Jimmy Maher's IF Comp 2007 Reviews (1 of 3)

I was rather disappointed by this year's crop of games. Last year, the
first that I played all the games and wrote reviews, I was concerned at
the number of 8s and 9s I was handing out, wondering if it was
hopelessly uncritical of me to be passing out high scores like so much
Halloween candy. This year there were long stretches where I wondered
if I was ever going to be able to write a genuinely positive review.
Either I have grown much more jaded and cynical over the past year or
the quality of the average entrant has dipped rather dramatically.
While I really enjoyed a handful of games, I didn't give out any 10s
this year. Nothing quite impressed me the way that last year's Elysium
Enigma did. I did pass out two 9s and a couple more 8s along with a
handful of 7s, for what it's worth.

Notably, and I think contributing to a somewhat underwhelming Comp,
virtually all of the "big names" were absent this year. No Emily Short;
no Andrew Plotkin; no Jon Ingold; no Jason Devlin; no Eric Eve; etc. An
unusual number of first-time authors unfortunately yielded an unusual
number of ill-tested, half-baked efforts, many of which had considerable
potential if treated to a bit more spit and polish. Many of said
authors will hopefully learn their lesson this year, and return in the
future more knowledgable about the work required to craft a really solid
game. Testing, bug-swatting, and polishing may not be fun or glamorous,
but they are as important as coming up with a strong idea in the first
place.

As I write these words just before the results are to be announced, I
have absolutely no idea what game will win. My personal favorite was
The Chinese Room, which nudged out Across the Stars by just a hair. I
don't really expect either of those games to win, though, as both are
much, much longer than the two-hour Comp standard. I didn't really care
about this; I just scored them after two hours as I was supposed to and
then kept right on playing. I think that many others, for better or for
worse, will mark them down mercilessly for their length. If I had to
guess, I would say that Lost Pig will win this time, which would be
fine. I liked that one a lot too.

While I didn't purposely set out to spoil the games in my reviews, I
wasn't really that careful about it either. If a paraticular puzzle or
segment annoyed or impressed me, I wasn't shy about describing it in
more detail than I might in, say, a more formal review for SPAG. If you
haven't yet played these games and want to come to them completely
fresh, you should therefore beware of reading further. If you don't
mind just a little bit of spoiling around the edges in the interests of
finding out what is worth playing, you're probably okay.

This reviews can also be accessed at
http://home.grandecom.net/~maher/if/comp07.html.

Reviews in this posting:

Beneath: A Transformation
Slap That Fish!
A Matter of Importance
A Fine Day for Reaping
Adventure XT
Fox, Fowl, and Feed
Wish
Deadline Enchanter
My Mind's Mishmash

Beneath: A Transformation

And so Comp 07 begins for me with this modest little effort. One knows
as soon as one fires this up that it's not going to contend for, well,
much of anything, but it still seemed to have the potential to entertain
in a modest little text adventurey way. Its story -- what there is of
it -- is based upon several short stories by Robert E. Howard of Conan
fame. You play a nondescript fellow who has just been kicked out of the
library at closing time, and now you can't find anyplace to read the
book you were in the middle of. Well, anyway, that's about as close as
the game gets to providing you with a coherent motivation for the things
you are about to do.

So, then, the game involves wandering around town solving a bunch of
arbitrary little puzzles just because they are there. Further, and I
know this is going to drive many people nuts, it is ridiculously easy to
make the game unwinnable. The only way to get through this one is to
restart and restore again and again, gradually piecing together not only
what needs to be done but, more importantly in a way, the exact order to
do everything in so that all of the plot pieces will fall into place
just so. The author does at least warn his players about his design
choice, so I did go into it with fair warning. In the end it wasn't
this choice that put me off the game. I don't generally mind a game
where restarting and restoring is necessary if it is reasonable in size,
reasonably solvable, and clearly signposted as such by the author.

The thing is, though, a game like this, with little going for it in the
realm of plot, character, setting, or innovation, must rise and fall on
the strength of its puzzles and its funness as a purely gamelike
experience. And this one starts to fall down in those areas pretty
quickly. I got stuck before getting too far at all and turned to the
walkthrough, where I learned that I had to successfully play a game of
"guess the conversation topic" to continue. So I duly started plugging
away again, and duly got stuck again. The problem this time was with
the implementation, not the design. At least, I think that throwing
something in a crack should be the same as throwing something through a
crack. After this, I pretty much just played from the walkthrough, but
even doing this I had some problems solving one more fairly ridiculous
puzzle.

For all that, there was some effort put into this game. The writing,
while hardly memorable and decidedly minimalist, is clear and
grammatical, and everything is basically spelled right. The
implementation, as noted above, has some problems -- including
additionally atmospheric movement messages that appear even when you try
to move in invalid directions and a strange rope that can be viewed from
every room in the game when placed in a certain position -- but I'm sure
I will see much, much worse before the Comp is over.

But tellingly, there is no mention in the credits of beta-testers. A
handful of testers could have told the author about the design problems
that make his game almost impossible to solve unaided and spotted the
various little technical glitches that bring the game down. Why do so
many authors fail to take this last, critical step? Even if all of its
problems were fixed, this would hardly be an outstanding effort, but it
could have scored a couple of points better easily enough and left its
first-time author with better feelings for beginning a second, hopefully
more ambitious effort.

Still, nondescript as this game is, it is the first game I've played in
which the player's ultimate goal is to become a worm. That has to count
for something.

Score: 4 out of 10.

Slap that Fish!

I had quite a lot of fun with this one in spite of its having a few
problems. The premise is certainly unique, being a Progress Quest sort
of send-up of the typical computer RPG. You play a fellow who has a
serious -- really serious -- objection to fish. The entire game is a
series of combats with deadlier and deadlier finned enemies that take
place in a typical city alleyway. How can you fight fish when the alley
is not -- or at least doesn't appear to be -- underwater? Beats the
hell out of me. You learn to stop asking such questions soon enough and
just go with it.

There are actually two levels on which to play the game. First of all,
you will likely just be trying to win each of the combats, and not
particularly concerned about what you look like doing it. During the
first half of the game, this is trivially easy, merely a matter of
punching, slapping, backhanding, and kicking your enemies in whatever
order feels most appropriate and most fun. It is so easy, in fact, that
I was starting to think the game was nothing but an elaborate joke for a
while. During the second half of the game, though, straightforward
hand-to-hand violence is usually not the answer, in spite of the fact
that you do get to "level up" and become stronger a couple of times. If
one tries to punch a shark, after all, one can generally expect to lose
one's arm no matter how strong one is. Winning at this stage requires a
bit more creative thinking and puzzle-solving.

After each battle, you are scored based on how quickly, elegantly, and
efficiently you dispatched your opponent. Herein comes the other level
of challenge. My first time through the game my score was not very
good, and so I diligently started over to try to maximize my score. I
only got about halfway through this time, though, as I could not figure
out how efficiently dispatch the tuna, and couldn't work up the
motivation to continue with that ugly blot on my record.

So, yes, I had fun with this, and it deserves lots of credit for
originality and for a certain cheerful insanity. There are lots of
cracks showing in the implementation, though, which make it impossible
for me to give this a really good score. All sorts of scenery and fishy
parts are unimplemented. Stuff like this crops up again and again:

>x shark
The shark adjusts its monocle to get a better look at you. You can hear
its stomach rumbling, in anticipation of its next meal.

>x monocle
I don't know the word "monocle".

What makes this even more frustrating is that there are places where you
do have to target particular parts of a fish. Thus winning the game
literally requires that you constantly beat your head against its
limitations, looking for that one actually implemented thing that you
need to solve a puzzle. It's the sort of thing that was par for the
course once, of course, but not quite what I want to still be seeing in
2007.

There are also outright bugs to found, including a couple of nasty TADS
library programming faults. So it's a somewhat rough and unpolished
experience, but still good fun, and absolutely screaming for the good
cleaning-up that would turn it into an emminently recommendable little
trifle.

Score: 6 out of 10.

A Matter of Importance

I beta-tested this game for its author, so I obviously cannot vote on
it. I'm going to go ahead and write a review, though, along with
assigning it the score I would have given.

The premise has you playing the part of a thief who is about to get
kicked out of the guild due to poor performance of his thiefly duties.
Out of this comes a fairly straightforward little adventure, albeit with
some fairly subversive meta-commentary on the IF genre itself to spice
things up. Although the author doesn't explicitly explain this part
until the game is over, it's probably the most interesting aspect of the
piece, so I'm going to spoil it here.

The author does not like what he calls "decoration items," by which he
means those scenery objects that exist for flavor but cannot be
interacted with in any meaningful way -- only examined. It's a
prejudice I don't share at all, as it seems to me there are only two
ways to avoid them: to meticulously implement every possible interaction
the player might choose to make with everything (impossible), or to
simply leave everything but puzzle objects umimplemented (ugly).
Therefore "decoration items" are the least bad solution, it seems to me,
although I don't generally appreciate simple dismissive messages for
them like "That's not important." Even after testing the game, I'm not
quite sure if it is messages like this or the whole concept of scenery
objects in general that the author objects to, and therefore don't quite
know how to take the satirical aspect of the game.

But anyway, the satire works this way: Every single item in these long,
intricate room descriptions is examinable, but everything that is not
necessary for actually solving the game has something to the effect of
"but that's not important" tacked to the end of its (often very
detailed) description. The satire doesn't really work for me, I think
for two reasons. First, I don't really have any great objection to the
thing that the author is satirizing; and secondly exactly what the
author is doing never became really clear to me until I read his end
notes. Before that, I just thought the game had a really weird,
repetitive way of describing its world.

But once we move away from the meta-commentary, what do we have? Well,
we have a playable enough text adventure with a number of very clever,
fun puzzles and a couple of extremely dodgy ones. The completely out of
left field solution to the soccer puzzle is the worst offender. I
didn't get this when testing, and still wouldn't have gotten it this
time around if I hadn't remembered what to do. I didn't even realize my
shoes were implemented, since they don't show up in my inventory or my
self-description. The guess-the-verb bit that comes when crossing the
road will probably drive some people crazy as well, although I actually
got this one very quickly and enjoyed it.

The writing is certainly vivid enough, although as mentioned above
rather exhausting at times in its sheer depth of descriptive detail .
The exhaustion factor is counteracted by the occasional very funny bit,
however. My girlfriend is still laughing at the footnote describing the
soccer... I mean, football.

Score: 6 out of 10.

A Fine Day for Reaping

Mr. Webb's entry in the previous Competition, The Sisters, was one of my
unsung favorites. This year's entry is very different from that game,
showing impressive versality. Once again I am very impressed by the
writing and design, but also let down a bit this time by a lack of polish.

The game has you playing a version of Death (a.k.a. the Grim Reaper)
inspired by the portrayal of same in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.
I haven't read that depiction -- I bounced hard off a couple of
Discworld novels that did not feature Death years ago, and can't work up
the interest to return to the series -- but I can say that in game form
it is very, very funny. This author can write! It's a pleasure to play
a genuinely funny game, and one that doesn't come along as often as I
wish, as most jokey IF tends to feel labored to me. Death in this game
is a bit of a loser, really, with a pronounced lisp and a decided lack
of self-confidence, but he's only the tip of the proverbial comedy
iceberg. There are many, many funny situations and turns of phrase that
made me smile often and laugh out loud at least occasionally,
engendering enough good will to let me overlook -- or at least not
punish too badly -- plenty of faults.

As Death, you have been instructed by the Powers That Be to reap five
unfortunate souls who have proven reluctent to leave their bodies
behind. (Death in this milieu is, it seems, is a kind of second-level
troubleshooting service, dealing only with those souls who prove
problematic and presumably cannot be reaped by lower minions.) These
souls are located all over the world, but easily enough reached through
the use of Horse, your (you guessed it) skeletal steed. The game design
is really quite clever, much more intricate than the typical effort.
The scenes of all of these passings -- plus your extra-dimensional home
and a few other locations you may discover as you play along --
interrelate with one another. Items from one are often required to
solve puzzles in another, etc. Further, the problems surrounding each
soul can be solved in two or three different ways, all of them generally
clever and satisfying. The end result is an impressive example of open,
non-linear gameplay. It wouldn't work quite so well in a more serious
game, of course, but here it's a real treat.

All is not sunshine and roses, though. There's the terrible parser,
which I'm not even sure is worthy of the name. The author wrestles
actively with its limitations, but that only leads to ugly solutions
like this to the problem of using an elevator:

Type either 0,1,2 or 3 depending on whether you want to go to the lobby,
first or second floor or simply exit the lift at the floor you are
already on.

Apparantly something like "push first button" is too much for the ADRIFT
parser. In other places Mr. Webb has come up with some quite clever,
intricate puzzles, but the game solves them for you in response to the
simplest beginning on your part, which really leaches a lot of the fun
out of them.

And then there is a certain sloppiness here that cannot (gasp!) be
blamed on ADRIFT. Lots of typos, run-ons, etc., that could have been
corrected with a bit more proof-reading, and some significant bugs and
glitches as well. I found I could solve the Paris problem at least
twice due to the game's not recognizing that the soul had already been
reaped. And then there is stuff like this everywhere:

Room 247 (Paris)

You are in a hotel room in a luxurious Parisian hotel. The decor is of
the usual standard expected by those who have plenty of money but no
class. Gold trim and regal, red wallpaper with extravagant, crystal
light fittings and a white smoke alarm that looks out of place. The
floor is polished oak, or some other kind of luxury wood. There is a
four-poster double bed against the far wall. Everything is very wet
from the sprinkler, and the chalk-line has been erased.

Exits: East

Agathe Laurent's corpse lies on the bed.

examine bed

A large, soft bed. It's probably very, very bad for your back. Agathe
Laurent beckons you over, grinning.

The annoyances and problems in this one never overwhelmed my enjoyment,
though, and for that reason I'm going to give it a pretty good score in
spite of everything. It kept me entertained and interested throughout,
which I suppose is the most important thing. Mr. Webb has a rare gift
for both writing and design. I hope he will continue to create IF for
us, preferably with a bit more attention to details in future efforts.

Score: 7 out of 10

Adventure XT

(This game was disqualified after I played it for having been previously
released. Perhaps we should disqualify all of Panks's entries, since
they are all effectively the same game? Anyway, I've left my review
here in case anyone is interested.)

And so I come to the first of Paul Panks's three (!) entries. As usual
with Panks's submissions, I don't quite know what to say about this one
that I haven't already said in previous reviews of his work. Mr. Panks
basically (ha!) writes the same game over and over again with only the
most minor variations. Once again you start in a village tavern about
to begin a quest to free the surrounding land from the oppression of
some evil wizard or other. Once again you do that by wandering over a
huge landscape that contains a whole lot of nothing, fighting monsters
in simplistic randomized combat when you aren't fighting with the
atrocious two-word parser. Once again the parts of the game that are
supposed to be funny, such as (I presume) the Smurf encampment aren't,
but much else unintentionally is. Take this:

Light Forest
You have reached a particularly dark section of the forest, more
secluded than
the rest.

Or this:

In a Small Cottage
You are standing inside a large cottage within the forest.

I'm not sure even "large cottage" is a good description of the place,
actually, because it turns out to have inside it a long, long hallway
full of rooms; that doesn't really match my notion of a cottage of any
description. But hey, who am I to quibble in the face of other delights
like water I can carry around using only my bare hands?

I'll give this a two just because it can't be easy to write an adventure
game in BASIC and have it turn out even this well. (The obvious
corollary, of course, being "why the hell would you want to?")

Score: 2 out of 10.

Fox, Fowl, and Feed

This whole game is a single set-piece puzzle which has you, as a
delivery man, trying to transport a fox, a duck, and some feed across a
river using only an old rowboat. You can only carry one item across at
a time, which is where the difficulty lies. I'll let the game explain
further:

Notes:
* Do not leave the fox alone with the duck. Foxes think ducks are tasty!
* Do not leave the duck alone with the grain. Ducks are always hungry...
* Only one item may be transported at a time in any non-company vehicle
(e.g., rowboat).

Anyone who has played any quantity of IF at all can see exactly where
this is going. Still, it's a clever little idea in its way, and has the
potential to make a nice diversion.

If it wasn't hopelessly, completely bugged, that is. I solved the game
in about five minutes simply by dropping the pesky duck into the middle
of the river -- something I assume from reading the hints I am not
supposed to be able to do -- and picking it up again once the fox and
sack of grain were safely across. The hints say that the fox is
supposed to get upset when placed in the boat, leading to problems, but
that didn't happen to me either.

The writing is literate enough, and there's even some nicely done online
hints, so some effort went into this. I'm guessing this was just an
instance of a last-minute change gumming up the works, or maybe it just
really needed more than one beta-tester. Anyway, I'll give it a 3
because it was mildly amusing even in its bugged state and because it
wasn't a bad idea for a game. Shame about the execution.

Score: 3 out of 10.

Wish

This is a sweet enough little story about a young girl who enters a
dream-world at a moment of crisis in her life. You travel through this
landscape, solving simple puzzles as you go, while occasional "cut
scenes" gradually reveal the backstory in the real world. It's not a
bad effort, and its heart is certainly in the right place, but I have to
say that I didn't find much here very compelling either. The scenery of
the dream is described in a rather minimalistic fashion that doesn't
allow for much sense of wonder, and the story felt like something I had
heard a million times before, albeit often more evocatively told.

From a technical point of view, nothing is really wrong here. The game
seems well-tested, the prose is grammatical, and everything seems to
work as it should. I do have issues with one of the puzzles, though. I
figured out pretty quickly that I needed to construct a kite, but was
unable to figure out a way to use the gel to glue the thing together in
spite of trying every phrasing imaginable. It turns out I had to rub
the gel on myself, at which point I accidentally drip some onto my
half-constructed kite. I must drip a whole lot on there, actually, as
it is somehow enough to hold the whole contraption together. Not only
is this frustrating in itself, but it also robs the player of the
satisfaction of really solving the puzzle by making the whole thing seem
random and accidental.

This is the worst offender, but it does point to some of what is wrong
with this game. It's not bad, but it doesn't quite manage to be good
either. No effort has been made to customize the stock Inform 6 parser,
meaning that things must often be phrased somewhat awkwardly, or just in
the One True Way the author anticipated. Yes, it's bug-free, but the
author didn't do anything to take that extra step to make this a
polished, non-frustrating experience. A little more ambition -- in the
story, the writing, and the absolutely linear design -- would have gone
a long way with me.

Score: 6 out of 10.

Deadline Enchanter

Most of the time, these reviews are pretty easy to write. Every once in
a while, though, I come upon a game like this, and I don't quite know
what to say. This is one of the most inscrutable works of IF I have
ever played, and that's saying something. What's it about, you ask?
Well, that's just it... I'm not quite sure. You start out wandering
through a city that is apparantly suffering under some sort of
occupation or oppression, but it's all described so obliquely -- and by
such a discursive, chatty narrator -- that I can't tell much more than
that. I'm really not even sure if I'm human or alien.

It's not that getting through the game is the slightest bit difficult.
It's comically easy, in fact. You find lying about the locations you
visit lists of commands to enter, literally in-game walkthroughs.
Follow these to the letter, and you're golden. Should you be masochist
enough to try to ignore these and puzzle your way through independently,
you will quickly realize this to be impossible. Many essential elements
are not described at all in the room descriptions. You can only know
that an exit, for instance, is in a certain direction by following the
walkthroughs.

So the problem is not playing the game. The problem is figuring out
what the hell you've just played when all is said and done. There seems
to be quite an intricate narrative in its author's head, involving at
least three governments -- or cults, or races, or aliens -- at odds with
one another. Although the game is absolutely linear, you switch
locations and points of view at a bewildering rate, and there is
something of a moral choice at the end -- if a choice (offered by the
narrator) between turning off the game and continuing to play can really
be considered an in-game choice, that is. The big problem with this
moral "choice" is that I didn't understand its ramifications; no
surprise there, I didn't understand much of anything in this one.
Anyway, by this time I was way too annoyed by the pretentiously chatty
narrator to really care.

Speaking of pretension, I feel like in order to be a proper,
sophisticated reviewer I should be throwing around some of it right now,
talking about how this game "subverts our expectations of IF" and making
sure to throw in some good postmodern buzzwords. I just don't have the
heart for it, though. I didn't understand this game, nor did I like it
very much. I think I'll just leave it at that. I'm not against
"difficult" works per se, but a difficult work has to interest me enough
in some way -- in form, in setting, in character, or in plot -- to make
me want to plumb its depths. This one never did. The gameplay is
completely linear and uninteresting, and nothing about the background in
which it takes place grabbed my interest at all. The game does indulge
in some clever wordplay with the parser and other staples of IF that is
almost funny, but nothing else about it made me care. I'm not going to
give it a terrible score because I can tell that a lot of work and
thought went into this. I'll give it a nice, neutral five then subtract
one for irritating me on such a frequent basis. Possible Golden Banana
of Discord material here, I think.

Score: 4 out of 10.

My Mind's Mishmash

This game takes place in an online multi-player VR game of the (I
assume) near future. Within this VR takes place quite an intricate
story, involving five preternaturally gifted teenagers who have been
conscripted due to their native psychic abilities to fight an Alien
Menace. Think Endor's Game happening within a smaller and more tightly
scripted World of Warcraft, in ten or twenty years time. Now, you are
yourself a teenager in the real world with the rather annoying handle of
Surviveor (don't ask), who is a player within this game. Initially you
are playing the role of one of the five chosen teenagers, but soon other
events -- or, more specifically, the nefarious actions of your
arch-enemy Memoryblam -- leave you running about the simulation as a
sort of ghost. You must find your way through five "episodes" of the
game by locating an exit node in each that will allow access to the next
level. And of course you must fend off the harrasments of Memoryblam,
and eventually defeat him before making your final escape. Got all
that? If not, don't worry about it. Suffice to say that if you fail,
all will be lost. Or at least your homework will when your computer
crashes.

In spite of having short tolerance for snotty teenage gamers, I have to
recognize that it's a clever and intricate scenario, well thought
through for the most part. There are problems here, though, that make
it impossible for me to love or even like it too much.

First of all, it's written with ADRIFT, and the usual parser problems
with that system crop up right from the first scene, in which you are
fighting, still "in character" as this point, inside a sort of robotic
combat suit. (Shades of Starship Troopers. Mr. Street has certainly
covered all of the classic science fiction bases with this one.) This
suit is equipped with a suitably cool variety of weaponry. It's not
much fun to play with, however, when stuff like this starts happening:

shoot traitor with psychic disruptor
You activate the machine guns, aiming them towards the traitor's suit.
You scatter your fire to try to catch the quickly dodging suit. Some
bullets hit the mark, but the armour is too strong. You eventually stop
to conserve bullets and consider your next tactic.

In case you were wondering: yes, the psychic disruptor and the machine
guns are two completely different weapons. This sort of parser fun
continues throughout the game, leaving you with that constant
uncomfortable feeling of wondering whether you are truly on the wrong
track or the game just doesn't understand what you are trying to do
because you haven't hit on the One True Word Combination. Some very
tricky puzzles, and ADRIFT's unfortunate tendency to lie to you about
what it can really understand by giving innocuous responses to things
that should result in "I don't understand you" error messages, really
excacberate the problem.

But this game has problems that go beyond ADRIFT. While the intricacy
of the world it constructs is admirable, there are a few puzzles I found
dodgy and underclued, bordering on unfair if not completely crossing the
line. That's a shame, as there are plenty of others that are genuinely
engaging and fun to solve. Another big problem is the writing. It's
clear and grammatical and all that, but it reads like an adventure game
filtered through the sensibility of Rain Man. Everything is described
well enough, but it's just so dry that it quickly becomes a chore to get
through this quite lengthy game. If the author can't get any more
excited than this about his own game, why should I?

The logic of your ability to interact with the gameworld also seems to
break down in a few places, unless I am misunderstanding something. You
wear something called a ghost cap throughout most of the game, which
makes you invisible to computer-controlled inhabitants of the world but
also prevents you from directly interacting with your physical
surroundings. Many of the puzzles thus involve taking off the ghost cap
at just the right moment to accomplish what you need to while not being
spotted and killed. For the most part, this works well enough, but in
some places later in the game you can do some decidedly active things
while wearing the cap. This leads to an even further level of
confusion, as you are never quite sure what you really can and cannot do
while wearing the cap.

Score: 5 out of 10.

--
Jimmy Maher
Editor, SPAG Magazine -- http://www.sparkynet.com/spag
Thank you for helping to keep text adventures alive!