
>x jessica
Tall, blonde, and cool as a martini at five o'clock. Legs that begin
somewhere down around Cape Horn and don't quit till they reach the
Northwest Territories. The type of woman other women despise. The
type every man falls for. Once.
Ok, look, it's not grand innovation on the detective strain, but can you
argue that it fails to ante up on the promise of what Chandler, Sam
Spade, and Easy Rawlins might deliver?
What I believe makes IF so well suited for mystery is that the most
tried and true prologues are of the amnesiac genre (e.g. "You wake up in
a small white room, noticing that your skull has sustained a sharp blow.
Ears ringing, you hobble to the door to find it locked before noticing
the small trace of blood on your hospital gown."). This game plays into
that theme nicely, with the private eye appropriately grasping at straws
early on, and building up his case slowly and naturally.
Which brings us to the question of plot. Does it live up? My answer is,
"Almost." As far as it goes, I can't criticize the plotting itself, per
se. The game grinds out as a pretty decent clue-finding exercise for a
while, followed by figuring out just how to corner the culprit. The
trouble isn't that the plot doesn't hold together, nor that there are
non-intuitive moments, big gaps, or ridiculous leaps that the player
must make. The problem, if there is one, is that the storyline winds up
more linear and compact than the player will imagine it should be. Based
on the first scene, I would have expected more deceptive twists and
turns as I sifted my way through the clues. In literary terms, this
basically fleshes out a novella, after the opening moments seem to have
promised a full-length novel. Imagine seeing the first hour of the movie
"Chinatown", and not the full version. A great half of a movie. Really
great. Abbreviated in form, minus much of the intrigue of the real deal.
But ask yourself, when it comes to IF, how many other works have
successfully addressed this?
Besides the plot, there are a pile of little features and touches that
make this game more enjoyable, and which should be emulated by others:
- Use of keys is handled automatically (no fumbling for the right one
outside a locked door.)
- There is an in-game notepad. This can be used to avoid mapping the
whole world, or for any other data you want to store there.
- The GO TO <LOCATION> command further obviates the need for
extensive mapping, and smoothly handles operation of your car.
- The in-game hint system is particularly clever, amusing, adaptive
to your progress, and seamless with the plot. All at once.
Those are just gimmicks, though. You may be wondering what it IS that
makes this game take up the maximal 512K storage of an overstuffed z8
game file. The answer is that the author decided to implement a boodle's
worth of stuff that other authors would have considered mere
distraction. In short, Irene went a-world-buildin', and did a mostly
fine job of it, with a medium-to-large number of locations which each
have their fair share of fully implemented items. And, for the most
part, all of this mess interacts with all the other mess pretty well.
Honestly, how many other IF-towns have you been to recently that had
functioning offices, police stations, newsrooms, libraries, service
stations, hospitals, bars, pawnshops, apartments, cars, restaurants,
banks, etc. Of course, it's all under the illusion of
man-behind-the-curtain "functioning", but that's the point. There's even
good IF-style humor lurking behind many of the stock answers that grease
the wheels behind each the scenes of the functioning world-spaces
(example here from the pawnshop):
>kiss earl
Earl works out at the local gym a couple times a week. You don't.
>hit earl
Earl works out at the local gym a couple times a week. You don't.
>break display case
Rumor has it Earl once killed a man for less.
You get the picture.
Naturally, there are exceptions. Like many games with mandatory sleeping
and eating, there are annoyances when you haven't really played along
correctly. I tend to explore the locations of a large game pretty
randomly at first, without solving puzzles (when I can actually get away
with it), and that's hard with sleeping/eating games. And, of course,
there is the money handling algorithm, which attempts to help you out by
avoiding the need for counting your change too precisely. Some players
will agree, and some won't. This shakes out as pretty minor,
fortunately.
In all, Irene should be lauded for her example of solid top-to-bottom
game design. Even better, the spit and polish make the player feel like
they are inside a game with has a complete, all-around feel to it. Like
a good DVD that has plenty of extras and good packaging, Dangerous
Curves has all the right finishing touches (short of hard-copy feelies)
that give it a near-professional quality.
Returning to the point at which this review began, let's just take a
second to survey the scope of private eye IF that has come before, to
better put in context how this game should now be judged. Previous IF
mysteries include Infocom's Witness and Deadline, Gumshoe, and most
recently Guilty Bastards. Given its recentness and degree of similarity,
I assert that Guilty Bastards is a key reference point. From my view,
G.B. is a competent and engaging mystery. It set a mark for all-around
quality as the flagship game of the Hugo system, but didn't quite impose
a moratorium on detective IF. If you will allow me a little license: We
might say that while the movie {game} Usual Suspects {Guilty Bastards}
rejuvenated the atrophying subgenre of suspense {mystery} movies {IF},
and raised the bar, there was and is still room for artistic success by
others. Take a look at L.A. Confidential or Talented Mr. Ripley
{Dangerous Curves}.
Given the thirst for larger, longer, non-comp games Irene has to be
greatly praised for producing an enjoyable, well-integrated game of this
size.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: Adam Myrow <myrow SP@G eskimo.com>
NAME: FailSafe
AUTHOR: Jon Ingold
EMAIL: ji207 SP@G cam.ac.uk
DATE: December, 2000
PARSER: Inform
SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
AVAILABILITY: GMD
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/FailSafe.z5
VERSION: 1? (no version info shown and version command ignored)
This is possibly the strangest piece of IF I've ever encountered. It's
fairly short -- in fact, I think even the slowest person could complete
it in 30 minutes. The story is confusing. So far as I can tell, you are
at a base or something. You get a distress call on an emergency
frequency and you have to respond. It seems that a small space pod has
been attacked and there is only one survivor who is trying to fix the
engines before the ship crashes. To make matters worse, there is a war
going on and the enemy is massing for an attack. That's really all I can
tell without giving the end away, although really, that's all I'm sure
of. The ending is sure to be a surprise, and there are at least three
different endings that I am aware of. It's hard to tell if you've won or
lost, you just completed the story. The other odd thing is that all of
the standard meta commands (score, save, script, version, etc.) are
disabled. I think the author is trying to provide tension by making you
feel that you don't have much time and you can't save in real life.
However, he could have at least left scripting enabled so that it would
be easy to provide a transcript of something. The only way you could do
this now is to copy and paste.
As for the writing itself, it is intentionally choppy. The idea is that
the signal is really poor, almost inaudible in fact. If you type an
invalid command, the response is to the effect that the other person
can't hear you due to the static. Here is a sample to give a taste of
this game. This is actually what you get after the opening credits.
Bzzt. Crackle. *Static*
"...hello? Hello? Can... me? .. Anyone! Hel.... Need.. hello?"
Bleep - PLEASE WAIT - Locating/Tuning signal...
..
".. help. Repeat, can anybody hear me? Can you hear me? Hello.."
>>yes
"Hello? Hello! The .. <crackle> pretty bad. Are you receiving this?
Over."
>>yes
"Oh, thank God. Thank God.. ..emergency frequency.. We need help.
This is the space pod 'Serpentine'. We've been attacked, a small
cruiser. They.. they came out of nowhere.. tried to board us..
...stly dead.. systems are all messed up, we're drifting.. I need
help to fix this.."
"I'm by the console, there's wires everywhere. The computer flashing
something. What do I do? Hello?"
Note the double prompt. This makes it obvious from the start that
this isn't your traditional game. A poster on rec.games.int-fiction
called this game "Suspended for dummies," but I don't see it that
way. The only similarity to Suspended that I could see is the fact
that you are dropped into the middle of a disaster without much
warning. I really don't think there's anything like this in
existence. It's certainly a unique way to tell a story, but I am not
sure if I like it or not. Perhaps if the multiple endings were a bit
more descriptive, but they continue the choppy nature of the
beginning with multiple signals being received in some cases. The
bottom line is that people who like to fill in stories from bits and
pieces will probably like this particular game more than those who,
like me, enjoy a rich, detailed world.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
TITLE: Fear
AUTHOR: Chuan-Tze Teo
EMAIL: ctt20 SP@G hermes.cam.ac.uk
DATE: 1996
PARSER: Inform standard
SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition96/fear/fear.z5
VERSION: Release 1.0
One of the forgotten treasures of the 1996 competition, Chuan-Tze Teo's
Fear, is subtitled "An Interactive Nightmare"--but though the setting
(alone in your house) and apparent initial premise (beginning of opening
text: "You are running for your life down dark, labyrinthine corridors,
your heart pounding almost as loudly as the heavy boots of your
relentless pursuer") evokes horror/slasher IF, this is actually
something quite different. The drama is more psychological than literal,
and the object is more akin to therapy than to saving your skin as
such--and while it's not a perfect effort, it's notable in a few
respects.
You're irrationally afraid of spiders, heights, sounds, and the dark,
and you wake up in the middle of the night, completely unable to move
around your house normally because of your fears. You end up conquering
your fears in a series of episodes--one of them seemingly a flashback,
two others apparently dreams--triggered by various objects you encounter
in your house. The way in which the flashbacks are triggered is a bit
tortured, but it's a minor sin--the episodes themselves are
imaginatively done, with reasonably logical connections to your various
phobias.
The atmosphere is nicely done: the game doesn't so much portray a scary
setting as portray an ordinary setting, with details magnified out of
proportion. E.g., "You feel suddenly claustrophobic as you hear a
rustling nearby. What lurks in the shadows, waiting to pounce?"
Sometimes, the events that set off your alarms are entirely internal:
"As you try to compose your mind, dark memories wash over you:
explosions, death, the tolling of funeral bells, gloom, isolation."
Arguably, this is one of the few works of IF where the PC's mind is as
well rendered as the physical setting. If there's a flaw, it's that you
don't get much about *how* you became so mentally crippled--there are
vague allusions to memories, but nothing concrete. It seems like
confronting whatever caused the fear in the first place would be both
more effective and more interesting, in terms of characterization.
Most of the puzzles take place in the phobia episodes, and they aren't
easy; a few of them, in fact, verge on the unfair. The worst case
involves an object that you have to destroy in order to use--and it's an
object that seems like it would be useful in its original states for
solving the puzzle at hand. The solutions are logical, but in a few
cases in particular, there isn't much in the game to signal that you're
on the right track, so things are harder than they should be. Adding to
the difficulty is a guess-the-syntax problem in one episode that may
prevent you from realizing that you're on the right track even when you
are. The last puzzle suddenly introduces a time limit, and it's a pretty
tight time limit at that--you're likely to miss it a few times while
you're figuring out what the game wants of you. There's a comprehensive
hint system, so the problems aren't intractable, but it'd be nice if the
game's execution were as good as its concept; puzzles as hard as these
risk requiring so much mental energy of the player that he/she loses
sight of the plot, which is the best thing the game has going for it.
The concept is good enough to overcome the game design problems, though,
and it's not simply an excuse for outlandish puzzle settings. The PC's
neuroses are sufficiently real that failing to do certain things to keep
them at bay actually kills you; saying "snap out of it" to the PC isn't
an option, of course. In that sense, you're forced to be the character
in a way that's still uncommon in IF (and was even more so in 1996,
before experimental IF was in vogue). The vividness of the setting lies
not in what you see but in how you experience it--i.e., through the eyes
of the phobic PC. It may not sound revolutionary, but getting the player
to focus not on the PC's external goals but on the internal barriers he
has to clear represents a real shift in goal-orientation--and even if
the puzzle-solving gets projected into external tasks, it's still worth
pondering. (That is, you don't actually delve into your own head, a la
Losing Your Grip--though one scene comes close. But what's in your head
is sufficiently close to the surface throughout the game that your
puzzle-solving is almost the same thing.)
As a set of challenging puzzles or as an exercise in atmosphere, Fear
works, on the whole--well enough to be worth rediscovering five years
later.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
[Note: Stas' English, by his own admission, is not so hot. Consequently,
this review has been heavily edited -- everything lost in the
translation is entirely my fault. --PO]
From: Stas Starkov <stas_ SP@G mail.rb.ru>
NAME: Gateway 2: Homeworld
AUTHOR: Legend Entertainment
EMAIL: unknown
DATE: 1993
PARSER: Legend standard
SUPPORTS: MS-DOS
AVAILABILITY: Game is commercial, but I don't know where to get it now.
URL: http://www.legendent.com
First of all, I must say that "Gateway 2: Homeworld", like many Legend
games, has several differences from almost all IF (interactive fiction)
games, especially from games available at the IF Archive --
ftp.gmd.de/if-archive. These differences are obvious from the moment the
game is loaded, but let's look at them point by point:
1. This game is commercial.
I warn you - the following is my opinion, but it is supported by many.
I think that people don't value something that they get for free. When
you get something without paying for it (with money or with your sweat
and blood), you don't expect too much; you don't have the urge to milk
as much benefit as possible from the thing. That's life. And life is
sometimes very cruel to kind people. (But that's another story, which,
by the way, you can read about in "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert
Heinlein, or in the works of a writer named Jubal Hershow [I'm not
completely sure about that name - I have only a Russian translation of
the book] who said many such wise but cynical things.) I don't know
exactly how to express it in English, but in Russian there is a saying:
"We value something only after losing it". Again, that's life, man.
I really _hope_ that you get the idea. Do you?
2. This game is a professional piece of work.
"Gateway 2" was created by Legend Entertainment. The people that work
there are paid for their jobs. In the credits you can see about twenty
people, including some important figures in IF history. In case you
didn't know, Bob Bates -- author of the great games "Sherlock: The Riddle
of the Crown Jewels" and "Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur" when he
worked for Infocom Inc. -- now works at Legend and took part in the
creation of this game. The staff at Legend is composed of professionals
who have proven that they _can_ do good games.
This game is indeed very solid work. All events tied tightly, no holes
in the plot, good development of characters (NPC and PC), writing
without spelling errors. "Gateway 2" has millions of small pieces that
help you enjoy the game. Most (thank God, not all) games on GMD have
from zero (sometimes less) to only a portion of those pieces -- maybe
half a million small hints of talent that ensure the player's pleasure.
That's life -- no one is perfect. Dealing with these games is a bit like
listening to the Vogon Captain's poetry from "Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy" -- "Enjoy!"
And this game got enough beta-testing. I think you know what I mean.
3. This game has graphics.
Yes, this game has graphics. Some hate this unnecessary _feature_, some
love it and can't live without it. If you're one of the haters, your
problem is easily solved -- you can just turn off the _nasty, annoying_
graphics and play in text only mode. The 3D graphics in this game are
hardly top notch, but you can ignore them (by pressing ESC). I don't
want to explain the interface (see the game's manual) but I must mention
that this game _allows_ use of the mouse, and that there are scrolling
menus where you can choose verbs and nouns. And don't forget: you can
turn off the graphics.
Next, I must point out a phrase from the game manual:
As you play Gateway II: HOMEWORLD you will encounter several screen
interfaces that are different from the standard Legend interface
described earlier. These alternate interfaces include cut scenes,
dialogue trees, various futuristic computer systems, an alien genetic
manipulator, a starship control panel, a robot interface, and other
interesting devices and interfaces.
And at least one puzzle _requires_ examining and remembering graphic cut
scenes.
4. This game has music, but there are no sound effects.
"Gateway 1" had sound effects, but they were mediocre and low quality.
So Legend threw away the sound effects for the sequel, "Gateway 2". As
for music - you can turn it off, if you want, also. But before that,
maybe you should give the really good MIDI music an opportunity to touch
your heart (or stomach if you're a text-only purist). Music
(unfortunately mono) for this game was written by Glen Dahlgren, Doug
Brandon, and Eric Heberling, and it really helps to evoke the mood of
various scenes of the game -- tragedy, triumph, danger, curiosity,
suspense. In my opinion, "Gateway 2" has one of the best _MIDI_ music
soundtracks of all the games that I've ever played.
Well, on to the game!
Humanity began to dream of the day when it was not human at all. And
that dream (some think that it was laziness) impelled people to want
more, to think about a way how to get it and, at last, to do it. All
history is based on that dream, in my opinion. Then, through the various
forms of fiction, bare dream transforms into science fiction (SF), where
wild dreams merge with technical progress, trying to foretell the
future. The future is unknown and humans fear uncertainty, but they try
to imagine problems hard enough to deal with. That's why SF is full of
troubles. ;-)
First of all, "Gateway 2" is based on the Gateway novels by Frederick
Pohl. "Gateway 2" is an SF adventure of the near (well, almost near)
future -- 2112 AD. And I'm happy to say (after playing IF games like
"Kaged"), that the future in this game almost corresponds with my
visions of the future. It is quite realistic, capitalism with
mega-corporations and so on. There are no strange technical things that
you're not familiar with from other SF stories. The setting for this
game was taken from the Gateway Universe, so a professional SF writer
did all the work, and it feels true.
By the way, if you're interested in reading all the Pohl novels set in
this universe, here is, I think, a full list:
Gateway
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon
Heechee Rendezvous
Annals of the Heechee
The Gateway Trip
Story... well, you're a rich ex-prospector of Gateway (an artifact left
by the alien Heechee -- it's a big space station that contains thousands
of faster-then-light spaceships). You rest peacefully without troubles,
but then... I don't want to tell you more for fear of ruining your
interest in discovering the story on your own. I can only promise you
that the story is in the best traditions of SF. I can also tell you that
you will be traveling in space.
Puzzles. All the puzzles are story based (!) and logical! The game gives
you enough hints to ensure your attention to detail, and I like it this
way. The first part of the game is easy, but then sometimes you need to
scratch your head before doing the next turn. You can get in an
unwinnable situation, but these (errr...) alternative endings are richly
described and even worth playing. So save often and keep old save files.
On the other hand, if you want to get a long story, "Gateway 2" turns to
be very linear, but it is well done and you don't notice its linearity
as long as you don't want Zork-like cave exploring.
I must note the conversation system in "Gateway 2". It is menu-based. It
is possible to have a good menu-based conversation system -- I really
think so, despite the many opinions to the contrary on R*IF. For
example, there is another, in my opinion, good implementation --
Legend's "Companions of Xanth". But what's wrong with the conversation
system in "Gateway 2"? First, your previous phrases are not removed from
the menu at all. Second, I think that the dialogues, as literature, are
the worst part of the game. I strongly suggest you pay as little
attention as possible to the conversations, but sometimes you need to
talk to someone to get useful or necessary information. So just run
through all points of the menu, barely reading it, and forget it. This
method will make the game more challenging and remove overly
straightforward hints. ;-)
The game has a huge amount of rooms, but fortunately you only have
access to less then ten rooms simultaneously. This is a good way to
implement text games. Doing so, the player doesn't need to wander in all
hundred rooms and examine every object closely (like in "Anchorhead" by
Michael Gentry). And there is an auto-mapping feature -- it makes life
(um... the game, I mean) easier.
The literature aspect of the game is at least good. I can't say
excellent, because I'm Russian and don't understand all nuances. I'll
just give you an example from the game.
Corridor
The corridor is about ten meters long. One end connects to the
hull door of your probeship. The other end terminates in a
heavy bulkhead. The walls of the corridor and the bulkhead seem
to have an underlying structure of rectangular metal plates
covered by clumps and veins of lumpy, melted looking metal. The
metal glows with a soft blue radiance that is bright enough to
illuminate the corridor. A metal door is set into the bulkhead
to the north. It is closed.
>examine door
A closed metal door is set into a bulkhead that blocks further
progress down the corridor. The heavy door is a powered
mechanical unit, a huge slab of glowing blue metal covered with
elaborate patterns. To the left of the door, on the bulkhead
itself, is a blue hemispherical protrusion, a round bump that
might be a button.
>open door
Ancient machinery grinds to life and the door slides open.
To my mind, everyone has forgotten what a manual is for an IF game.
"Gateway 2" has a manual. I own only the electronic version of it, but I
can say that this manual will really help you if you're new to IF. There
is an installation procedure, explanation of game commands, the story of
"Gateway 1" -- all you need to start playing the game. It is clearly
written and covers most essential subjects (but bear in mind that this
game was written in 1993).
The game itself usually doesn't need configuration, but if your sound
card doesn't work -- consult the manual. This game goes fine in a DOS
box under Windows 9x (not tested under NT and 2000), but I recommend you
play in plain DOS.
I'm almost finished. One last thing that I can suggest you read -- the
copyright notice in the game manual! ;-) You will be pleased.
Play this game if you're looking for good solid IF, especially if you
enjoy SF.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: Alex Freeman <Freemanry SP@G aol.com>
NAME: Humbug
AUTHOR: Graham Cluley
EMAIL: hamrag SP@G cix.co.uk
DATE: Aug 1991
PARSER: Quite good
SUPPORTS: DOS
AVAILABILITY: Public Domain
URL: http://members.aol.com/gcluley
In this game, you are Sidney Widdershins and have been sent to
Granddad's for the winter holidays. When you arrive there after being
deposited by a taxi and get in, you find that Granddad is asleep and is
holding a document. When you read it, you find that Granddad's neighbor,
Jasper, has offered to buy Granddad's home, Attervist Manor, since
Granddad is so deeply in debt. Granddad claims that there is hidden
treasure in the grounds of the manor, but Jasper apparently thinks he is
nuts. Granddad thinks lowly of Jasper and has written a rude word on the
document (not shown in the game). However, if Granddad is not nuts and
if there really is hidden treasure, you could help him get out of debt.
The atmosphere is unique and quite odd. For instance, there is a Viking
called Sven whose boat has been caught in the frozen lake nearby the
manor. There are also a bar, a hacker, and an octopus underneath the
manor. The game also does not always make sense. For instance, what is
giant slug doing in the manor? But, eh, who cares? It makes the game
interesting.
There are other interesting places you can explore, such as the forest
maze and the manor back in the Victorian times (via time machine).
The NPCs are fairly well developed. You can get to know them better by
asking them questions in the format "ask character about subject".
Obviously, the characters can't have a special response for everything,
so when you ask a character about something or someone he doesn't know
(e.g. asking someone who lives in the Victorian times about someone who
lives in modern times) the character has a special response to indicate
that he doesn't know anything about what you've asked. One of my
favorite responses is the one you get when you ask Horace the gardener
about something he doesn't know:
Horace looks suspiciously at me, but remains silent. I am not sure it
is in his terms of employment to actually communicate with sentient
life forms. Herbs and vegetables he can cope with, but people give
him problems.
Another interesting NPC is Kevin the clockwork shark, who is one of
Granddad's many inventions and was made by him during WWII. You get this
description of him upon entering the pantry for the first time:
I am in the pantry. It is a small, dark room - the only source of
light being a barred oval window built close to the ceiling in the
west wall. A definite niff of seaweed wafts around the shelves. Small
mountains of marzipan and icing sugar are liberally scattered across
the damp stone floor. There is a movement from behind one of the
taller mounds of marzipan and a shark totters around on his hind
fins. The shark smiles benignly at me, "Hello my little sugar-plum."
The shark paternally pats me on the head with a damp flipper,
flamboyantly places a small caddy on one of the pantry shelves. The
shark smiles at me again, and waggles his eyebrows in anticipation of
my response.
There are many other NPCs, such as a Victorian grave digger, Alex the
hacker, Jasper, and, of course, Granddad.
As you've probably noticed, the writing is quite descriptive. It's also
quite humorous. In fact, my wildcard points are for the humour in the
game. You also get funny responses if you try do silly actions. For
instance, typing DRINK PETROL gives you the response "Heh, heh. I think
not." You even get 10 points for it! My only complaint about it is that
it contains a few minor punctuation errors (as you might have noticed).
The parser is very good. It can understand fairly sophisticated
sentences and is easy to use, but it doesn't do some fancy stuff like
recognizing multiple sentences (not that I would type multiple sentences
if I could but still).
However, this game has one serious flaw. Most of the puzzles are either
too easy or too hard. For instance, I find a banana and later I find a
chimp. Gee, I wonder what to do next. That one is, of course, an example
of a puzzle that's too easy. A puzzle that is too hard is how you're
supposed to put out the fire underneath the manor. I don't know how
anyone is supposed to figure that puzzle out! It is quite illogical. The
hint system partially solves this problem, and it is quite good, but it
is no substitute for good puzzles. The only problem with it is if you
can't solve a puzzle because you haven't solved another puzzle, it won't
tell you that. Instead it gives a hint or the solution (it depends on
which you choose) of the puzzle whose solution you have requested. I
ended up getting solutions to puzzles I probably could have solved on my
own in this way because I didn't realize that it wasn't the puzzle I was
currently trying to solve that was the problem but some other one.
However, don't get me wrong. Not all the puzzles are bad. In fact,
almost half are quite good. It's just that there should have been more
good ones.
I also managed to find one bug in the game. In Humbug, you can EXAMINE
objects, or you can LOOK at them in order to get descriptions. You can
abbreviate EXAMINE with x and LOOK with l. I am more used to LOOKing at
objects than I am to EXAMINing them, so I used the abbreviation l. This
abbreviation worked on all the objects on which I tried it out EXCEPT
one. During the game, I decided to look at my hair because I thought
maybe that would help me solve a puzzle (I won't say how). When I typed
"l hair", the game didn't seem to understand the command. I later used
the hint system to get the solution to the puzzle that involved my hair.
I wondered how I could have solved that puzzle since I figured that I
couldn't look at my hair. However, when I looked at a written solution
for Humbug, I found out that you're supposed to type "x hair". The hair,
apparently, is the only object at which you can't LOOK but still can
EXAMINE, which isn't supposed to be the case for any of the objects.
This bug effectively prevented me from solving an important puzzle in
the game.
Anyhow, the plot in Humbug is wonderful! I'd say it's the best part of
the game! You are given bits of the story as the game progresses, and
there's one major plot twist! The ending is spectacular and was really
fun to read!
Overall, Humbug is a good game and is worth playing. Just be prepared
for some illogical puzzles here and there. It could have been an
excellent game if the puzzles had been better.
Atmosphere: 1.8
Gameplay: 1.5
Writing: 1.8
Plot: 2.0
Humour: 1.6
Total: 8.7
Characters: 1.5
Puzzles: .8
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: Adam Myrow <myrow SP@G eskimo.com>
NAME: Inform School
AUTHOR: William J. Shlaer
EMAIL: shlaer SP@G aol.com
DATE: December 1999
PARSER: Inform Standard
SUPPORTS: Infocom/Zcode interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware GMD
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/School.z5
VERSION: Release 1
I originally downloaded this file because I've always wanted to learn
Inform and start writing games eventually. I am somewhat familiar with
mainstream programming languages like C and C++, but I figured that it
was best to use the tools that are already designed for games. Like any
prospective Inform programmer, I had a copy of the Designer's manual,
the compiler, latest library, and sample source code. I had a vague
understanding of things, but wanted to experiment further and really try
to grasp them better. I tried a program called the Informatorium, but
found it sorely lacking in tutorial potential. It just wasn't
interactive enough although I got a good laugh at its IF references. So,
while browsing the index file on GMD, I encountered the entry for
school.z5 which proclaimed to be an Inform tutorial. "What the heck?" I
thought. It can't hurt to try it. So I downloaded it and discovered that
it is much more useful than Informatorium. In fact, the author wrote it
to be an improvement on that game and expand on it and make it truly
educational. The result is amazing for this purpose. Not only do you get
to see source code, you get to write it! That's right, you can try out
object creation and even create a simple game within the program and
yes, make mistakes. It's an implementation of Inform within Inform.
Actually, it calls itself INF, a severely truncated version of Inform,
but it lets you do most typical activities. In fact, I suspect that most
of the "Ruins" sample in the designer's manual could be created within
the context of the game.
The program starts out with a warning that it could crash an interpreter
and may not work on all Zcode interpreters. After that dismal warning,
you have the choice of going to the Inform lab, fully equipped, restore
a saved game, or start from the beginning. I started from the beginning
and got a lengthy notice about what to try if things didn't work and an
introduction about how I decided to take summer classes in aself-taught
Inform school. "Ok, whatever," I thought and started to explore and
read. It didn't take me long to find a text-book that explained what was
up and find a lab where Igor is! He sits around and comments on some of
your errors and can be made to give you a demo of how to go about
creating objects. From here, you're on your own. You have some
assignments in the book that is part of the game and you can read them
with simple commands. You can even mark which ones are done and which
still need doing. The assignments start out very simple and get harder
from there. The first assignment is to create a starting room and then
you add objects to that. Next you add doors, more rooms, locked
containers, and scored objects. You go into things that can be turned on
and off, and finally, get to start defining rules to make something a
poison, make it produce sound, and change default responses for taking
and dropping. You get to also experiment with naming objects in ways
that make it hard to interact with them. On top of all this, you can go
to "class rooms" that have the same numbers as the assignments and they
have fully implemented answers to each exercise. You can view their
source code and the book that you read within the game in some cases,
tells you exactly what to type. I haven't really followed the
assignments in exact order. I went out of my way to use them as examples
to create my own objects. For example, I started out with an airplane, a
bag of peanuts, and the tray that you would put food on while in flight.
I went from their and defined some other ideas that I wanted to try to
implement and now have a HAM radio that if on will generate a
description of hearing a conversation through static and if off, is
silent. It's fun to create objects without having to compile a complete
story file. Actually, I'm trying out ideas for my first Inform game
which I may or may not ever write. If I should write it, the game will
involve surviving a plane crash and having to get out of the forest. I
was thinking of having a HAM radio that you have to repair or make an
antenna for and use it to send out a distress signal. Like I said, I
don't know if this will ever amount to anything, but I like
experimenting and learning interactively at the same time.
As for the warnings about crashing the interpreter, it isn't kidding.
The program doesn't do real strict error checking, so if you forget
quotes where they should be, you may find yourself looking at something
like "fatal error: print at illegal address." This doesn't really bother
me, as I figure it's part of the learning experience. Besides, if you
want error checking, use the standard compiler. This gives you an idea
of what would happen if the compiler let you get away with bad syntax.
For example, mess up an after rule, and you might make an object
untakeable with no response whatsoever if you try to take it.
In short, if you want to learn Inform, but are having trouble, give this
program a try. It isn't perfect, but it will give you a nice place to
practice without having to constantly compile story files. You can
create objects and change them on the fly and see how they will behave.
It's really worth it for any potential student of Inform and could save
a lot of aggravation when you're ready to write a real game.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: Alex Freeman <Freemanry SP@G aol.com>
NAME: Jacaranda Jim
AUTHOR: Graham Cluley
EMAIL: hamrag SP@G cix.co.uk
DATE: 1987
PARSER: Quite good
SUPPORTS: DOS
AVAILABILITY: Public Domain
URL: http://members.aol.com/gcluley
Jacaranda Jim is another game by Graham Cluley. It was actually written
before Humbug, but there are many similarities between the two games.
In Jacaranda Jim, you are... Jacaranda Jim. You have crash landed on the
planet Ibberspleen IV. The game starts with you waking up from a dream.
When you do wake up, you find that you are in a dark cave with Alan the
Gribbley. In case you're wondering what a gribbley is, it is some
strange creature that is a cross between a neanderthal and the aftermath
from a night with Malcolm Muggeridge. Alan has a rather disgusting beard
also.
Anyhow, you don't really know what to do, but you figure (no doubt
correctly) that it would be at least a good idea to find some way of
getting back to Earth. As you explore Ibberspleen IV, you find that it
is a lot like Earth: There are a post office, a zoo, a grocery store, a
church, and other Earth-like buildings. While you're doing all this,
Alan is constantly at your side even when you're out in the rain, but he
leaves when it becomes night (the game goes through the cycle of day and
night).
The NPCs are generally not as well developed as they are in Humbug, but
you get to know them better (or at least the well developed ones) by
asking them questions. My favorite NPC is the thief. When you're on the
beach, you better beware because he may try to rob you. When he does, he
says, "Har, har! Give us yer valuables!" If you ask him about the police
he says, "They aren't after me; are they?" Also, don't think that
running away from him will help you any because he'll chase after you
and smash your head with his mallet.
My favorite place in the game is the cave. It contains interesting areas
and plenty of puzzles. It also contains one of my favorite puzzles: the
wall of fruit. As you explore the cave, it becomes less and less like a
cave (it contains stuff like a telephone booth and a safe).
Its parser is quite good. It is easy to use and understands fairly
sophisticated commands. However, it can't do really fancy stuff like
recognizing multiple commands.
Like Humbug, it is humorous but not as much. It is still rather witty,
and it sure adds to the game, though. My wildcard points are once again
for the humour.
Its main flaw is its puzzles. Many of the puzzles were too hard, such as
the colored buttons one. The hint system solves this problem partially,
but it is no substitute for good puzzles. Don't get me wrong, though. It
has many good puzzles such as the wall of fruit that I mentioned
earlier, but there should have been many more.
Overall, Jacaranda Jim is a good game and worth playing, but it could
have been an excellent game if the puzzles had been better.
Atmosphere: 1.3
Gameplay: 1.5
Writing: 1.5
Plot: 1.2
Humour: 1.3
Total: 6.8
Characters: 1.3
Puzzles: .8
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
TITLE: Mulldoon Legacy
AUTHOR: Jon Ingold
E-MAIL: mulldoon SP@G ingold.fsnet.co.uk
DATE: 1999
PARSER: Inform standard
SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/Mulldoon.z8
VERSION: Release 6
Okay, I'm not sure we need Glulx's memory-extending capabilities after
all. Not if the Z-machine as it presently stands can produce something
as large as Mulldoon Legacy, which is easily the biggest IF game I've
ever played. (*Much* bigger, amount-of-puzzles-wise, than Anchorhead,
Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, or Varicella, to take three examples of
games that recently pushed the Z-code size envelope.) Granted, Mulldoon
Legacy doesn't weigh itself down with a lot of NPCs, so there's a clear
difference in priorities there, but still--I have difficulty conveying
exactly how huge this thing is. (I suppose I could sit down with a
transcript and count the puzzles, but that's not much fun.) The initial
premise is familiar--explore your grandfather's museum so that you can
get your legacy--but it gives rise to a highly convoluted story.
Part of the reason that it's huge is that it's full of puzzles--this is,
in every way, a puzzle-fest. Moreover, a lot of the puzzles are quite
difficult, sufficiently so that you shouldn't expect this to take less
than several weeks (unless you have a telepathic connection to the
author or are relying heavily on a walkthrough). The length and
complexity of the game adds to the difficulty, in fact, since you may be
required to connect one puzzle with an earlier event that you might have
encountered several weeks before, or with an object that you haven't
touched in a month. Similarly, you accumulate quite a few objects by the
end of the game, meaning that (a) it's easy to lose track of some in the
shuffle and (b) it's easy to overlook the connection between the latest
puzzle and one of the objects in your archive.
That brings up another point, however, namely that the puzzles in
Mulldoon generally don't boil down to apply-the-object. (There *are*
quite a few keys and locked doors, but there are creative twists
associated with those.) Some of them are set pieces--they could have
been wrenched out of the code and plunked down in another
puzzle-fest--but many turn on applying knowledge in relatively subtle
ways, and even the set pieces are creative. There's an entertaining
variant on the Zork III Royal Puzzle, for example, and another scene
involving the manipulation of a marble maze that's done in a
surprisingly novel way. They come from a variety of genres, too--there's
a cryptic crossword clue that's key to one puzzle, a chemistry problem
of sorts that features in another, and a math/logic problem of sorts at
another point. There are a few old chestnuts, to be sure; you assemble
the ingredients for a potion over the course of the game, and collect a
set of four related objects as well. But there's enough of the game that
doesn't depend on those old chestnuts to make it bearable for the IF
veteran.
The puzzles themselves--well, a lot of them are hard, and some of them
are unfairly hard. Not all, but some--sometimes because they require
intuitive leaps that simply don't come naturally, and sometimes because
they assume that you're picturing something the way the author is, which
ain't necessarily so. (One of the latter moments, unfortunately, comes
very near the beginning of the game.) I'd like to recommend Mulldoon
Legacy as a game for the puzzle fan to plow through without help, but I
can't honestly do that, because there are a few puzzles whose logic is
unclear to me even now. In other words, if you don't keep a walkthrough
handy, you're liable to bog down, and when you give in and check the
solution and find something completely unexpected, you're liable to lose
faith in the game. Again, though, they're not all bad, and most of them
are good enough to be worth spending some time on before you move on.
Adding to the difficulty is the design: the layout is, for the most
part, highly wide, so it's easy to get into a position where you have a
lot of problems but only have the equipment to solve a few of them.
Worse, it's not always clear when an object or room offers more
possibilities in the puzzle department (though this is only occasionally
a problem). It's relatively difficult most of the time to make the game
unwinnable--and usually, when you do, it's obvious--but making any
progress at all is at times quite a struggle.
These are all standard problems in a puzzlefest, but I think Mulldoon
deserves a spot a notch above your average puzzlefest because of the
depth and complexity of the story. I wouldn't say it's a chin-strokingly
profound story, but there's a lot of it and it's tied into most of what
goes on in the game, a few set-piece puzzles aside. Moreover, the nature
of the puzzles is often such that they reward attention to the progress
of the plot--or, rather, you may find yourself lost if you regard the
story as mere background. Some aspects of the story, to be sure, have
been done; there's a time-travel angle, for instance, a very familiar
trope (one moment comes as something of an homage to Sorcerer) and the
framing story seems to owe more than a little bit to Curses. But some of
the plot elements really are pretty novel, and the various pieces manage
to come out of the blender in reasonably surprising ways. (Part of it
may be that there's so much in the game--there are some familiar aspects
of the plot that manage to be surprising because they're juxtaposed with
familiar elements from entirely different genres.) It's also worth
noting that the design is pretty good, even if not especially
forgiving--I don't think it's possible to run into events or puzzles out
of order (no small feat in something this large), and the pace of the
plot development follows the pace of the puzzle-solving in a reasonably
natural way.
Mulldoon Legacy doesn't appear to have the most vivid setting
initially--you're wandering around an old museum looking for your
grandfather. But one of the whimsical charms of the game is the way that
it keeps pouring more and more incongruous things into that
setting--while occasionally transporting you out of the setting, of
course; it's my belief that the author intended to try to make the
player lose track of what's within the primary setting and what's
outside it. The game spends a while teetering on the edge between
explore-a-wacky-museum and something between fantasy and sci-fi (before
eventually toppling full-bore into the latter), and while it's
teetering, the author milks the confounding-expectations game for all
it's worth. Not all that notable if you've had the genre bait-and-switch
done to you before, perhaps, but still fun if you like having your head
messed with.
As with most puzzlefests, whether Mulldoon Legacy works is primarily in
the eye of the beholder: if you find the puzzles challenging but fair,
then it'll work, but I can't say confidently that it will or won't work
for any given player. It does occur to me, though, that this is a
throwback to the days when people expected IF to keep them busy for
weeks at a time, and likely didn't have four or five other freeware
releases competing for their attention. That is, you're expected to give
an event your attention, enough attention that you can recall it (at
least, the general contours) hundreds or even thousands of moves later.
Likewise, when there's a plot development, the game isn't going to
connect all the dots each time; it's expected that you'll recognize key
people and events. Granted, '80s-era IF wasn't this large (excepting,
perhaps, Acheton, which I haven't played), but it's the same general
feeling: finishing the game takes a real commitment. If you plan to
finish Mulldoon Legacy, prepare either to make a similar commitment or
to consult the walkthrough more than occasionally.
While Mulldoon is at heart more puzzlefest than story, it does a
better-than-average job of integrating its puzzles with its plot and of
making the latter more than a token effort, and arguably it's notable
simply for those accomplishments. If you're not a fan of puzzlefests,
you may not get much out of this, but it's a well-put-together game
nonetheless.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: Cedric Knight <ADDRESS REMOVED>
TITLE: The Pyramids of Mars
AUTHOR: Patrick Wigfull
EMAIL: ?
DATE: 1994
PARSER: AGT, sub-Inform
SUPPORTS/PLATFORM: AGT interpreters, comes with AGT runtime
AVAILABILITY: Freeware?, GMD
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/agt/mars.zip
Being a fan of the BBC TV show, "Doctor Who", I was pleased to see this
in the archives. The game pays tribute to the show by adapting one
popular story from 1976 when the central character was played by Tom
Baker. This had a typical plot in that an ancient Egyptian god is
discovered to be a powerful alien intent on laying waste to whole
galaxies, yet the action centres around a quiet country house in 1911,
reminiscent of the H.P. Lovecraft influence common in IF.
This particular story might seem a good candidate for adaptation due to
the technical puzzles that are solved, but in fact "do something
terribly clever" isnt handled well by most parsers. Therefore Wigfull
has had to eliminate many of the obstacles of the TV series and replaced
them with some plausible alternatives that will work in an adventure
game while being in keeping with the original plot. So theres still
plenty of challenge for people with reasonably clear memories of the
version released on video, although for people with no previous
knowledge there will be challenge in the substantive problems as well as
the minutiae. "Mars" is a faithful homage, which only Who obsessives
would think of picking holes in. It is unfortunate that some of the new
puzzles are very particular in their solution, e.g. "put gelignite on
equipment" is legal, but not useful. There are also several ways you
can get yourself into an unwinnable situation and have to restart. Most
players can cope with this, although when you have explored the
environment once, you have to wait for about 50 turns before events
unfold enough for you to really start the action.
The AGT interpreter for the PC that comes with this package gives a
divide-by-zero error probably due to higher processor speeds, but the
DA1 file runs reasonably well in AgiliTy except for a few
considerations. In particular the hint/help system doesnt work, neither
do the cursor and function keys as described in the documentation, and
opening the front door (an unnecessary action in any case) generates an
infinite loop error.
IF has of course moved on considerably since this game was written. One
NPC here is very static, and may provide you with some useful
information, while the others are of the variety that may flit by for a
brief dramatic scene, although they get bumped off very early anyway.
The Scarman brothers could be developed much more, instead Laurence
unaccountably "sniffs the teapot" or "checks his fly". Most notable by
her absence is Sarah, the Doctor's companion in the TV story. Its often
said of the TV companions that they were mostly there to ask stupid
questions so the Doctor could explain the plot to the viewer, and Sarah
was surplus to requirements here, but it was a shame the author did not
take the opportunity to develop the characters role for its own sake.
PLOT: Momentous (1.4) ATMOSPHERE: Good in parts (1.2)
WRITING: A few typos (1.0) GAMEPLAY: AGT (0.8)
ADAPTATION: Difficult source (1.2)
OVERALL: 5.6
CHARACTERS: Single-purpose (1.1) PUZZLES: Sometimes illogical 1.0
DIFFICULTY: Medium
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
TITLE: Small World
AUTHOR: Andrew Pontious
E-MAIL: [removed at author's request. See game for email address.]
DATE: 1996
PARSER: TADS standard
SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/SmallW3.gam
VERSION: Release 3
Small World, another largely forgotten gem from the 1996 competition, is
a nice effort on several levels--the puzzles are creative and reasonably
forgiving, there's a funny and thoroughly implemented NPC, and the game
takes whimsical pokes at a variety of targets that should keep even the
non-puzzle-solver entertained.
You've been transported magically to a tiny world (eight feet in
diameter) which has stopped spinning, so your brief is to get things
moving again. Along the way you encounter a miniature Adam and Eve,
nuclear war, interplanetary conflicts of various sorts, and other
problems of various seriousness. The most memorable aspect of the world
is the devil that tags along behind you on a pogo stick making snarky
comments about most events in the game; as a parody of Satan (in
reference to heaven, "Is that powderpuff really where you want to go
when you die?") or as general comic relief ("A miserably whistled
rendition of 'Can't Get No Satisfaction' assures you the devil is right
behind"), the devil is one of the game's main assets.
The game itself has become somewhat more user-friendly in recent
releases--the competition release made inventory management somewhat
excessively cumbersome for the sake of realism. (The cleanup makes
sense--insisting on realism in the story of an eight-foot-in-diameter
world was probably overkill.) Still, owing to the nature of the beast,
it's not an easy game; when so much of what goes on is dependent on
whimsy, it can be difficult to tune into the author's brand of whimsy in
order to get the puzzles solved. Some of the non-user-friendly aspects
are still there, in fact--the game can close off without warning early
on if you do certain things out of order. Nor is there an overarching
logic to the game that the player needs to acclimate to, really--there's
no theme or motif that explains the puzzles. They're not bad puzzles,
but they're not particularly accessible, either--and the last one, which
effectively plays games with the syntax and is rather difficult to
visualize, is even more challenging. There's a hint system; it doesn't
adapt perfectly to your situation, but it works well enough.
What's interesting about Small World is that it doesn't appear to take
itself seriously, and yet the conflicts on the world you inhabit are
rendered as actual conflicts rather than as humor. That is, even though
the devil appears to be mostly there for fun, you do have to get rid of
him, and at a key moment you get the devil rooting against you (and
various heavenly choirs rooting for you). When you finally succeed, the
devil gives "a great despairing wail, taken up by all his followers,
combining the sounds of howling wolves, screeching canaries, hissing
snakes, yammering jackhammers," which eventually "trails off to a
hollow, echoing moan, then silence." A little heavy for a comedy game,
as are the various nuclear warheads hurled at you (you're given a
thousand-turn countdown until the inhabitants run out of missiles). In
its own way, though, the comic/serious duality works--after all, your
role is, in a sense, to play God/savior for the miniature world, and you
get a sense of both the comic absurdity and the tragedy of such a role.
That is, your perspective permits you to laugh at the world you're
charged with saving, but the inhabitants can be forgiven for not seeing
the humor in it all. The quality of the writing helps here: generally,
when the game's being funny, it does so through understatement, without
appearing to try too hard, so shifting into a less whimsical mode
doesn't feel like a jolt.
Small World is uneven in a few respects, but it's none the less
enjoyable for that, and the most recent releases have improved its
production values.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
[Note: In the original version of Neil's review, the game's title was
maintained in strict lower case -- "t-zero" -- after the game's own
fashion of referring to itself. I've changed the case for the sake of
readability only. --Paul]
From: Neil Yorke-Smith <neilys SP@G yahoo.com>
NAME: T-Zero
AUTHOR: Dennis Cunningham
DATE: 1991
PARSER: Custom
SUPPORTS: PC
AVAILABILITY: Shareware ($20)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/pc/t-zero.zip
VERSION: 1.04
T-Zero is an anomaly of IF. Released in 1991, after the heady Infocom
days but before Inform and the renaissance of IF, T-Zero is a
surprisingly modern game. Dennis Cunningham's puzzle-based work evokes a
rich atmosphere in a land familiar and yet unknown.
Cunningham sees himself as a programmer with literary leanings and -- on
the evidence here -- succeeds in both. T-Zero runs as a stand-alone DOS
game, released in full as shareware.
"An Adventure for the Time Being", the subtitle, sums up the story.
T-Zero is an adventure game. A literate, immersive piece of IF, but
foremost an adventure game. The player-character must locate six objects
"scattered across ages and landscapes", objects which are to be
transported "somehow...to progressively future time zones where they can
right the troubled times." Echoes of other games, such as Level 9's
Lords of Time, and premonitions of Nelson's seminal Curses and Jigsaw.
(Cunningham had hoped to quote extensively from T.S. Eliot -- compare
Jigsaw -- but permission was not granted.)
As the subtitle also suggests, time is the motif running through the
game. Time and words, although there is much more going on than
chronological word-play. A typical example is this extract from the
opening:
It's just as well that you were dismissed from the museum--your
duties as combination custodian and librarian involved either
re-shelving books and dusting off clocks or rewinding timepieces and
dusting off books. However, you were onto something.
An ex-libris librarian, then, the PC has an account to straighten with
the mysterious owner of the museum (a museum devoted to time,
naturally), Count Zero. Just what the Count is up to, and how the
troubled times might be righted, is pieced together as the game
progresses.
As the game opens, the status-line, in addition to the usual location
and score, reads "6:00AM * Day 1 * Present"; there is a strange compass
in the initial inventory. It is clear that the PC could be visiting time
zones other than the Present. Indeed, once inside the museum, there is
time for the Past, Present and Future...and beyond.
While T-Zero is not overly large, much more exploration is required than
in other games of a similar size. Time is realistically modelled (how
could it be otherwise?); each move takes five minutes of game time. The
world reflects the current time: the sun rises and sets, hours are
chimed, and so on. Exploration is also necessary since some objects do
not appear at once and some actions must be performed at the right time
-- although precise move-counting is uncommon.
The writing is strong, often thematic. Responses defy the conventional,
sometimes cheerfully breaking mimesis, but always seem appropriate (try
'g' or 'turn'-ing a fixed object). A favourite is the response to a word
not understood by the parser, "That word comes from an unknown realm."
Cunningham is not afraid to impose his eclectic world upon the player
and the effect can be entrancing:
Moebius Strip.
The racing strip here twists in on itself to form a continuous band
without inside or out. Contenders, defying gravity, adhere to the
track whether right-side up or upside down.
There are a tortoise and a hare here. The hare is running moebius
strips around the tortoise which assuredly continues with measured
progress.
> get hare
You miss by a hare's breadth.
T-Zero is impressive technically, particularly considering that it was
written without the aid of an authoring system. Unlike some stand-alone
games, the parser is well up to Infocom standard, handling full
sentences and even genuine adjectives without a murmur. Cunningham
appears to have implemented an object system of sorts: the parser knows
that poppies and marigolds are both types of flowers, for instance.
Most interesting are the meta verbs that become available later in the
game: 'find', 'where', 'copy' and 'imagine', the latter which "allows
[the] player to 'visualise' unencountered objects or locations."
The parser does not pretend to understand more than it does -- which is
commendable -- but can lack synonyms and, if rarely, lack objects
mentioned in the room descriptions, which is less commendable. It can
become confused between verbs and nouns, for instance with 'lever' and
'plant', and plural objects must be referred to as 'it', not 'them'.
Version 1.04 of T-Zero is available on the IF archive. The interface has
all the conveniences expected: command history, scripting, customisable
colours. Function keys are programmable, the arrow keys can be used to
enter directions, standard short-cuts (except 'z') and undo all work.
Cunningham has added some neat touches, too, like an inline menu for
disambiguation and selection, and careful use of colour.
The puzzles, on the whole, are not hard in themselves provided the
language, time or popular culture references are familiar; the game has
built-in context-dependent hints. However, a certain amount of waiting
around and verbal dexterity is required, and I found the insight for
some of the puzzles slow in coming. When the insight comes, the
consequences can be delightful. There is a well-signposted maze early in
the game, one which exhibits Lewis Carroll-like qualities.
On occasion, I was reminded that the game does not neatly sit in the
Infocom tradition. Exits, to take one example, are not consistently
listed in room descriptions because an 'exits' verb is provided instead.
The descriptions thus seem more natural and concise, at the cost of the
repeated use of 'exits' when first exploring. Increases to the score, to
take another example, are signalled as default by a small tune, not by a
textual message (although of course the status-line changes).
There are three main criticisms that can be brought against T-Zero. The
first is that the expectations of contemporary IF have shifted from
those of the early 1990s. Death, for instance, can occur instantly
without warning in the most unexpected ways. While UNDO will remedy the
situation, such happenings only irritate. Similarly, some puzzles (to my
mind) assume too many Americanisms. And finishing with full points is
harder than it ought to be. The player has a Bill of Rights, remember?
The second criticism is that sometimes Cunningham's world is too
detailed. The PC has a limited carrying capacity, as do all the
containers to be found. Objects in or on another object are tediously
listed (sand in an egg timer, for instance). The world seems rounded and
understanding -- but too easily the parser is seen to be lacking real
knowledge. None of these things is wrong by itself but their cumulative
effect can become tedious.
Finally, on occasion, Cunningham over-reaches himself. While not quite
guess-the-verb, the syntax to perform a desired action can be elusive: I
found the moebius strip infernally demanding, for example. While often
delightful, the linguistic ingenuity can be frustrating and the parser
trying (no more trying than Inform or TADS, it should be added). When it
works, however, the game works splendidly.
It's unclear whether the author is still accepting registration for
T-Zero. Various email addresses are given in the documentation, but a
search of the web reveals no homepage. Other shareware IF from the time
-- see the review of Humbug in SPAG #11 [or, indeed, in this very issue!
--PO] -- has now passed into the public domain.
T-Zero is an anomaly. Although not to the liking of everyone, definitely
recommended: it is, arguably, a piece of modern IF before the modern
era, so always lacking the full attention it deserves. An unusual game,
unwittingly reflecting its unusual place in the history of IF.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: Francesco Bova <fbova SP@G pangea.ca>
One day, about 10 years ago I found myself ready to give up on my amber
colored IBM XT. Maybe it was the flicker of a screen too old to be any
good, or the speed of a processor so slow that words didn't appear until
10 seconds after I was finished typing, but I'd finally had enough and
was getting ready to get rid of the old hunk of junk.
My real lament was that outside of some word processing and spreadsheet
programs, there was really nothing I could do with my old XT. So, I
explained my dilemma to a programming buddy and asked for a little help.
He promised he would download a few games for me off a local BBS and
when the disk finally arrived it turned out to be only one game and
something called a "text adventure" to boot.
Now I was sort of familiar with text adventure games, as I had played
the Zork trilogy way back in the early 80s, but what I was unaware of
was that the quality for most shareware games produced during the early
nineties was very low (relative to today, at least). It was a stroke of
fortune then, that my friend downloaded for me the competently created
T-Zero.
T-Zero chronicles the bizarre plight of a recently fired and evicted
Museum custodian who is charged with figuring out what his former
employer and game antagonist Count Zero is up to. The story starts off
with you waking from uneasy dreams with the realization that you were
onto something incriminating about the Count just before he fired you.
The bulk of the game then revolves around you trying to get back into
the museum to rediscover what exactly it was that you'd latched on to.
It's a simple premise to get started on that eventually turns complex,
with bit players galore, conspiracies, plans for anti-utopic world
domination, and time travel to a past and future world vastly different
from the one you started out in. Confused yet? Well there's more afoot
here than a simple time travel game where the same room's locations
change to reflect your temporal journeys. The plot goes from the
mundane, to the prehistoric, to an Orwellian nightmare with landscapes
that are as evocative as So Far's surreal worlds but held together more
succinctly, with the common thread of slightly familiar settings that
change notably over different time periods. Here for example, is a
sketch of a sawmill described in the present, past and future:
Present:
Abandoned Mill
Yellow dew-drenched mushrooms pop through the scattered timbers and
redwood sawdust that mark the site of an abandoned mill.
Past:
Sawmill
You've lumbered onto a mill with a conveyor belt that lazily leads
under whirring sawteeth.
Since all the forests you've encountered in this era have been
characterized by immature growth, you vaguely wonder about the
purpose of the mill.
Future:
Gristmill
Although nothing is being ground here, a host of befuddled joggers
relentlessly power a series of studded treadmills. Their emaciated
bodies suggest that they are attempting something more than mere
exercise.
That's some pretty awesome prose in my opinion. The beauty of
Cunningham's writing style is that it's so economical, with nary a word
wasted. His room descriptions give the reader enough information to
accurately describe the setting and mood, while leaving a good part of
the surrounding scenery to the reader's imagination. The only criticism
about these beautifully rendered scenes is that Cunningham seldom if
ever puts in exit descriptions. I've always found that writing exit
descriptions tends to break up the flow of a room description, and
certainly, one of the reasons I think I enjoyed T-Zero's prose as much
as I did was because of the lack of phrases like "There are exits
leading east, north, and southwest," tacked on to the end of each
paragraph. Having said that though, take a look again at the text in the
preceding sawmill description. Do you have any idea how to exit this
location? Yeah, me neither. One of the real drawbacks of T-Zero is that
you'll probably have to try all 8 cardinal directions upon entering each
new room (until you become more comfortable with landscape), and that
can be a real pain; especially in a day-and-age where we would expect
exits to appear in every room description. A small quibble however, and
it does very little to detract from this game.
The prose was also particularly good when it came to NPC dialogue. The
NPCs by-and-large tend to be pretty one dimensional in terms of their
conversation. More often than not you'll get responses like,
"<character> is too preoccupied at the moment." when you ask a question.
But when you find a conversation topic that the character has something
to say about, the responses are typically witty and reflective of the
absurd nature of the NPC and the game's surroundings. Here's an example:
> Ask Prufrock about Count Zero
"My former Prince seems to be intent upon squeezing the universe into
a ball and rolling it towards the future without regard to who's
flattened in the process. I'd like to see his head, grown slightly
bald, brought in upon a platter."
What's more, the principal NPCs, like many of the game's items, are
"reusable", which is to say that you need to utilize their skills on an
ongoing basis at different points in the game.
The fabulous prose also fleshes out what is in essence a big
house-o-puzzles-type game, making the substantial differences between
the game's diverse surroundings seem, well... almost seamless. The puzzles
themselves are genuinely hard. Not many of them are unfair, but there
are 3 or 4 incredibly obscure puzzles, that will probably irritate you
to no end. One of them revolves around a Nord-and-Bert-style
turn of phrase, a culturally biased colloquialism; another two involve
some extremely suspect lateral thinking; and finally there's an
ultra-obscure puzzle centering on a reference to a Beatles song that I
didn't get until I saw Oasis do a cover version a few years back. By and
large however, the puzzles are well done and integrate effectively with
the story. All the puzzles are clued (Hmmm... I won't say well-clued,
because not many of the solutions are exceedingly obvious) in one way or
another, with a huge emphasis placed on the way object, dialogue and room
description text is worded for some of the tougher puzzles. In fact,
word association may be a good exercise when you find yourself stumped.
Among the more standard-type puzzles there are some interesting spins,
with perhaps the most novel maze I've ever seen (It's actually a
pleasure to map out once you find the key), the most original key I've
ever encountered, and some great lateral puzzles that involve actions in
one time period affecting the landscape of another.
The game's objects are also many, varied, and interesting. Some of the
more notable ones include items that enable you to look at your
surroundings as they're presented in the future and in the past, which
results in a few hilarious descriptions like this one: "It's a good
thing you're merely looking into the past because if you were actually
present, you would be impaled on the sharp point of a... etc.", and
objects that speed up, distort, and even reverse the flow of time (the
status line in this game takes one heck of a beating!). There's also a
huge amount of reusability with the game's items with an adventurer's
backpack full of many, apparently single-use, items that can be
transformed or broken apart to form other important items. If that isn't
enough, still other items have interesting mechanics or physics all
there own, and I often found the experimentation process with these
items to be as much fun as solving some of the more satisfying puzzles.
So, to wrap up: T-Zero is a well-crafted game in almost every sense. In
fact, considering the production date of this game (way back in 1991), I
was surprised to find how easily I felt it could rival some of today's
better games in terms of story, puzzles, and game design. Now, that's
not to say that it doesn't suffer from typical problems associated with
shareware games of that era, because at times, it most certainly does.
I've already mentioned the problems with listing exits in room
descriptions and one-dimensional NPCs, but there are also problems with
the parser handling very few synonyms, and the parser demanding exact
and complex syntax for what should be very easy commands. The game
unfortunately can also be put into an unwinnable state in many
situations without player notification, and I can't begin to imagine how
frustrating it would be for a player to make it all the way to the
game's end only to realize that something crucial was rendered
unattainable near the game's beginning. Still, there are more than
enough user-friendly player aids to make up for these shortcomings. As
the game progresses, new verbs may become available to you such as
"WHERE" (a command which lists the last place you left an object once in
your possession) and "FIND" (a command reminiscent of the "GOTO" verb
from Irene Callaci's Dangerous Curves, that effectively puts the parser
on autopilot until you've reached the destination you just typed in.)
Similarly, the parser is extremely helpful in pointing out where it
didn't understand your message, with menus to help choose between
ambiguous objects and arrows pointing out the parser's problems with
your commands. Here are a few examples:
> Get go
^ ^
Please one action at a time
> Get xyzzy
^
That word comes from an unknown realm.
> Drop book
You possess more than one of those. Please choose between them:
> Scarlet book.
> Tan book.
> None.
All this, and with a parser that appears to be home-brewed to boot! Wow!
All I can say is I was lucky that T-Zero was the first shareware
text-game I played. T-Zero spoiled me, with its nifty puzzles, beautiful
story, and delicate prose, and in a way I've been looking for that same
playing experience ever since (and, I've of course found it on occasion
:). You can imagine my chagrin when a few years later, I found the IF
Archive and began playing the easily executable crop of AGT games, and
found them nowhere near as entertaining, challenging, or playable. On
that fateful day when my friend downloaded T-Zero, imagine what path my
life may have taken had he instead given me a copy of Space Aliens
Laughed at My Cardigan. I'd probably be homeless and penniless on the
street as I write this!
READERS' SCOREBOARD -------------------------------------------------------
The Readers' Scoreboard is an ongoing feature of SPAG. It charts the
scores that SPAG readers and reviewers have given to various IF games
since SPAG started up. The codes in the Notes column give information as
to a game's availability and the platforms on which it runs. For a
translation of these codes and for more detailed information on the
scoreboard's format, see the SPAG FAQ. This FAQ is available at the
ftp.gmd.de IF-archive or on the SPAG web page at
http://www.sparkynet.com/spag.
Name Avg Sc Chr Puz # Sc Issue Notes:
==== ====== === === ==== ===== ======
1-2-3... 4.2 0.7 0.4 1 F_INF_GMD
9:05 6.4 0.5 0.7 7 20 F_INF_GMD
Aayela 7.4 1.2 1.5 5 10 F_TAD_GMD
Abbey 6.8 0.6 1.4 1 S10_I_GMD
Above and Beyond 7.3 1.5 1.6 5 F_TAD_GMD
Acid Whiplash 5.3 0.6 0.2 3 17 F_INF_GMD
Acorn Court 6.1 0.5 1.5 2 12 F_INF_GMD
Ad Verbum 7.4 0.8 1.4 1 23 F_INF_GMD
Adv. of Elizabeth Hig 3.1 0.5 0.3 2 5 F_AGT_GMD
Adventure (all varian 6.2 0.5 1.1 12 8,22 F_INF_TAD_ETC_GMD
Adventureland 4.5 0.5 1.1 5 F_INF_GMD
Adventures of Helpful 7.0 1.3 0.9 2 F_TAD_GMD
Aftermath 4.0 0.7 0.7 1 F_TAD_GMD
Afternoon Visit 4.1 1.0 0.8 1 F_AGT
Aisle 6.6 1.4 0.2 7 18 F_INF_GMD
Alien Abduction? 7.5 1.3 1.4 5 10 F_TAD_GMD
All Alone 9.0 1.5 1.0 1 22 F_TAD_GMD
All Quiet...Library 5.0 0.9 0.9 6 7 F_INF_GMD
Amnesia 6.9 1.5 1.3 4 9 C_AP_I_64
Anchorhead 8.8 1.7 1.5 25 18 F_INF_GMD
And The Waves... 6.7 1.4 1.1 1 23 F_INF_GMD
Another...No Beer 2.4 0.2 0.8 2 4 S10_I_GMD
Arrival 7.9 1.3 1.4 5 17 F_TAD_GMD
Arthur: Excalibur 8.0 1.3 1.6 44,14,22 C_INF
Asendent 1.7 0.0 0.3 1 F_INF_GMD
At Wit's End 7.1 1.2 1.3 1 23 F_TAD_GMD
Augmented Fourth 7.7 1.4 1.5 5 22 F_INF_GMD
Aunt Nancy's House 1.3 0.1 0.0 2 F_INF_GMD
Awakened 7.7 1.7 1.6 1
Awakening 5.6 0.9 1.1 2 15,18 F_INF_GMD
Awe-Chasm 3.0 0.7 0.7 2 8 S_I_ST_GMD
Babel 8.4 1.7 1.3 10 13 F_INF_GMD
Balances 6.6 0.7 1.2 8 6 F_INF_GMD
Ballyhoo 7.3 1.5 1.5 6 4 C_INF
Bear's Night Out 7.3 1.2 1.4 6 13 F_INF_GMD
Beat The Devil 5.5 1.2 1.1 4 19 F_INF_GMD
Being Andrew Plotkin 6.8 1.4 1.0 1 23 F_INF_GMD
Best Man 6.3 0.9 1.5 1 F_INF_GMD
Beyond the Tesseract 3.7 0.1 0.6 1 6 F_I_GMD
Beyond Zork 8.0 1.5 1.8 9 5, 14 C_INF
Big Mama 6.2 1.4 0.9 1 23 F_INF_GMD
BJ Drifter 7.0 1.2 1.2 4 15 F_INF_GMD
Bliss 6.3 1.1 0.8 4 20 F_TAD_GMD
Bloodline 7.7 1.4 1.1 2 15 F_INF_GMD
Border Zone 7.2 1.4 1.4 7 4 C_INF
Break-In 6.1 1.1 1.4 3 21 F_INF_GMD
Breaking The Code 0.5 0.0 0.0 1 F_INF_GMD
Broken String 3.9 0.7 0.4 4 F_TADS_GMD
BSE 5.7 0.9 1.0 3 F_INF_GMD
Bureaucracy 6.9 1.5 1.3 11 5 C_INF
Busted 5.2 1.0 1.1 1 F_INF_GMD
Calliope 4.7 0.9 0.8 3 F_INF_GMD
Cask 1.5 0.0 0.5 2 F_INF_GMD
Castaway 1.1 0.0 0.4 1 5 F_I_GMD
Castle Amnos 5.5 1.1 0.9 1 F_INF_GMD
Castle Elsinore 4.3 0.7 1.0 2 I_GMD
CC 4.2 0.4 1.0 1 F_ALAN_GMD
Change in the Weather 7.6 1.0 1.4 12 7,8,14 F_INF_GMD
Chaos 5.6 1.3 1.1 2 F_TAD_GMD
Chicken under Window 6.9 0.6 0.0 3 F_INF_GMD
Chicks Dig Jerks 5.2 1.1 0.7 9 19 F_INF_GMD
Chico and I Ran 7.2 1.7 1.1 1 F_INF_GMD
Christminster 8.3 1.6 1.6 18 20 F_INF_GMD
City 6.1 0.6 1.3 2 17 F_INF_GMD
Clock 3.7 0.8 0.6 1 F_TAD_GMD
Coke Is It! 6.2 1.0 1.0 2 F_INF_GMD
Coming Home 0.6 0.1 0.1 1 F_INF_GMD
Common Ground 7.2 1.6 0.4 2 20 F_TAD_GMD
Commute 1.3 0.2 0.1 1 F_I_GMD
Comp00ter Game 0.9 0.1 0.1 1 F_INF_GMD
Congratulations! 2.6 0.7 0.3 1 F_INF_GMD
Corruption 7.2 1.6 1.0 4 14, 21 C_MAG
Cosmoserve 7.8 1.4 1.4 5 5 F_AGT_GMD
Cove 6.7 1.1 0.7 3 22 F_INF_GMD
Crimson Spring 6.9 1.5 1.2 1 F_HUG_GMD
Crypt v2.0 5.0 1.0 1.5 1 3 S12_IBM_GMD
Curses 8.0 1.2 1.7 19 2, 22 F_INF_GMD
Cutthroats 5.7 1.3 1.1 9 1 C_INF
Dampcamp 5.0 0.8 1.1 3 F_TAD_GMD
Danger! Adventurer... 3.2 0.3 0.7 1 F_INF_GMD
Dangerous Curves 8.6 1.5 1.6 1 F_INF_GMD
Day For Soft Food 6.8 1.0 1.3 5 19 F_INF_GMD
Deadline 6.8 1.3 1.3 8 20 C_INF
Death To My Enemies 4.4 0.9 0.7 4 F_INF_GMD
Deep Space Drifter 5.6 0.4 1.1 3 3 S15_TAD_GMD
Deephome 4.0 0.5 0.9 2 21 F_INF_GMD
Delusions 7.9 1.5 1.5 5 14F_INF_GMD
Demon's Tomb 7.4 1.2 1.1 2 9 C_I
Desert Heat 6.0 1.3 0.7 1 23 F_TAD_GMD
Detective 1.0 0.0 0.0 9 4,5,18 F_AGT_INF_GMD
Detective-MST3K 5.8 1.1 0.1 9 7,8,18 F_INF_GMD
Dinner With Andre 7.2 1.6 1.4 1 23 F_INF_GMD
Ditch Day Drifter 6.7 0.9 1.7 4 2 F_TAD_GMD
Djinni Chronicles 7.9 1.5 1.2 1 23 F_INF_GMD
Down 6.0 1.0 1.2 1 14 F_HUG_GMD
Downtown Tokyo 5.7 0.8 0.9 5 17 F_INF_GMD
Dungeon 7.1 1.0 1.7 2 F_GMD
Dungeon Adventure 6.8 1.3 1.6 1 4 F_ETC
Dungeon of Dunjin 6.0 0.7 1.5 5 3, 14 S20_IBM_MAC_GMD
Edifice 8.0 1.4 1.8 10 13 F_INF_GMD
Electrabot 0.7 0.0 0.0 1 5 F_AGT_GMD
E-Mailbox 3.1 0.1 0.2 2 F_AGT_GMD
Emy Discovers Life 5.0 1.1 0.8 3 F_AGT
Enchanter 7.3 1.0 1.4 9 2,15 C_INF
End Means Escape 6.1 1.4 1.1 1 23 F_TAD_GMD
Enhanced 5.0 1.0 1.3 2 2 S10_TAD_GMD
Enlightenment 7.1 1.3 1.6 2 17 F_INF_GMD
Erehwon 6.2 1.2 1.5 4 19 F_TAD_GMD
Eric the Unready 7.8 1.5 1.6 4 C_I
Everybody Loves a Par 7.0 1.2 1.2 3 12 F_TAD_GMD
Exhibition 6.2 1.4 0.3 6 19 F_TAD_GMD
Fable 2.0 0.1 0.1 3 6 F_AGT_GMD
Fable-MST3K 4.1 0.7 0.1 2 F_AGT_INF_GMD
Fear 6.3 1.2 1.3 3 10 F_INF_GMD
Fifteen 1.5 0.5 0.4 1 17 F_INF_GMD
Firebird 7.1 1.5 1.3 4 15 F_TAD_GMD
Fish 7.5 1.3 1.7 4 12, 14 C_MAG
Foggywood Hijinx 6.2 1.2 1.3 3 21 F_TAD_GMD
Foom 6.6 1.0 1.0 1 F_TAD_GMD
For A Change 8.0 0.9 1.3 6 19, 22 F_INF_GMD
Forbidden Castle 4.8 0.6 0.5 1 C_AP
Four In One 4.4 1.2 0.5 2 F_TAD_GMD
Four Seconds 6.0 1.2 1.1 2 F_TAD_GMD
Frenetic Five 5.3 1.4 0.5 3 13 F_TAD_GMD
Frenetic Five 2 6.6 1.5 1.0 3 21, 22 F_TAD_GMD
Friday Afternoon 6.3 1.4 1.2 1 13 F_INF_GMD
Frobozz Magic Support 7.2 1.2 1.5 3 F_TAD_GMD
Frozen 5.5 0.7 1.3 1 F_INF_GMD
Frustration 5.7 1.1 0.9 1 21 F_TAD_GMD
Futz Mutz 5.3 1.0 1.1 1 F_TAD_GMD
Galatea 7.8 1.9 0.7 3 22 F_INF_GMD
Gateway 8.6 1.4 1.8 6 11 C_I
Gateway 2: Homeworld 9.0 1.8 1.9 5 C_I
Gerbil Riot of '67 6.3 0.7 1.1 1 F_TAD_GMD
Glowgrass 6.9 1.4 1.4 4 13 F_INF_GMD
Gnome Ranger 5.8 1.2 1.6 1 C_I
Golden Fleece 6.0 1.0 1.1 1 21 F_TAD_GMD
Golden Wombat of Dest 6.3 0.7 1.1 1 18 F_I_GMD
Good Breakfast 4.9 0.9 1.2 2 14 F_INF_GMD
Got ID? 6.2 1.4 1.0 1 F_INF_GMD
Great Archeolog. Race 6.5 1.0 1.5 1 3 S20_TAD_GMD
Guardians of Infinity 8.5 1.3 1 9 C_I
Guess The Verb! 6.9 1.0 1.3 1 23 F_INF_GMD
Guild of Thieves 6.9 1.2 1.5 4 14 C_MAG
Guilty Bastards 6.9 1.4 1.2 5 22 F_HUG_GMD
Guitar...Immortal Bar 3.0 0.0 0.0 1 F_INF_GMD
Gumshoe 6.2 1.0 1.1 7 9 F_INF_GMD
Halothane 6.6 1.3 1.2 4 19 F_INF_GMD
Happy Ever After 4.6 0.5 1.2 1 F_INF_GMD
HeBGB Horror 5.7 0.9 1.1 2 F_ALAN_GMD
Heist 6.7 1.4 1.5 2 F_INF_GMD
Hero, Inc. 6.8 1.0 1.5 2 F_TAD_GMD
Hitchhiker's Guide 7.4 1.4 1.5 14 5 C_INF
Hollywood Hijinx 6.5 0.9 1.6 11 C_INF
Holy Grail 6.2 0.9 1.2 1 21 F_TAD_GMD
Horror of Rylvania 7.2 1.4 1.4 5 1 F_TAD_GMD
Horror30.zip 3.7 0.3 0.7 2 3 S20_I_GMD
Human Resources Stori 0.9 0.0 0.1 2 17 F_INF_GMD
Humbug 7.4 1.6 1.3 4 11 F_I_GMD
Hunter, In Darkness 7.6 0.9 1.5 5 19 F_INF_GMD
I didn't know...yodel 4.0 0.7 1.0 5 17 F_I_GMD
I-0: Jailbait on Inte 7.8 1.5 1.3 18 20 F_INF_GMD
Ice Princess 7.5 1.4 1.6 2 A_INF_GMD
In The End 4.8 0.6 0.2 3 10 F_INF_GMD
In The Spotlight 3.2 0.2 1.0 2 17 F_INF_GMD
Infidel 6.9 0.3 1.4 14 1 C_INF
Infil-Traitor 2.9 0.1 0.7 1 F_I_GMD
Informatory 5.5 0.5 1.3 1 17 F_INF_GMD
Ingrid's Back 7.0 1.6 1.6 2 C_I
Inheritance 5.0 0.3 1.0 3 20 F_TAD_GMD
Inhumane 4.4 0.4 1.0 3 9, 20 F_INF_GMD
Intruder 6.7 1.3 1.1 4 20 F_INF_GMD
Jacaranda Jim 7.5 1.0 0.9 3 F_GMD
Jacks...Aces To Win 7.1 1.3 1.2 3 19 F_INF_GMD
Jarod's Journey 2.5 0.5 0.3 1 F_TAD_GMD
Jewel of Knowledge 6.3 1.2 1.1 3 18 F_INF_GMD
Jeweled Arena 7.0 1.4 1.3 2 AGT_GMD
Jigsaw 8.2 1.5 1.6 18 8,9 F_INF_GMD
Jinxter 6.1 0.9 1.3 3 C_MAG
John's Fire Witch 6.5 1.0 1.5 9 4, 12 S6_TADS_GMD
Jouney Into Xanth 5.0 1.3 1.2 1 8 F_AGT_GMD
Journey 7.2 1.5 1.3 5 5 C_INF
Kaged 8.0 1.2 1.3 1 23 F_INF_GMD
King Arthur's Night O 5.9 0.9 1.0 4 19 F_ALAN_GMD
Kissing the Buddha's 7.9 1.8 1.5 6 10 F_TAD_GMD
Klaustrophobia 6.4 1.1 1.3 6 1 S15_AGT_GMD
Knight Orc 7.2 1.4 1.1 2 15 C_I
L.U.D.I.T.E. 2.7 0.2 0.1 4 F_INF_GMD
Lancelot 6.9 1.4 1.2 1 C_I
Land Beyond Picket Fe 4.8 1.2 1.2 1 10 F_I_GMD
LASH 8.5 1.4 1.0 2 21 F_INF_GMD
Leather Goddesses 7.1 1.3 1.5 11 4 C_INF
Leaves 3.4 0.2 0.8 1 14 F_ALAN_GMD
Legend Lives! 8.2 1.2 1.4 4 5 F_TAD_GMD
Lesson of the Tortois 6.9 1.3 1.4 5 14 F_TAD_GMD
Lethe Flow Phoenix 6.9 1.4 1.5 5 9 F_TAD_GMD
Letters From Home 6.4 1.1 1.5 1 F_INF_GMD
Life on Beal Street 4.7 1.2 0.0 2 F_TAD_GMD
Light: Shelby's Adden 7.5 1.5 1.3 6 9 S_TAD_GMD
Lightiania 1.9 0.2 0.4 1 F_INF_GMD
Lists and Lists 6.3 1.3 1.1 3 10 F_INF_GMD
Little Billy 1.1 0.4 0.0 1 F_I_GMD
Little Blue Men 8.2 1.4 1.5 10 17 F_INF_GMD
Lomalow 4.6 1.0 0.6 3 19 F_INF_GMD
Losing Your Grip 8.5 1.4 1.4 6 14S20_TAD_GMD
Lost New York 7.9 1.4 1.4 4 20 S12_TAD_GMD
Lost Spellmaker 6.1 1.3 1.1 4 13 F_INF_GMD
Lunatix: Insanity Cir 5.6 1.2 1.0 3 F_I_GMD
Lurking Horror 7.2 1.3 1.4 16 1,3 C_INF
MacWesleyan / PC Univ 5.1 0.7 1.2 3 F_TAD_GMD
Madame L'Estrange... 5.1 1.2 0.7 1 13 F_INF_GMD
Magic Toyshop 5.2 1.1 1.1 5 7 F_INF_GMD
Magic.zip 4.5 0.5 0.5 1 3 S20_IBM_GMD
Maiden of the Moonlig 6.4 1.3 1.5 2 10 F_TAD_GMD
Masque of the Last... 4.7 1.1 0.8 1 F_INF_GMD
Masquerade 7.3 1.6 1.0 1 23 F_INF_GMD
Matter of Time 1.4 0.3 1.4 1 14F_ALAN_GMD
Mercy 7.3 1.4 1.2 6 12 F_INF_GMD
Metamorphoses 8.7 1.3 1.6 1 23 F_INF_GMD
Meteor...Sherbet 7.8 1.4 1.5 7 10, 12 F_INF_GMD
Mind Electric 5.2 0.6 0.9 4 7,8 F_INF_GMD
Mind Forever Voyaging 8.3 1.4 0.9 13 5,15 C_INF
Mindwheel 8.5 1.6 1.5 1 C_I
Mission 6.0 1.2 1.4 1 21 F_TAD_GMD
Moist 6.8 1.4 1.2 4 F_TAD_GMD
Moment of Hope 5.0 1.3 0.3 3 19 F_TAD_GMD
Moonmist 6.1 1.2 1.0 15 1 C_INF
Mop & Murder 5.0 0.9 1.0 2 5 F_AGT_GMD
Mother Loose 7.0 1.5 1.3 2 17 F_INF_GMD
Mulldoon Legacy 7.4 1.2 1.8 1 F_INF_GMD
Multidimen. Thief 5.6 0.5 1.3 6 2,9 S15_AGT_GMD
Muse 7.9 1.5 1.2 4 17 F_INF_GMD
Music Education 3.7 1.0 0.7 3 F_INF_GMD
My Angel 7.9 1.7 1.2 1 23 F_INF_GMD
Myopia 6.1 1.3 0.6 2 F_AGT_GMD
Mystery House 4.1 0.3 0.7 1 F_AP_GMD
Nevermore 7.2 1.5 1.4 1 23 F_INF_GMD
New Day 6.6 1.4 1.1 4 13 F_INF_GMD
Night At Computer Cen 5.2 1.0 1.0 2 F_INF_GMD
Night at Museum Forev 4.2 0.3 1.0 4 7,8 F_TAD_GMD
Night of... Bunnies 6.6 1.0 1.4 1 I_INF_GMD
Nord and Bert 6.1 0.6 1.2 9 4 C_INF
Not Just A Game 6.9 1.0 1.3 1 20 F_INF_GMD
Not Just... Ballerina 5.3 0.8 0.9 3 20 F_INF_GMD
Obscene...Aardvarkbar 3.2 0.6 0.6 1 F_TAD_GMD
Odieus...Flingshot 3.3 0.4 0.7 2 5 F_INF_GMD
Of Forms Unknown 4.5 0.7 0.5 1 10 F_INF_GMD
Offensive Probing 4.2 0.6 0.9 1 F_INF_GMD
On The Farm 6.5 1.6 1.2 2 19 F_TAD_GMD
On The Other Side 2.2 0.0 0.0 1 F_I_GMD
Once and Future 6.9 1.6 1.5 2 16 C30_TAD_CMP
One That Got Away 6.4 1.4 1.1 7 7,8 F_TAD_GMD
Only After Dark 4.6 0.8 0.6 4 F_INF_GMD
Oo-Topos 5.7 0.2 1.0 1 9 C_AP_I_64
Outsided 2.5 0.7 0.2 2 F_INF_GMD
Pass the Banana 2.9 0.8 0.5 3 19 F_INF_GMD
Path to Fortune 6.6 1.5 0.9 3 9 S_INF_GMD
Pawn 6.3 1.1 1.3 2 12 C_MAG
Perilous Magic 4.9 0.9 1.1 1 21 F_INF_GMD
Perseus & Andromeda 3.4 0.3 1.0 1 64_INF_GMD
Persistence of Memory 6.2 1.2 1.1 1 17 F_HUG_GMD
Phlegm 5.2 1.2 1.0 2 10 F_INF_GMD
Photopia 7.5 1.5 0.7 23 17 F_INF_GMD
Phred Phontious...Piz 5.2 0.9 1.3 2 13 F_INF_GMD
Pickpocket 4.1 0.6 0.8 1 F_INF_GMD
Piece of Mind 6.3 1.3 1.4 1 10 F_INF_GMD
Pintown 1.3 0.3 0.2 1 F_INF_GMD
Pirate's Cove 4.8 0.6 0.6 1 F_INF_GMD
Planet of Infinite Mi 6.8 1.1 1.3 1 23F_TAD_GMD
Planetfall 7.3 1.6 1.4 13 4 C_INF
Plant 7.3 1.2 1.5 4 17 F_TAD_GMD
Plundered Hearts 7.3 1.4 1.3 10 4 C_INF
Poor Zefron's Almanac 5.6 1.0 1.3 3 13 F_TAD_GMD
Portal 8.0 1.7 0.2 3 C_I_A_AP_64
Prodly The Puffin 5.4 1.0 0.9 1 23 F_INF_GMD
Punk Points 6.4 1.4 1.3 1 F_INF_GMD
Purple 5.6 0.9 1.0 1 17 F_INF_GMD
Pyramids of Mars 5.8 1.2 1.1 2 AGT_GMD
Quarterstaff 6.1 1.3 0.6 1 9 C_M
Ralph 7.1 1.6 1.2 3 10 F_INF_GMD
Rameses 8.2 1.8 0.8 1 23 F_INF_GMD
Rematch 7.9 1.5 1.6 1 22 F_TAD_GMD
Remembrance 2.7 0.8 0.2 3 F_GMD
Reruns 5.2 1.2 1.2 1 AGT_GMD
Research Dig 4.8 1.1 0.8 2 17 F_INF_GMD
Reverberations 5.6 1.3 1.1 1 10 F_INF_GMD
Ritual of Purificatio 7.0 1.6 1.1 4 17 F_GMD
Sanity Claus 7.5 0.3 0.6 2 1 S10_AGT_GMD
Save Princeton 5.6 1.0 1.3 5 8 S10_TAD_GMD
Scapeghost 8.1 1.7 1.5 1 6 C_I
Sea Of Night 5.7 1.3 1.1 2 F_TAD_GMD
Seastalker 5.1 1.1 0.8 10 4 C_INF
Shade 8.8 1.4 1.0 1 23 F_INF_GMD
Shades of Grey 7.8 1.3 1.3 6 2, 8 F_AGT_GMD
Sherlock 7.0 1.3 1.4 5 4 C_INF
She's Got a Thing...S 7.0 1.7 1.6 3 13 F_INF_GMD
Shogun 7.0 1.2 0.6 2 4 C_INF
Shrapnel 6.8 1.3 0.5 5 20 F_INF_GMD
Simple Theft 5.8 1.3 0.8 1 20 F_TAD_GMD
Sins against Mimesis 5.5 1.0 1.2 3 13 F_INF_GMD
Sir Ramic... Gorilla 6.0 1.2 1.2 2 6 F_AGT_GMD
Six Stories 6.3 1.0 1.2 4 19 F_TAD_GMD
Skyranch 2.8 0.5 0.7 1 20 F_I_GMD
Small World 6.2 1.3 1.1 3 10 F_TAD_GMD
So Far 8.0 1.1 1.4 12 12 F_INF_GMD
Sorcerer 7.2 0.6 1.6 7 2,15 C_INF
Sound of... Clapping 7.0 1.2 1.3 7 5 F_ADVSYS_GMD
South American Trek 0.9 0.2 0.5 1 5 F_IBM_GMD
Space Aliens...Cardig 1.5 0.4 0.3 6 3, 4 S60_AGT_GMD
Space under Window 7.2 0.8 0.4 5 12 F_INF_GMD
Spacestation 5.6 0.7 1.1 1 F_INF_GMD
Spellbreaker 8.5 1.2 1.8 8 2,15 C_INF
Spellcasting 101 6.7 1.0 1.3 2 C_I
Spellcasting 201 7.8 1.6 1.7 2 C_I
Spellcasting 301 6.0 1.2 1.2 2 C_I
Spider and Web 8.4 1.6 1.7 15 14F_INF_GMD
SpiritWrak 6.7 1.2 1.3 6 22 F_INF_GMD
Spodgeville...Wossnam 4.3 0.7 1.2 2 F_INF_GMD
Spur 7.1 1.3 1.1 2 9 F_HUG_GMD
Spyder and Jeb 6.2 1.1 1.4 1 F_TAD_GMD
Starcross 6.6 1.0 1.2 7 1 C_INF
Stargazer 5.4 1.1 1.1 1 F_INF_GMD
Stationfall 7.7 1.6 1.5 7 5 C_INF
Statuette 3.7 0.0 0.1 1 F_INF_GMD
Stiffy 0.6 0.0 0.0 1 F_INF_GMD
Stiffy - MiSTing 4.7 1.1 0.4 5 F_INF_GMD
Stone Cell 6.0 1.1 1.0 3 19 F_TAD_GMD
Strangers In The Nigh 3.2 0.7 0.6 2 F_TAD_GMD
Stupid Kittens 2.2 0.1 0.1 1 F_INF_GMD
Sunset Over Savannah 8.7 1.7 1.4 6 13 F_TAD_GMD
Suspect 6.0 1.2 1.1 7 4 C_INF
Suspended 7.5 1.5 1.4 7 8 C_INF
Sylenius Mysterium 4.7 1.2 1.1 1 13 F_INF_GMD
Symetry 1.1 0.1 0.1 2 F_INF_GMD
Tapestry 7.1 1.4 0.9 5 10, 14 F_INF_GMD
Tempest 5.3 1.4 0.6 3 13 F_INF_GMD
Temple of the Orc Mag 4.5 0.1 0.8 2 F_TAD_GMD
Theatre 7.0 1.1 1.3 13 6 F_INF_GMD
Thorfinn's Realm 3.5 0.5 0.7 2 F_INF_GMD
Threading the Labyrin 1.9 0.0 0.0 1 F_TAD_GMD
Time: All Things... 3.9 1.2 0.9 2 11, 12 F_INF_GMD
TimeQuest 8.0 1.2 1.6 4 C_I
TimeSquared 4.3 1.1 1.1 1 F_AGT_GMD
Toonesia 5.8 1.1 1.1 6 7, 21 F_TAD_GMD
Tossed into Space 3.9 0.2 0.6 1 4 F_AGT_GMD
Town Dragon 3.9 0.8 0.3 2 14, 22 F_INF_GMD
Transfer 6.8 0.9 1.6 1 23 F_INF_GMD
Trapped...Dilly 5.1 0.1 1.1 2 17 F_INF_GMD
Travels in Land of Er 6.1 1.2 1.5 2 14 F_INF_GMD
Trinity 8.7 1.4 1.7 16 1,2 C_INF
Trip 4.6 1.2 1.0 1 F_TAD_GMD
Tryst of Fate 7.1 1.4 1.3 1 11 F_INF_GMD
Tube Trouble 4.2 0.8 0.7 2 8 F_INF_GMD
Tyler's Great Cube Ga 5.8 0.0 1.7 1 S_TAD_GMD
Uncle Zebulon's Will 7.3 1.0 1.5 12 8 F_TAD_GMD
Underoos That Ate NY 4.5 0.6 0.9 3 F_TAD_INF_GMD
Undertow 5.4 1.3 0.9 3 8 F_TAD_GMD
Undo 2.9 0.5 0.7 4 7 F_TAD_GMD
Unholy Grail 6.0 1.2 1.2 1 13 F_I_GMD
Unnkulian One-Half 6.7 1.2 1.5 9 1 F_TAD_GMD
Unnkulian Unventure 1 6.9 1.2 1.5 8 1,2 F_TAD_GMD
Unnkulian Unventure 2 7.2 1.2 1.5 5 1 F_TAD_GMD
Unnkulian Zero 8.4 0.7 0.8 21,12,14 F_TAD_GMD
Varicella 8.2 1.6 1.5 9 18 F_INF_GMD
Veritas 6.6 1.3 1.4 4 S10_TAD_GMD
Vindaloo 2.9 0.0 0.4 1 F_INF_GMD
VirtuaTech 6.1 0.0 1.2 1 F_TAD_GMD
VOID: Corporation 3.2 0.4 0.8 1 F_AGT_GMD
Water Bird 5.0 1.1 0.8 1 F_TAD_GMD
Waystation 5.5 0.7 1.0 4 9 F_TAD_GMD
Wearing the Claw 6.5 1.1 1.2 6 10, 18 F_INF_GMD
Wedding 7.4 1.6 1.3 3 12 F_INF_GMD
What-IF? 1.2 0.0 0.0 1 F_INF_GMD
Where Evil Dwells 5.1 0.8 1.1 1 F_INF_GMD
Winchester's Nightmar 6.9 1.5 0.5 1 22 F_INF_GMD
Winter Wonderland 7.6 1.3 1.2 7 19 F_INF_GMD
Wishbringer 7.4 1.3 1.3 13 5,6 C_INF
Withdrawal Symptoms 4.4 0.5 0.7 1 F_INF_GMD
Witness 6.5 1.5 1.1 9 1,3,9 C_INF
Wonderland 5.4 1.3 0.9 2 C_MAG
World 6.5 0.6 1.3 2 4 F_I_ETC_GMD
Worlds Apart 7.8 1.7 1.4 9 21 F_TAD_GMD
YAGWAD 7.0 1.0 1.4 1 23 F_INF_GMD
Your Choice 5.5 0.0 1.1 1 F_TAD_GMD
Zanfar 2.6 0.2 0.4 1 8 F_AGT_GMD
Zero Sum Game 7.2 1.5 1.5 3 13 F_INF_GMD
Zombie! 5.2 1.2 1.1 2 13 F_TAD_GMD
Zork 0 6.3 1.0 1.5 10 14C_INF
Zork 1 6.2 0.8 1.4 22 1, 12 C_INF
Zork 2 6.5 1.0 1.5 12 1, 12 C_INF
Zork 3 6.5 0.9 1.4 8 1, 12 C_INF
Zork Undisc. Undergr. 6.0 0.9 1.1 2 14F_INF_GMD
Zork: A Troll's Eye V 4.4 0.6 0.1 3 14 F_INF_GMD
Zuni Doll 4.0 0.6 0.9 2 14 F_INF_GMD
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The Top Ten:
A game is not eligible for the Top Ten unless it has received at least
three ratings from different readers. This is to ensure a more
democratic and accurate depiction of the best games.
Well, last issue we had 33 contributions to the scoreboard. This time
around, we almost doubled that figure, with 65 contributions. This is
great. However, it seems significantly less great when you take into
account the fact that 47 of those are one person's attempt to rate every
game from Comp00. Also, not to be a downer or anything, but 65 is far
short of the three-digit figures achieved in earlier issues.
Nonetheless, there was quite a bit of movement in the Top Ten -- guess
those of you who *do* submit ratings tend to do it on top-ranked games?
Gateway 2 [reviewed in this issue] held on to the top spot, while
Anchorhead slithered up two notches to number 2. Other movements include
a little do-si-do between Babel and Spider And Web, and the re-
appearance of perennial favorite A Mind Forever Voyaging at number 10.
1. Gateway 2: Homeworld 9.0 5 votes
2. Anchorhead 8.8 25 votes
3. Sunset over Savannah 8.7 6 votes
4. Trinity 8.7 16 votes
5. Gateway 8.6 6 votes
6. Losing Your Grip 8.5 6 votes
7. Spellbreaker 8.5 8 votes
8. Babel 8.4 10 votes
9. Spider and Web 8.4 15 votes
10. Mind Forever Voyaging 8.3 13 votes
As always, please remember that the scoreboard is only as good as the
contributions it receives. To make your mark on this vast morass of
statistics, rate some games on our website
(http://www.sparkynet.com/spag). You can also, if you like, send ratings
directly to me at obrian SP@G colorado.edu. Instructions for how the rating
system works are in the SPAG FAQ, available from GMD and our website.
Please read the FAQ before submitting scores, so that you understand how
the scoring system works. After that, submit away!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
___. .___ _ ___. ___.
/ _| | \ / \ / ._| / _|
\ \ | o_/ | | | |_. \ \
.\ \ | | | o | | | | .\ \
|___/ |_| |_|_| \___| |___/ PECIFICS
SPAG Specifics is a small section of SPAG dedicated to providing in-
depth critical analysis of IF games, spoilers most emphatically
included.
WARNING! SPOILERS BELOW FOR THE FOLLOWING GAMES:
Heroine's Mantle
The Tempest
PROCEED NO FURTHER UNLESS YOU HAVE PLAYED THESE GAMES!
THIS IS NOT A TEST! GENUINE SPOILERS TO FOLLOW!
LAST CHANCE TO AVOID SPOILAGE!
From: Emily Short <emshort SP@G mindspring.com>
TITLE: Heroine's Mantle
AUTHOR: Andy Phillips
EMAIL: aphillips SP@G ma.man.ac.uk
DATE: December 2000
PARSER: Inform
SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
AVAILABILITY: GMD
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/if-archive/games/zcode/Heroine.z8
VERSION: Release 3
I have a love-hate relationship with this game.
It's been a long time since I've played a large puzzle game; I think the
last time I sat down and plowed through one was Jigsaw. I started
Ballerina, I started Mulldoon, I even started and didn't finish (and may
the IF deities have mercy for this hideous omission) So Far; canon it
may be, but it's challenging and slow, like a long journey on foot
through deep snow, and the sheer beauty of the surroundings makes me
want to look closely, but then the looking closely slows my pace so that
I stop playing entirely. A bit of a catch-22, that.
What Heroine has that keeps one playing is frantic forward movement. The
prose is nothing special. There were no signs of Important Symbolism, or
Imagery I might want to Savor Later. Just the plot, rocketing onward
from near-death to nearer-death to death itself. Somehow this worked for
me, as it hasn't with Phillips' previous games. (Heist and Enemies are
also on the list of games I started but never finished.) It made more
sense to me, at least, and felt better-fleshed-out and more complete,
than the opening sequences of Heist; so perhaps Phillips has matured in
his game-writing, preserving the velocity of the plot while rendering
the scenery just cohesively enough to keep you engaged for the ride,
like a comic book. And like a comic book, it draws on elements of both
science fiction and fantasy, with rich heapings of cliche for the
characters.
This has interesting implications for both puzzle and story aspects of
the game. The puzzle design was incredibly ambitious. Sometimes this
worked brilliantly: I'd see a problem, and a subtle, five-stage plan
would form in my devious brain(*), and I would try it, and it would
WORK. Nothing builds confidence in a game faster than that. (*especially
since it flatters the player into supposing that she is Real Smart.) I
was intensely pleased by the sequence in which you pry open the elevator
doors and stand on top of the elevator, because this occurred to me
organically.
And other times I would see nothing, just a bunch of really strange
objects I had no idea how to manipulate, with no clear motivation on why
to manipulate them thus. NPC interactions were a bit sticky in this
regard, since I had to ask people things that weren't immediately
obvious or well-cued, but there were also a lot of cases where I needed
a vital thing that I'd assumed was scenery, or had to do something
because ten turns later it would matter during a timed puzzle (save and
restore, boys and girls), or where the situation was simply not
described in clear enough detail for my mind to come up with anything.
Hence the liberal use of the walkthrough.
As far as the story goes, I was less entranced. It does, at some basic,
comic-book level, work: it is episodic, but that makes it playable, and
the extreme events are, I suppose, appropriate to the genre. The
characters are likewise exceptionally unsubtle. This isn't a question of
implementation or any kind of technowhizgiggery attaching to the
interaction with the characters; it's just writing. Rameses had
characters I could believe existed, even if I couldn't do much with them
and didn't like them and in fact wished that they would fall into a lake
and die. They had nuances of personality. The characters in Heroine's
Mantle, up to and including the PC, do not have nuances. They have
unique identifying attributes, such as Misogyny, Peglegs, or a Penchant
for Abusing a British Accent. This I might also have taken in stride as
genre-appropriate, except for two things.
One is that there are moments where the story seems to attempt to
transcend this extreme broad-brush approach and tries for something
deeper and subtler and more complicated; and at those moments I found
myself a little embarrassed on its behalf, the way someone might feel
embarrassed watching a couple of sixth-graders valiantly trying to play
King Lear. Nice idea, guys, but you lack the range. It tries for
self-awareness (cf. the comment about the sailor's British effeteness
wearing a bit thin) and moments of depth (the self-sacrifice scene, in
particular.) And an ending, in particular, that eschews Grand Heroism
for Everyday Virtue, after showing us almost no everyday people or
situations. The world of Everyday Virtue is not one for which our
heroine is equipped, having, it seems, almost no normal ties or
relationships (orphaned, alone, with her only friend a dead ex-superhero
herself); no wonder she has to die before the New Way can be instated.
The second issue is that a lot of the characterization -- a
disproportionate amount, really -- seemed to align itself around the
theme of gender relations. I don't consider myself particularly
fanatical on this topic, but it got kind of hard to ignore the
persistence of it. Some was obviously played for ironical effect: male
characters who downplay the abilities of the heroine are due for a
Shock, ha ha! And certainly Phillips takes numerous overt shots at
misogyny.
At the same time, I didn't entirely know what to think about the
polarization of male and female interests. Men and women are
fundamentally different in this game. They have different roles and
functions and one must interact with them differently. The fact that the
staff works on men but not on women. The business with the
different-colored masked in the cultists' compound. The security guard's
sneering idiocy. The women may come out looking somehow better, but the
schism of treatment is itself a message of a sort.
To some extent this belongs within the comic-book genre. Look at Wonder
Woman and her island of Amazons. Still, there was something disturbing
and uncomfortable to me about Heroine's portrayal of female sexuality as
a Snare, now in convenient alsanine form. Like an evil Bond girl,
Mistletoe is lascivious and uses her sexuality against people; like a
good girl, our heroine avoids and tries to ignore such things. (Though
she is powerless against the alsanine, giving rise to a scene of hot
girl-girl action straight out of adolescent male fantasy. But, thank
goodness, she gets over it. NB. that I am not necessarily opposed to a
portrayal of female-female attraction in IF; I just think it could be
handled with a great deal more maturity -- and, dare I say it,
accuracy.)
This is such an old and obvious trope that pointing it out is almost not
interesting: what I didn't really understand was what it was doing
_here_, in a game that seemed to be trying to eschew the idea of the
woman as helpless or constrained to act only sexually. And yet... the
pieces are there. The Matriarch and the Maiden opposed to the Whore.
Sexual attraction as dangerous and manipulative. Mistletoe as an
extension of male power: a tool.
So there were moments when I could agree with the ideology of the game,
and moments when I could ignore it, and then I enjoyed playing. But
there were other moments when the characterization had me gritting my
teeth (or muttering "oh brother" under my breath, which may not be much
better.) I have the vague feeling, too, that if Andy Phillips is reading
this he is either horrified or furious.
I guess what it comes down to is this. There's been discussion lately on
rgif about whether it's possible to build a game around a Message, or
whether the game has to come first and the Message express itself
naturally as part of the story. I'd say Heroine's Mantle has a similar
problem. In order for any of its possible messages about human
interactions to work, they first have to seem to be interactions between
real humans, not between puppets and archetypes. Concentrated
observation of how people actually behave might give rise to
characterization much more genuine and with much more truth to convey.
Or else the attempt needs to be set aside and the comic book conventions
embraced wholeheartedly. The cognitive dissonance is confusing.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: Dennis Jerz <jerzdg SP@G uwec.edu>
TITLE: The Tempest
AUTHOR: Graham Nelson
E-MAIL: graham SP@G gnelson.demon.co.uk
DATE: 1997
PARSER: Inform, sort of
SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/tempest/tempest.z5
VERSION: Release 3
Tasking Ariel in Graham Nelson's The Tempest
--------------------------------------------
Gentles all,
be ye now invited to play Ariel
(a tricksy spirit)
in
Mr William Shakespeare's much-admir'd Comedy
The Tempest
[Pray depress key, that albeit depress'd
Cheerly unlock this our trumpery-chest --]
-- Title page, Nelson's "The Tempest"
...but this swift business
I must uneasy make, lest too light winning
Make the prize light.
--Prospero, The Tempest
In Graham Nelson's IF version of The Tempest, the player takes on the
role of the fairy spirit Ariel, who must perform tricks in order to win
his freedom. The game file contains the nearly complete play text, plus
an additional 20% of iambic pentameter computer messages of the "You
can't do that here" variety. In theory, text-based interaction sounds
like a great way to experience Shakespeare's work in a new context. In
practice, however, Nelson's program is likely to prove equally
frustrating to fans of modern computer games (who are used to a much
greater degree of interaction on a broader, shallower narrative field)
and "serious" theater people (who will be put off by the interludes of
puzzle-solving gameplay that interrupt the dramatic flow of events).
Nelson's dramatic experiment is most valuable for the light it casts
upon the nature of this particular computer-mediated genre.
INTRODUCTION
The Tempest seems a natural candidate for interactive fiction -- not
only because many IF games in the 1980s featured wizardry (and thus
audiences might be attracted to the subject matter) but also because
both Elizabethan drama and interactive fiction use language in order to
stimulate the senses. Shakespeare and his contemporaries openly wrestled
with the limits of Elizabethan stagecraft -- for example, in the
prologue to Henry V, the Chorus apologizes for not being able to produce
real kings and whole armies, imploring the audience: "Think, when we
talk of horses, that you see them / Printing their proud hoofs i' th'
receiving earth; / For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
/ Carry them here and there, jumping o'er times...". Further, the speech
with which Enobarbus describes Cleopatra's barge (Antony and Cleopatra
II.i) is not only more economical, but far more elegant than any
mechanical special effect the Elizabethan stage might have attempted.
Shakespeare's Chorus would need to do a lot of explaining in order to
draw audiences into the pictures from Roberta Williams's 1980 "Mystery
House" (generally held as the first computer narrative that employed
graphics). Infocom's advertising campaigns played upon the notions that
text games were more intellectual and did not require expensive computer
systems. After a boom in the early and mid 80s, the commercial market
for text-based computer games fell before the arrival of inexpensive
computer graphics.
Nelson -- who created the IF programming language Inform, and also some
of the best IF of the 90s, is Marlowe (of the "mighty line") and
Shakespeare rolled into one. (His online persona also shares elements of
Dr. Johnson, Lewis Carroll, and, of late, J.D. Salinger.) His epic works
Curses (a delirious mythological and genealogical romp, 1993) and Jigsaw
(a time-travel romance, 1995), did much to rekindle interest in
"serious" IF.
While Linda Hutcheon, discussing the postmodern tradition of emphasizing
the receiver's role in constructing a text, offers interactive fiction
as "the most extreme example I can think of" (77), the plots of most IF
works are tightly constrained, such that the story does not advance
until the player-reader has solved certain puzzles. The puzzles can
range from uttering a magic word, to finding the right key, to
successfully mastering a complex simulation of a WWII "enigma machine"
(from an extremely challenging chapter in Graham Nelson's "Jigsaw"); but
owing to the technical difficulty of coding such puzzles, and the
aesthetic difficulty of integrating such puzzles into the fabric of the
story, the plots of most IF works are tightly constrained. Aarseth's
Cybertext is one of few critical examinations of electronic text that
looks beyond canonical literary hypertext (see Landow, Moulthrop and
Shelly). Montfort and van der Linde are among those who recognize the
significance of Aarseth's efforts to expand the horizons of the attempt
to theorize electronic literature.
PLAYING THE TEMPEST
(Spoilers)
Playing the game requires knowledge of IF conventions as well as at
least some familiarity with Shakespeare. Upon being greeted with the
opening screen of text, which includes a reference to "the sharp wind of
the north," (which actually comes from I.ii.225), the experienced IF
player would try to "go north," which presents the ship carrying the
Duke of Milan and his train. A user who knows the play, or who can infer
properly from the game's title, would gather that Ariel's job is to
create a storm. Simply typing "create storm" yields only the iambic
pentameter error message, "That instruction, that verb, doth elude me."
But an experienced IF player knows that "blow on" is one of the commands
that game authors frequently employ; thus, typing "blow on ship"
conjures up the storm. The storm is described via a passage lifted from
Ariel's report to Prospero, and the player is awarded one point.
The ship (which now "founders on the wave") is still the only object in
the vicinity, so the player sends Ariel in for a closer look (typing
something like "enter ship" or simply "go in"). This action triggers a
cut-scene, which presents Shakespeare's (slightly edited) opening
dialogue. The individual speeches are visually separated by the prompt
"<--->," which signals the user to press a key. When the scene plays
out, and the narrative stops in order to give Ariel a chance to act, the
player gets the ">" prompt again.
When the interface works, it works well -- as the following transcript,
in which the Ariel first opens and then enters the hatches.
>open hatches
I ope the hatches.
>go in
What desireth you to go in?
>hatches
Now on the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flamed amazement... Who was so firm,
So constant, that this coil
Would not infect his reason?
There is a cry within.
<--->
Boatswain A plague upon this howling! they are louder than
the weather or our office. Lay her a-hold, a-hold! set her two
courses off to sea again; lay her off.
<--->
All but mariners
Plunge in the foaming brine and quit the vessel,
Now all afire with me: the king's son, Ferdinand
With hair up-staring, -- now like reeds, not hair, --
Is the first man to leap, crying "Hell is empty
And all the devils are here."
The mariners wet cry out, We split, we split, we split!
[Your score has increas'd a point.]
>_
"The Tempest," submitted under the name "William Shakespeare" to the
1997 Interactive Fiction Contest, finished 27th out of 34 entrants.
While it later won the 1997 "Best Use of the Medium" from XYZZYNews,
upon its first release, reviewers were both surprised and frustrated by
Nelson's respectful adherence to the Shakespearean plot. One of the
competition judges, apparently as vexed by Nelson's The Tempest as the
mariners he paraphrases, dismissed the entry:
What a clever idea! (Which, together with a ha'penny, will
buy you a brick.) I couldn't figure out what the hell to do.
Even reading the beginning of the original play. I got as
far as when the King's party jumped overboard, and then I
was stuck. So I split. I split, I split, I split. (Plotkin)
The passive act of reading the dialogue far outweighs the interactive
elements, as in this extended sequence. The user types several commands
which the programmer must exclude from the narrative. In the following
transcript, the first several commands ("look," "kiss miranda," "hit
prospero," and "throw phial at prospero") do nothing to advance the
plot, but they do establish the setting and lay down some of the rules
of this fictional world.
>look
The island, before thy cell (in guise of an airy spirit)
Upon the island beach, secret paths run north to south, while thy
cell stands here; and a copse lies east.
Prospero watches the sloven breakers, leaning upon quarterstaff.
Beside him, plucking at sleeves, his daughter Miranda.
>kiss miranda
No, I must guard my lips for now.
>hit prospero
Come, you but dally;
I pray you, pass with your best violence,
I am afeard you make a wanton of me.
>throw phial at prospero
I have no aim, no, no chance of a palpable hit.
>enter cell
Prospero's Cell (in guise of an airy spirit)
Thy cell is furnish'd with books and caparison'd with strange and
sombre hangings: yet it has a kindly aspect, being these many years
Miranda's schoolroom, and mark how sunlight strikes through the
window.
Thy enchanted net hangs from the lintel.
Thy magic flute rests on its rough-hewn stand.
Prospero and Miranda, yet drowsy, follow.
<--->
Prospero ...Some food we had and some fresh water that
A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,
Out of his charity, being then appointed
Master of this design, did give us, with
Rich garments, linens, stuffs and necessaries,
Which since have steaded much; so, of his gentleness,
Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
<--->
Miranda Would I might
But ever see that man!
<--->
They take bread, and return.
>_
Nelson is far too respectful of Shakespeare's text to allow any
alteration to the plot. The resulting necessity to close off all other
possible actions (except for the one action necessary to trigger the
next scene) left many reviewers wondering where the "fun" in the game
was supposed to lie. Others pulled out their copies of The Tempest in
order to figure out what to tell Ariel to do, and then felt irked when
the "reward" for solving a puzzle consisted in having to scroll past
lines of online text that replayed the scene they had just studied. One
poster, pondering the brave new world of interactive fiction, wondered:
Would it be possible to write a story-line exploring
other possibilities of the 'Tempest' such as Miranda
not falling in love (which I always thought was a
litle [sic] too pat), the baddies killing each other...
a sort of 'what if?' interactive fiction. (Olive)
Nelson himself replied as follows:
It might have been possible (for a better author, anyway),
except that then it wouldn't have been a performance of
"The Tempest"... it would have been more like those
19th-century outings for "King Lear" in which Cordelia
lives at the end and marries Edgar while Lear goes off
to an old people's home, on the grounds that everybody
likes a happy ending. (Nelson, "Re: Tempest: still stuck!")
Despite the fact that the game will let the plot progress only towards
the end that Shakespeare had already prescribed for it, some of the
puzzles are fairly difficult to solve, simply because their solutions
are not always clear. (Whereas "blow on ship" was the solution to the
opening puzzle, one cannot "blow on flute" to wake Ferdinand, but must
rather "sing". Such a restriction may be obvious to anyone who remembers
Ariel's songs from this scene, but within the logic of the game, there
is no reason why playing the flute, or simply shaking the sleeper's
shoulders, wouldn't do just as well.)
Although Nelson does not seem to have provided his own hint or
walkthrough file, one USENET wag suggested that the full text of
Shakespeare's The Tempest should suffice; yet even when the player knows
what scene is supposed to happen next, it's sometimes hard to figure out
how to tell Ariel to accomplish it. As Prospero notes (in the quote at
the top of this page), to make a game too easy robs it of its pleasure;
but the "prize" Miranda and Ferdinand stand to win is to live happily
ever after. I for one felt silly re-reading a scene in order to figure
out what to tell Ariel to do, and then having the game "reward" me by
displaying that very same scene!
While most IF games permit the player a great deal of local freedom
(wandering around a sprawling textual topography, interacting with
complex props, and solving puzzles which unlock doors that lead to new
exploratory and interactive possibilities), Nelson does not give the
reader the opportunity to change the plot. This makes a certain amount
of sense; after all, a player who takes on the role of Ariel should feel
Ariel's constraints. Whereas Shakespeare's textual world is rich and
vivid, Nelson's version -- which used the very same words --feels like a
cardboard cutout. I don't see this as a weakness in Nelson's ability,
but rather as evidence of the complex layering of textual meanings and
interactive possibilities that native IF typically represents.
From Duncan Stevens's online review of The Tempest:
Certainly, the extensiveness of the Inform hacking is impressive, and
the sheer concept of adapting a drama and making it interactive is
novel -- but the game does not, in truth, meet all the challenges the
task presented..... Though the gameplay limitations of Tempest are
considerable, they are there for a valid reason, not simply
inadequate coding -- and, as such, I decided they shouldn't count too
heavily aganist [sic] the game. Though it doesn't "work" especially
well, the concept as put into practice works about as well as it
could, and the author should get some credit for a worthy effort.
<http://www.sparkynet.com/spag/t-z.html#tempest>
>From Paul O'Brian's online review of The Tempest:
The Tempest is entertaining and innovative; it often feels quite
magical to inhabit the Prospero/Ariel connection, and to take part in
a groundbreaking interactive experience. I think that the game also
has great potential as an educational tool, allowing readers to
experience Shakespeare's language in a new and thrilling way.... The
author's erudition is clear, from the simple choice of subject matter
to the deft interweaving of other Shakespearean and Renaissance
phrases into the play's text when necessary (for example, to the
command "throw x at character" the game responds "I have no aim, no,
no chance of a palpable hit.", a phrase echoing Hamlet). Such
attention to scholarly detail recalls some of the finer moments of
Nelson's epics, especially Jigsaw.
<http://ucsu.Colorado.EDU/~obrian/97rev4.html#tempes>
WORKS CITED
Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.
Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York and London:
Routledge, 1988.
Landow, George. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical
Theory and Technology. Boston: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
Lawrence, Rich. "WinFrotz 2.32 R5.2b." 32-bit Windows freeware. 1999.
Available <http://www.cris.com/~Twist/WinFrotz/>. A translation of
Frotz (Stefan Jokisch, 1995-96).
Montfort, Nicholas A. "Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star," [review of
Aarseth, Cybertext]. Electronic Book Review 11. 2000?
<http://www.electronicbookreview.com/ebr11/11mon/index.html> Accessed
8 Jan 2001.
Moulthrop, Stuart and Nancy Kaplan. "Something to Imagine: Literature,
Composition, and Interactive Fiction." Computers and Composition 9.1,
1991: 7-23.
Murray, Jane. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in
Cyberspace. New York: The Free Press, 1997.
Nelson, Graham K. "The Tempest: An Interactive Performance." 1997.
Freeware. Available
<ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/tempest/tempest.z5>.
-----. "Re: Tempest: still stuck!" Usenet posting. 6 Nov. 1999.
<rec.games.int-fiction>.
"Olive" (olive SP@G studio.ifb.co.uk). "Tempest: still stuck!" Online posting.
6 Nov. 1999. <rec.games.int-fiction>.
Plotkin, Andrew. "COMP97: Zarf's comments." Usenet posting. 1 Jan, 1998.
<rec.games.int-fiction>.
van der Linde, Gerhard. "Text without boundaries." Trans: Internet-
Zeitscrhift fu:r Kulturvissenchaften 9 (October, 2000). N.p.
<http://www.fh-mars.ac.at/arlt/institut/trans/9Nr/linde9.htm>
Accessed 20 Dec 2000.
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