#
ISSUE #20 - March 15, 2000

          ___.               .___              _             ___.
         /  _|               |   \            / \           / ._|
         \  \                | o_/           |   |          | |_.
         .\  \               | |             | o |          | | |
    The  |___/ociety for the |_|romotion of  |_|_|dventure  \___|ames.

                             ISSUE # 20

               Edited by Paul O'Brian (obrian SP@G colorado.edu)
                           March 15, 2000

               SPAG Website: http://www.sparkynet.com/spag

    SPAG #20 is copyright (c) 2000 by Paul O'Brian.
    Authors of reviews retain the rights to their contributions.

    All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine
    with the traditional 'at' sign.

    REVIEWS IN THIS ISSUE -----------------------------------------------------

    Christminster
    Common Ground
    Deadline
    Enemies
    I-0: Jailbait on the Interstate
    Inheritance
    Inhumane
    Intruder
    Lost New York
    9:05
    Not Just A Game
    Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina
    Perilous Magic
    Shrapnel
    A Simple Theft
    Skyranch

    SPECIFICS
    =========
    Bliss
    9:05

    EDITORIAL------------------------------------------------------------------

    When I was asked to assume editorship of SPAG, one of the first things I
    did was to read every back issue. Out of those thousands of lines of
    text, one item in particular struck me, and has lingered in my memory
    ever since. It was a letter, written way back in 1995 by Gareth Rees
    (the author of Christminster, reviewed in this issue.) In this letter,
    Rees argued that most IF criticism, such as the reviews printed here, is
    great for players, but isn't as useful for authors. This imbalance,
    according to him, is due to the nature of IF itself, namely the
    imperative to avoid spoilers. He suggests that when we avoid spoilers,
    we are forced into talking about IF games in broad, general terms, terms
    that of necessity exclude some important and fruitful topics. In his own
    words: "Because adventure games are puzzle-oriented and because the
    kinds of people who play the games tend not to want the puzzles spoiled
    for them, extant reviews... have tended to be very coy about saying
    *anything* specific about the games under consideration." [To see the
    entire text of this letter, check out SPAG #6 in the "Back Issues"
    section of the SPAG website.]

    Rees' letter brought into sharp focus a concern that has vaguely worried
    me ever since I began to write reviews. Sometimes, when reviewing a
    piece of IF, I'll find myself wanting to talk about the ending of the
    game, or about what worked and what didn't for a particular puzzle, or
    about certain character reactions and what I thought of them. But as
    soon as I recognize the impulse, I'll stop short, and start looking for
    ways to skirt the issue. Why? Because I couldn't discuss any of those
    things in specific terms while still keeping the review spoiler-free. I
    could still discuss enough aspects of any game that a prospective player
    could determine whether or not it was her cup of tea, but how useful
    might it have been to the author, or to other authors, had I been able
    to dissect in detail some of the specific aspects of the game? The more
    I thought about Rees' letter, the more I agreed with him that the lack
    of in-depth analysis in IF criticism is "an unsatisfactory state of
    affairs."

    In that spirit, I'd like to inaugurate a new section of SPAG: SPAG
    Specifics. Unlike the reviews in the main section of SPAG, Specifics
    reviews can and should contain spoilers. In fact, this kind of in-depth
    review isn't new to SPAG -- after the first IF competition, then-editor
    Kevin Wilson provided breakdowns of several games, spoiler-laden reviews
    which wouldn't have been out of place in SPAG Specifics. I'd like for
    the reviews in this new section to help further the state of IF
    criticism by allowing critics to discuss IF games in unambiguous,
    explicit terms. The section is making its debut in this issue with two
    reviews by Duncan Stevens, one for the Comp99 game Bliss and another for
    Adam Cadre's recent short piece, 9:05. Neither of these reviews could
    discuss what they do if they were bound by the typical SPAG "no-spoiler"
    policy, and I think they both contribute useful insights to the ongoing
    study of IF. I'm pleased and proud that SPAG can provide a home for
    them.

    Let me be clear about my intent: SPAG's primary purpose has been and
    will continue to be to provide spoiler-free reviews that help players
    decide which pieces of IF might interest them. I recognize that it takes
    some discipline to write reviews sans spoilers, and that the temptation
    exists to include spoilers, even if one's use of them doesn't
    particularly serve any kind of incisive analysis. For this reason, I'm
    only going to accept two or three reviews per issue for the SPAG
    Specifics section, and those reviews will be required to provide
    in-depth analysis to justify their usage of spoilers. Note also that
    even though the reviews in this issue's Specifics section discuss games
    whose most important element is one of surprise, any and all pieces of
    IF are eligible for a Specifics review. SPAG Specifics will be included
    at the end of each issue (after the Readers' Scoreboard) and festooned
    with spoiler warnings. I hope that both authors and players will find it
    useful, and that it will help us, in the words of Gareth Rees, to "get
    beyond the generalities and into specifics."

    NEWS ----------------------------------------------------------------------

    AND THE XYZZY GOES TO...
    Saturday, February 12, saw the 4th annual XYZZY Awards held in the
    beautiful Auditorium of Tomorrow on ifMUD
    (http://ifmud.port4000.com:4001). The XYZZY Awards are sponsored by our
    fellow IF zine XYZZYNews, edited by the able Eileen Mullin. Though it's
    been a long time since the last issue of XYZZYNews (there's a "Come On
    Eileen" joke in there somewhere, but I'm not going to look for it), the
    zine has faithfully hosted the awards ceremony every year, and it's been
    a great showcase for spotlighting the best games from each calendar
    year, both in and out of the competition. For 1999, the victor in the
    Best Game category was Adam Cadre's Varicella. In fact, the observant
    among you may have noticed that Adam Cadre and Andrew Plotkin have a bit
    of a ping-pong match going in the XYZZYs, with Cadre winning best game
    in 1999 and 1997 (for Varicella and I-0, the latter of which is reviewed
    in this issue), while Plotkin won in 1998 and 1996 (for Spider and Web
    and So Far, respectively.) Vegas oddsmakers are looking to Plotkin for
    the 2000 XYZZYs, but of course, he has to release a game first. Full
    results of the 1999 XYZZY Awards follow:
       * Best Game: Varicella, by Adam Cadre
       * Best Writing: For A Change, by Dan Schmidt
       * Best Story: Worlds Apart, by Suzanne Britton
       * Best Setting: Hunter, in Darkness, by Andrew Plotkin
       * Best Puzzles: The Mulldoon Legacy, by Jon Ingold
       * Best NPCs: Varicella, by Adam Cadre
       * Best Individual Puzzle: The Maze, from Hunter, in Darkness
       * Best Individual NPC: Miss Sierra, from Varicella
       * Best Individual PC: Primo Varicella, from Varicella
       * Best Use of Medium: Aisle, by Sam Barlow

    NEW GAMES
    I'm so proud of our SPAG reviewers. First of all, this issue remedies
    some long-standing gaps in the SPAG review record, covering games such
    as Christminster, I-0, and Lost New York, all of which have languished
    for years without the benefit of a SPAG review. Not only that, but this
    diabolical delay between a game's release and its review in SPAG (a
    delay which I will most emphatically *not* christen "SPAG lag") has been
    virtually eliminated in the case of two games released just since the
    last issue of SPAG came out two months ago -- John Menichelli's Not Just
    A Game and Adam Cadre's Shrapnel are both reviewed in this issue. Other
    new games since last issue include a couple of pieces of tiny IF, a
    German Inform adventure, a Z-Machine abuse, and a full-blown HTML-TADS
    game:
       * Lost In New York by Mikko Vuorinen (no relation to Neil DeMause's
         Lost New York, reviewed in this issue)
       * Starrider (in German), by Max Kalus
       * Not Just A Game by John Menichelli
       * Shrapnel by Adam Cadre
       * Sycamora Tree by David Dyte
       * Z Trek by John Menichelli (another "abuse of the z-machine")
       * The Adventures of Helpfulman by Phillip Dearmore

    THE PARSIFAL MOSAIC
    Roger Firth had already made a great contribution to IF Authorship on
    the web with a page that demonstrated the same small demo game as
    implemented in 9 major IF languages
    (http://homepages.tesco.net/~roger.firth/cloak/), but he didn't stop
    there. He's just unveiled PARSIFAL
    (http://homepages.tesco.net/~roger.firth/parsifal/), a dense and
    thorough collection of links to many many homepages and web sites
    related to IF. It makes for fascinating surfing. By the way, in keeping
    with the IF world's love for acronyms, PARSIFAL stands for People And
    Resource Summary -- Interactive Fiction Authorship Links.

    EVERY REVIEW A WANTED REVIEW
    I couldn't be more pleased with the results that have been generated by
    the SPAG 10 Most Wanted List. The long-awaited reviews I mentioned above
    (in the NEW GAMES section) are all items that appeared on the last
    couple of Most Wanted lists -- many people didn't even realize that
    those games had never been reviewed in SPAG! This issue's list has a
    nice mix of the new, old, and otherwise unjustly neglected. Please note
    that the 10 Most Wanted List refers to regular SPAG reviews, not those
    intended for the new SPAG Specifics section:

    SPAG 10 MOST WANTED LIST
    ========================
    1.  The Adventures of Helpfulman
    2.  Bad Machine
    3.  Cutthroats
    4.  Dr. Dumont's Wild P.A.R.T.I.
    5.  Guilty Bastards
    6.  Lunatix: The Insanity Circle
    7.  The Mulldoon Legacy
    8.  Offensive Probing
    9.  Winchester's Nightmare
    10. Worlds Apart

    KEY TO SCORES AND REVIEWS--------------------------------------------------

    Consider the following review header:

    NAME: Cutthroats
    AUTHOR: Infocom
    EMAIL: ???
    DATE: September 1984
    PARSER: Infocom Standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: LTOI 2
    URL: Not available.

    When submitting reviews:  Try to fill in as much of this info as you can.
    If you choose, you may also provide scores for the games you review, as
    explained in the SPAG FAQ. The scores will be used in the ratings
    section.  Authors may not rate or review their own games.

    More elaborate descriptions of the rating and scoring systems may be found
    in the FAQ and in issue #9 of SPAG, which should be available at:

            ftp://ftp.gmd.de:/if-archive/magazines/SPAG/
     and at http://www.sparkynet.com/spag

    REVIEWS -------------------------------------------------------------------

    From: Nick Montfort

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ---

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

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

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

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

    =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

    From: David Samuel Myers

    I'm biased, I'll admit it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    From: Duncan Stevens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Or this, from Frank's perspective:

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

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

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

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

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

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    FROM: Volker Lanz

    NAME: Deadline
    AUTHOR: Marc Blank (Infocom)
    EMAIL: mblank SP@G eidetic.com
    DATE: 1983
    PARSER: Early Infocom
    SUPPORTS: Infocom Ports
    AVAILABILITY: Masterpieces
    URL: Not available
    VERSION: Release 27.

    Deadline was the first Infocom mystery and their third released game
    (after Zork I and Zork II). Author Marc Blank said that he did not want
    to do another fantasy game after the Zorks and thought that a mystery
    was an obvious choice: "I thought it was a great idea because most
    people, when they read mysteries, are constantly trying to think ahead,
    what happened. 'Ooh, I would have looked here, I would have done this. I
    would have been more clever.' So, it seemed to lend itself perfectly."

    Deadline was also the first Infocom game to come with feelies: In the
    box were interviews with the suspects, some tablets, a photograph of the
    murder scene, a letter from the attorney and a coroner's note.

    The story: Marshall Robner, a wealthy industrialist, is found dead in
    his locked-up library one morning. He died of an overdose of Ebullion, a
    medicine he has been taking for his depressions. An apparent suicide...
    Really? The attorney of the deceased asks you, the detective, to
    investigate this case to "quash the suspicions" that are inevitable when
    a wealthy man dies an unnatural death. You have twelve hours to solve
    this case and you begin your work on a Friday morning at 8 a.m.

    >From the beginning, almost the complete playing field is accessible to
    the player, so Deadline is a good choice for everyone who likes wide
    game designs and non-linear plots. On the other hand, Deadline also
    suffers from the "you-have-to-know-what's-happening-where-and-when"
    problem that Suspect later showed (though not as much): By your actions,
    you are likely to trigger reactions of the NPCs that happen somewhere
    else. If you don't know that, you are likely to miss crucial points of
    the plot.

    Speaking of NPCs: This is where the game really shines. The six main
    NPCs (not counting the attorney, who only plays a minor role) are really
    fleshed out; they act reasonable and consistent to their character and
    motives. You can show a lot of things to them and study their reactions,
    you can ask them about many topics, you can follow them around, you can
    accuse them and listen to what they have to say. Only few i-f games have
    such complete NPCs, I would say.

    A weaker point of the game is the early parser it uses: It understands a
    lot of things, but sometimes gets confused or reacts in the wrong way to
    the player's input. Also, the game is quite buggy if you do things that
    the author apparently didn't think of (the Infocom Bug List on GMD only
    shows about a third of the bugs I found).

    One major problem with the game is how hard it is: Not only do you have
    to get evidence against the guilty party, you also have to prove that a
    crime was committed at all. This turns out to be a tough job and can
    cause the player quite a headache for some time. Some actions you have
    to perform aren't that obvious (what to do with the holes in the garden;
    or how long exactly you have to wait before you may interrupt certain
    NPCs when they are doing something -- too early and you can't prove
    what they did, too late and they've finished), so players may be tempted
    to revert to a walkthrough or the hints.

    All in all, Deadline is a good game that is still worth playing after
    all these years -- in my opinion the best mystery that Infocom did.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    From: Francesco Bova

    NAME: Enemies
    AUTHOR: Andy Phillips
    EMAIL: aphillips SP@G ma.man.ac.uk
    DATE: January 1999
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/inform/Enemies.z8

    Andy Phillips has a thing for .z8 games. In 3 attempts he's produced 3
    REALLY big puzzle-oriented games with varying degrees of success. The
    one constant has been that with each successive attempt, he's made great
    improvements in terms of both game design and story. Enemies, his most
    recent work, doesn't fail to impress in many ways and is certainly more
    "user friendly" than his first two offerings. The game chronicles the
    life of Charlie Johnson, accountant and every day Joe, who has
    unknowingly attracted the attention of an enemy (who it also turns out
    is a serial killer). The enemy is a person from Charlie's past who has
    been planning to test Charlie's resolve and intelligence for sometime.
    The enemy contends that Charlie's had life 'too easy' up until this
    point and needs to prove his worth. As an added incentive for Charlie to
    participate in the game, his enemy has also kidnapped his girlfriend.
    The game is broken into three sections: a prologue section (where
    initial bits of Charlie's past are revealed); a main story section
    (which revolves around an obstacle course full of puzzles and memories
    that take place in Charlie's former college); and an ending section
    (where Charlie's enemy is revealed and a final battle ensues). There's
    lots of prose to work through here and the puzzles are many and varied.
    But with such a cavernous game to review, the question is where do you
    start?

    Well, let's start with the positives. The best thing about Enemies is
    (surprisingly) the atmosphere. I mention the surprise because what had
    always impressed me about Phillips' work in the past were his puzzles.
    His storytelling conversely had been a little weak. In Enemies, however,
    it's his prose that takes the foreground. The writing is generally very
    creepy and Phillips does a great job of making the player feel that the
    threat is real and around every corner. There were a few instances when
    the prose went a little over the top and when it got to be too much it
    typically fell into one of these two categories:

    Aggravatingly repetitive

       "It's quite easy to get caught up in the world of finance and forget
       about the rest of us unfortunates who never had your chances."
       "I'd like to see you fail for once, Charlie. You think you're a major
       player, but in reality you're just a pawn in a very big game -- and
       it's time to start playing."
       "Imagine having to write your obituary, Charlie. If they had the
       decency to be truthful, they'd say what a heartless creep you were,
       but the ability to lie is second nature to accountants."

       - This is a sample of Charlie's enemy's dialogue, anytime Charlie's
       enemy comes within earshot of Charlie. By the end I felt like saying
       "Alright, either kill me or get some new material because I can't
       keep going on like this!"
                                        OR
    Cringe-inducing

       "She never had a chance to say, 'I love you'."

       - Charlie's reaction after discovering his dead fiancée. Wait a
       minute, after dating for two years and proposing marriage, she never
       told him she loved him? Boy, that upper lip in England gets stiffer
       every year. :)

    But it was worth going through that drivel to get to the little gems
    like this one:

       "It's difficult to ascertain an age since wet sandy hair covers most
       of her blistered face, but she can't be much older than twenty. You
       only see her body for a split second before sheer revulsion makes you
       look away, but the details are memorable: ankles bound with strong
       twine, adhesive tape starting to peel off her swollen mouth, tattoos
       of red flowers on her hips."

       - A description of one of your enemy's many victims. Most of the
       victims are done like this and it's quite unsettling when you find
       them within the fondly described rooms of your former college.

    Another technique Phillips uses to sustain the atmosphere is the
    flashback (which is used when Charlie either gets knocked out or
    stumbles onto something that triggers a memory). Through the flashbacks
    we learn about Charlie's history - more specifically his college years -
    and the characters from Charlie's past. The characters are all well done
    with the usual suspects in full force; we have the bully, the love
    interest(s), the victim, and Charlie's teachers. From this group, a few
    suspects with potential motives arise but unfortunately, all of their
    motives are suspect in turn.

    Phillips tries hard to create tension between Charlie and the other
    characters with the flashbacks but what the flashbacks really illustrate
    is that - contrary to his enemy's ravings -- Charlie was a victim for a
    good part of his college life, and had it anything but easy growing up.
    If I feel sorry for anyone in this game it IS Charlie. His past would
    constitute the lead role in any Shakespearean tragedy. In fact, if any
    character has a motive for vengeance it's him. Did Charlie make mistakes
    in his life? Sure. But they were very human mistakes and certainly not
    intentional. That's what makes his enemy's hatred (and through that any
    of the supporting cast's motives for wanting to kill him) a little
    unrealistic. Enemies also tries to convey the feeling that it was
    Charlie's actions that drove his enemy to (amongst other things) serial
    killing. Given Charlie's past, this too seems flawed.

    Maybe it's the case then that Charlie's enemy is a psychopath, and that
    Charlie is a casualty of circumstance -- a victim, caught in the wrong
    place at the wrong time. If this was the author's intent. however, then
    the story loses a bit of its effectiveness and the game changes from a
    battle between two masterminds to that of a lowly victim being hunted by
    a mindless predator. My jury's still out on this because I don't think
    that was Phillips' intent. At any rate, it ends up being a minor speed
    bump on the road through a very chilling story.

    As I'd mentioned earlier, the focus of Phillips' games in the past have
    been his puzzles. He's racked up a few XYZZY puzzle nominations already
    for some of his previous work and with Enemies he continues to impress.
    I was reading one of the int-fiction newsgroups a while ago and noticed
    someone making a comment about Andy Phillips' previous game Heist. Their
    comment was that in many cases it looked like the plot was being built
    around the puzzle and not the other way around. I had personally never
    seen it that way (maybe it's because Heist is one of my favorite games
    or maybe it's because I've always preferred puzzles to plot), but in
    retrospect I think the author of the post may have had a point. Enemies
    improves a bit on Heist in that respect with many of the puzzles
    centering around different college-related courses including chemistry,
    mathematics, history, and astronomy. The college section is also capped
    off with an entertaining macro-puzzle (a spin off of the board game
    Clue) that brings everything together quite nicely.

    Once you move through the college into the final confrontation with your
    enemy, there are fairly strict time limits imposed which require a lot
    of saving and restoring, and in most cases there can't be progress
    without a little learning by death. I know most players don't view this
    as a terribly good thing, but in this case I think it supports mimesis.
    After all, how much time would a serial killer give you if they were
    intent on killing you?

    The final battle between you and your enemy is also done very well. It
    involves both offensive and defensive maneuvers as well as some
    pre-planned setups. I've always been impressed with good fight sequences
    in IF because getting the timing done correctly and keeping up the
    player's intensity is considerably more difficult than with a graphical
    game.

    There were 2 puzzles however that I think might really taint the
    player's perception of this game. The first one in particular ended up
    being a point where I know a lot of gamers stopped playing, and it's
    unfortunate because they miss out on a thrilling finale. Without giving
    too much detail, the puzzle involves an intricate number of steps where
    each step has to be performed correctly. If one step is missed, the
    player gets killed. This sort of thing isn't terribly uncommon in IF but
    the problem here is that the game doesn't give you any clues as to
    whether you're on the right track or not. To make matters worse, the
    puzzle is very complex and requires several boatloads of author
    telepathy to be done correctly. To finally make this puzzle truly
    horrible, there is a random element to the puzzle that means never
    producing the same set of information for the same game so that even
    after reading the walkthrough, I still had difficulty. In frustration, I
    had to e-mail the author with my set of data and he had to feed me back
    the answer. My motivation to play Enemies after completing this puzzle
    was severely diminished, and it took many moons to get my appetite back.

    Perhaps not as brutal, but equally frustrating was a poorly implemented
    puzzle revolving around viewing certain pieces of evidence and then
    confronting your enemy with their existence. Although I did see all the
    necessary evidence, I never managed to make the connection that I had to
    see it all in the same saved game, and thus was killed immediately when
    my enemy confronted me. I actually figured out the enemy's identity
    early on in the game because of a subtle hint in one of the puzzles (in
    fact, it was so subtle it may have been inadvertent), so not being able
    to confront my enemy with the evidence made this puzzle even more
    frustrating.

    These were my two main sticking points with the puzzles but there were
    also a few minor problems with the parser, and some guess-the-verb
    problems. The problems were so minor, in fact, that they might not even
    be worth mentioning, but I think I will because I've noticed that these
    particular problems are quite common in bigger games. There were
    instances where I had a vague idea as to what I was supposed to do, but
    the solutions revolved around non-standard Inform actions (i.e., throw
    (x) over (y), put (x) under (y)). In a game like this, it's tough enough
    trying to figure out what to do when you're armed with a stable of
    common Inform verbs, but throw some "not-so-obvious" ones in there, and
    things get exponentially more difficult. A suggestion to remedy this
    problem might be to include a piece in the INFO section detailing all
    the verbs that can be used in the game. A good example of how to do this
    is Jon Ingold's 1999 release, and similarly puzzle-oriented game, The
    Mulldoon Legacy. Ingold lists all the potential commands in the game in
    a special section in the help menu and this makes a very difficult game
    puzzle-wise, much more enjoyable. Ingold also makes a comment in the
    help section of his game that guessing what verbs to use shouldn't be
    part of the puzzle. I tend to agree with him, especially in this case,
    because Enemies would still be sufficiently hard with a comprehensive
    verb list.

    There, that's my last squabble with the puzzles. The truth is that there
    were at least two or three puzzles in this game that could easily be
    nominated for XYZZY awards, and the sense of satisfaction I got from
    completing most of them was very high. A recommendation might be to play
    this game with a walkthrough close by, and when you hit one of the
    killer puzzles (believe me you'll know when it happens), you can save
    both your gaming experience and yourself the grief of trying to plow
    through them.

    The ending as I'd mentioned is really well done but one last thing sort
    of irked me. If you finish the game with a full point score, you're
    awarded the rank of "Man of Little Merit". Not that I'm sure Charlie
    ever had anything to prove, but if he did, he at least proved that he
    was worthy of life. Not a big deal, but it left a bad taste in my mouth
    when I finished.

    All gripes aside, Enemies is a fine game and for those of you who like
    puzzle-heavy games that don't completely sacrifice plot, this may be one
    to download.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    From: Christian Baker

    NAME: I-0: Jailbait on the interstate
    AUTHOR: Adam Cadre
    EMAIL: ac SP@G adamcadre.ac
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/I-0.z5

    When I first started up I-0, I didn't know what to think of the game. It
    starts in the front seat of your fantastic new car, which has broken
    down on the way home to celebrate Thanksgiving. The game has a gimmick,
    or rather, two gimmicks. The first one would be that you can take all
    your clothes off, and it really is fun to watch the NPCs react to
    partial or total nudity. This makes you want to classify it as a Leather
    Goddesses type game, but it isn't really. It's just about fun. I for one
    would love to see the reaction of other people if I started stripping in
    a garage.

    The second gimmick would be the fact that you can take multiple paths.
    There is more than one way to win. It is quite easy to win, but I don't
    really think the point of the game was mind-bending puzzles (Adam has
    shown his love of non-puzzle games with Photopia.) I-0 is a very good
    (and funny) game, but there are a few things lacking. The NPCs seem a
    bit stereotyped, but there is a good bit of conversation from Larry, the
    loveable truck driver. The writing is very good and always shows the
    funny side of things, as shown here:

       You'd like to be able to say you're in the middle of nowhere, but
       that would be wishful thinking. You're stranded at least fifty miles
       away from the middle of nowhere.

       The entire landscape is nothing but barren desert dotted with scrub.
       Being a desert kid, you're well aware of how much danger you're in.
       The scenery may be beautiful in its own way, but the sun is beating
       down like it's got a personal mission to melt you into goo, and
       you're well aware that out in the desert everything is either
       poisonous or covered with spikes. Not to mention what could happen to
       a pretty girl all alone on a deserted highway...

       As for this particular spot, well, a barbed-wire fence lines the
       roadside, and Interstate Zero itself stretches endlessly to the east
       and west. There's a sign here, too, and its twin is on the other side
       of the freeway directly to your north.

    I thought the inside of Taco Junta could have been used better, as it
    seemed a pretty useless location to me. The game isn't particularly big,
    or particularly difficult, but it doesn't give you any "You can't do
    that here" messages, and everything is very detailed. It lets you roam
    free, it doesn't let you sit there and have the plot stuffed down you
    throat. Adam, a darn fine piece of work.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    From: Duncan Stevens

    TITLE: Inheritance
    AUTHOR: Eric Toth
    E-MAIL: ericndana SP@G juno.com
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABIILTY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/inherit.gam
    VERSION: Release 1 (I think--no version number in the game)

    Eric Toth's Inheritance is a throwback of sorts: it's a house filled
    with puzzles for the sake of puzzles, puzzles for their own sake rather
    than for the purpose of a story. While there's an ostensible plot, it
    doesn't really have much to do with the action besides providing an
    excuse for the puzzles. On the other hand, several of the puzzles are
    very clever indeed, and the whole thing is solidly done.

    It seems that your rich uncle has asked you to come to his mansion to
    discuss your inheritance, so here you are-- the trick is finding your
    uncle, who doesn't seem to be around. The mansion is crammed with
    strange puzzles, though, as noted, and as you might guess, solving
    enough of them entitles you to fabulous wealth. And off you go, solving
    puzzles, and eventually you reach the end. The puzzles themselves
    vary--some are a bit obscure, but all are logical and some are rather
    ingenious; one relies on an object that the room description seems to
    dismiss as unimportant, and another suggests that there's a way to
    manipulate it that doesn't in fact work, but there are worse sins, I
    suppose. The plot itself hinges on a series of shapes you pick up here
    and there--plastic circles and squares and such--which go into an device
    with appropriately shaped slots. There are very few surprises along the
    way, really--just puzzles. They're not bad puzzles at all, really;
    several of them span multiple rooms in reasonably creative ways. But
    they're puzzles for their own sake.

    The various elements of Inheritance hang together quite well. There are
    no bugs to speak of, and the few misleading responses aren't
    game-killers. A few objects go underdescribed, and one puzzle is a bit
    contrived, but the game design, while not incredibly innovative, is
    quite adequate for the job. The writing, likewise, is unremarkable but
    competent; I didn't see any errors or awkward phrasing. (You may miss
    the final bit of text, however, because the game kicks you straight out
    to the DOS prompt when you reach it. Play Inheritance from DOS rather
    than from a window, in other words.) There are attempts at cobbling
    together a story of sorts--one significant object is described as a gift
    from your uncle that doesn't really fit, another is identified as
    incongruous in another respect--but the bits don't add up to a story.

    There's not much inherently wrong with Inheritance, really, other than
    the point when it appeared, namely late 1999--as all-puzzle,
    minimal-story games are hardly in vogue these days. The puzzles would
    have to be impressive indeed for such a game to be received well--see
    Erehwon for a puzzle-driven game whose puzzles were good enough to make
    up for the lack of plot--and while Inheritance's puzzles aren't buggy,
    they're not all that original either. The shift toward the fiction
    aspect of IF has raised the playing population's standards regarding
    what works as a game, and even the most skillfully done crossword will
    get a tepid response if the narrative doesn't justify it. Here, I'm
    afraid, the narrative doesn't do much more than provide an excuse for
    the setting.

    Nostalgic fans of IF--those who first encountered IF when story was
    subordinate to puzzles--may well enjoy Inheritance--it's a solid example
    of its type. But IF as it has come to be known rarely works this way,
    I'm afraid.

    =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

    From: Karen Tyers

    My attention was drawn to this little gem by a posting on the newsgroup
    I read, and it was precisely because it was deliberately being
    under-promoted that made me go online and get it. I can't remember the
    exact wording now but the responses to the posting ranged from 'if it's
    that *** bad why should I play it' to 'I played it and loved it'. Anyway
    I duly downloaded the TADS gamefile and this was the intro that greeted
    me:

       "You haven't spoken to your rich, eccentric uncle in several years,
       but when he asks you to visit his mansion to discuss your
       inheritance, you gladly agree. His private helicopter picks you up at
       his office building and flies you to his secluded mansion. The pilot
       sets down on a roof-top helicopter pad, and informs you that your
       uncle is waiting for you in the south tower, before flying off into
       the night.
       INHERITANCE by Eric Toth (ericndana SP@G juno.com)
       Developed with TADS, the Text Adventure Development System."

    So I found myself on the roof of the mansion looking at two towers, one
    of which I could enter and one I couldn't. Having got down into the
    mansion, I duly began to explore. It's not a very large game - about 27
    locations, excluding the arbitrary maze, which is not large and very
    easily mapped. Actually I am probably wrong to call it a maze, since the
    exits are clearly marked and there's no real way to get lost.

    I soon came across my uncle's laboratory (minus one uncle....), which
    contained a peculiar device which looked like one of those children's
    puzzles with slots of varying shapes. At last, I could use the various
    pieces of plastic I had found. There was also something that looked like
    a printer attached to it.

    This is a simple little game, and should be easily finishable in a
    couple of hours, or as the author says, over a lunchtime, unless you are
    like me of course. I got totally stuck because I couldn't get a blasted
    cat to move out of the way. However, a quick email to the author solved
    that problem, and one other concerning a photo (which was a bit oblique
    but when you knew the answer, quite logical).

    This could easily be developed into a much larger game, although I don't
    think Eric has any intention of doing anything else with it. It's a real
    shame, because it is a lovely traditional game, and if like me, you are
    not keen on the way a lot of i-f is going, you will have a lot of fun
    zooming around this one.

    There were one or two grammar errors ('a' instead of 'an' and wrongly
    used apostrophes for example), but I only found one 'proper' bug and
    that does nothing to stop you playing the game - just try typing 'sleep'
    when you're sitting in the armchair and you'll see what I mean. It would
    also have been improved by the addition of more synonyms.

    Overall this is ideal for beginners - they should only come unstuck in
    one place, where a more detailed description of a very mundane item
    could point you in the right direction, but this is really my only
    gripe. Go download it - you'll have a couple of hours fun.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    From: Francesco Bova

    NAME: Inhumane
    AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin
    EMAIL: erkyrath SP@G netcom.com
    DATE: when he was 14
    PARSER: BASIC adapted to Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/inhumane.z5

    Have you ever wondered how some of your favorite interactive fiction
    authors got started? I can remember playing Jigsaw for the first time
    and thinking that its author (Graham Nelson) must have been born from an
    exceptionally intelligent gene pool, gone to an ivy league school, or
    been raised by alien technology. The game was incredible and I'd always
    wondered what sort of experience had lead to producing someone with such
    good programming and writing skills.

    Well, the game "Inhumane" provides us with a brief snapshot of what one
    of the better known IF authors, Andrew Plotkin, was up to in his younger
    years. Inhumane (a game originally coded in basic by Plotkin when he was
    14), is a spoof of the Infocom classic Infidel. Infidel was one of the
    easier Infocom games (I think I won in it in about 2 days), and keeping
    with that tradition, Inhumane is easily winnable within an hour. No
    guess-the-verb puzzles, no scenic landscapes, no moral plays. Basically,
    it's the antithesis of everything Andrew Plotkin has made since. (see So
    Far, Spider and Web)

    The game follows the same premise as Infidel (find the buried treasure),
    but that's where most of the similarities end. Much like Infidel, Andrew
    has incorporated a few novel traps into this game. Unlike Infidel, the
    goal is not to disarm or avoid them, but rather to get killed by as many
    of them as possible. Only then can you attain the ultimate treasure
    (you'll understand this bizarre logic once you play the game). I'm not
    really giving too much away here because you should be able to win the
    game in the time that it takes you to download it.

    As a game, the traps are adequately programmed and maybe the only real
    flaw is that the objects you can examine usually don't have any
    descriptions. This seems to be a fairly small shortcoming considering
    the age of the author when he wrote it, and the fact that this game was
    coded in BASIC.

    All in all, not a bad little game. Certainly better than some other
    first attempts out there. At the very least, it's interesting from a
    historical standpoint to play the first offering from one of the premier
    talents in the interactive fiction community before he became a premier
    talent.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    From: Duncan Stevens

    TITLE: Intruder
    AUTHOR: Volker Lanz
    E-MAIL: volker.lanz SP@G gmx.net
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/intruder.zip
    VERSION: Release 59

    One of the most important advances in recent IF is what might be called
    player-friendliness, meaning the game's capacity to supply logical
    inferences. Michael Gentry's Anchorhead was a particularly good example
    of this: not only did the game have a large rucksack-type object (a
    trench coat, in that case) that could hold everything in the game, but
    it also handled the bulk of the item-juggling for you, so that you put
    items into and take them out of the trenchcoat automatically when you
    needed them. Likewise, you had a keyring, and when you came upon
    something you wanted to unlock, the game automatically sorted through
    the keys on the ring and checked whether any of them were the right one.
    Not many games do as much as Anchorhead to help out the player and keep
    annoyance at bay, unfortunately, and while Volker Lanz's Intruder is a
    good effort in many ways, the frustration factor is very much a problem.

    It seems you're a private eye hired to break into a house by a woman who
    wants evidence against her husband for their divorce proceeding--though
    it's more like coercion than hiring, since the woman threatens to have
    your creditors start collecting on their loans if you don't help out. At
    any rate, you do indeed break into the house, and the initial goal
    drives what you do in most significant ways for about two thirds of the
    game. At that point, you start trying to find something else, and how
    you know what you're looking for or where it would be escaped me
    completely. It's true, of course, that no IF protagonist ever really
    feels content if he or she leaves doors unlocked, but there's a
    difference between pure exploration games--fantasy, in particular, where
    it makes some sense to look under every stone--and others where you have
    a defined goal that doesn't include playing magpie. It's one thing to
    have ill-defined motivations throughout the game, but it's another to
    have very clearly defined motivations that don't in fact shape
    everything you do. (Well, they explain the importance of what you
    eventually find, but you get no hint as to why you would start looking
    for it originally.) It might have been helpful to actually throw in some
    of your mental processes: "your thoughts now turn to matter X, and you
    wonder whether it's possible to find object Y." At least, that would
    keep the plot moving.

    Complicating your task in addition is a _very_ small inventory limit, a
    finite light source (which is pretty easy to exhaust), a fairly
    restrictive time limit, and a puzzle that requires massive amounts of
    logistical planning and traipsing around. None of it is illogical per
    se, I should stress--I can't say that logic is advanced by infinitely
    large rucksacks, flashlights that last all night, and such--but
    sometimes cold logic and realism are not the friend of an IF designer.
    One particularly frustrating puzzle in Intruder necessitates either that
    you walk around turning on every light in the house or wander around in
    the dark, which is simply irritating, and while there are several clever
    puzzles (though some are old chestnuts), the annoyance aspect is
    considerable. Intruder seems to put a premium on having to do silly
    little things, like locking your car door before breaking into the
    house, and while it makes sense, these are the sort of gaps I'd rather
    just have the game fill for me. (Also, the hints only cover the first
    third of the game, which I found frustrating, since the puzzles for that
    section are pretty easy.) It's also annoyingly easy to lock yourself out
    of victory.

    Technically, likewise, Intruder is a mixed bag. One container object
    does not suggest that it is openable, another suggests that it's
    unlockable when it's not, and the syntax for another puzzle was a total
    shock to me. There are various little things that bothered me--dropping
    objects down a hole elicits a "you hear a sound as if something's
    breaking," even if you dropped a key or a bolt cutter, which aren't in
    fact likely to break. There are some typos and writing errors as well,
    but the bulk of the problems are design-related, and they diminish any
    potential for immersion considerably.

    The frustration factor is all the stronger because there's plenty to
    like about Intruder in other respects. The backstory is well done--it's
    rare that you have a PC with such a thoroughly defined set of
    motivations--and there's an actual reasonably believable plot. The
    characters--you and the woman who hires you, and to some extent her
    husband--come across very effectively; the author spends enough time
    developing each character to make them understandable and not
    caricatures. The setting itself is well described without excessive
    detail, and most of the objects and locations make sense. The tedium
    distracts from the story, unfortunately, and the logistical-planning
    aspect makes Intruder less a story than a set of tasks. In short, the
    story of Intruder has plenty of promise, but the implementation of the
    puzzles gets in the way.

    Intruder isn't a bad effort, at bottom, and it has its moments. If you
    can overlook the design flaws, it might be worth a try.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    FROM: J.D. Berry

    NAME: Lost New York
    AUTHOR: Neil DeMause
    EMAIL: neild SP@G echonyc.com  (Not sure how current this is)
    DATE: 1996-1997
    PARSER: TADS   (Also available in PC format)
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Shareware ($12) (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/lostny14.gam
    VERSION: 1.4

    Start spreading the news
    Download this today
    You'll want to be a part of it
    It's "Lost New York"
    These time-traveling shoes
    Are longing to stray
    Right though the very heart of it
    It's "Lost New York"

    Sports aficionados say the mark of a good referee is that you never
    notice him. He quietly and efficiently does his job controlling the game
    without seeming to control the players. Lost New York (LNY) is that
    referee. There's a definite air of professionalism throughout the work,
    but you may not realize it until after the game. "You know, I don't
    think the ref blew any major calls."

    Interactive fiction players think one mark of a good game is when they
    become absorbed by it. For this to happen, the world not only must feel
    real but it must be engaging. Now, if you've ever been to New York City
    (NYC), you know the smell isn't always a pleasant one. But, not only its
    smells but by its whole atmosphere (good and bad), you KNOW where you
    are. You're in New York, *&^%$! Remember, though, a game must do more
    than capture the effect. It must do so in an interesting way. LNY
    succeeds here too. You never get the feeling you're just walking down
    each street for the sole purpose of realism. You never get the feeling
    you are just a tourist. You are part of an unfolding story as well.

    I love the rich history that permeates the game, often seeping into
    strange but satisfying places. Your score is compared to a mayor of NYC
    complete with a small biography. Excellent! This also ties in nicely to
    the game in general. Even the better mayors were not without their flaws
    and not without the sense that the city was so much bigger than they
    were. You, the player, are thrust into the same situation. You control
    some things, but the city largely has its own say, its own destiny.

    I must point out that I am neither a patient person nor a master game
    solver. Thus the complaints I do have about the game may be more
    accurately pointed at my own flaws as a player. As a reader of the
    newsgroups, though, I feel some of you may be in the same dock. With
    this in mind, I think you'll get an idea of how to approach this game
    based on your strengths and weaknesses.

    The game can become unwinnable quite easily. For instance, I didn't
    bring along a certain object because I had already taken the "important"
    thing from it. Later on of course I needed to use that object for
    something else. Restoring back so far was quite annoying. If you're the
    sort of player who has an intuitive feel rather than an expert gamer
    feel, you may find yourself in these kinds of traps too.

    Near the end of the game I resorted to the walkthrough. I'm glad I did,
    because I don't think I would have put everything together no matter how
    long I had played. But I was able to solve 5/6 of the game on my own.
    The puzzles and situations were generally very fair, although at one
    point you will perform an action of questionable morals which is a
    little out of character for the "average joe" player you are. (The rich
    man in the park.)

    Let me quickly finish the remaining other little nits. I had trouble
    figuring out how to use the future subway. Also, the timing of a subway
    encounter in another situation frustrated me. Every now and then I had
    difficulty in communicating what I wanted to do. None of these remotely
    resembled downright aggravation.

    If you love detailed and responsive NPCs, you won't find them here.
    However, this does not take anything away from the game. In the first
    place, NYC is not the most congenial of places. There are no kindly but
    knowledgeable grandmothers or entertaining yet clue-revealing minstrels
    here. The thieves are definitely not gentlemanly. Also, LNY is a history
    piece. You are dealing with the city as an evolving entity. The NPCs are
    like little cogs in a bulky, inefficient, black box machine. They may or
    may not have a minuscule role in city's existence and evolution. They
    are important only to the degree that they can help you. This attitude
    may hurt most games, but it works perfectly here. It fits.

    Lost New York is an engaging work of interactive fiction and even a
    standard on which all historical pieces should be judged. Bear in mind
    that its whole is definitely greater than its parts. Each element taken
    by itself is merely good. The overall effect is very pleasing.
    Experience it for yourself!

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    From: Michael Macwilliam

    TITLE: 9:05
    AUTHOR: Adam Cadre
    E-MAIL: ac SP@G adamcadre.ac
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/905.z5
    VERSION: Release 1.00

    You wake up in bed. A reassuring start and one familiar from several
    games. You are spared the precision manoeuvring that was required in
    Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy; instead, if you pick up the phone you
    receive a message urging you to work. It is 9:05 and you have slept
    longer than you intended...

    The game plays smoothly with no real apparent problems - something might
    strike you as strange when you are given a set of keys, but don't seem
    to be able to lock the front door on the way out, but hey, this is
    interactive fiction anyhow, and if we are prepared to accept endless
    magical transportations and interdimensional shifts in other games, then
    we should be able to deal with that. Also, the author's hand is clearly
    seen to be pushing you in a certain direction late in the game, where
    the line "Walk into Bowman's office without the form? Not smart."
    appears, even though we can easily reach that stage without having
    encountered the form yet. A petty point which doubtless could be dealt
    with in the next version - and also one that shows the high standards
    that IF has reached in recent years: if that's all we've go to moan
    about, then we aren't being badly served by the current crop of writers.

    Back to the game: play it once, definitely play it once, just to hear
    yourself say "WHAT?" when you reach the end screen. Then play it again,
    and investigate those nooks and crannies that you passed over the first
    time... things shall become apparent. Play it that second time and reach
    the best (?) resolution. On the basis of Cadre's earlier piece I-0 (aka
    Interstate Zero) I suspect that there may still be many hidden treasures
    (not *TREASURES*) lurking in the background though - I played that one
    through about eight or ten times and still missed out on at least half
    the fun. I don't know though - there do seem to be only two ways out of
    this set-up.

    In the end, 9:05 is a simple game which could almost be described as
    puzzle-less one - it does contain one puzzle which does not advertise
    itself as such until it is way too late. It's a game that is somewhat
    closer in spirit to Cadre's take on Flowers For Algernon than his other
    more involved Photopia or I-0.

    As an end note, it is interesting to see that the whole game can be
    cracked on the second move (if not completed on the third as was the
    case for Flowers).

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    From: Duncan Stevens

    TITLE: Not Just a Game
    AUTHOR: John Menichelli
    E-MAIL: menichel SP@G pixi.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/njag.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    The game in question in John Menichelli's Not Just a Game is the game of
    Go--the game is set up around a Go board of sorts, and the last few
    puzzles are simply Go problems transplanted directly into the game.
    (There's a booklet lying around for the heretofore uninitiated.) Not all
    the puzzles are Go-related, though; in fact, most of them are
    conventional IF puzzles, and many are quite clever. The result is a
    somewhat schizophrenic but overall fairly enjoyable game that even
    offers some food for thought.

    It seems your Go teacher has mysteriously disappeared, but she's left
    behind some clues. The clues lead to a sort of larger-than-life Go
    board, which you have to navigate, by turns using your Go knowledge and
    your common sense. The puzzles you encounter along the way are mostly
    logical, with a few exceptions, and their structure blends symmetry and
    asymmetry in a way appropriate for the underlying game of Go. If there
    are problems, they're largely motivational: most of the puzzles are
    premised on something akin to "here's some stuff to fiddle with, and if
    you fiddle with it properly, you'll have something that will eventually
    prove to be useful," rather than actual goal-driven reasoning. Still,
    Not Just a Game has a lot of company in that respect, and it's hardly a
    fatal flaw. There's also an interesting blend between
    chinoiserie/Orientalism and Western culture, in that the bulk of the
    puzzles that aren't directly related to Go could fit into your average
    house-setting or fantasy game, and there are certain objects (e.g.,
    chewing gum) that would seem a bit out of place if the game were really
    striving to be culturally correct. In fact, the game itself calls
    attention to this contrast--the initial room description puts a Go board
    "between the sofa and the TV," and the description of a computer
    mentions that your teacher "doesn't feel comfortable around
    technological equipment." (Quick disclaimer: I'm not saying technology
    is Western. Merely that late-twentieth-century stuff like computers
    don't fit all that well into the chinoiserie setting, as exemplified by
    Sound of One Hand Clapping, or, for that matter, the endgame of Not
    Just a Game.)

    The aspect of the game that requires that you actually apply Go
    knowledge in more than a superficial way isn't quite as successful,
    unfortunately. It may be that Go just isn't easy to learn from a few
    entries in a booklet, but the Go problems that appear at the end of the
    game were difficult enough that I often didn't understand why the
    correct solution was correct, even after I'd found it by trial and
    error. This might be my mental block, but I'm not sure that applied
    reasoning on this level, even if it's only to learn Go, is well suited
    for IF--at least, barring a more thorough tutorial process than Not Just
    a Game provides. The final puzzle, which essentially involves scoring a
    completed Go game, is tedious in the extreme, moreover--once you figure
    out the premise of Go scoring, which isn't all that complicated, it's a
    matter of counting dots on a large grid. Whereas the other puzzles felt
    obscure, this one just feels mindless--and the game would benefit
    considerably, I think, if it were removed.

    The writing is quite good--it's rarely especially evocative (the setting
    is largely pretty unremarkable, after all), but it also rarely gets in
    the way of the game, which takes some skill in itself. There's also some
    humor scattered here and there, documented in an 'amusing' section.
    There are likewise few technical flaws or game design problems: one
    section involves a lot of traipsing around, which does get tiresome
    after a while, but at least it's straightforward traipsing. The story
    itself requires some disbelief-suspending, but no more than your average
    fantasy game, to be fair--and the only reason that the suspensions of
    disbelief here require a conscious effort is that the initial genre of
    the game isn't clear from the outset, and the setting wanders back and
    forth a bit between Western suburbs and, um, a vaguely Oriental setting.
    That may be jarring initially, but it's also rather creative, and it
    allows for some interesting juxtapositions. For instance, the "Five
    Elements of Chinese Philosophy" can be found in a poster on a
    refrigerator, and a baseball bat figures prominently in putting together
    the Go-related materials. The picture that emerges is one of cultural
    synthesis, in some respects: your teacher clearly is struggling to
    retain her own values in an unfamiliar culture, and yet you--and she,
    implicitly--are surrounded by the trappings of that culture, and draw on
    them to achieve your ends. The cultures are more complementary than
    conflicting, then--it's not a question of rejecting one in favor of the
    other. (I must say, though, that the computer with Z-abuses on it was an
    odd touch, even under a cultural-synthesis analysis.) In that light,
    then, it's not necessary to believe uncritically that, as your teacher
    says, Go is "a reflection of your inner self"--merely that there are
    many for whom the game of Go really is that important, and that it's
    worth examining the implications of those values.

    As a game, then, Not Just a Game is quite solid, if hardly
    extraordinary. The puzzles are good, and reasonably creative, but
    nothing particularly remarkable, and the Go puzzles themselves don't
    work particularly well. But among the subtexts are some rather unusual
    IF themes, unusual enough to make this one of the more interesting
    recent works of IF.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    From: Karen Tyers

    TITLE: Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina
    AUTHOR: Jim Aikin
    E-MAIL: jaikin SP@G pacbell.net
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/ballerina102.z8
    VERSION: Release 1.02

    I downloaded this game from the ftp.gmd.de archive after seeing an
    announcement on the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup and as soon as I read
    the introduction I knew I was in for a real treat:

       It's Christmas Eve. Rather late on Christmas Eve. Just this afternoon
       your darling 7-year-old daughter Samantha announced that fully a week
       ago she mailed a letter to Santa Claus asking for Sugar Toes
       Ballerina, the unbelievably sought-after, impossible-to-find fad doll
       of the decade. Unwilling to see little Sam heartbroken on Christmas
       morning, you frantically phoned every toy store in town.
       Miraculously, you found a shop that claimed to have a Sugar Toes
       Ballerina in stock!

       But that was two hours ago -- before the flat tire. Now it's getting
       dark, and icy weather is closing in. The address you were given, on
       the outskirts of town, has proven to be that of a dilapidated and
       disreputable-looking shopping center -- not a modern chrome-and-neon
       strip mall, either, but a hulking two-story structure that looks to
       be the ill-favored offspring of a fairy castle and a canning factory.
       The shopping center is tucked well back from the street among
       brooding skeletal trees. Other than a few dim yellowish lights that
       show no trace of holiday spirit, the building is shrouded in gloom,
       and yours is the only car in the parking lot.

    Although my own kids are grown up now (well, they think they are...) I can
    well remember the fad toys that were always (and still are) hyped at
    Christmas, and how kids are made to feel they are missing out if they
    don't have one. So, with great nostalgia I embarked on my quest for the
    Sugar Toes ballerina doll.

    The first impressions are great. The dark, apparently deserted shopping
    centre, hardly a sound anywhere, and freezing cold. Wandering around, I
    found I couldn't get very far as seemingly the power was off, and my
    hands were too cold to do very much. I found a security guard almost
    immediately but fortunately for me he was sound asleep. Unfortunately
    his elbow was leaning on a very interesting looking key and I couldn't
    obtain it straight away as he kept waking up and frogmarching me out of
    the building. However, there is a way to get hold of it and after much
    messing about I managed to do that very thing, and then found I could
    unlock most of the locked doors in the complex. However, that didn't
    solve the problem of no power, therefore no lighting. One other problem
    to over come initially was the series of security monitors covering the
    entire centre from the office where the guard is. Eventually, after much
    pulling out of hair, I did manage to disable them all and find a power
    source, so was able to explore at leisure.

    Perhaps leisure is not the right word here, as there are three floors to
    the centre, plus the roof, so I found my map sprawling over several
    pages. There are loads of shops and almost all of them have a unique
    puzzle attached to them, which in turn relates to another puzzle
    somewhere else. The difficulty level of the puzzles ranges from
    easy/medium to oblique/!**! impossible. Well not quite impossible, but
    some of the hardest I have come across in a very long while. A couple of
    them put me in mind of Steve Clay's Taxman series some years ago, but
    don't let that put you off. The game has an inbuilt gradual hint system
    so if you find you're really stuck you can use that.

    I have to say here that I am not sure I am in favour of the in-game hint
    system, as it makes it too easy to cheat if you are weak-willed. I
    managed to be very disciplined and only resorted to the hints three
    times, and given the difficulty of the game, I was quite pleased with
    myself.

    On your quest you will come across such things as a depressed elf, a
    homeless man, the security guard and a rather nasty, very large dog,
    plus one or two others.

    I have to say I haven't enjoyed a game as much in a very long time. It's
    one of those that keep pulling you back for just one more try. On more
    than one occasion I found myself looking at the clock to realise it was
    past two in the morning, and that doesn't happen very often.

    The writing is excellent, with very little in the way of errors. Of
    course, you have to allow for the difference in spelling (eg tire
    instead of tyre), but I have no quibble about that. The game runs
    smoothly, and solving one puzzle seems to lead right into another
    without any let up. I lost count of the number of objects to be found -
    63 at the last count, and every one has at least one use. This will give
    you some idea of the size and complexity of the game.

    I haven't quite finished it yet. I have found Sugar Toes, but haven't
    yet managed to pay for it (I'm very honest you see). This last puzzle
    has me climbing the walls - I know what to do and I have the necessary
    items (I think), but will have to put a lot of time and effort into
    solving it. There appears to be no built in hints for this last one
    (deliberate?) so I may well email the author and ask for help.....

    To close I would say that this is an unmissable game, and you know me, I
    don't say that very often.

    =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

    From: Duncan Stevens

    There are inherent mimesis problems in most puzzle-fest IF, since most
    of us do not live in a world where we need to solve logic problems or
    math riddles to open doors. One of the most significant mimesis problems
    is the objects-out-of-place syndrome--since most interesting puzzles
    involve objects with unusual or striking properties, the game author
    needs to come up with a good reason why the setting might include the
    objects that are vital to her chosen puzzles. Jim Aikin's Not Just an
    Ordinary Ballerina solves the problem in a rather creative way: the game
    is set in a shopping mall. Not just any shopping mall, of course; this
    one includes such things as a hair salon, a book bindery, and an antique
    store, the better to craft puzzles with, my dear. What results is about
    as unabashed a puzzle-fest as IF has ever seen--and while not all of the
    puzzles are highlights, the result is still thoroughly enjoyable.

    You're a parent (the game carefully avoids giving you a gender, though
    given the limited NPC interaction, this isn't all that remarkable a
    feat) searching for a doll on Christmas Eve, after the stores have
    closed; your 7-year- old daughter has her heart set on one Sugar Toes,
    and you're determined to find it. That's the premise, and it's a good
    one, but in truth it hardly matters whether you're after a ballerina
    doll or the Magic Hair Dryer of the Gods, since you can largely forget
    about your ostensible purpose until the very end. NJAOB is an old-style
    game: the puzzles are, I think it's safe to say, the raison d'etre, and
    your daughter and the doll provide a reasonably plausible framing device
    but not much more. (Perhaps that's not fair--some of the crueler
    obstacles you overcome could be taken as a wry comment on Christmas
    shopping and the primitive instincts it brings out in parents who are
    intent on keeping their kids up with the latest craze--but the game
    doesn't really do anything with that particular angle.) The result is
    distinctly reminiscent of Infocom's golden years in several respects;
    there's an initial premise, and the player is told to go forth and solve
    puzzles, most of which have no obvious connection to the ultimate goal,
    in hopes that things will work out in the end. On its terms, it works
    well--but as the trend in recent IF has been toward the integration of
    story and puzzles, NJAOB feels like something of a throwback.

    The puzzles--well, thereby hang quite a few tales. Most are quite
    clever; indeed, even those that are familiar in certain respects have
    original twists that help liven up the proceedings. There are some
    regrettable inclusions, in particular a fifteen puzzle--with a twist, to
    be sure, but it's still a fifteen puzzle in mechanics, and I dearly
    wished for a way to skip it--and several mazes, all of which have a
    twist of some sort, of course, but they're firmly within the maze
    category. Several are math-based, one (one of the first puzzles in the
    game) in a rather obscure way--and while some are straightforward,
    others come perilously close to read-the-author's-mind. On the other
    hand, most of the puzzles have a certain elegance--none, with the
    exception of a certain logic puzzle, are needlessly complicated--and a
    few require rather subtle lateral thinking. The layout of the game is
    distinctly "wide"--after the player solves the first few puzzles, dozens
    more are suddenly available all at once, so there are multiple
    puzzle-solving avenues to explore for most of the game. As with most
    "wide" games, however, there's an inherent frustration element--there
    may be many puzzles to solve, but it's distinctly possible (particularly
    toward the later stages of the game) that only one or two will be
    solvable at any particular moment, meaning that you may not have the
    tools to solve the problem you're currently struggling with. There's an
    in-game hint system that adapts nicely to your progress in the game,
    however, and which informs you if you're not yet ready to tackle a
    puzzle, so that's a saving grace. There's even one puzzle that depends
    on ASCII-art renderings for description-- and while the ASCII art is
    competently done, it feels like something of a betrayal to have largely
    textual IF give up on text at a key point. Moreover, as with many
    puzzle-fest games, the puzzles work only if you don't think about them
    too much--the technicians who set up the power and security systems for
    this shopping mall were either math Ph.D's or Games Magazine editors.

    Puzzle-fest IF has an inherent drawback that Ballerina addresses but
    doesn't entirely overcome. The problem is that the game can feel like a
    long slog, a series of Mensa-type puzzles without much in the way of
    reward along the way; if the story doesn't go anywhere when the player
    solves puzzles, and the only payoff is an object that's presumably
    useful for another puzzle somewhere, the whole exercise can turn
    wearisome after a while. Ballerina tries to overcome this in a rather
    unusual fashion: there's a subplot of sorts that periodically intrudes
    on the puzzle-solving in rather unexpected ways, so that now and again
    you're rewarded with some interesting and particularly well-described
    events that give your quest--well, not context as such, but something of
    a contrast. The subplot doesn't really withstand close scrutiny--the
    hows and whys are never resolved, or even touched, and some of the
    puzzle-solving associated with it owes more to whimsy than to sense--and
    yet it improves the game immeasurably, somehow; the incursion of the
    unexpected (and fantastic) leaves the player feeling like she's
    experienced something more than a doll-hunt. Suffice it to say that the
    story element lends the game a touch of wonder--and considering that the
    premise effectively requires breaking and entering on a grand scale,
    wonder is exactly what's needed here.

    The setting is vividly rendered, though the talents of a writer as
    gifted as this one aren't likely to be appreciated in this sort of game:
    there are few notable events with which to capture the player's
    imagination, and even the most skillful of room descriptions gets old
    after a hundred readings or so. The tone of the descriptions varies from
    sparing...

       The heavy structure of the shopping center stretches left and right
       from here. When you crane your neck the building seems almost to be
       leaning outward, as if it's in some danger of collapsing on top of
       you, or perhaps pouncing on you. Doubtless that's only a trick of the
       light. An arched entryway beckons to the south, above it the
       inscription

               FLOGG & GRABBY'S STUFFTOWN
                        EST. 1974

       carved in a pigeon-flecked substance that looks more like plaster
       than real stone. Running along the building above the arch is a
       covered-over exterior walkway.

    ...to faintly silly:

       You've never seen so many lamps in your life. Floor lamps, table
       lamps, gooseneck lamps, chandeliers, porch lights, track lighting --
       when God said, "Let there be light," whoever owns this shop said, "I
       can make a buck on that." The only exit is the door to the lower
       concourse on the east.

    The feel of a slightly seedy shopping mall is well conveyed, for example
    in the "pigeon-flecked substance" in the first description quoted above,
    and to the extent that the game has an overall tone, the tawdriness fits
    it well. Less well developed or apt is the eerie aspect, brought out in
    the "pouncing" bit here and in various references to shadows and gloom
    elsewhere; the writing is more than good enough to set a creepy scene,
    of course, but the tawdry-glitzy aspect and frequent lapses into
    goofiness (the above is hardly the only silly bit) undermine the effort.
    Again, though, given that the puzzles rather than the setting and story
    are the focus of attention here, it's hardly a major drawback. The
    overall feel of playing Ballerina is hard to convey concisely; there's a
    temptation to simply ignore the setting and view the game as a set of
    puzzles, given the number and variety of those puzzles. Most players are
    likely to initially absorb the well-described setting, but increasingly
    disregard it as they start tackling the puzzles, and the extent to which
    the tone and style of the game stays with the player consequently
    varies.

    Technically, everything works well here--admirably well, considering the
    size (a 500K-plus Z8 file) of the game and the vast numbers of objects.
    The rucksack stand-in, appropriately enough a shopping bag, isn't
    flawless--I spent more time than I wanted to fiddling with it, and the
    game doesn't provide for things like automatically taking a key out of
    the bag in order to unlock a door. The same problem recurs elsewhere;
    several places where modern-day IF veterans might expect the game to
    supply inferences don't make such inferences, which can be frustrating.
    Still, it's good enough, and most of the glitches I noticed were minor
    details rather than game-stoppers. The hint system is quite well
    done--the adaptive aspect worked perfectly--and several puzzles have
    reasonably logical alternative solutions.

    If Ballerina suffers as a game-playing experience, then, it's less
    because it doesn't succeed in what it set out to do than because its
    genre isn't in critical vogue these days, if a field as sparse as IF
    criticism can be said to have a vogue. The PC is largely a cipher, the
    story intermittent and largely without momentum, the NPCs fairly
    cardboard--in short, the game exists largely for the sake of the
    puzzles, rather than trying to create an immersive experience through
    the story. It's far more difficult--virtually impossible, even--to make
    a puzzle-centered game immersive in the same way, and in that Ballerina
    occasionally requires that the player draw on outside knowledge of one
    form or another, it doesn't really try for immersion as such. The
    expectations of IF players in this day and age have been shaped by so
    many moral ambiguities, unreliable narrators, branching plots, and the
    like that the puzzle-oriented nature of Ballerina may prove
    unsatisfying.

    On the whole, then, Ballerina fits its genre admirably, and the player
    who doesn't ask it to be more than a puzzle-fest will not be
    disappointed. The puzzles are difficult, but largely fair, and they
    boast a wealth of originality. It has some minor flaws, but it's worth
    checking out.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    From: Francesco Bova

    NAME: Perilous Magic
    AUTHOR: David Fillmore
    EMAIL:  Noslwop SP@G Hotmail.Com
    DATE: June, 1999 ????
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/permagic.z5

    3 rooms, 2 characters, 8 tangible objects, and 1 joke; that's all that
    there is to David Fillmore's 1999 offering Perilous Magic. Perilous
    Magic is one of a growing number of 'bite-sized' pieces of non-COMP IF
    that have become quite popular over the last year. 'Bite-sized' IF is
    interesting in that there's usually one convention that's being pushed
    or one joke that's being promoted and the games are typically finishable
    in a few minutes. Often, these smaller games are a nice break away from
    the bigger pieces out there that can seem more laborious than fun to
    finish.

    Perilous Magic takes place in the Zork/Enchanter universe and is
    entirely built around a historical reference from the accompanying
    material in the Infocom game Enchanter. The game actually reminded me a
    bit of the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, where the story
    of Hamlet is told from the confused perspective of the aforementioned
    bit players. With Perilous Magic, we look at a bit of Zorkian history --
    specifically the misuse of a spell resulting in disaster -- through the
    eyes of the person who caused the disaster. The puzzles are straight
    forward and the goal easy to attain. The end result is amusing but alas,
    even for 'bite-sized' IF, the game is a little too sparse with many
    interesting options left untouched.

    Most of the problems revolve around not putting enough effort into
    coding objects. As I'd mentioned previously, there are roughly 8
    tangible objects in this game. 2 of these objects are Enchanter-like
    spell scrolls that are implemented using Graham Nelson's source code for
    Balances. One of the spells is a stand-alone spell that can't be cast on
    anything while the other spell can be cast on objects and people with
    interesting effects. You can imagine my chagrin then, when I started
    getting the dreaded non-default response, 'The spell fades and fizzles'
    when I cast the spell on objects that were part of the game's scenery.
    Considering the scope of Perilous Magic, it left me wondering whether it
    would really have taken much more energy to implement a few creative
    results.

    There were similar problems with the game producing too many default
    messages for actions that should have had less than ordinary responses.
    This was especially true in areas where I felt a good snarky comeback
    would have been easy to come up with. I realize it's tough to come up
    with good non-default responses for everything, but we're not talking
    about a game the size of Jigsaw here. We're talking about 8 objects, and
    1 NPC. Spells should never fade and fizzle in this universe and towering
    stacks of paper, precariously positioned on the corner of your desk
    should not be hardly movable when pushed.

    I know a few of you readers are probably asking why I'm being so tough
    on Perilous Magic for its poorly 'padded' objects when it was obviously
    intended to be nothing more than a small diversion and considering the
    fact that a lot of smaller games are conceived of, programmed, and
    released all in the span of an hour or two, and in those cases polish
    isn't particularly important (take Speed IF for example). Well consider
    this oddity: If you download the latest version of Perilous Magic,
    you'll find that you've download version 10 (yes, 10) of the game. How
    is it a game the size of Perilous Magic has been updated 10 times while
    larger games like The Mulldoon Legacy and Enemies only need 3 or 4
    releases? The point is that after 10 updates of a 3-room game, I expect
    to see non-defaults for every action I can think of let alone the
    obvious ones. If I try to squeeze my desk, jump over my co-worker, or
    kiss my report something interesting had better happen in every
    instance! Hmmm... that's going a little overboard (well actually more
    than a little...), but I think you catch my drift.

    Non-default problems aside, Fillmore seems to have promise as an author
    because of his good sense of humor. In fact, Perilous Magic's INFO
    section (much like in his '99 IFCOMP release) is as memorable as the
    game because of it. Fillmore also seems to grasp the basics of
    programming Inform well enough and even pulls a few neat tricks straight
    out of the Inform manual including a little Microsoft Windows sound that
    goes off when you get points (at least I heard them using Winfrotz).
    Still, quirky sounds, a good INFO section, and flashy quotes can't
    disguise the fact that their isn't much flesh on this skeleton and it
    all left me wondering what might have been had Fillmore focused his
    attention more on the game and less on the bells and whistles.

    When you reference your IF heavily to the Zork/Enchanter series there
    will always be comparisons drawn. The question is then, does Perilous
    Magic successfully qualify as a new chapter in the wonderful
    Zork/Enchanter anthology (like perhaps Nate Cull's game Frobozz Magic
    Support)? Nah, it's more like an extension to an existing footnote, but
    probably still worth the download if you have five minutes to kill.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    From: Christian Baker

    TITLE: Shrapnel
    AUTHOR: Adam Cadre
    E-MAIL: ac SP@G adamcadre.ac
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/shrapnel.z5

    Shrapnel is weird. Really weird. I just want to get that out in the
    open. Shrapnel seems less like a game, more like an idea that Adam Cadre
    had been mulling around. The question on r-g-i-f is, is Adam Cadre a
    genius or a madman. I’m settling for genius, but as Andrew Plotkin said,
    "If he snaps and starts barbecuing the neighbors, of course, we'll have
    to pencil in some corrections."

    Shrapnel starts off outside the classic Zork White house, but it’s soon
    obvious that this is no Zork clone. Or any clone of anything ever made.
    You go north, you get eaten by vicious attack dogs. I try to quit,
    seeing that this is just another "One room death" game. I start typing
    QUIT, and find to my surprise that the game is forcing me to type
    RESTART. I go north from the original location, and find that another
    location has opened up. And so on. And so forth. I felt like the game
    was leading me round the (extremely strange) plot, and it seemed like it
    was just a matter of time before I completed it.

    But on the brighter side, the writing and room descriptions were
    excellent. A good example is:

       In the pines
       As you proceed along the path, the light trickling in through the
       treetops seems to grow brighter, as if it had been sunrise and not
       sunset when you began. And the trees... this isn't North Carolina
       anymore. This is, what? Maryland? Pennsylvania? You'd think a man
       would notice walking two hundred miles, but apparently not.

       You hear voices in the distance.

       "Hey, Green," says the first one. Even this is enough for you to
       pinpoint the accent: Carolina. So you're not caught behind enemy
       lines. Good to know.

       "Yeah?" says someone, presumably Green. There was a Green in your
       regiment, you recall. Common enough name to be coincidence, though.
       "Have you been helped?"

    The characters are a bit underdeveloped, but what do you expect from a
    game you can complete in under 10 minutes? What this game does best is
    unsettle you. The whole game has an extremely eerie atmosphere, and half
    of that is due to the strange plot (or lack of a plot, I’m not sure
    which.) The other half is due to some Adam Cadre writing, and the
    strange ignoring of player input. It really adds something to the game,
    and gives the feeling of a total lack of control. All in all, the game
    is short and pointless, but darn enjoyable for a short while.

    =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

    From: Duncan Stevens

    It's science fiction! It's a split-identity story! It's a war story!
    It's a parody of Zork! It's a satire! It's Adam Cadre's Shrapnel, the
    weirdest bit of IF to come down the pike in quite some time, and there
    are enough things going on here to drive several full-length games (this
    one takes about 15-20 minutes, though). The ideas are interesting, but
    there's not much polish here--mostly, we only get the ideas. Still,
    Adam's ideas are better than most, and the game does has its intriguing
    moments.

    To try to describe the plot of Shrapnel would be a thoroughly futile
    endeavor, because the point is that the story doesn't travel in any
    discernible path: rather, you come across fragments of story here and
    there, and what exactly is going on isn't apparent until the end, when a
    character appears and infodumps all over you. Even then, it may not be
    fully clear how everything fits together--there are still plenty of hows
    and whys left unresolved for those who care about such things. Moreover,
    there are quite a few memorable images and surprising moments, meaning
    that you might remember and be affected by certain bits of Shrapnel even
    if you never tried to put the various story pieces together.

    Shrapnel might in fact be remembered more for its meta-IF elements than
    its actual story. For one thing, this is the first work of IF to
    actually ignore keystrokes--not disregard a command, but actually ignore
    that the player is typing something and show something else as the
    input. What's shown is 'restart,' no matter what the player types, at
    the restore/restart/quit prompt, though restart generally continues the
    story from where it left off rather than starting from scratch.
    Moreover, pauses are an essential part of the presentation of the text,
    again a meta-IF function that may catch the IF veteran off guard.
    Similarly innovative is "talk" as a conversation system: you direct your
    conversation toward whoever you're paying attention to, usually the
    person you last interacted with, and you're given a choice between
    accepting or rejecting a proposed rhetorical sally; if you refuse, your
    character says something else, something you have no way of predicting.
    The fragmentary aspect, the variety of apparently unrelated plotlines,
    is reflected in the text itself, which now and again spits out
    disjointed words and phrases that have already appeared elsewhere.

    All these are intriguing, even subversive takes on IF as we've known it
    up to now, but--I know, I know, this is a hangup of mine--they also
    reduce the interactivity aspect down to just about zero. In something as
    short and disjointed as Shrapnel, the immersion factor is minimal
    anyway--by the time the player has figured out what's going on in the
    story, the story's over--and when the game commandeers the keyboard, the
    player is justified in thinking, well, why do you need me here, tapping
    on the keyboard? Why don't you just let everything scroll by me at once?
    Certainly, there's interaction of a sort here, even if it's forced:
    being powerless to stop the course of the story is an integral part of
    the experience, of course (though it's still possible to quit at prompts
    other than restart/restore/quit), but, again if you can't figure out
    what story is being told, it's hard to get all worked up about not being
    able to stop it. The limited control over the conversation system is
    similar: if the player's only control over what's said is a veto on one
    conversational option, the character may as well just start talking.
    (Admittedly, there are several people the player can talk to, but the
    choices aren't exclusive--were this rewritten as static fiction and the
    conversations simply written out, one character after another, the
    effect wouldn't be dramatically different. There are a few effects that
    couldn't be reproduced in static fiction: notably, you die repeatedly
    over the course of the story, and the place is littered with your own
    corpses by the end--but it's questionable how much impact that has on
    the story when the player's likely reaction to the deaths is something
    on the order of "huh?" It's not that there are no choices to be made in
    Shrapnel, but the choices there are affect the outcome so minimally that
    the result is closer to F than IF.

    Still, in its own way, this is pretty good F; the effect may be that of
    an early draft of a novel, with ideas, themes, and character development
    all fighting for space, but it looks like it would be a fascinating
    novel. Notably, the protagonist is split between two separate
    identities, and piecing together the way those identities is an
    intriguing challenge. (Of course, given the rampant confusion, the
    player isn't likely to make much headway in separating out those
    identities by the end of the story, but there's definite replay
    potential.) On the figurative level, the numerous violent deaths you
    experience are a precursor to the pain that your character inflicts, and
    you could even say that you're desensitized to the violence sufficiently
    that it doesn't have much effect on you, the player, after a while. (A
    similar process seems to have gone on with the character himself.) The
    Zork parody element--Shrapnel is set in and around a white house, and
    the living room has a rug with a trap door under it--brings out the
    ho-hum-more-violent-deaths aspect, since one hallmark of traditional
    fantasy IF is dying violently so many times that *You have died* has
    zero emotional impact. The core of the story, involving a dysfunctional
    family and abuse, is vividly and disturbingly rendered: the abuse is
    sufficiently distanced from you (you hear accounts of it rather than
    actually seeing it--that your sense of culpability is minimized, which
    is exactly the effect that the character himself has achieved. The way
    you seem to find horrific violence around every corner is a direct
    reflection of the nature of the story: the events that have already
    transpired have left unsightly secrets everywhere. The science-fiction
    aspect that appears at the end of the story, in an apparent attempt to
    make a bit of sense of the demented structure of the story, feels a bit
    tacked on, but it doesn't diminish the impact of what's come before.

    In its own way, then, Shrapnel is quite a story, and that it's less
    interactive fiction than a forced march isn't a major drawback, in the
    end. It's certainly not easy to make sense of what goes on, nor is it
    particularly pleasant, but it's still an impres precursor to the
    paindown to just about zerooff guardfragmentary aspectdemented
    structureseems to have gone onho-humrhetorical sallytacked onrampantbits
    of Shrapneldisregard a commandscratchdiscernible pathculpability*you
    have died* [Hit any key to exit.]

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    From: Duncan Stevens

    TITLE: A Simple Theft
    AUTHOR: Mark Musante
    E-MAIL: olorin SP@G world.std.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/quick.zip
    VERSION: Release 1

    Mark Musante's A Simple Theft is indeed simple: you're apprenticed to a
    fellow who wants to retrieve a jewel from a castle, and you're sent in
    to do the deed--but it's a nice small game nonetheless, with just a few
    puzzles and a fairly thoroughly done backstory. The setting is fantasy,
    but magic at this point is not under control--your master is hoping to
    find something that would help in control it--and the incursion of magic
    at an entirely unexpected point in the story, and your discovery that a
    certain object has magical properties, therefore fit the plot nicely:
    you have no special insight into or control over magic, so you're not
    expecting it when it appears.

    The technical aspect, while mostly good, isn't flawless: one puzzle is
    marred by what I consider a major design flaw (it turns on using an
    object that you're told you can't pick up), and a key object is rather
    confusingly described. Still, in a game this small, there's only so much
    that can go radically wrong, and on the whole the coding is fairly
    solid. Likewise, the writing is more than good enough to tell the story,
    and it's pretty funny in spots as well.

    A Simple Theft feels like an introduction to a longer game--in
    particular, your boss, who's barely a character in this one, is an
    intriguing character who deserves more development in a longer, more
    in-depth game. Indeed, the ending text suggests that there's more to
    come: the story doesn't feel at all complete. For one thing, most of the
    names dropped in the introduction remain dropped--they're not explained
    anywhere--suggesting that the author intends to make something more of
    the world introduced here. The PC is worth fleshing out as well--it's
    intimated that you're a thief, but you don't learn anything about how
    you learned your trade or how you came to be apprenticed to your boss.

    In short, A Simple Theft is a nice preview of what could be an
    intriguing full-length game. Should there be a followup, it'll certainly
    be worth a look.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    From: Robb Sherwin

    NAME: Skyranch
    AUTHOR: Jack Driscoll
    E-MAIL: slackerbox SP@G snet.net
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: DOS, custom
    SUPPORTS:
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition99/skyranch/skyranch.exe
    VERSION: 1

    Professionalism.

    With over a hundred new text adventures being written every year and
    excellent libraries, documentation, and newsgroup help available, it's
    perfectly reasonable to have expectations of the games we choose to
    play. The thing is, it doesn't always work out that way. Skyranch is
    completely lacking in professionalism. Many have stated that it did not
    appear as if the author was a native speaker of English. Valid, perhaps,
    but there has always been a percentage of the population that simply
    does not come across as fast, competent and skilled when it comes to the
    electronic word. We have all seen "the first e-mail" from our otherwise
    intelligent computer-newbie friends that looks like it was typed by a
    mentally handicapped, three-fingered snow ape. This is the type of voice
    Skyranch speaks with. We're actually somewhat lucky that the game is not
    written all in caps.

    The game definitely has potential. It's about an experiment in the sky.
    As a survivalist type, you have signed yourself up to take part in the
    skyranch project. The real challenge isn't dealing with the lack of
    oxygen and air pressure as so much as being unable to concentrate on
    anything other than the dreadful sounds of heavy machinery.

    One verb will usually do it for Skyranch. If Driscoll was made aware of
    the concept of synonym he no doubt thought, "bah! Who needs 'em?"
    Unfortunately, this does not bode well for the player. You absolutely
    have to go into the game with the understanding that the game's
    vocabulary is slightly better than Mystery House, second-level verbs
    are not going to be referenced and guessing the verb won't help you as
    much as getting a thesaurus and typing in alternate ways to express
    "exit" one by one.

    The thing is, it's often extremely amusing to place yourself in a
    literary world where the author is not a superb writer of English. (The
    Walter Miller Home Page, or Fat Chicks In Party Hats website, for
    instance.) Driscoll's game offers this style of appeal. His description
    for the robot that follows you around ("Lloyd 2.0") ends with the robot
    telling you, "I will love you always." This apparently sincere
    expression of emotion in a sea of poor spelling and incorrectly used
    homonyms is *funny*. No one, short of the author of Annoyotron, really
    goes out and attempts to make a bad game. The unexpectedness of Lloyd
    2.0 can at least produce a chuckle. Realizing that the author does care
    about the game can shock you into seeing it differently. More, the
    game's concept, at least, is not completely without merit. Sure, it's no
    Trinity -- hell, it's not even Punkirita Quest, but Skyranch contains a
    small bit of style to keep it from otherwise being a *complete* waste of
    time.

    Unfortunately, the lack of a decent parser really does damn the game.
    Exiting the ferry is not accomplished by "exit" or "out" or "get out of
    ferry" -- it is done by typing "leave." Although making those sort of
    breakthroughs allow you to continue to play the game, you can't
    effectively experience it in one sitting unless you are blessed with the
    gift of telepathy (and, er, have Mr. Driscoll sitting next to you within
    your effective mental range). Skyranch would be most effective -- and
    most entertaining -- if Driscoll collaborated with an experienced TADS
    or Inform programmer. Any sort of spell checking would absolutely ruin
    the game's charm, but being able to navigate the game's world is a must.
    Until that time, Skyranch's appeal is limited to the sort of player that
    enjoyed Space Aliens Laughed At My Cardigan, Symetry, and Human
    Resources Stories.

    READERS' SCOREBOARD -------------------------------------------------------

    The Readers' Scoreboard is an ongoing feature of SPAG. It charts the
    scores that SPAG readers and reviewers have given to various IF games
    since SPAG started up. The codes in the Notes column give information as
    to a game's availability and the platforms on which it runs. For a
    translation of these codes and for more detailed information on the
    scoreboard's format, see the SPAG FAQ. This FAQ is available at the
    ftp.gmd.de IF-archive or on the SPAG web page at
    http://www.sparkynet.com/spag.

    Name                    Avg Sc    Chr     Puz    # Sc  Issue Notes:
    ====                    ======    ===     ===    ====  ===== ======
    Aayela                    7.4     1.2     1.5       5     10 F_TAD_GMD
    Acid Whiplash             5.3     0.6     0.2       3     17 F_INF_GMD
    Acorn Court               6.1     0.5     1.5       2     12 F_INF_GMD
    Adv. of Elizabeth Hig     3.1     0.5     0.3       2      5 F_AGT_GMD
    Adventure (all varian     6.3     0.6     1.0       9      8 F_INF_TAD_ETC_GMD
    Adventureland             3.9     0.5     1.4       3        F_INF_GMD
    Afternoon Visit           4.1     1.0     0.8       1        F_AGT
    Aisle                     6.6     1.4     0.2       7     18 F_INF_GMD
    Alien Abduction?          7.5     1.3     1.4       5     10 F_TAD_GMD
    All Quiet...Library       5.0     0.9     0.9       6      7 F_INF_GMD
    Amnesia                   7.4     1.5     1.4       3      9 C_AP_I_64
    Anchorhead                8.6     1.7     1.5      16     18 F_INF_GMD
    Another...No Beer         2.4     0.2     0.8       2      4 S10_I_GMD
    Arrival                   8.1     1.3     1.5       4     17 F_TAD_GMD
    Arthur: Excalibur         8.0     1.3     1.6       4  4, 14 C_INF
    Aunt Nancy's House        1.3     0.1     0.0       2        F_INF_GMD
    Awakened                  7.7     1.7     1.6       1
    Awakening                 5.6     0.9     1.1       2 15, 18 F_INF_GMD
    Awe-Chasm                 3.0     0.7     0.7       2      8 S_I_ST_GMD
    Babel                     8.5     1.8     1.3       6     13 F_INF_GMD
    Balances                  6.6     0.7     1.2       8      6 F_INF_GMD
    Ballyhoo                  7.3     1.5     1.5       6      4 C_INF
    Bear's Night Out          7.6     1.4     1.3       3     13 F_INF_GMD
    Beat The Devil            6.0     1.2     1.1       3     19 F_INF_GMD
    Beyond the Tesseract      3.7     0.1     0.6       1      6 F_I_GMD
    Beyond Zork               8.1     1.5     1.8       7  5, 14 C_INF
    BJ Drifter                7.3     1.3     1.2       3     15 F_INF_GMD
    Bliss                     5.7     1.2     0.6       3     20 F_TAD_GMD
    Bloodline                 7.2     1.7     1.2       1     15 F_INF_GMD
    Border Zone               7.2     1.4     1.4       7      4 C_INF
    Break-In                  6.1     1.1     1.4       3        F_INF_GMD
    Broken String             3.9     0.7     0.4       4        F_TADS_GMD
    BSE                       5.7     0.9     1.0       3        F_INF_GMD
    Bureaucracy               6.9     1.5     1.3       9      5 C_INF
    Busted                    5.2     1.0     1.1       1        F_INF_GMD
    Calliope                  4.7     0.9     0.8       3        F_INF_GMD
    Cask                      1.5     0.0     0.5       2        F_INF_GMD
    Castaway                  1.1     0.0     0.4       1      5 F_I_GMD
    Castle Elsinore           4.3     0.7     1.0       2        I_GMD
    CC                        4.2     0.4     1.0       1        F_ALAN_GMD
    Change in the Weather     7.6     1.0     1.4      11 7,8,14 F_INF_GMD
    Chaos                     5.6     1.3     1.1       2        F_TAD_GMD
    Chicken under Window      6.9     0.6     0.0       3        F_INF_GMD
    Chicks Dig Jerks          5.6     1.2     0.6       6     19 F_INF_GMD
    Christminster             8.3     1.7     1.6      13     20 F_INF_GMD
    City                      6.1     0.6     1.3       2     17 F_INF_GMD
    Coke Is It!               6.2     1.0     1.0       2        F_INF_GMD
    Coming Home               0.6     0.1     0.1       1        F_INF_GMD
    Common Ground             7.4     1.8     0.8       1     20 F_TAD_GMD
    Commute                   1.3     0.2     0.1       1        F_I_GMD
    Congratulations!          2.6     0.7     0.3       1        F_INF_GMD
    Corruption                7.2     1.6     1.0       4     14 C_MAG
    Cosmoserve                7.8     1.4     1.4       5      5 F_AGT_GMD
    Crypt v2.0                5.0     1.0     1.5       1      3 S12_IBM_GMD
    Curses                    8.2     1.2     1.7      15      2 F_INF_GMD
    Cutthroats                5.7     1.3     1.1       9      1 C_INF
    Dampcamp                  5.0     0.8     1.1       3        F_TAD_GMD
    Day For Soft Food         7.1     1.0     1.4       4     19 F_INF_GMD
    Deadline                  6.8     1.3     1.3       8     20 C_INF
    Death To My Enemies       4.7     1.1     0.7       3        F_INF_GMD
    Deep Space Drifter        5.6     0.4     1.1       3      3 S15_TAD_GMD
    Deephome                  5.9     0.7     0.9       1        F_INF_GMD
    Delusions                 7.9     1.5     1.5       5      14F_INF_GMD
    Demon's Tomb              7.4     1.2     1.1       2      9 C_I
    Detective                 1.0     0.0     0.0       9 4,5,18 F_AGT_INF_GMD
    Detective-MST3K           5.7     1.0     0.1       8 7,8,18 F_INF_GMD
    Ditch Day Drifter         6.7     0.9     1.7       4      2 F_TAD_GMD
    Down                      6.0     1.0     1.2       1     14 F_HUG_GMD
    Downtown Tokyo            5.7     0.8     0.9       4     17 F_INF_GMD
    Dungeon                   7.4     1.5     1.6       1        F_GMD
    Dungeon Adventure         6.8     1.3     1.6       1      4 F_ETC
    Dungeon of Dunjin         6.0     0.7     1.5       5  3, 14 S20_IBM_MAC_GMD
    Edifice                   8.3     1.6     1.8       6     13 F_INF_GMD
    Electrabot                0.7     0.0     0.0       1      5 F_AGT_GMD
    E-Mailbox                 3.1     0.1     0.2       2        F_AGT_GMD
    Emy Discovers Life        4.6     1.1     0.7       2        F_AGT
    Enchanter                 7.3     1.0     1.5       8   2,15 C_INF
    Enhanced                  5.0     1.0     1.3       2      2 S10_TAD_GMD
    Enlightenment             7.1     1.3     1.6       2     17 F_INF_GMD
    Erehwon                   6.1     1.1     1.4       3     19 F_TAD_GMD
    Eric the Unready          7.8     1.5     1.6       4        C_I
    Everybody Loves a Par     7.7     1.3     1.2       2     12 F_TAD_GMD
    Exhibition                5.6     1.1     0.4       3     19 F_TAD_GMD
    Fable                     2.0     0.1     0.1       3      6 F_AGT_GMD
    Fable-MST3K               4.1     0.7     0.1       2        F_AGT_INF_GMD
    Fear                      6.3     1.2     1.3       3     10 F_INF_GMD
    Fifteen                   1.5     0.5     0.4       1     17 F_INF_GMD
    Firebird                  7.2     1.6     1.2       3     15 F_TAD_GMD
    Fish                      7.5     1.3     1.7       4 12, 14 C_MAG
    Foggywood Hijinx          6.2     1.2     1.3       3        F_TAD_GMD
    Foom                      6.6     1.0     1.0       1        F_TAD_GMD
    For A Change              7.8     1.0     1.5       4     19 F_INF_GMD
    Forbidden Castle          4.8     0.6     0.5       1        C_AP
    Four In One               4.4     1.2     0.5       2        F_TAD_GMD
    Four Seconds              6.0     1.2     1.1       2        F_TAD_GMD
    Frenetic Five             5.3     1.4     0.5       3     13 F_TAD_GMD
    Frenetic Five 2           6.6     1.5     1.1       2        F_TAD_GMD
    Friday Afternoon          6.3     1.4     1.2       1     13 F_INF_GMD
    Frobozz Magic Support     7.2     1.2     1.5       3        F_TAD_GMD
    Frozen                    5.5     0.7     1.3       1        F_INF_GMD
    Frustration               5.7     1.1     0.9       1        F_TAD_GMD
    Gateway                   8.3     1.3     1.7       5     11 C_I
    Gateway 2: Homeworld      9.0     1.7     1.9       2        C_I
    Glowgrass                 6.9     1.4     1.4       4     13 F_INF_GMD
    Gnome Ranger              5.8     1.2     1.6       1        C_I
    Golden Fleece             6.0     1.0     1.1       1        F_TAD_GMD
    Golden Wombat of Dest     6.3     0.7     1.1       1     18 F_I_GMD
    Good Breakfast            4.9     0.9     1.2       2     14 F_INF_GMD
    Great Archeolog. Race     6.5     1.0     1.5       1      3 S20_TAD_GMD
    Guardians of Infinity     8.5             1.3       1      9 C_I
    Guild of Thieves          6.9     1.2     1.5       4     14 C_MAG
    Guilty Bastards           6.9     1.4     1.2       5        F_HUG_GMD
    Gumshoe                   6.3     1.0     1.1       6      9 F_INF_GMD
    Halothane                 6.9     1.3     1.3       3     19 F_INF_GMD
    HeBGB Horror              5.7     0.9     1.1       2        F_ALAN_GMD
    Heist                     6.7     1.4     1.5       2        F_INF_GMD
    Hero, Inc.                6.8     1.0     1.5       2        F_TAD_GMD
    Hitchhiker's Guide        7.2     1.3     1.5      13      5 C_INF
    Hollywood Hijinx          6.5     0.9     1.6      11        C_INF
    Holy Grail                6.2     0.9     1.2       1        F_TAD_GMD
    Horror of Rylvania        7.2     1.4     1.4       5      1 F_TAD_GMD
    Horror30.zip              3.7     0.3     0.7       2      3 S20_I_GMD
    Human Resources Stori     0.9     0.0     0.1       2     17 F_INF_GMD
    Humbug                    6.9     1.6     1.4       3     11 F_I_GMD
    Hunter, In Darkness       8.1     1.0     1.5       4     19 F_INF_GMD
    I didn't know...yodel     4.0     0.7     1.0       5     17 F_I_GMD
    I-0: Jailbait on Inte     7.5     1.5     1.3      11     20 F_INF_GMD
    Ice Princess              7.5     1.4     1.6       2        A_INF_GMD
    In The End                4.9     0.6     0.0       2     10 F_INF_GMD
    In The Spotlight          3.2     0.2     1.0       2     17 F_INF_GMD
    Infidel                   6.9     0.2     1.4      13      1 C_INF
    Informatory               5.5     0.5     1.3       1     17 F_INF_GMD
    Ingrid's Back             5.6     1.6     1.2       1        C_I
    Inheritance               5.2     0.5     1.0       2     20 F_TAD_GMD
    Inhumane                  4.4     0.4     1.0       3  9, 20 F_INF_GMD
    Intruder                  6.7     1.3     1.1       4     20 F_INF_GMD
    Jacaranda Jim             7.9     0.9     1.0       2        F_GMD
    Jacks...Aces To Win       7.6     1.6     1.3       2     19 F_INF_GMD
    Jewel of Knowledge        6.3     1.2     1.1       3     18 F_INF_GMD
    Jeweled Arena             7.0     1.4     1.3       2        AGT_GMD
    Jigsaw                    8.2     1.5     1.5      13    8,9 F_INF_GMD
    Jinxter                   6.1     0.9     1.3       3        C_MAG
    John's Fire Witch         6.8     1.1     1.6       8  4, 12 S6_TADS_GMD
    Jouney Into Xanth         5.0     1.3     1.2       1      8 F_AGT_GMD
    Journey                   7.2     1.5     1.3       5      5 C_INF
    King Arthur's Night O     5.6     1.0     0.9       3     19 F_ALAN_GMD
    Kissing the Buddha's      8.0     1.8     1.4       5     10 F_TAD_GMD
    Klaustrophobia            6.4     1.1     1.3       6      1 S15_AGT_GMD
    Knight Orc                7.2     1.4     1.1       2     15 C_I
    L.U.D.I.T.E.              1.9     0.2     0.0       3        F_INF_GMD
    Lancelot                  6.9     1.4     1.2       1        C_I
    Land Beyond Picket Fe     4.8     1.2     1.2       1     10 F_I_GMD
    Leather Goddesses         6.9     1.3     1.5      10      4 C_INF
    Leaves                    3.4     0.2     0.8       1     14 F_ALAN_GMD
    Legend Lives!             8.2     1.2     1.4       4      5 F_TAD_GMD
    Lesson of the Tortois     7.1     1.4     1.4       4     14 F_TAD_GMD
    Lethe Flow Phoenix        6.9     1.4     1.5       5      9 F_TAD_GMD
    Life on Beal Street       4.7     1.2     0.0       2        F_TAD_GMD
    Light: Shelby's Adden     7.5     1.5     1.3       6      9 S_TAD_GMD
    Lightiania                1.9     0.2     0.4       1        F_INF_GMD
    Lists and Lists           6.3     1.3     1.1       3     10 F_INF_GMD
    Little Blue Men           8.4     1.4     1.5       7     17 F_INF_GMD
    Lomalow                   4.8     1.2     0.5       2     19 F_INF_GMD
    Losing Your Grip          8.5     1.4     1.4       6      14S20_TAD_GMD
    Lost New York             7.9     1.4     1.4       4     20 S12_TAD_GMD
    Lost Spellmaker           6.9     1.5     1.3       3     13 F_INF_GMD
    Lunatix: Insanity Cir     5.6     1.2     1.0       3        F_I_GMD
    Lurking Horror            7.2     1.3     1.3      15    1,3 C_INF
    MacWesleyan / PC Univ     4.9     0.6     1.2       2        F_TAD_GMD
    Madame L'Estrange...      5.1     1.2     0.7       1     13 F_INF_GMD
    Magic Toyshop             5.2     1.1     1.1       5      7 F_INF_GMD
    Magic.zip                 4.5     0.5     0.5       1      3 S20_IBM_GMD
    Maiden of the Moonlig     6.4     1.3     1.5       2     10 F_TAD_GMD
    Matter of Time            1.4     0.3     1.4       1      14F_ALAN_GMD
    Mercy                     7.3     1.4     1.2       6     12 F_INF_GMD
    Meteor...Sherbet          7.9     1.5     1.6       5 10, 12 F_INF_GMD
    Mind Electric             5.2     0.6     0.9       4    7,8 F_INF_GMD
    Mind Forever Voyaging     8.2     1.3     0.9      12   5,15 C_INF
    Mission                   6.0     1.2     1.4       1        F_TAD_GMD
    Moist                     6.8     1.4     1.2       4        F_TAD_GMD
    Moment of Hope            5.0     1.3     0.3       3     19 F_TAD_GMD
    Moonmist                  5.9     1.2     1.0      14      1 C_INF
    Mop & Murder              5.0     0.9     1.0       2      5 F_AGT_GMD
    Mother Loose              7.0     1.5     1.3       2     17 F_INF_GMD
    Mulldoon Legacy           7.4     1.2     1.8       1        F_INF_GMD
    Multidimen. Thief         5.6     0.5     1.3       6    2,9 S15_AGT_GMD
    Muse                      7.5     1.5     1.1       3     17 F_INF_GMD
    Music Education           3.7     1.0     0.7       3        F_INF_GMD
    Myopia                    6.1     1.3     0.6       2        F_AGT_GMD
    Mystery House             4.1     0.3     0.7       1        F_AP_GMD
    New Day                   6.6     1.4     1.1       4     13 F_INF_GMD
    Night At Computer Cen     5.2     1.0     1.0       2        F_INF_GMD
    Night at Museum Forev     4.2     0.3     1.0       4    7,8 F_TAD_GMD
    Night of... Bunnies       6.6     1.0     1.4       1        I_INF_GMD
    9:05                      4.9     0.4     0.6       2     20 F_INF_GMD
    Nord and Bert             5.9     0.6     1.1       8      4 C_INF
    Not Just A Game           6.9     1.0     1.3       1     20 F_INF_GMD
    Not Just... Ballerina     6.3     1.0     1.1       2     20 F_INF_GMD
    Obscene...Aardvarkbar     3.2     0.6     0.6       1        F_TAD_GMD
    Odieus...Flingshot        3.3     0.4     0.7       2      5 F_INF_GMD
    Of Forms Unknown          4.5     0.7     0.5       1     10 F_INF_GMD
    Offensive Probing         4.2     0.6     0.9       1        F_INF_GMD
    On The Farm               6.5     1.6     1.2       2     19 F_TAD_GMD
    Once and Future           6.9     1.6     1.5       2     16 C30_TAD_CMP
    One That Got Away         6.5     1.4     1.0       6    7,8 F_TAD_GMD
    Only After Dark           4.6     0.8     0.7       3        F_INF_GMD
    Oo-Topos                  5.7     0.2     1.0       1      9 C_AP_I_64
    Outsided                  2.5     0.7     0.2       2        F_INF_GMD
    Pass the Banana           2.9     0.8     0.5       3     19 F_INF_GMD
    Path to Fortune           6.6     1.5     0.9       3      9 S_INF_GMD
    Pawn                      6.3     1.1     1.3       2     12 C_MAG
    Perilous Magic            4.9     0.9     1.1       1     20 F_INF_GMD
    Perseus & Andromeda       3.4     0.3     1.0       1        64_INF_GMD
    Persistence of Memory     6.2     1.2     1.1       1     17 F_HUG_GMD
    Phlegm                    5.2     1.2     1.0       2     10 F_INF_GMD
    Photopia                  7.3     1.5     0.8      13     17 F_INF_GMD
    Phred Phontious...Piz     5.2     0.9     1.3       2     13 F_INF_GMD
    Piece of Mind             6.3     1.3     1.4       1     10 F_INF_GMD
    Pintown                   1.3     0.3     0.2       1        F_INF_GMD
    Planetfall                7.2     1.6     1.4      11      4 C_INF
    Plant                     7.3     1.2     1.5       4     17 F_TAD_GMD
    Plundered Hearts          7.3     1.4     1.2       8      4 C_INF
    Poor Zefron's Almanac     5.8     1.2     1.3       2     13 F_TAD_GMD
    Portal                    7.0     1.8     0.0       2        C_I_A_AP_64
    Purple                    5.6     0.9     1.0       1     17 F_INF_GMD
    Pyramids of Mars          6.0     1.2     1.2       1        AGT_GMD
    Quarterstaff              6.1     1.3     0.6       1      9 C_M
    Ralph                     7.1     1.6     1.2       3     10 F_INF_GMD
    Remembrance               2.8     1.0     0.1       2        F_GMD
    Reruns                    5.2     1.2     1.2       1        AGT_GMD
    Research Dig              4.8     1.1     0.8       2     17 F_INF_GMD
    Reverberations            5.6     1.3     1.1       1     10 F_INF_GMD
    Ritual of Purificatio     7.0     1.6     1.1       4     17 F_GMD
    Sanity Claus              7.5     0.3     0.6       2      1 S10_AGT_GMD
    Save Princeton            5.8     1.1     1.3       4      8 S10_TAD_GMD
    Scapeghost                8.1     1.7     1.5       1      6 C_I
    Sea Of Night              5.7     1.3     1.1       2        F_TAD_GMD
    Seastalker                5.1     1.1     0.8      10      4 C_INF
    Shades of Grey            7.8     1.3     1.4       5   2, 8 F_AGT_GMD
    Sherlock                  7.0     1.3     1.4       5      4 C_INF
    She's Got a Thing...S     7.0     1.7     1.6       3     13 F_INF_GMD
    Shogun                    7.0     1.2     0.6       2      4 C_INF
    Shrapnel                  7.3     1.5     1.0       1     20 F_INF_GMD
    Simple Theft              5.8     1.3     0.8       1     20 F_TAD_GMD
    Sins against Mimesis      5.5     1.0     1.2       3     13 F_INF_GMD
    Sir Ramic... Gorilla      5.0     1.0     1.5       1      6 F_AGT_GMD
    Six Stories               6.2     0.9     1.1       2     19 F_TAD_GMD
    Skyranch                  2.8     0.5     0.7       1     20 F_I_GMD
    Small World               6.2     1.3     1.1       3     10 F_TAD_GMD
    So Far                    7.9     1.1     1.5      10     12 F_INF_GMD
    Sorcerer                  7.2     0.6     1.6       7   2,15 C_INF
    Sound of... Clapping      7.2     1.3     1.3       6      5 F_ADVSYS_GMD
    South American Trek       0.9     0.2     0.5       1      5 F_IBM_GMD
    Space Aliens...Cardig     1.5     0.4     0.3       6   3, 4 S60_AGT_GMD
    Space under Window        7.2     0.8     0.4       5     12 F_INF_GMD
    Spacestation              5.6     0.7     1.1       1        F_INF_GMD
    Spellbreaker              8.5     1.2     1.8       8   2,15 C_INF
    Spellcasting 101          6.7     1.0     1.3       2        C_I
    Spellcasting 201          7.8     1.6     1.7       2        C_I
    Spellcasting 301          6.0     1.2     1.2       2        C_I
    Spider and Web            8.6     1.6     1.7      11      14F_INF_GMD
    SpiritWrak                7.1     1.3     1.3       5        F_INF_GMD
    Spodgeville...Wossnam     4.3     0.7     1.2       2        F_INF_GMD
    Spur                      7.1     1.3     1.1       2      9 F_HUG_GMD
    Spyder and Jeb            6.2     1.1     1.4       1        F_TAD_GMD
    Starcross                 6.6     1.0     1.2       7      1 C_INF
    Stargazer                 5.4     1.1     1.1       1        F_INF_GMD
    Stationfall               7.7     1.7     1.6       6      5 C_INF
    Stiffy                    0.6     0.0     0.0       1        F_INF_GMD
    Stiffy - MiSTing          4.5     1.0     0.4       4        F_INF_GMD
    Stone Cell                6.7     1.3     1.4       2     19 F_TAD_GMD
    Strangers In The Nigh     3.2     0.7     0.6       2        F_TAD_GMD
    Sunset Over Savannah      8.7     1.7     1.4       6     13 F_TAD_GMD
    Suspect                   6.0     1.2     1.1       7      4 C_INF
    Suspended                 7.5     1.5     1.4       7      8 C_INF
    Sylenius Mysterium        4.7     1.2     1.1       1     13 F_INF_GMD
    Symetry                   1.1     0.1     0.1       2        F_INF_GMD
    Tapestry                  7.1     1.4     0.9       5 10, 14 F_INF_GMD
    Tempest                   5.3     1.4     0.6       3     13 F_INF_GMD
    Temple of the Orc Mag     4.5     0.1     0.8       2        F_TAD_GMD
    Theatre                   6.9     1.1     1.4      10      6 F_INF_GMD
    Thorfinn's Realm          3.5     0.5     0.7       2        F_INF_GMD
    Time: All Things...       3.9     1.2     0.9       2 11, 12 F_INF_GMD
    TimeQuest                 8.1     1.2     1.7       3        C_I
    TimeSquared               4.3     1.1     1.1       1        F_AGT_GMD
    Toonesia                  5.8     1.1     1.1       6      7 F_TAD_GMD
    Tossed into Space         3.9     0.2     0.6       1      4 F_AGT_GMD
    Town Dragon               3.9     0.8     0.3       2     14 F_INF_GMD
    Trapped...Dilly           5.1     0.1     1.1       2     17 F_INF_GMD
    Travels in Land of Er     6.1     1.2     1.5       2     14 F_INF_GMD
    Trinity                   8.7     1.3     1.7      15    1,2 C_INF
    Tryst of Fate             7.1     1.4     1.3       1     11 F_INF_GMD
    Tube Trouble              4.2     0.8     0.7       2      8 F_INF_GMD
    Tyler's Great Cube Ga     5.8     0.0     1.7       1        S_TAD_GMD
    Uncle Zebulon's Will      7.3     1.0     1.5      12      8 F_TAD_GMD
    Underoos That Ate NY      4.5     0.6     0.8       2        F_TAD_INF_GMD
    Undertow                  5.4     1.3     0.9       3      8 F_TAD_GMD
    Undo                      2.9     0.5     0.7       4      7 F_TAD_GMD
    Unholy Grail              6.0     1.2     1.2       1     13 F_I_GMD
    Unnkulian One-Half        6.7     1.2     1.5       9      1 F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Unventure 1     6.9     1.2     1.5       8    1,2 F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Unventure 2     7.2     1.2     1.5       5      1 F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Zero            8.4     0.7     0.8       21,12,14 F_TAD_GMD
    Varicella                 8.5     1.6     1.5       8     18 F_INF_GMD
    Veritas                   6.9     1.3     1.4       3        S10_TAD_GMD
    Vindaloo                  2.9     0.0     0.4       1        F_INF_GMD
    VirtuaTech                6.1     0.0     1.2       1        F_INF_GMD
    Waystation                5.6     0.6     1.0       3      9 F_TAD_GMD
    Wearing the Claw          6.6     1.2     1.2       5 10, 18 F_INF_GMD
    Wedding                   7.4     1.6     1.3       3     12 F_INF_GMD
    Where Evil Dwells         5.1     0.8     1.1       1        F_INF_GMD
    Winter Wonderland         7.9     1.3     1.2       5     19 F_INF_GMD
    Wishbringer               7.5     1.3     1.3      12    5,6 C_INF
    Witness                   6.5     1.5     1.1       9  1,3,9 C_INF
    Wonderland                5.4     1.3     0.9       2        C_MAG
    World                     6.5     0.6     1.3       2      4 F_I_ETC_GMD
    Worlds Apart              8.3     1.6     1.4       6        F_TAD_GMD
    Zanfar                    2.6     0.2     0.4       1      8 F_AGT_GMD
    Zero Sum Game             7.2     1.5     1.5       3     13 F_INF_GMD
    Zombie!                   5.2     1.2     1.1       2     13 F_TAD_GMD
    Zork 0                    6.3     1.1     1.4       9      14C_INF
    Zork 1                    6.1     0.8     1.5      19  1, 12 C_INF
    Zork 2                    6.5     1.0     1.5      11  1, 12 C_INF
    Zork 3                    6.5     0.9     1.4       8  1, 12 C_INF
    Zork Undisc. Undergr.     6.5     1.0     1.2       1      14F_INF_GMD
    Zork: A Troll's Eye V     4.6     0.9     0.1       2     14 F_INF_GMD
    Zuni Doll                 4.0     0.6     0.9       2     14 F_INF_GMD

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    The Top Ten:

    A game is not eligible for the Top Ten unless it has received at least
    three ratings from different readers. This is to ensure a more
    democratic and accurate depiction of the best games.

    Well, I've received over 250 ratings for the scoreboard since the last
    issue of SPAG, which sounds great until I tell you that 220 of them were
    from the same person! Still, that great big passel o'ratings is nothing
    to sneeze at, and the ratings I've received have been enough to cause a
    bit of movement in the top ten. Our new champion is Sunset Over
    Savannah, replacing Varicella in the top slot. The Legend Lives! and
    Hunter, In Darkness have dropped out of the top ten, with Christminster
    and Spellbreaker (both longtime top ten residents) rushing in to fill
    the empty spaces. The fact that both the absent games feature
    punctuation in their names is purest coincidence, I'm sure.

    1.  Sunset over Savannah  8.7   6 votes
    2.  Trinity               8.7   15 votes
    3.  Spider and Web        8.6   11 votes
    4.  Anchorhead            8.6   16 votes
    5.  Varicella             8.5   8 votes
    6.  Losing Your Grip      8.5   6 votes
    7.  Babel                 8.5   6 votes
    8.  Spellbreaker          8.5   8 votes
    9.  Little Blue Men       8.4   7 votes
    10. Christminster         8.3   13 votes

    As always, please remember that the scoreboard is only as good as the
    contributions it receives. To make your mark on this vast morass of
    statistics, rate some games on our website
    (http://www.sparkynet.com/spag). You can also, if you like, send ratings
    directly to me at obrian SP@G colorado.edu. Instructions for how the rating
    system works are in the SPAG FAQ, available from GMD and our website.
    Please read the FAQ before submitting scores, so that you understand how
    the scoring system works. After that, submit away!

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
     ___. .___    _    ___.     ___.
    /  _| |   \  / \  / ._|    /  _|
    \  \  | o_/ |   | | |_.    \  \
    .\  \ | |   | o | | | |    .\  \
    |___/ |_|   |_|_| \___|    |___/ PECIFICS

    WARNING! SPOILERS BELOW FOR THE FOLLOWING GAMES:

    Bliss
    9:05

    PROCEED NO FURTHER UNLESS YOU HAVE PLAYED THESE GAMES!

    THIS IS NOT A TEST! GENUINE SPOILERS TO FOLLOW!

    LAST CHANCE TO AVOID SPOILAGE!

    From: Duncan Stevens

    TITLE: Bliss
    AUTHOR: Cameron Wilkin
    E-MAIL: bwilkin SP@G ix.netcom.com
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition99/tads/bliss/bliss.gam
    VERSION: Release 1.1

    Cameron Wilkin's Bliss is well-nigh impossible to review effectively in
    no-spoiler format, because the most interesting aspect of the game
    happens in the final few moves; accordingly, the following is more a
    discussion than a review as such, and it does include spoilers. You have
    been warned.

    The initial direction of Bliss is stock fantasy--indeed, with orcs, evil
    wizards, dragons, and dungeons involved right at the outset, the game
    fairly screams "stock fantasy." But the real story in Bliss is not at
    all stock fantasy-- the initial premise and the way it's developed
    doesn't so much tell a story as it takes a measure of the player. Does
    the player object to simplistically violent solutions to problems
    because they're in a fantasy setting? Or does the player gleefully hurt
    others whenever it serves his own ends, as long as the setting is
    fantasy? Bliss poses these questions and more.

    The author's notes indicate that the point of the game is to "ask which is
    better: the real world or the fantasy world?" With all due respect, I'm
    not sure that's really what the game asks; no one would contend that the
    PC's fantasy world is "better," though it's certainly more comfortable for
    the PC. That is, even the most sympathetic would be hard pressed to see
    the PC's retreat into his fantasy world as good, or "better" than his
    maintaining a grip on reality, given what ensues because of it. The player
    can understand why the PC does it, but hardly condone it. (I hope so,
    anyway.) To my mind, the more interesting questions are about fantasy
    itself, as suggested above--does fantasy violence desensitize those who
    view it, read about it, experience it through IF to real violence? It's
    much debated these days in the wake of Littleton and such, and generally
    the arguments produce considerably more heat than light; few can even
    agree on whether fantasy violence produces violent behavior in any given
    individual, as opposed to society as a whole. Bliss doesn't purport to
    address these questions as such, but in giving us a PC whose fantasy life
    enables him to commit violent acts that, it seems, he would not have been
    able to commit otherwise (his horror when he discovers what he has done
    suggests as much, anyway), the author raises some problematic issues.

    The nature of the masterfully done bait-and-switch in Bliss suggests one
    answer. Most players, somewhere in the course through the game, probably
    begin wondering about what's going on--perhaps it's the discontinuities,
    the brief flashes into the real world, but for me it was the bizarre
    monotony of the killing. It struck me as strange and disturbing that
    every single problem the PC has is resolved by killing someone; the
    ethics of fantasy, so to speak, don't generally allow for randomized
    killing. Disposing of the guards was one thing, but killing the imp and
    the bear because they happened to be in the way--that rang false to me;
    likewise, killing a dragon while it's asleep made me wonder. That, in
    turn, suggests to me that fantasy does have rules, and indiscriminate
    killing definitely breaks those rules, meaning that the deadening moral
    effect of imaginary violence might not be quite so clearcut (and the
    enabling aspect of this particular PC's fantasy might be the product of
    a warped fantasy life, one that doesn't abide by the normal rules).

    Equally intriguing is the problem of complicity posed by Bliss: the
    marriage of the player's and PC's goals (the player is perfectly willing
    to help the PC escape from the prison and kill the evil wizard) suddenly
    breaks apart when the fantasy veil falls away. When the player surveys
    the wreckage, there should be a sense of participation in the evil--a
    sense that the player's participation made the carnage possible, and
    that a more responsible player would have averted the tragedy. In this
    particular case, of course, the complicity analysis doesn't stand up to
    scrutiny very well, since there were no alternate paths; the choices
    were enabling wholesale murder or simply stopping the story. Still,
    pulling the player up short in this way offers a wealth of
    possibilities--we may one day see IF in which that discovery of
    complicity permits and encourages the player to try again, find a better
    path.

    The "unreliable narrator" aspect of Bliss is worth exploring as well.
    Does it make a difference if the narrator is unreliable to himself as
    well as to the reader? No, except that the complicity aspect diminishes
    if the narrator is deliberately deceiving the reader, and complicity can
    be a valuable feeling (particularly in settings like this, where
    desensitization is a real issue). To be sure, I may be responsible for
    violent acts even if I'm told they're all right, and it's still possible
    for the IF player to feel complicit on the same basis. But Bliss, and
    perhaps variants thereof that give the player a bit more freedom. pose a
    starker moral problem, in that the PC had no idea what he was doing and
    the player failed to intervene to set things right. The technique of
    setting up an "unreliable narrator", and the fun of experiencing it,
    endures whether the narrator is deliberately or unwittingly deceiving
    the reader/player, but the moral shock value is different--and if Bliss
    doesn't have moral shock value, it's not worth the download time.

    The ending of Bliss allows for a variety of interpretations--is the
    house episode a fantasy? A memory? Clearly, it helps explain how the PC
    got to be where he is, but its placement in the story raises some
    questions about whether the story itself is reliable. (Being locked in
    one's room by one's father is just as credible a fantasized version of
    the asylum as the orcs-dragons-wizards fantasy, after all.) If we're not
    meant to think that (and the ending explanation about how the child
    fantasy life led to commitment in the asylum suggests as much), the
    alternative is rather disturbing: the story as it stands seems to
    suggest that a fantasy life as a means of escape from an unpleasant or
    painful childhood can lead directly to, well, the PC in Bliss. (The
    movie Heavenly Creatures tells a similar, though somewhat more
    complicated, story.) That seems extreme, on its face--but fantasy life
    takes such a beating in this game that it's hard to see what else to
    conclude.

    Though it may not do what the author set out to do, there's much that is
    thought-provoking in Bliss, and it deserves a spot somewhere in the
    hallowed halls of IF theory.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    From: Duncan Stevens

    TITLE: 9:05
    AUTHOR: Adam Cadre
    E-MAIL: ac SP@G adamcadre.ac
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/905.z5
    VERSION: Release 1.00

    It's more a joke than a game, really, but Adam Cadre's 9:05 is a pretty
    good joke--all the more so because the joke's mostly on you, the
    archetypal IF player, and on your assumptions.

    The principal joke going on involves the problem of PC identity.
    Conventional modern-day IF has developed a variety of ways for the
    player to "discover" who he or she is--someone calls you by your name,
    you find your name written in some obvious place--that make the
    identity-assumption process less clunky than would a simple "You're Joe
    Blow." Old-style IF, by contrast, generally never gave the PC a name or
    any other indicia of identity at all; there was just a task to do. In
    9:05, in most significant ways, you're the latter--you don't have an
    identity of your own other than "burglar"--but everything the game does
    is set up to make you think you're happening upon your own identity as
    you wander around. The game does this rather artfully--you see "a
    wallet" and "a driver's license" rather than "your" possessions, which
    is unobtrusive enough that most players don't notice it in the ho-hum
    house setting. You solve the "puzzle" of figuring out where you work by
    looking at your ID, so the game doesn't need to actually mislead you by
    calling the office your workplace. And at the end, there you are,
    suckered into assuming someone else's identity because you found some
    objects and assumed they were yours. ("I didn't mean it, officer. I've
    been playing too much IF.")

    Similarly, what your character does, or rather has done--commit theft
    and murder--is quite in tune with classic old-style IF, except that the
    setting is wrong: you're not in a fantasy or sci-fi setting, where it's
    "okay" to rob and kill indiscriminately, you're in the suburbs. The
    mundane apparent premise--get dressed, get to work--also helps set this
    up, since the expectation engendered by such a promise is that you'll
    discover a plot somewhere along the way (i.e., something will happen to
    you to make the story less mundane), and the surprise is that non-
    mundane things are already going on. (In fact, owing to the knowledge
    gap between the player and the PC, the player mistakenly directs the PC
    to assume that mundane rather than highly bizarre and dangerous events
    are going on.)

    One amusing parallel to this is that one persistent illogicality in
    house-setting IF--i.e., the game has to tell the PC all about the
    details of the house he lives in as if he's seeing them for the first
    time--is remedied: the surroundings actually are new (well,
    relatively--you saw them the previous night) to both PC and player. The
    game doesn't really force you to figure out much about the home or
    anything else, so it doesn't do as much with this angle as it might
    have--but it's still an interesting sidelight. (It does take away
    virtually every intuitive shortcut, however--you have to open doors
    before going through them--which does convey that you're not used to
    your environment to some extent.) Likewise, the appraising eye of the
    PC--you evaluate everything, including the comfort of the living room
    (limited with no stereo, DVD player, or TV, which are in your trunk, of
    course) and the neighborhood (too much crime, you say) makes little
    sense in most IF--who bothers to appraise his everyday surroundings on
    every viewing?--but plenty of sense here.

    Beyond all that, though, 9:05 says something interesting about the way
    most players approach IF: give us a task rather than simply a setting to
    explore, make the task seem urgent, and we'll spend very little time
    actually poking around. (When "undo" is available, there's no real
    reason for not at least looking at what's given.) There are a variety of
    commands other than LOOK UNDER BED that hint that not all is as it
    appears: SMELL, for instance, and EXAMINE CLOTHING, and EXAMINE ME
    certainly indicates that something is up. A more-than-cursory look at
    the setting in 9:05 should suggest to the player that something's wrong,
    in other words, and yet it appears that most people, goal-oriented by
    the initial phone call, didn't catch on until the end.

    At any rate, in the end, it's a good joke.

    SUBMISSION POLICY ---------------------------------------------------------

    SPAG is a non-paying fanzine specializing in reviews of text adventure
    games, a.k.a. Interactive Fiction. This includes the classic Infocom
    games and similar games, but also some graphic adventures where the
    primary player-game communication is text based.

    Authors retain the rights to use their reviews in other contexts. We
    accept submissions that have been previously published elsewhere,
    although original reviews are preferred.

    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

               Thank you for helping to keep text adventures alive!

Click here for a printable, plain text version of this issue.