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Game Reviews C

These reviews are in alphabetical order according to the name of the game reviewed. The index also has a few extra features. First and foremost of these is the instant gratification feature. If you see the SPAG button:

Then you can click on it to retrieve the file from ftp.ifarchive.org, or to go to that file's directory on the archive (in the case of competition games).

The email addresses used are those submitted with the review, so naturally some of them may be out of date. All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine with the traditional 'at' sign.

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    Table of Contents
    Caffeination
    La Cara Oculta de la Luna
    Carma
    Castaway
    Catseye
    Cattus Atrox
    Cerulean Stowaway
    Chancellor
    A Change in the Weather
    Chateu Le Mont
    Chicks Dig Jerks
    Christminster
    The City
    City Of Secrets
    The Coast House
    The Colour Pink
    Common Ground
    Conan Kill Everything
    Concrete Paradise
    Constraints
    The Corn Identity
    Corruption
    CosmoServe
    The Cove
    A Crimson Spring
    Crypt
    The Curse of Eldor
    Curses

    Caffeination
    From: J. Robinson Wheeler <jrw SP@G jrwdigitalmedia.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #35 -- December 31, 2003

    TITLE: Caffeination
    AUTHOR: Michael Loegering
    EMAIL: loegering SP@G earthlink.net
    DATE: October 2003
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/zcode/caffeination
    VERSION: Release 0 (competition version)

    Okay, there are a lot of problems with this game, but I'm going to try
    to be constructive about it. This is a game where the author is having
    an enormously good time and the player is having no fun at all. That's a
    heck of a problem, and it's a sad one to have to point out to someone
    who's got a big cheesy grin on his face. This author went wrong
    somewhere along the line, and had no clue he was creating a total
    misfire, even has he continued to pack in numerous contrivances and
    clever details and elaborate red herrings and locations and multiple
    puzzles with multiple solutions. I'm sure he thought it would be a lot
    of fun. In a way, it reminded me of my first Comp entry, "Four in One,"
    which was packed with all sorts of fun details that only a few players
    ever saw because the main game wasn't fun enough to warrant exploration.

    The setting of the game is kind of a limp workplace satire that looks
    like it fell through a wormhole from the 1999 Comp. Meet your boss, Mr.
    Norom. Ho ho ho. That kind of thing. First location of the game: a
    cubicle with a computer. Next sixteen locations of the game: everyone
    else's cubicles. Sigh.

    I halfheartedly played along for ten minutes, and felt totally lost as
    to what to do. The author provided no focus at all. Sure, there was a
    stated goal: get a big cup of coffee. But that fails to provide any
    focus when you're rambling around trying to interact with
    thinly-implemented NPCs and office settings. I found a hidden hole
    puncher and a coffee maker and some day-old coffee grounds, and I did
    somebody else's work because a notepad suggested I try that, and then I
    gave up. I went to the walkthrough file, and, just like I did with last
    year's limp workplace satire, "BOFH," I ended up just reading the whole
    thing and quitting then and there, because (just like last year) I could
    see there was no point to trying to come up with the contorted solutions
    to each stage of the game on my own. The walkthrough made it clear that
    I'd have to be the author in order to solve the author's puzzles.

    For example, I mentioned that I found a hole puncher, which I assumed
    had something to do with punching the holes on the freebie coffee card I
    also found. But, that wouldn't work until I also did the following:

       Escape the office and go to the Buy 'n Blow. Enter and exit the
       shop until you see a message that the store is being robbed. Go
       tell the cop about it and go back to the store. You will see
       the theif being arrested and drop something. It is his knife.
       Get the knife and cut the card three times. Presto! Instant
       legitimate coffee card.

    Can you see the problem with the above? In order for me to be pursuing
    this goal, my efforts have to be somewhat directed. I could spend two
    hours wandering around the game map, running through laundromats and
    bookstores and finding all sorts of items and fighting off rats and
    never hit upon the idea of waiting for a store to be robbed so that I
    can tell a cop to arrest the guy so that he drops the item I need to
    finish the work I started with the hole puncher. The mind boggles. And
    yet, I can emit a long, slow whistle at the hours the author must have
    put in to implement all of these nifty ideas of his.

    You can't let your players flail around trying to read your mind. You
    have to use the game's text to give them direction and focus. This game
    was all over the place, even in the smaller section of being trapped in
    the office. I have a feeling this author is going to be somewhat
    surprised and very disappointed at how his game places in the final
    rankings.

    Because I didn't give this game much of an honest chance and quit to
    read the walkthrough, I have to decide whether to recuse myself and not
    vote on it, or just give it a score based on its failure to engage me. I
    guess I will choose the latter.

    RATING: 4

    Directory with zcode .z5 file and walkthrough

    La Cara Oculta de la Luna
    From: Javier Carrascosa ("Grendel Khan"), translated from the Spanish SPAC
    review by Pablo Martinez Merino ("Depresiv") and DJ Hastings
    Review appeared in SPAG #49 -- August 18, 2007

    TITLE: La Cara Oculta de la Luna ("The Hidden Side of the Moon")
    AUTHOR: Aventurero KRAC
    DATE: 2004
    PARSER: InformATE
    SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: freeware
    URL: http://www.geocities.com/aventurero_krac/av_juegos_luna.htm

    April 14th, 1935, in any city in Spain. There is great political upheaval and
    social instability. The Spanish people don't know it, but there's only one year
    left before war will ravage their country. And you have your own problems:
    you're a university student who, with your ever declining income, can hardly
    finish your studies. The factory where you were recently working has just closed
    down, so you have lost your job. Eating a late breakfast for the first time in
    many years, you have a
    look at a magazine. Almost by accident, your eyes notice a small advertisement:

    "Prestigious psychologist professor of the University of Salamanca needs subject
    to study. Experiment consists of a series of questions. Every participant will
    be paid a thousand pesetas. Details: The Hidden Side of the Moon, Old Way,
    Km.6."

    A thousand pesetas! That's a lot of money! You don't think twice before going to
    the address mentioned in the advertisement. It's an old mansion built many years
    ago by some rich guy, and thought to be abandoned by everyone around. It now
    belongs to the psychologist, apparently, and you don't care too much where he
    does his experiments as long as he pays afterward...

    (...)

    Thus begins one of the most difficult adventures of the last few years in the
    Spanish community. In "La Cara Oculta de la Luna" we play the part of a poor
    Spanish guy who, spurred by his debts, decides to become the guinea pig of a
    psychologist. But what we imagined to be a boring session of questions and
    answers turns suddenly into a hard trial to the death. The protagonist is locked
    in an old mansion with only a madman for company. A madman who has promised to
    hunt him down and kill him in a few minutes- unless he finds a way to escape.

    There are "feelies" included with the game: some annotated images of paintings
    by "El Greco," and an article on the film "Leave Her to Heaven" by John M.
    Stahl. This information seems to have nothing to do with the game, because as
    soon as we play a little we find out that the most important goal is to discover
    an exit from the house. So the "El Greco" paintings will soon be forgotten...
    until we find them in the game. And that's when we also find one of the best
    puzzles I've solved
    since I started playing adventures, in the painting "El Caballero de la Mano en
    el Pecho" ("The Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest").

    The old mansion is a trap for us. We are unable to escape through any window, as
    all of them are barred. We can try to exit through the chimney, but with no
    success, and trying to exit through the attic results in death. Exploring the
    house can be easier with the help of a map. My advice is to draw one with a
    pencil and paper and take down all the rooms and their connections. Although the
    hunter will kill us even before we've managed to get to the second floor,
    there's a little trick to avoid that: don't follow the hunter in the first scene
    and take your time investigating the house before talking to him.

    The game would make no sense without the figure of the hunter, one of the best
    characters I have ever seen in an adventure. He possesses all the qualities of
    the classical psychopath: a well-mannered and educated gentleman who hides a
    relentless serial killer inside. All kinds of theories can be outlined about the
    hunter... Who is he? Why is he motivated to act this way? The fact is that he
    will inevitably manage to kill us when we are first starting to play. Getting
    rid of him is a very
    complicated task, although there are five different ways to do it. This gives us
    the opportunity of replaying the game to find all the possible methods of
    defeating the hunter.

    The difficulty of the adventure is high, although not as high as some other
    Spanish adventures like "La Torre" ("The Tower") or "La Isla de Tokland" ("The
    Island of Tokland"). But solving some of the puzzles will amply reward the time
    you spent on them. Take some time to examine the objects and to find the exits
    through the floors and ceilings of the mansion. Look for all the "El Greco"
    paintings. There's a lot to discover. Also, there's a prize: if you manage to
    finish the adventure, you can access a secret file the author has hidden on his
    website. That file has the name of a certain object you can see at the end of
    the adventure. Hurry up before he loses his hosting!

    Conclusion: La Cara Oculta de la Luna is an excellent adventure that grips you
    from the beginning with its well cared for setting and superb programming. The
    hunter is a believable character with whom we can always interact, something to
    be grateful for in Spanish adventures. The game can be discouraging at the
    beginning, but as soon as we start moving and uncovering the many details this
    adventure holds, we find that we can't stop playing. It is inexplicable that
    this adventure is one of the most forgotten in the Spanish community.

    My theory on the hunter (Warning: don't read this if you haven't finished the
    game):

    The aristocratic figure of the hunter makes me guess that, although the mansion
    is not his home, it could have been the house of a relative or friend who he had
    to kill once his secret was discovered. The hunter must have hunted elephants
    and lions in Africa, and in that continent he must have known other cultures.
    His passion for hunting probably increased while assimilating the beliefs of
    some savage African tribe which worshipped a bloodthirsty god to whom they
    offered their sacrifices. Our man adopted those beliefs and traveled back to
    Spain to hunt a different kind of animal in its habitat: humans! It wasn't hard
    for him to find his prey. Famine and misery battered most of Spain and he only
    needed the lure of an economic profit to attract his victims. The habitat where
    they would move would be the mansion, appropriately prepared by the hunter: bars
    on the windows, locked wardrobes, beds without mattresses, tables without
    drawers... the prey would have no other option but hiding. No other option? No,
    the hunter always gives a means of escape, and that's where another of his
    passions comes into play: painting. Our man is a painter; maybe not a very
    critically acclaimed one, but a good imitator, and an admirer of the work of "El
    Greco." His house contains many different copies of "El Greco's" paintings, made
    by himself. His prey need only find one of his most renowned works: "El
    Caballero de la Mano en el Pecho" ("The Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest").
    If they are curious, they will be able to discover the key that will lead them
    to freedom.

    The hunter is a follower of the Fascist movement, judging by the books in his
    library, and an initiate in the Dark Arts, judging by the other book we can take
    from it. That's where my theory comes from that he makes sacrifices of his
    victims in the same way as the tribes he found in Africa.

    Even so, the hunter made some mistakes: he didn't consider the possibility of
    his prey killing him in his own field, did he? The fact is, if we climb to the
    second floor and look at the lounge from above, we can see whenever he's coming
    after us. If at that point we are armed with a small table or a stool, we can
    throw it at his head and get rid of him. We can also finish the game without
    killing him, though, which is a very advisable option to avoid the remorse of
    becoming killers ourselves.

    Zip containing Z-Code game file (in Spanish)

    Zip containing instructions in HTML format

    Carma
    From: Suzanne Britton <tril SP@G igs.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #27 -- January 4, 2002

    TITLE: Carma
    AUTHOR: Marnie Parker
    E-MAIL: doeadeer3 SP@G aol.com
    DATE: October 2001
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Glulx interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/glulx/carma/carma.blb
    VERSION: Release 1

    Well, that was a rousing adventure.

    I refer, of course, to the adventure of getting "Carma" to work on my
    Linux system. But an hour, 4 source packages, and 2 patches later, I was
    all set for the full multimedia experience. Hooray! Many thanks to
    Marnie for giving detailed system-specific advice in terps.txt, so I
    didn't have to break down and boot into Windows.

    It was well worth the effort: the graphics, sound effects and music in
    Carma are absolutely delightful. In particular, the Perry Mason shtick
    with the jarring chords had me roaring. And if I could stop my
    evaluation at that, I'd give this entry a 10.

    Unfortunately, I found little enjoyment in Carma outside of the
    whizzbang multimedia, and I guess I'm still old-fashioned enough to feel
    that that's missing the point of Interactive Fiction. The biggest
    problem was simply the *lack* of interactivity: I felt like I was
    spending over half my time in cut scenes (note to authors: please make
    cut scenes skippable!), and the interactive parts were not well-fleshed
    out. The "strike" scene was particularly tedious--interview X, ask X
    about X, ask X about sign, ask X about demands, repeat N times.

    By the time I got to the courtroom scene, the whole thing was growing
    tiresome, although I perked up a bit at the highly-amusing Perry Mason
    spoof. This brings up Carma's other major weakness: punctuation, however
    you slice it (splice it?), just isn't exciting enough a subject to carry
    one through a mid-sized IF game, not even for other would-be writers. It
    would have done better as a shorter piece.

    The programming was competent, and if nothing else, this makes for a
    great glk/glulx demo. And on a final positive note, I loved the ending.

    Directory with Glulx .blb file, hints, and interpreter suggestions

    Castaway
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #5 -- April 19, 1995

      NAME:  Castaway                       GAMEPLAY:  No synonyms
      AUTHOR:  Conrad Button                PLOT:  Rudimentary
      EMAIL:  ?                             ATMOSPHERE:  None
      AVAILABILITY:  MS-DOS                 WRITING:  Basic
      PUZZLES:  Basic                       SUPPORTS:  MS-DOS
      CHARACTERS:  None                     DIFFICULTY:  Novice

         In Castaway, by Conrad Button, you are first mate of the cargo
    ship, Katie Sue (I don't know why, but I suspect that this is Button's
    daughter.  A little nepotism here, hmm?).  When your ship is smashed on
    a reef, you fortunately wash ashore on an island that has a rescue ship
    anchored a mile away.  Your job is to find the fixins' for a signal
    fire, as well as locate ten treasures hidden on the island.
         The mixing of the rescue theme with the treasure hunt theme
    produces some bizarre results.  Though you will probably spot the ship
    a few moves after landing, you will avoid signalling it until you've
    gotten all the treasures.  In real life you'd be much more concerned
    that the ship might leave.  You can get around this problem by
    signalling the ship but not boarding it until you've gotten all the
    treasures, but this creates another bizarre situation:  the ship
    sitting in the lagoon waiting around until you feel like being rescued
    ("Snap it up fella, we haven't got all day!").
         In your search, you will encounter the lost city of Pango Tongo,
    which has several of the treasures you need.  We are never told
    anything about this city like "what is it doing there," and "what
    happened to the people".  It is just there.
         The game features the traditionally bad Buttonware parser; two-word
    input and absolutely no synonyms.  If you call the "parrot" a "bird,"
    the game will have no idea what you're talking about.  The game's
    difficulty level is Novice, so you probably won't have much trouble
    solving it anyway, but generally introductory games should be as
    user-friendly as possible, to encourage the player to play more text
    games.  This one doesn't.
         One nice feature (that I wish more Introductory games would
    emulate) is that each room lists the directions that you can travel on
    a separate line. This is much easier for the novice trying to draw his
    first map than having to pick all of the directions out of the room
    description.
         Castaway is not up to scratch by 1995 standards, but one must
    remember that it was written in the pre GAGS/LADS/AGT/TADS/Inform days
    of 1986.  Under the circumstances, putting out any shareware text game
    at all was an impressive feat.

    PC Executable (.zip)

    Solution (Text)

    Catseye
    From: Mike Tulloch <tarage SP@G bellsouth.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #41 -- July 15, 2005

    TITLE: Catseye
    AUTHOR: Dave Bernazzani
    EMAIL:daveber SP@G gis.net
    DATE: October 17, 2004
    PARSER: Simple (Microform parser)
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware -- Author's site
    URL: http://www.gis.net/~daveber/miniventure/
    VERSION: 3

    A 10k adventure? How good could it be? With visions of Scott Adams' 16k
    (master)pieces in mind, I began with trepidition. I found the game,
    converted it to pdb format, and loaded it on my aging Handspring Visor
    PDA.

    The intro is concise and informative, and gets you into the action right
    away. The game possesses a pulp fiction or a Golden age comic book feel.
    Your quest? Retrieve the necklace of your uncle Xevion from his
    mysterious house. It's straight-ahead youthful mystery-fantasy.

    The room descriptions are sparse, occasionally omitting words,
    presumably to save memory. Some of the error messages are unhelpful
    because of their brevity. For example, a simple one word response with
    nary a period in sight shows up quite a bit. Still others are errors,
    where a blank line displays as the response to your actions. You'll also
    notice some familiar synonyms missing, the most annoying of which is
    "get" -- you must use "take".

    Frustration builds into a claustrophobic spiral, brought on by the small
    number of rooms, the crippled parser, and the unhelpful responses. Only
    occasionally do zephyrs of humor lighten the mood. Want to take a
    breather? You can't, because the game can't be saved. Granted, that's
    not a problem on the PDA, unless you wanted to play another IF game and
    resume where you left off. Still, I'm of the opinion that all
    frustrating games should allow you to save.

    Catseye consists of one puzzle that starts off simple and rapidly
    becomes maddening; you have to play "guess the verb" and also "guess the
    input format for the verb". I finally resorted to r.g.i-f to find enough
    clues to win the game. I say that to my embarrassment, but to the
    author's shame. Even when you've won, you feel like the game's getting
    the last laugh. Your effort is rewarded with a scant two sentences.
    Unfair!

    I congratulate Bernazzani for cramming a game into 10k. However it feels
    like more of a programming triumph than an artistic one. The game is
    playable, but inordinately frustrating. It has an interesting feel, but
    not enough to compensate for the parsing problems and lack of feedback
    (both of which seriously interfere with gameplay). The lack of verbs and
    missing punctuation are also drawbacks. In short, thumbs down.

    Score: 3/10.

    Cattus Atrox
    From: Adam Cadre <adamc SP@G acpub.duke.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999

    NAME: Cattus Atrox
    AUTHOR: David Cornelson
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/atrox

    PACK UP THE CATS
    Cattus Atrox by David Cornelson

    Theodore Dreiser has been called the worst prose stylist ever to
    qualify as a great writer.  Over the course of my college career I had
    to read his SISTER CARRIE no fewer than four different times, and sure
    enough, Dreiser's prose is often just laughably bad.  Whether he's
    interrupting a paragraph to mention that "It was in August, 1889"
    (without specifying what "it" was), or beginning a chapter by
    introducing "the, to Carrie, very important theatrical performance",
    or lurching into ridiculous archaisms like "Carrie!  Oh Carrie! Ever
    whole in that thou art hopeful!", Dreiser's control over the English
    language often reminds the reader of a four-year-old trying to steer a
    Saturn V rocket.

    Still, there's a reason I had to read SISTER CARRIE four times, and
    it's not because my professors were trying to get me to break out the
    aerospace refs.  The prose, rough as it is, is often startlingly
    effective: the railway strike chapter, for instance, is rendered with
    a you-are-there intensity unmatched by many a more polished writer.
    Which is why Dreiser was very much on my mind as I played Cattus
    Atrox.  Cornelson's prose isn't going to impress anybody: it's full of
    comma splices and other errors, not to mention such howlers as
    "lust-filled orgasms" and a character screaming "LIONS!" into a
    telephone and then hanging up.  Nevertheless, Cattus Atrox provides
    the most intense visceral experience of any game in this comp.

    Now, I'm not one to lose myself in a game the way some people
    apparently are: at no point did I myself feel fear when the lions were
    smacking the PC around.  But you couldn't tell from the way I was
    playing.  During the chase scene, I was entering directions as fast as
    I could, running around in a panic, typing N then W then N then E then
    S then W then S again without even bothering to glance at the text
    flashing by.  Not really the recommended method of playing IF, but,
    y'know, I had to get away from those lions.  I mean, they were, like,
    eating me and stuff.

    And then when I found the crowbar, I mean, forget it.  Here I'm the
    guy whose game specifically penalizes the player for being so cruel as
    to do violence to an animal, and the second I find the crowbar, I
    switch into full-on Neanderthal mode.  I beat that lion cub to death
    with the club and then stood there beating its corpse over and over
    again even as on a conscious level I recognized that the game was
    spitting error messages at me for doing so.  I took that crowbar and
    spent the next half hour whacking anything I registered as a noun.  It
    got to the point that I half expected that if I threw the crowbar into
    the air it'd turn into a spacecraft.

    So while the prose is less than masterful, the syntax for some
    required commands is often weird, and the ending is silly and over the
    top, Cattus Atrox gets high marks for grabbing me by the collar and
    yanking me out of detached-observer mode.  This game stuck with me.
    Several games later I had to restrain myself from rushing into the
    Muse telegraph office and tapping out "LIONS!" on the telegraph.

    My score: 7.3 (5th place)

    Directory with Inform .z5 file and walkthrough

    Inform source code (.zip)

    Cerulean Stowaway
    From: J. Robinson Wheeler <jrw SP@G jrwdigitalmedia.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #35 -- December 31, 2003

    TITLE: Cerulean Stowaway
    AUTHOR: Roger Descheneaux
    EMAIL: rpd SP@G world-nexus.com
    DATE: October 2003
    PARSER: TADS2 standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS2 interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/tads2/stowaway
    VERSION: Competition release

    This comic, old-school science fiction game gave me a bad feeling at the
    very beginning, with introductory text that ran on for a couple of
    screen pages before the first prompt. Normally, that turns me off right
    away. However, when I took the time to read it all, it was fairly
    amusing. Funny enough to make me feel like there would be some chuckles
    to be had along the way.

    I actually had to take more than two hours to finish this game, even
    though it is not particularly large. It was one puzzle after another,
    and eventually, despite the in-game hint system, I got stuck. The hint
    system was welcome, but broke down after a certain point. I kind of got
    faked out by it, in that I learned to rely on it -- at one point, at the
    most complicated puzzle, the final hint in the sequence for that area
    goes ahead and spells out exactly all of the things you need to do -- so
    that when it thinned out and stopped being specific, I was left flailing
    around. There's nothing quite as frustrating as being trapped in a very
    small map with a pretty limited set of objects, and having no idea how
    to make the game proceed. You end up pacing around, staring at the same
    sixteen locations and the same inventory of red herrings over and over
    and over again. In the end, a combination of this and the game's other
    problem (which I'm about to get to) made me deduct a point from the
    score I was going to give it just for being a generally entertaining
    old-school game.

    Here's an instance of something that, as a player, bothered me:

       Window Washers' Scaffold
       Across a small gap to the east is the open hatchway of the
       Cerulean ship. Falling into the gap would most likely be fatal,
       but you're certain that you can jump into the spaceship with
       little difficulty.

       >jump
       You jump up and down. It's like being on a pogo stick, except
       without the pogo stick.

       >jump to hatchway
       I don't know the word "hatchway".

       >jump to hatch
       I don't know the word "hatch".

       >jump to ship
       I don't know the word "ship".

       >jump into spaceship
       I don't recognize that sentence.

       >x spaceship
       I don't see any spaceship here.

       >jump to shuttle
       I don't recognize that sentence.

       >jump gap
       I don't know the word "gap".

       >e
       Cerulean Landing Vehicle
       The interior of the Cerulean landing vehicle is made of the
       same shimmering metal as the outside of it. [...]

    If an author tells me, "you're certain that you can jump into the
    spaceship with little difficulty," I expect >JUMP INTO THE SPACESHIP to
    be implemented. I mean, come on.

    The nastiest bit of business like this begins when you finally make it
    to the alien ship. Everything on the ship has a label of some sort. You
    get some glasses that allow you to read the language. I guess maybe it
    was because the author wanted to allow for you not having the glasses,
    and so separated out the reading of things to be handled separately, or
    maybe it's just a case of TADS allowing READ to be a separate verb from
    EXAMINE, unlike Inform. (Inform can be made to do this, of course, but
    TADS comes with a 'readable' class in the standard library.) But it
    drove me batty, examining things only to be told "It has some writing on
    it.", forcing me to READ it:

       >x wax
       The can of floor wax has some writing on it.

       >read it
       Some English writing on the can of floor wax reads, "Floor
       Wax. Warning: Highly Flammable! Keep away from fire". Highly
       flammable floor wax? Is that safe? You suspect that they the
       Ceruleans got a really good price for this at some liquidation
       center.

    Why not just tell me what it says when I'm examining it? Gradually,
    grudgingly, I trained myself to use the READ command instead of typing
    X, but old habits die hard. I play a lot of IF. I'm used to EXAMINE, you
    know, printing descriptions of things.

    Here's a choice encounter with this problem:

       Security Center
       A bank of monitors fills most of the north wall, and a
       huge control console fills the west wall.

       >x console
       The control console has three basic panels on it: an output
       panel, an input panel, and an action panel. Each of these panels
       has further controls on it.

       >x output
       Which output do you mean, the output panel, or the output control
       dial?

       >panel
       The output panel has an output control dial and some writing on it.

       >read output panel
       Some Cerulean writing on the output panel reads, "Output panel.
       Select output location using the dial below".

       >read input panel
       Some Cerulean writing on the input panel reads, "Input selection
       panel. Select input source using the dial below".

       >x input dial
       The input control dial has some writing on it.

       >read input dial
       Some Cerulean writing on the input control dial reads, [...]

       >x action panel
       The action control panel has some writing on it.
       Three buttons are set into it: one red, one green, and one blue.

       >read action buttons
       I don't see any action buttons here.

       >x red
       Which red do you mean, the battered red lunchbox, or the red
       button?

       >button
       This button has some writing on it.

       >read red button
       Some Cerulean writing on the red button reads, "Stop".

    It took me too long to figure out that the bulk of the game was all
    about finding ways to dispatch alien guards one at a time, until I'd
    offed enough of them to get to the endgame. It wasn't until after I'd
    hit the two-hour mark that I realized this was the point of it all. Just
    when I was about to quit, I hit on this idea, so I finally saw what was
    apparently a winning ending about twenty minutes later, although I only
    had 126 out of 161 points. The most I ever got was 145 points. I have no
    idea how you get the last sixteen lousy points, but I don't care to try.

    Hmm. Writing about this and reliving my gripes has made me deduct
    another point. This game might have gotten a score of 7 from me in the
    best possible case: amusing, with some interesting puzzles, but still
    built from a clichéd set of ideas at the core. That'd be worth a 7 on my
    scale. However, I got frustrated and stuck a lot, and the READ thing was
    pretty annoying, and I wasn't able to finish in two hours. Sorry, but
    that's how it goes, I guess.

    RATING: 5

    TADS2 .gam file (Revised version)

    TADS2 .gam file (competition version)

    Chancellor
    From: Valentine Kopteltsev <uux SP@G mail.ru>
    Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    NAME: Chancellor
    AUTHOR:  Kevin Venzke
    EMAIL: stepjak SP@G yahoo.fr
    DATE: October 1, 2005
    PARSER: TADS 2
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2005/tads2/chancel/
    chancel.gam

    Kevin Venzke is the author of Kurusu City, the entry in the previous IF-Comp
    that (at least as far as I'm concerned;) would have won the TADS division if
    the division rating still was there. Well, the reviewed work is *entirely*
    different; the light-hearted atmosphere of Kurusu City made way for gloominess
    and mysteriousness, and probably the only thing that remained unchanged was the
    player character being a young female.

    Chancellor rather brought up reminiscences of two other IF-classics: for one
    thing, Dave Lebling's Lurking Horror, from which it inherited parts of the
    setting (a deserted college building), along with a couple of characters (
    including a murderous janitor); for the other, Losing Your Grip by Stephen
    Granade that lent to it the way of telling the story in several fits, the
    switching of the player character between two fairly distinct worlds, as well
    as the extensive usage of deeply symbolic (well, maybe pseudo-symbolic) stuff.

    Actually, a superposition of elements from other works alone isn't a suitable
    tool for creating a decent game, no matter how splendid the "donors" have been.
    OK, OK, I probably don't have the right to say such things, because
    Chancellor's inheritance of certain features from other games is entirely my
    assumption, and the similarities mentioned earlier might be purely coincidental.
    Anyway, coincidence or not -- Chancellor does better than just mixing up
    ingredients of other games, and introduces a device personally I quite rarely
    (if at all) encountered in IF: it lets the two game worlds melt together. This
    process goes on not too quickly, but steadily, progressing with each episode:
    first, items from one world start appearing in the other one; then,
    interconnections between the worlds begin to crop up, and finally, the two
    worlds become one. It's been a thrilling experience indeed, which has been
    enhanced even more by the magnificent writing and the very comprehensive
    setting that implemented every object mentioned in the descriptions, and
    responded adequately to every action I could think of.

    Unfortunately, the game isn't crowned with a worthy end; rather, it shakes off
    all the mysterious stuff the player has encountered using a quite battered
    excuse. In this respect, it called to mind yet another work of IF -- this time,
    Rippled Flesh by Rybread Celsius, where the player, after being taken through a
    series of weird rooms and shown a number of scary things, receives an ending
    that is essentially unrelated to the game itself, along with an explanation of
    all the oddities he encountered (in the vein, "the bloody corpse in the bedroom
    was a practical joke of your second cousin once removed... and the hellish
    sounds coming from the hall was your dog Berny toppling over the clothes tree".)
    Now, Chancellor acts very similarly -- only the explanatory note isn't needed,
    and thus (thankfully) absent. That's a pity; while cutting the Gordian knot is
    a handy approach for a number of real life situations, it doesn't work half as
    well for entangled IF-plots. On the other hand, I can understand the author's
    point -- resolving the story properly probably would double the game size, thus
    rendering it totally unsuitable for the Comp.

    Still, in spite of this not minor issue, Chancellor remains a notable game, even
    -- I dare to say it -- a "must play". You just don't see worlds being melted
    together every day.

    SNATS (Score Not Affecting The Scoreboard):

    PLOT: The ending spoils it somewhat (1.0)
    ATMOSPHERE: Galore (1.5)
    WRITING: Discreet but effective (1.5)
    GAMEPLAY: Unhurried (1.4)
    BONUSES: Two worlds blending together (it seems I can't stop saying that
             again and again;) (1.5)
    TOTAL: 6.9
    CHARACTERS: Quite good, but not the kind I'll remember for the rest of
                my life (1.2)
    PUZZLES: Just solid (1.2)
    DIFFICULTY: Manageable (6 out of 10)

    COMP SCORE: 6

    COMMENTS: Chancellor was one of the few entries in this Comp not providing
              any hints or a walkthrough (the stub of a hint file that was
              accompanying it contained clues for the prologue only). Combined
              with the unhurried gameplay (and it must be said that the rich
              setting practically pleads for not moving ahead too fast and for
              fiddling with the environment instead), this resulted in me getting
              stuck somewhere within the third fit by the end of the judging
              period. At that stage, there was no sign yet of the two worlds
              growing together -- the feature that, in my opinion, makes
              Chancellor outstanding. Thus, I had no other choice than to give
              it a rating corresponding to solid yet non-exceptional games. A
              simple inclusion of a walkthrough would earn it at least one extra
              point from me.

    TADS2 executable
    Hints file

    A Change In the Weather
    From: Magnus Olsson <mol SP@G df.lth.se>
    Review appeared in SPAG #7 -- October 14, 1995

      Name: A Change in the Weather           Parser: Inform
      Author: Andrew Plotkin                  Plot: Non-linear
      Email: erkyrath SP@G netcom.com            Atmosphere: Excellent
      Availability: F, IF Archive             Writing: Excellent
      Puzzles: Time-critical                  Supports: Infocom ports
      Characters: One, simple but memorable   Difficulty: Above average

    During a picnic with your friends, you decide that you'd like some
    privacy and walk away on your own to explore the nearby hills. Soon,
    however, the warm, beautiful summer evening turns into the proverbial
    dark and stormy night (the "change in the weather" of the title), and
    you find yourself cut off from your friends by a rain-swollen stream
    that threatens to carry away the only bridge...

    Although unpleasant, such a mundane situation may not seem like the
    stuff from which a tale of wonder and adventure is built. That,
    however, is just what Andrew Plotkin has succeeded in creating. With
    very small means he manages to increase tension until your attempts to
    save the bridge turn into a nightmarish struggle against time. The
    writing is excellent, as are the atmosphere and the changes in mood.
    As if to demonstrate further how far you can get with deceptively
    simple means, the one NPC of this game - an endearing little fox -
    doesn't do very much, but is nevertheless very effective (of course,
    animal NPC's are simpler than humans since they don't speak).

    Despite its small size, "A Change in the Weather" is not an easy game.
    The author himself classifies this game as "cruel," and that is no
    great exaggeration.  The puzzles aren't very diffciult in isolation,
    but they are very time-critical and you have to perform actions in a
    carefully timed order to win. You should be prepared to save and
    restore a lot, even to replay from the beginning, since the tiniest
    mistake will put the game in an unsolvable state.

    This kind of game behaviour has been condemned in the debate on
    rec.arts.int-fiction, the main argument being that all the restoring
    and replaying ruins the enjoyment of the game and disrupts the
    story. Also, of course, it lowers realism if, for example, you have to
    die five times beofre finding the right way to disarm a bomb; in real
    life you have to get it right the first time.

    In this particular case, however, having to save and restore
    frequently didn't detract anything from my enjoyment of the game;
    in fact, somehow knowing that the smallest mistake may mean disaster
    actually enhanced the sense of drama and urgency. It may of course
    have helped that you can't die in this game (the worst thing that can
    happen is that you have to wade across the stream to get home). The
    size of the game certainly played an important part - having to
    restart from the beginning is less cumbersome in a tiny game like this
    than in a larger game.

    To summarize, this is an excellent little game: well written, with a
    simple goal that isn't that easy to attain, an interesting sequence of
    logical puzzles and an excellent atmosphere; all of which makes this
    perhaps the most memorable of all the competition entries.

    From: Palmer Davis <palmer SP@G ansoft.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #7 -- October 14, 1995

      NAME: A Change in the Weather       PARSER: Inform v1405
      AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin              SUPPORTS: Infocom Ports
      EMAIL: erkyrath SP@G netcom.com          AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
      ATMOSPHERE: Outstanding
      WRITING: Generally well written, though eye slides past in spots
      CHARACTERS: Memorable
      PLOT: Mutual exclusion between branches
      PUZZLES: Nicely done, but with dead ends and save/restore puzzles
      DIFFICULTY: Moderately challenging

    Now *this* is more like it.  The game starts out rather slowly:
    you wander away from a picnic to go exploring in the park.  After
    a beautifully described sunset (and an encounter with the
    competition's most memorable NPC), the idyllic day suddenly turns
    nasty, and you are forced to seek shelter, eventually thrusting
    you into a dreamlike race against time and vague, sinister evil.

    The atmosphere, scenery, and overall sense of immersion in this
    entry were far and away the best in either division, approaching
    that of Infocom's better efforts in spots.  In one or two spots,
    the writing is dense enough that the casual reader's eye slides
    right past (lists of exits, mostly), but otherwise the writing
    is among the best in this year's field.

    If there's a weakness here, it's the rather languid pace that the
    game gets off to at first.  That's an unavoidable consequence of
    the tranquil, contemplative mood that the author creates in the
    first section, but it makes it difficult to warm up to the game
    at first.  The plot really needs a kick in the tail that it doesn't
    get until after nightfall; an opening with enough action to make
    wandering off alone seem a welcome respite (playing volleyball until
    you get sick of it, perhaps?) might correct this.  (The virtues of
    establishing emotional context through player interaction rather
    than imposing it by fiat have been discussed at length elsewhere.)
    Of course, the game flirts perilously with the two hour limit as
    it is; leaving out such an opening is understandable given the
    nature of the competition.  Furthermore, the contrast between the
    slow pace of the first section and the frantic pace of the dream
    sequence works quite well, and is perhaps the sole example of
    such a mood shift in the contest.

    The save/restore nature of the section after nightfall is also
    likely to put off many players, as is the game's ability to be
    closed off after the player attempts actions that are otherwise
    perfectly reasonable.  While any race against time necessarily
    runs the risk of degenerating into save/restore, a bit more time
    between the appearance of the light source and the expiration of
    the player's time might have been nice; as it was, I didn't get
    past that part before time ran out.  Likewise, a second (possibly
    more difficult) option for getting into the cave after the
    destruction of the needed object would also have helped.  Still,
    the game was quite satisfying, especially in contrast to the
    rest of the division.

    BOTTOM LINE: Yes.  Like that.  My choice for the division winner.

    From: Gareth Rees <Gareth.Rees SP@G cl.cam.ac.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #8 -- February 5, 1996

    My second favourite of the competition games, after "The One that Got
    Away".  This was a fun experiment and a deserved winner of the Inform
    category.  I found it very challenging, but it wasn't outright
    impossible (unlike one or two of the other games in the competition), so
    I think the difficulty was well-judged.  Three aspects of "A Change in
    the Weather" were excellent: the quality of the writing, the changing
    descriptions of the scenery, and the way the components of the puzzle
    interacted.  I was reminded of my decision in "Christminster" to keep
    the player indoors from seven p.m. until ten so that I didn't have to
    write descriptions of the sun going down!  Andrew Plotkin tackled this
    problem head on and the result was very impressive.

    What I didn't like was the very short time limit and the way it was
    incredibly easy to get stuck.  To finish "A Change in the Weather"
    required an enormous amount of patience: going back to a saved game,
    trying something new, observing the consequences, going back again and
    trying something else, and on and on.  The puzzles themselves were quite
    elegant, but I didn't appreciate them very much because I was a bit
    fatigued by the process of solving them.  I also felt the game lacked
    for NPCs (the fox was better than nothing), and the dream was just
    willfully obscure.

    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #14 -- May 17, 1998

    PLOT: Small, tightly woven (1.6)       ATMOSPHERE: Remarkable (1.8)
    WRITING: Excellent (1.6)              GAMEPLAY: "Cruel" (1.3)
    PUZZLES: Very difficult (1.3)         CHARACTERS: One, intriguing (1.2)
    MISC: Interlocking parts fit together well (1.6)
    OVERALL: 7.9

    Andrew Plotkin's first serious game, as he terms it, is an intriguing
    effort: it introduced the IF community to many key Zarfian elements,
    notably the "cruelty" of making nearly every move vital and closing
    off the game without warning, and the magic realism that dominated
    So Far, though it's present here in a much subtler form. Beyond that,
    though, Change in the Weather offers a remarkably vivid setting, and
    effectively uses small changes in the landscape to advance the plot.

    The story, at first glance, is not overly complicated: you wander away
    from your companions in a park and get stuck out in the rain on a
    steep hillside, and must use what comes to hand to keep a bridge from
    washing out. Watching all the while is a fox who seems to understand
    the action better than you do; the fox is only relevant on two
    occasions, but having it around gives you a sense of collaboration in
    your efforts to save the bridge. At any rate, the story is essentially
    divided into two; there is a languid opening section that affords a
    chance to explore the hill, and a breathless second half where you
    have, by my count, precisely one move to waste (out of perhaps 45 in
    all). The landscape changes to reflect the onset of the darkness and
    the rain, but various events--lightning striking a tree, for
    example--also cause important changes. Virtually every detail is
    vital; the player is advised to take time in the beginning to observe
    everything available.

    Change in the Weather is a veritable textbook for authors who want to
    know how to create and then change a mood, or infuse a scene with
    tension. The changes in the landscape, while important to the plot,
    are perhaps even more important for the atmosphere they create. In the
    first part, for example, we get this:

       You're standing on a ledge, on a rather steep, overgrown hillface.
       Greenery hides the stream below and the hilltop above, and the
       meadows and sky beyond sweep away into the incandescent west.

    Whereas, after nightfall:

       You're standing on a ledge, on a rather steep, overgrown
       hillface. Rain hides the stream below and the hilltop above, and to
       the west is only dark.

    The changes in the setting to induce a change in mood recall
    Wishbringer, and while Change in the Weather owes less to fantasy than
    Wishbringer, the details evoke a similar sense of unease, reinforced
    by voices in the distance which seem to be calling your name, and
    which become louder as you dash around the hillside. Plotkin is
    particularly skillful in using timed events and small details to
    heighten the tension: once the protagonist awakens amid the storm,
    everything appears to be happening at once--runoff starts flowing,
    lightning strikes a tree and a branch falls, the stream rises, and the
    voices in the distance persist at the edge of the player's
    consciousness. The various events are all separated by line breaks, so
    they have the feeling of independent events that are following their
    own paths.

    Plotkin uses sound as well as visual details to build the tension: a
    bush gives way with a "small snap," the tree falls with a "splintering
    crash" after the "Crack!" of thunder--and the dizzy rush of detail
    among all the concurrent events produces a whirling, desperate
    confusion. Though we get little of the protagonist's thoughts, it
    seems plausible to support that he or she is somewhat less than calm,
    and the author does his utmost to transfer the growing sense of panic
    to the player. When lightning dazzles you and leaves you in the dark
    again, you "blink furiously, trying to sort out the shadows from
    what's really there." That connotes both the sensory struggle--night
    vision shattered in a flash of light--but also the urgency; your task
    is sufficiently pressing that you try to blink away the afterimages
    and keep moving, lest you waste valuable time. For the most part,
    Plotkin is content to show the details rather than telling the player
    how to feel, and the few exceptions--digging a trench, you "claw
    desperately" at the earth--are well placed.

    The author notes that this is a "cruel" game, and he doesn't
    exaggerate: it is virtually impossible to solve it on the first try,
    or even on the first ten tries. Making every move count is one form of
    cruelty, and the writing is good enough (and the mood sufficiently
    pervasive) that the game doesn't get dull even after many
    repetitions. Another form of cruelty--a required action in the first
    half of the game which is much less than obvious, and which is clued
    rather subtly--is less successful, to my mind, because it weakens the
    game's logic: it's one thing to have to make sense of a wide variety
    of concurrent events, it's another to make an intuivie leap that a key
    object is hidden in a strange place. The sense in the second half,
    even when I failed to think of something vital on the proper move, was
    that, well, if I'd been really thinking, I would have known that. And
    other elements, the "magic realism" feel--the fox's remarkable
    prescience, a certain change that the rain couldn't logically
    cause--don't break the logic, somehow, because they seem only just
    outside the realm of usual possibilities; they seem like the sort of
    things we feel could happen easily enough, given a minor incursion of
    the supernatural. It's hardly less logical that the interlocking parts
    of the game come together in the way they do, after all, but the
    player isn't about to question that; likewise, the magical bits
    require only the sorts of suspension of disbelief that a player is
    happy to make anyway. Moreover, certain bits of the game that can't
    quite be put down to magic remain speculative at the end, perhaps
    intentionally so; a Zarf game wouldn't be a Zarf game if everything
    were fully explained (or even explainable).

    The charm of Change in the Weather, for me at least, lies in the way
    it infuses a relatively ordinary setting with such a range of
    feelings: from pleasant sunset to violent, ominous night storm to
    placid dawn, the same locations are rewritten to instill different
    moods. Like all good writers, Plotkin is sparing with the adjectives
    and more often uses verbs to produce the desired effect:

        You are high on the hill; it rolls downward and off to the
        west. Beyond the trees and brush, meadows glow in the thickening
        sunlight. Behind you stands the last stony lump of hill. A narrow
        trail curves away to the northwest.

    The various elements of the scene are given personality by "rolling"
    and "glowing" and such, and the impression of a peaceful sunlit scene
    is clear enough that more description isn't necessary. Likewise, after
    sundown:

        A wide angular tongue juts out from the hillside. A black expanse
        stretches to the north and west, impenetrable with rain. Every few
        moments, a directionless flicker of lightning tries to pull detail
        from the darkness; but there is only mist.

    Again, elements of the scenery get active verbs rather than simply
    being described, and the adjectives are placed to convey something
    essential rather than simply piling on the description: the
    "directionless" lightning illustrates how the flash comes from and
    leads nowhere in particular, the "impenetrable" darkness limits the
    immediate range of vision. The best atmospheric effects are those that
    aren't obviously trying to be, and in that respect, Change in the
    Weather succeeds--and, as in Wishbringer, only minor changes are
    necessary to convey the developments in the landscape.

    Though its scope is more limited than that of So Far, Change in the
    Weather is accomplished in its own right. Even if "cruel", it's
    successful both as a puzzle-solving challenge and as an evocative
    setting.

    Inform File (.z5) (updated version)

    Inform File (.z5) (competition version)

    Solution (Text)

    Chateu Le Mont
    From: Jessica Knoch <jessicaknoch SP@G mindspring.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #32 -- March 20, 2003

    TITLE: Chateu Le Mont
    AUTHOR: Paul Panks
    EMAIL: dunric SP@G yahoo.com
    DATE: Fall 2002
    PARSER: DOS (homebrew)
    SUPPORTS: DOS
    AVAILABILITY: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/basic/chateu.zip
    URL: http://www.geocities.com/dunric/westfront.html (with screenshot!)
    VERSION: 5.75

    The latest Star Trek movie, Nemesis, is a great movie. But only if you
    like Star Trek movies. If, for one instant, you were to view it
    critically and compare it to a truly great film (an exercise left to the
    reader), you would come away feeling that Nemesis wasn't worth seeing
    even if the theaters paid people to see it and threw the popcorn in too.
    If you *like* Star Trek, on the other hand, and are able to completely
    ignore any technological problems and gaping plot inconsistencies, you
    will like the movie.

    Chateu Le Mont by Paul Panks is a text adventure written in BASIC. If
    you like BASIC adventures, with their simplicity of plot, the occasional
    bug, and complete lack of character development, not to mention the
    amazingly simple one-line room "descriptions," then you will like Chateu
    Le Mont. All it takes is the ability to recognize the game for what it
    is, and play it for those qualities.

    For whatever reason, I was able to get into Chateu Le Mont and really
    ended up liking it. Of course, a lot of that is because the feel of the
    gameplay from its "kill everything because it is there" mentality to its
    plug-and-chug combat to its "pick a spell, any spell" magic system is
    quite reminiscent of Dungeons and Dragons, and I really like Dungeons
    and Dragons. You have hit points, an armor class, and a level, and you
    gain experience points for killing anyone or anything. All of the
    "monsters" are regenerated at the start of each new "day," and that
    includes any townspeople you might have killed, so feel free to hack
    away. Hey, that villager has 167 hit points compared to my 100!

    So, your purpose in Chateu Le Mont is to kill a vampire, who lives south
    of town. So far, so good. You spend a good bit of time flailing about
    the town, until you figure out where to get a weapon and some armor, and
    what happens when you die (you are resurrected every time). This is the
    point at which you learn you can die from dehydration, and that drinking
    from the well doesn't help your dehydration, but the fountain does.

    The dehydration death is just one of many "sins" of Chateu Le Mont,
    although at least it doesn't have a maze. There's a light problem, and
    figuring out how to turn on the lantern is a guess-the-verb puzzle all
    on its own (although it shouldn't be -- I'm just not used to trying the
    verb "use" -- and that shouldn't be considered a spoiler, it should be
    called a blessing to modern IFers). Other "sins" include the parser
    pretending to understand things that it doesn't: WEAR (to give a random
    example) SHOES gives "You can't wear that" when what it *really* means
    is "You can't see any such thing" or "You must be holding an item before
    you can wear it." There are a ton of useless locations that are a little
    tricky to map at first. There are actions that make the game unwinnable
    with no logic and no warning. And, last of the major "sins," the player
    has to depend on randomness (in the form of the fighting system) to win
    the game.

    There are a few strange bugs which seem not to affect gameplay much. For
    instance, whenever you find some gold, the gold remains wherever it was,
    meaning you can pick it up again, and again, until the limits of your
    patience run out (or some kind of overflow -- I wonder what the integer
    limit is?), racking up all the gold you can stand. Unfortunately, there
    is nothing exciting to buy with the gold except items you brought to the
    store yourself, and the shopkeeper never marks up his prices, so it's
    always a straight exchange.

    Another odd bug that does affect gameplay is that when you save your
    game, quit, and restore it, you are knocked back to level 1. I think the
    hit points remain, but upon perusing the source code I found that you
    must be level 7 before you can go after the vampire in his own house, so
    the save/restore bug could be an annoyance. The source code really came
    in handy on this one, by the way, although I was unable to effectively
    change the annoying inventory limit.

    Finally, the first time I fought the vampire, the vampire cursed me and
    made the stake disappear. I can't kill the vampire without the stake,
    and it was nowhere to be found. I have no idea why this happened, and
    ended up replaying to finish the game.

    All in all, this is a fun little game that may amuse, depending on your
    tastes. The "problems" I've touched on speak for themselves: if you can
    look past them, and like random combat, go ahead and have a good time
    with Chateu Le Mont! However, I would recommend just another shot or two
    of originality from the author the next time around. I mean... a hobbit?
    And did the vampire HAVE to be named Count Dracula?

    P.S. I finished with 14932 points. Can you beat that?

    DOS executable and QBASIC source code

    Chicks Dig Jerks
    From: Adam Cadre <ac SP@G adamcadre.ac>
    Review appeared in SPAG #19 -- January 14, 2000

    NAME: Chicks Dig Jerks
    AUTHOR: Robb Sherwin
    EMAIL: robb_sherwin SP@G juno.com
    DATE: November 1999
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/inform/chix

    Um.

    So, does anyone disagree that this game contains the best writing of any
    game in the comp? Oh, you do? Hrm. Well, I think you're wrong. See, I'm
    not talking about the oh-so-very-hip ranting patter, or the universe of
    next year's slang, but rather about the frequent turns of phrase that
    make you say, "Yes! See, this is why language was invented." I'm talking
    about strings of words that are: (a) new, never before seen by either
    myself or Ezra Pound; (b) interesting, containing words one wouldn't
    expect to see together, yet which somehow match; and (c) evocative,
    creating a very precise mental image. Phrases like:

    * "bathed in a honeycomb" Bathing in honey is vaguely interesting as an
      image, but it brings to mind a marquise in the court of Louis XVI
      reading "Tales of Ribaldry"; bathing in a huge-ass honeycomb, on the
      other hand, is both fresher and more specific, beautiful in its own way
      yet bizarre enough to avoid becoming saccharine.

    * "chunks of desperate bride" "Bride" is a fairly charged word, and
      "desperate" is on the powerful side in its own right -- putting the two
      together is a nice afternoon's work, but sticking "chunks of" in front
      makes for an impressive coup de grace. And it even teaches some
      valuable life lessons: nothing jams up blender blades like pieces of
      Lisa.

    * "enough bad habits to poorly clothe every single nun on the continent"
      Without "poorly", this is lame. With it, it's freakin' hilarious.

    And yeah, as that last entry indicates, this is clearly someone who has
    the goods. Discipline can be learned; much harder to learn is precisely
    why "yellowjackets" is the only word that will work in a certain spot
    and "bees" or "hornets" just will not do.

    Sherwin also has his comedic chops down pat. The early line about the
    sneezing, the late line about getting out of bed in the morning... these
    are just a couple lines I'm finding randomly flipping through the TXD
    dump. There's one on every screen. Did I laugh, as with King Arthur?
    Nah. It's a different kind of comedy. The King Arthur brand I laugh at,
    then forget; this is the sort that makes me sort of pause and nod and
    think, "Hmm -- that's *really* funny. Have to remember that one."

    Moving outward, what about the game beyond sentence level? Here things
    aren't quite as strong. The instincts are good: combining disparate
    elements is usually a reasonably reliable formula for success.
    Graverobbers have been done; singles bars have been done; but
    graverobbers at singles bars? That's a new one (and a fricking *great*
    one.) I didn't even mind the left turn between the bar scene and the
    cemetery scene. But things do fall apart a bit after the bar scene draws
    to a close; the cutscene is just ridiculously overlong, and the sequence
    that follows is sort of a train wreck -- but hey, at least that implies
    the existence of a speeding train, rather than a Ford Aspire sputtering
    up a hill. And it is nice that so much of the game is character-based
    rather than centered around fixing air conditioners and such. The fact
    that the characters come off as characters rather than switch statements
    is an especially nice bonus.

    That said -- you can have all the talent in the world, and you're still
    not going to turn out anything more than promising slush unless you
    buckle down and acquire the discipline referred to earlier. I would have
    loved to give this game a ten, but the sad fact is that it's buggier
    than a corpse left out in a swamp for three days. I understand the time
    constraints of the comp, but still, weird time-loop bugs and
    unfinishable climaxes are just not the sort of things that even a
    forgiving reviewer can completely overlook. In the end, the author ends
    up looking like a playground hoops legend: you can dazzle with your
    talent and jazzy crossover and whatnot, but you've got to put in a whole
    different kind of work to make the pros.

    A footnote: this is one of *two* Comp99 games set in Fort Collins,
    Colorado. New York or Los Angeles or London I could understand as the
    settings for multiple games -- hell, even Seattle I could see -- but
    *Fort Collins*??

    Score: EIGHT.

    Directory with Inform .z5 file and walkthrough transcript

    Christminster
    From: Nick Montfort <nickm SP@G media.mit.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000

    NAME: Christminster
    AUTHOR: Gareth Rees
    EMAIL: wgr2 SP@G cus.cam.ac.uk [See editor's note after footnote 1. --PO]
    DATE: August 1995
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware.
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/minster.z5

    "Upon this Oath that I shall heere you give..." The seventeenth-century
    verse that begins Christminster brings on tingles, dropping the
    interactor directly into an atmosphere of ancient secrecy, a world where
    mysteries must be unlocked. It becomes smoothly evident that the main
    character, Christabel, is an outsider: She's come to visit her brother
    at all-male Biblioll College, which seems rather shut off from the
    surrounding town and happens to be completely closed today. The
    situation is more quotidian than the epigraphical quotation suggests,
    but, being sure of conspiracy inside, the interactor's curiosity is
    provoked.

    Christ! How is Christabel to get into Christminster's cloistered college
    on the Lord's day? [FOOTNOTE 1] More critically, what will she do when
    she finds that brother seems to have been engaged in forbidden research,
    and is now missing?

    The college is populated with particularly rich characters who play
    their parts well through the usual sorts of text-adventure interactions.
    There are good excuses to interact with them along the way, too,
    provided by a plot which twists along past different personalities. Rees
    has said that his puzzles are contrived for the purpose of drawing the
    interactor through the story and into contact with different characters,
    and that is evident in Christminster. Areas of the setting are
    consecutively unlocked for exploration, but the whole college is worked
    into the story very evenly, throughout the narrative.

    That said, the actions required to unlock the college and the secrets
    within are, as is so often the case in interactive fiction, convoluted.
    The general nature of the challenges that Christabel faces do fit in
    well with the situations of the story. The artifice of puzzles is
    visible, though, and sometimes tugs against the authorial and narrative
    voice. Although challenging, the solutions to the puzzles are plausible,
    in the context of current interactive fiction -- and the puzzles are
    quite well-crafted, as one would expect from Rees's The Magic Toyshop --
    but to actually solve them the interactor must shift away from reading
    and exploration to worry about waiting a number of turns, crossing
    different-colored wires, and decrypting enciphered text. This is often
    the case with interactive fiction. The nice thing about Christminster is
    that, aside from its interlocking challenges, there is some good reading
    and exploration to be done.

    In some ways Christminster might be held up against with The Lurking
    Horror -- the university setting and occult mysteries being the obvious
    points of comparison. There are important differences. [FOOTNOTE 2] The
    main character in Christminster is unfamiliar with the campus, which
    fits in with the interactor actually having no previous knowledge of the
    fictional college. Importantly, Christminster is more populated than The
    Lurking Horror. The life of the university is still going on, even if at
    a Sunday pace.

    How the revelation of the conspiracy occurs, and what actually happens
    in Christminster, is most fascinating. The writing in which these events
    are described does not shine, but the descriptive text in Christminster
    is clear. Objects in the environment, and the behaviors of those
    objects, are well-defined and aptly described. A few commands elicit
    responses that ring a bit false -- ">pet the parrot. Keep your hands to
    yourself!" -- but the interaction is, overall, well-constructed. For
    those concerned with allowing more English-like interaction,
    Christminster does not advance the state of the art. It would help to be
    able to "leave" a room that has only one exit, for instance. As is
    conventional, compass directions are required for movement through most
    locations.

    At times the objective description in Christminster yields and the
    emotions of the main character are described. This does little, for the
    most part -- "Your heart sinks as you look around this room." -- but
    sometimes it adds a bit of color: "It is a hot summer's day in
    Christminster, the kind of day that makes you think of strawberries and
    cream and punting on the river."

    Rees excellently ties together the acquisition of keys and the advance
    through locations with quotations from alchemical literature and from
    Coleridge's "Christabel." Although it may seem a minor element, it links
    the work to the world of literature strongly, and draws the interactor
    deeper into the mysteries of the college. The quoted material is not as
    thematically meaningful as are the excepts in Trinity, but these texts
    build up the rich and enveloping atmosphere of this work.

    Christminster overcomes more than a few of the obstacles that keep
    casual gamers and readers unfamiliar with the form from enjoying
    interactive fiction. The map in Christabel's bag, for instance, is
    nicely rendered in ASCII graphics on-screen. This makes pencil-and-paper
    map-making unnecessary, removing one encumbrance for those who are new
    to the form. Although some of the puzzles are challenging, the
    compelling story and fairly well-developed interaction makes
    Christminster a good work to introduce readers to interactive fiction.
    [FOOTNOTE 3]

    Overall, Christminster has both gaming and literary merits. The two
    halves of the work could, perhaps, fit together better, and particular
    aspects of the work might have been honed further. Amazingly, though,
    both the overarching narrative and the puzzle set provided are
    exemplary. This, along with several important smaller touches, makes
    Christminster a work of lasting value, of interest to both veterans of
    Spellbreaker and readers of the conspiratorial Pynchon and Eco.

    ---

    FOOTNOTE 1. A major Christ-initial place name and character name may
    sound contrived, but truth is at least as strange as fiction. Rees's
    home page [at http://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/people/wgr2/home.htm] reveals
    that he's a fellow of Christ's College at Cambridge, and his wife is
    named Christine.

    [Editor's note: After this issue was released, an astute reader pointed
    out that the web site mentioned above is not for the right Gareth Rees.
    The Christminster Gareth Rees attended Cambridge but does not teach
    there. Consequently, the email address provided with this review is also
    incorrect. The proper email address is gareth.rees SP@G pobox.com. As of
    this writing (March 2000), Gareth reports that he does not maintain a
    web page.]

    FOOTNOTE 2. Christminster is inferior to the Lurking Horror in one
    respect: MIT students won't find any splufty in-jokes to appreciate.

    FOOTNOTE 3. Not as ideal, perhaps, as a simpler selection (e.g.,
    Wishbringer, the Trinity preface), but still a good choice.

    From: David Samuel Myers <dmyers SP@G ic.sunysb.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000

    I'm biased, I'll admit it.

    But every longtime IF player, I think, must have a special soft spot for
    at least one game. Even though you know it's probably not the very best
    game out there, you're very forgiving with these games that live in your
    soft spot because they worked for you on a level that is hard to
    replicate. For me, Christminster is one of those games. Games which I
    have finished get unconsciously compared to 'Minster in deciding whether
    or not they are worthy enough to reside permanently on my hard drive in
    dim hopes of being replayed. And yet I have replayed this game twice.
    Why?

    For starters, the setting is a rich one. I'm not positive if the game is
    patterned after Oxford directly, but there is a Christ Church college
    there, and from pictures that I have seen of it, I can believe this was
    the inspiration for the surroundings in the game. No room or location is
    out of place. It all seems in keeping with what you might expect at an
    Oxford college a few decades ago... er... except for the magic potions
    and the like. This little academic world provides plenty to do despite
    only a moderate sized map.

    Now, there have been quite a few other college games: Save Princeton,
    Veritas, and PCU come to mind. In each case, the cliche aspects of dorm
    life are highlighted in a jokey manner, with a sort of jump through the
    hoops plot. Christminster largely avoids that, using the college more as
    a backdrop for a web of intrigue than anything else. Your job is to find
    your brother and save him.

    There are so many fantastic elements in this game, it's hard to review
    them all. The NPCs were what impressed me the most. There is the Master
    of the college, who appears to be a generator of stock replies, but can
    actually be asked about a host of topics (many of which, ironically,
    won't be informative enough to help you). There is Professor Wilderspin,
    who is completely in character in utterly blowing you off until you
    figure out what will engage his attention. There are the villains, who
    are plainly identifiable as being the bad guys early on. They do exhibit
    some complex behavior in attempting to thwart you, generating some good
    dialog at key moments (many of which are just before you either win or
    lose the game).

    But above all is Edward, the student who'll be most helpful to you in
    your quest. He's chattery in a quaint way, and forlorn in a way that
    makes you feel pretty smart as the PC at times. The subplot of having to
    help Edward find his pet bird is ingenious, and gives character not only
    to him as an NPC, but indirectly to you as the PC. It is one of those
    puzzles that feels less like a puzzle because it's so integrated into
    the plot. Part of this is because it recurs a couple of times.

    Certain key puzzles define almost all games, and leave a lasting
    impression. Here, one that comes to mind is figuring out the phone
    wiring. Getting through dinner without any gaffes in etiquette was
    another, again with a lot of dialog interwoven so that the atmosphere
    feels less straightforwardly puzzlish. The puzzle most associated with
    Christminster, though, has to be the street magician from the opening
    sequence. The magician spews so much text that it's hard to determine
    what kind of NPC interactions are going to be needed to solve it at
    first. You have to sit and observe (and unfortunately, restart) to
    figure out what is going on. The author has said that this was the
    hardest part of the game to program, and I can't help but wonder if it
    got away from him more than he wanted it to. This puzzle is just harder
    than it should have been for being this early in the game. It warped my
    expectations of how hard the rest of the game would be. Nonetheless, it
    is a rewarding puzzle in the end-- once you've saved and restored a few
    (dozen) times to nail down what is going on.

    Although there are a number of specialized elements in the plot, the
    results are not overwhelming. Very few cases involve utterly novel
    situations that send you into guessing verbs. Once you've gained access
    to the college after the tricky opening sequence, you're free to pursue
    a number of avenues simultaneously, with no single puzzle being
    ridiculous in nature. The in-game hint system is reasonably
    well-developed too. Some tricky puzzles do occur late in the game, with
    sufficient obscurity as to challenge most any player. But it's
    engrossing and immersive enough that few players who get that far are
    likely to quit altogether.

    It is clear from playing the game that it has been through extensive
    beta testing that refined the surroundings and ensured that a lot of
    touches were added to avoid stock responses at virtually every turn.
    What's more, interspersed with the plot are poetic undertones here and
    there, taken from various books you encounter in your research in the
    game. In terms of writing, this game is strong-- despite the absence of
    a directly story-driven plot (this was 1995). Instead, the plot in this
    game is uncovered slowly by exploration and sleuthing.

    Alas, in any game, there are always things that could have been better.
    There are a few infuriating aspects to Christminster that I could have
    done without. For instance, after the initial information collection
    that goes on, there is too much subsequent lookup of books and facts
    through the library. The indexing feature just seems overused. It's
    realistic to the story, at least, but in general, I find that if in-game
    reference materials have to be used more than a few times, I am bored
    with the device. Also, the story itself begins to get a bit convoluted
    after a while. Another thing is that there are too many containers late
    in the game, and they are tough to keep track of without botching your
    eventual objective. Minor sins, really.

    The thing I liked the least is that the game can be made unwinnable in
    subtle enough ways that the player can go on for quite a while unaware
    of the situation. In this regard, Christminster is probably a bit more
    fragile than it should be. In all, though, the small cracks don't mar
    the soundness of the game. The overall game design is as tight and
    sensible as just about anything I've seen. Christminster certainly makes
    my top five of all time, and stands as a classic. I suspect it will hold
    up well under the test of time. One hallmark of such games is that they
    make it hard to release a new game with a similar setting, plot, or
    milieu because the author has so well nailed it down. That seems to be
    the case here for college campuses and Christminster.

    Inform .z5 file

    Inform 5.5 source code

    Solution, point list, and list of objects

    The City
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999

    NAME: The City
    AUTHOR: Sam Barlow
    E-MAIL: sb6729 SP@G bris.ac.uk
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/city/city.z5
    VERSION: Release 2

    Part of the charm of the IF competition is that it brings out
    interesting ideas, ideas which might not be suitable for a full-
    length game but do something interesting that contributes to the IF
    oeuvre in one way or another. The converse, however, is that having a
    forum for short games may discourage authors from developing stories
    as completely as they might.  Sam Barlow's The City is a case in
    point: it has an interesting idea, but in its present form, there
    isn't much more than an idea, and the result is rather unsatisfying to
    play.

    The premise, though suspiciously reminiscent of Delusions, is
    reasonably well done. You're trapped in a room with no way out and a
    video recorder and tape on hand; the tape shows a man taking a pill;
    you accept a pill from a handy assistant, take it, and black out;
    repeat. The man in the tape is, of course, you; your goal is to break
    out of the loop and see what you find. Unfortunately, you don't find
    much, and you certainly don't find much that's surprising, and it
    isn't clear that anything you do goes to accomplish anything. (Being
    trapped in a nightmare laboratoryish sequence is starting to feel a
    little familiar as an IF premise; the IF world may be getting
    overloaded with bizarre dystopias, though that certainly isn't
    Mr. Barlow's fault.) Now, if a sense of futility is the point here, IF
    is ideal for conveying that. Ain't nothin' more frustrating than IF
    that goes in circles. However, as noted, Delusions already did that
    pretty well, even if the resolution was different. More importantly,
    sheer futility generally does not a satisfying experience make, IF
    experience included. Likewise, there's a point toward the end where
    there's only one action available, and it's fairly obvious that you
    don't "really" want to take that action--but there's no way around
    it. (Piece of Mind, from the 1996 competition, did something
    similar--but, IMHO, much more satisfyingly.) The game keeps you from
    doing plenty of obvious things without explanation, which certainly
    hits the frustration angle--but it's frustration with the mechanics of
    the game, not with the situation depicted. (Okay, you can argue that
    it's all one. But merging the character's frustration with the
    player's does not produce a fun game.)

    The problem is that, really, The City doesn't do enough with its
    premise.  The backstory never really shows up, and backstory is what
    might have distinguished this from its many predecessors; if there
    were some interesting story behind how things became how they are, the
    game might stay with the player for more than a few moments after
    playing. There's painfully little to do once you _do_ break out; the
    "outside" world isn't any more interesting than the "inside." The
    futility idea might be more interesting if there were a stronger
    illusion of control, but there isn't much; you can't get very far, and
    you can't get anywhere appealing. The City needs to be about twice as
    long as it is in order to involve the player in the story; as it is,
    it ends almost as soon as it starts.  Moreover, whereas Delusions
    mixed its futility with a sense of urgency owing to frequent and short
    time limits, The City eschews all time requirements--in other words,
    you are never required to take a pill--which means frustration is
    mixed with, if anything, boredom.

    Technically, everything works well enough, apart from the failure to
    provide logical choices at certain points. The author disabled undo
    and save/restore to no particularly vital purpose, as far as I can
    tell; if the idea was to remind us that we're at the mercy of other
    folks and can't do much about our own fate, well, we weren't likely to
    forget, save/restore or not. Still, there are no technical problems to
    speak of, and in fact one rather complicated aspect of The City is
    handled well: the tape that records you actually does play back
    whatever you did last time around, and describes your actions
    reasonably well. (On the other hand, there's not a lot you can do
    anyway.) There are some other odd features--none of the rooms have
    names, for some reason, though they are distinctly different
    rooms. (Perhaps the idea was to suggest that you can't really get
    anywhere, but it's rather confusing at first.) There's no status line,
    no opening title, no compass directions, etc., and the minimalism
    doesn't distract much from the game; in that respect, The City works
    well enough.

    Still, there isn't much here that anything could distract anyone from,
    and besides a few gripping moments--on the roof, notably-- it's a
    rather frustrating experience. It's technically sound enough that I
    gave it a 7, but it doesn't make much of what might have been an
    intriguing game.

    From: David Ledgard <dledgard SP@G hotmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999

    I played this game once and didn't get very far. So later came back to
    it, armed with some hints. The game is quite small, but with a thought
    provoking plot, a bit George Orwell 1984ish. Some puzzles were fairly
    easy, others not so. It was difficult to work out what you were
    supposed to do next and whether the plot had actually advanced. I know
    for a fact that I would never have completed it without hints, not in
    a million million years

    Directory with Inform .z5 file and associated text files

    City Of Secrets
    From: Cirk Bejnar <eluchil404 SP@G yahoo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #37 -- July 10, 2004

    TITLE: City of Secrets
    AUTHOR: Emily Short
    EMAIL: emshort SP@G mindspring.com
    DATE: June 24, 2003
    PARSER: Enhanced Inform
    SUPPORTS: Glulx interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive (http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/glulx/CoS.zip)
    URL: http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/CSUpcoming2.htm
    VERSION: 3

    My overall impression of this game was very good. Short's
    characteristically strong coding and writing combine for a great
    experience, and I found no notable bugs in this release.

    From a purely technical standpoint, the work is a gem. Short has again
    used her resource-intensive ask-tell/menu hybrid conversation system.
    There are two difficulty settings and various options to set up the
    conversation system and the graphics to suit a variety of tastes. There
    is an impressive amount of detail in the descriptions with nearly all
    first level objects implemented and many second and third level as well.
    Such extras as your complementary personal shampoo from the hotel are
    fully implemented, which gives the world a solid feeling. The City seems
    to be an actual place rather than merely the setting for a game. The
    superb map design also contributes to this feeling. The city is
    represented as 20 or so rooms, but between the graphical map that you
    have available and the intuitive layout of the main thoroughfares travel
    is easy. She has also admirably succeeded in giving the different
    sectors of the City a unique feel. A quick glance at the room name will
    tell you whether you are in Malta or May Street and thus what to expect
    from your surroundings.

    The writings is, as I said before, also up to Short's usual high
    standards. Once the plot got rolling I could see the main twist coming
    but resisted it because of my personal convictions. (This also seemed
    perfectly in character for the PC.) However, as details emerged I was
    slowly won over, against my will, as it were, to the other side. That
    Short could pull this off, even while I was aware of it, is a testament
    to the immersive effect of the prose and the real emotional impact of
    the characters.

    However, this work is not perfect. None are. And in this case, the weakest
    link is the plot. It is well written and paced, in my opinion, but more
    predictable and linear than I would have preferred. In particular I was
    not able to derail it by personal choice, as far as I could tell. My
    choices were generally to advance the plot or to continue wandering
    about the City. I was unable to find a way to take decisive action
    according to my own judgment, only as the story dictated. The exception
    to this is the climatic move in the snowstorm. In this case, however, I
    was too dense to figure out why my options have the effects they do. I
    know that it is supposed to be mysterious but it would be nice if saving
    the world depended on more than a guess.

    In summary, City of Secrets is a fine game that demonstrates not only
    Short's preeminence in the field but also the way that writing and
    atmosphere can carry a game rather than devilish puzzles or
    breathtakingly new plot.

    From: David Jones <drj SP@G pobox.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #38 -- September 28, 2004

    First off, an issue that arises, I suspect, because I am using a
    curses-based text-only Glulx interpreter: the about system is horrible,
    and so are all the menus in the game. It's probably not the author's
    fault, but it's her decision to use it. I couldn't work out how to
    escape the menus and restarted (hurray for Control-C!) resolving never
    to use the menu. Maybe you'll have better luck if you're not so much of
    a stick-in-the-mud text-only sort of person. Aside from a permanent
    display of "Glk library error: set_hyperlink: hyperlinks not supported."
    it didn't affect the game play (except that I had to resist using the
    help menu).

    Be a tourist in a city you never intended visiting. Miss your best
    friend's wedding. Get a guided tour from one of the native lunatics. Get
    robbed. Become a secret agent. Flirt with a mysteriously attractive and
    secretive woman. Learn about magic. Talk to a lot of people.

    The action takes place in a city. You arrive there on you way to your
    friend's wedding after the train you are on breaks down. It is a city
    where technology is fused with magic (or should that be opposed to?).
    The city is a melting pot of oppositions (or at least, opposites): magic
    and technology; old and new; autocracy and democracy; austere and
    opulent. The implementation of the (small) city is incredibly well done.
    For immersion, I would say that City of Secrets is state of the art.

    The city bustles. People pass you by in their own conversations, they
    jostle you, they look in shop windows, they get on and off the city's
    trolley system (I haven't discovered a way to use the trolley system,
    you don't have a pass). This is all done with randomly generated
    descriptions of people and actions. The programming of this is really
    well done (and must have been a bit tedious at times); various events in
    the story will change the mood of the city and the way people act and
    react changes accordingly. A typical example is: "A cheerful lady
    wanders along, arm in arm with a well-built older fellow." I was
    initially impressed, and then, after discovering that you can't really
    interact with any of these people, disappointed. I was impressed again
    when I discovered how things changed as the story progressed. Obviously
    one can't hope to provide any accurate emulation of a city, but in City
    of Secrets we see a pretty good approximation using the technology of
    today.

    One or two things (near the beginning of the game) stood out as a little
    odd, as if programmed on the cheap. In any other game I wouldn't have
    bothered mentioning them, but because of the depth of interaction that
    City of Secrets generally gives us, my expectations were raised. There's
    no opportunity to tip the bell-hop, and "run bath" executes an entire
    bath sequence (running the water, getting undressed, waiting for the
    bath to fill, washing, getting out, etc) in one move. I was rather
    looking forward to a bit of a splash around in the bath (but evidently
    the PC wasn't).

    Your mental state is displayed in the lower window alongside the room
    description, like this: "Outside Train Station, Wandering around,
    Tired". This initially annoyed me. I found the author's attempts to make
    me feel the PC's tiredness clumsy. Or at least, displaying it in the
    status window is clumsy. Thankfully it's not the author's only device.
    Having arrived at a hotel I examine a travel brochure: "A rather pretty
    brochure with a map and color pictures. There is writing, too, but it
    just seems to swim around, thanks to your current state of fatigue."
    That kind of thing seems spot on and just what it's like to arrive in a
    place that you never intended to visit. After a while I got used to the
    display and it didn't bother me at all.

    After half-an-hour or so, I was asking myself, "What's the point?". I
    kept on playing for three reasons: 1) it's called City of Secrets, 2)
    it's by Emily Short, and 3) I had already decided to write a review of
    it. In the end, I'm glad I did. It took me 3.5 hours on my first play
    through and I played it through again only to discover that my first
    play through wasn't an entirely successful one (but it nearly was).

    It soon becomes clear that there is a conflict in the city, a conflict
    between the Illuminated Ones and the Gnostics, the city's opposing
    political/religious sects. You get to play a significant part in this
    conflict. Initially, your part starts out as a sort of investigation,
    but as you learn more about the city, its characters, and its magic it
    becomes clear that you can (and must?) step outside your initial brief.
    Most of the time, you'll be talking to people and reading things to gain
    various clues. There's a vast amount of text in this game. I have given
    up all hope of experiencing the "whole" game. I'm still discovering
    significant new things on my third play-through.

    Talking to NPCs is done with a combination of a menu system and a topic.
    You initiate a conversation with a greeting like "GREET CONCIERGE," and
    can then either choose one of the conversational options presented on
    the menu or try a new topic of conversation such as "TOPIC FOOD". It
    works fairly well. I think it provides a good balance between the
    author's obvious desire to constrain the topics of conversation and the
    player's ability to pick any topic for discussion. Sometimes you can
    lose a conversational option for apparently no good reason. EG I had
    only one option left on my conversation option card (about shopping). I
    typed "how", a non sequitur, just to see how the game would respond,
    "(You can think of nothing to say.)", and the option was removed from my
    card (now empty). Most of the people you meet are prepared to talk about
    a lot of things though their opinions on some topics, the fortress and
    food most notably, seem to be drawn from a common pool giving me the
    impression that some of the lesser characters are punched-out from the
    same die. The way the conversation progresses influences your standing
    with the NPCs; you can turn them against you or earn their favour (to
    some extent). The "AMUSING" section points to some very strange
    consequences that can happen, only one of which I found before
    completing the game and none of them I have managed since (not that I've
    tried that hard). Occasionally this conversation system stumbles;
    selecting a topic can initiate a conversation about something
    surprisingly different, but it's a forgivable minor flaw in such an
    ambitious system. You can recall your impressions of people with
    "REMEMBER CONCIERGE" which gives you a summary of what you have learned
    (mostly from other people) about the person in question. I like it.

    The writing is excellent. I had previously played, and enjoyed,
    Metamorphoses (also by Emily Short) and was somewhat put off by the
    excessively flowery language (no, I mean I was overwhelmed by a
    sumptuous filigree of syntax which sparkled with every twist and turn of
    the light that shone upon it). City of Secrets has plainer language
    wielded with the same skill. I found it a change for the better.
    Occasionally the descriptions are overwhelming -- one simply has too
    much text to read, and it sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish
    the set from the game, though I suspect that's rather the point. To my
    surprise I did find a couple of genuine mistakes: "pier" instead of
    "buttress" (correct, but obscure. Or is this a feature of North American
    English?); confusing "glassine" with "glassy" (poetic license? I hope
    not). The occasional misused punctuation mark. The very few mistakes
    don't seem to be due to lack of attention more perhaps that the writer
    is stretching herself beyond her ability. On the other hand, City of
    Secrets is a much bigger work than Metamorphoses so perhaps it is just
    down to the problem of proofreading this vast text.

    There are a couple of dream sequences. I was initially quite excited at
    the prospect of an interactive dream sequence, but they proved to be
    less interactive than I had hoped (on a level with Lurking Horror).
    They're more like slightly surreal infodumps. Still they do add
    character and they're not just dream sequences foisted upon you because
    the author wanted you to know something and couldn't think of anything
    less clumsy. They have a proper part to play in the story and are
    integrated well.

    Wandering around the city and chatting to people is quite fun and
    sometimes almost feels adventurous as you wander into increasingly
    dilapidated parts of town. There's plenty of people to talk to, and
    quite a lot of things to read (more and more text!), but not all that
    much to do (though the "AMUSING" section clearly indicates that I didn't
    even scratch the surface). Overall the game is fairly easy (which is
    intended), the puzzles being reasonably straightforward.

    I discover that there are some nice attempts to help the absolute
    beginner along. For example, if the first thing you do is press enter at
    the prompt you receive a little spiel about the prompt and simple
    instructions.

    The story branches. I haven't fully explored to what extent, but I'm
    already impressed at the different branches that I have seen. I strongly
    suspect that there are different endings (probably according to which
    faction in the city you ally yourself to), but I haven't had the
    tenacity or patience to find them.

    Jumping zorkmids! I just noticed that the download is over 6 Megabytes!
    I suppose that includes pictures (which I haven't seen as I played it on
    a text-only interpreter).

    Overall it's an excellent game. It's not a puzzle-fest; it's not
    supposed to be. It's a conversation-fest. You can chat to (and "up" to
    some extent) a large number of NPCs who are all intelligently
    programmed. The way that the story unfolds is very well done, with
    different NPCs (and some books) filling in different parts of the canvas
    with their own style. To be honest it's not my cup of tea -- I prefer
    puzzles (like Metamorphoses), but I have no problems recommending this
    game to anyone.

    Glulx .blb file

    The Coast House
    From: Emily Short <emshort SP@G mindspring.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #27 -- January 4, 2002

    TITLE: The Coast House
    AUTHOR: Stephen Newton and Dan Newton
    E-MAIL: snewton SP@G sj.znet.com and hackmusik SP@G earthlink.net
    DATE: October 2001
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/tads/coast/coast.gam
    VERSION: 1.0

    Almost as bad as no lead-in is too much lead-in. Worse yet is if the
    wodges of text come larded with misused words and misplaced apostrophes.
    For instance, we learn at the beginning of this game, amid a great deal
    of family history and implied mystery, that grandpa felt "little
    remorse" at grandma's funeral; but remorse would only be suitable,
    really, if he'd offed the old biddy himself (surely not!).

    The whole of the game is flawed in similar ways: misused words, abused
    apostrophes, simple game-design carelessness. Descriptive sections
    include such things as:

       You see the first photograph, the second photograph, the third
       photograph, and the fourth photograph here.

    Why not label them as to content, or introduce them more subtly? I think
    I detect, in many places in this game, indications that the authors are
    relatively new to TADS, and that they are comfortable doing the
    straightforward tasks but uncertain about the customizing nuances that
    smooth over awkward bits.

    The puzzles are also generally not very exciting, and mostly consist of
    finding things and applying them, without that much by way of reward
    offered for diligence. My strongest puzzle-related memory from this game
    is that I drove myself crazy trying to get into a certain section which
    was sort of but not entirely off-limits: I could enter it, but a timed
    sequence of events would drive me out again. There was, of course, a
    solution to this, but I didn't know enough about the game to know for
    certain that the solution wasn't to be found *inside* the area that I
    kept being forced out of. So I made many frustratingly brief exploratory
    missions before I finally gave up, consulted the walkthrough, and
    discovered that the correct way of dealing with the problem lay
    somewhere else entirely in an area I was not yet aware of. I would
    complain even more strenuously if the game design *had* necessitated
    repeated trips into the semi-restricted area; as it was, it was just my
    own stubbornness and failure to explore another puzzle adequately that
    had me rushing back in there over and over. But I still don't
    particularly care for this effect, I'm afraid.

    Story and atmosphere were likewise mostly unexceptional, with a few
    standout bits. Some of the most endearing features were things that I
    assume are accurate observations of the real coast house on which this
    is modelled. I ordinarily don't care for real-life details when said
    real-life details are, e.g., a careful implementation of your television
    and VCR: I know how those behave and derive no joy from manipulating
    them in virtual form. Perhaps what sets this apart from other
    implementations of well-known places is that I have not, in fact, ever
    spent that much time at a vacation house like this one, so it struck me
    as peculiar and intriguing. I was oddly touched by the Piggly Wiggly
    bag.

    The backstory itself, as finally revealed, seemed tonally out of place,
    or at least to belong to a different mood from the rest of the game.

    Summary: An unambitious little game with some nice atmospheric touches,
    lacking a lot in surface polish.

    Directory with TADS .gam file, map, and walkthrough

    The Colour Pink
    From: Mike Snyder <wyndo SP@G prowler-pro.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    TITLE: The Colour Pink
    AUTHOR: Robert Street
    EMAIL: robertrafgon SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: October 1, 2005
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2005/zcode/pink/
    pink.z8
    VERSION: Release 1

    I love this game.

    This is old-fashioned puzzle goodness. You are sent to investigate the
    disappearance of a colony, missing from an alien planet. Eating a suspicious
    bird egg – for no good reason other than an irresistible urge – puts you into a
    surreal, alternate reality. I did something similar way back in the ’99
    competition. It was met with mixed reactions.

    You must be thinking “Great. Another one. Everything is all random and unreal,
    but it’s all just part of the fantasy and that’s supposed to make it okay.”
    That’s one way of looking at it. Yes, this does allow for some wacky encounters
    in which animals (both real and mythical) talk and ask for help with personal
    dilemmas. The puzzles are well-clued and not very difficult (aside from a
    carrot-harvesting bit that’s optional anyway), and most importantly, the entire
    game is fun. It’s really fun. This is what adventure gaming is all about.

    I solved the game along one path (not realizing another was even possible)
    without hints. The various endings are picked CYOA-style (following a CYOA
    ending in the game I played just prior, Vendetta). I was left missing 5 points,
    and a few objects/areas seemed unused. So, a peek at the hints, the after-game
    notes, and finally the walkthrough put me onto an alternate path that not only
    expands the enjoyment of the game, but actually changes much of the second half,
    resulting in two additional endings.

    The first two areas are quads that require no real mapping. The next area is
    larger, but arranged in a pattern that looks pretty cool on paper. Another quad
    underwater reflects some aspects of the “real” world, as does the interior of
    the red tower. As was probably the author’s intent, no single ending seems like
    the best or the most real, and it’s never quite clear how the things in the
    alternate land (either of them, since there are two paths) relate to the
    missing people or the lost inventory from the real world.

    The writing in The Colour Pink isn’t particularly colorful or clever (although
    it is pink in spots), lacking complicated metaphors and dense descriptions.
    This keeps it unpretentious and more game-like than story-like. The focus is
    always on the puzzles. I have little else to say about this game, except that I
    highly recommend it to puzzle fans – especially those who like the easy,
    traditional kind, where the gold key always opens the gold door and the carrot-
    loving rabbit is always going to give you something good if you feed him.

    As for the story, it’s not complicated, but it could be deeper than it seems.
    I’m not sure why the pink theme was abandoned mid-way, nor why the love potion
    was just a segue to the fantasy world. I’m basing the game at 9.0 on my scale,
    skewing +0.5 for an “unofficial” 9.5 because I had so much fun playing.

    Zcode executable (.z8)
    Walkthrough

    Common Ground
    From: Duncan Stevens <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000

    TITLE: Common Ground
    AUTHOR: Stephen Granade
    E-MAIL: sgranade SP@G phy.duke.edu
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/Ground.gam
    VERSION: Release 2

    It's not quite true that Stephen Granade's Common Ground goes somewhere
    that no IF has gone before, because most of what it does has been done
    in one form or another. Notably, Photopia pioneered the changing-
    perspectives aspect and, to some extent, the conversation system, Muse
    and a few others have made the plot turn on relationships more than on
    any tangible goal, and--well, this is a no-spoiler review, but there are
    other creative but not precisely novel elements. What's interesting
    about Common Ground is that the various elements get put together in an
    interesting way--and that the characters are well enough drawn that we
    care, at least somewhat, about each one by the end.

    There are four chapters in Common Ground, though the last chapter is
    something of an epilogue: the heart of the game (work?) is the first
    three chapters, each of which adopts the perspective of a different
    character. The characters are Jeanie, a teenage girl who's as teenaged
    as they come, her stepfather Frank and her mother Debbie, and the three
    main chapters are all set in approximately the same time frame. Some of
    the events are actually depicted twice, though not all of them, and you
    get somewhat different takes on the relevant people and events in each
    segment. The point actually isn't to adapt a Rashomon-style trick to IF,
    wherein incompatible stories are told and the truth lies somewhere
    between them, if anywhere; figuring out the truth is less the objective
    here than understanding the characters and why they do what they do. The
    result is susceptible to a variety of interpretations, in a few
    respects--the player's sympathies may rest with one of the characters,
    or all, or none, depending on what he or she makes of the various
    exchanges. That aspect of Common Ground is particularly skillfully done,
    in fact: playing the various characters gives a more nuanced look at the
    situation than playing one character might, and an honest look at the
    story more than likely leaves the player neither canonizing nor
    demonizing any of the characters outright, which is as it should be.

    A somewhat less successful aspect of Common Ground is the conversation
    system. Granted, no one has come up with a successful IF conversation
    system as such, but this one--"talk" says something preordained, and
    continuing to type "talk" steers the character through the conversation
    whether or not the player understands what's going on--isn't really any
    more interactive than a cut scene, in that the player's only power over
    what's going on is to walk away or do something else. In a way, that's
    significant in this particular story--Jeanie in particular can make
    statements by refusing to say anything--but as a conversation system,
    it's more than a little clumsy. It's especially frustrating here because
    the characters are fairly well developed--there are plenty of things to
    ask them about-- and the "talk" straitjacket makes the game feel more
    like reading a script than it should be.

    I shouldn't exaggerate the straitjacket aspect, though, because there's
    another aspect of Common Ground that works quite well: when you're done
    playing Jeanie and you're seeing her through the eyes of the other
    characters, you'll find that Jeanie does most of what you chose to have
    her do when you were playing her. That is, the game records the
    decisions you made and plays them back at you later. The same is true,
    though less so, with Frank. Obviously, there are some complexities that
    aren't acknowledged, but on the whole this works quite well and allows
    for substantial replayability; better still, playing one character
    differently elicits some revealing reactions from the other two. It's an
    impressive technical feat--it was done on a reduced scale in Infocom's
    Sorcerer and Sam Barlow's The City, but this is much more thoroughly
    implemented, and the various choices available do more for the story (in
    that both the characters and the perceptions of them can change in a
    variety of ways). If there's a fly in the ointment, it's that the game
    doesn't really try to ensure that you did what the other characters saw
    you do, beyond certain limitations--you can't go wandering around the
    house, but you have the discretion to avoid certain conversations,
    whether or not you had those conversations from the other side. Still,
    on the whole, it's a successful gimmick.

    Common Ground stands or falls on the character depictions, though, and
    those depend to some extent on the player's reactions. The characters
    initially seem a bit cliched--the angry teenager, the solicitous parent,
    and to a lesser extent the left-out and unappreciated stepfather--and
    while there's more to each of them than the cliches, that's not
    necessarily immediately obvious. Moreover, depending on what the player
    does with each character, the cliches might actually get reinforced;
    there's enough freedom to allow for that--particularly so with Jeanie
    and Frank (Debbie is a much less developed character). The details that
    the author introduces to portray both the characters themselves and the
    others' take on them are nicely done, as in this example from Jeanie's
    perspective:

       As you come down the stairs, Frank looks up at you. "Goin' out
       tonight too, huh?" Is his speech slurred again?

    Or this, from Frank's perspective:

       >talk to jeanie
       "I hated school, too.  Couldn't wait to graduate."

       "Yeah? Why'd you even bother? Not like you need a diploma to do
       factory work."

       Should of known better than to even try to talk to her.

    Both snippets are revealing, both about the characters and about their
    assumptions and prejudices, but a player too ready to categorize might
    not pick up on the subtleties. The point is that while there's much more
    to these characters than cliches, a given player might not realize
    that--and if the player doesn't respond to the characters, he or she's
    unlikely to enjoy Common Ground. In other words, the player should feel
    some sympathies toward all of the three main characters, and arguably a
    player who doesn't hasn't really given the story a fair shake, since
    nothing is as simple as it first appears.

    Common Ground is an unusual piece of IF, on the whole. There are no
    puzzles to speak of, and no real objective--the point is to explore the
    characters and see how they interact. While the result isn't successful
    on every level, it's certainly a worthy experiment, implemented well,
    and it's worth checking out.

    TADS .gam file

    TADS Source code

    Conan Kill Everything
    From: William McDuff <wmcduff SP@G mac.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #41 -- July 15, 2005

    TITLE: Conan Kill Everything
    AUTHOR: Ian Haberkorn
    EMAIL: haberkornj SP@G yahoo.com
    DATE: April 12 2005
    PARSER: Infocom Standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/inform/ConanKillEverything.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

       "I hope it is adequately stupid. Comments are appreciated."
                         -- Ian Haberkorn on Conan Kill Everything

    Fear not, Ian! You game is most definitely "adequately stupid". Which is
    meant in the best way possible, of course.

    Though perhaps Ian Haberkorn is a bit confused about which competition
    he entered with "Conan Kill Everything". When the title placed second in
    StupidTitleComp (a voting mechanism test for the 2005 Spring Thing) he
    seems to have thought he entered IntroComp, and created a playable game
    with that title, possibly hoping to claim a prize before the year was
    up. Alas, he will win nothing for creating this game other than the
    renown for creating such an amusing, if small, game.

    In this game you play the legendary Cimmerian barbarian, Conan, and your
    objective is simple. Kill everything. No, not every living thing.
    Everything. The walls of the room only escape Conan's mighty wrath
    because they "are already dead. Conan suspects that he killed them in an
    earlier episode."

    Although a one room game, and as mentioned before, very short, some
    interesting puzzles exist here. None will stymie a veteran IF player for
    long, but they puzzles are fair and logical, if progressing to a logical
    extreme. There's not much of a plot or story to speak off, but given the
    source of the game, expecting one seems silly.

    The game itself is technically sound, although more verbs could be
    implemented as with most games, and what can be reached from the table
    is perhaps a bit generous. Also, the actions of the fly in the room seem
    to be a bit too random at times, which can make a long wait. The writing
    is terse, tight phrasing emulating the 'action, not words' approach of
    your average barbarian stereotype. This simplistic style actually
    generates some of the humour, and there are also some great lines
    sprinkled here and there.

    Significantly, the game endings take a step back to a director's view of
    the action as a movie, giving a view that this farce is something of a
    play within a play. This decision actually helps, as some distance from
    the absurdity keeps the player from getting too involved and turned off
    by the stupidity of the main action. Not that these aren't amusing as
    well.

    The main complaint against the game is that it is, as I've said
    repeatedly, quite short, finishable in less than half an hour even if
    you get stuck at one point or another. More could certainly be added:
    for instance, Conan's association with beautiful women is a significant
    part of the mythos, and is missing here. Besides, with such an addition,
    there's a got to be a joke about the 'little death' that could be
    inserted somewhere.

    Still, considering the inspiration, this is an excellent little game.
    One can only hope that "You Get Transported To Another Dimension and
    Find This Weird Machine In A Maze And Then Some Other Stuff Happens,
    It's Really Cool" will be as good if Jacqueline H. decides to produce
    it. (Though it's certain to be stupid.)

    Zcode .z5 file

    Concrete Paradise
    From: Mike Roberts <mjr_ SP@G hotmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #31 -- January 3, 2003

    TITLE: Concrete Paradise
    AUTHOR: Tyson Ibele
    EMAIL: ivanisavich SP@G yahoo.com
    DATE: September 2002
    PARSER: TADS Standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/tads2/concrete/concrete.gam
    VERSION: 1.0 / 052202

    I'm not sure what this game was meant to be. The story seems to be about
    a carefree youngster, whose age is never precisely specified but which
    we can infer must be in the late single digits or early teens, who's
    sent away to an island prison for life due to an essentially trivial and
    unintentional crime. The main story takes place three years into the
    life sentence, and revolves around escaping the prison.

    The opening of the story is somewhat jarring, in that before the player
    character gets sent to prison for life, he's portrayed as an innocent
    kid who's not even trying to get into trouble. We're not really trying
    to do anything at all, for that matter; there's not any particular goal
    at this point.

    On my first couple of tries at the opening scene, I figured the prison
    sentence must simply be an elaborate "death" scene. In other words, I
    figured that the game was telling me the equivalent of "*** You have
    died ***", which is the traditional message an IF game displays when the
    player character is killed by an incorrect action. I got this impression
    because the actions in question seem so random and trivial, and because
    there are lots of them; in some games, such a variety of ways to "die"
    would simply indicate boundaries of the game, with the deadly
    consequences meant to guide players away from those boundaries and back
    to the correct path. (It's not an especially subtle way of marking a
    game's boundaries, and authors lately tend to favor other means, but
    plenty of older games use this approach.) However, after a few tries, I
    realized this must actually be the way forward in the story.

    Once we're in the prison, there's nothing to do but set about escaping.
    And here we encounter another jarring plot development: almost
    immediately, we have to kill a guard in the course of our escape. The
    player character's original crime is depicted as essentially accidental,
    with no evil intent, but the murder of the guard is quite deliberate.
    It's made clear that the player character is no psychopath -- he feels
    bad after the fact that he had to kill the guard -- but this just means
    he's become an utterly ruthless pragmatist who kills in cold blood when
    it serves his goals.

    So is "Concrete Paradise" a cautionary tale, a meditation on the
    poisonous consequences of vindictive criminal justice, that turns an
    innocent youth into a vicious killer in a few years' time?

    Probably not. As the game progresses, it seems quite free of such
    serious implications; this is simply a puzzle game that happens to have
    some rather grim plot elements. If anything, the sensibility is
    cartoonish, the grimness of the plot just a wild exaggeration for the
    sake of an interesting story.

    As a puzzle game, "Concrete Paradise" is serviceable, but suffers from a
    few flaws. The most consistent is a certain fussiness about command
    phrasing; in some places, an alternative syntax will reply with a
    message about the command you should be using (which is annoying enough:
    if the game can tell me "try this instead," it should almost always just
    do that instead, instead), but in many others it simply didn't recognize
    reasonably conventional phrasings for things that could be accomplished
    with other phrasings. Which isn't quite as bad as the usual "guess the
    verb" problem, where the only correct phrasing is unusual; rather, the
    correct phrasing in these cases is perfectly ordinary, but other
    equivalent ordinary phrasings aren't accepted.

    Another deficiency in some of the puzzles is insufficient information to
    motivate the solution. In one place, for example, I think you're
    expected to simply try different directions randomly; in the location in
    question, it's clear that you can't see where you're going, so this
    isn't as bad as an unannounced exit in an otherwise ordinary location,
    but you're given no reason to think the location would have any exits
    other than the one you came in from. In other places, objects -- or
    details of objects -- are found to be unusual only after close
    inspection, even though they should be obvious at less detailed levels
    of examination. For example, if there's something obviously unusual
    about a wall, I shouldn't have to examine the wall to discover that,
    because an obviously unusual feature of a major room component ought to
    warrant mention in the room's top-level description.

    Despite the occasional flaws in its puzzles, and the puzzling thematic
    intentions, this game is fairly well written and playable. I didn't feel
    greatly drawn in, mostly because of the unclear motivations of the main
    character, I think; but most of the puzzles are logical and well
    integrated into the story, and so are satisfying to solve.

    Directory with TADS2 .gam file and walkthru

    Constraints
    From: Tony Baechler <baechler SP@G myrealbox.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #31 -- January 3, 2003

    TITLE: Constraints
    AUTHOR: Martin Bays
    EMAIL: martin SP@G zugzwang.port5.com
    DATE: September 2002
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/zcode/constraints/constraints.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    If I had to describe this game in one word, I would pick "crazy." This
    game, or series of mini-games, is wacky. Yes, it makes some sort of
    weird sense, but you will probably only get a headache trying to figure
    it all out. No, it is not confusing. The stories or sections in
    themselves are easily understood. Trying to put all of them together and
    figure out what the author's point is will drive you crazy, so just sit
    back and enjoy the ride.

    The fun of this game is not the puzzles or trying to figure out what to
    do. For example, in "Falling" it is completely obvious what is
    happening. You are falling and there is nothing you can do about it. The
    enjoyment comes in trying every weird or wacky response you can think of
    and watching what happens. I particularly liked "xyzzy." Ultimately, you
    are forced to go along with the ride but it is short and amusing. After
    you have finished, try "walkthrough" to see what I mean.

    In another section, you get a completely opposite response to what you
    expect. If you type "z," you get "Time does not pass." In fact, no
    matter what you do, you cannot affect anything. Again, in terms of a
    puzzle this is rather minimal and boring. The entertainment is in trying
    everything. I can easily imagine this game becoming an IF classic in its
    own right. I would definitely not recommend it for new IF players,
    although it can show off what a really good parser can do. It goes
    without saying that anything I could think of got a response and I think
    I never got a default library message.

    Unfortunately, there were two problems. One is an unnecessary use of
    profanity. It added nothing and the game would have had just as much
    charm without it. This is really too bad. The other problem was a very
    small grammar error. Towards the end, it says "hint's" instead of
    "hints." This is very small and would normally be overlooked, but for a
    game which is otherwise so well written it stands out. The final problem
    is an unnecessary maze. No, this is not a typical IF maze, but a Nethack
    style maze. I wish I could have found a way to finish it because it
    would be nice to see the closing text, if any. Oh well.

    All three of the above brought the game down a point or two. If there
    would have been a different constraint instead of the maze, this game
    could rank a 10. It is not that I never give out scores that high, it is
    just that most games are not worthy. I might give it another point
    anyway, but I doubt it. This is just a suspicion, but I think Magnus
    wrote this. It is not his traditional writing style, though.

    My comp rating: 8

    Directory with zcode .z5 file

    The Corn Identity
    From: Aaron Reed <aareed SP@G gmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    TITLE: The Corn Identity
    AUTHOR: The "IF Whispers" Project
    EMAIL: mark.musante SP@G gmail.com
    DATE: September 26, 2005
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/whispers.z5

    VERSION: Release 1

    The Corn Identity is a unique experiment in collaborative interactive fiction.
    Thirteen authors were each responsible for taking the previous author's source
    code and, without having seen the whole story, constructing a new segment
    before passing their code on to the next author. The concept is somewhat
    similar to the party game "Whispers" or "Telephone," where a phrase is passed
    from person to person with increasing loss of fidelity.

    The release notes say "It should be obvious that this idea can't be effectively
    applied to interactive fiction.  So of course we had to give it a try." But
    what emerges is not the muddled mess one might expect: instead, the
    conspirators have created a dreamlike pastiche of corpses, puzzles, a
    distressingly ballooning inventory, and scenarios alternatingly disturbing and
    goofy. It manages, surprisingly, to be entertaining.

    Awakening groggy and trapped in a twenty foot steel cube, the player must
    explore a sequence of connected areas and solve a variety of puzzles from
    simple to middling-tricky, in order to unravel a mystery that seems to involve
    corn, murder, shadowy powers-that-be, drugs, and a lot of colorful buttons. As
    might be expected, the style of the game varies; in some parts you may die
    without warning and need past-life experience to solve puzzles, while in others
    you can't die at all and the puzzles are self-explanatory; some parts of the
    game feature well-implemented areas while others are bare-bones and empty.
    Interestingly, the tone of the story also varies, from deadly serious "X-Files"-
    like mystery to goofy self-referential comedy to political satire and back
    again.

    What's perhaps not so expected is how smoothly the game transitions between all
    these states. Any given moment feels self-consistent; it's only when you think
    back to fifteen minutes ago that you realize you're essentially playing a
    different game. Like a dream or a David Lynch movie, the game hustles you along
    through self-contained situations that flows smoothly into each other, almost
    succeeding in distracting you from the fact that the big picture is making less
    and less sense all the time.

    This is often annoying, as items tend to become useless as you move on to the
    next segment, and plot threads are introduced and discarded so frequently that
    the story slowly becomes a tangled mess. You never know when the game will
    throw you a curve ball revealing that the new author has no idea what a certain
    plot thread signifies, or rather, used to signify. The ending, in particular,
    is unsatisfying, since it fails to tie up the myriad of loose ends that the
    hapless final author could not even have known about.

    But on another level, the experience is fascinating. Something taken for
    granted in interactive fiction is that the game always knows more about its
    story than you, and your goal is to figure out what commands will convince it
    to give you more of its knowledge. Here, after the first few segments you
    honestly know more about what's going on than the author did, and the game is
    funniest when it acknowledges this shortcoming:

    >>EXAMINE MAN

    ...  He resembles no one you know, either from your scientific life or your
    family life (the two of which you take great care to keep separate).

    In a context where the author knows nothing about the character's distant or
    even immediate past, and indeed has no idea what the character is even meant to
    be doing, this otherwise humdrum line had me grinning from ear to ear.

    "The Corn Identity" is by no means a great game, and by many standards may not
    even be a good one: it is often sparsely implemented, breaks no new ground in
    terms of story, structure, or content, has a poorly-hinted puzzle or two and
    enough dead-ends and red herrings for three games its size. For IF novices in
    particular, it would be an off-putting introduction to the medium. But for
    those familiar with the conventions of IF or the styles of the individual
    authors, it's an amusing, sometimes clever, and always surreal adventure.

    Zcode executable (.z5)

    Corruption
    From: Walter Sandsquish <Sandsquish SP@G aol.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #21 -- June 15, 2000

    NAME: Corruption
    AUTHOR: Robert Steggles and Hugh Steers
    DATE: 1988
    PARSER: Magnetic Scrolls
    SUPPORT: Magnetic
    AVAILABILITY: Secondhand Retail/Auction (Out of Print)
    URL: Possibly
    VERSION: Version 1.12

    Two schools of thought define adventure games. One school says, "an
    adventure game is a story whose conflicts have been translated into
    puzzles," while the second believes, "an adventure game is a puzzle
    described in terms of a story."

    The difference is significant.

    If you look at "Corruption" through the eyes of the first school, you
    will see a vastly unfair and agonizingly difficult work of interactive
    fiction. The game cannot be finished, or even understood, without
    experience gained through player-character "death." What's more, I can
    predict, a little smugly, that everyone will discover, just before he
    thinks he is about reach "Corruption's" climax, that he neglected to do
    something at the start of the story, and must replay the entire game.
    For instance, I found out that I should have thoroughly searched the
    toilet sometime before the 15th move.

    If that sounds absurd, this may not be a game for you. Much of the
    behavior required of the player character, like breaking into his
    partner's office, would seem unmotivated -- even paranoid -- in any
    other storytelling medium.

    On the other hand, members of the second school of thought will find a
    mesmerizing, Chinese-puzzle-box of a game. "Corruption" is a giant
    riddle, and to decipher its meaning, you must play, and replay, each of
    its parts. Once the player has mapped out the movements of the
    non-player characters, he will recognize a web of deceit and betrayal,
    and be able guide his character to paths that lead to a satisfying
    ending.

    In this way, "Corruption" is similar to Infocom's murder mysteries, but
    "Corruption" is an English game, published by Magnetic Scrolls, and it
    puts the same sort of twist on text-adventure mysteries that the English
    director Alfred Hitchcock put on filmed mysteries. Instead of a
    professional detective or reporter, the player character is a naive
    everyman who becomes caught up in a criminal conspiracy.

    Unfortunately, conspiracies are difficult to uncover, and while a
    reporter or detective has an assignment, the everyman in "Corruption"
    has no immediate goal and will, most likely, wander around aimlessly
    until the player figures out where and when to look for clues.

    Fortunately, Steers and Steggles' prose doesn't ramble. It efficiently
    paints effective portraits of characters, events and locations, making
    the illustrations redundant. I turned the graphics off when I played.
    It's not that there was anything wrong with the illustrations, it's just
    that characters like the brusque secretary, who really tries to be
    friendly, and the indifferent lawyer, who, nevertheless, offers
    comforting platitudes to the law's victims, are vivid and honest enough
    to trigger mental images on their own.

    In short, "Corruption" is a well-written, bug-free puzzle fest, and the
    puzzles are strongly related to an interesting suspense story. Remember
    to save early and save often.

    Solution (Text)

    CosmoServe
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #5 -- April 19, 1995

      NAME:   CosmoServe                      PARSER:  AGT 1.32
      AUTHOR: Judith Pintar                   PLOT:  Linear
      EMAIL: 76636.2067 SP@G compuserve.com        ATMOSPHERE:  Unusual
      AVAILABILITY:  IF Archive; Freeware     WRITING:  Fair
      PUZZLES:  Clever; logical               SUPPORTS:  AGT ports
      CHARACTERS:  Fairly Flat                DIFFICULTY:  Easy to Medium

         In Cosmoserve, you play R.J. Wright, a plumber and freelance
    computer programmer in 1999.  The program you are using to complete one
    of your assignments has a glitch in it, and you must sign on to
    Cosmoserve to download a patch file.  Along the way you will encounter
    computer viruses, virtual reality games, lost passwords, online
    conferences, FBI raids, online stalkers, and Rick's Cafe Americain.
         I think that Cosmoserve is my favourite non-commercial text game,
    and certainly the all-time best AGT game.  Judith Pintar performs
    wonders with the AGT parser.  You can actually navigate through the
    hard drive of your 786 computer using DOS commands.  When you logon,
    you are treated to phone dialing and modem sounds.  When you are in an
    online conference the other users' statements come one at a time, as in
    real life.  Maxis could market this game as "SIM BBS".
         The plot is delightfully interwoven, as the simple task of finding
    your patch file takes you on a trip through a myriad of forums, file
    directories, conferences and e-mail encounters.
         There is limited online help in three places.  There is a hints
    forum (GO HINTS) that will answer a few questions.  Also, Ms. Pintar
    herself makes a cameo appearance in the Virtual Reality game as Judith,
    the Cosmoserve Hints Sysop.  Thirdly, your Aunt Edna will drop by early
    in the game if you are unable to find your new password.
         The atmosphere is superb.  Watching the debate in the Plumbers &
    Electricians forum over which profession provides a better metaphor for
    the human condition (one purifies with water, the other with fire) is
    frighteningly funny.  Tongue-in-cheek games about real life are
    invariably compared to Infocom's Bureaucracy, and they usually fall far
    short.  This one doesn't.
         This is probably not a game that can be completed in one pass.  You
    are on a time limit of less than 12 hours, and some things can only be
    done at certain times.  It is likely that you will have to restart the
    game from the beginning at some point to optimize your time
    utilization.
          A couple of points.  Although Cosmoserve is available for all AGT
    ports, MS-DOS users will have a slight advantage, as the game is keyed
    to simulate a PC.  Also, people who have logged on using generic
    communications software will be better prepared for the game, as there
    is no "Cosmoserve Information Manager".
         Incredibly this game only tied for first in the AGT Game Writing
    Contest.

    From: Donna McCreary Rodriguez <donnar SP@G ix.netcom.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #5 -- April 19, 1995

            "CosmoServe: An Adventure Game for the BBS-Enslaved"  has a
    "play-within-a-play feel."  You are an absent-minded, self-employed computer
    consultant/programmer and erstwhile plumber who is trying to beat a project
    deadline.  Solutions to the bugs in your creation may be found on CosmoServe,
    but--alas--you have forgotten your password, and, what's more, you've got a
    bbs hacker time-bandit to contend with once you finally logon.  Things
    escalate from there to a fairly engrossing set of subplots and
    games-within-games.  Much of the game is set in a simulated computer/bbs
    environment, and therein lies its appeal.  The novel atmosphere more than
    makes up for the flat characterization.  The puzzles are clever and logically
    solved, and the plot is tightly written, with only 86 locations.
    Give this one a try.  Hats off to the author, Judith Pintar, who doesn't ask
    a fee, just that you e-mail her "the meaning of life, in 20 words or less."

    AGT files with PC Executable runtime (.zip) (Final Release)

    PC Exectuable (.zip)

    Walkthrough (Text)

    The Cove
    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #22 -- September 15, 2000

    TITLE: The Cove
    AUTHOR: Kathleen M. Fischer
    E-MAIL: mfischer5 SP@G aol.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Cove.z5
    VERSION: Release 3

    The growing trend away from puzzle-based IF toward--well, toward
    non-puzzle-based IF, which has taken a variety of forms--has meant that
    an author's ability to convey a scene has become more important. IF fans
    have always put a premium on good writing, of course, but in the era of
    puzzle IF the point was generally to set the scene and get out of the
    way; the writing in many canonical IF games--Zork I and Planetfall, for
    instance--was distinctly on the terse side. Now, when simulation is more
    prized, writing that does more than convey the basic relevant
    information is needed, and Kathleen Fischer's The Cove, an example of IF
    whose setting is the raison d'etre rather than an excuse for some
    puzzles, nicely illustrates the importance of effective writing.

    The Cove won Best Landscape in Marnie Parker's Art Show in the spring of
    2000, and the landscape really does take center stage: there are only a
    few locations, but all of them are packed with things to experience. In
    fact, your score increases not with problems solved, but with things
    seen (or heard, or smelled, or felt), though exactly which ones give you
    a point and which don't feels rather arbitrary. Interestingly, much of
    the interaction is purely sensory--there aren't many objects to
    manipulate, and you can't really affect your surroundings much, though
    you can certainly be affected by them. The scene itself--a seaside
    cliff, a beach, a cave--is familiar, but there are enough unexpected
    elements--a sea lion, an otter, tidal pools--to make it feel fresh, and
    the game oozes attention to detail. An example:

       Long ribbons of seaweed strewn across the shore mark the leading edge
       of the surf at a quarter of the way up the beach. Additional clumps,
       dried and full of sand, lie tangled amongst the rocks at the base of
       the cliffs -- a warning of the sea's intentions.

       >examine clumps
       Ripped from their holdfasts during heavy seas, the long strands of
       seaweed are pushed along by wind and tides until they are at last
       flung up upon the shore. There they form tangled mophead heaps, a
       haven for the small flies, crabs, and the like who feed upon the
       decaying fronds.

    Seaweed you might expect in a beach scene, but not every game would
    think to point out what sorts of things eat the seaweed. (Okay, flies
    don't really eat the seaweed as such, but that's a minor detail.)
    Likewise, the note that the placement of the seaweed indicates the
    high-water mark is an effective detail, even if the "warning" is a touch
    more obvious than it needs to be. Again, it's not the sort of thing that
    rewards extensive poking and prodding--there's nothing you can actually
    do with the seaweed. The point is to appreciate the details and recreate
    the scene in your imagination, and the game does a good job of giving
    your imagination plenty to work with.

    The writing, likewise, is quite good. There are some misspellings and
    mechanical errors that prove a little distracting--arguably more so than
    in your average game, because the descriptions aren't here to be
    skimmed, as they sometimes are. But there are also lots of effective and
    well-placed images--the "tangled mophead heaps" of seaweed above are one
    example, as is this: "A long legged plover chases after the waves,
    pecking at the sand as it goes." The scene is littered with small but
    vivid details--the cliffs are described as "fractured granite," for
    instance--and the author takes care to use verbs rather than adjectives
    whenever possible, usually a sign of better-than-average writing.
    (Example: "The leading edge of the storm clouds reaches the cove,
    blotting out the sun.") The verbs are often passive, muting their
    effectiveness somewhat, but it's a minor sin.

    Unfortunately, the landscape isn't the only thing here; there's a plot
    of sorts involving a dead lover and a pressured marriage and such that
    owes much to cliché and adds very little to the game. One of the verbs
    that you're encouraged to use is REMEMBER, which tells you the emotional
    significance of this location or that sensation in rather, well,
    heavy-handed ways. It's not a great choice, on the whole, simply because
    it's not easy to identify with someone else and take on her memories
    when you've only been in that character's shoes for a few minutes--and
    the game is short enough that you can't really put in any more time than
    that. It's not impossible, of course, that the landscape element of the
    game would be enriched by a story that goes with it, but the nature of
    this particular story, and the clichés underlying it, make it difficult
    for it to work as planned. Part of the problem is that the author's
    skills appear to lie more in sensory description than in conveying your
    emotions--at least, the former is more effective; perhaps, had the
    author given us an actual flashback that would permit us to experience
    the relevant past events for ourselves, we would feel them a little more
    keenly. As it is, when the focus turns from the present to the past, the
    player tends to feel a bit shut out. It's for this reason that the
    ending of The Cove--which has more to do with the plot than with the
    landscape-isn't quite as involving as what's come before. It says
    something about the current state of IF, I suppose, that the author felt
    compelled to add the plot elements rather than merely providing a
    landscape to explore-there's not really much precedent for IF that's
    both plotless and puzzleless. But there's no inherent reason, to my
    mind, why such a thing can't work.

    At any rate, The Cove does demonstrate the potential of "art show"
    IF--the landscape aspect makes for an absorbing IF experience, well
    worth the download. That the story doesn't add much illustrates, in a
    backhanded way, the potential of the form.

    Current version (release 3)

    Art show version (release 1)

    A Crimson Spring
    From: Miguel Garza <looper SP@G access4cheap.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #33 -- June 25, 2003

    TITLE: A Crimson Spring
    AUTHOR: Robb Sherwin
    EMAIL: beaver SP@G zombieworld.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Hugo
    SUPPORTS: Hugo interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/hugo/scourgdos.hex
         (Note: this is the no-sound, no-pictures version of the game)
    VERSION: Release 1.0.04

    I enjoyed Robb Sherwin's A Crimson Spring quite a bit. It is well-paced
    and enjoyable to read and play. It sucked me in like a good book or a
    good movie, something I often find myself wishing for in a text
    adventure game but rarely find. Paradoxically, one vehicle for achieving
    this end in A Crimson Spring is what is frequently derided in
    contemporary discussions of good interactive fiction: the game is very
    much "on rails".

    For instance, about half of the game is driven by conversation that
    moves in one primary direction. Conversation progress is accomplished
    through a TALK TO system, in which the player chooses the number of the
    conversation-opener the player character (PC) wishes to use. The PC can
    keep on talking until there are no more openers left. I personally have
    no problem with this system, because the responses are intriguing and
    entertaining. They propel the story. I do not feel as if I am reading a
    dry transcription of a chain of events, but rather that I am
    participating in those events. I think this is primarily due to the
    quality and pacing of the writing.

    By "pacing of the writing", I am referring to the interplay between plot
    or exposition and player action. In some games, the player is required
    to discover what the plot is, and this as much as anything is the
    central conflict and motivating factor for the PC, at least in the
    beginning. Not so with A Crimson Spring. From the beginning, we are
    presented with a fleshed-out protagonist with a problem and a goal. This
    was a boon to me because I do not enjoy wandering around randomly
    examining things and trying to logically discern what goes with what.
    Instead, in this game the player is much more limited in terms of where
    the PC can go or what the PC can do, but it doesn't *feel* limiting,
    because at any one point in the game there are usually only a few
    choices that would make any sense for the protagonist to make.

    At points where there is really only one choice that the PC would make,
    the choice becomes automated. For example, at one point in the game the
    PC intends to visit a non-player character's (NPC's) home. At that
    point, the player doesn't need to manually move the protagonist to the
    NPC's house by typing in directional commands -- once the player moves
    the protagonist out of his house, the game takes the protagonist to the
    other person's house.

    This is where the quality of the writing comes in: at junctures where
    events occur outside the player's jurisdiction. Without good writing at
    those junctures, the player gets bored. The player won't be interested
    in the PC or his damn problems. Fortunately, Robb Sherwin is a good
    writer, and I found myself intrigued rather than bored by his
    descriptions of events occurring outside my control.

    Despite the fact that the story moves primarily in one direction, the
    game feels like it is in the player's control. There is more than one
    ending to the game, and much of the conversation is supplemental, rather
    than essential, to the story itself, so there is room for
    experimentation. The author does a good job of treading the line between
    dictating the story and letting the player find it.

    That said, there are a few minor qualms that I have about the game.
    There are some continuity problems, such as that, after a certain point,
    a certain minor NPC will say the same thing to you each time you meet
    him, or that an NPC inexplicably knows how to contact you even though
    only one other character in the game besides yourself knows where you
    are, and those two NPCs probably have not spoken to each other. This
    problem shades over into a realism problem. The game is set in a gritty
    superhero world (I can hear people grumbling, wondering why I am
    concerned with realism). I gladly accept the poetic conceit of
    superheroes existing in a modern-day world, but when a major villain and
    the superheroes get together to duke it out and there are no bystanders,
    no police, and no discernable threat made by the villain to the populace
    at large, I find it difficult to swallow. Nonetheless, the
    aforementioned battle is an exciting and well-written part of the game.

    I cannot stress enough that the storyline and the writing in this game
    are both very good. There is a sense of drama evoked by the events in
    the game that I find lacking in many games which are more open-ended in
    terms of what the player can do and in what order. The "on rails"
    quality of A Crimson Spring works because it is not difficult to move
    forward in the plot, on the one hand, and the plot itself is
    well-written and intriguing, on the other. The puzzles are not difficult
    at all, and primarily consist of getting information (by talking to
    people) so that the PC will know what to do next. I enjoy the easy
    puzzles because it returns the player's attention to the story at hand.

    As I said earlier, the game pulled me in. It has a well-paced and
    interesting story, and that is its shining glory.

    Hugo .hex file with graphics and audio enabled (updated version)

    DOS version of Hugo .hex file (updated version, no sound or pictures)

    Directory with Hugo .hex file, resource file, and walkthrough (competition version)

    Hugo source code

    Crypt
    From: Konstantin Yu. Boyandin <mbo SP@G ccphys.nsu.ru>
    Review appeared in SPAG #3 -- October 26, 1994

      NAME: Crypt v2.0                             GAMEPLAY: 0.5
      AUTHOR: Steve Herring                        PLOT: Linear
      EMAIL: N/A                                   ATMOSPHERE: Good
      AVAILABILITY: IF Archive S12                 WRITING: Good
      PUZZLES: Average                             SUPPORTS: MSDOS
      CHARACTERS: Primitive                        DIFFICULTY: Medium

        Crypt is a small gothic horror story about an adventurer
    discovering the mysteries of the old church and its old history. I can
    only add that I liked the story, but found it a bit straightforward and
    predictable. The main flaw of the game is a poor vocabulary and
    the existence of traps one cannot get out of (for example, if you fall
    into a grave without a ladder). Characters are 'part of the interior' and
    behave like special places rather than intelligent beings.  Nonetheless, the
    story is impressive and the whole game is worth registering.
        Alas, I have been unable to finish the game yet. Hope to do that after
    registering.

    PC Executable (.zip)

    Solution (Text)

    The Curse of Eldor
    From: C.E. Forman <ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #10 -- February 4, 1997

    NAME: The Curse of Eldor
    AUTHOR: Stuart Allen
    EMAIL: stuart SP@G perf.no.itg.telstra.com.au
    DATE: October 1996
    PARSER: JACL (Homebrew parser)
    SUPPORTS: DOS runtime
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/jacl
    VERSION: Version 1.0

    A for-the-most-part nice old-style adventure game with the vastness
    and anachronistic amalgamation of magic and technology.  The atmosphere
    is very Zorkish, as are the puzzles.  There's a balloon, a dragon, a
    retired grue, a magic potion, an eating cycle (not a problem once you
    find out where the food is), some guesswork puzzles, one suicide puzzle
    (Is it my imagination, or is there a lot of suicide among this year's
    entries - "Eldor," "In The End," "Rippled Flesh," "Delusions"?), some
    clever bits, a dash of guess-the-verb, and an overall quest for curse-
    breaking artifacts that in the end really amounts to a simplified
    treasure hunt.  A fine example of this type of adventure, though it
    offers nothing we haven't seen before.

    The game engine, however, could use some work.  Ambiguous verb
    resolution (that is, the ability to fill in the missing command
    information) doesn't work at all, there's no "UNDO," no "AGAIN," no
    command recall, not even "VERBOSE" (for me, the most annoying of all).
    "Eldor" has some rather glaring bugs as well.  Trying to take the
    amulet from the dragon is a fatal move, but restarting completes the
    command successfully, eliminating a large string of puzzles.  "SAVE"
    and "RESTORE" also gave me some problems, placing me in a room with
    all the takeable objects only to kill me off one turn later.  This
    made me reluctant to play through on my own, and eventually I resorted
    to the walkthrough.

    A major detriment is the fact that, even ignoring the "RESTORE" flaws,
    the game is still thoroughly impossible without the walkthrough, unless
    you're a darn good guesser.  Four or five locations contain items or
    characters that aren't even mentioned!  In the very first room, for
    instance, a historian is waiting with a note for you, but there's no
    indication whatsoever of his presence!  This, along with the crystal in
    the locked chest, the thief in the dungeon, the goblin in the sewers
    below town, all make the game a pain to finish, especially since one has
    to restart the game (because of the "RESTORE" bug) each time the
    walkthrough is consulted.

    Directory With PC Files

    Curses
    From: Molley the Mage <mollems SP@G WKUVX1.WKU.EDU>
    Review appeared in SPAG #2 -- September 26, 1994

      NAME: Curses                            PARSER: Similar to Infocom
      AUTHOR: Graham Nelson                   EMAIL: graham SP@G gnelson.demon.co.uk
      ATMOSPHERE: Excellent, Well-Researched  AVAILABILITY: Freeware_IF Archive
      WRITING: Literate, Educated, Amusing    PLOT: Excellent
      PUZZLES: Logical (mostly)               SUPPORTS: Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS: Often Quite Funny           DIFFICULTY: Rather (7 out of 10)

    This is the finest work of IF which I have played since Trinity, bar none.

    Curses is perhaps the most "literate" work of IF to come along in years.  I
    really cannot say enough good things about this game, so you have no choice
    but to go out right now and get a copy for yourself.  You can't really make
    any excuses about it, either, since Curses is completely free and is
    written using the old Infocom story file format, which means that it's
    playable on just about any computer in existence with one of the existing
    Infocom interpreter programs (I recommend Mark Howell's Zip but
    InfoTaskForce's will also work, as will any of several others).

    You are an aristocrat who is preparing to go on vacation in Paris.  All you
    want to do is find one lousy tourist map which you KNOW is in the attic
    somewhere, and then you're off.  Sounds easy, right?  Right...

    I can't even begin to describe this game without spoiling the plot, so I'll
    simply ask:  How would you react when a seemingly simple situation in your
    attic transformed into ancient magic, past and present places and times, a
    mental tour of your own history, a "chance" to control the fundamental basis
    upon which the universe is founded, the discovery of ancient powers
    utilized by Merlin himself, Heaven, Hell, robot mice, and of course curses?

    I don't know about you, but I reacted by becoming glued to my terminal for
    about 50 hours straight.  Graham Nelson, the author of Curses, deserves the
    highest kudos for his accomplishment.  I can't wait to see what he's going
    to do next -- if you are going to play one IF game this year, make it
    Curses.  Be warned that some of the puzzles are fiendishly difficult, and
    one or two are a bit non-intuitive, but there are legions of loyal Curses
    fans just dying for the chance to help you out anyway just so they will
    have someone else to talk to about this wonderful game.  Go get it NOW.

    From: Nick Patavalis <npat SP@G kmp.forthnet.gr>
    Review appeared in SPAG #22 -- September 15, 2000

    A couple of days ago I solved Graham Nelson's Curses. Before this, my
    recent Interactive Fiction experiences were with small and mostly
    "experimental" games like For a Change, Shrapnel, Hunter, in
    Darkness, 9:05, etc. I was worried that next to these games Curses
    would seem somewhat archaic and dusty or even superficial. (Something
    like jumping directly from reading Joyce to reading Homer)

    Early in the game my worries seemed to materialize: I am asked to play
    the role of an English gentleman (an aristocrat, as will shortly become
    evident) looking for a map in my mansion's attics. Not a special map,
    not a secret map, not a treasure map; just an ordinary tourist map of
    Paris. Why am I, the player/character hybrid, then going through all
    this trouble? Aren't there any traveler's bookstores open nearby? It's a
    Thursday in June 1993 after all! OK, exploring the attics, browsing
    through all these forgotten objects of the past brings back memories,
    but does this justify plotting against my aunt Jemima just to steal her
    gardening gloves? Where is my sense of proportion? Why am I putting
    myself in danger going up and down the cellars in rusty old elevators?
    Why is it so big a problem to find a fresh battery? Why, after all, am I
    playing this game?

    But I did keep playing the game.

    And before I realized it I was seriously hooked: I started drawing maps,
    taking detailed notes, reading carefully, line by line, word by word,
    the biographies of the members of the Meldrew family. I even restarted
    the game several times, not because I got stuck in a puzzle, but because
    I wanted to reread the text to make sure that there was no detail I had
    missed the first times through. Slowly and masterfully, Nelson starts
    unwinding a strange story, taking you back and forth in time and
    speaking about supernatural phenomena, about magic, about ancient
    curses, about greek mythology and decay. It does so in such a beautiful
    way, always keeping the game open and making the player the center of
    the game-world, so that it is the player who writes the story; it is he
    who synchronizes the unbelievable chain of events. The writer has
    created a beautiful universe, has defined its rules, has filled it with
    treasures and miracles and invited you to come and explore it. He
    doesn't drag you by the nose with a linear plot. He doesn't even confine
    you in the bodycast of a strongly characterized alter-ego. This is not a
    novel. This is not a movie, nor a painting: it is an Adventure Game!
    Nelson shows this clearly from the very first moment by making the early
    puzzles so obviously distanced from the story: There's no doubt about
    it, you've turned on your computer to play and Adventure Game. Either
    enjoy it or switch it off and do something else.

    As the game evolves, the puzzles get more and more woven into the story,
    up to the point where they actually become part of it. Solving the
    puzzle becomes part of the plot. Overcoming the obstacle carefully
    planted by the ingenious author becomes integral part of the
    exploration. It is one of the few games where the puzzles and riddles
    actually enhance the atmosphere and enrich the dramatic content of the
    narative than threaten it. Even the hint-system is nicely embedded in
    the game-world. Ocasionally, though, one will find the author devilishly
    smiling between the lines as he playfully puts the most impossible
    object (like, for instance, a beach-ball) in the most improbable place!

    There are some difficult puzzles here, puzzles that will trouble even
    the most experienced adventurer. Almost all of them, though, are logical
    and staged in such a way that the player will receive enough hinting.
    Curses is not a game to be solved in a couple of hours. It is a game to
    be enjoyed for weeks. It is a game to create obsessions. If you are of
    the type of player that has a walkthrough by your side as you play, then
    perhaps Curses is not for you. Running through the scenes of the story,
    instead of slowly and carefully exploring, will I fear ruin the effect.
    In this game you must stumble, you must retreat, you must visit every
    place several times, read the text carefully, read it again, look for
    hints everywhere, become suspicious. This intricate little world is for
    the explorer, not the tourist!

    To cut a long story... long, the more I played the game the more I
    enjoyed it. It had "become a matter of pride now not to give up", to
    solve it without resorting to hints or walkthroughs. It wouldn't be
    untrue to say that the month I spent with Curses included maybe the most
    exciting adventuring moments I had since I first played Zork back in
    1988.

    Curses is a classic, and it must be treated as such. Nelson has studied
    the great Interactive Fiction tradition from as far back as ADVENT and
    collected the elements that define the medium. He then blended and used
    them in a skillful way to create a masterpiece. Curses is not
    experimental. Curses is conclusional. It does not try to explore the
    vague borders of the medium; it stays well behind the trenches, ploughs
    the rich soil and collects the harvest that feeds the experimentalists'
    armies. Experimentation without games like Curses is sterile. If works
    like Shrapnel and So Far expand Interactive Fiction (and they do),
    then games like Curses prove it.

    I would like to close this review using a quote that appears on the
    first page of Nelson's essay on if-authoring:

       Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful
       objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill
       gives us modern art.
             -- Tom Stoppard, Artist Descending A Staircase

    If there is something you cannot blame Nelson about, it is lack of
    skill. If there is something you cannot blame Curses about, it is lack
    of importance. The rest is ALSO a matter of personal taste!

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