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Game Reviews B

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The email addresses used are those submitted with the review, so naturally some of them may be out of date.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
    Babel
    Bad Machine
    Balances
    Ballyhoo
    Baluthar
    The Baron
    Bastow Manor
    Beam
    A Bear's Night Out
    Beat the Devil
    The Beetmonger's Journal
    Being Andrew Plotkin
    Bellclap
    Best Of Three
    Betty Carlson's Big Date
    Beyond
    Beyond the Tesseract
    Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor
    The Big Mama
    The Big Scoop
    Blink
    Bloodline
    Blow Job Drifter
    Blue Chairs
    Bmissfill
    The Boggit
    Bolivia By Night
    Book and Volume
    Border Zone
    Break-In
    Bugged
    Building
    Bureaucracy
    Busted!

    Babel
    From: Laurel Halbany <mythago SP@G twisty-little-maze.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #13 -- February 5, 1998

    NAME: Babel
    AUTHOR: Ian Finley
    EMAIL: mordacai SP@G ix.netcom.com
    DATE: Competition '97
    PARSER: TADS
    SUPPORTS: TADS ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (competition game)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/comp97/tads/babel.gam
    VERSION: Release 1

    Too many I-F games have the irritating habit of being firmly set in a
    single genre, with clichéd rather than inventive trappings (space
    games have their talking computers, fantasy games have their
    dragons). Babel combines science fiction and horror imaginatively, so
    that the separate elements of each genre support and enhance rather
    than fight each other.

    The game begins on an apparently abandoned and nonfunctional space
    station; you don't know who you are, or how you got there, you're
    freezing cold, and the lights are off. The mood of vaguely unsettling
    horror and the tension of the character's investigation are very well
    presented.  The author has done an excellent job of making the
    descriptions of rooms different when they are lit and unlit; rather
    than "It is pitch black," a dark room is described in sinister, vague
    terms, turning from threatening to clinical when the lights come
    on. The layout of the space station is straightforward without being
    simplistic, and solving the first problem (getting the lights on)
    doesn't take much wandering. Most items have been described or dealt
    with, rather than allowed to fall under the heading of "I don't
    understand that."

    The character learns most of the plot through various set-pieces; you
    find blue glowing fixtures in different areas, and when they are
    touched, there is a flashback (not necessarily in chronological order)
    to something that happened on this station, when it was inhabited.
    These are well-written, and though there are plenty of them, at one
    point you can obtain an item that will automatically "catalog" them
    for you. The set-pieces cleverly manage to add the humanizing element
    of interaction with NPCs, without detracting from the gloomy emptiness
    of Babel station.

    The problem with these set-pieces is that the characters, and
    therefore the story, is a bit hackneyed. There is the Bright Young Man
    (clearly headed for trouble); the deeply religious researcher who
    fears human hubris; the older, father-figure head of the team with his
    own agenda; and the brillant, beautiful female scientist who
    unsurprisingly ends up having a romance with the Bright Young Man
    despite the team leader's severe disapproval. (Out of jealousy?
    Concern for unprofessionalism? A little too much paternal concern? We
    don't know.) This also tends to ruin the central mystery of the game;
    by the time you finally solve the puzzle that reveals in fact who the
    character is, you-the-player have probably long since figured it out;
    there's not much shock in the revelation. The memory of what happened
    to the team of scientists is similarly predictable.

    Most of the puzzles are not mind-wracking, but do take some
    thought. There are often clues given in how the station reacts to you,
    or in the set- pieces. Most involve finding an item and applying it,
    although this is not mechanical. There are a number of locked-door
    puzzles involving an ID-card slot. It's nice that this is easy to
    solve, but I found it unrealistic: there were only four scientists on
    Babel, all of whom had access to the entire station, so why did they
    need ID cards to open the doors? The final important puzzle of the
    game, involving synthesis of liquids and manipulating machinery, is
    forgiving of mistakes but tedious to do. It seems as though the author
    wanted a difficult final hurdle, but it is mechanical rather than
    exciting, and not particularly difficult. The last set-piece is,
    sadly, not as original as it might have been.

    Overall, I found Babel to be a well-crafted, atmospheric horror game
    that, while not a classic, is certainly enjoyable and absorbing.

    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #13 -- February 5, 1998

    PLOT: Outstanding (1.           ATMOSPHERE: Very effective (1.7)
    WRITING: Consistently absorbing (1.8)   GAMEPLAY: Fairly good (1.2)
    CHARACTERS: Quite good (1.5)    PUZZLES: Few, nothing special (0.9)
    MISC: Outstanding storytelling, even if the plot's derivative (1.6)
    OVERALL: 8.1

    In the realm of science fiction, very trodden ground indeed, Ian
    Finley's Babel does not seem profoundly original; you have an
    experiment in an isolated lab that goes wrong, an unscrupulous
    scientist, dramatic confrontations, even a countdown of sorts. But the
    whole is often greater than the sum of its parts, and there is more to
    Babel than might appear from a thumbnail sketch. The puzzles are few
    and not particularly remarkable, but for simple storytelling power,
    this one ranks among the best in the competition.

    That, unfortunately, means that it's difficult to review effectively
    without breaking the spell for future players, so this may be somewhat
    unrevealing. The initial premise is set out before the first room
    description:

        One by one, your senses speak to you.  There is one absolute:
        cold.  The hard surface you're lying on is cold, the thin gown
        thrown over your body is cold, the disinfectant-tinged air is
        cold, the darkness around you is cold. Even your mind is cold
        and empty.  Where are you?  Who are you?  You feel the warm
        edge of a memory, but it fades as you approach.  Slowly, your
        joints bulging with ache, you get to your feet and look
        around.

    Where you are and who you are become clear through a series of
    discoveries that begin as cryptic vignettes and only gradually begin
    to make sense; though the game exercises only limited control over the
    sequence of your discoveries, the control is sufficient to make your
    reconstruction of the storyline reasonably predictable. Moreover, the
    manner of those discoveries amplifies the uneasy feel: relevant facts
    come out first as offhand references and are only explained much
    later. A computer that you discover early on supplies some background
    information, but no more than that; you learn about the course of
    events that led to your awakening alone on the floor through other
    means. Helpful in that respect (and for keeping things straight) is a
    calendar that you find, and in which you note the sequence of events;
    even if it feels like a device to keep the player from being confused,
    it's a welcome one.

    One of the best parts of Babel's story is the believability of the
    characters it depicts: though you never interact with them over the
    course of the game, your discoveries about them make them as real as
    NPCs that are actually present. Mr. Finley's writing deserves the
    credit for that; the dialogue is good enough to supplement rather than
    drag down the story (not at all a given these days), and what you see
    of the way the characters interact both fills out the plot and gives
    them some life.  Admittedly, the scenes you encounter are heavily
    steeped in science fiction conventions, and perhaps those who read
    more science fiction than I do will find the whole thing too old to be
    interesting. But for my part, I found a genuine interest in the
    characters, as opposed to nifty gadgetry or wondrous discovery, that
    made the story much more compelling than much of the science fiction
    I've read. If anything, I was hoping for more development, more plot
    to discover, though I recognize that Mr. Finley was limited by the
    two-hour format. The strength and complexity of the story line makes
    Babel feel more like fiction than puzzle-based IF.

    As noted, Babel's puzzles are secondary to the story, and what we do
    get is not especially memorable (though neither are they very
    hard). One puzzle involving a cabinet strains belief a bit, as does
    another involving security mechanisms that you defeat, and the
    beginning presents a bottleneck of sorts that requires both close
    reading and something of an intuitive leap -- but once a certain barrier
    is passed, most of the game will come easily to the experienced IF
    player. But that factor works well here: more difficult or
    time-consuming would slow down the plot and take away the realism of
    the premise. As it is, there is almost no need to save and restore:
    there is a time limit, but it is loose enough to afford plenty of room
    for wandering around and making mistakes, and all of the ways to die
    or make the game unwinnable can easily be foreseen. But there is a
    nice puzzle involving a locked door, and many of the puzzles draw on
    the development of the plot -- you need knowledge that you discover
    along the way, for example -- in a way that is all too rare even in good
    IF.

    Particularly notable about Babel is that it tells its story in a way
    that conventional fiction could not -- at least, not as well or as
    powerfully.  Though a short story or novel could in theory be written
    in the second person, it couldn't put the reader in command of events,
    and leave the unveiling of the plot to the reader's discretion. A
    storyline in which discovering your own identity is central works well
    in a medium where your persona is rarely fixed; in conventional
    fiction, where using the second person is uncommon, the device just
    wouldn't work. In an odd way, the usual limits of IF work to the
    advantage of this game, as the player's expectation of a series of
    puzzles rather than an identity problem makes the resolution to the
    problem genuinely surprising; the twists in the plot are effective
    precisely because of the questions the player doesn't ask of the
    game. The strength of the writing also helps; to quote much of it
    would give the plot away, but room descriptions like the following
    convey the frigidity of the setting:

        Grey light drips in from an octagonal skylight in the ceiling of
        this room, making the room look as cold as it feels.  To the
        north, east, and south, doorways lead into unlit halls.  The metal
        door frame of the east hall glows faintly with an eerie blue
        light.

        The dominating element of this small cube is the color white.  The
        walls are white, the stiff bed by the east wall is covered in
        white sheets, the counter sticking out of the wall in the corner
        looks as though it were carved from snow.  Set into the counter is
        a pale, porcelain sink.  Even the air smells as if it has been
        scoured bare.

    The atmosphere is effective throughout; the countdown messages, when
    they come, heighten the tension, and stray details -- shattered mirrors,
    dead mice -- work to the same effect.

    There are some gameplay problems that complicate matters now and
    again.  "Search" is never useful, as far as I can tell, and "examine"
    does what might be expected of "search" in more than one case. One
    sequence involving a radiation chamber, though put together with
    admirable realism, feels rather tedious to work out -- and some related
    actions require rather exact wording. At one point, the game asked me
    if I wanted to open the east door when it meant the west door, and
    there are some events and feelings embedded in room descriptions that
    accordingly recur a bit too often. These are minor glitches, though;
    bugs are relatively few (and the author has promised that those that
    do exist will be cleaned up in future releases).

    There are similarities between Babel and C.E. Forman's Delusions -- in
    the premise and in some of the plot devices, notably. But Babel works
    on a much different level; the story is more central to the game here,
    and is hence better developed and more compelling -- and, naturally, the
    puzzles are far fewer and less involving. (For my part, I found that
    the plot of Babel made more sense than that of Delusions, but perhaps
    that's just me.)  There is no reason why playing Delusions should
    spoil the experience of playing Babel (nor vice versa). I enjoyed
    Babel, in short -- I gave it a rating of 9 -- and I consider the
    storytelling equal to that of any recent work of IF.

    From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G colorado.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #13 -- February 5, 1998

    Babel is not only one of the best competition games I've ever played,
    it's one of the best pieces of interactive fiction I've ever seen,
    period.

    The game starts from a well-worn IF trope: you awaken alone, with no
    memory of your identity. Then, Babel unfolds into a breathtaking,
    emotional story.  The work of exposition and plot development is
    performed through the protagonist's enhanced powers of tellurgy, which
    the game defines as "the ability to experience past events by touching
    objects present when the event occurred." The clarity of these visions
    varies according to the emotional intensity of the event being
    witnessed. This device, reminiscent of that in Stephen King's The Dead
    Zone, is the central convention of the game, and it allows a degree of
    character development very rare in interactive fiction. Certainly
    other games (most notably Zork:Nemesis) have used this device in the
    past, but none have brought it about so convincingly and so
    effectively as does Babel. The tellurgic episodes gradually bring an
    awareness of the character's identity, and how he came to be in his
    amnesiac state, as well as tell a chilling story of scientific
    arrogance and attendant disasters.

    Another interesting aspect of Babel is the moral ambiguity of its main
    character. Typical IF heroes (or heroines) have few ethical shades:
    they are either unambiguously on the side of good, working to save the
    universe or some version thereof, or basically self- interested
    seekers of wealth or fame. The hero of Babel falls into neither of
    these convenient categories. Instead, he appears first as a victim,
    then eludes that simple assignation as well, becoming a character of
    depth and complexity very rarely realized in IF. The experience of
    playing such a character was a powerful one, especially as the story
    gradually revealed just how willing a participant he was in his own
    undoing.

    Finally, I think it's worth noting that two games in this year's IF
    competition (Unholy Grail and Babel) deal with a metallic research
    station where the player discovers the frightening results of
    unbridled scientific inquiry run amok. What is the meaning of this
    thematic fascination in a community devoted to a form of gaming which
    has been bypassed in the marketplace by games which grasp to exploit
    the newest, flashiest technology? It's a speculation for another
    essay, but I feel safe enough asserting this: Babel is an outstanding
    treatment of the theme, the best I have ever seen in IF, and one of
    the best I've ever seen in any medium anywhere.

    Prose: Babel's prose was nothing short of outstanding. It unerringly
    conveyed the experience of being stranded in a deserted Arctic
    outpost, addressing all the senses and the emotions as well. Powerful
    turns of phrase abounded, and extreme experiences (such as being out
    in the Arctic winter wearing only a hospital gown) were very vividly
    rendered. The characterization and dialogue in the cut-scenes of the
    tellurgic visions were sharp and effective, outlining strongly defined
    and complex characters. Small touches like tiptoeing across the cold
    floor in bare feet, or the equation of the cold-hearted scientist's
    eyes with the Arctic ice (notice the pun), combined with broader
    strokes for an astonishingly realistic and well-written whole.

    Plot: The game's plot unfolds masterfully, revealed in dribs and drabs
    by the tellurgic episodes. The author provides a chronology for all
    these events with the (rather forced) device of giving the character a
    calendar on which he "instinctively" jots down the date of each
    occurrence. As the story develops, the tension becomes greater and
    greater: the unfolding mystery of the character's origin serves to
    heighten the power of the story's eventual climax. Some of the
    Biblical imagery is just a tiny bit heavy-handed, but the whole is
    strong enough to overpower any objection of didacticism or triteness.

    Puzzles: The puzzles almost effortlessly achieved the ideal of
    blending seamlessly into the narrative. There were no arbitrary
    puzzles, and the artfully gradual revelation of the plot was served
    elegantly by simple but logical obstacles. There were no puzzles that
    were particularly ingenious or unique, but that wasn't the point of
    this game. The puzzles were there to provide some control over the
    narrative flow, and in this they served their purpose just right.

    Technical:
    writing -- The prose mechanics were excellent. I only noticed a couple
    of proofing errors in this very word-heavy game.

    coding -- Coding was equally strong. I found a couple of very minor
    bugs, but there were many, many touches that made it clear that a
    great deal of thought, foresight, and effort went into the coding of
    this game.

    TADS file (.gam) (updated version)

    TADS .gam file, hints, walkthrough, and DOS executable (.zip) (updated version)

    Directory with TADS .gam file, hints, and walkthrough (competition version)

    Map (.pdf)

    Bad Machine
    From: Valentine Kopteltsev <uux SP@G mail333.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #36 -- March 16, 2004

    [For years I've been wishing for a review of Dan Shiovitz's mind-bending
    and idiosyncratic work Bad Machine. My pleas must finally have been
    heard, because recently a little hole in the universe opened and
    extruded the following piece. I can't vouch for its grounding in
    reality, but Dan has approved its publication, so publish it I will. Let
    me put it this way: it's the best Bad Machine review I've ever been
    sent. --Paul]

    TITLE: Bad Machine
    AUTHOR: Dan Shiovitz
    EMAIL: dans SP@G drizzle.com
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: TADS Hacked
    SUPPORTS: TADS2 interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/bmch.zip

    A pseudo-inter-RE-view with Dan Shiovitz
    ----------------------------------------

    I asked for it, and I got it: a cozy arm-chair next to a fireplace,
    where I can lounge while sipping cold beer and interviewing Dan, who's
    sitting opposite me in a similar arm-chair.

    Valentine Kopteltsev: Danny, partner, would you please tell me some
    background info about your game -- maybe something about its history,
    the creation process, etc.

    Dan Shiovitz: No, no. You're going about it from the wrong end. Look,
    for one thing, I agreed to help you with your REVIEW, which is supposed
    to be some sort of summary of YOUR OWN, PERSONAL impressions of the
    game. For the other, would you mind refraining from calling me Danny?
    I'd appreciate it a lot.

    V.K.: Well, then, let's begin from the very start. How does it happen
    that the trailer for Bad Machine is essentially unrelated to the game
    itself?

    D.S.: You didn't enjoy it?

    V.K.: On the contrary, I did; in fact, I thought it was just great.
    However, I found it a tad bit confusing to discover the main game had
    nothing to do with it.

    D.S.: I see no problem with that. Just take it as some sort of epigraph.
    How many books have you read in your life where the epigraph represented
    an integral part of the story?

    V.K.: M-m-m... Sounds convincing. Let's move on, then. The world of Bad
    Machine, this fully automated warehouse, is astounding, even
    overwhelming: while it doesn't take too much time to finish the game,
    one could spend I think at least a couple of hours exploring
    possibilities, gaining information, and trying to figure out how
    everything works. And despite its large size, you somehow managed to
    maintain both its consistency and a high level of detail. Danny, pal,
    please tell me -- was it difficult to create?

    D.S.: Could you please stop calling me Danny? You bet it was! You know,
    your question appears somewhat... inadequate.

    V.K.: You mean, it's stupid. ;) Sure, come to think of it, I have to
    admit it is. I mean, considering the dimensions of the warehouse, the
    number of different robots you had to implement for it, as well as the
    fact that you rewrote the standard TADS parser almost beyond
    recognition, one really needn't ask you whether it was a lot of work.
    Still, during gameplay, I ran into a few bugs, and there also were
    several things I thought I (or, to be more precise, the player
    character) should be able to do but wasn't. What do you think of this?

    D.S. (smiling): I think you're a nitpicker.

    V.K. (also smiling): Probably I am -- after all, none of the bugs were
    too critical. Still, there were some issues considering the puzzles and
    the overall gameplay. While, on the whole, the puzzles were logical and
    quite manageable (while I'm not the best puzzle-solver, I could finish
    Bad Machine without resorting to the hints; OK, I used them, but only
    after solving yet another puzzle -- as some sort of proof I was on the
    right track), there were episodes where I had to wait quite a few turns
    for something relevant to happen, and this was a bit confusing. Also,
    considering the recent discussion in SPAG about how doors should
    automatically unlock if the PC has a key, it occurred to me that some
    players (although I'm not one of them) might find the game too pedantic
    about always getting explicit commands. Danny, chum, please tell me your
    opinion on that matter.

    D.S.: Please don't call me Danny. First of all, Bad Machine was released
    a few years before this discussion, so referring to it here seems a bit
    inappropriate. Besides, the player is controlling a not too advanced
    robot in this game; I think that requesting precise instructions is
    exactly the behaviour most people would expect of a machine, isn't it?
    As for puzzle solutions requiring waiting for a random number of
    turns... You already mentioned the action in Bad Machine takes place in
    an automated warehouse. This structure has its own production cycles,
    and works strictly in accordance with a certain schedule. If it broke
    this schedule just to be more convenient for the player, that'd be
    rather unrealistic, wouldn't it?

    V.K.: OK, I think I can buy this explanation. However, for me, probably
    the strangest thing about Bad Machine was its ending. Somehow, I
    couldn't make heads or tails of it. You know, I've always had trouble
    understanding deeply symbolic games (Losing Your Grip by Stephen Granade
    is a good example); I guess that's the reason for my confusion about Bad
    Machine. Danny, buddy, please give me some clue for better
    understanding.

    D.S.: I suspect you also have troubles with your memory, for I have
    asked you several times not to call me Danny, and you still do. Well,
    I'm afraid I can't help you with that.

    V.K.: But Danny, my friend...

    D.S.: NOW STOP CALLING ME DANNY WILL YOU!!!

    V.K. (only slightly disconcerted): Er... still, a little explanation
    would be nice.

    D.S. (glancing at his watch): Sorry, I'm afraid we have to skip this. I
    suggest you get right over to the SNATS [Valentine's traditional "Scores
    Not Affecting The Scoreboard" --Paul] section -- I have another
    appointment in a few minutes.

    V.K.: Well, let's have a look at what we've got here... the PLOT is the
    element of the game that gives me the most trouble (1.1). Then, the
    genuine ATMOSPHERE of a robot factory (1.6)... WRITING that manages to
    be computer-like and not to degenerate into binary code at the same time
    (1.8)... GAMEPLAY with episodes requiring random waiting, but I think
    the multiple solutions balance it out (1.4)... and BONUSES for the
    overall consistency, lots of background material, as well as for some
    responses (in particular, the response to debris manipulation attempts)
    (1.3). All this results in a TOTAL RATING of 7.2. Considering the theme
    of the game, the CHARACTERS are almost perfect; however, it must be said
    that implementing robots probably is easier than implementing people
    (1.4). The PUZZLES were interesting and logical enough, although I had
    the feeling the game could use a couple more of them (1.3). As to the
    difficulty... well, even *I* was able to solve it without resorting to
    hints (max. 6 out of 10). But Danny, comrade, would you please give me a
    final comme...

    D.S. (producing a butcher's axe): HERE!

    Disconnect performed -- limb (top, left) removed
    Disconnect performed -- limb (top, right) removed
    Disconnect performed -- limb (bottom, left) removed
    Disconnect performed -- limb (bottom, right) removed
    Disconnect performed -- head removed

    D.S. (now alone): Time to find someone to bring this to the reclamation
    area.

    ---

    P.S. I honestly hope you play Bad Machine if you haven't already. The game's
    definitely worth it.

    TADS .gam file and readme

    Balances
    From: Magnus Olsson <mol SP@G df.lth.se>
    Review appeared in SPAG #6 -- July 26, 1995

      NAME: Balances                          PARSER: Inform
      AUTHOR: Graham Nelson                   EMAIL: graham SP@G gnelson.demon.co.uk
      ATMOSPHERE: Nostalgic, slightly surrealistic
      PUZZLES: Some old friends, some quite original ones
      AVAILABILITY: IF Archive, Freeware      SUPPORTS: Infocom ports
      WRITING: Very good, rather minimalistic PLOT: Simple, non-linear
      CHARACTERS: Few and sketchy             DIFFICULTY: Below average

    It is an interesting fact that one of the most talked-about adventure
    games of 1994, and certainly the one that caused the most controversy,
    was, according to its author, not intended as a game at all, but just
    as a demo.  Despite this fact, the game/demo did not only become quite
    popular, but the debate about whether its puzzles are in any way
    "unfair"  or "illogical"  reached enormous proprtions, degenerating
    into the first big flamewar of rec.arts.int-fiction (a Usenet newgroup
    devoted to the art of writing adventure games).  I have seen several
    people writing very kindly about this game, ranking it among their
    favourite pieces of IF; it was recently included on the companion disk
    of XYZZYnews; many people have expressed disbelief in the author's
    claim that the game is just a demo.  [Had our esteemed editor been in
    the habit of putting more varied headlines over reviews than just the
    name of the game, this review may have been titled "The Game That
    Wasn't," or perhaps "The Little Demo That Could"  :-)]

    The game in question is "Balances"  and the author is Graham Nelson, of
    "Inform" and Curses fame.

    If this game is "nothing but a demo," then it is certainly one of the
    most ambitious and playable demos ever written; the fact that so many
    people played it as a game, never noticed the demo aspect, started
    criticizing it as any other game, and seemed to have difficulty
    believing the author when he told them it was just a demo, makes a
    very clear point.  On the other hand, some aspects of the game, which
    would be serious flaws had it been intended as a game, are quite
    natural in a demo, at least in retrospect - but we're of course all
    blessed with 20/20 hindsight.  Be that as it may: game or demo,
    "Balances" is in many ways a very attractive piece of IF, with great
    charm.

    Any Infocom fan is bound to recognize the setting of "Balances": it
    takes place in the same universe as the Enchanter trilogy, as a kind
    of epilogue to Spellbreaker.  Not only that, but the user interface
    is almost identical to those games; spells are cast in the same way,
    and you'll recognize some of the spells, and even some objects.
    Indeed, the opening words reflect this: "This transcript is not from
    the Enchanter trilogy, but it does show most of the usual things you
    can do in those stories..."

    If the universe, interface, and general look and feel of "Balances"
    are almost identical to Infocom games, then "Balances" is considerably
    less detailed: there aren't many objects, there are very few
    locations, and neither the object nor room descriptions are very long.
    This is, of course, quite in line with the game being a demo: if you
    are going to demonstrate that you can implement certain advanced
    features of Infocom games, then you don't want to spend too much time
    designing or describing the rooms and objects that are the necessary
    framework for those features.  Still, however, the author has taken
    the time to create a coherent, consistent world, albeit a tiny one.
    The whole game has a sketchy character to it, but that is sketchy in
    the sense of a sketch by a great artist: Leonardo's sketches are still
    considered great art.  The prose is sparse, but of high quality;
    despite the small amount of text, the author manages to create a very
    pervasive atmosphere of nostalgia (a feeling of nostalgia for the golden
    days of magic before the Change, when seen from the perspective of the
    protagonist; from the perspective of the player, the nostalgia is for
    the golden days of Infocom), more than a little surrealistic, of a
    dreamlike quality that gets a twist in the very concluding paragraph.

    The puzzles are of varying quality, most of them rather easy. Some are
    familiar to all Infocom players (how do you open a locked door without
    a key in Enchanter?), while others are quite novel and innovative.
    The "lleps" spell in particular is perhaps alone worth the effort to
    download this game.  Some puzzles have been criticized for seeming to
    require exhaustive exploration of all possible actions - this,
    however, is only natural for a demo, where you're really expected to
    try all possibilities just to see what happens.  It is maybe
    unfortunate that a critical puzzle hinges on a pun that may be easily
    overlooked, but once you've got it, it's quite delightful as puns go.
    Perhaps the most notable feature of the puzzles - one which elevates
    this game high above the level of ordinary demos, and even of many
    serious games - is that many (though not all) of the puzzles not only
    advance the plot, but actually act to reinforce the mood of the game.
    I'm referring primarily to the puzzles involving balances - the
    constant repetition throughout the game of the concept of "balance" in
    various forms enhances its dreamlike quality quite a bit.

    If the prose and puzzles are of a quality (though not quantity)
    comparable to the very best of IF, then the playability aspects of the
    game are more "demo-like".  According to the author, the game (being a
    demo) didn't go through any playtesting; this notwithstanding, it's
    more playable than, say, most AGT games, but the parser and vocabulary
    are not quite up to Nelson's usual standards. The lack of synonyms had
    me playing the rather more disagreeable game of "hunt the word" for
    quite some time.  Another aspect of the game that lowers playability
    is the complicated way spells are cast: you must memorize the spell
    before casting it, you can only cast it once before having to
    re-memorize it, and you can only keep four or five spells in your
    memory at once.  Of course, Graham Nelson can't really be blamed for
    this, since he copied the system from Enchanter; still, in a game
    like this, where you really have to cast a _lot_ of spells (and the
    demo aspect makes you want to try out all possible and impossible
    spell combinations just to see what happens) you tire very rapidly of
    this rather pointless complication.  I can only urge current and
    future IF authors _not_ to use this spellcasting system in their
    games, but try to find something more convenient, or, if they really
    want to make spellcasting hard, something novel, innovative and less
    time-worn.

    To summarize, is "Balances" really a game or a demo?  I'm not certain
    of the answer, or even if this choice of categories is the appropriate
    one.  As a demo, "Balances" has achieved a state of almost
    unbelievable sophistication; as a game, it is very enjoyable but rather
    sketchy and not quite as playable as one might wish.

    Perhaps instead "Balances" should simply be regarded as a piece of
    interactive literature.  As such, it is orsiginal and very charming;
    the dreamlike, nostalgic mood is quite memorable - "Balances" is very
    small and quickly played through, but the mood and the images are
    likely to stay with you for a long time.  Finally, let me just quote
    one line which might be destined to become a classic quotation of IF;
    a line that nicely exemplifies the surreal quality of this game:

    "Tiny in the blue sky, a tortoise flaps across the sun".

    Inform File (.z5)

    Solution (Text)

    Source (Text)

    Ballyhoo
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995

      NAME:  Ballyhoo                            GAMEPLAY:  Infocom
      AUTHOR:  Jeff O'Neill                      PLOT:  Good
      EMAIL:  ?                                  ATMOSPHERE:  Very Good
      AVAILABILITY:  LTOI 1                      WRITING:  Very Good
      PUZZLES:  Well Done                        SUPPORTS:  Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS:  Colourful, Distinctive        DIFFICULTY:  Standard

            In Ballyhoo, you begin as a typical circusgoer.  While wandering
    around, you discover that the daughter of the circus owner, Mr. Munrab
    (Barnum spelled backwards) has been kidnapped.  Anxious for a little glory,
    you decide to look into the crime yourself.  This turns out to be fortunate,
    as the detective Munrab engages turns out to be less than competent
    (surprise).  Your search takes you on a tour through the underside of circus
    life.
            When I first played Ballyhoo, I strongly disliked it because of a
    technical problem.  I got stuck about 3/4 of the way through.  When I found a
    walkthrough of the game, I solved the problem, but found that I had done
    something wrong earlier and had to restart the game.  When I did so, I found
    that I could not get past a part I had gotten through without trouble
    earlier.  I then postulated a completely false idea of what I must have done
    accidentally the first time, and tried various ways to recreate it.  By this
    time I was ready to throw the game under Monty Python's 16-ton weight.
            Eventually, I figured out what the problem was.  It wasn't a bug,
    just one of those unfortunate things.  It would not give away any part of the
    game to say that the command "WHIP LION"  does not mean the same thing as "HIT
    THE LION WITH THE WHIP".
            Seemingly this game is plagued with bad luck, as when Activision put
    out The Lost Treasures of Infocom 1, they inadvertently omitted one page of
    the original documentation that gave the frequency for WPDL, an all-classical
    AM radio station (1170 AM by the way).  This information is vital twice; once
    in the middle of the game, and again at the very end.
            But if you can get past these glitches, you will find quite a nice
    little game.  There are several characters, all well developed.  There are
    everal amusing little responses and sidelights, such as when you try to get
    the mousetrap, when you jump off the top of the cage, and when you are
    standing in line for ice cream.  The game captures the circus feel in much
    the same way that Hollywood Hijinx captures the Hollywood feel.  As an added
    bonus, you get an all text blackjack game in the bargain.
            Ballyhoo is neither a classic, nor a "must-play," but it is an
    enjoyable game well worth the time you will put into it, if you can avoid the
    little land mines surrounding it.

    Solution (Text)

    Baluthar
    From: Mike Russo <russo SP@G caffeinedreams.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #35 -- December 31, 2003

    TITLE: Baluthar
    AUTHOR: Chris Molloy Wischer
    EMAIL: breathingmeat SP@G graffiti.net
    DATE: October 2003
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/zcode/baluthar
    VERSION: Release 1 (competition version)

    The opening Ecclesiastes quote immediately got me on this game's side.
    The fact that existential apathy prevented me from moving off the bed
    until I found some motivation was another bright mark. In general, I
    think motivating the player is a very important and oft-overlooked
    component of a good opening, and Baluthar's got me to buy into the game
    almost immediately.

    Unfortunately, I didn't find the rest of the game quite as compelling as
    the first few moves. Part of this is due to the prose; it's euphonic and
    at times evocative, but sometimes drowns in its own wordiness. Take this
    description of the terrain around the player character's hut: "the
    vegetation of the forest where you make your home is austere and
    shadowy, as is typical of plants in your country." Austere and shadowy,
    that's good, but that last tacked on clause takes the wind right out of
    the image. Still, this is a minor complaint, and there are some
    intriguingly creepy ideas on offer -- the skull which reclothes itself
    in flesh and the ghoul which is the grown-up form of a zombified child
    are off-kilter and memorable. The dungeon beneath the well could have
    degenerated into cheesiness redolent of a Hammer flick, but the author
    does a good job keeping the parade of monsters distinct and horrific.

    The puzzles are logical and generally quite well-integrated into the
    game. While some of them are a bit rote (learning the name of the ghost,
    finding a light source), others are fairly clever, especially the one
    involving the skeleton's key, where the player is never quite sure if
    he's doing the right thing or something monumentally stupid. The hint
    system is complete and does a good job of providing useful nudges before
    spoiling the whole thing.

    Where Baluthar ultimately fails is in engaging the player's emotions.
    We're told of the horrifying invasion from above, but we don't see the
    immediate effects of their tyranny, and it thus never quite connects.
    Without this goad driving the plot, Rykhard's actions appear idiotic and
    foolhardy -- as indeed they're meant to, but instead of sympathizing
    with the pain that led him to make his choice, we're just frustrated
    with him. The opening sets us up to expect a tale of existential
    paralysis, but once in the dungeon the player character is
    disappointingly heroic. The dread god Baluthar might weigh heavily on
    the minds of the player character and his son, but we never see his
    glowering visage driving home the hopelessness of the situation, which
    drastically reduces the effectiveness of the (thematically quite neat)
    denouement. Rykhard's mind has been changed, true, but that all happened
    off-screen; the player character hasn't evolved as a result of his
    experiences, which undercuts the sense of closure the author is trying
    to sell.

    All in all, the fact that I'm nitpicking some details of prose and the
    mechanics of player investment rather than bemoaning poor coding and
    broken puzzles argues very much in Baluthar's favor. It's got a good
    opening and some neat ideas, and while it isn't quite great, it's
    nonetheless a very solid game.

    Directory with zcode .z5 file and walkthrough

    The Baron
    From: Mike Snyder (wyndo SP@G prowler-pro.com)
    Review appeared in SPAG #44 -- April 30, 2006

    TITLE: The Baron
    AUTHOR: Victor Gijsbers
    EMAIL: victor SP@G lilith.gotdns.org
    DATE: March 31, 2006
    PARSER: Inform 6
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Inform .Z8) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/springthing/2006/baron.zip
    VERSION: Release 1

    The Baron deserves a spoiler-free review.

    The difficulty is it's a game that can barely be discussed at any length
    *without* spoilers. I think this one is as spoiler-free as you'll find, but
    *anything* said about The Baron might be too much. In other words, reader
    beware.

    The author's introductory text describes the story's theme as disturbing,
    shocking, and tragic. On the surface, it's about a missing girl and the father
    determined to save her from her captor, the evil Baron. I use the word
    "evil" because the game does ("x photo" in your bedroom, near the
    beginning). After that, it's left up to the reader. What kind of monster is
    the Baron? Can he be redeemed, or should he die? Is he a monster at all?

    The story (if ever a work of Interactive Fiction wasn't a game, this is it)
    begins in a cave. You must slay the dragon, because nobody else will. I found
    no way to achieve this, but later events make it clear that you don't have to.
    After this, the main quest begins. Along the way - and it's a journey that
    feels much longer than it actually is - you encounter three obstacles. These
    are decision points, not puzzles. Each obstacle can be overcome in numerous
    ways. Not every way is obvious in a first play-through, and some of the
    multiple-choice decisions won't even make sense the first time. It should
    really be played at least twice. The second time, your decisions are likely to
    be wildly different - not because you're poking around for changes to the
    story, but because you will understand the story in an entirely different way.

    Before setting out toward the Baron's castle, look around the house first. At
    the Baron's castle, it also pays to poke around. Even though the story lacks
    puzzles, it features bonus material for the observant reader. A torture
    chamber, found through a hatch under a rock at the castle, hints that things
    aren't exactly as they seem. Well, not so much that, but it's a good
    indication that the author is relying on symbolism to enhance the story.

    In relating what has happened at the *end* of the story, the PC mentions
    nothing of a dragon. It stands to reason that the story's first scene was
    someone else's experience. If this is the case, it might have made more sense
    for the dragon to approach from a southern lair, while the PC stands firm.
    When it ends, the story offers no congratulations. You haven't won. You
    haven't lost. The final choices allow the player to affirm his or her
    convictions. The story doesn't tell *you* what's right and what isn't. *You*
    tell the story.

    What I expected from The Baron wasn't what I got. In his introductory text,
    Gijsbers does a good job of preparing the player. Actions should be taken
    because they're meaningful in the situation, not because they "solve a
    puzzle". My first reaction was "sure - I've heard this before." I can't
    help but treat IF as a game - even when the author tells me not to - because
    every decision affects the outcome. In The Baron, that's not the case. Some
    decisions affect the PC's dialogue at the end, but none of it affects the
    experience of the *reader* except to the extent that the decisions themselves
    are part of the experience. So, even though the author warned me that it
    wasn't a game, I tried to play it like a game. I expected something dark and
    sinister. I expected torture, helplessness, suffering, and perhaps victory in
    the end. The story delivers these things, but in an unconventional way... in a
    disturbing, shocking, and tragic way.

    If all of this leaves you wondering just what you might be getting into if you
    try The Baron, by all means read a spoilery review. Even though this could
    soften the punch of experiencing it for yourself, you might be doing yourself
    a favor. You may say to yourself "bah - I can handle blood and gore and text-
    rendered pain." If that's what The Baron actually had in store for you, a
    disclaimer would be unnecessary.

    It's difficult to say if The Baron hits the mark, without knowing what the
    mark was. The final choices in the walkthrough included with the Spring Thing
    version (available from the HELP menu) might be how the author imagines it.
    Most of us won't be able to feel compassion or empathy for the Baron, though -
    let alone identify (thank goodness) with the story itself. So, are these final
    decisions meaningful to us, as readers?

    With precious little else to be said without delving into spoilers, some
    discussion of the design and craft is fitting. The story file is in .Z8
    format, written in Inform. The English translation of the Dutch original (also
    included) is surprisingly good. Aside from a few typos, not much in the
    translation detracts from the experience. Even with a second play-through (or
    read-through) of some of the story, I found it easy to complete in an hour and
    a half. Certain bits - especially the dialogue - are presented in multiple
    choice lists. The rest of it, however, manages to maintain the traditional IF-
    style command system. You move around a map. You get, drop, and examine
    things. You open doors. You take an active part, just as IF is meant to be.

    It's hard to describe The Baron as a *good* story, in the way a game can be a
    *good* game. It's an *effective* story. Appreciating it doesn't mean *liking*
    it. Even so, I can imagine the opinions of various readers will vary wildly.
    Some may say it was emotional. Some may say it wasn't. Some may say it was
    purposely manipulative. Some may say it was an honest and heart-rending story.
    Some may resent becoming an unwitting participant as the story unfolds. Some
    may describe it as grim. Some may feel entirely detached from it. Some may say
    it will receive accolades it doesn't deserve, while others may believe it to
    be unfairly criticized. Some may even say it's a story that didn't *need*
    telling.

    I say... nothing, except that it was an interesting experiment. In the context
    of the Spring Thing competition, it's far too short (even adding a replay or
    two). I was moved (I'm a parent - how could I not be moved?), but this alone
    doesn't make it a clear winner when this year's competition features three
    other very good games. Scoring it is even harder than reviewing it. After some
    thought, I have settled on a middle-of-the-road score. It succeeds as
    Interactive Fiction, and it doesn't pretend to be a game. It fails as
    entertainment (for me), even though it's more like art for the sake of
    emotion. In another context, it might be a "9" or a "10". It should prove
    to be one of the most memorable works of 2006, regardless.

    My Spring Thing score: "6"

    ZIP file containing both English and Dutch versions (ZCode version 8)

    Bastow Manor
    From: Yuzo Takada a.k.a. Dark Fiber <entropy SP@G mpx.com.au>
    Review appeared in SPAG #12 -- December 13, 1997

    NAME: Bastow Manor (The Secret of Bastow Manor)
    AUTHOR: Softgold
    EMAIL: ???
    DATE: very early 1980's
    PARSER: Scott Adams Standard
    SUPPORTS: C64 and C64 Emulators (many platforms)
    AVAILABILITY: IF archive
    URL: ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/c64/bastow.gz

    Bastow Manor is one of those old classic Commodore 64 games. In a fit
    of nostalgia I hunted high and low for this and a bunch of other
    classic games (see the review of Mystery Island as well), some of
    which I managed to find with the help of Andrew Williams.  Bastow
    Manor is one of those C64 text graphic games where the C64 ASCII
    character set is used to its full advantage to draw the graphics.
    This form of textgraphic was basically confined to the C64 genre of
    games.

    The graphics in this game (and the other Mountain Valley and Softgold
    games) are some of the best C64 textgraphic ASCII pics you're likely
    to ever come across.  Every location has its own individual picture of
    about half screen height and full screen width (This changed in later
    games to half screen height and half screen width).

    All the Softgold and Mountain Valley games are very reminiscent of
    the Scott Adams games.  They are very small sized games with few
    locations and objects.  Most every location serves a purpose and every
    item has at least one use in the game.  Bastow Manor uses the standard
    verb-noun parser.

    The story behind the game is err, I don't really know.  You're not
    told in any introduction at the start of the game.  Maybe there was a
    nice lead-in in the manual or documentation but none of that is
    available, so I shall give you what I assume to be the lead-in.  The
    aim is to get into Bastow Manor and find its secret cache of gold and
    escape!!  Err, yes.  Were you expecting something else?

    Text in the game is minimal at best and I suspect the picture is meant
    to explain more about your surroundings than the "You are in a shed"
    "You are outside the manor wall" descriptions.  Objects have no
    description whatsoever.  A knife is a knife is a knife is a knife.  An
    interesting side effect of the game is that it was very poorly
    programmed, so that you must "look" at an object multiple times to
    find out all you can about it.  Take for example the mail box, you
    need to look at it twice or you will miss a valuable clue!  There are
    a few other examples of this through out the game.

    Some of the puzzles in Bastow Manor are logical and some are stupid.
    One of the puzzles I'll give away to you here and now, as it's
    impossible to complete it without looking at the source to the game
    (an error on part of the programmer), in that there is a panel above
    the desk in the study.  There is no mention of this panel anywhere in
    the game at all, and thats all I'll give away to you ^_^.  Fortunately
    you don't have to play guess the verb to complete any of the puzzles.

    Like Scott Adams' games, Bastow Manor is small and well designed in
    places.  Location exits and the layout of the house are fairly
    logical, i.e. the mad scientist's laboratory is not connected to the
    upstairs ensuite.  Some of the puzzles are a bit frustrating and death
    is quick to follow a wrong move.  If you don't save often before you
    try something you will find yourself back at the start of the game.
    It IS unfortunate that you have to die once or twice before you
    realise that it's a puzzle that needs to be overcome (re: the puzzle
    to do with the suit of armour, the apple puzzle).

    With exception of one dodgy puzzle (re: panel in the study) the game
    is fairly easy and can be completed in a few hours.  The nostalgia
    factor is a good reason to play this game, if any, or if you have two
    hours to spare.

    If you already have a copy of this game but you did not get it from
    the IF archive, I strongly suggest you get the one from the archive as
    I have patched and bugfixed it so you can save/load at any point and
    some of the more nasty bugs were removed (the knife/clock bug for
    instance).

    Emulator users: PC64 is not a good choice for this game as it gets
    the colours wrong, well not wrong just not... right ^_^.  Frodo or
    C64s get the browns and greens the correct shades.

    In scoring this game out of 10, note that I am using Scott Adams as a
    benchmark. I would give this game a 7 out of 10.  The nostalgia factor
    gives the overall score a +1 so its really 6/10.

    D64 disk image (.zip)

    Beam
    From: DJ Hastings <dj.hastings SP@G wavecable.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #47 -- January 16, 2007

    TITLE: Beam
    AUTHOR: Madrone Eddy
    EMAIL: pe8283 SP@G yahoo.com
    DATE: October 1, 2006
    PARSER: Quest Standard
    SUPPORTS: Quest interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2006/quest/beam/Beam_1_10.cas
    VERSION: 1.10

    Beam is the first game I've played using the Quest interpreter. Quest's
    interface is similar to the Adrift Runner, with the addition of a panel on the
    side of the screen. The panel contains lists of objects in the room and in
    inventory, with buttons for some common actions like "get" and "examine".
    There's also a panel of buttons corresponding to the standard directions.

    I don't know whether it's the fault of the author or the interpreter, but Beam
    doesn't seem to be integrated very well with this side panel. For example, some
    objects are mentioned in the room description but not in the object list. But
    you can't just ignore the list, because there are other objects that appear in
    the list and not in the room description. And a few objects show up both places!
    As a player I'd probably never use the button interface, but having a list of
    objects that I can interact with could be handy- if I could trust it. But I
    can't, and so I have to examine everything in the room description *and* keep an
    eye on the object list. Instead of saving me time, the object list is wasting
    more of it.

    Another Quest feature used by Beam is the ability to have some things occur in
    real time. Beam includes separate hunger, thirst, and oxygen timers, all of
    which count down in real time, as well as a couple of doors that close
    automatically a few seconds after you've opened them. These doors were an
    irritation more than anything. Several times when I was going slowly I'd open a
    door only to have it close again before I had gone through it. At other times, I
    had to wait for a door to close after I'd gone through because I could find no
    way to close the door on my own. (The doors were part of an airlock, and I
    couldn't open both at once.) This would have worked much better for me if the
    doors had closed automatically when I went through, or something like that,
    instead of operating on timers.

    Beam contains a lot of empty space. In fact, there are three or four empty rooms
    for each interesting one! These are mostly hallways- catwalks, actually-
    connecting the other rooms. Now, I don't mind walking through a hallway on the
    way from one interesting room to another- but seven of them? That's overdoing it
    a bit.

    And even most of the interesting rooms (and by "interesting" I mean "contains
    something") are unnecessary to the game. In fact, beating the game only required
    me to enter three such rooms, along with twelve catwalks. The other rooms
    contain puzzles that can help satisfy the hunger and thirst timers. But since
    these timers are in real time, you can easily finish the game well before you
    starve. Since I was using the walkthrough for most of the game, I had no
    motivation to go solve the other puzzles.

    Why was I using the walkthrough? Well, I started the game by a tree, and
    thoroughly explored it. I could climb the tree (to several different levels) and
    do several things, but I couldn't figure out where to go from there. I couldn't
    go anywhere from the ground but up the tree, and I couldn't go anywhere from the
    top of the tree but back down. So eventually, I checked the walkthrough. It
    turned out that I needed to climb the tree and then go in. Not into a hole in
    the tree or something like that, but into the tree's top branches! This is not
    at all an intuitive thing to try, particularly since there's nothing in the text
    even hinting at the proper action, but that's not the worst of it. Remember the
    button panel with the various directions? Well, a button is only enabled if you
    can go in that direction, so the panel acts as a quick exits list. But from the
    top of the tree, the "in" button is *disabled*. In other words, the game
    interface told me that I couldn't go in when I really could! This destroyed my
    faith that the game was going to play fair with me, so I used the walkthrough
    heavily from that point on.

    Those were the worst problems that I ran into, but there were also some bugs, a
    bunch of unimplemented stuff, and some disambiguation problems. (At one point I
    typed "pull lever", and the game responded "You don't see a doorknob.")

    As far as I remember, the writing was free of errors. (I couldn't save a
    transcript in Quest, so I can't be sure that there weren't *any* mistakes, but
    I'd remember it if there were many.) And most of the game was clear about where
    I could go and what I could interact with. I did have one problem with the room
    descriptions, though: I was never told where my current location was in the "big
    picture." For example, most of the game takes place on a network of catwalks.
    But I didn't know whether these were suspended in midair in a big warehouse,
    running through narrow underground tunnels, or balanced on a table in a giant's
    laboratory. (This last one was my original guess, but eventually I found out
    that I was wrong.) The lack of context made the game feel extremely artificial
    and... well, bland.

    And that's a pity, because the setting could have been made very interesting. In
    fact, I personally thought that the game's setup was its strongest point. It's
    an interesting idea that I liked, and could have made for a good game.
    Unfortunately, the author didn't go anywhere with it, and I didn't even get to
    find out about it until the game was over.

    I also liked some of the other ideas in the game, particularly the initial
    puzzle of figuring out where you are. I had problems with it (like the tree
    mentioned above), so it didn't actually work for me, but I still think the idea
    is a good one.

    Unfortunately, the game's good ideas were overwhelmed by its poor
    implementation, and I have to advise skipping it.

    Quest game file

    Hints (HTML format)

    Map (JPG format)

    A Bear's Night Out
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #13 -- February 5, 1998

    NAME: A Bear's Night Out
    AUTHOR: David Dyte
    E-MAIL: ddyte SP@G cricket.org
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/competition97/inform/bear/bear.z5
    VERSION: Release 2

    PLOT: Not always consistent, but amusing (1.4) ATMOSPHERE: Not bad (1.4)
    WRITING: Very good (1.5)            GAMEPLAY: Excellent (1.7)
    CHARACTERS: Few (1.2)     PUZZLES: Reasonably clever (1.5)
    MISC: Central gimmick well done (1.7)
    OVERALL: 7.7

    If 1996's Ralph was a game that managed to be consistently doggy in
    its outlook -- in that it effectively took on the perspective of a
    house mutt -- 1997's Bear's Night Out is quite consistently, well,
    beary; the player is put in the position of a teddy bear that
    mysteriously comes to life one night and pads merrily about its
    owner's house. (Actually, given how comfortable this particular bear
    seems to be with exploring on its own, perhaps this isn't the first
    time -- the game isn't clear on this point.) It's a genuinely charming
    premise that author David Dyte carries off with humor, and as with
    Ralph, that premise shapes both the plot and the puzzles in a way that
    makes Bear's Night Out feel fresh.

    Your goal, which you discover on the course of your explorations, is
    to prepare for the annual Teddy Bears' Picnic, slated to happen the
    next day, by finding out what you need to bring and assembling
    it. (The author sprinkles quotes in pop-up format throughout the game,
    but "If you go down in the woods today..." is not one of them,
    curiously.) Why you need to do all this yourself rather than leaving
    it to your owner is not wholly clear, but it hardly matters: the story
    holds together adequately in setting out a series of problems. The
    best of them hinge on the problems associated with inhabiting a teddy
    bear's body -- unlike Ralph, the identity of the central character is
    in several instances an obstacle to overcome.

    The writing is quite good, even though spare; most of the settings are
    relentlessly ordinary, and Mr. Dyte does not try to load them down
    with special characteristics when they are, in truth, generic rooms in
    a house.  This is not to say he shirks his writing duty, of course,
    merely that the descriptions of rooms and events are not what makes
    the game compelling.  That said, though, the "bear's eye" view of the
    house is fairly consistent and well done -- take this example, for
    instance, part of a room description:

        Along one wall stands a high bench, featuring a sink full of
        dirty dishes, next to which you can see a telephone and an
        answering machine, if you step back and crane your neck a
        little.

    The player is virtually never allowed to forget he is inhabiting a
    teddy bear's body, one of the best things about this game: Mr. Dyte
    evidently didn't simply have some puzzles that he threw together in a
    game and grafted a funny plot on, and he clearly took some time making
    the game environment and gameplay appropriate to the game. As a
    result, the cute and funny factors are considerable, which makes the
    game appealing in its own right even without good puzzles. When you
    climb down from something, for example, you get "You tumble down, but
    being a soft bear, that's ok."  Better still, in response to JUMP:
    "Full marks for cute and furry, but none for achievement." Though not
    everything in the game really fits the mode -- how does this teddy
    bear manage to carry so many items -- the sacrifices are generally in
    the name of facilitating gameplay and as such are wise choices. (For
    example, a teddy bear's paws aren't probably up for much in the way of
    manipulation -- but Mr. Dyte fortunately didn't confine the player's
    actions to things like pushing or pulling. That would go beyond
    realism into annoyance.)

    The puzzles themselves are well constructed and not too hard, on the
    whole, and some of them even offer multiple solutions -- though one of
    them, in the bathroom, requires rather exact syntax (and some luck in
    stumbling on the puzzle in the first place, unless I missed
    something). There is a hint system included, Invisiclue-style, which
    provides help for any problem, so difficulty certainly isn't a
    problem, and most of the puzzles are logical. The one event that isn't
    particularly logical is funny enough to make it worthwhile (and is
    also a veiled reference to Sorcerer, better still).

    The only problem is that the first real puzzle to be solved requires
    some real exploration, so things can bog down a bit while you try to
    figure that out -- though, after that, things move along more quickly.
    This problem might be alleviated with perhaps a hint or two as to the
    location of a certain object required to solve the first puzzle -- as
    it is, you discover it, but not because you were looking for it as
    such. The other main problem is that there is a side plot that
    separates out from the main plot after a certain point -- and though
    it is fairly obvious that you need to solve the relevant puzzles, it
    isn't clear why until the very end of the game (and the reasons are
    rather thin, I think, as justification for having the side plot). I
    did enjoy the second plot, of course, quite a bit, but it might have
    helped to have the reasoning for pursuing the puzzles better
    incorporated into the story.

    One of the perks for the seasoned IF player is the wealth of IF
    references; this one rivals Sins Against Mimesis for sheer IF
    knowledge.  The author claims 32 references to other games, and while
    I certainly didn't find that many, I can believe that they're in
    there. (One puzzle even involves finding a "z-chip" that allows you to
    play interactive fiction.) Excursions into Dungeon, Curses and
    Adventureland are among the game's highlights -- my favorite moment in
    the entire game was luring Holly into Adventureland -- and the IF-full
    environment and barrage of self-reference (the author is present,
    though asleep in bed the entire time) increase the enjoyability and
    replayability factors. Along with finding the IF references, there are
    many funny things to do, quite a few deriving from the limits of your
    character; the "fun stuff" section is ample, much larger than that of
    most games, and affords a wealth of alternatives.

    Bear's Night Out doesn't do much wrong, in short, and what it does do
    wrong is easily balanced by what it does right. With consistently
    funny writing, this is one of the best of this year's competition,
    earning a 9 from me: it's a good idea, well implemented.

    Inform file (.z5) (updated version)

    Directory with Inform file & solution (competition version)

    Inform file (.z5) (German translation)

    Solution (Text)

    Beat The Devil
    From: Francesco Bova <fbova SP@G pangea.ca>
    Review appeared in SPAG #19 -- January 14, 2000

    NAME: Beat the Devil
    AUTHOR: Robert M. Camisa
    EMAIL: bredon SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: November 1999
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/inform/btd2

    Recipe for a slice of tried and true IF:

    5 parts Perdition's Flames
    4 parts John's Fire Witch (or substitute with Sins Against Mimesis)
    1 part Leather Goddesses of Phobos

    Mix well with some solid writing and logical, if not difficult, puzzles
    and you'll wind up with the '99 IFCOMP entry Beat The Devil (BTD).

    BTD, was one of the better games written for this year's comp. The
    premise: The PC, after a long night of drinking, finds he's signed an
    agreement with the Devil in exchange for the affections of a certain
    girl. The wager has also landed him in Hell and in order to return back
    home, he must defeat Lucifer's lieutenants (the 7 deadly sins). Also,
    Hell turns out to be a shopping mall (as opposed to an unforgiving
    purgatory) with demon clerks, ATMs, change rooms, and fitness centers.

    The game flows quite logically and solving one puzzle will often give
    you an object or some information that you need to solve another. The
    geography is well... I guess very mall-like which is entirely appropriate
    for the game and most of the generic shopping center conventions are
    accounted for (movie theatre, food court, gym, etc.). The author makes
    good use of the geography (although once you've solved a puzzle in an
    area, you'll probably never have to visit it again), and the 7 deadly
    sins are all appropriately placed near areas that are related to their
    particular vices.

    The puzzles are of medium difficulty and you'll find yourself stumped
    quite infrequently. The writing is good and comical with few spelling
    mistakes, and there's only a few irrelevant bugs (most are cosmetic).
    There's really not too much to complain about here. The whole thing
    holds together very nicely.

    That's why it felt so odd feeling completely unsatisfied once I'd
    finished it.

    I was puzzled at first without realizing why, until I played BTD a
    second time for this review. The reason for my dissatisfaction was that
    I'd seen almost every element in the game somewhere before. Almost
    everything from the setting, to the PC's goals, to a few of the game's
    items had been lifted (granted this may have been done inadvertently or
    unknowingly) from one piece of IF or another.

    Let's start with having a modern day Hell as the setting for a game. I'm
    sure many players thought this was a novel idea when they first played
    BTD, but the truth is, it's not. This game concept had actually been
    used before (and with much brighter strokes) in Michael Roberts' game
    Perdition's Flames. To be fair, Perdition's Flames was a much bigger
    game (not comp-sized for sure) and I think commercially released at one
    point. Still, there was a shopping element to Perdition's that was done
    rather well and BTD didn't really offer anything over the top or
    incredibly novel in its layout.

    Similarly, the goal of the game (defeat the 7 deadly sins), has not only
    been used before (John's Fire Witch), but has also been copied by a
    previous Comp game (Sins against Mimesis)! It's true that BTD requires
    the player to defeat the sins as opposed to collect or perform them (the
    goals of both Fire Witch and Sins), but some scenes in BTD seem just a
    little too similar to the aforementioned games (compare the scenes
    involving 'Envy' in both Fire Witch and BTD). What's more (irrespective
    of whose game came first), John's Fire Witch felt just a bit tighter in
    terms of game design and it left me wanting a bit while playing BTD.

    The game's objects and puzzles were by and large original and I think
    probably the best part of the game. There was still one object that sort
    of irked me, however. BTD's 'un-un' machine had a lot of potential, but
    alas, it remained unrealized. The machine removes the letters 'un' when
    they are present in any object and is comparable to the Leather Goddess
    of Phobos' 'T-remover' machine which worked similarly on objects that
    possessed the letter T. Again, it was a good attempt at something novel
    but unfortunately it didn't stand up to the original. The problem was
    that the 'un-un' machine could only be used on less than a handful of
    objects. To make matters less interesting, the few items that the
    machine would accept were each puzzle-related. In contrast, The
    T-machine in Phobos (which I think was programmed a bit better because
    it actually took the letter 'T' out of an existing piece of text; even
    if the resulting word made no sense), had tons of hilarious applications
    (coon balls anyone?) and only one that affected any of the game's
    puzzles. I realize that Phobos was a considerably larger game, but even
    in BTD, there was at least one other object (that I found anyway)
    outside of the puzzle-related ones that contained 'un'. When I tried to
    use the machine with this object, it indicated that the machine only
    worked on objects that began with 'un'; not ones that merely contained
    it. By defining the parameters for the machine so narrowly, it pretty
    much railroaded the player into inserting only the puzzle-related
    objects. The machine served its purpose for sure, but it really wasn't
    as much fun as it could have been. It's not a big deal (certainly not
    worth a paragraph's attention), but it's those small touches that make
    the difference between good games and great games.

    I don't know. Maybe I'm being overly harsh here because the games I'm
    comparing BTD to were much bigger and their authors didn't have to worry
    about the two-hour time limit that the IF Comp imposes. They could
    therefore expand a bit more on their themes, plot, puzzles, etc.. Still,
    I think if you're going to copy someone else's material (which I have no
    problem with whatsoever), the goal should be to try and improve
    significantly on the previous work or spoof the heck out of it. I'm not
    sure if BTD does either.

    If you've never played any of the games listed in the recipe at the
    beginning of this review, then I would definitely recommend Beat The
    Devil. If you have played those games, then I guess I would probably
    still recommend it, with some reservations. Like I mentioned in the
    opening, the puzzles are logical, and the writing and storyline have
    good flow. As a stand-alone piece of IF it's very solid. Unfortunately,
    as soon as you take the games that preceded it into consideration, it
    pales a bit in comparison.

    Directory with Inform .z5 file, source code, and walkthrough

    The Beetmonger's Journal
    From: Cameron Wilkin  <camdog571 SP@G hotmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #27 -- January 4, 2002

    TITLE: The Beetmonger's Journal
    AUTHOR: Scott Starkey
    E-MAIL: scotto SP@G yekrats.com
    DATE: October 2001
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/tads/Beet/Beet.gam
    VERSION: Release 1

    One nifty aspect of this game is that the player gets to change
    perspectives as it progresses. You begin the game as Aubrey Foil, the
    companion to the famous architect Monsieur Lapot, who is being followed
    by merciless reporters. You stumble into a cave that turns out to be the
    tomb of Avielle the great beetmonger. You discover her journal and begin
    to translate it, at which point you become Avielle and essentially write
    the journal on the fly. As Avielle you attempt to thwart the plans of
    Prince Radiant, who is turning the populace against beetmongerism.

    There's definitely a lot going for this game. It's well written, and its
    dead-serious treatment of a conflict between the general populace and
    the secret order of beetmongers made for an amusing atmosphere. The
    treatment of perspective in the game is interesting as well. You start
    the game as Aubrey, but all your commands influence what Lapot does, and
    the game responds with Aubrey's interpretation of what happens.
    Avielle's section is in the past tense, so it seems that what you do is
    simply what is recorded in the journal Lapot is translating. Those are
    very nice touches.

    The game does have a branching story line as well. You can attempt to
    make a peaceful or a violent solution with the Prince, and that leads to
    entirely different sections of the game, with different puzzles. I only
    played through the violent section, so I can't comment on the other, but
    the fact that the plot branches is a big plus.

    There are a few drawbacks as well. The author made some odd design
    choices. At the beginning there is an "instant death" room. Although the
    game warns you against going there, it just seems unnecessary. It
    would've been better if it were just an empty room. Also, the map layout
    was confusing. If you go north from the west concourse, you'll reach the
    main square. If you go south from the main square, you'll reach the war
    memorial. I really hated this part. It seems illogical and made me get
    lost quite frequently. I was never able to build a good picture of my
    surroundings because of this. There were a couple of bugs too, (you
    can't show colleen the flags), and there was a lot of scenery you can't
    refer to (such as the war games). None of this is game breaking, but
    it's certainly annoying.

    Also, a lot of the game failed to instill me with a sense of purpose.
    After hearing the prince's speech and talking to colleen, I had no idea
    what to do. I had to run to the walkthrough just to find out what the
    game wanted me to do.

    Despite these flaws, I enjoyed playing through this game. It has a fun
    story line. The puzzles (once you figure out what they are) are, for the
    most part, rather simplistic, but I like them that way. Nothing
    exceptional, but still quite fun.

    Directory with TADS .gam file, hints and walkthrough

    Being Andrew Plotkin/Prodly The Puffin
    From: Sean T Barrett <buzzard SP@G world.std.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #23 -- December 29, 2000

    TITLE: Being Andrew Plotkin
    AUTHOR: J. Robinson Wheeler
    E-MAIL: wheeler SP@G jump.net
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/bap/bap.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    TITLE: Prodly The Puffin
    AUTHOR: Craig Timpany and Jim Crawford
    E-MAIL: timpany SP@G pingus.cx, pfister_ SP@G mindspring.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/prodly/prodly.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    >SAY "PARODLY IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY"

    I don't like Pokey the Penguin.

    In fact, Pokey the Penguin ranks right up with jerkcity in terms of
    massively annoying me, simply because *several* different people have
    recommended it to me, and each time I go check it out, look at it, and
    say "I still don't get it". Am I annoyed at other people for thinking
    it's funny? Am I annoyed at myself for not getting it? I don't know. I'm
    just annoyed.

    Like I said in my review of Asendent and Comp00ter Game. Misspelling?
    Funny once, maybe. For Prodly (PtP), non sequitur? Funny once.

    Ok, PtP is better than Pokey in this regards. I dutifully avoided asking
    myself about anything because that led to the stupidity that I fail to
    see any humor in. The rest of it was mildly amusing and surreal, along
    the lines of "Stupid Kittens", with a few great touches: the mysterious
    hovering beak, and the one bit that made me laugh out loud, the "bug in
    the menu system" bit.

    PtP is, then, a game which is sort of a parody and sort of an homage to
    an existing property which is itself (supposedly) humorous, and it
    managed to make me laugh out loud once.

    BAP is an homage to an existing property which is itself humorous, and
    it managed to make me laugh out loud twice. (And no other comp games
    made me laugh out loud.)

    Starting off, I was very worried about BAP (although perhaps not as much
    as I was PtP after seeing its opening quote), fearful that it would
    slavishly imitate "Being John Malkovich". And, in fact, it did at first.
    Worse yet, the initial scene's trivial puzzle is underwritten in an
    implementational sense: not only do you have no particular reason to
    push the button (indeed, the game will advance at that point simply
    because it triggers an unrelated event), but you can open the lid of the
    copier, and there's nothing in it to copy; and you're not carrying
    anything to copy, either.

    The game stayed pretty close to the movie for quite a bit longer, which
    continued to worry me, along with the questionable decision to make
    "open drawer" and "pull drawer" distinct commands--is there some other
    way to open a drawer? Still, it was managing to amuse me, and I stuck
    with it, and it turned out that the author very carefully both stuck to
    and deviated from the movie, in exactly the right way so that he could
    work economical fragments of humor by referencing the movie, and yet
    deliver jokes all his own. For example, Melvin, the character who maps
    onto the old lecherly guy with a secret in "Malkovich", is both wimpy
    and lecherly, but he not only has a different secret, but this secret
    explains those two behavior patterns in a totally different way--and
    indeed his POV was the first laugh-out-loud moment for me.

    "Malkovich" is about a puppeteer who gets the once-in-a-lifetime chance
    to control another human being. Of any funny movie one might choose to
    adapt into IF, this one gets the obvious thumbs up for the thematic
    relevance; indeed, I believe in the very old days some people would
    explain text adventures to newcomers by describing the PC as a 'puppet'
    under the player's control. (In fact, the first thing I tried to do
    after my tunnel ride was type something like "ZARF, DRINK"--and I was
    disappointed when this was misdirected at an object I was carrying.)

    In the end, I had so much fun with BAP I couldn't deny it second place
    of all the games I played (and no, I've never been on ifMUD). Of course
    it was horribly on rails. Why didn't this bother me? I don't know.

    Scenes I would have like to have seen:

       * a puzzle that required typing "x yz zy" instead of "x zy"
       * the player controlling Peter controlling Andrew Plotkin controlling
       Zarf, if you know what I mean

    From: Tina Sikorski <tina SP@G eniac.stanford.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #23 -- December 29, 2000

    Walkthrough? Yes
    Genre: Mixed/Movie tribute/In-Joke/SF

             +------------------------------------------+
             |Overall Rating        B |Submitted Vote  8|
             |Writing               B+|Plot           B+|
             |Puzzles               C |NPCs           A |
             |Technical             B |Tilt           C+|
             +------------------------+-----------------+

    *** Initial Thoughts

    Although I had not ever seen the movie _Being John Malkovich_, I had
    been fairly certain from the moment I saw the title that it was, in
    fact, related somehow. Reviewing this from the perspective of someone
    who doesn't know a -thing- about the movie may change things a bit; if
    you -have- seen the movie, you're probably better off with someone
    else's review.

    You'll notice I had a hard time classifying this into a specific genre.
    I'm open to other suggestions...

    *** Writing (B+)

    Throughout, the writing was consistently good. At times, it was actually
    far better than that. And what's best is that I often felt like the
    author was just having a plain old great time writing it, which for some
    reason always appeals to me. For instance, this line:

       Valerie plummets into the big hedge with an unladylike
       ka-thump-krickle.

    ...was the kind of thing that, had I written it, I would've been
    giggling a bit to myself when I did, not at my own cleverness but rather
    at the sheer delight of creating a line like that. I hope I'm right
    about this; people who have fun creating things tend to create more.

    Too, there were little bits like this: "There are sweat stains on them.
    Stifling the urge to make a comment, you adjust your grip to touch only
    the dry spots." Not really necessary, just color -- but what color it
    is! I read this and I think "Okay: So, Marvin is a loser, and you really
    don't care for him; he has COOOOOTIES." [Okay, well, maybe the author
    wasn't thinking of cooties, but hey, -I- was.] No need to spell it out
    explicitly; it's all about the feel.

    I also enjoyed the way things changed a bit when there was a perspective
    shift, but I'll get into that more under NPCs...

    *** Plot (B+)

    To be honest, this would probably have been different if I knew anything
    about the movie beyond the very, very basic premise. I found the
    execution of the idea hilarious (and I'm beginning to think I may have
    to go rent the movie if it's -anything- like this) and particularly with
    the bits and pieces that let you see the world in different ways (again,
    more under "NPCs"). To be perfectly honest, I didn't get the optimal
    ending, and I was in too much of a hurry to try replaying and fixing
    this, but for some reason that didn't faze me; perhaps just because what
    I'd experienced up to that point was... cool.

    The thing is, I can't actually narrow down what about it was cool --
    which is a major fault in a reviewer, I admit, but alas, remains the
    case. Maybe it was just the entire idea of being in ZARF'S head (a scary
    idea to me). Maybe it was just the whole concept of your boss (I swear
    I've worked for this "man"). I wish I could explain.

    Suffice it to say: it was worth doing.

    *** Puzzles (C)

    Hmm. My notes don't go into a lot of details on this, which pretty much
    supports the mid-range rating. Taking a quick look through, the only
    time I seem to have gotten outright stuck (other than, I'm ashamed to
    admit, the recursion problem) was because it just didn't occur to me to
    type "look at mud" -- for some reason I wanted to "look at computer"
    (which didn't give me any more detail) or "type" (which just didn't
    work). For some reason, specifically thinking of the MUD as an object
    just didn't occur to me.

    *** NPCs (A)

    This was really, really the big strength of the game. Not only did we
    have several NPCs, we actually got to -be- some of them. And every time
    we did, something changed a bit about the perception of the world we
    were in.

    I thought -all- the characters were interesting. While they were a bit
    limited in conversational style, they still feel fully developed, and
    even better, when they look at -each other-, they see the people they
    interact with differently. This, to me, is primo stuff. I know that
    people like saying "Ho, hum, just character switching again, everyone
    does it", but... folks, not everyone does it WELL. In fact, it's quite
    rare. Again, as with the writing in general, the little touches are what
    makes this category absolutely superb, for instance, both Valerie and
    Peter dislike Melvin, but they still see him differently, and the rooms
    have some minor differences depending on who you are.

    *** Technical (B)

    Actually, in retrospect, I'm not sure I know why I gave this a B. Maybe
    just the sheer impressiveness of writing x number of different
    descriptions of each area based on who would visit it and keeping
    correct track of something on that scale. Too, I found no bugs, which is
    generally a good thing. So, er... (*fumbles*) Okay! Nothing to see here,
    move along.

    Oh wait. One -bad- thing:

       >go through secret door
       You can't, since the secret door is in the way.

    *** Tilt (C+) and Final Thoughts

    In retrospect, I think this deserved a higher 'tilt' from me. I suspect
    I was a bit frustrated with not finding the recursion puzzle answer when
    I handed out the 'tilt' score (which is always my initial score), and
    not seeing the last bits of the game. And some of it was just that while
    I enjoyed the game, it really was a one-time sort of joke.

    Here's a few other things that I have in my notes, for amusement value:

       You give the stuck cabinet drawer the old heave-ho, and instead of
       merely opening, it yanks loose from the wall, revealing a strange,
       small door in the wall!

       >of course it does
       That's not a verb I recognize.

    [I frequently talk to the games. This is probably not something you
    needed to know.]
    ****
    that code (Melvin) for some reason reminds me of COBOL, which is scary.
    ****
    No Ikea! Ikea bad!
    ****
    I don't WANT To be Zarf! It scares me!

    Being Andrew Plotkin: Directory with Inform .z5 file and walkthrough (competition version)

    Prodly The Puffin: Directory with Inform .z5 file (competition version)

    Bellclap
    From: Carolyn Magruder <carolynmagruder SP@G yahoo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #39 -- January 7, 2005

    TITLE: Bellclap
    AUTHOR: Tommy Herbert
    EMAIL: cavebloke SP@G excite.com
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Inform altered
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/bellclap/bellclap.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Score: 9 out of 10.

    By the brief amount of time spent upon this game (I completed it in 8
    minutes), one might presume that I disliked it -- but, much to the
    contrary, I enjoyed it a great deal. I spent less time on it because it
    was late, I was tired, and I wasn't feeling particularly brilliant,
    which means that I hit the walkthrough in doubletime. (If you get the
    impression from reading my reviews that I'm a great believer in
    walkthroughs... you are absolutely right. I get stuck, I hate being
    stuck, and I like being unstuck. Bring on the hints and bring on the
    walkthroughs! I do this for the story, not for the frustration.)

    I loved the interface! The premise took only seconds to understand, and
    it was designed with a wonderful sense of quirky humor. In sum, you are
    a deity -- not an omnipotent one, but one who works through
    communication and inspiration. The main character is the hapless
    Bellclap, a pathetic shepherd who worships you and has taken shelter
    from a rainstorm in your temple. The parser is your obedient servant who
    relays your entries on the command lines to Bellclap and passes back
    information on Bellclap's actions. I don't think I've seen it done
    before, and, if it has been done before, I doubt it's been done as well
    as it was done here.

    The puzzles were a bit more cunning than I was ready to face without the
    walkthrough in hand, but they all left me with a delighted "ah-hah, what
    fun!" feeling. One command did not occur to me without the assistance of
    the walkthrough, but looking at the related object provided a cue for
    the command, so I would presume that other people would not have this
    difficulty.

    The writing was excellent, the PC was memorable, the major NPC was
    memorable, and I only found one bug in the whole game. (Admittedly, I
    wasn't looking for them, but still!) That bug dealt with an object
    failing to change its messaging in a fashion that I expected at the end
    of the game, and, while mildly annoying, it really didn't reduce my
    enjoyment.

    Thank you very much, Tommy Herbert! I can't help noticing that you
    haven't got any other fiction in the IF Archive... a pseudonym, perhaps?
    If so, I look forward to finding out what else you've written. I plan to
    play it as promptly as possible if I haven't played it already.

    Directory with .z5 zcode file and walkthrough

    Best Of Three
    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #27 -- January 4, 2002

    TITLE: Best of Three
    AUTHOR: Emily Short
    E-MAIL: emshort SP@G mindspring.com
    DATE: 2001
    PARSER: Glulx Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Glulx interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/glulx/Bestof3/Bestof3.blb
    VERSION: Release 1

    I wrote a while back that Emily Short's Galatea had "moved the
    goalposts" with respect to conversation in IF, and while I think that
    was true -- and that subsequent Emily efforts did the same -- much of
    the focus has been on the format: the blending of ASK/TELL with menus
    and such. Emily's experiments with format are worth noting, but the
    content of the conversations bears notice as well -- the games not only
    make it possible to have interesting conversations, they actually have
    interesting conversations, and Best of Three, the latest effort, is, in
    my view, no exception.

    The premise is both simple and too complex to explain concisely: you
    encounter an old flame of the unrequited variety, first by chance in the
    street and then less by chance in a coffeeshop, and repartee of various
    sorts ensues -- you discuss the past and present, literature, music, and
    embark on various abstract philosophical digressions as well. The format
    is the same blend of ASK/TELL and menus that appeared in Pytho's Mask:
    you have a variety of lines to try on any one topic, but you can also
    heave a topic entirely and choose to discuss, say, hockey with >TOPIC
    HOCKEY or >T HOCKEY, and if you have anything to say about hockey,
    you'll have some menu options. There are some recent innovations as well
    -- if you've tried some topics that don't turn up anything and you want
    to go back to the last menu, UNTOPIC sends you back there, and THINK
    ABOUT doesn't produce any spoken output but occasionally yields
    something you might want to talk about. The effect, as should be
    obvious, is to afford flexibility both macro and micro -- you have the
    ability to ditch an apparently unfruitful topic and start a new one, but
    also the ability to say a variety of approaches to discussing any one
    topic. If there's a drawback, it's that you can get a conversation that
    veers wildly from topic to topic with no apparent discomfort from the
    NPC, and Best of Three particularly suffers in this regard -- in fact,
    the menu options that Best of Three prompts the player with often seem
    to represent major non sequiturs. Still, considering the state of NPC
    interaction before Emily Short made her contribution, veery
    conversations seem a venial sin.

    Most of the negative reaction to Best of Three has focused on the main
    NPC; people find him an insufferable twit or some variant, or just find
    talking with him boring. There, I suppose, the player's MMV, but there
    are also moments where the NPC acknowledges the limits and shallowness
    of his understanding (particularly with regard to music), which aren't
    really consistent with a simple portrayal of a self-centered
    know-it-all. Moreover, I feel compelled to point out that there aren't
    many NPCs in the annals of IF that were sufficiently developed for the
    player to actually dislike. There have been annoying NPCs, to be sure,
    but the aversion to this one doesn't characterize him as annoying --
    he's pompous, self-centered, supercilious, or other such things, and
    creating a character that elicits those reactions is not simple. I'm
    reminded of an NPC that got a similar reaction from one reviewer, namely
    Bob of Brent van Fossen's She's Got a Thing for a Spring, the
    mountain-cabin dweller with responses for anything; Andrew Plotkin noted
    that he wanted to throw a brick at Bob's head. As Bob was pretty much
    the pre-Short NPC gold standard, it's not a bad precedent. For my part,
    I didn't dislike him, exactly -- a few responses struck me as
    irritatingly self-justifying, and some of his opinions seemed a little
    sweeping, but listening to him wasn't a chore. (This may be because I
    went to school with the author and hence know not a few people that
    resemble Grant -- and, perhaps inevitably, have had not a few
    conversations that resemble this one -- and by personal taste I don't
    mind hanging around with someone with too many opinions who's too apt to
    drop literary references.) His patter is also leavened by a few measures
    of wit -- not one-liners as much as amusing phrasings, comic
    exaggerations, and such -- and I suspect I have a hard time really
    disliking people I find witty. One example, from the prologue, after the
    NPC concludes that the PC has made him lose his pen: "The karmic
    repercussions will be severe. Expect to live your next life as a dung
    beetle." Afterwards, after the NPC takes the PC's pen and then returns
    it: "All week my conscience has been haunted by the vision of you
    crouched in a garret writing with a lumpy Bic." I can see why people
    might find this pompous, but I took it more as mock-pompous, and I'm
    fairly sure it was intended that way. (The wit is not, of course,
    limited to the NPC's lines. One of my favorite bits was this: "His whole
    body scrunches tighter in on itself, as though he were an anemone and
    you a five-year-old with a pointy stick." Not particularly funny without
    "pointy," hilarious with it.)

    Er, what's that, Paul? Write about the game, not about my personal
    tastes? Oh, okay. As Best of Three consists entirely of conversation,
    the conversation needs to be compelling for the game to work -- and
    while it's difficult to write a conversation that every player would
    find compelling, Best of Three gives it a pretty good try. As noted, the
    PC and the NPC have a shared past to explore, but they also have
    individual (and highly unusual) family lives to explain, and all of the
    conversations tie together reasonably well, despite the veering
    mentioned earlier. For example: at one point, the NPC mentions his
    dislike of Dostoevsky, and when the PC presses him on why, he grumbles
    about how "everyone's emotions run over like a vat of boiling borscht
    poured into a thimble," both an amusing image and (implicitly) a comment
    on an event in the PC's and NPC's past. (There's also a dash of
    self-reference a moment later, when the NPC complains about a lack of
    "narrative momentum, just people sitting around spewing out ideas,"
    which could certainly be said of Best of Three.) At another point, the
    NPC remarks of a teacher that made a melodramatic display that "in a
    peculiar way you have to admire someone who is willing to risk a little
    ridicule," again a veiled reference to past episodes. (In this case, a
    negative reference, as the PC doesn't appear to have been willing to
    risk such ridicule.) And there's another occasion where the PC refers to
    the lack of communication in her family and describes a
    dancing-around-the-subject process that mirrors in some respects the
    game itself. The conversation is not, in short, aimless, even though it
    covers a lot of ground.

    It should also be noted that the nature of the conversation is far from
    fixed -- the PC can handle the interaction in more than one way -- so if
    the player doesn't care for the NPC and isn't interested in playing
    along, why, there's no need. True, such an approach doesn't reach what
    the game seems to consider an optimal ending, but you can't have
    everything. I don't want to exaggerate this feature -- to an extent,
    different approaches to the conversation tend to lead to the same
    elements in a different order, or most of the same elements with perhaps
    a few missing -- but there is the option to take an unsympathetic view
    of the whole thing.

    As implied in the Dostoevsky comment, however, Best of Three needs more
    narrative pace to genuinely work as a game -- it's more a series of
    conversational vignettes, some more illuminating than others, that
    eventually lead around to where you want to go, and the whole thing ends
    pretty abruptly thereafter. The obvious contrast is with Galatea, where
    the NPC's psychology, and the difficulty of getting her to open up, gave
    the story a trajectory of sorts; here, getting the NPC to open up is,
    shall we say, not a problem. The problem that arose in Galatea (from the
    author's perspective, anyway) is that seasoned IFers tended to regard
    the game as a puzzle -- get the Right Ending and Hear the Roar of the
    Crowd -- which, it's safe to say, wasn't quite the idea. Best of Three
    certainly avoids that pitfall, but as a consequence it also forfeits
    some of the involvement the player had with the story in Galatea. It's
    also true, of course, that there were more conversational options in
    Galatea, and it was less obvious that you'd run out of things to say on
    a given topic, as there was no menu system. The challenge, though, is to
    maintain a storyline that goes somewhere -- in Best of Three, the
    fluidity with which the subject changes means that there's not much of a
    feeling that any given topic is inaccessible at any moment -- while
    avoiding the feeling of goal-orientedness that has long reduced NPCs to
    locked doors. If Emily isn't there yet, she's a whole lot closer than
    anyone else.

    For myself, I enjoyed Best of Three, and it's probably not quite fair to
    say that its reach exceeds its grasp -- it doesn't purport to be
    anything more than a complex, meandering conversation, and on that level
    it works fine. It may not be the apotheosis of NPC interaction in IF,
    but it's not a bad effort, and it got an 8 from me in this year's
    competition.

    Directory with Glulx .blb file

    Betty Carlson's Big Date
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #11 -- September 16, 1997

    NAME:          Betty Carlson's Big Date
    AUTHOR:        Betty Carlson
    EMAIL:         ?
    DATE:          ?
    PARSER:        AGT Standard (originally a LADS adventure)
    SUPPORTS:      All AGT Ports
    AVAILABILITY:  Freeware
    URL:           ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/agt/bigd-src.zip

    Betty Carlson's Big Date is in essence Zork 1 transferred to a
    suburban setting.  The player goes on a scavenger hunt for items which
    much all be brought to a specific location in order to win.

    The player is Betty Carlson, the author of the game, who is preparing
    to go on a date.  Unfortunately, her three kids have gone on a rampage
    and have scattered the clothing she needs to wear all over the house.
    Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to gather up your
    clothes and deposit them in your trophy case...er, bedroom.  One item
    needs a little repair work before it is usable.

    At least Ms. Carlson has come up with a reasonable explanation of why
    the treasures...er, clothes are scattered in the first place.  In Zork
    1 I could never understand how all those valuables could still be
    lying around when the Thief and the Troll got there long before you
    did.

    If only she had turned it into a full-blown Zork parody, and cast her
    kids in the role of the Thief.  It would have been very funny to drop
    an item, make a move, and then hear something like "My, I wonder who
    left this fine necklace lying here," or something like that coming
    from the next room.  As it happens though, neither the kids nor any
    other characters appear in the game.

    The problem with the game is that it just isn't very interesting.
    Grab a few items, wrestle with the parser a little, and that's it.
    There is little story, and very few item descriptions.  Trying to
    examine something will usually respond with nothing more than "You see
    nothing special about the <item>."  Even the clothes are nondescript.
    You can't even wear any of them, they are simply treasures to be
    brought to the designated area.

    Part of the problem may be that this was originally a LADS game.  I've
    seen several LADS conversions, but never an original, so I don't know
    what the capabilities of the language are.  The conversions I've seen
    have usually been not much more advanced than this one.  The game may
    very well be a good one taking the LADS limitations into account.
    There are no serious bugs, and everything seems to work the way it is
    supposed to.  The main technical problem seems to be a couple of
    poorly chosen item adjectives, such as the "a glue" and the "some
    earrings" (shades of Detective's "wooden wood").  It's also
    unfortunate that you can take the long ladder into your Chevette.

    Bottom line: there's nothing terribly wrong with the game, but not
    enough in the way of either story or puzzles to grab the player's
    interest.

    AGT source files

    Beyond
    From: Michael A Russo <mar2116 SP@G columbia.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    TITLE: Beyond
    AUTHOR: Mondi Conifanti
    EMAIL: beyond SP@G terradif.net
    DATE: October 1, 2005
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Glulx interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/glulx/Beyond.zip
    VERSION: Release 2

    I recently made my way through a video game called Indigo Prophecy. Initially,
    it looked like a dark and brooding game of psychological horror, but about two
    hours from the end the wheels fell off and it devolved into, to put it
    charitably, batshit lunacy.  What started out as a compelling examination of
    the intrusion of random, terrifying  violence into an ordinary life, dealing as
    much with the emotional fallout as with the inevitable whodunit, metastasized
    into tripe about Mayan prophecies, Matrix-style kung-fu, Illuminati-style
    conspiracies, and sentient AIs.  The transformation cripples the game, making
    it impossible to take seriously - one gets the feeling the designers wanted
    to pull out all the stops and reveal twist after twist, but didn't realize
    that the more stripped-down, impressionistic stuff at the beginning was the
    best part.

    Don't get me wrong, Beyond certainly isn't crippled by its twists to nearly
    the extent of Indigo Prophecy, but I did find that my enjoyment of the game
    steadily eroded as time went by, not so much because the writing or puzzles
    got less compelling as due to the fact that the slow hints led up to
    revelations which seemed disappointingly over-the-top.  The early stages of
    Beyond successfully invoke world-weariness, wistfulness for what might have
    been, and a compelling investigative urgency, but the endgame turns into
    something different, more garish and obvious and inferior to the understated
    early sequences.

    The opening is very strong, introducing the central mystery and the framing
    device which turns it into something other than just a commonplace cop-show
    procedural.  The authors manage to evoke real pity for the fate of the central
    protagonist, and the complicated way she interacts with the character who the
    player guides through most of the game winds up being enjoyable - trying to
    solve the mystery of one's own death is a compelling premise.  In the first
    viewing of the corpse, for example, the player in his detective-guise is
    presented with a young victim of violence, leading to a hint of paternal
    feeling, while simultaneously in the child-protagonist's eyes, the body is
    that of a lost parent.  The overlapping impressions create dynamic frisson
    which very much deepens the experience.  The small Italian village in which
    the main action is set is well-drawn, and the characters quickly manage to
    make an impression.  Indeed, the detail of the real-world vignettes make for
    an effective contrast with the overtly fantasy-based interludes.

    One could perhaps complain that these interludes occasionally suffer from
    being overly-precious - the Mad Joker's transformations do sometimes feel too
    zany for the surrounding narrative - but when they work, they're absolutely
    devastating.  The authors managed to make a sequence of chores into the most
    compelling thing in the story; this luminous portrayal of a casual domesticity
    rendered impossible by violence is far more effective and heart-wrenching than
    the late-game reveals on what was going on in the shack's cellar.  There is a
    noticeable missed opportunity in this sequence, however - when fetching well
    water, DRINK WATER returns a default "you're not thirsty" response.  The
    protagonist, a child who's never been born, has never tasted water before;
    this would have been a perfect chance to zoom in and bring home the poignancy
    of lost possibilities, of the mundane experiences the protagonist will be
    denied.

    The puzzles are well-clued and unobtrusive, which is almost a shame, as the
    integrated hint system is elegant and enjoyable in its own right.  Finding the
    secret door in the shack is nicely handled, and the initial investigation is
    more entertaining than just Xing everything in sight, as the player
    demonstrates that he's figured out what the murderer did by walking through
    the same steps.  A word should be said about the accompanying artwork, which
    is evocative and very successful at setting  a mood of obscure dark fantasy -
    again, especially in the opening, where everything is threatening and
    unfamiliar.

    So I did very much enjoy most of Beyond, but as alluded to at the top  of the
    review, I found the game got decreasingly effective as it wore on.  From the
    set-up - a young girl, murdered as her pregnancy becomes obvious - I'd assumed
    that the crime was essentially domestic and squalid, arising out of a
    relationship which never should have happened, the fruit of desperation and
    anger and stupidity.  The  murderer, I imagined, was somebody who acted out of
    recognizably human motives - evil, sure, but still essentially a person.  The
    authors, however, went in a rather different direction: the killer is a Satan-
    worshipping priest who'd been ritually and sexually abusing two different
    girls of the town.  This felt disappointingly over-the-top, turning the
    villain into a cartoon and rendering everything far too simple and pat.
    Besides this aesthetic objection, conjuring up the specter of ritual satanic
    child abuse brought to my mind the famous hoaxes,like the McMartin Preschool
    case, which further undermined its effectiveness.  Sure, there's something
    horrific about discovering that your father is a demon-worshipping sexual
    predator, but since the character is so unrecognizable, it's essentially safe.
    Presenting the villain as an actual person who did something terrible for all
    the wrong reasons would have been far creepier, and more memorable.  I'll
    willingly concede that choosing this particular trope isn't by any means
    invalid or wrong, and it certainly pops up in fictional portrayals with some
    regularity, but again, I think a more humanistic approach to the evil would
    have made for a more satisfying experience.  The final real-world sequence
    compounds the mistake in my view - the hostage drama, replete with guns and
    shouting, lacks the grace and subtlety which are the game's greatest strengths.
    In the final sequences, understatement is deprecated in favor of spectacle and
    narrative pyrotechnics, but I think the detail-work of the opening is superior
    to the broad strokes of the endgame.

    Additionally, while the game is quite solid, a few mistakes did seep through -
    I noticed misspellings of "chamomile" and "consecrating,"  but these are
    forgivable.  Likewise, in one place I saw "e" used in place of "and,"
    presumably due to the authors' native language being Italian.  There also
    appeared to be some inconsistencies involving the appearance of the
    protagonist; during the first interlude, she is supposed to look like a woman
    in her twenties, but looking in a mirror returns a description about her being
    a child in a pink dress, and X ME gives the newborn response.  And in a few
    places, I ran into disambiguation issues.

    I feel churlish even mentioning these, though - as is often the case with
    games I enjoyed, I think I've spent most of this review harping on things I
    disliked, which might give the wrong impression.  To state it baldly, Beyond
    is a good game, and has all sorts of highlights - from the moody art to the
    artful juxtaposition of fantasy and reality, with plenty of imaginative
    flourishes (the discourse on bright and dark inspirations sticks in my head as
    particularly clever).  I think the choice of making the bad guy a *really* bad
    guy broke the emotional realism of the scenario, but up until that point, I
    got as much  enjoyment from the game as from anything else in the Comp, and
    even looked at in aggregate, I still think it's one of the very strongest
    games on offer.

    Glulx and Zcode (.z8) executables

    Beyond the Tesseract
    From: Anonymous <Virus2Wyrm SP@G aol.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #6 -- July 26, 1995

      NAME: Beyond the Tesseract                  PARSER: 2 Word Syntax
      AUTHOR: David Lo                            PLOT: Science Fact
      EMAIL: ?                                    ATMOSPHERE: Creepy
      AVAILABILITY: IF Archive                           WRITING: Good, but short
      PUZZLES: Great                              SUPPORTS: IBM
      CHARACTERS: Strange, inhuman                DIFFICULTY: Hard*

    Taken from the docs:

    Scenario:
    ---------
      You have reached the final part of your mission.  You have gained access
      to the complex, and all but the last procedure has been performed.  Now
      comes a time of waiting, in which you must search for the hidden 12-word
      message that will aid you at the final step.  But what choice will you
      make when that time comes?

      The scenario for the adventure is meant to be vague.  Once the adventure
      has been completed, the scenario will hopefully become clear.

    -----

    Vague is the word for it!  At first glance the world is 4 rooms large, but
    don't worry, soon you'll be popping your stack and collapsing universes,
    looking for those key words.  Also, you'll have a dream, read an IF book <!>
    and have fun trying to get the improbability.

    I personally found this game hard...but that's because I'm in 8th grade and
    haven't had physics or quantum mathematics.  These are the refrences the
    author lists for this game.

        The Beauty of Fractals.
        The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought.
        The Fractal Geometry of Nature.
        Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
        The Heritage Illustrated Dictionary Of the English Language.
        Mathematics: The New Golden Age.
        The New Lexicon Webster's Dictionary, Encyclopedic Edition.
        The Penguin Dictionary of Science, Fifth Edition.
        Roget's International Thesaurus.
        The Science of Fractal Images.
        The VNR Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics.
        The World of M.C. Escher.

    Ummmm....I've heard of Escher ;).   My favorite part was the dream where if
    you think, an idea will become an object, but then the hypothesis will come
    and you'll have to prove it.  When in the interactive book, you'll find a
    machine that doesn't work.  Now while you would think from what this game has
    been like so far, some heavy mechanical skills would come in handy.  Nope.
        The charecters are not human, except the Professor, but he's in the
    dream.  There's a plant that would really like some fluid....could you please
    fit it in my klein bottle?  And of course the party of numerals!  Don't
    worry.  They won't hurt you.  In fact, nothing will.  You can't die or get
    stuck in this game.
        The game plays exactly like a Scott Adams game.  Room descriptions are
    short and to the point.  He does describe objects better than Mr. Adams
    though.  That brings up another point: VERBS.  You'll be doing a lot of
    popping and _y_ing. Yes, _y_ is a verb in this game.
        Over all this is a fun game that could take a long time to play, or a
    very short time to delete.  Let it grow on you, and if you're really stuck,
    there's a solution on ftp.ifarchive.org

    P.S. The game also comes with a great philosophy on adventure games.  Check
    it out!

    Tesseract:
    ----------
                   /*--------------/*
                 /  '            /  '
               /   '|          /   '|
            */----'---------*/    ' |
           '|    '  |      '|    '  |
          ' |   '   |     ' |   '   |
         '  |  '   /*----'--|--'---/*
        '   | '  /  '   '   | '  /  '
       '    |' /   '   '    |' /   '
      '    /*/----'---'----/*/    '
     '   /  '    '   '   /  '    '
    '  /   '|   '   '  /   '|   '
    */----'----'----*/    ' |  '
    |    '  | '     |    '  | '
    |   '   |'      |   '   |'
    |  '   /*-------|--'---/*
    | '  /          | '  /
    |' /            |' /
    */--------------*/

    PC Executable (.zip)

    Atari ST disk image(.arc)

    Solution (Text)

    Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com&rt;
    Review appeared in SPAG #5 -- April 19, 1995

      NAME:  Beyond Zork:  The Coconut of Quendor
                                            GAMEPLAY:  Infocom Deluxe
      AUTHOR:  Brian Moriarty               PLOT:  Roller Coaster
      EMAIL:  ?                             ATMOSPHERE:  Rich
      AVAILABILITY:  LTOI 1                 WRITING:  Very Good
      PUZZLES:  Multiple Solutions          SUPPORTS:  Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS:  Very Good                DIFFICULTY:  Advanced

         Beyond Zork, the first game in the Zork series since the
    publication of Zork III five years earlier, really owes much more to
    the Enchanter trilogy than the Zork trilogy
         The story takes place concurently with Spellbreaker and begins in
    the Guild Hall of Borphee shortly after your departure.  The remaining
    Guild Heads (still in enchanted form), realizing that your quest in
    that game will result in the destruction of magic itself, decide that
    the legendary Coconut of Quendor must be seized from the Implementors
    and stored away, to be brought out again in the distant future.
    Considering that the Implementors are literally the staff of Infocom
    (try to ZIFMIA IMPLEMENTORS in Enchanter to see what I mean) this could
    present a thorny metaphysical problem if one thought about it too much.
    In a move reminiscent of Enchanter, they decide that an untrained
    initiate must be selected for this quest.
         Beyond Zork was one of the format experiments Infocom conducted
    during the 1987-1989 period, and certainly contains the best parser of
    any of the non-graphics games.  The function keys could be programmed
    to represent any input desired, with or without a carriage return.  The
    top left part of the screen contained a box that constantly displayed
    the room description, while the top right contained a small onscreen
    map that displayed the immediate vicinity.
         The game was an attempt to integrate role-playing with text
    adventures, and was surprisingly successful.  While most text games
    have one or two random elements, Beyond Zork has many.  You begin by
    setting your character's attributes from a pool of points that you are
    given (or you can select a preset character) as in a proper RPG.
    Several puzzles cannot be solved unless a certain attribute is high
    enough, even if you are aware of the proper action to take.  Combat is
    conducted as in normal RPG's, with your attributes being
    cross-referenced against a computerised die-roll.  Even the map changes
    slightly from game to game.
         The scale of the map areas vary greatly.  Some "rooms" are as small
    as a tavern's common room, while others are the size of a city.  The
    main playing area spans over several towns scattered through the
    Westlands, but parts of the game may take you through geological ages
    of time, or on a trip to the land of Oz (the name is changed in the
    game of course).
         Beyond Zork is a game with a great amount of play and replay
    value.  Many of the puzzles have multiple solutions, and will keep
    players coming back to find more even after they have played the game
    to a conclusion.

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

    Brian Moriarty's Beyond Zork is in several ways unique in the Infocom
    library--not only for its use of the Z6 format to do on-screen
    mapping, but for its use of a role-playing-game-like plot. Just as
    importantly, it gives the player a sense of place in the land of
    Quendor that the Zork and Enchanter series had lacked. Though the
    role-playing element needs work, Beyond Zork succeeds admirably as a
    puzzle-solving game in its own right.

    Beyond Zork's title suggests that it continues the Zork series, but it
    actually has little in common with the originals--the heavy reliance
    on magic suggests the Enchanter series, and the sense of exploring a
    populated land rather than a series of caverns gives the game a
    different feel. Most obvious of the innovations in the gameplay is the
    role-playing game element, an element that produced decidedly mixed
    results for Infocom on each try (Quarterstaff, not that this reviewer
    would know, and Journey), and while Beyond Zork succeeds, the combat
    element is far from the highlight of the game. It's a bit hard to
    explain why this is so--like most RPGs, the player can choose between
    swordplay and magic to fight the battles, and acquire increasingly
    sophisticated weaponry (okay, okay, a sword over a battleaxe over a
    shillelagh, maybe not all that sophisticated) to dispose of the
    enemies.

    The difference may lie in that opportunities to increase skill
    levels--strength and dexterity and such--are rather haphazard in
    Beyond Zork, whereas many RPGs increase character qualities with each
    level attained, meaning that one can improve one's character without
    necessarily getting anywhere in the game. In Beyond Zork, though the
    character qualities are occasionally relevant, there are few instances
    where the player increases his or her intelligence or strength merely
    in order to be smarter or stronger; usually, the increases are
    directly linked to solving puzzles. Though that approach seems
    preferable, it made the few times when a puzzle's solution was
    unavailable because the requisite character attribute was too low a
    bit irritating. (In other words, there may be times when the player
    needs more of a certain attribute to solve a puzzle, and goes out
    hunting for a way to increase that attribute. This sort of thing
    strains the idea that the attributes are supposed to measure your
    development, since increasing them is an end in itself.) More
    fundamentally, though, Beyond Zork is far more plot- and
    puzzle-oriented than the bulk of RPGs, and the combat scenes feel like
    the game stops while the player tries to get rid of the obstacle.

    Another factor separating Beyond Zork from Zorks 1-3 is the NPC
    element--there are as many of them here as in the first three games
    combined (perhaps more, depending on whom one includes on each count),
    and most of them are well developed and coded. (The minx may still be
    my favorite Infocom NPC, even though her usefulness in the game is
    limited.)  Encounters with the cook, the sailor, the cardinal, and
    others help reinforce the feel that the territory is populated, rather
    than a deserted maze, and while this lends a schizophrenic feel at
    times--does no one care that you pick up everything that isn't nailed
    down?--it makes for an intriguing game environment.

    The plot--retrieve the Coconut of Quendor to safeguard the existence
    of magic, or, I should say, Magick--is nothing particularly special;
    it suffers from the usual disease of a big game, specifically that one
    muddles along solving puzzles with very little sense that they have
    anything to do with the larger objectives, besides that the game
    designers surely wouldn't bother throwing in irrelevant puzzles
    (unless they included Steve Meretzky, which they don't here). I can't
    say that this bothers me much anymore, but it seems particularly
    obvious here--one does not learn anything about the whereabouts of the
    coconut until well into the game, and finding it at the end amounts to
    stumbling over it. What plot Beyond Zork has is often entertaining,
    but it hardly makes a coherent whole. The game takes place
    concurrently with Spellbreaker, and it occurred to me that it might
    have been interesting to dovetail the plot with that game a bit
    more--magic, except for when you find Orkan of Thriff's journal,
    doesn't appear to be failing. Certainly, what plot Beyond Zork has is
    well beyond collect-the-treasures, but I still wanted something more.

    The puzzles are original and entertaining, though somewhat maddening
    in a few cases (mild spoilers ahead)...I figured out one of the
    solutions to the bridge problem early on, but assumed that I was
    solving it "wrong," that the resource I was using needed to be used
    elsewhere. (It also seemed like that particular puzzle ignored a
    perfectly good solution--the use of the dispel staff.) The time-travel
    puzzle is an original variant on a much-used convention, though, and
    the butterfly puzzle employs magic in a novel way, and both are among
    the Infocom's best--and the multiple solutions to several puzzles are
    a refreshing touch. (Though there are some apparently logical
    solutions that aren't implemented, frustratingly.)

    Most of the puzzles aren't particularly hard, though a few require
    semi-suicidal actions for motivations that aren't particularly
    obvious--and the final puzzle is so obvious that it hardly deserves
    the name. (Tangent: many of Infocom's fantasy games seem to either
    have an absurdly easy or an absurdly difficult puzzle at the
    end--Enchanter, Sorcerer and Wishbringer (even for an introductory
    game) are easy in that respect, and Zorks 2 and 3 are difficult to the
    point of unfairness.  Spellbreaker, I think, is just right, and Zork 1
    and Zork Zero don't really have ending puzzles as such.) Several of
    the puzzles revolve around the combat situations; a few aren't really
    combat situations at all, but rather puzzles in disguise, enemies to
    be dispatched by ruse rather than by brute force. Those moments
    highlight the tension between conventional IF and RPG that's going on
    here--and, naturally, the IF element usually seems more compelling.

    The writing is, as usual, first-rate--the room descriptions show why
    no self-respecting game author should be allowed to get away with "You
    are in a forest...you are in a forest...you are in a forest" for a
    series of similar rooms. Consider:

        Twilight
        An ancient oak tree turns the day to twilight beneath the
        impressive sprawl of its branches.

        Pine Grove
        A carpet of amber softens your footsteps between the rows of tall,
        sweet-smelling pines.

        Eerie Copse
        A nameless blight has twisted the surrounding elms into sinister forms
        that creak and groan in the dry breeze.

    These and other well-written sequences (an amusing riff on The Wizard
    of Oz, for instance--did this have anything to do with the plan
    kicking around Infocom to write a full-length Wizard of Oz
    parody?--and the visions of other Infocom games in a crystal ball of
    sorts) make Beyond Zork much more than wandering between puzzles, even
    if the story is a bit weak. The humor vital to so many Infocom works
    is plentiful here--playing as a woman and asking the shopkeeper about
    the Potion of Might is one of the best Easter eggs in any Infocom
    game--and there are lots of entertaining moments: one of the enemies
    you encounter is a "cruel puppet" whose form of combat hinges on
    creative insults: it twists its appearance into a caricature of yours,
    or "accuses your mother of shocking improprieties." This is all the
    funnier because it feels like a dig at RPG combat, which usully
    requires either impressive weapons or an elaborate system of magic;
    battling via insult (it would be even better if you could answer)
    comes as a sly "sticks and stones" sort of jab at those conventions.

    Experienced Infocom players will recognize many little responses or
    objects, from Wishbringer ("A concealed bell tinkles merrily" and the
    vapor) to Hitchhiker's (being teased for a typo) to the Zork series
    (the sailor, of course), and a sequence involving the Implementors
    adds the obligatory element of self-reference. But perhaps the best
    moment in Beyond Zork is the archway puzzle and the point of view of
    the game's setting that it provides--it puts the game into a
    perspective that I found sobering. (Very few fantasy games are endowed
    with as much pseudo-historical background as the Zork series, and
    Beyond Zork, much more than the original series, puts the history to
    good use.)

    On the whole, Beyond Zork is well worth the playing; truly difficult
    puzzles are few, the game atmosphere is effective, and the
    ending--even if it points to a sequel that never happened--is
    thoroughly rewarding. Even if RPGs aren't your style, there is plenty
    more in Beyond Zork than hack-and-slash; it deserves consideration
    among Infocom's best.

    Solution (Text)

    The Big Mama
    From: Adam Cadre <ac SP@G adamcadre.ac>
    Review appeared in SPAG #23 -- December 29, 2000

    TITLE: The Big Mama
    AUTHOR: Brendan Barnwell
    E-MAIL: BrenBarn SP@G aol.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard, with conversation menus
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/bigmama/bigmama.z5
    VERSION: Release 8

    I don't think the author was trying hard enough. If you're going to put
    the phrase "the big mama" into pretty much every response, why stop
    there? Why, it could've appeared in every paragraph or, indeed, every
    sentence. (The big mama.) I mean, if it's good ten thousand times, why
    not a hundred thousand? Why not write in the style of Henrietta
    Pussycat, only swapping in "the big mama" for "meow"? What a missed
    opportunity. Also, the big mama.

    So, let's see. I do like the idea of a sort of multi-turn AISLE. But the
    thing about AISLE was that most of the endings were really well-written
    and interesting in and of themselves, not to mention diverse. The same
    cannot be said of THE BIG MAMA. There are a lot of games in the comp for
    which I scribbled down notes like "rocky prose" or "semi-literate," but
    this game proves that you can have an excellent command of the language
    and still provoke winces. (The big mama.) Let's see, there was the bit
    where a sign warns you about how the next 1.5 miles of beach are
    private: "'Stupid imperial measurement,' you mutter." Urgh. Why not just
    give the player-character a renaissance flute while you're at it? Oh,
    and the little boy. "Almost every day I billa cassel." Throw this kid
    into the nearest wood chipper, please. I mean it. Stop him before he
    soliloquizes again. Also, the big mama.

    Even the less egregious paths all seem to lead to inane conversations
    and fairly ham-handed passages desperately trying to hammer home the
    theme that the ocean is pretty. Sometimes the inane conversations result
    in relationships, but none of these sequences is really even remotely
    convincing -- I'm sure every day there are beach encounters that lead to
    hookups, but I doubt that any of them have resembled even one of the
    paths set forth in this game. Also, the big mama. There are also some
    quirks with the way the various characters are programmed: the surfer
    alternates between sunbathing and surfing about every eight seconds, and
    the teenage girl seems to have no memory whatsoever -- you can scare her
    off with some creepy line, watch her wander off, and two turns later
    she's back and seems to have no idea who you are. This is the sort of
    thing that makes characters look like chunks of code rather than
    representations of people. Also, the big mama.

    More bugs of note: jumping the rail takes you to the beach, but once you
    get there, the game tells you that "You're not up for that kind of
    leap." Sounds like some routine is neglecting to return true somewhere
    in there. Oh, and while the game notes that "everyone in town speaks
    Spanish," I have to wonder -- "las" is a plural article. The only way
    that works with "Lorena" is if "Lorena" is a last name and the name of
    the town is a reference to a all-female family: "The Lorena Sisters", or
    some such. Which I could buy as a novelty musical act from the early
    70s, but not as the name of a city. Also, the big mama.

    Perhaps my favorite bit:

       | 0: Say nothing.
       | 1: "Yeah, let's watch a movie."
       | 2: "A walk sounds great."
       | 3: "Let's play a game."
       | 4: "<illegal object number 357>"

    Me, I thought it was a bit early in the evening to propose illegal
    object number 357, but hey, turned out she was into it. Kinky!

    Score: a low THREE. Also, the big mama.

    From: Tina Sikorski <tina SP@G eniac.stanford.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #23 -- December 29, 2000

    Walkthrough? No
    Genre: CYOA/Mixed/Romance

             +------------------------------------------+
             |Overall Rating        C |Submitted Vote  6|
             |Writing               B |Plot           C-|
             |Puzzles              n/a|NPCs           C+|
             |Technical             C |Tilt           C |
             +------------------------+-----------------+

    *** Initial Thoughts

    As a few other people have mentioned, I would have expected the sea to
    play a larger part in this work, which is basically a choose-your-own-
    adventure with no particular focus on the sea. I called it a "romance"
    genre game in part because a LOT of the routes seem concerned with
    romance, but there are a few other routes that don't contain it.

    *** Writing (B)

    I can't help but take a moment to compare this to last year's entry by
    this author (Lomalow, which I, quite frankly, did not like). Although
    the styles are different, there's an element to both of them that is
    similar: the attempt to evoke some specific emotions. This year's entry
    does a much better job with the writing; it doesn't feel as forced, as
    heavy-handed. It's still got some flaws, but overall I feel much less
    preached at than I did last year and there were times when there were
    hints of excellence. I don't know if you can attribute this to the
    different format, practice, or even the different topic matter, but
    whichever it is, I'm actually quite glad to see something I like from
    Brendan.

    If I had any complaint it was that at times it was too long, a hazard, I
    think, of the CYOA format choice. I do enjoy longer text breaks than
    some people will accept gracefully, but there were a few times when too
    much happened on a trigger.

    What I enjoyed the most, I think, were occasional clever or cute turns
    of phrase, such as these portions of some room descriptions:

       "These little establishments sell everything from shrink-wrapped,
       dessicated muffins to decent hot dogs."

       "The breeze is straight out of some beach-blanket B-movie: salty,
       soft, and refreshing."

    But even the more serious writing is honest, and while there isn't a LOT
    of substance to this as a game, (see "plot", below), I enjoyed reading
    it.

    *** Plot (C-)

    As with many CYOA games, it's so hard to rate plot. First off, there are
    multiple "plots" here... although as I mentioned above, many of them
    seem to have the same basic tilt, which is: romance. But what I saw was
    a bit... thin. Not quite Calista Flockhart, but definitely thin.

    Still, they weren't bad little plots. Just not a lot of substance, much
    more the Twinkie of IF than the dinner at Ruth's Chris. [If you haven't
    ever encountered Ruth's Chris, they are the most incredible steakhouse
    ever.]

    *** Puzzles (n/a)

    Due to the CYOA format, I did not rate on puzzles, breaking my "formula"
    but, ultimately, I think, being more fair.

    *** NPCs (C+)

    This game is basically NPC driven, in that it's almost entirely
    conversationally driven. So you would hope that the NPCs would have some
    depth to them -- and, actually, they do in spots. But you don't really
    get a good glimpse about what they're -really- like, mostly because your
    interactions with them are so short. Whether this is a shortcoming of
    the format or whether they were simply undeveloped is hard to judge;
    they DO have personality, but it's pretty focused.

    *** Technical (C)

    There was certainly nothing in particular that was outstanding
    technically here, and only one bug of note, so I gave it an average
    rating.

    *** Tilt (C) and Final Thoughts

    I found 4 or 5 different endings before I stopped playing, so there may
    be more depths here I have not plumbed. Those of you with more patience
    than I (and a CYOA roto-rooter) may discover more.

    It was an amusing diversion.

    Inform .z5 file (competition version)

    The Big Scoop
    From: Joao Mendes <joao-mendes SP@G netcabo.pt>
    Review appeared in SPAG #39 -- January 7, 2005

    TITLE: The Big Scoop
    AUTHOR: Johan Berntsson
    EMAIL: johan SP@G microheaven.com
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/scoop/scoop.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Wake Up: Disoriented

    Well, actually, the wake-up part applies only to the prologue, as you
    switch protagonists when the actual game starts. Namely, you start out
    as a woman being framed for murder who must escape an embarrassing
    situation, then switch over to a journalist who sets out to help her
    prove her innocence. Pretty standard stuff. Even the story behind the
    murder itself is a bit on the plain vanilla side, and the game even
    comes with its own "too-stupid-to-shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later"
    garden variety villain. This is not saying that it is badly done, mind
    you. Even with such a bland theme, the author does a competent job of
    putting together a well-paced story, complete with an action sequence at
    the end. Throughout, the game feels like a 50-minute episode from some
    80's detective TV show.

    The level of writing is rather decent, although there is a distinctive
    feel that English is not the author's first language. No glaring errors
    or grammar inconsistencies that I could spot, which is nice, but the
    whole thing lacks in force in some way. I felt like I was watching the
    show, rather than being part of it.

    Technically, again, not a bad job at all. I didn't hit any snags, and I
    enjoyed the implementation of the NPCs in the story. They all played
    their standard parts in the plot, rather flatly if one thinks about it,
    but they behaved so much exactly like I expected them to that they
    actually felt alive. There were a couple of points where I hit my head
    against parser limitations, however. That feeling of knowing exactly
    what you want to do but not knowing how to phrase it so the game
    understands it can bit a bit annoying.

    As for the puzzles, they neither add to nor detract from the story.
    Again, much like an 80's TV show, the things the characters do are
    rather self-contained, dealing with one problem at a time, and relying
    on what I like to call "script-writer luck" to get through some
    situations. One particular puzzle has a solution that is just contrived
    enough to make sense on TV but nowhere else. I can't go into details
    without being spoilery, but if you play it, I'm sure you'll know what I
    mean. Also, I confess I had to go to the hints for quite a number of
    times, but given the nature of my relationship to puzzles in general,
    that is to be expected.

    Story: 3 (basic, but bonus points for good pacing and internal
    consistency)
    Writing: 1 (competent and solid, but lacking in force)
    Technical: 1 (well-rounded and solid, but penalty for making me struggle
    against the parser)
    Puzzles: 1 (pretty standard stuff throughout, though competently done)

    Final rating: 6

    Directory with .z5 zcode file, readme, and .rec walkthrough

    .z5 Zcode file, Swedish version

    Blink
    From: Carolyn Magruder <carolynmagruder SP@G yahoo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #39 -- January 7, 2005

    TITLE: Blink
    AUTHOR: Ian Waddell
    EMAIL: ian SP@G the-underdogs.org
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/blink/blink.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Score: 8 of 10.

    "Blink" is a powerful, compact little game. In some ways, due to its
    length, it's hard to review it at all without spoiling it; I have to be
    very careful about what I do and don't say. The best summary I can give
    is that it involves a situation in which a man confronts the demons of
    his past and his morality. If I said anything more, I would run out of
    game.

    The writing is excellent and the game is very well implemented. Objects
    all have appearances, and, though it's menu-based, people have
    meaningful conversations and react well to what goes on around them.
    There are a few tiny grammar/spelling issues that could have been
    clobbered, but nothing I'd complain about heavily.

    I only found a couple things that bothered me in terms of parsing,
    implementation, and the like. In one case, I couldn't talk to someone
    who was talking to me. The game overrode me and provided both "You can't
    think of anything to say" and a built-in answer. In another, I couldn't
    kiss my own wife! If she's the love of my life, shouldn't I get more
    than a "no thanks" when I try? (I couldn't hug my son, either, but that
    seemed a bit more reasonable, considering the main character.)

    I talked my husband into playing this game, and he encountered a parser
    oddity when he tried to sit down on a chair that didn't exist. As a
    result, he almost sat on something that he would NOT have wanted to sit
    on. Yuck!

    This game is 95% puzzleless, but there is one puzzle, which was about to
    frustrate me before I had a stroke of luck and got it through chance.
    More experienced IF players may not have the same problem.

    Other people may find this game preachy. I did not. Others may find it
    too short; I did not. For what it was, it was precisely the right
    length, and filling it out further would have detracted from it. The
    game did promise different paths in its "about", and I didn't find them
    despite playing through it four times. (I found different responses, but
    not different endings; the different responses did not seem to be
    sufficiently different from one another to justify a "different paths"
    alert to me.) That was disappointing.

    .z5 Zcode file (competition version)

    Bloodline
    From: Jarvist Frost <BOBFROST SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #15 -- October 11, 1998

    NAME: Bloodline, An Interactive Coming-of-age
    AUTHOR: Liza Daly
    E-MAIL: gecko SP@G retina.net
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Slightly below Inform Standard
    SUPPORTS: Z code 5 interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/mini-comps/games/bloodline.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Bloodline is a game based abound its NPC's. The entire game takes
    place in the basement of a friend's house. You (female) are playing a
    board game called bloodline which involves chasing after the fortune
    mentioned in a will, battling with all the other relatives. This
    appears to have been a way of fulfilling the criteria for the mini
    comp rather than a central game piece. You are playing against the Boy
    of Your Dreams (tm) and the ultimate decision is to either use your
    special card and win the game or let the boy beat you. Your decision,
    either way, ends the game.  There is no movement and interaction with
    the NPC's is kept to a bare minimum (you're too distracted by the
    boy's eyes to even think of talking to him). I thought that the TV was
    an excellent touch, the slasher movies caused me to come back to the
    game time after time.

    If a Crinkly were to review this then they would complain about the
    blunt humour, absence of puzzles, obsession with the boy etc. As a
    teenager I found this to be a fun short piece of IF. My only problems
    with this game was the way that I had to be female and a few weird
    parser problems cropped up. In particular I liked the introduction,
    this is the 'reading of the rules' (essential for all board
    games). After reading the premise.txt I was expecting a serious game
    and the introduction confused me for a moment until I realised it was
    a 'tongue in {his} cheek' game.  This game captures the style of
    teenage sleep overs, right down to the passing of notes.

    As an example of a parser problem I give you this:

    >examine randy's game piece
    I only understood you as far as wanting to examine Randy's game piece.

    Weird or what?

    There is no movement and no real manipulation of items. The game will
    automatically end in 25 moves if you can't reach a decision. The game
    would generally be solved in 20 moves or under. There are no real
    actions that you can do, you just have to admire the scenery until you
    have to make the Ultimate Decision on which your future teenage
    happiness is based. Apart from examining and reading objects, there is
    nothing much that you can do. The ending that would appear to bring
    the most satisfaction to the girl that you are playing seems to give a
    rather un-feminist view of live, you have to let the male win so that
    he likes you.

    All in all, this game was a fun five minute piece of vaguely
    interactive fiction.

    Inform file (.z5)

    Inform source code (.inf)

    Blow Job Drifter
    From: Joe DeRouen <jderouen SP@G sparkynet.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #15 -- October 11, 1998

    { Editor's note: The following review is of a game which will possibly
    be rather offensive to many people. As with all SPAG reviews, the views
    expressed in the review are those of the reviewer. }

    Name: Blow Job Drifter
    Author: Big Al
    Email: al_biggone SP@G hotmail.com
    Date: 1998
    Parser: Inform
    Availability: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/incoming/if-archive/bj.z5
    Version: Release 3.0

    Plot: Who needs plot?  (1.0)
    Atmosphere:  Cinemax soft porn  (1.0)
    Writing: Better than most in the genre  (1.2)
    Game play: Way too much "guess the verb"  (0.6)
    Characters: Typical Penthouse Forum fare  (1.0)
    Puzzles: A good mix  (1.2)
    Overall: Cheesy, but fun nevertheless  (1.1)

    Blow Job Drifter.  The name doesn't automatically conjure up great
    images of Interactive Fiction, does it?  This is definitely an "adult"
    text adventure, but just because it falls into that category doesn't
    necessarily make it a bad or sloppily done game.

    The object of the game, if you haven't already guessed, is to "score"
    orally (and we're not talking about giving speeches here, buddy) with
    as many different women as you can.

    The game starts out in your apartment.  You're naked and, for some
    reason that I've yet to fathom, you have absolutely nothing in your
    home to wear.  Your first mission, then, is to find some clothes.
    After you've managed that fairly simple task, the whole city (and
    beyond) awaits your lecherous advances. There are over a dozen
    different female targets in BJ Drifter.  Because the game is fairly
    linear, however, you'll have to go through most of them one by one.

    Despite way, way, way too many instances of "guess the verb", the game
    is a fun play.  BJ Drifter doesn't take itself too seriously and thus
    serves as a parody of sorts to the more "serious" adult IF out there.
    The writing is surprisingly well done, the puzzles clever if a bit
    off- the-wall (when you get to the fish stuck in the woman's mouth,
    you'll know what I mean,) and the sex scenes . . . well, those you'll
    have to judge for yourself.  But aside from being obviously misogynist
    (the game is from a male point of view, after all) they're pretty
    darned good.

    This is the first adult IF game I've played in years.  In fact, I
    think my last such game was something called "Farmer's Daughter",
    which I played on the Commodore 128 way back in the mid-eighties.  BJ
    Drifter is heads (and, dare I say it, tails) above that one, and
    manages to be fun and "adult" without being too offensive.  Of course,
    if you're easily offended, you're probably better off staying away
    from BJ Drifter.  For the rest of us, though, it's a great Sunday
    afternoon diversion that just may (bad pun alert!) keep you up all
    night.

    Inform file (.z5)

    Blue Chairs
    From: Mike Russo <mar2116 SP@G columbia.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #39 -- January 7, 2005

    [NOTE: The following review contains a bit of obscene language, quoted
    from the game. --Paul]

    TITLE: Blue Chairs
    AUTHOR: Chris Klimas
    EMAIL: klimas SP@G crunchable.net
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/bluechairs/bluechairs.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    This game shouldn't work. The literary allusions are forced and don't
    really cohere. The balance of realism and surrealism is cock-eyed, so
    that after the initial scene the player is swept away on an overlong
    wave of dream-logic that ultimately edges towards the monotonous. The
    puzzles are a mix of the reasonable, the evocative, and the peremptory.
    A central symbolic motif never quite swims into focus. It all wraps up
    with the hoariest cliché imaginable.

    Yet work it does, with more than enough panache to spare. Yes, all of
    the above problems are inarguably present -- the sequence in the
    maze-complex or whatever it is does drag on too long, there are some
    actions I'd never think to do if the walkthrough didn't tell me to, and
    the whole Dante-and-Beatrice angle made me roll my eyes. But man, it
    just doesn't matter. I'm willing to concede that a good part of my
    goodwill towards this game is a result of its peculiar aesthetic, and
    particularly the author's knack for description, which comes off like
    Clockwork Orange by way of Freaks and Geeks. Most of my notes for the
    game consist of memorable one-liners: the first NPC we meet is
    "simultaneously thinking of fucking some cheerleader's brains out and
    calculating how many XP a red dragon is worth," while "putting on a
    dungeonmaster grin". All of the dialogue at the party manages to be both
    clever and absolutely true-to-life, which is a neat trick indeed. The
    narration wonderfully conveys the PC's personality -- sardonic,
    detached, and yearning for meaning. Even when the prose doesn't need to
    do any heavy lifting, the author manages to toss off an offhand gem. I
    don't even remember the context for many of the lines littering my
    notes, but even on their own they're great: "A miracle of genetic
    instinct and secular humanism"; "a faint smell, the kind that ought to
    trigger an old memory but doesn't".

    The puzzles for the most part live up to the off-kilter yet sharp
    aesthetic of the prose. Nothing's more natural than the game's solution
    for how to dance better (or at least not notice that you're dancing
    poorly), and the sequence where you're forced to assign tag-lines to the
    major characters does a good job of forcing the player to recognize some
    of the thematic work that's going on beneath the surface. I do think
    they get noticeably weaker in the second half -- the entire sequence in
    the darkened passageways slows the game down, and the sharp NPC
    interaction which enlivened the party is conspicuously absent. Finding a
    hidden safe combination and navigating a maze that adds rooms as you go
    just didn't seem activities that inhabited the same universe as the rest
    of the game.

    The sequence in which the player trudges across the desert as George W.
    Bush, on the other hand, was brilliant. Possibly my personal beliefs
    brought more to this scene than the author intended, but floundering
    across the sand, attempting to justify a horrible mistake, definitely
    brought to mind the Iraq war, and made me feel the queasy sense of
    uncertainty that the PC suffered. I'm unsure how well this scene would
    work for anyone else, or indeed at any other point in time, but as far
    as I'm concerned it was the single most effective moment of the comp.

    Again, I don't mean to elide the game's real problems -- all of those
    above mentioned, and it must be conceded that the prose does lurch
    towards wordiness on occasion. But there's real ambition on display
    here, and the places where everything clicks, it works about as well as
    anything in IF can possibly work.

    Directory with .z5 Zcode file, PDF notes, and walkthrough

    Bmissfill
    From: Stas Starkov <stas_ SP@G mail.rb.ru>
    Review appeared in SPAG #30 -- September 20, 2002

    TITLE: Bmissfill
    AUTHOR: Tilli Productions, Santoonie Corporation
    EMAIL: None given
    DATE: 2002
    PARSER: TADS Standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/bmiss.gam
    VERSION: Release 1

    Warning: I consider this game extremely short, bad, and stupid. I'm
    writing this review only to warn you to avoid the game.

    Premise of the game: you must escape from a prison. The task must be
    accomplished by doing stupid actions, based on a guess-the-verb scheme.
    Further features are: deaths-without-warning, bad writing, and a lot of
    (intentional, I believe) typos. Example:

       Cell Block H
           The stoned stones of the cell walls are cold and damp, and the
       grey light coming in from the window is striated by the irony iron
       bars which prevent your escape.  A small cottish cot is along one
       wall, and the doorlike door to your south is closed.
           You see a prison window here.

       >x door
       You can't see any way of opning it.

       >x cot
       This is where you sleep.  It's has a worn mattress and a tattered
       blanket on.

       >take blanket
       Taken.

       >x it
       Its age really prevents you from feeling warm, but you put it on at
       night anyway.  Theirs something about having a blanket on when you
       sleep that makes you feel more secure.

       >x cot
       This is where you sleep.  It's has a worn mattress and a tattered
       blanket on.

    Despite the game's size (around 120 Kb), it consists of only five rooms
    (I think), which almost don't have any objects. The main obstacle that
    will stop you from winning in two minutes is the bad implementation of
    the game. And it's not funny!

    Verdict: trash.

    TADS .gam file

    The Boggit
    From: Christian Baker <lankro SP@G hotmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #21 -- June 15, 2000

    TITLE: The Boggit
    AUTHOR: Fergus McNeill and Judith Child (Delta 4)
    E-MAIL: ?
    DATE: 1986
    PARSER: Quill (a bit dodgy)
    SUPPORTS: Commodore 64, Spectrum, Amstrad CPC.
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://www.c64.com/search.php3?sok=boggit&kind=realname

    The Boggit is a parody of the original Melbourne House adventure "The
    Hobbit". It starts off in "your round tunnel like hall", although the
    only difference seems to be that there's a toilet at the end of it. Then
    things really start to change. Grandalf (or rather "Gandalf") crashes
    through your window to give you a card and some exploding chocolates,
    you find out the only reason the dwarves bring you with them is to be
    fed to Maug (Smaug), and that Thorny's (Thorin) father is in a mental
    home and thinks Grandalf is his son.

    The whole game is written in the past tense, and it's also written in a
    third person perspective. The games writers were about 17 when they
    wrote this. The room descriptions are fairly dull and below standard,
    but the rest of the writing is really funny, and will make you want to
    laugh out loud (Watch out for when Thorny or the dwarves start to sing.
    It's fantastic!). The game is littered with IF references (one of the
    puzzles involve the cleaning robots from Hitchhikers Guide), although
    some objects seem out of place (a credit card on a mountain?). The game
    has an 80's "home-made" style, which I say just adds to its charm.

    The characters are very basic, although they do say something funny if
    you're lucky, but nearly all the characters are just cardboard cut-outs
    put in there to fit in with the game's Tolkien roots. They may be very
    funny at times, but most of the time they don't want to talk at all. The
    best characters in the game have to be the three trolls: Andre, Bernard
    and Matthew (scary!). Bernard has the occasional slip of grammar (which
    Matthew promptly corrects), and Andre just grunts. Great fun.

    The parser is very simple, and if you say something like THROW ROPE at a
    time when that's not part of the puzzle, the game will give you the
    impression that you have a made an unfair suggestion. Some of the
    puzzles just require common sense (the exploding chocolate one, and the
    Gameshow one), some require knowledge of a subject (a big no-no for
    IF), and some are just plain weird. Overall, the game is simple, but
    highly entertaining. Oh, and just for you, here's the whole of the
    Dwarvish song:

       Being a merry sort of bunch, the dwarves began to sing:

       We're dwarves, we're dwarves, all doomed to die
       We'll probably finish in the dragon's pie
       So we'll take ol' Bimbo Faggins, a real cement head
       Hopefully ol' Daug will eat him instead.

       Sing: Hog the gold!
       Pass the buck!
       Split Bimbo's share between us!

       Across the Wiffy mountains, all through dark Berkwood
       We'll drag ol' lardball with us, he'll do as dragon food
       And afterwards we'll celebrate, in Thornys treasure hold.
       With ale and nosh and diamond rings and imitation gold

       Sing: Hog the gold!
       Pass the buck!
       Split Bimbo's share between us!

    Bolivia By Night
    From: Eric Woods <ewoods SP@G cocenter.org>
    Review appeared in SPAG #41 -- July 15, 2005

    TITLE: Bolivia By Night
    AUTHOR: Aidan Doyle
    EMAIL: aidandoyle SP@G rushpost.com
    DATE: March 9, 2005
    PARSER: TADS
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/springthing/2005/bbn.gam
    VERSION: One

    Bolivia By Night is a typical mystery-based interactive fiction game
    and, therefore, there's nothing particularly innovative about it. You
    play a journalist for an English-speaking newspaper, The Bolivian
    Herald. Initially you find yourself in an editorial meeting where you
    discover that David, the head reporter, has been missing for over a
    week. You also get the assignment of interviewing two Bolivians with
    interesting jobs, a cook with a nationally televised show and a Ninja
    master. The game doesn't allow the story to progress until these
    interviews are completed. The whole game moves along in a similar
    fashion, giving the player only one course of action at a time. Bit by
    bit you discover a murder or two, the supernatural background of the
    motives for these murders, and the only course of action to make
    everything in the world right. Like I said, it's pretty typical.

    The author obviously had a political and moral motive in creating this
    game. There are many interesting geographic, historical and cultural
    facts about Bolivia woven through the storyline as well as some cracks
    on Republicans. These cracks often are presented when you touch photos
    of Presidents after you have been given heightened senses. The political
    figures making cameos in this story are the Bush boys, Margaret
    Thatcher, and Reagan. I found it ironic that if you choose to be
    American at the start of the game you find a photograph of Lincoln in
    your desk drawer. This is apparently a sign of admiration for Lincoln. I
    wonder if the author knows that Lincoln was a Republican.

    The game play is very smooth in Bolivia By Night. The author recommends
    that players use a multi-media interpreter though I didn't. I didn't
    notice any difficulties with making progress without those features. The
    author also recommends that you keep the game in verbose mode which I
    generally don't like. There were two points where this would have been
    helpful since room descriptions sometimes change when you return to them
    and you won't get any of the changed description upon re-entering. This
    was easy enough to overcome with a simple look command, though.

    There were some nice features in this game which I haven't seen in
    others. The C command gets you a list of characters with whom you have
    already interacted or about whom you have learned something. The a T
    command gets you a list of topics on which you have discovered some
    information. These innovations made note-taking during playing
    unnecessary, which I found to be very helpful. There is also a
    well-implemented hint file contained within the game, though the game is
    simple enough that a gamer with experience probably won't need it.

    There is an Internet café which you can enter and check your email. You
    get some choices as to how you can respond to these emails and the story
    does a good job of implementing your choice in later scenes. For
    example, if you decide to order the Rodriguez Twins DVD Volume III you
    will find it in your apartment, all packaged up, later in the game. You
    can collect all three DVDs throughout the game if you care to.

    The puzzles range from very easy to easy. Even those that border on
    clever are given direction through unprompted statements by your
    sidekick. Your sidekick, by the way, is a talking T-shirt. Again, due to
    the linear nature of the game, I didn't find any problem with following
    the storyline or deciding what I had to do next. I don't generally mind
    being pushed through a story but a little less of this would have suited
    my tastes more.

    By the time you've discovered the nature of the mystery, gained some
    super natural powers and thwarted the bad guys and their evil plot to
    return Bolivia back to the days when it was ruled by drug lords you'll
    have a clear idea of the author's motive for producing the game. It's a
    good notion, of course, but perhaps a little predictable. Overall I
    found the game enjoyable though not very engaging or memorable.
    Certainly it is well written with no bugs, typos, or grammatical errors
    if you don't include the rare preposition at the end of a sentence.
    There are also some points where the humor made me crack a smile. While
    the map able area is relatively small it does a decent job of
    representing Bolivia though I assume I was supposed to feel more like
    the people were struggling than I did. Have a whack at it if you have a
    couple of hours to kill and you aren't overly sensitive about some mild
    Republican bashing humor.

    From: "Niz" <snowblood SP@G bigfoot.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #41 -- July 15, 2005

    Maybe its just me, as the IF community has not been showering it with
    glowing reviews, but Aidan Doyle's BOLIVIA BY NIGHT (2nd place in 2005's
    Spring Thing competition) should have all the ingredients required to
    sweep the XYZZY awards next year, especially if the author can release a
    post-competition bugfixed version soon. It probably won't, but hey,
    that's awards for you.

    Initial feelings that the author made the game just to say, "Hey look, I
    went to Bolivia on holiday and instead of boring you with my photo album
    I'm gonna bore you with an IF game I made about it" are thankfully
    quickly shaken off as you head off on various reporting tasks for the
    "Bolivian Herald", investigate a murder, and uncover a conspiracy. The
    scenery feels right throughout: locations are never a chore to plough
    through simply looking for nouns to "examine". The writing is plain,
    simple and funny -- the author is thankfully not a frustrated poet
    trying to wow you with his turn of phrase. It's refreshingly
    down-to-earth. The characters feel alive (especially the TV chef and
    your chauvinistic colleague). The puzzles are just simple enough not to
    get in the way of the story, and entertaining enough to complement it.
    The whole thing is reasonably long (several hours' worth for an average
    player, divided into convenient chapters to allow for short spells of
    gaming), and the story could easily have come straight out of Robert
    Anton Wilson's ILLUMINATUS! trilogy of novels (a good thing).

    Okay, the tone of the game is somewhat silly, but let us compare for a
    moment with THE CABAL, an XYZZY nominee for best story of 2004: sure,
    THE CABAL didn't have talking Che Guevara t-shirts, ninjas and the ghost
    of Klaus Barbie, but it comes from the same "school" of piling on the
    conspiracies and craziness until you give in and just go with the flow
    hippy-style... its a style you either "dig" or you don't, and if it was
    "dug" for THE CABAL, why not here?

    The locations are fantastic. You can really taste the dusty, dry
    atmosphere, the slow pace of life, the coffee and cocoa. Every South
    American cliche is thrown in, from drug lords to llamas to witch-doctors
    to ancient Incan secrets to Shakira. Best compliment: I'm seriously
    considering travelling there now.

    Puzzle-quality is very high, often providing unique spins on standard
    fetch-quest type puzzles, and incorporating what could have just been
    storyline-asides into the main fabric of the game. The range and style
    of these puzzles is very varied: one such fetch-quest is solved rather
    literally (and gruesomely); another (to derail the bad-guys' actions) is
    solved by making use of what could have been just a throwaway gag; yet
    another is solved via a callback to your early reporting missions. As for
    the climactic "boss battle", any puzzle that involves a sun bed, a racy
    DVD, and a portable camera could never be considered derivative.

    Yes there are some technical flaws, in particular an annoying bug with
    the framed photo in Richard's room, and some awkward syntax requirements
    at times, but these things can easily be fixed. The tricky bit is
    getting the story, setting and puzzles right, and there the author has
    definitely nailed it.

    I get the feeling the game might be lost in the shuffle before the
    awards season comes round, as it doesn't feature any amazing new
    technical innovations or break the narrative conventions of IF. It's
    just a very solid, very playable, very entertaining romp that does
    something few other games can achieve: it's fun.

    TADS .gam file

    Book and Volume
    From: Jose Manuel Garcia-Patos <josemanuelinform SP@G josemanual-gp.jazztel.es&
    gt;
    Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    TITLE: Book and Volume
    AUTHOR: Nick Montfort
    EMAIL: nickm SP@G nickm.com
    DATE: November 17, 2005
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/bookvol.z5

    VERSION: Release 7

    It is my great pleasure to write the review of the game that brings back to the
    genre one of the best authors and theorists in the IF community. Book and
    volume, Nick Montfort's latest work, possesses two fundamental virtues: it is
    extraordinarily entertaining and intellectually stimulating. It also has one
    problem: it hides these virtues with a lot of talent. The arbitrary deaths, the
    large number of ways of getting stuck in an unwinnable position, and the never
    too clear statement of the final objective of the game play against it. I think
    this can be attributed to the technique employed (maybe unconsciously) by the
    author in the design of the game, which could be summarized as: "Trust me. In
    the end everything will make perfect sense".

    And it's true, for the game leaves, like good wines do, a great taste and a
    strange melancholy. Not only because the ending opens the door to multiple
    interpretations and passionate reflections, but also because all the crazyness
    that wraps it up finally finds its sense -- even though it never ceases to be
    just that: crazyness.

    I must admit, however, that I miss more literature. Nick is a brilliant writer,
    but he seems not to want to demonstrate it here with better descriptions of
    places and stuff, or more possiblities of interaction with the NPCs. I think
    this was a lost opportunity, because the game is so entertaining that even the
    most "arcade inclined" among us would have been delighted to read a little more.
    This deficiency reveals itself more notably if we take a look at the list of
    games that he recommends for those new to IF, which includes some titles that
    even I consider boring and too literary, like Savoir faire, by Emily Short, or
    Varicella, by Adam Cadre (about which Nick even wrote a very good essay years
    ago). I am afraid that, due to this dryness of its style, some of the people
    who decide to try Book and Volume will lose many of the big and little ideas,
    suggestions and winks that fill almost every moment and place in it. This game
    contains much more than meets the eye, but that's exactly the problem: the
    player has to look for everything by himself without any indication from the
    author of what he might find if he does. (One example, the title: Probably most
    of you know where it's taken from, but do you know where does it appear in the
    game?) In a game like this the author should sting the player's curiosity, but
    here its own mechanics kind of forbid that, at least the first few times. It is
    my opinion that doing that (giving more room to the player for moving,
    exploring, interacting) everyone would enjoy it more and they all would be
    taking more out of it. What were Nick's reasons for not taking this approach?
    My bet is that he did it out of respect for the player. Respect to his freedom
    to interpret the game in any way he wants to or to not interpret it at all and
    just play and have fun with it.

    So, what's the game about? That's a good question. Thanks for asking. Our role
    is that of a sysadmin in the city of nTopia. The game begins with a call from
    our boss telling us that several of our servers are down. One of the reasons
    why we must leave our apartment in the wee hours of the morning to reboot some
    stupid servers is that in a couple of days will take place a mysterious demo
    which we seem to be the only ones in town who haven't heard about. From this
    moment on, things will be getting more and more bizarre, and more and more
    complicated, to the point that, almost certainly, we'll end, not just once or
    twice, but lots of times, in a snowy white hospital where our only
    entertainment will be to play cards with a tall, deaf and dumb indian.

    Talking about indians and hospitals, I'd like to mention a detail that I think
    is a bug in the game, and it is that after doing (or not) certain actions, we
    can be sent to this pillowed white room which you can only get out of to play
    cards with the indian. My question is: if you can't get out of the room
    (according to the author's own confession), why should you spend there such a
    long time trying to escape or whatever? I'm sure there is an explanation for
    this behaviour, as it just seems illogical, but I honestly didn't see it.

    Another detail, that others may consider a bug, although I don't think of it to
    be one at all, is the measure of time. Time is very important in this game. The
    player, as he dies and achieves tasks (in this order), will realize that he's
    got a lot of free time. One of the things he must do with it is wander around,
    examine every spot of the city. Almost every location in the game has something
    interesting to offer, although it's true that you must look a little harder
    than usual, and, more importantly, look at the right time of day. As in any
    other town, not all places are open 24/7 in nTopia.

    From:	Neil Butters <NEIL.BUTTERS SP@G SYMPATICO.CA>
    Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    Book and Volume is a sci-fi/fantasy/techno mind game that could have been much
    more interesting and satisfying. It may be entertaining for some but others may
    find it tedious. I, unfortunately, fall into the latter category as I found
    wandering around the city fixing computers less-than-compelling gameplay. The
    game is short and could probably be played in a couple of hours. It opens with
    you lying on your couch.  Your beeper sounds and you are then sent on a series
    of tasks by your boss that take you into the city. As you perform the tasks
    weird things happen and you come to question reality. I think there is only one
    conclusion although maybe had I tried a few more things after finishing the
    tasks there might have been more to the game.  The conclusion I reached was
    obtuse, it didn’t help me to understand the game at all. It should  however
    cause you to at least pause and think about the preceding events even if you
    may not come up with a satisfying explanation of the game.

    The game has stripped-down prose that only contains essentials. The interiors
    of buildings are in a few sentences at most. For example, your apartment
    consists of a couch and some clothes and no other rooms. The NPCs do not
    generally stick around to chat and those that do aren’t particularly helpful.
    This helps keep you focused on what needs to be done, and you don’t spend time
    needlessly performing useless actions.  This terse approach gave the game a
    cold, impersonal feel that may or may not be what the author was striving for.
    At times this approach was frustrating. The setting is a futuristic city with
    some really interesting places that I would have liked to learn more about. The
    airport for example is not what you would expect but when you try to examine
    objects you get two-word descriptions.

    The game’s puzzles consist mainly of wandering around the city doing tasks to
    get a job done. The tasks are not particularly difficult. There are no hints or
    walkthroughs but there is a map available at
    http://www.xs4all.nl/~rlbos/bookvol%20feelie%20map.pdf.  On the plus side the
    growing realization that something odd is definitely going on is well
    done. The conclusion fits nicely with the game’s feel even though it is
    difficult to interpret and I don’t think anyone will see it coming. It may have
    some meaning that was lost on me. The game is technically sound and I did not
    find any bugs. I had no problems doing what I wanted to do and tasks that
    should not be difficult, ie working with your laptop, are made simple.

    I don’t think this game will appeal to everyone. If you don’t know your server
    from your waiter you may find the game uninteresting and a bit tedious. But if
    you are a techno/ sci-fi enthusiast you may appreciate some of the goings-on
    and the general feel of the game.

    Zcode executable (.z5)

    Break-In
    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #21 -- June 15, 2000

    TITLE: Break-In
    AUTHOR: Jon Ingold
    E-MAIL: ji207 SP@G cam.ac.uk
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/break-in.z5
    VERSION: Release 7

    The line between entertainingly silly and annoyingly silly is a fine
    one, and Jon Ingold's Break-In doesn't always stay on the right side of
    it: the game strives so relentlessly to be goofy that the whimsy feels a
    bit forced, and some serious game design flaws don't help. Still, there
    are some funny moments and a few genuinely clever puzzles amid all the
    weirdness.

    It's not unknown for IF to pull a sort of bait-and-switch with its
    genre--i.e., giving the player an initial premise that fits into one
    genre, which suddenly gives way to an unexpected development that throws
    the story into a different genre entirely. Trinity did it, to some
    extent (well, tourism isn't really a genre, but stumbling into a surreal
    fantasyesque dimension was a shift), and Once and Future did something
    similar (with somewhat peculiar results due to the divergence between
    the feelies--which studiously avoided any implication that the game
    wasn't all about war--and the manual, which referred, among other
    things, to a sword suitable for summoning spirits). Break-In takes those
    precedents and runs with them: there are several genres all going on at
    once, with no Big Transitional Event to indicate that the initial
    premise has yielded to something else. (The end of the game returns to
    the original plotline, with no acknowledgment of the wacky stuff that's
    gone on.) As in, the game conflates your ostensible mission--as a
    freelance burglary artist, to break into a home and retrieve some
    plans--with silly surreal stuff--chicken-dragons and such--and also with
    conventional fantasy, casually mixing all three together. There are some
    explanations provided, but they're not particularly convincing, and
    they're largely provided after the fact--i.e., there are no warnings
    that the game is about to take a sharp turn. There's nothing inherently
    wrong with all this, I suppose, but it does sort of destroy the
    immersive aspect of the story--the player constantly saying "okay,
    what's going on NOW?" generally is not particularly immersed. Similarly,
    while pieces of the setting are well rendered, it's so
    incoherent--things are juxtaposed that can't really be logically
    juxtaposed--that the player tends to give up trying to picture the
    scene.

    The fluidity of the genre boundaries isn't the main problem here,
    though--it's the game design. It's not all that difficult to render the
    game unfinishable in unexpected ways--e.g., by failing to properly
    manage inventory before a change of scene, or by failing to pick up a
    hidden object before leaving an area that, it turns out, you won't be
    able to revisit. There's lots more of that than there needs to be, and
    it makes it difficult to enjoy the silliness of the game--inventory
    management is about a prosaic a task as IF offers. The hint system,
    which is helpful in some areas but completely neglects others, doesn't
    help much. Worse, there are quite a few bugs-- some fatal, others merely
    irritating. Break-In is not especially polished--there are writing
    errors here and there along with the bugs--and the rough-edges feel
    often distracts from the game. There are some clever puzzles--oddly,
    the one nominated for an XYZZY is far from the game's best; there are
    others that are much more creative--but some rely on rather large
    logical leaps, and one in particular is hampered by a lack of
    alternative solutions.

    It's a shame because, taken the right way, the game is actually very
    funny--the implicit premise is that spies after the end of the Cold War
    are reduced to concocting ridiculous projects to keep themselves busy,
    and the notion of espionage artists dealing with things like giant
    chickens is, at bottom, pretty amusing. The game may not be particularly
    immersive, but it's got a fair measure of wit, as in the following:

       By the doormat lies a brown-paper parcel, tied up with a length of
       string. It's probably just one of the Prof's favourite things.

    Or this:

       >get shoot
       The shoot is attached to some kind of model or pendant, which appears
       to be of an orange alien in a green dress dancing wildly. What a
       weird thing to have buried in your garden! It has several 'arms' of
       different lengths all pointing upwards, and each with the same cone
       shape as the main 'body'. There's nothing in the way of a head, the
       cone just rounds to a blunt point. Maybe something fell off in the
       hole.

       >examine alien
       No, on second thoughts, its actually just a knobbly carrot. You were
       holding it upside down.

    Here, the burglar/spy persona of the PC comes across well--you ascribe
    suspicious or fantastic properties to everything--and it would benefit
    the game if that persona were more often in evidence. After all, the
    beginning of the story sees the PC pondering the course of his career in
    rather weighty terms--"Still, its not petty thieving. It's for national
    security, which is different"--and it seems like there's plenty of humor
    to be mined from the PC's reaction to all the silliness. E.g. (not from
    the game--just my suggestion): "You reflect sourly that none of your
    training at M5 prepared you for giant chickens. An oversight, clearly."
    As it is, if you don't find the chickens funny, you won't find the game
    funny (and those chickens do get tiresome pretty quickly).

    Break-In is a game with considerable potential but not entirely
    successful implementation, in other words. Had the author chosen to make
    more of the story and PC, and less of the goofiness, the result might
    have been both funny and intriguing; as it is, there are some nicely
    done bits (intelligent puzzles, well-described settings) and a lot of
    mistakes. Try it only if you're in a very peculiar mood.

    Inform .z5 file

    Border Zone
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com&rt;
    Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995

      NAME:  Border Zone                GAMEPLAY:  Infocom Standard
      AUTHOR:  Marc Blank               PLOT:  Well Interwoven
      EMAIL:  ?                         ATMOSPHERE:  Good
      AVAILABILITY:  LTOI 2             WRITING:  Serious but Light
      PUZZLES:  Very Good               SUPPORTS:  Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS:  Good                 DIFFICULTY:  Slightly above average

            Border Zone is another compartmentalized game, in the spirit of
    Nord & Bert and Shogun.  Unlike Shogun, the chapters don't have to be played in
    order, and unlike Nord & Bert there is no single concluding chapter that you
    must earn the right to play.
            Border Zone involves the attempt to prevent an important assasination
    in and around the country of Frobnia.  In Chapter 1, you play an ordinary
    businessman, who has been given a document with the details of the
    assasination, attempting to sneak it out of the country.   In Chapter 2, you
    play the wounded agent who gave the businessman the document, attempting to
    escape from Frobnia himself.  In Chapter 3 you play an American double-agent
    attempting to prevent the assasination without blowing his cover.
            All three chapters are played in real time.  If you ponder your
    moves too long, the story may go on without you.  This is both good and bad.
    The puzzles are generally the save/restore type; although they are generally
    logical and good, they are not the type that you are likely to hit on the
    first time.  You have to learn from several failures before you hit on the
    correct strategy.  This is fine for puzzle fans, but not so good for realism
    fans (you can't RESTORE in real life).  However, the whole idea of doing the
    game in real time seems to be geared towards pleasing the realism fans,
    though this may not have been the best game to do it.
            The second chapter is the largest and seems to be the centerpiece of
    the game, but I liked Chapters 1 and 3 better.  Chapter 1 is small and easily
    mapped, but rich in detail, and quickly concluded, making it an excellent
    introduction to interactive fiction.  Chapter 3 has some clever puzzles
    (especially how you figure out which room the sniper is in), and like
    Plundered Hearts, it has several different relatively successful endings, but
    one which is clearly better than the others.  Blank does a good job of tying
    in events from previous chapters, creating an interlocking "big-picture".

            The game is fairly light on gadgetry; featuring only an exploding pen
    in Chapter 2.  I'd have liked a shoe phone and the Cone of Silence myself.
    Still, this is Infocom's only spy story, and is quite a good game.

    Solution (Text)

    Bugged
    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #26 -- September 26, 2001

    TITLE: Bugged
    AUTHOR: Anssi Raisanen
    E-MAIL: anssi.raisanen SP@G cop.fi
    DATE: 2001
    PARSER: Alan (full-sentence)
    SUPPORTS: Alan runtimes
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/alan/bugged.zip
    VERSION: Release 1.0

    Anyone who's ever tried to slog through a vintage AGT game will get a
    chuckle or two out of Bugged, where the bugs are deliberate -- you're
    beta-testing a game for a cousin, see, and the cousin needs a lot of
    programming help, and the only way to plow through the game is through
    exploiting bugs (because the solutions your cousin has attempted to
    implement don't work, due to other bugs). It's no more than a chuckle,
    but chuckles are important in the IF world too.

    The bugs themselves are standard-issue: takeable objects that aren't,
    untakeable objects that are, mostly, along with a dash of verbs
    defaulting to the wrong noun. Getting into the spirit of things takes a
    while -- unless you're a long-standing beta-tester, you're unlikely to
    think of getting rid of an obstacle by simply taking it, say -- and
    things get difficult toward the end, when you're carrying around all
    kinds of immobile objects and it's not clear which one of them is
    useful. (The last puzzle, in fact, turns on a bizarre syntax trick that
    fits nicely into a buggy game but doesn't exactly spring to mind
    otherwise.) In other words, the bugs accumulate over the course of the
    game, after a fashion, and the potential for ridiculous interactions
    among various unlikely objects becomes considerable. Some of the bugs
    strain credulity a bit -- it's not clear what sort of coding error would
    make an object both out of reach and takeable. Likewise, it sometimes
    seems like every single object that should be takeable isn't and every
    one that shouldn't be is, suggesting that the "cousin" simply doesn't
    understand the word "static" (or an Alan equivalent) -- but on the whole
    it's a plausible buggy game.

    The joke, I suppose, is that the buggy game is more interesting than the
    non-buggy one would have been; the puzzles that you would have solved
    are bog-standard, whereas the buggy version at least requires some
    thinking outside the box. True enough, though it's hard to picture
    anyone writing a game that's quite as boring as the one your cousin
    supposedly tried to write, and in that light it's not hard to come up
    with something more interesting. For my part, I found Bugged
    entertaining simply because it's loopy in the usual way of a buggy game;
    something about picking up apparently huge objects with no comment on
    your feat of strength is inherently amusing, though the humor would
    probably pall in a game of any length. As it is, Bugged is quite short,
    short enough that most players are unlikely to tire of the idea before
    reaching the end.

    The main problem with Bugged is the lack of a hint system (and in this
    case a hint system is even more preferable to a walkthrough than usual,
    because the puzzles are well suited for nudges but the solutions are
    usually one-move) -- it's frustrating enough to struggle with a game
    that's trying to be helpful, but when things are intentionally broken
    it's even worse, as there are (naturally) no clues that you're on the
    right track. In fact, since some bugs amount to red herrings, it's
    possible to get suckered into trying to exploit the wrong bugs
    altogether. I ended up poring over the data file to solve a few of the
    puzzles, which is appropriate, in a way -- cheat to finish a game whose
    premise is cheating to finish a game -- but not especially satisfying.

    Bugged is a twenty-minute diversion at most -- if it takes you longer,
    resort to the data file -- but it's amusing enough, and perhaps it's a
    fitting tribute to/preparation for the upcoming competition. (Shame on
    this cynical reviewer.) IF veterans should get a kick out of it.

    ALAN game files

    Building
    From: Daphne Brinkerhoff <cendare SP@G hotmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    TITLE: Building
    AUTHOR: Mike Tulloch
    EMAIL: poster SP@G aurora.cotse.net
    DATE: July 2005 (original release)
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: freeware; IF Archive and author's website
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/building.z5

    VERSION: Release 15

    BUILDING: RED HERRINGS, PURPLE PROSE, AND A CORRIDOR OF BLUE LIGHT

    (Disclaimer: I played an older version of Building than what is currently
    available.  So I have not mentioned bugs or typos in this review, assuming that
    they're probably fixed.  But if I've criticized something else that's changed
    in the newer version, please let me know.)

    My friend oh-so-casually remarked, "You know that new game Building?  I hear no
    one has beaten it yet."  "I know a dare when I hear one," I said.  I played it
    anyway.  My goal was to win without hints.  I didn't quite achieve that, but I
    still feel a sense of satisfaction.  Building is a toughish game.  It's not
    Curses-level long, or Curses-level tough, but it's no CYOA IFComp entry.  If
    you're going to play, be prepared to spend a week or two with it.

    The game begins with some nightmarish visions, after which you wake up with
    amnesia, standing in front of a building.  I don't think it's giving too much
    away to say that it's an office building.  Building is about how office work
    turns people into soulless drones.  Yes, we've had Little Blue Men on that
    subject, but in LBM your character was angry and still fighting the inevitable.
    Here there is just a sense of hopelessness.

    The story in Building is minimal.  You're supposed to be figuring out who you
    are, but really from the beginning you know everything important about yourself
    except your name.  It's an office building, you worked here, and it sucked (one
    "remember" will tell you all that).  Gradually you do discover hints that your
    bosses might have been doing something odd, above and beyond the usual
    corporate evils.

    Generally, though, this game is more about atmosphere than story.  Dark, dusty,
    uninhabited (mostly), a little off-kilter, with remnants of technology lying
    around, seemingly abandoned mid-use...  If I may get all English-majory for a
    moment, this just reinforces the artificiality and transience of the office
    life that came before.  At least that's how it made *me* feel, especially given
    the contrast between your memories and the present disrepair.  Another plus:
    the author paid a lot of attention to implementing as many of the five senses
    as possible.  I particularly noticed sounds in various locations (the cicadas,
    the generator, ghostly voices), but there are smells and textures mentioned too.
    This worked for me.

    A few people have commented on the purple prose in the game.  It's a fine line
    between lush writing and overwriting, and I think this game has examples of
    both.   Sometimes the author relies a little heavily on adjectives (emphasis
    mine):

    Second-floor Stairwell
    FLUORESCENT lights mounted at ODD angles send down DYING, ARTIFICIAL light that
    provides a HARSH, CLINICAL hue for the DINGY carpet and YELLOWED walls. A set
    of stairs descends into shadows nearby, and OPEN hallways lead east and west.

    Out of 39 words in this room description, 9 of them are adjectives.  This felt
    overdone.  In contrast, strong verbs make this room description work better
    (again, emphasis mine):

    Authorized Room
    The remnants of a COMPUTER CONTROL room, this room now provides a case study in
    destruction. SEVEN-FOOT HIGH cabinets lie face down, their GLASS windows
    shattered in BRILLIANT LIGHT-REFRACTING sprays of BROKEN glass; cables of every
    shape and hue lie severed from the wall as though victims of a BIZARRE type of
    autopsy. Computers lie caked in dust with their innards utterly removed and
    scattered in pieces across the floor.  Dust covers even these, as though these
    acts occurred several generations ago.

    Here there are 9 adjectives again, out of 82 words, a much more reasonable
    proportion (IMHO).  And verbs like "shattered", "severed", and "caked"
    strengthen the description.

    Although the main strength of the game is its atmosphere, it's not a story-
    based game, but instead is packed with puzzles.  The structure is extremely
    loose.  There's one opening puzzle (get into the building), and then the game
    opens up with multiple puzzles that can be completed in any order.  It's almost
    like a treasure hunt -- once you've remembered enough, you can go on to the
    endgame.

    For the most part, the puzzles are difficult but fair, requiring intuitive
    leaps that are more-or-less well-clued (getting into the corridor of blue light,
    finding the Ruined Lobby, even getting a light source).  But occasionally
    almost-right actions don't give any hint of the proper solution (I'm thinking
    here of getting the ring).

    There's also a plethora of red herrings.  I spent quite some time trying to get
    into inaccessible places, interact with scenery, and look under immobile
    objects.  I rather like red herrings -- they give a sense of a world that's not
    just created for these specific puzzles.  However, in Building it's a little
    frustrating, since the game doesn't really give you a sense of what you need to
    be working on next at any particular time.  So my advice to players is, don't
    assume you have to open a locked door just because it's there, or make use of
    some unusual room feature because no one would ever put a salsa-dancing Venus
    flytrap into their game if it weren't part of a puzzle.

    I found the inventory limit imposed by the game to be extremely irritating.
    There doesn't seem to be any reason for realism in a game with such a surreal
    setting.  And I didn't find any puzzles related to the inventory limit (e.g.,
    the kind of thing where you can only take five things with you to the next
    stage of the game, choose carefully).  I ended up just dumping objects in a
    centrally located room and coming back later.  I also found that sometimes the
    game would let me drop an object I was carrying but not pick it back up again
    on the next turn -- granted, a bug, but one that wouldn't happen without the
    inventory limit.  I'd definitely consider getting rid of the limit in a future
    release.

    The limit makes things especially hard because of one recurring puzzle of sorts.
    I'm trying to avoid spoilers here, so I'll just say that several objects in the
    game are keyed to particular rooms.  But it's almost always an arbitrary
    connection, so there's no way to know which room unless you bring the object
    there.  As an imaginary example, you might think that a dictionary would be
    connected to a library, but in this game it's likely that the dictionary would
    instead be connected to the bathroom.  This really makes the inventory limit
    feel constricting.  You have to make sure you've carried every object into
    every room, but you keep having to leave objects behind and pick others up, and
    unless you've got a better memory than I do, it's just about impossible.

    As you travel through the building and its environs, you gain memories of
    yourself a la Babel.  However, unlike in Babel, there's no way to replay a
    memory.  Once it's gone, it's gone, and you'd better have gleaned everything
    the first time.  You can get the game to list memories with short descriptions
    (an imaginary example: "Grocery shopping with Nyarlahotep").  I would have
    liked it if typing "REMEMBER X" with some of the key words in those
    descriptions (in this example, "REMEMBER GROCERY" or "REMEMBER NYARLAHOTEP")
    would work.  That seems easier for the player than having to go back to the
    location of the original memory.  But any mechanism for remembering would have
    been useful.

    So, do I recommend this game?  My main experience in playing it wasn't
    enjoyment but frustration, as anyone listening could attest.  "What do you mean
    I can't?...  Oh, great, now what?... Somehow solving this didn't get me as far
    as I'd hoped."  But that does go to show that I was engaged in the game.  I
    wasn't bored.  And it's also typical of puzzle-based games.  Basically I don't
    regret having put in the time to play it, and I'll definitely download the
    author's next game.

    Zcode executable (.z5)

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

      NAME:  Bureaucracy                 GAMEPLAY:  Infocom Standard
      AUTHOR:  Douglas Adams             PLOT:  Great
      EMAIL:  ?                          ATMOSPHERE:  Excellent
      AVAILABILITY:  LTOI 2              WRITING:  Excellent
      PUZZLES:  Difficult                SUPPORTS:  Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS:  Archetypal            DIFFICULTY:  Expert

         In Bureaucracy, you have just moved to a new town and must get your
    bank to acknowledge your change of address form before embarking on
    your all-expense paid trip to Paris, as well as untangle several other
    Bureaucratic mishaps from missed connections to surly waitresses.
         The game is divided into four parts.  In the first, you must cash
    your check to get money for the cab ride to the airport.  In the
    second, you must get through the airport to reach your flight.  In the
    third, you must escape from the wrong airliner you have found yourself
    on before it crashes (or does it?).  In the final part, you must take
    care of the computer hacker who is responsible for most of your
    problems.
         This game has become the standard by which almost all tongue-in-cheek
    games about real life are measured, and has been imitated many times, but
    seldom equalled.  The atmosphere is not surprisingly, very much like
    The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but is in many ways funnier since it hits
    areas that the gamer will have experienced firsthand.
         By the time this game came out Infocom had abandoned their difficulty
    rating system, but this game is as difficult as any other Infocom game with
    the exception of Spellbreaker.  Many of the puzzles are intuitive rather than
    logical and force you to recreate Douglas Adams' twisted thinking to make
    sense of them (for example, the way you get your check cashed at the bank).
    Others are logical, but require you to grasp complicated patterns to solve
    them (i.e., the way you dispose of your Zalagasan Stew on the airliner).
         There are many well-developed characters that represent a cross-section
    of the most annoying people in daily life from the llama treat delivery man
    (who comes up with the brilliant idea that you should get your expired credit
    card replaced) to the surly waitress, to the survivalist, to Random Q. Hacker
    himself.
         One problem with the game is getting to the end of it.  The story
    is so rich in detail that many will not want to remain stuck indefinitely on
    one of the puzzles.  Unfortunately no editions of Bureaucracy contain
    onscreen hints, and it was included in Lost Treasures 2, which had no hint
    books enclosed.  If you get stuck, your best bet is to download a walkthrough
    from the archive or the Compuserve Gamer's Forum, or to call Activion's 900 hint
    number.  [I suggest ftp.ifarchive.org:/if-archive/solutions/infocom/ for you ftp
    capable readers. -GKW]
         The freebies are some of Infocom's best.  One is a copy of Popular
    Paranoia magazine, which gives you the low down on the conspiracies
    that threaten to destroy your life.  Another is the infamous carbonless
    triplicate form.  Most people sign these daily, taking it for granted
    that the lower copies are identical to the top one.  Activision did
    this itself, and only reproduced the top copy for their Lost Treasures
    documentation.  But if you look more carefully, you may find that the
    line for your zip code on page 1 may ask for your wife's weight, or the
    number of pancakes that you have eaten today on succeeding copies.
         Too bad Adams never made this into a book...

    Solution (Text)

    Busted!
    From: Murderous <patch SP@G evilemail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #25 -- June 20, 2001

    NAME: Busted!
    AUTHOR: Jon Drukman (also did port)
    EMAIL: jsd SP@G cyborganic.com
    DATE: July 1993 ADVSYS; 2001 Inform port
    PARSER: Infocom Standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters; unreviewed ADVSYS version
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/busted.zip
         ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/advsys/busted.dat

    This is a port of an older Advsys title in order for the author to learn
    Inform and two things are clear: the game is firmly-rooted in the "old
    school" of adventuring; and that the author is not yet a master of
    Inform.

    You start as a University student with an urgent story-hook: an
    answerphone message from a friend who has just been ... busted! He has
    given you enough warning that you can hide all your 'stuff' before the
    cops catch up with you.

    You're provided with plenty of locations, but you visit rather than
    explore; there's plenty of objects, but their placement is so obvious
    it's fake. 'Random' events (turn-timed or location dependent) range from
    the disjointed to the outright daft. Nothing subtle here.

    The introduction was quite effective in bringing the immediacy of the
    situation to play, but it's abandoned for 'eat in X turns or die'.
    Thereafter the urgency proved too difficult to resurrect, so it was
    replaced by a 'get some sleep or die'. Eh? What happened to the urgent
    starting hook?

    Tech warning - there are a number of bugs, object conflicts, and the
    parser is 'functional' at best; but while they can be annoying they
    don't entirely destroy the game, just keep it simple. It's a plain urban
    school adventure, on mild drugs.

    The trump-card of this title is the humour, and if you hate/hated parts
    of your academic life then you'll find the game all the more funny: the
    truly appalling food, the space-case friends, evangelical Christians --
    BUSTED certainly has its moments. There are funny remarks and cute ideas
    that break up the otherwise sparse text. It's free. And you start with a
    joint in your inventory, which is an immediate saving grace, so the game
    isn't entirely without merit. But with all the brilliant IF in the world
    it's hard to be enthusastic about it either.

    PLOT: Strays (0.7) ATMOSPHERE: Suitably rendered (1.3)
    WRITING: Functional, with humour (1.0) GAMEPLAY: Flat or dips (0.7)
    SOME HUMOUR AND FUN: Can't deny it (1.3)
    TOTAL: 5.0

    CHARACTERS: Colourful cardboard (1.1) PUZZLES: Arbitary obituary (0.7)
    DIFFICULTY: Not a brain taxer, but parser and bugs don't help.

    SUMMARY: Check it out if you're interested in some retro adventuring
    with a drug twist, but it's probably better st0ned.

    AdvSys file

    Inform .z5 file and associated files

    Hint file (text -- answers in ROT-13)

    Stepwise solution (text)

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