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ISSUE #17 - May 10, 1999

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

                 ISSUE # 17  -  COMPETITION '98 SPECIAL

               Edited by Magnus Olsson (zebulon SP@G pobox.com)
                             May 10, 1999.

                  SPAG Website: http://welcome.to/spag

    SPAG #17 is copyright (c) 1999 by Magnus Olsson.
    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 -----------------------------------------------------

    Acid Whiplash
    Arrival, or Attack of the B-Movie Cliches
    Cattus Atrox
    The City
    Downtown Tokyo, Present Day
    Enlightenment: A One-room Absurdity
    Fifteen
    Four in One
    Human Resources Stories
    I Didn't Know You Could Yodel
    Informatory
    Little Blue Men
    Mother Loose
    Muse: An Autumn Romance
    Persistence of Memory
    Photopia
    The Plant
    Purple
    Research Dig
    The Ritual of Purification
    Trapped in a One Room Dilly

    + an interview with Adam Cadre

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

    It's been a long time.

    This issue is more than two months late, and some people have started
    worrying that something has happened to it, or that it may be
    defunct. But there's no need to worry - SPAG will continue to appear
    (if perhaps even more irregularly than before), at least as long as
    you people continue to submit reviews. I'm only sorry that it took so
    long this time.

    SPAG #17 is devoted entirely to the 1998 IF Competition. I hope
    you'll find it worth the wait.

    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. At the moment, we are
    reluctant to accept any more reviews of Infocom games (though
    exceptions happen).

    COMPETITION RESULTS -------------------------------------------------------

    1:  Photopia, by Adam Cadre
    2:  Muse: An autumn romance, by Christopher Huang
    3:  The Plant, by Mike Roberts
    4:  Arrival, by Stephen Granade
    5:  Enlightenment, by Taro Ogawa
    6:  Mother Loose, by Irene Callaci
    7:  Little Blue Men, by Michael Gentry
    8:  Trapped in a One-Room Dilly, by Laura Knauth
    9:  Persistence of Memory, by Jason Dyer
    10: Downtown Tokyo. Present Day, by John Kean
    11: Informatory, by Bill Shlaer
    12: The Ritual of Purification, by Jarek Sobolewski
    13: The City, by Sam Barlow
    14: Where Evil Dwells, by Steve Owens and Paul Johnson
    15: Purple, by Stefan Blixt
    16: Four in One, by J Robinson Wheeler
    17: Research Dig, by Chris Armitage
    18: CC, by Mikko Vuorinen
    19: Spacestation, by David Ledgard
    20: Cattus Atrox, by David Cornelson
    21: In the Spotlight, by John Byrd
    22: Lightania, by Gustav Bodell
    23: Acid Whiplash, by Cody Sandifer and Rybread Celsius
    24: I Didn't Know You Could Yodel, by Andrew Indovina and Michael Eisenman
    25: Fifteen, by Ricardo Dague
    26: The Commute, by Kevin Copeland
    27: Human Resources Stories, by Harry Hardjono

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

    Andrew Plotkin had a field day at the 1998 XYZZY awards ceremony
    (organized by our rival fanzine XYZZYnews, www.xyzzynews.com, and
    hosted by the IF mud), his "Spider and Web" winning no less than five
    awards, including the one for "best game". Michael Gentry and Adam Cadre
    won two each, and SPAG founder G. K. "Whizzard" Wilson grabbed the last
    award:

    Best game:              Spider and Web, by Andrew Plotkin
    Best writing:           Photopia, by Adam Cadre
    Best story:             Photopia, by Adam Cadre
    Best setting:           Anchorhead, by Michael Gentry
    Best puzzles:           Spider and Web, by Andrew Plotkin
    Best NPCs:              Once and Future, by Gerry Kevin Wilson
    Best individual puzzle: Getting out of the chair, from Spider and Web
                            (Andrew Plotkin)
    Best individual NPC:    The interrogator in Spider and Web (Andrew Plotkin)
    Best individual PC:     Little Blue Men, by Michael Gentry
    Best use of medium:     Spider and Web, Andrew Plotkin

    INTERVIEW WITH ADAM CADRE ---------------------------------------------

    SPAG: First of all, congratulations on winning not only the
    Competition, but two XYZZY awards (for best writing and best
    story). And even apart from the awards, people have liberally heaped
    praise on your game _Photopia_. What are your feelings about this
    success?

    AC: It's hard to know how to feel.  On the one hand, it's certainly
    nice to open my inbox and find it full of such effusive praise, but
    then it's hard to know how to respond -- "Glad you liked it, thanks
    for writing" seems rather inadequate, you know?  So I feel a bit
    guilty about that aspect of it.

    I certainly didn't expect Photopia to do as well as it has, since it's
    so different from conventional IF.  I expected that there would be a
    small group of people who'd think it'd be the greatest piece of IF
    ever, a somewhat larger group who'd find it unbearably pretentious,
    and a still larger group in the middle who'd find it to be a mildly
    interesting experiment.  This makes my second IF release in a row
    whose reception has far exceeded my expectations.  I suppose this
    means that the first time I come up with something I think people will
    really enjoy, it'll bomb miserably.

    SPAG: For the benefit of those of our readers who may not have heard
    of you before, perhaps a short introduction would be in order. Who,
    what, where and why is Adam Cadre?

    AC: The border guards asked me that when I was driving home from
    Canada, and I'm just as stumped by the question now as I was then.

    So let's see.  I'm 25 (but look somewhere between 13 and 17.)  I live
    in Anaheim, California, at least for the time being.  I'm
    straightedge.  I'm multiracial.  I'm overeducated -- was well into a
    doctoral program in English until I finally had my fill at the end of
    '97 and became the slacker I am today.  I suppose I can call myself a
    professional writer now that I've sold my first novel, but it still
    seems a bit silly to say that, considering that the book isn't out yet
    and as of this writing I haven't received any actual money for it,
    though the check is supposedly in the mail.  I suppose I can also call
    myself a professional musician, since I'm in a band which has a CD for
    sale, but that too seems silly at present since the official members
    of the band have never played together all at once.  I feel equally
    uncomfortable calling myself a teacher, since even though I work as a
    substitute teacher and in-home tutor, I don't have a class of my own.
    In any event, I'm not a capitalist and so I suppose that defining
    myself in terms of how I make money, as the culture seems to demand,
    is bound to feel wrong to me.  I'm just zis guy, you know?

    SPAG: What made you interested in writing IF?

    AC: I wasn't an IF fan in Infocom's heyday -- the only game I ever
    bought was Trinity, and I ended up playing it for a year without even
    making it out of the Kensington Gardens.  When I finally found a copy
    of the hint book, I ended up developing every clue.

    In 1992, I went to the mall to get Star Control II (still my favorite
    computer game.)  It wasn't in yet, so I got Lost Treasures of Infocom
    II instead.  Then, on the way home, I got into a car wreck with a
    wanted felon, but that's another story.  In any event, that was my
    real introduction to Infocom.

    Of the games on Lost Treasures, I liked A Mind Forever Voyaging the
    best by far -- enough so that when I happened upon the Masterpieces CD
    about four years later, I decided to pick it up expressly so that I
    could play AMFV again (at this point my Treasures disks were,
    appropriately enough, lost.)  I loaded up the CD, and noticed that
    there was a game included called "A Change in the Weather" which I
    didn't remember; I booted it up and was astonished to find that (a) it
    was written in 1995, and (b) it was clearly not a commercial effort.
    It'd never occurred to me that the Infocom games had been written by
    anyone, any more than I stopped to wonder who drew the cartoons I
    watched when other people in the IF community were playing Zork and
    such.  But "Weather" clearly had an author.  And that got me thinking
    -- hey, if people actually write these things, maybe I can too!  In
    fact, I bet that'd be fun!

    SPAG: What gave you the idea for _Photopia_?

    I answered this question in a roundabout way in the Photopia Phaq,
    which is on my web site, http://adamcadre.ac.  Primary sources of
    inspiration, in no particular order: a poorly-Xeroxed copy of an old
    magazine called "Photoplay"; the film THE SWEET HEREAFTER by Atom
    Egoyan (but not the book by Russell Banks); the work of Carl Sagan;
    Ojars Kratins's seminar on the fantastic in literature; my sister's
    death.

    Aren't you glad I didn't say I got it from a mail-order company?

    SPAG: The boundary between IF as games and IF as literature is a hotly
    debated topic. What do you think of this - is there such a division?
    Should there be one?

    AC: I haven't been answering these questions in order; as I write
    these words, this is the last one left, and I've been trying and
    failing to come up with a decent answer for a couple of days now.  Um.

    One of the things that's been throwing me off about this question is
    that I keep lurching between talking about puzzle-IF vs. story-IF on
    the one hand, and "low" IF vs. "high" IF on the other.  I think it's
    the word "literature" that's the culprit.  We generally hear it used
    to denote high-quality fiction (or at least high-quality narrative);
    in the IF world, however, it often signifies nothing more than that
    the narrative is the most important aspect of a piece, or even simply
    that it *has* a story.  But nearly all IF has a story, in a sense.
    It's just that some of the stories are kinda lame: "Some guy wanders
    around grabbing stuff and then uses it later to defeat a monster or
    something. The End."

    But some people don't mind that, I guess.  Some people have fun
    spending hours pushing virtual buttons and pulling virtual levers for
    no reward other than a message like "You have gained a fabulous
    treasure!" or "*** You have won ***".  Then there are the people like
    me who like the pleasures literature has to offer -- big chewy ideas
    to think about, narrative twists and turns, funny or beautiful turns
    of phrase, that sort of thing -- and also like wandering around
    someone else's world and knocking over vases.  So, sure, there's a
    division there.

    That said, I'd point out that of course you can't simply map puzzle-
    driven vs. story-driven onto low vs. high.  Story-IF that tries to be
    "literary" by adopting a mannered, high-falutin' style is bound to
    fall flat; and some of the most (to me) truly literary IF has been of
    the more-game-than-story variety.  I don't actually play these; I
    watch other people play them, or feed the game a walkthrough and read
    the output.  Some people say that's missing the point, especially in a
    puzzle game, but not every story ends up looking like the one above --
    after all, when you think about it, an awful lot of literature is
    about people trying to figure their way out of problems.  It just has
    to be done artfully.

    SPAG: In the light of the previous question, do you think _Photopia_
    should be regarded as a game? And do you think there are any problems
    with doing so (for example, it has been suggested that viewing it as
    a game would make people more frustrated that they can't change the
    ending)?

    AC: It's not a game, of course, but I find myself calling it one
    anyway.  That's just the standard term for a piece of IF.  But, yeah,
    to the extent that the "goal" is either unattainable or unavoidable,
    depending on the way you think about it, it's not a game.

    SPAG: _Photopia_ has been criticized for not being sufficiently
    interactive. Some people have gone so far as to suggest that it
    shouldn't be considered "IF", but just "F". What are your views on
    this?

    AC: I think I covered this in the Phaq too... let's see... "True, the
    player has little power to affect the events of the story.  But it was
    crucial to me, was in a sense the whole point of the piece, that the
    player *inhabit* the places of the game.  In the "real life" sections,
    I wanted to provide the experience of hanging out with this kid, to
    the extent I could; in the bedtime-story sections, it was absolutely
    vital that the player be the one wandering around in the various
    strange locales of the tale.  Quite frankly, there's not enough to
    them to be worth experiencing them secondhand.  I came up with these
    places, and I wanted to plop the player down in them just long enough
    for her to look around, say "Whoa, neat," and then move on.  Rockvil
    in the third person would have been a fourth-rate dystopia; being
    there was what made it so chilling.  An author can incarnate a place
    in IF in a way that's not possible in other media.  If incarnating
    places is the point of what the work is trying to achieve -- which, in
    this case, the colored sections of the story were -- then IF is the
    way to go."

    SPAG: Could you comment a little on the use of coloured text in
    _Photopia_? What gave you the idea?

    AC: I actually came up with the title and the idea of using color long
    before I had any idea what the game would be about.  For a while I
    considered having objects retain the color of the places they came
    from, so your inventory list would end up looking like an ANSI
    rainbow, but eventually I decided to keep it simple.  I just thought
    it was a nice way to set the mood for each area, and differentiate the
    'Hard-boiled' parts from the 'Wonderland' parts (to borrow from
    Murakami.)

    SPAG: Which entries were your own favourites in the 1998 Competition?
    Why?

    AC: Those would be Little Blue Men and, to a slightly lesser extent,
    Muse.  I've already reviewed them both, and since the reviews can be
    found on my web site and on Deja News { Editor's note: Adam's review
    of _Muse_ is included in this issue }, I won't repeat them here.  But
    I will mention that the game I was planning to submit to the comp last
    spring, and am finishing up right now, is quite similar to both these
    games in many respects.  When I decided to switch to Photopia and
    enter that instead, I thought it was a risky move -- switching from
    what I thought all would agree was a well-done, interesting game to an
    experiment that a lot of people were sure to loathe and which would
    probably fare about as well as The Tempest.  As it turned out, my
    current project might well have prompted protests of, "Another one of
    *these*?" and suffered in the comparison to LBM and Muse, so I lucked
    out.  We'll see.

    SPAG: You're a writer not only of interactive fiction, but also of
    conventional, non-interactive fiction. Can you compare writing a piece
    of IF with writing a novel? Which is the most satisfying experience?

    AC: Well, writing IF is certainly more fun, in that so much of it is
    coming up with snarky error messages.  You might say that writing IF
    is itself interactive -- it's a conversation with an imaginary player
    who tries every possible command.

    But writing IF isn't like storytelling, at least not for me.  I write
    stories and books from start to finish, the same way I read them.  But
    when I write IF, it sort of accretes.  Create a location, compile.
    Add a couple objects, compile again.  Add an NPC, compile.  Equip the
    NPC with some actual behavior, compile yet again.  And so forth for
    several weeks.  Then, of course, there's the fact that English is my
    first language, and Inform isn't.  When I'm writing a story, I
    sometimes get stuck trying to figure out how best to phrase the next
    sentence, but I never find myself needing to learn some grammatical
    form I've never used before.  In IF, I'm always getting stuck wanting
    to achieve some effect and having no idea how to go about it.  So
    while it may be more fun than straight fiction on a moment-to-moment
    basis, it also has the potential to be a lot more frustrating.

    And then there's the fact that no matter how far above average a game
    may be, no matter how many revolutionary advances it makes, it's still
    going to seem sort of stiff and awkward to the newbie who tries >GO
    BACK TO WHERE I WAS A COUPLE MINUTES AGO and gets an error message,
    who types >BEAUFORD, DO YOU LIKE DOGS? and gets a default response.
    Even the most robust IF comes off as fragile and inadequate to people
    who haven't had their expectations adjusted by playing previous games.
    So while in a static narrative the reader can't participate in the
    world you've created, she also can't poke around and find that the
    walls are made of cardboard and the background's just a mural.  To
    that extent, it's sort of like the difference between making an oil
    painting of a house on the one hand, and on the other, actually
    building a house-- of cards.

    SPAG: We've certainly come a long way since the first
    Competition. What trends do you see in the development of the IF
    genre? Have there been any developments that have surprised you? Or
    any developments that you are still missing? What would you like to
    see in future IF?

    AC: Okay, since my answers have been on the dull side thus far, I'll
    give you a deliberately provocative one here.

    It seems to me that perhaps the primary trend in IF over the last few
    years is that it's become more and more idiosyncratic.  Infocom was in
    the entertainment software business, and if you look at some of the IF
    from a while back, you tend to find that same mindset.  The early TADS
    games, Curses and Jigsaw, Lost New York, Once and Future (which may
    have just come out recently, but which belongs to the pre-comp
    period)...  certainly they reflect the interests of their various
    authors, but they're still primarily entertainment software.  I
    suspect that if any of the games I've just mentioned been Infocom
    projects, they'd have had no trouble at all getting greenlighted.

    Now let's look at some of the more recent successful IF.  So Far,
    Sunset Over Savannah, Muse, Little Blue Men, Photopia... these don't
    strike me as entertainments.  It seems to me that the primary
    motivation for projects such as these is self-expression.  I'm not
    sure Infocom would've given these the go-ahead.  Now, to an extent,
    this is wonderful.  I mean, I'm certainly glad I didn't have to pass
    Photopia through a marketing department before I could release it.  I
    cringe to think of Michael Gentry being told to tone down the
    misanthropy because it isn't testing well in key demographics.

    But the phenomenon of creative works being freed from commercial
    concerns is not unique to IF.  The advent of the World Wide Web has
    meant that anyone can publish their fiction, just by putting up a web
    site.  Even before the WWW, there were the dot-creative Usenet groups.
    Has there been a renaissance of freeware fiction?

    Well, no.  Sure, there are fanfic authors who've gained popularity,
    but really, most anyone who puts up some stories and waits for the
    hits to come rolling in is due for a disappointment.  In my years on
    the net, I've yet to encounter anyone who really follows web.fiction.
    Why?  Because it's mostly dreck.  If you go to your local bookstore
    and find the shelves where they keep the reputable fiction, you at
    least have the comfort of knowing that for each book before you,
    someone who makes a living making these kinds of determinations has
    declared it to be of publishable quality.

    Now, you may think you know where I'm going with this, but actually,
    I'm not really much concerned about an onslaught of games with
    appalling spelling and takeable feces.  These games are already
    released at a fairly regular rate, and I don't expect that rate to
    change much in either direction.  But I'm reminded of a quote I read a
    while back by someone in the publishing business that went something
    like this: "Prospective authors seem to think that the slush pile
    consists of 10% publishable manuscripts, 20% manuscripts that aren't
    quite at that level, and 70% abysmal dross.  That's not the case.
    Less than half of what we get is abysmal dross.  But maybe one in ten
    thousand manuscripts is something we'd consider publishing.  The
    majority of the manuscripts we get are presentable, but still, clearly
    the work of amateurs."

    I don't much worry about people who release entertainment software
    that isn't well-received.  Nor am I much concerned about the
    fourteen-year- olds and the AGT masterpieces they throw together in an
    afternoon.  But there is one trend I foresee that does trouble me a
    bit.  IF has a built-in audience of at least a couple hundred people
    who play most of the games that show up at GMD.  That may not sound
    too impressive, but for someone whose collected works have garnered
    three hits in the last five years, that's a vast populace.  And the
    word about IF is slowly trickling out.  More and more people are
    coming into the fold.  And when they decide to write games of their
    own, I'm finding that for the most part they're less interested in
    whipping up solid entertainments than in crafting magna opera to
    capture their innermost souls.

    Most of these aren't going to be very good.  They won't be laughable,
    but they'll be mediocre.  I'm thinking about the kind of prose I was
    cranking out in my late teens.  I've still got a lot of it squirreled
    away in one directory or another: the beginnings of novels I didn't
    plan past chapter two, generous handfuls of short stories... the
    intentions were good, the grammar is impeccable, but the work
    nevertheless makes me wince.  I was quite pleased with it at the time,
    though.  And if I'd been writing IF in '92, you could wince along with
    me.

    But it's not even this that worries me.  If there's a cascade of IF
    that looks like it escaped from the creative writing class at the
    nearest junior college, so be it.  What worries me is what happens
    when the reception for these idiosyncratic works is less exuberant
    than that for some of the current big names in IF.  What'll happen
    when people who've poured their heart and soul (and effort and time --
    writing IF is hard work) into a piece of interactive fiction release
    it, and people don't like it much?  When their babies go unnoticed at
    Xyzzy time?  It'd be a shame if the IF community were poisoned by
    bitterness and resentment as new authors publish their cris de coeur,
    only to garner negative reviews, or to watch them get ignored in the
    wake of the latest Zarf release.  But I'm not sure what the solution
    is.  Certainly pretending that these games are better than they
    actually are is not the answer.  And maybe they won't even materialize
    -- maybe these trends I think I've spotted are purely illusory.  But
    nevertheless, I foresee thin skins and rancor, charges of elitism, and
    tears all around.

    SPAG: And, finally, what part do you plan on playing yourself in the
    future of IF?

    AC: Well, I have a bunch of future projects planned.  It's just a
    matter of finding the time to do them.  I'd like to release at least
    one major-ish project per year for the foreseeable future.  I'm not
    sure if that's a realistic goal, but that's what I'm shooting for.

    Also, if my novel does okay in the marketplace, I'm hoping that it'll
    prompt people to come visit my web site, which has a section devoted
    to IF.  So maybe some people who like the book and would otherwise
    have never even heard of IF will discover it that way.

    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.
    Also, scores are still desired along with the reviews, so send those along.
    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://welcome.to/spag

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

    From: "Paul O'Brian"

    NAME: Acid Whiplash
    AUTHOR: Rybread Celsius & Cody Sandifer
    EMAIL: rybread SP@G anok4u2.org (Celsius), sandifer SP@G crmse.sdsu.edu (Sandifer)
    DATE: September 1998
    PARSER: Inform whacked
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/acid
    VERSION: Release 1

    ACID WHIPLASH by Anonymous (a.k.a. RYBREAD CELSIUS CAN'T FIND A DICTIONARY
    by Rybread Celsius and Cody Sandifer)

       "This is terribly, terribly unfair. I'm really sorry. But I just
       started laughing hysterically, and it's not what the author intended.
       In the middle of an intense ending sequence, I read the line:

       'My blood pumper is wronged!'

       I just lost it. It's a very 'Eye of Argon' sort of line."
                            -- Andrew Plotkin, reviewing "Symetry", 1/1/98

       "It takes guts to do *anything* wearing a silver jumpsuit.
            My point:
       I bet Rybread wears *two* silver jumpsuits while he writes IF."
                                    -- Brad O'Donnell, 1/6/98

    I hope my title line isn't too big a spoiler. I guess I can't feel too
    guilty about giving away something that's revealed in the first 3
    seconds of the game. Anyway, it would be impossible to talk about this
    game without talking about Rybread Celsius. Yes, Rybread Celsius. The
    man, the myth, the legend. There are those who have called him "A BONA
    FIDE CERTIFIED GENIUS" [1]. There are those who have called him "the
    worst writer in interactive fiction today" [2]. There are even those
    who have called him "an adaptive-learning AI" [3]. Whatever the truth
    behind the smokescreen, opinion is clearly divided on the Celsius
    oeuvre. He appears to have an enthusiastic cult following who look at
    his works and see the stamp of genius, paralleled by another group who
    look at those selfsame works and see only barely coherent English and
    buggy code. I have always counted myself among the latter. Works like
    Symetry and Punkirita Quest set my English-major teeth on edge. I have
    never met a Rybread game that I've liked, or even halfway
    understood. But Acid Whiplash is different.

    First of all, I need to say that I'm going to call it Acid Whiplash, for
    several reasons:

      1. I'm not sure what the game's real name is supposed to be.
      2. The other name, while it may be (is!) perfectly true, is just too long
         to write out.
      3. Acid Whiplash is just such a *perfect* name for this game.

    I've never dropped acid myself, but I'm guessing that this game is
    about the closest text game equivalent I will ever play, at least
    until my next Rybread game. The world spins crazily about, featuring
    (among other settings) a room shaped like a burning credit card (???),
    nightmarish recastings of Curses and Jigsaw, and your own
    transformation into a car dashboard. Scene changes happen with
    absolutely no warning, and any sense of emerging narrative is dashed
    and jolted about, hard enough and abruptly enough to, well, to give
    you a severe case of mental whiplash. Sounds like a typical Celsius
    game so far, right? But here's the best part: stumbling through these
    hallucinogenic sequences leads you through a multi-part interview
    between Cody Sandifer and Celsius himself, an interview which had me
    laughing out loud over and over. Sandifer is hilarious, striking the
    pose of the intensely sincere reviewer, taking each deranged Celsius
    word as gospel, and in the process manages actually to illuminate some
    of the interesting corners of his subject, and subject matter. And
    Rybread is...  Rybread, no more or less than ever. Perhaps being
    changed into a dashboard while listening makes the whole thing funnier
    -- I'm not sure.

    As usual, my regular categories don't apply. Plot, puzzles, writing --
    forget about it. Acid Whiplash has no real interaction or story in any
    meaningful sense. (There is, however, one very funny scene where we
    learn that Rybread is in fact the evil twin of a well-known IF
    author). If you're looking for a plot, or even something vaguely
    coherent, you ought to know that you're looking in the wrong
    place. But if you aren't familiar with the Way of the Rybread, or even
    if you are, I recommend giving Acid Whiplash a look. It might shed
    some light on what all these crazy people are talking about... but
    don't expect to understand the *next* Celsius game.

    [1] Brock Kevin Nambo

    [2] Me. (Nothing personal.)

    [3] Adam Thornton

    Rating: 5.2 (This is by *far* the highest rating I've ever given to
    Rybread. In fact, I think it beats his past 3 ratings from me put
    together!)

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

    From: Second April

    NAME: Arrival, or Attack of the B-Movie Cliches
    AUTHOR: Stephen Granade
    E-MAI: sgranade SP@G phy.duke.edu
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: TADS
    SUPPORTS: TADS 2.2.6 and later
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/arrival.zip
    VERSION: Release 2

    I may not be in the best position to review Arrival, the first game of
    consequence written in HTML-TADS, since I'm working with a Stone Age
    system that can't deal with HTML-TADS games, and hence all I saw was
    the text. But I can say this: even if your system has not been graced
    with a port of an HTML-TADS runtime, check out Arrival anyway. It's
    easily one of the best games of this year's competition, graphics or
    not.

    The story: your life as an eight-year-old is enlivened by, why not,
    aliens landing in your backyard, except that these aliens clearly have
    been reading Calvin and Hobbes, since they're invisible to your
    parents. They commission you to run some errands for them so that they
    can get on with enslaving the planet, so you carry out some tasks, of
    varying degrees of silliness, to Thwart the Evil Plan.

    The author titles Arrival an "attack of the B-movie cliches," but that
    isn't really fair: Arrival is far wittier than any B-movie, and it's
    far too self-aware to be cliched. (Your character's reaction upon
    seeing the spaceship: "Oh man oh man, it must be a spaceship!  From
    outer space!  Maybe from Gamma Proxima Epsilon Centauri Five B!") The
    aliens owe much more to parody than to cliche: they demand Ho-Hos and
    grumble about the obnoxious way Earth constantly sends banal radio
    broadcasts into space. On hand is a translator that mutates the
    aliens' speech into Bill and Ted-speak, with consistently amusing
    results (the answer to one question changes from "You are quite a nosy
    child" to "Why don't you, like, go play in traffic"). The fact of the
    alien-invasion plot should not obscure the amount of wit that went
    into the writing of Arrival: for instance, when the alien's translator
    fails, he scowls and yells "Universal translator, my anterior
    appendage!" Few games can claim the amount of originality that Arrival
    offers.

    The fun of the game is largely in the writing and the amusing asides,
    however, rather than the puzzles: some are clever, but a few are
    simply obscure or insufficiently clued. There's a hint file to help
    things along, and Arrival is the rare game where it's better to turn
    to hints than to insist on unraveling puzzles yourself. The fun of the
    game diminishes when the player is stuck, and the payoff associated
    with solving the puzzles isn't so great that resorting to hints takes
    away a sense of accomplishment. The charm of Arrival lies, in short,
    more in seeing the aliens' funny responses to different actions than
    in solving problems, and it is hence more rewarding to move the story
    along, in order to discover more parts of the game that produce funny
    responses, than to stand still until you solve a puzzle by your own
    wits. The puzzles aren't especially bad or unfair, to be sure, but by
    and large (with one exception, a puzzle that turns on a sly joke about
    child-proof lids), but they don't match the level of the writing
    either.

    If there is a flaw in Arrival, apart from the puzzles, it is that your
    identity, an eight-year-old, only surfaces intermittently. There's
    plenty of humor to be mined from the world as viewed by a
    child--Calvin and Hobbes, for one, produced about ten years'
    worth. Aside from the occasional response, though (TAKE STICK when no
    stick is present: "I don't see no--I mean any--stick here"), you can
    largely forget that you're eight years old--and there are several
    moments, such as the discovery of a velvet Elvis and a rain stick,
    that might be enlivened by commentary from an eight-year-old's
    viewpoint. (On the other hand, your eight-year-old self comes out more
    clearly in some of the AMUSING responses, suggesting that the author
    wanted to mine that vein of humor but didn't get around to
    incorporating it into the story much. Moreover, as I understand it,
    the graphics appear to have been drawn by an eight-year-old, so
    perhaps that changes the game experience for those who can actually
    see the graphics.)  It's a minor flaw, though, and testifies to the
    general solidity of the game and its coding.

    Arrival is a well-crafted game--at least, the text portions are, and I
    trust the graphics and sound add to the experience. It's also littered
    with in-jokes and funny asides that more than make up for the
    derivative nature of the plot, and it plays up the alien invasion for
    satiric value, which excuses the cliches (for me at
    least). Reminiscent in some ways of Carl Klutzke's Poor Zefron's
    Almanac, but much more consistently funny and playable, Arrival is a
    worthy effort.

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

    From: "Paul O'Brian"

    The Arrival is the first HTML-TADS game I've ever played, certainly
    the first competition game ever to include pictures and sound. I was
    quite curious as to how these elements would be handled, and maybe
    even a little apprehensive. I wasn't sure that a lone hobbyist could
    create visual and musical elements that wouldn't detract from a game
    more than they added to it. But Arrival dispelled those fears,
    handling both pictures and sound brilliantly. The game's ingenious
    strategy is to cast an 8-year-old as its main character, which makes
    the fact that most of the graphics are really just crayon drawings not
    only acceptable, but completely appropriate. Just for good measure,
    the game chooses "Attack of the B-Movie Cliches" as its theme and
    subtitle, thereby making the cheese factor of the special effects
    (which is pretty high) actually enhance the game rather than embarrass
    it.  The pictures are delightful -- the crayon drawings evoke a great
    sense of childhood and wonder while continuing the humorous feel of
    the whole game.  The spaceship (two pie plates taped together) and the
    aliens (in the author's words "the finest crayons and modelling clay
    $2.83 could buy") are a scream -- I laughed out loud every time I saw
    them. The game also includes a couple of very well-done non-crayon
    graphics, one an excellent faux movie poster and the other a dead-on
    parody of a web page, both of which I found very funny. The sounds,
    though sparse, are equally good -- the sound of the alien spaceship
    crash-landing startled the heck out of me.  I'm not used to my text
    adventures making noise! But a moment later I was laughing, because
    the noise was just so fittingly silly.

    However, all the funny pictures and sounds in the world couldn't make
    Arrival a good game if it wasn't, at its core, a well-written text
    adventure. Luckily for us, it is. The game is full of cleverly
    written, funny moments, and has layers of detail I didn't even
    recognize until I read the postscript of amusing things to do. The
    aliens, who bicker like a couple of married retirees touring the
    U.S. in their motor home, are great characters. Each is given a
    distinct personality, and in fact a distinct typeface, the green alien
    speaking in green text while the purple alien has text to match as
    well. If you hang around the aliens you will hear quite a bit of funny
    dialogue, and if you manage to switch their universal translator from
    archaic into modern mode, you can hear all the same dialogue, just as
    funny, rewritten into valley-speak. The game has lots of detail which
    doesn't figure in the main plot but creates a wonderfully silly
    atmosphere and provides lots of jokes. For example, on board the ship
    is an examination room, where by flipping switches, pulling levers, or
    turning knobs you can cause all sorts of machinery to pop from the
    walls and perform its function on the gleaming metal table, everything
    from laser beams to buzz saws to Saran Wrap. In addition, Arrival is
    one of the better games I've seen this year at unexpectedly
    understanding input and giving snarky responses to strange commands,
    which has been one of my favorite things about text adventures ever
    since I first played Zork. Even if you can't (or don't want to) run
    the HTML part of HTML TADS, it would still be well worth your time to
    seek out The Arrival.

    However, don't be afraid to rely on hints. I had played for an hour
    and hadn't scored a single point when I took my first look at
    them. Now, once I got some hints I determined that the puzzles did in
    fact make perfect sense -- they weren't of the "read the author's
    mind" variety and I would probably have come to solve them on my
    own. Perhaps the presence of pictures, sound, and hyperlinks threw me
    out of my IF mindset enough that I was struggling more than I should
    have with the puzzles. That's probably a part of it, but I think
    another factor was that all the details in the game ended up becoming
    a big pile of red herrings for me. There are quite a few items and
    places which have no real use beyond being jokes, and I found it quite
    easy to get sidetracked into trying to solve puzzles that didn't
    exist. It's not that I don't think those pieces should be in the game;
    I actually find it refreshing to play a game where not every item is
    part of a key or a lock, and even as it caused me to spin my wheels in
    terms of game progress, it helped me ferret out a lot of the little
    jokes hidden under the surface of various game items. However, if
    you're the kind of player who gets easily frustrated when your score
    doesn't steadily increase, don't be afraid to rely on a hint here and
    there. Just remember to replay the game after you're done so that you
    can see what you missed.  Besides, that pie-plate spaceship is worth a
    second look.

    Rating: 9.6

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

    From: Adam Cadre

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

    PACK UP THE CATS
    Cattus Atrox by David Cornelson

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

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

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

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

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

    My score: 7.3 (5th place)

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

    From: Second April

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From: "david ledgard"

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

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

    From: Second April

    NAME: Downtown Tokyo, Present Day
    AUTHOR: John Kean, writing as Digby McWiggle
    E-MAIL: keanj SP@G agresearch.cri.nz
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Inform, altered somewhat
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if- archive/competition98/inform/tokyo/tokyo.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Perhaps 1998 was the year that authors gave up on text alone and
    resorted to other means of keeping players involved--Arrival and The
    Plant used HTML-TADS graphics and sound effects, Photopia used a color
    scheme, some others (Enlightenment, Muse) used .gif files external to
    the game. And then there was Downtown Tokyo, Present Day, which
    featured some dramatic moments rendered in...ASCII art. On the other
    hand, the drawings fit the tone of the game nicely, which is a cross
    between spoof of and homage to old B movies, and the whole effect is
    rather enjoyable.

    There's one interesting experiment going on that doesn't,
    unfortunately, work as well as it might: the player inhabits both the
    protagonist and a movie-theater onlooker, and commands sometimes are
    directed to the viewer persona rather than the protagonist persona
    without warning. Part of the reason it doesn't entirely work is that
    the protagonist's actions are all in the third person--"our hero
    enjoys a long slurp of soup"--but some of the library responses
    trickle in now and again. To be sure, it's pretty hard to keep that
    from happening, but it also doesn't take much of it to break the
    spell. (On the other hand, it reminded me of the actual experience of
    being in movie theaters--being absorbed in what's happening on the
    screen and suddenly having the spell broken, either by a flaw in the
    film itself or by some distraction in the theater. If that was the
    intent, it's quite well done.) Then again, I'm not sure there's a
    better way to keep the viewer and the protagonist distinct, and if
    they're not distinct, this could turn into a "you're sucked into the
    movie" game, which wouldn't be a tenth as interesting. It's a flawed
    experiment, but it's not a bad idea.

    The plot is minimal, and it's to the game's credit that the whole
    thing is rather casual about the story--plenty of room for even
    time-sensitive actions, and the story essentially stops in the middle
    so that you can wander around and have fun. This is the sort of thing
    I'd disapprove in most IF but which works just fine here, since
    B-movies don't exactly set a high realism standard and it's so much
    fun to play with the toys you're given. Indeed, this middle section
    (if you can call it that in such a tiny game) is the best thing about
    Downtown Tokyo; the beginning and end come off more as quotations,
    homages, than as parodies, and the parody is much more fun. The author
    provides for plenty of silly actions, logical and not. Still, even if
    you're inclined to try those silly things, this won't detain you for
    more than 10 or 15 minutes, and there isn't much reason to come back
    to it. Adding to the fun is the satire: the author claims never to
    have seen a monster movie, but he has a good feel for Hollywood
    cliches anyway. At the end, for example, when the hero and heroine are
    together, we learn that "their clothes are alluringly torn," pointing
    to the way films like to fuse danger and sex. Likewise, when people
    fall, they fall in slow motion, so that you have plenty of time to
    react.

    The only real problem with Downtown Tokyo is that it doesn't work
    particularly well as a game. At the outset, for instance, you can do
    essentially nothing for about 20 turns; so determined is the author to
    make fun of the plot contrivances that he doesn't let you interfere
    with them, logic be damned. The controls in the helicopter you end up
    flying around are rather nonintuitive--at least, the initial hurdle to
    overcome is a little strange. It's also distinctly possible to get
    lost in the city--the unimportant locations don't loop back, so you
    can wander very far away from the relevant scene. It wouldn't have
    broken too much with logic to keep the player from wandering away
    ("You can't leave now. Your reputation as a hero as at stake."). As it
    is, the game provides some cute satirical moments but not much more.

    There isn't a lot to Downtown Tokyo, Present Day, but what's there is
    pretty funny; the author manages to spoof old monster movies in a
    variety of ways. This was intended for the chicken- comp, and it would
    have been among the better entries had it been entered. As it was, in
    the real competition, I gave it a 6.

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

    From: "Paul O'Brian"

    Another very short (TextFire-length) game, Tokyo was originally
    intended for submission to Adam Cadre's Chicken-Comp, but the author
    didn't finish it in time. All the better for us, because the game is
    funny and entertaining, and still finds a little time to be innovative
    as well. With a game this short, it's hard not to give away plot
    spoilers in any extended discussion, but I'll try to be as discreet as
    I can. I'll only say as much as this: Tokyo is a very funny spoof on a
    beloved Japanese film genre (and it's not martial arts movies), one
    which often features the city of Tokyo (or the rubble thereof) as a
    setting. Considering this was originally intended to be a Chicken-Comp
    game, you can probably imagine how it works.  There are several
    reasons why Tokyo is fun, not the least of which is the
    writing. Random description "events", while having no effect on the
    main storyline, give the chaotic scenes an antic charm, and the
    depictions of movie cliches should bring a knowing smile to the face
    of any film buff.

    One interesting experiment in Tokyo is its use of a split PC. In other
    words, the player actually controls the actions of two characters,
    both a rather anonymous individual watching a movie and the hero of
    that movie.  This is an imaginative idea, and it sometimes works very
    well. At its best, Tokyo evokes the kind of split consciousness that
    actually happens while watching a movie. We are present, in the
    theater, there with the plush seats, the popcorn, and the people
    around us. But once we become immersed in the movie, we are inside of
    it as well. We forget about the theater and become part of the story,
    at least until the baby behind us starts crying, or the teenagers in
    the front make a wisecrack. However, the game is not always at its
    best. The split focus creates some confusion as to how commands will
    be interpreted -- you can never be sure whether your command will be
    executed by the viewer or the hero. This generally doesn't cause a
    problem, but it might have worked better if the transitions were
    smooth and complete, and the only interruptions happened outside of
    the player's control. In addition, the standard library has been
    mostly unmodified, so that its messages remain mostly in the second
    person voice. When that's the voice of the entire game, this is not a
    problem, but Tokyo asks second person POV to take on the special duty
    of signaling that the viewer, rather than the hero, is
    reacting. Consequently, messages like "You can't see any such thing"
    (rather than "Our hero can't see any such thing") can create a little
    confusion.

    Finally, I can't review Tokyo without mentioning its graphics. No,
    it's not a z6 game, but Tokyo has some surprises up its
    sleeve. Finding them provides some of the funniest moments of the
    game. Tokyo does a great many things well, and is one of the better
    short-short games I've played. Again, it's a bit disappointing when a
    game this enjoyable ends so soon -- I think this concept had quite a
    bit more mileage in it than was used by the author. Still, I enjoyed
    it while it lasted -- it won't entertain you as long as the average
    summer blockbuster movie, but it will probably entertain you more.

    Rating: 7.9

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

    From: Second April

    NAME: Enlightenment: A One-room Absurdity
    AUTHOR: Taro Ogawa
    E-MAIL: Taro.Ogawa SP@G navy.gov.au
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/enlighte
    VERSION: Release 7

    Enlightenment is proof positive that one-room games need not be
    one-joke or one-puzzle in style; in fact, they can be quite diverse
    and difficult.  In a competition with several of them, Enlightenment
    stands out as the most accomplished: there is a certain unity to the
    puzzles that justifies the one-room framework, and they are difficult
    enoguh to tax the player's mental energy, even within the confines of
    the room.

    The game also features a take-off on the Infocom "feelies" of old,
    with an HTMLized excerpt from Popular Enchanting and several silly but
    amusing tidbits. The excerpt reproduces the goofball feel of the
    Infocom manuals, and fits with the game's persistent tweaking of
    Activision (the darkness is inhabited by g***s, notably, and being
    eaten by one is "both g***ling and g***some"). (The prologue also
    refers to Frobozz Magic Napalm and a Frobozz Magic Tinning Kit, so
    there's not much ambiguity about who we're imitating.) The game blends
    traditional fantasy elements with anachronistic bits like
    battery-operated appliances in a way that likewise recalls Infocom;
    one of the familiar objects is a aerosol can of g*** repellent.

    The puzzles, though the solutions are sometimes silly enough to recall
    Steve Meretzky, would qualify as among Infocom's more difficult:
    several turn on realizing the physical properties of some of the
    objects you're holding, properties not at all obvious to the
    unscientifically minded. Still, the puzzles are inventive and require
    some lateral thinking--and some combining of objects in several
    cases--to solve; the difficulty stems less from unfairness or obscure
    facts than from the one-object or one-property conventions of most IF
    puzzles. The real fly in the ointment is the hint system, which seems
    badly broken--one must go through the hints for the concept of the
    game as a whole in order to get to those for specific puzzles, whether
    or not one has already grasped the goal. There may be a reason for
    that--the headings for the individual puzzles might give the game away
    for the player who hasn't picked up the point yet--but surely there
    must be a way to avoid that problem without such a maladaptive
    system. At any rate, in a game this difficult, the hint system is
    essential--and beyond the initial glitch, the system works well.

    The plot--at least, what can be revealed here--is simple enough: at
    the end of a cave-crawl hack-and-slash fantasy quest, you have to
    cross a bridge guarded by a troll. Therein lies the excuse for giving
    you an inventory full of sundry objects, presumably, which makes
    possible difficult and complicated puzzles. But the way you go about
    getting rid of the troll is more inventive than the premise suggests,
    and suggests an ironic reversal of one of the adventurer's commonplace
    tasks. Likewise implied is a jab at the interchangeability of fantasy
    quests, since the quest as a whole is clearly generic; you never find
    out, after all, what you were after in the first place. The joke, of
    course, is that the game sprinkles offhand references to other things
    you've already encountered in your quest, as if the premise were
    actually worth developing, more than an excuse for the one-room
    problem.

    Enlightenment is a short but extremely solid game: the puzzles are
    challenging enough that solving them feels rewarding. If it feels less
    like a game than a small section of a larger game, that's presumably
    the intent, and while it might be more satisfying to play a full-blown
    game, this sort of entry is ideal for the competition. With enough
    Infocom references to make fans nostalgic, and some of the feel of
    early Infocom, Enlightenment is an unabashed puzzle-fest that boasts
    some of the competition's toughest problems. It does what it does well
    enough that I gave it a 9 in the competition.

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

    From: "Paul O'Brian"

    What is it with all the one-room games this year? There must be some
    kind of movement happening in the collective IF unconscious which says
    "Plot?  Who needs it? Give me one room, and as long as it's got one or
    more puzzles in it, I'm happy." Well, sometimes I'm happy too. And,
    more or less, this is one of those times. Despite its title,
    Enlightenment has very little to do with gaining awareness or
    understanding Zen koans. To say what it *does* have to do with would
    probably be a bit too much of a spoiler, but it involves deliberately
    placing yourself in a situation that most text adventurers would avoid
    at all costs. Because of this, it took me a little while to actually
    catch on to how the game is supposed to work -- I just couldn't
    believe that deliberately placing myself in danger was the right
    path. It is, though, and getting there is all the fun. Like last
    year's Zero Sum Game, Enlightenment puts the PC at the *end* of an
    adventure of dizzying proportions. Unlike Zero Sum Game, Enlightenment
    isn't really an unwinding of the PC's accomplishments -- you get to
    keep your score, and even increase it. You've already overcome dozens
    of obstacles, collected lots of treasures, and scored 240 points out
    of 250; now there's just the little matter of getting past a canonical
    troll bridge and scurrying out of the caverns with your loot. But how?
    In the game's words:

       If only you hadn't used your Frobozz Magic Napalm on that ice wall...
       If only you hadn't used your TrolKil (*Tm) to map that maze...
       If only you hadn't sold your Frobozz Magic Tinning Kit.
       If only you hadn't cooked and eaten those three Billy Goats Gruff...
       ... or that bear ...

       If ONLY you'd checked the bloody bridge on your way in.

    This brief excerpt is representative of the writing in the game: it is
    both a very funny parody of the Zork tradition as well as an
    enthusiastic participation in that tradition. In fact, as you can see
    from the above quote, the game actually features some familiar parts
    of the Zork universe, such as Frobozz Magic products, rat-ants, and
    even certain slavering lurkers in dark corners. Activision apparently
    granted permission for this usage, as they did for David Ledgard in
    his adaptation of the Planetfall sample transcript for his game Space
    Station. Activision's willingness to grant permissions for such usage,
    as well as their donation of prizes to the competition and their
    sometime inclusion of hobbyist IF on commercial products, is great
    news for a fan community like ours -- their support of IF means that
    more people will devote their time to it, resulting (hopefully) in
    more and more good games. Enlightenment is one of the good ones, and
    one of its best features is its writing. Another way in which it is
    unlike Zero Sum Game is that it doesn't take an extreme or harsh tone.
    Instead, the writing is almost always quite funny in both its comments
    on text adventure cliches (the FULL score listing is a scream) and its
    usage of them. The game is littered with footnotes, which themselves
    are often littered with footnotes. Sly allusions and in-jokes abound,
    but they're never what the game depends on, so if you don't catch
    them, you're not missing anything important. Of all the one-room games
    I've seen this year, Enlightenment is definitely the best-written.

    It even includes some fun outside documentation in the form of the
    HTML edition of the latest issue of Spelunker Today: "The magazine for
    explorers and adventurers." This kind of mood-building file has been
    included with a few competition games this year, and Enlightenment's
    extras are definitely the best of the bunch. The writing in the faux
    magazine is just as good as the writing in the game, and the graphics
    look sharp and professional. I like these little extras -- they really
    do help set the mood of a game -- and they definitely add to the fun
    of Enlightenment.

    The one problem I had with this game was that, although the writing is
    funny and clever, it is sometimes not precise enough to convey the
    exact nature of a puzzle or its solution. In a heavily puzzle-oriented
    game like Enlightenment, this can be a major setback. For example, at
    one point in the game you're called upon to cut something, but it
    won't work to use your sword on it. You must find something else to
    cut with. Well, there is something else, but that object is never
    described as having a sharp edge. This is one of those puzzles that
    made me glad I looked at the hints -- the only way I would have ever
    gotten it is by brute force, and that's no fun anyway. In another
    instance, a part of the setting is described in such a confusing way
    that I still don't quite understand what it is supposed to look
    like. Part of the difficulty, I think, is that the game features a
    gate, with metal spikes at its bottom set into the stone floor. Now,
    this made me think of bars, like you might see on a portcullis.
    However, as far as I can determine the game actually means a solid
    wall, with spikes at the bottom, which I wouldn't describe as a
    gate. This kind of imprecision is a real problem when the objects so
    imprecisely described have to be acted upon in precise ways in order
    to solve puzzles. So I used the hints for a number of the puzzles, and
    I don't mind that I did, because I wouldn't have solved them on my own
    anyway. But imprecision aside, I'm still glad I used them, because it
    enabled me to play all the way through Enlightenment, and the trip out
    of that one room was well worth taking.

    Rating: 8.6

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

    From: "david ledgard"

    This game is based in the Zork Universe. You have just completed your
    mission and escaped with a load of treasure, but a troll blocks the
    last bridge to freedom, you can't go back because you've booby-trapped
    the gate. This is a one room adventure which I find a bit
    constraining, with only one NPC, the troll. Your inventory includes a
    lot of treasures, and a few other adventurer type items.

    I'm afraid I couldn't work out what to do, and was running to the
    hints within 10 minutes. I thought all the illuminated objects were
    some kind of programming error, probably me being a bit dense. I'm
    afraid the level of puzzles in this game was to complex for me, I only
    managed to solve a handful by myself, and kept having to use hints. I
    could never have completed it on my own.

    The game also comes with a mildly interesting HTML web page
    set-up. The author would of been wise to include a few subtle hints
    here, so people wouldn't have to use the hint system straight away,
    and point out it exists in the run file. Once you start using hints it
    ruins the game, and just becomes a chore of reading hints, and typing
    in what they say.  The game also has a footnotes system, but I never
    found footnotes much fun after the novelty value, and the old Footnote
    10 - Read Footnote 11, Footnote 11 - Read Footnote 10; and Footnote 20
    - we didn't mention that Footnote; jokes have worn off. It's just a
    thing to show off one's programming skill, and annoy the player.

    This game is well coded - I didn't find any errors - but too complex
    for my taste, and I suspect a lot of other people. The author has a
    Japanese sounding name, whether he is or not I don't know, but the
    game certainly seems Japanese: Ultra Efficient, and Ultra Boring.

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

    From: "david ledgard"

    NAME: Fifteen
    AUTHOR: Ricardo Dague
    E-MAIL: trikiw SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/fifteen

    VERSION: Release 7

    I quite enjoyed this game although it was very simple. Clearly a first
    adventure. The main item in the game is the Fifteen Puzzle which is
    implemented like one of those simple text games, you used to see in
    computer pre-history a bit like Robots, by Torbjörn Andersson,
    available from the IF archive. I remember playing Wrap and Zombies (a
    variant of Robots) on a Commodore Pet (yes, computers did once exist
    that used Tape Drives, and had memory measured in single 1K units),
    kind of nostalgic, showing my age.

    The rest of the game is very simple, locked doors, put the treasures
    on the table etc... I worked out the remote control program in about
    half a microsecond, but then I am a seasoned IF hand. I had a bit of
    trouble working out how to use the ladder, a guess the verb problem,
    which could be fixed. The game is short on narrative, with a lot of
    short room descriptions, which could be fleshed out a bit. Clearly
    this game was never going to have a good showing due to it's
    simplicity, but it was enjoyable none the less.

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

    From: "Paul O'Brian"

    NAME: Four in One
    AUTHOR: J. Robinson Wheeler
    E-MAIL: wheeler SP@G jump.net
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/tads/fourin1/fourin1.gam
    VERSION: Release 1.0

    Playing Four In One, I was in an unusual, unprecedented (for me)
    situation: I was playing a game of which I had already read a
    complete, winning transcript. Not a walkthrough, but a transcript of
    commands and game responses. It seems that the author submitted this
    transcript to Stephen Granade's IF Fan Fest, an informal
    quasi-competition held at Granade's Mining Company web page. If I had
    known this transcript was also going to be a competition game, I
    wouldn't have read it, because I hate spoilers.  But I didn't know
    that, so I read it, and it made playing the game a very strange
    experience -- the whole thing gave me a very strong sense of deja
    vu. Now, granted, the transcript isn't an exact one. You can't follow
    that transcript and hope to win the game, because the commands are not
    all perfectly duplicated, and there are some other differences between
    the two as well. However, they have a *lot* in common. Now, the funny
    thing about this is that when I initially read the Four in One
    transcript, my thought was "It's a funny idea, but it would be far too
    difficult to actually turn into a game." Well, I have been proved
    wrong.

    The idea behind the game is that you're a film director in the heyday
    of the Marx brothers, and you're directing them in their first picture
    for MGM. Or at least, you're trying to direct them. Apparently,
    keeping all the Marxes in one room, getting along, and working
    productively is somewhat akin to herding cats. Consequently, you're
    forced into the position of chasing after them, collecting them one by
    one, and forcing them to follow you around to their (and your)
    considerable annoyance. Even once you've got them all on the set and
    rehearsed, there's no guarantee that one or more of them won't go
    bolting off to make a phone call, hang out at the catering table, or
    read a book. What's worse, you have only two hours to get a good take
    on a crucial scene, or you and the picture will both be canned. The
    transcript makes this into a hilarious situation, showing the Marx
    brothers at their zaniest even when the cameras aren't rolling. In
    fact, *all* the comedy takes place when the cameras aren't
    rolling. This is the kind of thing that I didn't think an IF game
    would be able to pull off, but Four in One is the living proof. It's
    not as funny as the transcript, but it works, especially in places
    like Chico's dressing room, where more and more people keep entering,
    pushing you inexorably to the back wall like the first entrant in a
    phone-booth-stuffing competition. Scenes like this can be irritating
    as well, and the game sometimes steps across the fine line between
    funny aggravation and just plain aggravating aggravation. However,
    with the exception of one internal TADS error that I found, the
    technical details of the writing and coding are executed superbly, and
    this goes a long way towards smoothing out any annoyances.

    The place where the game's technical proficiency shines the most is in
    its characters. Four In One is a the most character-intensive piece of
    IF I've ever played. Almost every location has one or more characters
    in it at all times, and these characters are as fully implemented as
    they need to be.  The gaffer, for example, is not terribly talkative
    -- ask him about the movie and he'll say "A job's a job," but ask him
    about the lights and he has an opinion, as he should. Every character
    has responses about the things they should know about, though if you
    spend much time in conversations with them you will run afoul of the
    game's time limit. The Marx brothers can tell you about each other,
    the movie, MGM (Groucho says, "MGM stands for 'more godless
    movies.'"), and anything else they ought to know about. Four in One
    does an outstanding job juggling all these characters, giving them
    just the appropriate depth of implementation so that the game really
    rewards replay. After I had solved the game, I went back and just
    chatted with the various characters, and was delighted with the extent
    to which they are implemented. The author's research is quite apparent
    in these moments, and it makes a big difference. Four In One taught me
    things about the Marx Brothers that I had never known before, and made
    me want to go out and rent A Night at the Opera again. That's
    entertainment.

    Rating: 8.7

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

    From: Second April

    If competition entries got individual awards, Four in One would have
    to be recognized as the Greatest Sheer Effort. The game is simply
    littered with NPCs--24 by my count, and considering the way the
    characters wander in and out, I'm sure I missed at least a few. Some
    of them essentially stand still (though all have some dialogue
    potential), others have painfully complicated movement daemons, and
    just thinking about what it took to code all of them made me want to
    cry. (The source code is now available, but I haven't looked at it
    yet. Perhaps some day when I'm feeling especially brave.)
    Unfortunately, all that elaborate coding doesn't necessarily add up to
    a rewarding game--though given how much time the author obviously put
    into this, I certainly wish I could say it did.

    The premise: you're "Sam Wood," trying to put the finishing touches on
    the latest Marx Brothers movie, and you're charged with the task of
    assembling everyone on the set so that the last scene can be
    filmed. Your clout as director only goes so far, however, and trying
    to keep the brothers on the set long enough to film is, even for you,
    is like building a house out of Jello. You have a trusty sidekick who,
    frankly, isn't much use, and the set is filled with extras and techies
    and other actors. Egos being what they are, however, you don't seem to
    be able to delegate the task of rounding up the brothers, and so you
    scurry around the studio as if you were a lowly assistant.

    Since the end of the competition, the cry regarding Four in One has
    been fairly uniform: cute but too frustrating. The cry isn't wrong, as
    such, but let's be clear about why it's frustrating: it's not because
    there are a lot of NPCs to understand and manipulate. It's that so
    much of the NPCs' behavior is random, as far as I can tell, that a
    given game can be impossible to win if certain random events go
    against you often enough. If two certain characters get in a fight,
    for instance, another would leave, slowing down the rounding-up
    process. Too many fights and you'd lose your power to gather people
    together, for various reasons. I don't know whether the fights
    happened at random or were related to some other factor, controllable
    or not; if there was another factor, it was obscure enough that I
    never caught on. Likewise, another character gets bored after a
    certain amount of moves and wanders away--and if you don't get him to
    do what he's supposed to do before that happens, you've wasted a
    chance, and you don't have a lot to spare. To be sure, part of what
    makes the game realistic is that the NPCs are not entirely malleable;
    to that end, Four in One gets lots of realism points. Getting the
    brothers to do what you want is, as someone said, like herding
    cats. But all the realism points seem to come out of the fun column.

    However, there's an upside to all this: there's lots of replayability
    in Four in One, partly to find Easter eggs and partly because there's
    lots of extraneous detail to sift through. Most of the characters
    respond to a variety of questions--about the movie, other characters,
    life, etc.  Because a winning game can vary so much--two different
    games can present different challenges: solving the game once doesn't
    guarantee that you'll be able to solve it on the next try. (Then
    again, the random events might just not be on your side the next time,
    as noted.) The game is consistently funny--Groucho has lots of good
    one-liners, and Harpo has plenty of amusing antics, even if they
    usually impede your progress. The thoroughness of the coding is not
    limited to the NPC daemons--different characters have distinct
    reactions when they enter certain rooms, for instance, and putting
    certain characters in rooms together has unexpected results. In short,
    so much of Four in One works so well that it seems rude to point out
    that the game itself isn't always a lot of fun, at least if the player
    is interested in achieving the goal the game presents. Most of the fun
    to be had is extraneous to that goal.

    In summary, Four in One reminded me of Tempest from the previous
    year's competition--a brilliant idea, thoroughly and intelligently
    done, that I wanted to like more than I did. And just as Four in One
    arguably worked better as the transcript submitted to the IF Fan Fest,
    so Tempest works better as, well, the play, and the literacy of the
    attempt to translate it can't hide that. Four in One is quite a
    testament to the author's skills; as a game, however, it's flawed, and
    I gave it a 7.

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

    From: "david ledgard"

    This is quite an interesting concept, putting a new spin on
    IF. Instead of the game being object-centric, it is NPC-centric, with
    NO objects of any use what so ever, and more NPC's per square pixel
    than any other game I have played, although most of them are thinly
    implemented. But basically what happened is NPC's become gloryfied
    objects. You are on a film set and only have four remaining takes to
    complete a picture (hence the name), or you're out on your ear. The
    film includes the four Marx Brothers, I've vaguely heard of Groucho
    that's about it, and I thought there were only two. The problem is to
    get all the stars and extras in the same place at the same this. To do
    this you can TAKE people, to get them to follow you. The trouble is
    they keep wandering off while you're finding the others ones,
    sometimes after only one turn. There are, however, two NPC's who can
    help you locate missing people. Most of the time actors tend to go to
    the same places, but some won't follow without overs. Read the special
    commands to see how to control them. I'm afraid I couldn't finish this
    game, and suspect very very few people actually did.

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

    From: "david ledgard"

    NAME: Human Resources Stories
    AUTHOR: Harry M. Hardjono
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Multiple-choice (mostly)
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/hrs

    A lot of people pooh-poohed this game, just because it wasn't standard
    IF. I think the author was quite brave, trying a different format, and
    applying the genre in a different way. I don't think it deserved to
    come last. The suspension of the save facility was a bit annoying, but
    justified by the game context, I suppose. The game was a lot more
    complicated than most people appreciate, with it calculating a
    different job grade/wage depending on your answers. Also I think, but
    am not sure, the wrong answers changed depending on your previous
    answers. Vive la difference.

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

    From: "Jason F. Finx"

    NAME:   I Didn't Know You Could Yodel
    AUTHOR: Michael R. Eisenman and Andrew J. Indovina
    EMAIL:  I don't know, and frankly I can't really say I care
    DATE:   Some time in 1996, apparently (the copyright message at the top of the
            game says 1997, but the copyright message it gives when you get the
            "last lousy point" says 1996, so I'm assuming the earlier one is when
            the game was first created).
    PARSER: Better than Scott Adams, but not up to TADS/Inform standard.
    SUPPORTS:  IBM PC only
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, though the surviving author seems to be planning a
                  commercial (or at least shareware) release.  Currently
                  available in the contests98 folder of the gmd.de IF-archive.
    URL: http://chorn.com/~scorpion/yodel.html
         ftp://if-archive/games/competition98/msdos/yodel

    "Oh, no.  It can't be."

    That was my reaction when I looked at the results from the 1998 IF
    contest and saw, near the bottom of the list, the title "I Didn't Know
    I Could Yodel".

    Why this reaction, you might ask?  Well, about six months ago I
    downloaded a game by that title from FreeGames Online
    (www.freegamesonline.com), and made the mistake of actually playing
    it.  This was before I had heard of SPAG or the IF archive, and had I
    heard of those, and known how many other, much better text adventures
    were available, I would never have slogged my way through this one.
    As it was, I probably still wouldn't have were it not for a promise of
    some spectacular ending.  I was, at least, gratified to see how close
    to the bottom of the list the game had placed (ranking even below a
    game coauthored by the infamous Rybread Celsius! ;) ), which meant
    that other people had shared my opinion of it.

    But no, I later reasoned; it couldn't possibly be the same game.
    After all, the 1998 competition rules explicitly state that no game
    could have been released prior to its entry to the contest.  Either
    this was an illegal entry, or it was a different game by the same name
    - which was, I thought, entirely possible; after all, the title came
    from a rather old joke.

    Then I looked at the file "yodeltxt.txt", and saw the phrase "type 'vanna'
    to play hangman", and knew that my worst fears were realized.

    It was the same game.

    (Before I go on, a few notes about the fact that the game had been
    released well before the contest date.  If I understand the rules
    correctly, and this does constitute a violation of them, then there
    are things which lead me to believe that the rule violation was not
    intentional.  The statement in the file yodeltxt.txt that "[a]fter the
    contest, I would like to try to release it, if that's ok with you
    guys" suggests that the author assumed that "release" means "attempt
    to sell for money".  If, as I suspect, the author did equate
    "releasing" the game with charging money for it, then his violation of
    the rules was not a knowing one.)

    [ Editor's note: According to the Contest organizer, David Dyte, the
    pre-competition release of the game was made unbeknown to the authors,
    and without their permission, and a decision was made to let it
    compete despite this. ]

    Now, why did I dislike this game so much?  Well, the main problem with
    it I can sum up in two words: bathroom humor.  (And I use the word
    "humor" loosely.)  More bathroom humor than I've seen in all the other
    text adventure games I've ever played combined.  At two different
    locations in the game, you find yourself in desperate need of - ah,
    emptying your large intestine - or dire consequences result (i.e. your
    character dies horribly).  If that were the end of it, well, that
    would be that, but unfortunately it isn't; there's also a repulsive
    bit after the second time involving... well, we'll all be better off
    if I don't go into that.

    Actually, toilet humor wasn't even all of it.  The game almost seemed
    to go out of its way to be offensive and disgusting at every
    opportunity.  There are ethnic slurs, gay jokes, and jokes involving a
    certain other bodily secretion (I can't be more specific without
    giving away one of the puzzles), and at two different points you have
    to kill an innocent character (two different characters, of course).
    I think the single section of the game that stands out as the most
    repulsive was the Jed's House sequence, but the bulk of the game
    wallows in the same filth, if to a slightly lesser degree.

    Also, the insult-the-player-character device is getting really old,
    and this game takes it to rather extreme levels (which makes the
    endgame make even less sense than it otherwise would).  And speaking
    of devices that are getting really old, and are taken to extreme
    levels in this game, some other games may include their authors as
    powerful NPCs, but... well, I can't say more without giving away part
    of the ending.  Speaking of NPCs, though (while I'm segueing anyway),
    the NPCs of this game - and there are a lot of them - are fairly
    typical for old, second-class (i.e. not by Infocom or the other
    classic companies) text adventures.  Most of them are only there as
    puzzles to be solved; you can't interact with them outside of a few
    very narrow possibilities (the NPC, DO SUCH-AND-SUCH command structure
    isn't even implemented), and they do nothing on their own; either they
    just stay in one place until you get rid of them, or they appear, do
    whatever they're supposed to do, and then vanish. The only possible
    exception is the comedian, and even he only really has a set joke he
    spouts on entering each new room, which isn't even related to the room
    itself.  Actually, there was a lot of missed potential with the
    comedian - he could have made sarcastic comments on the player's
    actions, taunted the player when something didn't work, et cetera -
    but no; for the most part he just spouts irrelevant jokes.

    Now, to the technical issues.  To be honest, I didn't remember much
    about these details, but I figured if I was going to write a review of
    this game I'd better play through it again (especially since the
    version submitted might have been a later release than the one I
    played originally), so I stiffened my lip and subjected myself once
    more to its inane repulsiveness.  As it turns out, the grammar and
    spelling are far from perfect - there are some misplaced modifiers,
    missing ending quotation marks, and words that should be capitalized
    that aren't, among other things, and quite a few misspellings (the
    most annoying of which was the constant "your" for "you're", though I
    found it odd that the authors misspelled "monstrous" two different
    ways in the same paragraph!) - but it could have been a lot worse.
    The writing is awkward, though; sometimes a simple contraction or two
    would help its flow immensely, and in a few places there are obvious
    mistakes (usually in the form of omitted words) that the authors
    failed to catch, such as "A pudgy cop steps out the vehicle".  The
    attempt at poetry in the dogs' challenges in the Lawn is particularly
    awful, but at least its awfulness is acknowledged within the game.
    (Perhaps it was meant to be _dog_gerel?  Nah, I don't think the
    authors were that subtle.)

    Most of the scenery objects are examinable, though there are some
    glaring omissions.  For example, one room contains dogs with sombreros
    and big mustaches, but the game doesn't recognize the words "sombrero"
    and "mustache", and despite the fact that the game tells you that you
    read the walls of a bathroom stall, and examining the walls tells you
    they're "written all over", typing "read walls" gives the message
    "There's nothing to read".  Many room descriptions, unfortunately,
    neglect to mention the exits (and in at least one place the exits are
    listed incorrectly!).

    The parser - a homemade one written in Modula-2 - can handle
    multiple-word commands - adjectives and prepositions are allowed - but
    I got the idea that it didn't really so much parse them as just do a
    keyword search.  If there's an NPC you're supposed to ASK about
    something, for example, if often doesn't make a difference what you're
    asking about, or even whether the NPC is the object or the object of
    the preposition!  At the West End of Lawn, for example, "TALK TO
    WAITER", "ASK WAITER", "ASK WAITER ABOUT TOMATO", and even "ASK PRUNES
    ABOUT WAITER" all elicit exactly the same response from the waiter
    (which incidentally has nothing to do with tomatoes or prunes), while
    "TALK", "ASK", or even "ASK PRUNES ABOUT TOMATO" yield a different
    response from the waiter, even though you haven't said you're talking
    to him.  Worse, if there's an NPC around but not one the game requires
    you to talk to, the ASK and TALK commands get the response "There is
    no one to talk to," regardless of the objects.  Also, such
    now-standard commands as "undo" and "oops" are missing ("wait", rather
    inexplicably, yields the response "You must supply a noun").
    Additionally, there are a few places that could use better support of
    synonyms or rewordings: you can MOVE or PUSH a certain body, but not
    TURN it OVER or ROLL it OVER (despite the fact that when you push it
    it rolls over anyway), and KNOCK ON DOOR works where KNOCK is answered
    by the response "It doesn't do any good."

    There are a number of relatively minor bugs, but I only found three
    that I would consider really disastrous.  First, even after everything
    else is done, "ENTER BOAT" makes a voice say "YOU ARE NOT READY FOR
    THE BOAT YET!", but "WEST" gets you on the boat just fine, which is
    likely to lead players who only try the former command to think
    there's something left they have to do first.  Second, when the game
    requests a one-letter response, it only accepts lower-case letters,
    and in fact entering a capital letter in the hangman game (don't ask;
    its connection to the rest of the game is tenuous) crashes the program
    with the error "function fell thru the end".  Last, if you go to the
    Indian Battle Ground after getting the collar from the dogs, your
    collar disappears and you can't get another one, which makes the game
    unsolvable unless you've already finished everything in the dogs'
    area.

    As for the puzzles, well, to be honest, most of them weren't bad, and
    some of them were quite imaginative.  There were few that seemed
    totally illogical; though I admit I was turned off enough by the
    bathroom humor that I cheated on a few puzzles by looking at the code
    to get it over with (there was no walkthrough available when I first
    played it in August), even for those few puzzles that I cheated on
    when I found the solutions I thought I could have gotten them if I
    just hadn't given up so soon.  (Granted, though, a few of the puzzles
    that I did get without cheating involved little logic and a lot of
    guessing.)  One of the two puzzles that involved killing an innocent
    person was especially clever and well-done, though I wish they had
    made it so the NPC was only incapacitated instead of killed in cold
    blood.  Another puzzle (getting past the enraged Injun Simon) had me
    stuck for a long time when I first played it, but when I did finally
    figure out the solution it seemed blatantly obvious - which I think is
    one mark of a good puzzle.

    Most of the puzzles were, however, very disconnected, and there wasn't
    any plot to speak of (despite the explanation at the end); this again
    is fairly typical of many old second-class text adventures which were
    just hodgepodges of plotless puzzles.  Also, I seldom like the idea of
    riddles in a text adventure, and this one had a lot of them.  They
    were readily solvable (well, the last one had me stumped, and even
    after I cheated by looking at the code I didn't understand it for a
    long time, but after I finally "got" it I thought I should have gotten
    it sooner), and the end of the game at least gave some justification
    for them.

    In fact, for what it's worth, the ending didn't completely fail to
    deliver on its promise.  It didn't completely succeed either: the fate
    of your character was positive, but far too much so, so much that it
    seemed unmotivated (especially given the previous constant emphasis on
    your character's stupidity and general worthlessness - what exactly
    did he do to earn such a great reward?), and frankly rather
    unspectacular by its very superlativeness.  I did, however, like the
    idea of the brief descriptions of what later happened to all the
    game's NPCs.  Unfortunately, the authors' descriptions of what
    happened to the characters were as juvenile and unfunny as the rest of
    the game, but the _idea_ of having such a "where-are-they-now" list
    was original (as far as I know) and entertaining, even if the
    implementation in this particular game left a lot to be desired.

    In fact, something similar could be said of much of the game.  The
    authors were not at a loss for good ideas.  Subpar parser,
    plotlessness, and static NPCs aside, the biggest problem this game had
    was simply its authors' fixation on bathroom humor - and that _was_ a
    big problem.  There were quite a few positive aspects of the game,
    however.  Quite a bit of imagination went into it; it's just too bad
    that so much of it was directed toward jokes involving bodily
    functions.  There was at least one very nice red herring that I was
    convinced I must have to do something about (but, as it turned out, I
    didn't).  The geography, if bizarre and illogical, was at least
    consistent (with the possible exception of wherever exactly that horde
    of desert natives was supposed to be).  The "last lousy point" is
    actually given for something that makes sense for a change (within the
    context of the game).

    In short, these authors aren't completely without potential - well,
    "this author", I should say; according to the notes in the
    yodeltxt.txt file one (Michael Eisenman) is now deceased.  The main
    thing he needs to do is get his mind out of the gutter.  Sadly, in "I
    Didn't Know You Could Yodel", the authors' minds were so deeply and
    firmly wedged in said gutter that this completely overwhelmed any
    positive things about the game.  If Mr. Indovina makes another game
    without all the toilet jokes and other objectionable attempts at
    humor, it may conceivably be worth looking at (though unless he takes
    great strides in a lot of other aspects too it still will be far from
    top-of-the-line).  But unless you have the sense of humor of a
    particularly snickery preteen, "I Didn't Know You Could Yodel" is
    decidedly not worth the download.

    My score for "I Didn't Know You Could Yodel":

    Atmosphere 0   - None to speak of except repulsive "humor"
    Gameplay   0.9 - Not bad for a homemade parser, but far from state
                     of the art.
    Writing    0.3 - The writing was pedestrian at best, and far from
                     devoid of spelling and grammar errors, but at least
                     it didn't have as many as some other games.
    Plot       0.2 - No real plot, but at least there's some attempt to
                     explain things at the end.
    Discretion 0.3 - I didn't like toilet humor when I was 10, and I don't
                     like it any better now.  I didn't give a 0 for the
                     discretionary points, though because I felt the authors
                     deserved some credit for a few unique touches like the
                     "where are they now" bit at the end.
    Characters 0.3 - Lots of NPCs, but they're all caricatures you can't
                     interact with
    Puzzles    1   - By far the best aspect of the game, but still, few really
                     interactive puzzles, and a few felt like guessing games.
                     Plus, the riddles annoyed me.

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

    From: "Paul O'Brian"

    NAME: Informatory
    AUTHOR: William S. Shlaer
    EMAIL: shlaer SP@G aol.com
    DATE: September 1998
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/informat
    VERSION: Release 1

    Every year I've been writing reviews for the IF competition, I've seen
    several games which are their authors' first attempt at learning
    Inform.  These usually aren't the better games -- I find that most of
    the really good Inform games in the competition are not the first
    pieces of code ever hacked together by their authors. Informatory,
    however, gives a twist to this tendency -- it is the author's first
    attempt to *teach* Inform. Rather than replicating its author's
    apartment or dorm room, Informatory instead replicates a number of
    familiar scenes and objects from various canonical IF games, and
    allows its player to peek at their source code in order to give some
    insight as to how Inform could be used to create them. It does this
    through a handy device known as the "Codex Helmet" -- whenever the
    player character wears this helmet, source code for all objects
    becomes visible. Of course, a couple of elementary puzzles must be
    overcome in order to gain access to this miracle of technology, but
    hints are provided for those puzzles. Once the Helmet is acquired,
    Informatory presents a new kind of puzzle: to progress in the game,
    you must decipher the Inform source code of its objects so that you
    may use their special properties to your advantage.

    For me, this kind of puzzle worked well, because it relied on
    information I had already acquired through working on my own Inform
    creations. However, for someone who did not know Inform and wasn't
    particularly interested in investing much time to learn it, I think
    those puzzles would be a major nuisance. In fact, if you're not
    interested in learning Inform, my advice would be to give this game a
    pass. Its interests are much more in helping novices to learn Inform
    in a fairly fun and ingenious way than to provide a fun gaming
    experience for everyone. This is a perfectly acceptable goal, but it
    makes Informatory more educational software than entertainment
    software. The game invokes the genie from Andrew Plotkin's Lists and
    Lists, and the reference is quite apt -- that game also didn't much
    care about entertaining, instead giving the focus to its own
    (remarkable) z-machine implementation of Scheme. Informatory didn't
    feel quite as oppressive as Lists to me, probably because I'm already
    familiar with Inform, an advantage I sadly lacked when it came to
    Scheme. However, the two share a common theme: they are not so much
    games as teaching tools, and if you're not interested in learning, the
    tool isn't for you.

    Having thus limited its audience, Informatory does its task rather
    well, I think. The author bills it a "not-very-interactive tutorial,"
    and I think he's only half-right on both counts. Depending on how you
    define the term "interactive", I think Informatory is quite
    interactive indeed. It's probably the only game I've ever seen that
    actually assigns outside reading to its players so that they have a
    better chance at the puzzles. This obviously doesn't work in the
    competition context, but someone might find it a little useful when
    used as a tool in its own right, especially if that person is already
    in the process of learning Inform. Furthermore, Informatory's
    source-code-oriented puzzles are *much* more interactive than the
    typical tutorial style of "announce the concept, show the concept, now
    you try it." Now, this is a double-edged sword too: sometimes the lack
    of guidance can really be rather frustrating. I sometimes found myself
    wishing for the genie from Lists to keep hanging around, giving me
    clues when I needed them. Consequently, I didn't find Informatory to
    be "not-very-interactive", but I didn't really find it to be a
    "tutorial" either. Instead of teaching Inform piece-by-piece, it
    assigns reading in the Designer's Manual, and in fact those
    assignments are only reachable after solving a number of source code
    puzzles. Informatory therefore isn't much of a teacher, but it's a
    good quiz for those who are already learning.  As a competition game,
    it's no great shakes: at its best, it's about as much fun as taking a
    really interesting test. However, I can see it becoming one useful
    tool for people who are beginning to get their feet wet in the sea of
    Inform.

    Rating: 6.8

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

    From: "david ledgard"

    The first time I tried this game, I couldn't get in the White House so
    gave up. I had another look at it because I was suckered into doing
    these reviews, and am rather glad I did. The problem wasn't very
    difficult, just took a bit of time and intellectual albow
    grease. There are quite a number of humerous jokes in this game
    including the leaflet (having written a game myself I totally agree),
    and the sink and flame jokes. This game resonates with me, and I'll
    wager (a) the Author is British, and (b) has spent several years doing
    a computer course. A few minor gripes, toad should have said 'POOP!
    POOP!', and the letter Z is not recognised by "crudely" or "carved",
    ditto for the journal. I kind of figured I'd find a skeleton key in
    the skeleton, comment required for this action. I had thought of
    including inform snippets in my Spacestation game as well, but ran out
    of time. They'll probably be in the next version. The codex helmet did
    get very annoying very fast, though, it was just like looking up
    hints, only much more tedious. A FULL command, telling you where you
    scored your points, might have been good too.

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

    From: Second April

    NAME: Little Blue Men
    AUTHOR: Michael Gentry
    E-MAIL: edromia SP@G concentric.net
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/bluemen
    VERSION: Release 1

    Little Blue Men is, at bottom, a highly bizarre game. It begins in a
    ho-hum office setting and abruptly shifts into...well, it's hard to
    say.  Sci-fi/horror/dystopia/fantasy, maybe. The result, though uneven
    in spots, is certainly unique, and rather disturbing as well: familiar
    elements of the office environment are given a sinister cast, and the
    game is enlivened throughout by macabre humor.

    The game begins with you at your desk doing menial tasks, and it can
    end there very quickly as well unless you, the player, decide to put
    down your menial tasks at a certain point and go explore the rest of
    the office. In other words, the game gives you a quick "ending" after
    about five moves and doesn't emphasize that this ending is
    suboptimal. In an IF Competition rife with one-room or one-puzzle
    games, the size of the story file might be the only thing keeping the
    player from missing most of the game. This is an issue mainly because
    the game keeps you from wandering away at first, and provides minimal
    motivation for you to get up and wander around; it's not clear _why_
    you do what you do. The problem of unclear motivations recurs later,
    as the game transforms into, well, whatever it is: some of your
    actions have no obvious reasons. The author, to be fair, was trying to
    explore the idea of a protagonist motivated by evil ends--or, at
    least, ends with which the player cannot easily sympathize.  It's an
    underdeveloped area in IF, and this is an intriguing stab at it.  But
    without some flashes of intuition in that regard, the player is likely
    to discover what the character's goals are through the hints, which
    doesn't exactly have the same effect.

    As the game progresses, though, and the genre/setting becomes more
    clear, the author delivers several excellent shock-twists in ways
    reminiscent of Delusions, and just as effective. Once the player
    accepts the premise (and figures out what it is), Little Blue Men is
    terrific sci-fi in a vaguely absurdist way. Some lengthy speeches by
    NPCs could have come straight out of schlocky movies or books, but
    that just adds to the overall effect here: the author's main satirical
    theme is the line between irritating office banality and sheer evil,
    and the game plays the dichotomy for all it's worth. The puzzles
    largely reinforce that: most involve putting conventional office
    objects to new, devious uses, or turning humdrum objects into weapons,
    or conquering perennial office irritations (like the blaring smoke
    detector or the fickle vending machine). The cross-genre nature of the
    game leaves a lot of unanswered questions, of course--more backstory
    would help--but the dystopia part is so thoroughly done that it works
    well nonetheless.

    One of the more interesting aspects of Little Blue Men is its
    separation between goal and motivation. The character's goals are not
    always clear; it is clear that the character does not anticipate the
    ending of the game before it happens. Instead, the goals are more
    personal, more centered on the self: your emotional balance is
    somewhere between "steamed" and "frosty," and your object at any given
    moment is to become more frosty and eliminate those things that make
    you steamed. Once the player accepts that premise--that your objective
    is to get rid of annoyances--it drives the game, yet the author never
    provides any goals larger than that. The result is, in a sense, a
    rather narcissistic game--the importance of everything around lies in
    how it makes you feel--which is, no doubt, just what the author
    intended. One of the questions that Little Blue Men poses is whether
    getting rid of those things that annoy you leads to anything better:
    the ambivalent nature of the ending suggests otherwise.

    In fact, one of the best, and most frustrating things, about the game
    is the ending: the effect is both surreal and disturbing. It is not
    clear that the player has "won" when he or she reaches the end of the
    game; there is good reason, in fact, for thinking that the end of the
    story is merely another ending, no better than the "deaths" you can
    die earlier on.  This is a Zarfian ending taken a step further:
    whereas other games have given a clear resolution without allowing the
    player to "win," in the sense of resolving the problem or riding into
    the sunset with the treasure, Blue Men raises the distinct possibility
    that it might have been better not to reach that ending at all. It's a
    unique feeling that, unfortunately, doesn't necessarily make for a
    satisfying game experience, assuming the player realizes what's going
    on at all.

    Indeed, Little Blue Men works somewhat better on the theoretical level
    than as a game, though it's still a good game. The author seems to
    have set out to demolish certain IF tropes, and, give him credit, he
    does. Many of his points are sufficiently subtle that they're easily
    missed--after all, not many games attempt such things. The game
    itself, though funny in spots, doesn't work as well as the theory
    behind it: the unclear or questionable motivations are part of it, but
    it's also that the cross-genre feel keeps the player off balance,
    wondering where the story will go next, for most of the game. Those
    not interested in the theory of game design might well get to the end,
    say "what was THAT all about?", and quit. Still, perfect marriages
    between entertainment and subversion/experimentation in IF are
    rare--Spider and Web comes close; not many others do--and Little Blue
    Men does well to get the player through the game and raise some
    intriguing questions.

    This is, in short, an interesting effort, perhaps best suited for
    those experienced in IF and willing to question its
    conventions. There's lots of intriguing stuff going on in Little Blue
    Men, enough that I gave it a 9 in this year's competition.

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

    From: "Paul O'Brian"

    WARNING: Because Little Blue Men uses obscenities in its text, that
    language will also appear in this review.

    Well, the first thing I have to say is that starting Little Blue Men
    right after finishing Human Resources Stories was quite
    mind-bending. The game starts with a character who is sitting at his
    desk thinking of his job as "another day in the trenches," looking at
    his corner as his "own little slice of the shit pie those sons of
    bitches call an office." I had this sudden vision of IF authors as
    angry loners, driven by their misanthropy and lack of social skills
    into highly solitary hobbies like writing and programming, friendless
    misfits who hate their jobs, hate their lives, and generally hate
    people, and who write supposedly entertaining games that are really
    about how much the world sucks. Luckily, the vision passed as the game
    underwent a curious transformation. First of all, the game's
    disclaimer assured me that "at its most fundamental level, this game
    is about learning to love yourself." OK, maybe we're not loving
    anybody else yet, but loving yourself is at least a little
    positive. Next, I entered a few commands, the first ones that came to
    mind, really, and... won the game. Or did I? My final message said
    "*** You have learned to love yourself ***", which is what I was told
    the game was about. So I won, right? In 10 moves? I wondered how in
    the heck a game whose .z5 file was 171K could end up being so short. I
    wondered, in the game's words, "What the hell...?!"

    It turns out that although LBM may be about learning to love yourself,
    if you do the things that help you reach that goal too quickly you end
    up missing the entire story. That story consists of scheming ways to
    kill or otherwise waylay your co-workers, destroy the things that
    aggravate you, discover the secrets hidden behind the bland office
    walls, and figure out just who or *what* your boss, "that bastard
    Biedermeyer", really is. In short, it consists of getting an
    unpleasant character to do unsavory things, in service of a plot that
    grows more and more metaphorical and surreal as you progress through
    it. When I finally got to the end, I wasn't sure that I was any more
    satisfied with the "real" ending than the one I got to in 10 moves. In
    his postscript, the author tells us that he wants the story's
    structure to help us question to help us analyze some of our
    assumptions about IF. For one thing, we should think about what really
    is the most "optimal" ending of the game, and whether it's worth it to
    actually play through a game if it's possible to reach a positive
    ending at the beginning, and/or if the motivations of the character
    are twisted and repugnant? Now, these are not new ideas. Andrew
    Plotkin's A Change In The Weather offers a similar situation at its
    outset -- if you rejoin the picnic, you end up having fun after all,
    but you also miss the story. To go back earlier, Michael Berlyn used a
    related technique in Infidel by making the main character a shallow,
    exploitive greedhead who probably deserves a desert demise, then
    asking you to solve puzzles and find treasure on his behalf. Little
    Blue Men, though, makes these propositions starker than ever before by
    making its main character thoroughly repulsive and an optimal ending
    immediately reachable.

    Now, my answer to this question in its abstract form is that responses
    will vary depending on the player. Some people probably have no
    interest in playing a repulsive character, and so will just delete the
    game. Others might be driven by curiosity to complete the game even
    though they find the experience unpleasant. Still others will view it
    as a chance to get a glimpse into abnormal psychology, or to have some
    fun playing a villainous character. In this way, playing such a game
    is akin to watching a movie like Natural Born Killers, or reading a
    book like In Cold Blood -- it may be very well-done, but it's not
    everybody's cup of tea, and that's fine.  Consequently, I guess I
    don't view the question as all that interesting, maybe because any
    assumption I might have had about IF characters having to be good was
    eliminated as soon as I finished Infidel (in 1986). But even though I
    feel this way, LBM still didn't work for me, not because of its main
    character but because of its choices of setting, imagery, and
    metaphor. The game invokes the movie Jacob's Ladder a couple of times,
    which is a movie I loved. That film was by turns profound, chilling,
    and inspiring. LBM only achieves glimpses of these things, and I think
    the reason is because I found its imagery muddled and incoherent. The
    game is obviously taking place on some metaphorical level, but it was
    never at all clear to me what the metaphors were supposed to be
    representing, and as they stack up it only becomes more confusing. In
    addition, there was basically no connection with reality, which left
    the game's symbols floating unanchored. Some flashback scenes, some
    glimpses of reality, *some* type of explanation for the heaven/hell
    dichotomy the game presents would have gone a long way toward
    connecting its symbolism with something more meaningful than just
    other symbols. There's a lot to like about this game. It is written
    well, and although it doesn't achieve an overall arc, it does contain
    moments which can be quite moving or frightening.  Technically I could
    find very little for which to fault it, both in its writing and its
    coding. Its puzzles may have had some unpleasant content, but they
    were clever and engaging, and generally quite well integrated with the
    storyline. But for me, it did not succeed as a work of art.
    Nonetheless, I respect it for being an ambitious but flawed experiment
    -- I'll take that over competent repetition any day.

    Rating: 6.3

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

    From: "david ledgard"

    I quite enjoyed this game, although it was a bit vulgar, but not too
    vulgar. Basically it's about a guy in an office, trying to get though
    the day, with out getting too stressed, by the job, and his
    colleagues, and failing miserably. I would probably have given this
    game first place. I got about half way through the game before I felt
    the need for hints, and then went into hint-o-matic mode and totally
    ruined the game, and gave up. I really don't think it's a very good
    idea including on line hints, they're too tempting. Maybe people just
    want to show off their programming skills. It's much better to have
    easier puzzles that you can solve yourself, then you get the
    satisfaction of completing the game, and if you do have complicated
    puzzles make it difficult for people to obtain hints, so they give
    them a go.

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

    From: Second April

    NAME: Mother Loose
    AUTHOR: Irene Callaci
    E-MAIL: icallaci SP@G csupomona.edu
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/loose/loose.z5
    VERSION: Release 2

    Though Mother Loose is enjoyable, its premise is slightly
    misleading. The game begins alongside Humpty Dumpty, who is perched on
    a wall and asking for help, and it might seem that your mission will
    be to intervene to save some nursery-rhyme characters or to set their
    affairs right. But nursery rhymes are largely tangential to the story,
    it turns out; the real goal is to rescue your mother, who is in charge
    of this nursery-rhyme-influenced land, so that things return to
    normal. In a way, this is better than the alternative; it certainly
    allows for more originality than a player restoring a set of scenes to
    the pattern set down in the rhyme. But it takes some time to figure
    out where the game wants to do, unfortunately, and some parts are
    rather misleading. You meet someone named Mary who is indeed contrary,
    but her garden is not relevant to anything in the game.  (She also has
    a little lamb, but the lamb does nothing of importance, and it
    certainly doesn't follow her.) In short, the player may get confused
    if he or she takes the texts of the rhymes as controlling or even
    illuminating; it is better to view the rhymes as providing a setting
    and some characters, but, with one exception, no more than that.

    The author wrote this for her granddaughter Jennifer, and in some ways
    it's suitable for kids. Its messages are simple and direct, and the
    humor is accessible to most ages. Some of the puzzles are difficult
    enough that kids are unlikely to get them without help, though--they
    rely on connections that children might not make. (The last puzzle is
    particularly difficult.)  However, most can be solved more than one
    way; in fact, there is much more to do in the game than is strictly
    necessary to solve it, giving it lots of exploration and replay
    value. Your mother also scolds you for doing things you shouldn't,
    meaning that you can go back and try to eliminate those things from
    your path. There's a freshness of spirit to Mother Loose that is
    unusual--getting points for things like returning objects to their
    owners, not because it serves ulterior ends in the game but merely
    because the author feels it's a good thing to do, reminds the player
    that children are part of the intended audience. Were some of the red
    herrings either more fleshed out or eliminated, lest kids get
    frustrated, this could be the first genuinely child- friendly work of
    IF since Infocom faded from the scene.

    Plenty of wit went into the writing of Mother Loose: one character
    disparages the wolf as a refugee from fairy tales, not suited to
    nursery rhymes at all. Not all the jokes are solely for kids--kicking
    a cat elicits "I suppose you pull the wings off butterflies too"--but
    the author has plenty of fun with your various naughty deeds. There
    are, however, some odd moments--the wolf that follows you around makes
    a variety of comments, such as "Hey, what are you doing?", apropos of
    nothing at all, for example--and many of the naughty actions have no
    effect beyond one turn. (You can, for example, pull a character's
    loose tooth and get an angry reaction, but that character will smile
    and wave goodbye when you walk away the next turn.)  Though not
    seamless, the writing is entertaining enough to make Mother Loose fun
    even for those not stumped for long by the puzzles.

    Mother Loose is notable, in short, because it represents a rarity in
    current IF: a well-developed story environment, thoroughly coded with
    humor to boot, whose elements do not necessarily exist for the sake of
    puzzles. It's not quite accurate to call it an example of story-based,
    rather than puzzle-based, IF, because the story in Mother Loose does
    not exactly dominate: indeed, the player is most likely to discover
    the entire story at the end of the game. Rather, it's a game where the
    setting and atmosphere are its most memorable features, and the author
    clearly devoted significant time to fleshing out the setting and
    making it real. It's the sort of game that requires thorough and
    creative writing to make the environment feel real, and Mother Loose
    does have that. In short, this is a well-realized, entertaining entry
    that deserves a look from those who didn't judge the competition, and
    I gave it a 9.

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

    From: Second April

    NAME: Muse: An Autumn Romance
    AUTHOR: Christopher Huang
    E-MAIL: xhuang SP@G po-box.mcgill.ca
    DATE: September 1998
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/muse/muse.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Christopher Huang's "Muse: An Autumn Romance" is unquestionably a
    unique IF experience, and it's an ambitious effort. It attempts a
    story-centered approach; it emphasizes the characters and the plot
    over the puzzles, and virtually everything in the game turns on NPC
    interaction. While the writing is good enough to make Muse an
    enjoyable story, as story-driven IF it doesn't fully work.

    The story is that you're an elderly Victorian clergyman on your way
    back to your home parish in England, about to board a boat in a French
    coastal village, when you spy a German girl, traveling with her
    father, and are smitten. A poor artist named John Austin is also
    staying in town, and his looks and artistic ability may figure into
    the story--but they may not.  Muse has several different endings, all
    of them quite plausible, though some are harder to reach than
    others. In particular, one suboptimal ending--one that is
    categorically different from the others--is almost impossible to
    attain without knowledge obtained by previous playings, in that you
    must do certain actions in a rather nonintuitive order. That aside,
    though, the alternate endings fit the feel of the story well: the game
    portrays your situation as torn between diverging paths; the decisions
    you make, it is clear, have a more than incidental effect on the
    course of your life. It makes sense to structure the game in such a
    way that you try to figure out how to change your life for the better,
    not simply how to make it progress. Furthering that aim is the
    first-person-singular-past narrative, which reinforces that the story
    is happening to a real character, not the player in period costume,
    and also conveys the feeling that the story is a reminiscence, not a
    happening-right- now tale of adventure that the character has to make
    his way through. Setting the story in the past makes it more clearly a
    "musing."

    Unfortunately, though story-centered, Muse is not entirely
    puzzle-free, and some of the puzzles break the feel of the story. One
    in particular requires calculated manipulation of a character to
    achieve certain ends, different in process but not in nature from
    manipulating objects to pass obstacles, as might happen in your
    conventional puzzle-oriented game. It makes your character less human
    and sympathetic to have to figure out which of another character's
    buttons to push. This is not an atypical IF experience, particularly
    in NPC interaction, when many games require the character to fire off
    conversation topics until the right one unlocks the door, so to speak,
    of the NPC--but Muse stands or falls on its NPCs, and it's
    disappointing when they become doors to unlock. (Moreover, in some
    situations, the game closed off entirely without warning--the
    conversation could progress no further.) Exacerbating that feeling is
    the small array of topics available--again, typical, but still
    frustrating, particularly when it produces results like these:

        >ask konstanza about mother's death
        Chatting with Konstanza, even on frivolous subjects, was a pleasant
        experience, and it was a while before I realised how far we had
        digressed.

    Muse does endeavor to show the limitations on conversation imposed by
    Victorian customs, and the feeling of constraint produced thereby is
    well done: I was forced to get at what I wanted indirectly, much as
    someone of the period would have had to. But so arbitrary seemed the
    point that determined whether certain information was available that
    it broke mimesis; it made the requirement seem like a programming
    flag, not a real turning point in the conversation.

    It's a shame because, as observed, Muse has a lot of terrific ideas
    going for it. The interactions among different NPCs are complicated
    and well-rendered; they don't feel nearly as artificial as those
    between the player character and the NPCs because they're not so
    obviously controlled.  Muse makes a valiant attempt at bringing out
    the psychologies of its characters and making them central to the
    game. The reasons for many NPC actions are quite subtle--they may be
    doors to unlock in some instances, but they certainly are interesting
    doors. (Though only three of the seven NPCs offer much in the way of
    psychology, unfortunately--the others are fairly flat.) The game also
    relies on your role as a clergyman--your actions make sense from that
    perspective, you are constrained by that role, and other characters
    see you through your collar--which helps amplify the story element of
    Muse. And the story itself is rather moving at many points,
    particularly in the various endings, and the various box quotes that
    the author uses--Lewis Carroll, T.S. Eliot, Francis of Assisi--are
    particularly effective.

    The author has seamlessly rewritten the Inform parser for the first
    person, past tense, and I could find no technical problems with
    Muse. In virtually all respects, it's a thorough, well-thought-out,
    effective story. The inherent limitations of IF puzzles put a crimp in
    the NPC interaction and make you less a character than a player
    pushing through to the end of the story, which is unfortunate because
    you really do inhabit much of the story as a character. I enjoyed
    Muse, but considered it an idea with unrealized potential, and I gave
    it an 8.

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

    From: Adam Cadre

    THE CALLIOPE EFFECT
    Muse by Christopher Huang

    A few minutes into this game, I scribbled down the following in my
    notepad: "I grow old... I grow old... I shall wear the bottoms of my
    trousers rolled."  Later on the game quoted those lines back at me.  I
    wondered just how aware the author was of all the implications
    involved.

    You see, those lines were written by TS Eliot at the oh-so-elderly age
    of twenty-two -- the same age as the author of Muse.  Prufrock
    himself, from whose "Love Song" these lines are drawn, is given no
    specified age in the poem, but I tend to side with Fred Crews in
    believing that he too is somewhere in his twenties, sure that his
    prematurely thinning hair indicates that his life is effectively over.
    In which case Eliot is mocking those twenty-two-year-olds who would
    write unironically from the perspective of a fifty-nine- year-old.
    (If not, of course, then Eliot is such a one himself.  But there's too
    much implicit mockery in "Prufrock" for me to believe that if Eliot
    were to see those lines quoted at the end of Muse he would say
    anything other than "No, no -- if the mermaids aren't singing to you,
    it's probably because they're picking up that you're the type who
    identifies with someone three times your age.  For pity's sake,
    Prufrock is not a role model!")

    I also couldn't help thinking about a comment I received on an early
    draft of my novel, which revolves around a bunch of high-school-aged
    kids: "Ninety-nine percent of the manuscripts I read are about
    middle-aged people giving up or old people wondering why they didn't
    give up sooner.  I can't tell you how refreshing it is to read about
    some people who are actually *looking forward* to life!"  This is of
    course not the state of affairs in IF: indeed, Muse deserves credit
    for introducing a well-realized PC unlike any IF PC I can think of.
    But still, considering that a good deal of the fun of IF is to step
    into a space where you can do anything -- go ahead, hitchhike naked!
    kick that head! scrape that parrot! -- it's rather draining to play a
    character who can barely make it up the stairs.

    But let me, like J. Alfred Prufrock, reverse myself yet again.  The
    fact that the good reverend's collar felt confining is a testament to
    the author's success in creating a world with an atmosphere so
    seamless that I did very much feel like I was there.  And since that
    may well be what I like best about playing IF -- the ability to walk
    around a world born from someone else's mind, and knock over vases
    while I'm there -- Muse guaranteed itself a top score from me right
    from the get-go.  Not only was the world well-constructed, with nary a
    line to break the illusion of being somewhere else, it was exactly the
    right size for the story being told: any larger and it would have been
    daunting; any smaller and I would have been overcome by
    claustrophobia.  This is just one small example of the craftsmanship
    involved in this game, which is simply superb throughout.

    The idea behind the game gives one pause, though.  Here we have a game
    that advertises itself as having been built around interacting with
    NPCs -- the hardest thing to do well in IF, especially with an
    ASK/TELL interface.  And Huang doesn't quite carry it off.  The
    characters are all quite thin: partly because they each only have
    maybe a dozen things to say, and partly because what they do have to
    say isn't really all that interesting.  It was hard for me to work up
    any kind of feeling for my ostensible love interest when she couldn't
    have been less exciting had you shot her up with a tanker truck full
    of Haldol.  But, of course, that made sense in a way: she *is*
    Victorian.

    I'm used to getting frustrated struggling with the parser; in Muse, I
    found myself in a similar struggle, not with the parser, but with
    Victorian protocol.  That seemed to me to be an evocative association:
    I wondered how not being able to act naturally even to the extent we
    can today, having to fit everything you did or said into the strict
    bounds of a rigid code of propriety, resembled struggling with a sort
    of "parser" every waking moment of your life.  And then I started
    musing (appropriately enough) about Konstanza's character, or lack
    thereof.  So she's completely colorless as a character.  This may be
    boring -- but is it unrealistic?  This was, after all, a culture where
    women were trained from day one to be purely decorative creatures with
    nothing to say, no wills of their own... a culture that squeezed the
    life out of half the population until they stopped being human and
    became -- wait for it -- NPCs.

    At this point, Muse's author may be happily nodding, pleased that I
    picked up on the fact that his game is in fact a sly critique of the
    Victorian era, and hoping that I now realize that his "Prufrock"
    reference is another clue that we're supposed to recoil from the world
    he presents; on the other hand, he may be horrified at just how
    violently I'm reading against the grain here.  If it's the latter, I
    can only imagine how he'll take to the idea of me reconstructing the
    source code to his game and recompiling it with one little difference:
    this time around, the lass with whom the good reverend will find
    himself so taken is Tracy Valencia.  (Turn #3: >SUFFER STROKE.)

    My score: 8.6 (2nd place)

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

    From: Brian Blackwell

    Christopher Huang's 'Muse - An Autumn Romance' is, as far as I know,
    the first ever attempt at a Bronte-esque period piece of interactive
    fiction. It's an ambitious undertaking, but thanks to Huang's superb
    writing and characterisation, it is, for the most part, a success.

    The protagonist is the Reverend Stephen Dawson, a single, middle-aged,
    emotionally repressed English clergyman, who, at the suggestion of his
    sister Emma, takes a holiday in a secluded French village. In a series
    of exquisitely written paragraphs, the Reverend immediately falls for
    the beautiful Fraulein Konstanza von Goethe, who happens to be staying
    to be staying in the same inn with her father Herr Viktor. A
    conversation with Viktor and Konstanza reveals the reason for their
    journey to France, and also a certain coolness between father and
    daughter. Also staying in the village is an English painter with low
    self-esteem who eventually becomes involved in the plot.

    The game is written in the first-person past tense - a risky decision,
    but in this case it is extremely effective. The emotions 'felt' by the
    central character would simply not work in the traditional
    second-person perspective. It also makes the considerable restrictions
    placed on your actions seem natural and convincing.

    The quality of writing is excellent, and is consistent with
    19th-century style without ever descending into cliches. For example,
    take the Reverend's first glimpse of Konstanza:

        From the corner of my eye, I saw her. Like an angel descended
        from heaven, she stood on the cobbles at the other end of the
        pier. Her head was partially turned away from me; I caught a flash
        of a delicate throat and lustrous chestnut-brown hair....

        Time stood still, arrested by her presence. I had no desire to
        move, lest I lose sight of her. For an aching second, her parasol
        shielded her face from my sight.

    The characters are well fleshed out with varied and believeable
    responses to the player's questions. The exchanges with Konstanza in
    particular are affectionately handled, and the final scene in the
    'winning' outcome is a real tear-jerker. I have rarely been so
    affected by a scene in a work of IF.

    For me, this was the most satisfying game of the competition. It's
    great to see 'puzzleless', literary IF becoming more and more popular
    with authors.  Criticisms? A few of the actions necessary for the
    optimum outcome are rather obscure (fortunately the hints section is
    fairly comprehensive). This certainly does not detract from the scale
    of Huang's achievement. A highly enjoyable work.

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

    From: "Paul O'Brian"

    I've been sitting here for 10 minutes trying to find the right words
    to begin a review of Muse, but I can't seem to come up with anything
    that speaks as eloquently as the game's own prose. Muse is the most
    gorgeously written piece of IF in the competition -- I've still got
    several games left to play, but I would be very surprised if any of
    them even equaled Muse's marvelous skill with words, let alone
    surpassed it. The game is like the IF version of a Merchant-Ivory
    movie: quiet setting, stellar production values, highly
    character-oriented, and deeply, deeply felt. It's been a long time
    since I've been as moved by a piece of IF as I was by the "optimal"
    ending of Muse -- even some of the less satisfying endings are crafted
    so well that in themselves they can be quite emotional. The game takes
    place in a French village in 1886, as viewed through the eyes of Rev.
    Stephen Dawson, a 59-year-old clergyman from Barchester, England. It
    is not a typical IF setting, and Dawson is hardly the typical IF hero,
    but Muse is far from a typical game. It is a story, one of the most
    successful pieces of interactive fiction I've seen for pulling off the
    *fiction* as much as the interactivity. Its characters feel real,
    including its main character; it is the story of Rev. Dawson's own
    struggle for acceptance of himself and his role in life, of his
    journey past regret and into contentment. Through its masterful
    writing, excellent coding, and some clever techniques, Muse creates a
    story of someone else's emotional transformation, made all the more
    affecting by our direction of that character's actions.

    One way in which the game accomplishes its goal is to eschew the
    traditional second person, present tense IF voice, settling instead on
    a first person past tense narration. A typical exchange looks somewhat
    like this:

        >I
        I had on my person the following items:
           my pocket New Testament

        >READ BIBLE
        I practically knew its contents by heart.

        >GET TRUNK
        Oh, but the trunk was heavy! I managed to lift it just high enough
        for the purpose of moving it around, but I was getting far too old
        for this sort of thing.

    At first, I was surprised how little a difference this made to me. The
    game still felt quite natural, which I think is another testament to
    its writing. On reflection, however, I think that the changes did make
    a difference. By choosing a first person voice, Muse sidesteps all of
    the controversy surrounding assigning emotion to the player
    character. In fact, the game is *constantly* ascribing emotions to the
    PC, but it never grates because the first person POV assumes this role
    quite naturally. Having a game say things like "you practically know
    its contents by heart" or "you are getting far too old for this sort
    of thing" would cause much more dissonance for me, especially as the
    game moved into its deeper emotional registers. The past tense
    achieves a similar sort of distancing from the player, as well as
    heightening the "period" effect, not that the game needs it. Muse
    evokes the Victorian feel extremely well, and the spell is never
    broken by any piece of writing, any detail of setting, or any
    development of character.

    There's only one problem. One part of Muse's realistic, natural
    approach is that events go on without you if you aren't in the right
    place at the right time. On my first run through the game, I was off
    doing text-adventurely things like examining all the objects, trying
    to talk to various characters about dozens of different subjects (an
    effect which the game also pulls off remarkably well -- its coding is
    quite deep in some areas) and exploring the landscape. Even though the
    game was giving me gentle nudges to check into the inn, I didn't do
    so, because for one thing I couldn't find it right away, and for
    another thing I was having too much fun exploring the very rich world
    of the game. As a result, one of the major plot points happened
    without me, putting me into a situation where, as far as I can
    determine, the optimal ending was unreachable. What's worse, I didn't
    *know* I couldn't reach the best ending; because it was my first time
    through, I didn't realize I had missed anything I could have
    participated in anyway. I ended up wandering around, quite frustrated
    with my inability to cause the story to progress. When I finally
    looked at the hints, it became clear to me that I had failed to
    perform an important task, and that as a result the happiest ending
    had been closed to me. Now, this is of course very realistic -- we
    miss things all the time that could change our lives significantly,
    and we never know that we've missed them -- but I don't think it's the
    best design for a game, even a game so story-oriented as Muse. The
    loss was affecting in its own way, especially when I replayed it after
    completing the game with the happiest ending, but I didn't like it
    that I had "lost" without having any way of knowing I had done so. I
    don't think it had to be that way -- I can certainly envision how the
    game might have at least pushed (or strongly nudged) me into a less
    optimal ending, so that I might realize more quickly that I had missed
    something, or perhaps the game could even have left the optimal path
    open even when the plot point had been missed. I would have loved the
    chance to complete such an incredible story my first time through,
    without having to resort to hints.

    Rating: 9.3

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

    From: Second April

    NAME: Persistence of Memory
    AUTHOR: Jason Dyer
    E-MAIL: jdyer SP@G u.arizona.edu
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Hugo
    SUPPORTS: Hugo interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/hugo/memory
    VERSION: Release 1.0

    I can count the amount of works of IF set in wartime--that I know of,
    at least--on one hand, and I wouldn't even need all of that
    hand. There have been spy-thrillers that drew on Cold War assumptions,
    but Once and Future is the only work to be set even partly on a
    battlefield, other than Persistence of Memory. It's not obvious why;
    after all, latter-day IF authors appear to be fond of grim, bizarre,
    chaotic situations, and not many things fit that description better
    than war. Persistence of Memory is an interesting spin on war IF,
    though an extremely brief one, as well as yet another in a large
    collection of one-location games in the 1998 competition.

    The premise: you're a soldier in a nameless war against a nameless
    enemy, stuck in a field with one leg on a land mine, with a
    malfunctioning radio.  Unlike some other one-location games, the
    puzzles are not available at the outset for you to find; rather, they
    come to you, one by one, and you have a limited time to deal with each
    one. The experience is consequently rather limiting; the game attempts
    to make you feel powerless, and it does that quite well, with the
    exception of one puzzle solution that breaks the "powerless" feel
    somewhat (though there's a good reason for it). Among the obvious
    ironies of the game is that the protagonist is forced to depend on the
    inhabitants of the country he has been happily destroying, but the
    game doesn't do as much as it might have with that idea.

    Indeed, it's hard to say what Persistence of Memory is about, other
    than the superficial plot. If your encounters with the natives are
    supposed to be cathartic, or cause you to Rethink This Whole War
    Thing, the text provides only oblique hints to that effect. One
    message is that failure to communicate causes waste and destruction, a
    point well made, but is that the point of the story? It's hard to
    tell. Perhaps it's merely that certain experiences humanize an
    otherwise faceless enemy--not all that groundbreaking an idea, but
    then again just about any thoughts on war in the IF medium are new, as
    noted. Whatever the underlying message, the story works well; the game
    changes your motivations and thoughts effectively over its course,
    from "getting off this land mine" to more complex goals not
    necessarily centered on survival. Or, alternately, one could view your
    motivations as still focused on personal survival even as you realize
    the consequences of war upon the villagers, and your internal
    conflicts are a product of your guilt. Persistence of Memory is
    susceptible to a wide variety of interpretations; it is to the
    author's credit that he doesn't fill in many of the blanks. The scene
    is vividly described: one particularly well-done aspect involves the
    various physical discomforts you encounter over the course of the day,
    stuck in your awkward position, developing cramps and soreness and
    becoming more and more thirsty. (On the other hand, the game doesn't
    make as much as it might of your psychological discomfort.)

    The puzzles themselves aren't particularly hard; most of the solutions
    are fairly obvious. There are no multiple solutions. Indeed, it is
    almost impossible to deviate at all from the main narrative path and
    still complete the game, meaning that there is no replayability
    here. That's not a major drawback, given the nature of the story--the
    goal is less to challenge the player than to present some ideas--but
    the small size of the game makes it likely that, just when the player
    is settling into the character and the setting, the game ends, and
    there really isn't much incentive to go back and try again. (The
    message of this game and of Photopia, for me at least: if you want us
    to care about characters, make us spend significant amounts of time
    with them.) To the extent this game works, then, it does as thought
    experiment or as a statement about the nature of war; no one should
    play it for the puzzles. That's not, of course, a bad thing. But, as
    with Photopia, it isn't entirely clear that this story _needed_ to be
    set in the IF medium to be effective; this one has somewhat more claim
    to interactivity than does Photopia, since there _are_ problems to
    solve, but it does lay a rather linear path. The one-room aspect
    reinforces that; more so than in the other '98 one-room entries, the
    premise is a limitation, a confinement, and you the player do actually
    feel confined. That sense of limitation pervades the game and
    constrains the available experience considerably.

    The Hugo game engine is up to the task, though the task, technically,
    isn't all that much. The game does handle one action not easily
    translated into IF-speak quite well, though, accepting a wide variety
    of syntaxes and synonyms. Moreover, the WAIT command is altered for
    the occasion: time passes until something of note happens, rather than
    1 or 3 or 10 turns.  This proves very handy, though the player might
    find the game unspeakably boring if he or she does not realize that
    the action comes to the character, rather than the character producing
    the action. This and other functions are handled quite well; the hint
    system is minimally necessary but thorough nonetheless.

    Persistence of Memory does, I think, what it was trying to do: it's a
    short piece of IF set in wartime that raises complex questions of a
    soldier's personal responsibility and the needless loss wrought by
    war. It does all that reasonably well, enough so to merit a 7; it
    doesn't, unfortunately, work quite as well as a game.

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

    From: "Paul O'Brian"

    NOTE: Because of the nature of Persistence of Memory, it's difficult
    to talk about it without revealing a key secret. Therefore, be warned
    that any and all of the following review could be considered a
    spoiler.

    Memory is a new twist on the one-room game. The setting is war; could
    be Korea, could be Vietnam, but it's never really specified, and it
    doesn't really matter. It's a war in a foreign land, with villages,
    dense foliage, helicopters, rifles, and land mines. Especially land
    mines. In the first move of the game, you step on one, and realize
    that if you remove your weight from it, it will explode. Thus the
    potential paths which the game appears to have at its outset are
    reduced to one: wait. This restriction of freedom is a recurring theme
    in Memory. In incident after incident, the scope of action contracts
    until it becomes clear that there is only one action which will lead
    to your survival. Sometimes these actions are rather horrifying, but
    the game demands them if you wish to finish. I have mixed feelings
    about this kind of forcible plotting. On the one hand, it makes for an
    extremely linear game, and it curtails interactivity quite
    dramatically. This obstruction seems to fly in the face of the
    conventional wisdom about IF -- it violates one of the Players' Rights
    in Graham Nelson's Craft of Adventure: "To have reasonable freedom of
    action." In Nelson's words, "After a while the player begins to feel
    that the designer has tied him to a chair in order to shout the plot
    at him." On the other hand, I also think that interactive fiction can
    be a very good medium for conveying a sense of futility or
    entrapment. Because IF by its nature seems to require at least to a
    certain degree freedom of movement and action, and because it also
    creates a sense of immersion in the story's world, when a piece of IF
    chooses to violate that perceived requirement the player's sense of
    identification with the trapped character can be very strong
    indeed. Something about the frustration of having so few actions
    available to me which would not result in death made the equation of
    my situation with the character's feel more intense than it would have
    were I just reading a story about this character.

    Because of the game's premise, you don't seek out the puzzles; the
    puzzles come to you. And each puzzle must be solved if the character
    is to survive.  Luckily, all of the puzzles make sense and have
    intuitive solutions, though in some of them it's not clear what the
    deadly moment is until it arrives, and sometimes I found myself
    resorting to a save-and-restore strategy in order to defeat a puzzle's
    time limit. I don't think I could have solved the game straight
    through, because some puzzles had rather unexpected and uncomfortable
    solutions. This is where I found myself ill at ease with the game's
    lack of interactivity -- there's a fine line between identifying with
    a trapped character versus simply feeling trapped into an action
    because the designer allows you no other choice, even though more
    options might have been available in reality. It's hard to explain
    without revealing more spoilers than I already have, but some pieces
    of the plot felt rather forced, as though only one solution was
    provided because only that solution would create the game scenario
    desired by the designer.  However, the choices worked in the end, and
    I found I only needed to look at the hints once, and in retrospect I
    think I probably could have avoided that had I spent more time on the
    puzzle that was stumping me.

    The writing could get a little histrionic at times. Some descriptions
    tiptoed along the line between what works and what doesn't. For
    example, the mud around your feet is described as "torpid", a word
    which usually refers to a sluggish mental state. I suppose the mud's
    thickness and viscosity could be compared to slow mental processes,
    but it's a stretch.  There weren't too many moments like this -- for
    the most part the prose did a fine job of conveying the situation, and
    in fact sometimes was quite good indeed. The description of the hairs
    rising on the back of your neck as you try to conceal yourself from
    enemy soldiers was chilling and engrossing. I found no technical
    errors in the writing, nor in the code. Overall, Memory does a very
    good job with an unusual choice of subject matter, and when it was
    over I felt not triumph, but relief. I suspect this is what the game
    intended.

    Rating: 8.3

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

    From: "Paul O'Brian"

    NAME: Photopia
    AUTHOR: Adam Cadre
    E-MAIL: adamc SP@G duke.edu, grignr SP@G retina.net
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/photopia.z5
    VERSION: Version B

    If there was a prize for "competition game most mentioned on the
    newsgroups before the deadline had passed," Photopia would win hands
    down. Everyone was quite courteous about it, spoiler warnings and
    rot13 and all that, but there was a marked impatience to talk about
    this game, recommend it to other people, make it the test case in any
    number of arguments. There is a reason behind this impatience:
    Photopia is an amazing piece of work. It's also very hard to talk
    about without giving spoilers away, so please forgive me if I'm a
    little vague in my language. One of the most brilliant aspects of the
    game is its plotting. It has what Adam Cadre, in an unrelated
    discussion, called a Priest plot, named for writer Christopher
    Priest. I don't know if this is a term that Adam just made up, but
    it's a useful term nonetheless. It refers to a plot which just gives
    you fragments, seemingly unrelated to each other, which coalesce at
    (or towards) the end of the story. When the fragments come together,
    and you figure out how they relate to one another, the result can
    often be surprising or revelatory. When they came together in
    Photopia, I found the revelation quite devastating. I won't say too
    much more about this, except to say that it wasn't until the end of
    Photopia that I realized what a truly incredible, powerful story it
    is. It's the kind of thing where when you've played it all the way
    through once, you can then replay it and all the pieces fall into
    place, everything interlocking from the beginning in a way you can't
    understand until the end. I think that this is the game that opens new
    frontiers of replayability in interactive fiction -- I needed to play
    through Photopia twice in order to see all the text again, knowing
    what I knew after the end of the game.

    Actually, I hesitate to call Photopia a game, but not because it
    failed to live up to a standard of interactivity. It's just so
    patently clear that Photopia is not interested in puzzles, or score,
    or some battle of wits between author and player. Photopia is
    interested in telling a story, and it succeeds magnificently on this
    count. Unfortunately this deprives me of the use of the word "game" in
    describing it -- perhaps I'll just call it a work. In any case, it's a
    work that anyone who is interested in puzzleless IF should try. At no
    point was I even close to getting stuck in Photopia, because the
    obvious action is almost always the right one -- or else there is no
    right action and fated events occur with heavy inevitability. Oddly
    enough, this creates a strange contradiction. I was on ifMUD looking
    for a word to describe the plot of this work (I couldn't think of the
    phrase "Priest plot") and someone said, jokingly, "linear." But
    actually, that's true. Despite the fact that it's completely
    fragmented, and despite the fact that it jumps around in time, space,
    and perspective, Photopia is a linear composition. There's only one
    way to go through it, and the player has little or no power to make it
    deviate from its predestined course. I think the reason that this
    didn't bother me, that in fact I *liked* it, is precisely because
    Photopia isn't a game. Because it is a story, the emphasis is taken
    away from a teleological model, where the player tries to steer for
    the best outcome. Instead, you're really just along for the ride, and
    the ride is one not to be missed.

    Now, this is not to say that Photopia may as well have been a short
    story rather than interactive fiction. In fact, it takes advantage of
    the capabilities of the medium in some very inventive and almost
    unprecedented ways. One of the foremost of these is its use of color
    -- each section of the game (oops, there's that word again. Make that
    "the work") is presented in a preset color, and these colors also play
    a part in the Priest plot. I understood their function by the end of
    the piece, and once I understood, I knew exactly why they were there
    and how much they enhanced the storytelling. Unfortunately I found the
    colored text a little hard to read at times, especially the darker
    colors on a black background, but I wouldn't go back and play it in
    blue and white. The colors, like everything else in Photopia, worked
    beautifully, adding artfully to the overall impact of the story. The
    work is interactive in other important ways as well. In fact, in many
    aspects Photopia is a metanarrative about the medium of interactive
    fiction itself. Again, it wasn't until the end of the story that I
    understood why it *had* to be told as interactive fiction. And again,
    to explain the reason would be too much of a spoiler. I have so much
    more I want to talk about with Photopia, but I can't talk about it
    until you've played it. Go and play it, and then we'll talk. I
    promise, you'll understand why everyone has been so impatient. You'll
    understand why I loved it, and why I think it's one of the best pieces
    of interactive fiction ever to be submitted to the competition.

    Rating: 9.9

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

    From: Second April

    [Disclaimer: what follows is my own opinion, as always, but it is also
    distinctly a minority view. For other views on Photopia, the reader is
    advised to consult Deja News, or alternatively to read Paul O'Brian's
    review in this issue.]

    There is no denying that Adam Cadre's Photopia is a well-written,
    engaging work of fiction. (Well, okay, somebody probably will deny
    it. But it won't be me.) It tells a powerful story in well-crafted
    prose heavily seasoned with implicit allusions to other works, notably
    Russell Banks's "The Sweet Hereafter" (and Atom Egoyan's film
    thereof), and Carl Sagan's "Contact."  (The power of the story,
    incidentally, derives in part from figuring out its nature and
    structure, and hence I won't go too much into detail here.)  It
    skillfully uses multiple narrators to tell its tale, and carries
    themes and images throughout that help give the story life. In short,
    it's an excellent work of fiction.

    SPAG reviews works of _interactive_ fiction, however, and the
    interactivity quotient in Photopia is slight enough that it would
    arguably work just as well as a short story. Graham Nelson wrote
    several years ago of linearity in game design, noting that the player
    comes to feel that "the author has tied him to a chair in order to
    shout the plot at him," and Photopia suffers in that regard. No one
    would complain of having the plot shouted at him in a short story; the
    nature of story-based non-interactive fiction is that the author
    dictates and the reader absorbs. But the genius of good IF is that the
    player shapes the development of the story, even if the author has a
    certain end in mind; choices that the player makes affect the text
    recited at him in a material way. Admittedly, many games throw in the
    towel with rudimentary or nonsensical plots that serve as excuses to
    cobble together puzzles--the victory of the crossword over the
    narrative, in Graham's terms. Photopia represents the opposite, and
    less explored, extreme, with no puzzles to speak of--and though there
    is more to chew on here than past "puzzleless IF" efforts such as "In
    the End," the result, for me, was just as unsatisfying.

    It should be noted that the game does not simply ignore idiosyncrasies
    in the way you play the game; many choices are accounted for. Notably,
    one choice regarding whether you bring along a certain object or leave
    it behind is particularly clever and well-written. But the result is
    that the game achieves precisely the same result-- your "choice"
    affects the beginning of one paragraph. (The minimal changes in the
    text highlight the noninteractivity; it's almost as if the author were
    seeking out ways to keep the player from changing the course of the
    story. There is an obvious purpose to that in this particular work,
    but it puts a major crimp in the interactive aspect.) The difference
    may seem to boil down to quantity rather than quality--the amount of
    text that the player's decisions affect--but quantity matters: it can
    mean the difference between the player feeling like he has actually
    experienced the events described and feeling like he has watched a lot
    of text scroll by. Adding to this effect is the sheer amount of stuff
    that often happens between inputs--or, in other words, the amount and
    type of unforeseeable events that your actions produce; again, it's as
    if an existing work of fiction were translated to the IF
    medium. Photopia's invention of plastic geography--the player in some
    instances may travel in any direction, but the direction chosen will
    always lead to a certain location--makes the world seem larger than it
    is, and while it does that very effectively, it once again lessens the
    player's impact on the story.

    Another experiment that the author attempts ends up cutting off the
    player from the story even more, namely the conversation trees: rather
    than ASK/TELL, the player types TALK TO [character] and is given a
    short list of topics (1. TELL PRESIDENT CLINTON ABOUT IRAQ, 2. ASK
    PRESIDENT CLINTON ABOUT IMPEACHMENT, or 0 to say nothing). This is, of
    course, a matter of taste, but I found the conversation trees the
    least successful part of Photopia, because they completely destroy
    what illusion remains of interactivity. In one sequence, your
    character explains the basics of solar radiation, planetary accretion,
    gallium production, and other astrophysical phenomena; it is _very_
    hard, unless the player has ample background in astronomy, to avoid
    the feeling that you are watching a conversation unfold, not
    participating in it. I don't think it's impossible to give the
    character more knowledge than the player is likely to have, and then
    have the player act on that knowledge. But that requires more
    development of the character than Photopia affords: the player's
    involvement with the character is so brief that there is no time to
    warm to the part before the character starts rambling about the
    inverse square law. It is undeniable that the scene plays an important
    part in the story; it is also arguable that identifying the explainer
    of astrophysics as "you" heightens the emotional impact. But that
    scene and others like it give Photopia the sense that the
    "interactive" element is only a thin veneer over the "fiction" part.

    It is possible that more extensive conversation trees, encompassing a
    broader variety of topics relevant to the conversation might help;
    perhaps future games will answer the question. Having severely limited
    conversation topics is not essentially different from ASK/TELL with
    only a few subjects available, admittedly. But most games that
    implement ASK/TELL do not put words in the player-character's mouth to
    the extent that Photopia does, and leaving to the player's imagination
    how he or she would have phrased a question keeps the admittedly
    clunky interface from breaking mimesis excessively. In other words,
    the presumed advantage of conversation trees, that they give the
    character more natural speech (one question in Photopia spawned by
    TALK TO is ASK ALLEY ABOUT HOW I SOUND LIKE HER DAD, which no parser
    could handle, rather than something like ASK ALLEY ABOUT DAD), assumes
    that the player actually imagines the character grunting out curt
    questions. But it ain't necessarily so; it certainly ain't for me.

    Finally, though Photopia in many ways does what it does brilliantly,
    it doesn't do it for very long; one has to be a very, very slow reader
    to play a game this short from beginning to end longer than 20 or 25
    minutes.  Of course, the player can replay, but he or she will shortly
    discover that, as noted, the course of the story alters hardly a whit,
    no matter what the player does. This is, of course, a personal
    reaction: I can hardly say categorically that the brevity of Photopia
    waters down the emotional force when the game clearly had considerable
    emotional impact on many. (On the other hand, the two other people I
    have prompted to play it were likewise underwhelmed--and I did not
    tell them my own thoughts on the game until afterwards.) It is
    possible that the story's major twist would be more effective if there
    were more preceding it, more time for the player to get to know the
    characters. (I also thought the game overplayed its emotional hand a
    bit--exaggerated a certain character's traits--but that can be, and
    has been, argued.)

    Technically, Photopia is outstanding--the abovementioned textual
    changes, even if brief, are woven in seamlessly to preserve the
    story. A variety of changes in text color didn't work for me when I
    tried the colored version on WinFrotz, but clearly the colors worked
    fine for others. The conversation trees, whatever their merits, work
    just as they are supposed to; the experiment with plastic geography
    works brilliantly from a technical standpoint. Many other small things
    indicate that the game was exhaustively coded, never a bad thing--for
    example, examining a certain NPC while playing different roles yields
    a variety of perspectives. There are many other little things that are
    done well--transitions between scenes are particularly well done; the
    first sentence of each section of the story recalls the last sentence
    of the previous one, often in illuminating ways. But Photopia stands
    or falls on the player's reaction to the story, and my reaction, for
    whatever reason, was tepid enough that I gave it a 7 in the
    competition.

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

    From: Brian Blackwell

    Few works of IF have caused as much of a stir as Adam Cadre's
    'Photopia', the winning entry in the 1998 Interactive Fiction
    Competition. It is certainly vastly different from Cadre's last
    creation, the raunchy comedy I-0. It is a short, puzzleless, literary
    work which packs a powerful emotional punch, despite some
    shortcomings.

    The primary interest in Photopia is its structure - it makes the
    fairly simplistic plot seem much more complex than it actually is. The
    game jumps back and forth through the chronology of the storyline,
    leaving the player to mentally piece together these 'vignettes'. The
    different scenes are linked by different colours - red, green, blue,
    and so on. These transitional passages provide some truly magical
    moments.

    The very first scene in the game involves a pair of drunken 'fratboys'
    (an Americanism, I assume) and a car. Following this scene, we are
    immediately thrust onto Mars, taking control of 'Wendy Mackaye, first
    girl on the red planet'. This dramatic juxtaposition is confusing at
    first, but ultimately makes sense in the scheme of things (I won't
    spoil it for those who haven't played it yet).

    The story revolves around Alley, a butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth
    sweetie with an extremely precocious grasp of astro-physics. The
    player, throughout the game, plays the roles of various characters in
    the story - including her mother, father, a young girl whom she is
    babysitting, and a smitten teenage boy - but never Alley herself. The
    wide variety of angles from which we see Alley partially makes up for
    the fact that she is a relatively one-dimensional
    character. Beguiling, yes, but perhaps not as believeable as she could
    be. And the astro-physics? In an conversation with her father, the
    young Alley - a toddler at this stage - is given an impromptu (and
    very lengthy) lecture in 'inverse square law' and 'gallium
    production'. All very impressive, but a little over-the-top.

    These points, however, still don't dull the sheer emotional impact
    when you realise how the story ends. And because of the work's
    ingenious structure, this realisation actually comes around the middle
    of the game - and of course this will vary from player to player. The
    clever part about this design is that the game still continues even
    when it's obvious what the eventual outcome is.

    Ironically, structure is also the game's main downfall. The player has
    no real control over the story at all. This is not a problem in
    itself; in fact, all interactive fiction relies on the 'pick a card'
    principle - that inevitably the player will choose the author's path,
    with the number of choices available giving the illusion of
    'interactivity'. It's hard to explain why this didn't completely work
    for me in Photopia, but I could never escape the feeling that I was
    merely a passenger on the ride. It is not really interactive fiction
    in the traditional sense, but I must say that this does not alter the
    effectiveness of Photopia as a *work*.

    It may seem like I've been terribly harsh on this one, but when a work
    of IF has been hailed as 'literature' by the rec.arts.int-fiction
    crowd, it's only fair that it's judged on a similar level. And, at the
    end of the day, I enjoyed this immensely. It's certainly one of the
    most groundbreaking works to have appeared in ages, and will generate
    vigorous debate for some time to come.

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

    From: "david ledgard"

    I personally wouldn't have given this game first place. This isn't
    sour grapes, having entered a game of my own, but due to the fact that
    the game never really grabbed me. The first scene doesn't have any
    puzzles at all, although the multi choice conversation thing was
    clever, the usual way you never know what NPC's are going to
    understand. The second scene has a simple puzzle of find an item, and
    bring it back to a location. Although it had a clever thing where by
    which ever direction you went, the next location was created there,
    I'm not sure how this was programmed, but I imagine it could be quite
    complicated. A lot of people probably missed this entirely. The third
    scene, had restrictions on movement that really got my goat, saying
    you don't have a compass, so can't use the compass directions. This is
    where my patience ended, and I gave up, the game being too fiddly to
    play. The rest might have been really good, but I will never know. The
    narrative to puzzles ratio seemed very large, i.e. too much text, and
    too few puzzles.

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

    From: Second April

    NAME: The Plant
    AUTHOR: Michael J. Roberts
    E-MAIL: mjr SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: TADS
    SUPPORTS: HTML-TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/tads/plant/plant.gam
    VERSION: Competition Edition

    You're a witness to a hijacking. You're seeking a McGuffin in the form
    of a strange silver crate. You're investigating cover-ups in your
    company.  You're breaking into a strange plant. You're just generally
    trying to create mayhem. You're unveiling a government cover-up. All
    these things go on in Mike Roberts's The Plant, an entertaining caper
    better enjoyed for its sheer daffiness than as a coherent story.

    The initial premise is that your boss's car breaks down and you want
    to get help, but it's a thin veil, since you promptly witness soldiers
    hijacking a convoy of trucks and evidently forget all about trying to
    get your car started again, since you decide you want a piece of
    whatever action the soldiers are after. Weird coincidences drive much
    of the plot from there on: you defeat a security device to get into
    this supposedly ultra-secret plant by using stuff lying around, which
    seemed a tad absurd.  The puzzle you solve to get into the underground
    laboratory area is clever but relies on everyone in the complex being
    either blind or thoroughly stupid; other puzzles function on similar
    assumptions. As such, the tone varies somewhat; what might have been a
    sinister feel, created by the opening section, is subverted by the
    story's failure to develop any real sense of menace. The Plant works
    better viewed as a series of obstacles to overcome than as a real
    story, since the story is not always engaging.  The author consciously
    decided to make it impossible to lose or otherwise make the game
    unwinnable, a design choice that works well in some contexts but not
    in this one. The story, after all, to the extent I could make sense of
    it, involves some danger; breaking into heavily guarded top-secret
    complexes usually entails negative consequences if caught. But there
    are several points where harm should be imminent, logically, and
    knowing that the danger will just keep getting closer but never
    arrive, Zeno's-paradox style, destroys the illusion of the story and
    takes away the tension. This is particularly true at one point late in
    the game, when guards see you through a window, carrying out nefarious
    acts, and pound on the window. There is, of course, a door right next
    to the window, but you can examine everything in the room, take a nap,
    make faces at the guards, etc., and they will never, as far as I know,
    walk through the door. What might be an exciting moment is fairly
    ho-hum. Now, admittedly, with an IF engine that supports UNDO as well
    as SAVE/RESTORE, any "death" is but a passing setback--but avoiding
    death does affect a player's emotional experience, and knowing that
    there was no death to avoid reduces whatever emotional effect there
    is. What might be a good choice in another sort of game does not, in
    short, serve this one well.

    Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy here. The puzzles rival those of
    Enlightenment as the best in this year's competition: they are
    challenging but fair, with the exception of the one where an object is
    discoverable only with the command READ AUTHOR'S MIND. There are also
    enough of them for the player to feel like he or she has accomplished
    something, but few enough that the game is finishable within two
    hours. Several of them involve more than one object, or require
    manipulating the environment in creative ways, though a few rely on a
    few rely on random scenery-searching. The ones that involve opening
    passages or passing obstacles provide short cuts once the initial
    puzzle is solved, a great time-saver. The author also fairly
    consistently rewards the player for solving a puzzle by supplying more
    story, usually via cut-scenes of sorts--the player witnesses something
    going on. Some of the cut-scenes actually are cut-scenes--the text all
    goes by at once--and some aren't, and the logic of the distinction was
    not obvious to me. (The ones that force the player to keep typing Z
    don't actually give any potential for difference in how the player
    experiences the scene--at least, not obviously so.) The nature of the
    puzzles solved does make the player feel like he or she is coming
    closer to the goal, and getting glimpses of the McGuffin when
    obstacles are cleared reinforces that feeling to great effect. Your
    boss, along for the ride, is directly relevant only occasionally,
    though it seems like he might provide information about a few things
    if asked; still, he's a vaguely comic figure that helps lighten the
    feel of the story (another reason why the tone is a bit inconsistent).

    The Plant feels well-crafted as a whole; bugs are few, the writing is
    outstanding, and objects, even complex ones, largely do what they're
    supposed to do. That feeling of polish helps overcome the flaws in the
    story--or, more accurately, the flaws in the story don't detract much
    from its enjoyment because the game is so playable as a whole. The
    best puzzle in the game leads directly to its most ridiculous moment,
    but as long as the player can suspend disbelief, it doesn't really
    matter--because there's no question whether the moment works as the
    author intends it to.  The Plant illustrates how a skillful IF author
    can spin an entertaining yarn even with a contrived or silly plot, as
    long as he or she attends to the details that matter to the player;
    this one works well enough that I gave it an 8.

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

    From: "Paul O'Brian"

    You know, by the time I get finished writing these reviews, I'm pretty
    tired. It takes a lot of energy to put out twenty or thirty thousand
    words about competition entries, and even though my reviews are
    shorter than last year's, and there are fewer games involved, they
    were also written in a much more compressed judging period, so my
    exhaustion level is about the same. However, every year I've been
    reviewing the competition games I've gotten a little reward in the
    final game of the batch. In 1996, I was playing the games in order of
    filename, so the last game I played was Tapestry, an excellent piece
    of work by Dan Ravipinto which ended up taking second in the
    competition as a whole. Last year I let Lucian Smith's Comp97 order my
    choices randomly, and ironically the last game on the list ended up
    being Smith's own The Edifice. And true to form, that was another
    excellent game to finish on, and it ended up winning all the marbles
    in the 1997 comp. So it was with both trepidation and eagerness that I
    broached the final game of this year's batch, The Plant. When I saw it
    was by Michael J. Roberts, the legendary implementor of both TADS and
    HTML-TADS, my anticipation was increased even further. I've never
    played one of Roberts' games, having been an Inform initiate when I
    started programming, and having entered the IF scene just shortly
    before Roberts' departure. And after this buildup, I'm pleased to say
    that the Plant completely lives up to my mini-tradition of grand
    finales. It was a great game to end the competition with -- the reward
    I was hoping for, so that this review wouldn't be too hard to write.

    Probably the thing I liked the most about The Plant was its puzzles. I
    know there were several other games this year that were focused on
    puzzles, and some of the puzzles in those games were
    excellent. However, I liked The Plant's puzzles better precisely
    *because* the game wasn't focused on puzzles. Instead, its puzzles
    were very well integrated into its story, so solving the puzzles
    really propelled the narrative. It's much more interesting to solve a
    puzzle when it opens the door to the next piece of the story, rather
    than being just one of a roomful of puzzles that you have to solve to
    escape that room. The Plant was probably the only game in this year's
    competition to give me a feeling similar to what I have when I play
    Infocom games. I love that feeling of uncovering an exciting story by
    cleverly putting pieces together, using items in unexpected ways, or
    doing the right thing at just the right time. And the game's story is
    definitely an exciting one. It begins as you are stranded on an
    abandoned side-road with your boss, marooned by his unreliable
    car. It's up to you to find a phone or a service station and get
    moving again, but when you go looking you may find more than you
    bargained for. I won't give too much away about the secrets that are
    eventually revealed, but the game definitely packs plenty of
    surprises. The pacing is excellent -- I only felt completely stuck
    once. I turned to the walkthrough to solve the problem, just because I
    wanted to finish as much of the game as I could in the two-hour time
    limit, but if you're playing The Plant for the first time, let me urge
    you *not* to check the walkthrough unless you're completely stuck. All
    the puzzles are completely logical, none of them require reading the
    designer's mind, and many of them are quite satisfying to solve,
    requiring several steps or clever combinations of objects, or both.

    Now, the story itself does have some flaws. There are some parts that
    felt quite implausible to me, and from time to time the fact that your
    boss follows you around in your travels doing the same two or three
    things all the time starts to feel a little artificial. In addition,
    there are one or two minor spelling errors in the game. Outside of
    this, the plotting and writing are quite good. The Plant's prose often
    conveyed a very vivid sense of the visual. I drive by a plant like
    this about twice a month, and the game's descriptions of it, how its
    completely industrial and utilitarian networks of pipes and lights can
    seem almost like an abstract fairyland when glimpsed from afar, are
    right on the mark. I could really visualize most of the places in the
    game, and the mental pictures the game's text creates are quite
    dramatic and compelling. In addition, the game uses a few small
    touches here and there which utilize the power of HTML TADS. No
    pictures or sound, but a few well-placed hyperlinks in the help text
    and one or two spots with specially formatted text really make the
    game look sharp, and add to the very visual quality of the prose. If
    you sometimes start to feel a little impatient with all the growing
    that the medium of interactive fiction is doing, and long for a good
    old-fashioned Infocom-style thrill ride, check out The Plant. I think
    it may be just what you're looking for.

    Rating: 9.0

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

    From: Second April

    NAME: Purple
    AUTHOR: Stefan Blixt
    E-MAIL: flash SP@G df.lth.se
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/purple
    VERSION: Release 1

    Not many works of IF are spellbinding or even compelling from
    beginning to end; a game with a few memorable moments or some good
    puzzles may be remembered fondly and replayed often, even if the rest
    of the game is undistinguished. A notable example, to my mind, is
    Sorcerer, the bulk of which is rather ho-hum but which features two
    brilliant puzzles that most consider among Infocom's best ever. This
    is not to suggest that Purple, Stefan Blixt's entry in the 1998
    competition, is in Sorcerer's league; it's not. But as with that game
    and others, an otherwise undistinguished entry is redeemed by a few
    compelling moments and some intriguing ideas.

    Nuclear holocaust is imminent, but your brother Karl is planning to
    evade the blast and start over in the postapocalyptic world. To reveal
    precisely what you do would, I think, spoil the best moments of
    Purple: at its best, it has some of the austerity of well-imagined
    post-holocaust science fiction, such as Walter Miller's Canticle for
    Leibowitz; the way that remnants from the "before" turn up in the
    "after" is sometimes rather chilling. Purple is, to be sure, not even
    as well written as most average sci-fi, and certain moments go
    underdescribed--but the spareness of the prose serves the author well
    in spots. Descriptions are concise enough that they convey what
    happens and let the player mentally fill in the details. There is one
    moment at a turning point in the story that gave me a real chill--the
    author handles a certain transition particularly well--and I was
    disposed to like the game from that point on, I think.  There are
    other things that are done well: a certain hidden object is nicely
    clued, and the behavior of a certain NPC is well described.
    Disturbing details are scattered here and there, rather than filling
    every room description, suggesting a measure of restraint.

    As indicated, however, the general quality of Purple is uneven at
    best.  The writing hits several potholes, particularly in certain
    events toward the end of the game, where it becomes difficult to tell
    exactly what's going on. There are plenty of typos and spelling
    problems, and a few places where the brevity of the descriptions
    becomes confusing. Technical problems abound as well: there are a few
    crashes, a major disambiguation problem, and one character who
    consistently asks you for something no matter how often you give it to
    him. More generally, several plot angles go unresolved--it would be
    nice to see Purple extended or followed up to make some more sense of
    the story. As it is, it's a little like a trailer: lots of intriguing
    things happen, but it would be worth knowing more about them.

    There are other problems. After a certain point, Purple's pacing
    suffers: there aren't any time limits or even anything encouraging
    haste for most of the game, which is a shame because a sense of
    urgency might have made the plot more compelling. There are some
    points where wander-around-and-explore is a good mood to set, but
    after a while the exploratory feel needs to stop. Karl simply doesn't
    have enough to say--he has a few interesting responses, but too many
    things elicit no response, and his stable of comments is annoyingly
    small. (His one major task receives so little description that the
    effect is almost comic.) More generally, it's hard to escape the
    feeling that the author needed another month to fill in the details of
    Purple and clean up the bugs: if you deviate too much from the
    author's storyline, the seams start to show.  (Particularly toward the
    end, if you do things out of sequence.) Given that the game provides
    minimal direction about what to do when, the effect can be a bit
    confusing. The author provides plenty of interesting details in his
    world, but never manages to make it seem coherent.

    But Purple, I think, is greater than the sum of its parts, and the few
    compelling moments made up for the many bugs and slip-ups. If lack of
    polish bothers you, avoid this one; if you're so used to rough edges
    that you've learned to look past them, and you haven't tried Purple,
    you might appreciate the pieces of an interesting story that
    occasionally appear amid the bugs. Though far from a resounding
    success, Purple is a nice effort with some effective moments (and a
    huge improvement over the author's Pintown from the previous year),
    and I gave it a 7 in the competition.

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

    From: "Paul O'Brian"

    NAME: Research Dig
    AUTHOR: Chris Armitage
    E-MAIL: TheFarseer SP@G MailExcite.com
    DATE: September 1998
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/research
    VERSION: Release 1

    Research Dig has pieces of a good story, inexpertly handled so that
    they don't reach their full potential. In fact, the experience of the
    game was a bit like a real research dig -- you have to mine through
    some errors, cliches, and unclear writing, but you can come away with
    some pretty good pieces. So let me first focus on the positive. The
    game has an intriguing premise -- you are a beginning archaeology
    student, sent on a minor dig on behalf of your research center to an
    old abbey where the groundskeeper has uncovered "something old." When
    you arrive, you meet the groundskeeper's daughter, who whispers to you
    that the old piece belongs "to the Little People," who live
    underground. (Exactly how little these Little People are remains in
    question, but I'll get to that in a bit.) From this interesting start
    the game lays out a sensible map which delivers mystery and magic in
    reasonable proportions, never so much that it seems like a simple
    dungeon crawl or D&D knockoff. The writing can be rather atmospheric
    in several sections and some of the design contributes to this
    feeling, such as some important red herrings which lead nowhere but
    help to flesh out the game world. Overall, Research Dig feels like it
    was written by a beginner, but a beginner with good ideas and a
    passion for interactive fiction.

    That being said, it's also important to note that the game has a
    number of problems as well. Though the map was logical, it also felt
    quite a bit cliched, with underground tunnels, spooky crypts,
    mysterious rune-encarved stones, etc. There wasn't anything that felt
    very unique once the game got to this point, and it felt like a game
    with a lot of potential had devolved into another ho-hum underground
    excursion. In addition, the writing suffered at several points from
    basic proofreading errors. Spelling and grammar mistakes were not
    legion, but there were enough of them to be seriously distracting,
    especially since they sometimes turned up in places that would be read
    over and over again. For example, from the beginning of the game you
    find that you have a "referance book" in your inventory. After 10
    times reading the misspelled word, my patience started to wear thin.
    It's the kind of error that could have been avoided so easily, I have
    a hard time understanding why it's there. The same is true for some
    key coding errors, like the key whose short name is "a key labelled
    'Shed'."  The problem with a short name like this is that Inform
    already provides articles for objects, so in the inventory the key is
    listed as "an a key labelled 'Shed'." Compounding the problem, there
    are two keys with this same error. The glitch is all the more
    aggravating because it comes up almost every time the game tries to
    refer to the keys. My favorite example: "Which do you mean, the a key
    labelled 'Shed" or the a key labelled 'Conservatory'?"

    These mistakes were small, but sometimes small mistakes can make a big
    difference, and this game had the perfect example. However, before you
    read it, I should warn you that in order to explain my example, I have
    to spoil part of the endgame. Read on if you so choose. OK, so at one
    point you find an urn in the groundskeeper's house with a piece
    missing. Then later on you find a rune-encarved "slab of stone, about
    2' square." That's two feet square. That's way too big to be a piece
    of an urn. However, at the end of the game, you find out that it *is*
    in fact the missing piece of the urn.  Meanwhile, you see the
    groundskeeper defeated by "a small person, you guess at about 3"
    high." That's three inches high. That's mighty small! However, by this
    time you begin to suspect that the game confused its notations, and is
    using ' for inches and " for feet. This may seem like a minor error,
    but it changes the meaning of the things it affects so completely that
    it ruins any possibility of building the mystery. There's something to
    be learned here: in some ways writing (I mean creative writing) and
    programming aren't so far apart. Just as a missing semicolon can cause
    you no end of misery during compilation, so can a very small change
    completely deflate your story. Also, in both disciplines the semantic
    and syntactic errors are easiest to find, and your work is
    unacceptable until it is free of these.  Logic errors are more
    difficult to detect, and take much more sweat to ferret
    out. Unfortunately for would-be writers, there is no automatic
    proofreading service for fiction that provides the error-checking of a
    good compiler. You have to do it yourself.

    Rating: 6.2

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

    From: "Paul O'Brian"

    NAME: The Ritual of Purification
    AUTHOR: Jarek Sobolewski
    E-MAIL: sable SP@G polbox.com
    DATE: September 1998
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/ritual
    VERSION: Release 1

    The feeling I got while playing Ritual reminded me of nothing so much
    as those old Dr. Strange comics from the 60's, back when the master of
    mysticism was drawn by Steve Ditko, himself a master of the
    bizarre. The game is full of strange, hallucinatory images: a road
    that melts into nothing, an arch with marble carvings on one side and
    black decay on the other side, exploding and melting universes. The
    whole thing made me feel like I was immersed in a Ditko landscape, and
    the fact that the main character is a spellcaster on an astral voyage
    didn't hurt either. Of course, some of the scenes in Ritual could
    never have taken place in a 60's comic -- at least, not one that
    adhered to the Comics Code Authority.  There's nothing really
    outrageous, but there are scenes of sexuality, drug use, and gore that
    you'd never see Dr. Strange experiencing. I'm not suggesting that the
    game is some sort of Dr. Strange rip-off, or that Ditko was an
    inspiration for Ritual -- that's just what it reminded me of.
    However, one source of inspiration for the game was clearly some of
    the more obscure poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. At the completion of
    almost every puzzle, the game throws a box quote from Poe, usually one
    which has some relation to the obstacle just overcome. These quotes
    are well-chosen, digging deep into the Poe archives and highlighting
    how much he inherited from William Blake, as well as how much he
    prefigured H.P. Lovecraft. At its best, most deranged or sublime
    moments, the game evokes the weird, dark mysticism shared by all these
    creators. On the whole, the effect is very trippy, and a fair amount
    of fun.

    Unfortunately, there are some false notes as well. From time to time a
    character will say or do something fairly anachronistic, which tends
    to break the spell pretty thoroughly. In fact, at one point you can
    get a character to whip out a bong and start taking hits from it,
    which brings the whole elevated plane of symbolism and wonder
    dive-bombing back to earth. The effect is not so much of Alice in
    Wonderland's "hookah-smoking caterpillar", but more of Jeff Spicoli in
    Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It just doesn't fit. There are also a
    few times when the game seems to slip into cliches or "AD&Disms" --
    one beast is described as "biting easily through a set of plate mail",
    and some of the spells feel suspiciously close to ones I remember from
    7th grade basement role-playing sessions. In addition, the game has a
    number of grammar and spelling errors, usually minor problems like
    missing punctuation or vowel mistakes, but again they break the
    spell. Finally, and worst of all, there's a bug in the game which
    causes it to not respond at all if a certain action is taken sooner
    than the game expects it. There's nothing that ruins immersion quite
    so much as when a game just doesn't respond to a command in any
    way. Well, maybe not *nothing* -- crashing the interpreter would
    probably ruin immersion more, but because of the lack of response
    problem I ended up turning to the hints, only to find that I had in
    fact given the right command to solve the puzzle -- I just gave it a
    little too soon.

    The game suffers a bit from the "unconnected symbols" syndrome --
    sometimes it feels like all of these dreamlike images are just images,
    with no meaning or substance attached to them. However, the game
    manages to pull them together somewhat through its title, intro, and
    ending -- the bizarre symbols with which the game is littered are all
    loosely connected through a theme of purification, of facing inner
    demons and the pain & joy of life in order to become a better
    person. It didn't entirely work for me -- some of the symbolism seemed
    arbitrary or cliched to my mind -- but I think it was a good
    beginning. I would really like to play a game with this kind of tone
    which had freed itself from shopworn images and RPG
    leftovers. Something with imagery like the more arresting parts of
    Ritual, but which really cohered to make a powerful statement on some
    aspect of the human condition, could really take advantage of IF's
    immersive capability to create a remarkable work of art. Ritual isn't
    it, but I hope it becomes the jumping-off point for someone (the
    author perhaps?) to create something like it but better: no writing
    errors, no cliches, no anachronisms, no bugs -- just the Ditko
    universes exploding and melting all around us, with meaning.

    Rating: 6.9

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

    From: Second April

    NAME: Trapped in a One Room Dilly
    AUTHOR: Laura Knauth
    E-MAIL: Laura.Knauth SP@G asu.edu
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/dilly/dilly.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Laura Knauth's Trapped in a One Room Dilly is virtually the antithesis
    of her Travels in the Land of Erden from the 1997 competition--where
    that game was sprawling and filled with plot, Dilly is tight, focused,
    and almost devoid of plot. But while this is probably a better game
    than that one was, it has some deficiencies even as one- room games
    go.

    From the outset, Dilly more or less declares that it is forgoing plot:
    the initial room description states that "ou have no idea how you came
    to be in this room or what you were doing just before." You therefore
    commence solving puzzles that eventually allow you to get out of the
    room--the title adjective "trapped" rightly suggests that being in
    this room is a problem. What is missing, however, is a sense of
    direction--you fiddle with the objects at hand, which eventually lead
    you to a way out, but not in a way that could remotely have been
    foreseen when you started fiddling.  (Whereas at the beginning of
    Enlightenment, say, the entire concept is apparent from the beginning,
    and the challenge is using the materials at hand to solve the
    problem.) Dilly is therefore a fundamentally different sort of
    one-room game than Enlightenment, or In the Spotlight, or Persistence
    of Memory--and while that's not a bad thing, it's a little less
    plausible than more unified one-location games. As in, someone had to
    put together this bizarre room full of objects that, suitably
    manipulated, allow you to get out; why did they do that? To give Dilly
    credit, one of the wittiest parts of the game is a bookshelf full of
    made-up plots that could answer that question--alien abduction,
    government experiments, etc.--but making a joke of it only underlines
    the point: stories that could make sense of such a premise require a
    strange, contrived plot, with the situation engineered by some malign
    intelligent entity. Dilly works better, in short, when considered as a
    set of puzzles thrown into one room, rather than as a piece of a story
    that happens to fall within one location.

    The mechanics of Dilly are not quite as elegant as they might be. The
    room is evidently _crammed_ with stuff to play with--and though that
    isn't bad, as such, the relative sparseness of Enlightenment suggests
    that it needn't be that way. Very few objects in Dilly have multiple
    uses, or uses beyond the obvious; there just happen to be a lot of
    objects thrown into one room. Dilly could work as a two- or three-room
    game without losing its flavor, so to speak; other games, where the
    story or the atmosphere are tied into the one-room conceit, would
    not. (Such as, say, Enlightenment or Persistence of Memory.) Dilly
    might also be a little less confusing if it were more spread out;
    there are so many knobs to turn and buttons to push in that one room
    description that it is easy to lose something in the shuffle.

    Still, let me be clear: Dilly is a well-done example of a one-room
    game.  There are some inventive puzzles, particularly involving the
    physical properties of common objects you run across and components
    you can take out of larger objects. One change-the-environment puzzle
    could be clued a little better, but it's a good puzzle
    nonetheless. There are several points where you destroy or damage
    objects rather than simply working with them, which I found somehow
    refreshing: it meant thinking outside the lines, never a bad
    thing. (Of course, it can break mimesis to require destructive actions
    in some contexts--homes, public places, etc.--but this is not a
    setting where such actions would be a problem.) Even the more
    artificial puzzles--a dartboard that requires a certain number of
    points scored, a "myriad" puzzle--are reasonably well-crafted; the
    latter has some unusual patterns, the former adeptly uses the
    "practice" dynamic also seen in Edifice. And there are nice
    extras--there is a slot machine, and you can play it using coins you
    find, though as far as I can tell it is impossible to win
    anything. There are plenty of nice touches that help to alleviate the
    sense that the author has grafted together a set of puzzles that
    didn't fit in other games.

    It's not clear what Dilly contributes to the genre of one-room
    games. The author ruminated about the possibility of a full-length
    one-room game, which may yet be possible--but, I would venture to say,
    not the way Dilly does it, not with a room full of stuff and no
    guidance given the player.  Much of the relevant material should be
    hidden at first to avoid discouraging the player; more importantly,
    objects should be involved in more than one puzzle each. Moreover,
    goals and motivations should change during the game, to break up the
    monotony of staying in one room the entire time. Nevertheless, this is
    an intriguing effort, and I gave it an 8 in this year's competition.

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

    From: "Paul O'Brian"

    OK, probably the first thing I should confess is that I'm not hip
    enough to know what a "dilly" is. My handy dictionary suggests that it
    means "something remarkable of its kind" -- their example is "a dilly
    of a movie." Somehow I don't think that's what's meant here. So,
    judging from context, I'm going to assume that "dilly" means
    "relatively enjoyable puzzle game with good coding and writing, but a
    few guess-the-verb problems and sometimes not enough synonyms
    implemented." If this is what dilly really means, then Trapped In A
    One-Room Dilly has the most accurate title of any game in the 1998
    competition. Like many others in this year's competition, Dilly is
    very puzzle-oriented. Perhaps what we're seeing this year is a bit of
    a backlash against the periodically swelling outcries for "puzzleless
    IF." If backlash it is, I don't think that's entirely a bad
    thing. Sometimes because literature has so much more cultural capital
    than puzzles, we can get into a mindset which tries to shun puzzles in
    favor of an elusive brand of literary merit. Don't get me wrong -- I
    myself am much more interested in IF for its literary qualities than
    its puzzles, but I also think it's important to remember that (for
    some of us, anyway) there is also a pleasure in puzzle-solving, the
    "crossword" part of IF as opposed to the "narrative" part. I believe
    that interactive fiction can cover a very wide spectrum indeed, but
    that there will always be a place for puzzle-oriented IF on that
    spectrum, and I'll probably always enjoy a really well-done puzzle
    game.

    Dilly is the closest I've seen yet in this competition to that lofty
    standard, but before I talk about the things it does right, I have to
    take one step back and talk about a game from last year. The author of
    Dilly entered a game in last year's competition called Travels in the
    Land of Erden. Ironically, these two games could not be more
    different. Erden was a sprawling, gigantic game with an enormous map,
    any number of subplots, and a generally broad scope. When reviewing
    that game, I wrote about the benefits of focus, and suggested that "if
    the author had concentrated her energies on a game perhaps a quarter
    of the size of this one, she would have had time for much more
    extensive proofing and beta-testing, and the result might have been a
    tight, polished gem rather than the rough and gangly work she
    submitted." Well, when I'm right, I'm right. Dilly benefits enormously
    from having a much tighter focus than Erden. The game narrows its
    scope to (as you might have guessed from the title) one room, and the
    room is a really *interesting* room, full of enough gadgets and
    gewgaws to keep me busy for two hours. At no time in Dilly did I lack
    for something to figure out, look at, or do. The game crams about 10
    puzzles into this one room, but it didn't feel particularly strained
    to me. In fact, Dilly makes a sly gibe about its lack of plot by
    including a bookshelf full of books whose plots are plausible
    explanations for your situation (Intelligence testing, alien
    abduction, the bomb shelter of a wealthy wacko, etc.). The puzzles are
    generally creative and fun, and all of the coding and writing is
    technically proficient.

    Well, almost all. The only times I ran into trouble with Dilly were
    when I was close enough to the solution of a puzzle that I should have
    received some slight confirmation, but the game didn't provide it. For
    example, at one point in the game something is ticking and
    vibrating. If you listen closely to this object, you can hear it
    ticking. However, if you touch it "you feel nothing unusual." This is
    one of those instances where after I found out what was happening, I
    felt cheated. If I'm that close, I want at least a little nudge. In
    another instance, I had more of a guess-the-verb problem -- the game
    wants you to tie two things together with a rope, as in "TIE FROG TO
    LOG." (That's not really what you're tying, but I'm trying to avoid
    the spoiler here.) However, if you first "TIE ROPE TO LOG" you get a
    message along the lines of "That's useless." If I had tried "TIE ROPE
    TO FROG" first, the game would have picked up on what I meant to do,
    but I didn't make that lucky guess. I don't like to be put in the
    position of making lucky guesses. Nonetheless, these are relatively
    minor problems, easy to fix. They didn't stop me from enjoying my time
    in the one-room...  whatever it was.

    Rating: 8.5

    READER'S SCOREBOARD ---------------------------------------------------------

       Notes:

            A   - Runs on Amigas.
            AP  - Runs on Apple IIs.
            GS  - Runs on Apple IIGS.
            AR  - Runs on Acorn Archimedes.
            C   - Commercial, no fixed price.
            C30 - Commercial, with a fixed price of $30.
            F   - Freeware.
            GMD - Available on ftp.gmd.de
            I   - Runs on IBM compatibles.
            M   - Runs on Macs.
            S20 - Shareware, registration costs $20.
            64  - Runs on Commodore 64s.
            ST  - Runs on Atari STs.
            TAD - Written with TADS.  This means it can run on:
                    AmigaDOS, NeXT and PC, Atari ST/TT/Falcon, DECstation
                    (MIPS) Unix Patchlevel 1 and 2, IBM, IBM RT, Linux, Apple
                    Macintosh, SGI Iris/Indigo running Irix, Sun 4 (Sparc)
                    running SunOS or Solaris 2, Sun 3, OS/2, and even a 386+
                    protected mode version.
            AGT - Available for IBM, Mac, Amiga, and Atari ST.  This does not
                    include games made with the Master's edition.
            ADVSYS - Available for PC and Macintosh only, or so my sources tell
                     me.  (Source code available as well.  So it can be ported
                     to other computers.)
            HUG - Written with Hugo.  Runs on MS-DOS, Linux, and Amigas.
            INF - Infocom or Inform game.  These games will run on:
                    Atari ST, Amiga, Apple Macintosh, IBM, Unix, VMS, Apple II,
                    Apple IIGS, C64, TSR-80, and Acorn Archimedes.  There may be
                    other computers on which it runs as well.

    Name                      Avg Sc  Chr     Puz    # Sc  Issue Notes:
    ====                      ======  ===     ===    ====  ===== =========
    Aayela                    8.6     1.6     1.7       1        F_TAD_GMD
    Adventure (all variants)  6.6     0.7     1.0       7      8 F_INF_TAD_ETC_GMD
    Adventureland             4.0     0.5     1.5       1        F_GMD
    Adv. of Elizabeth Highe   3.1     0.5     0.3       2      5 F_AGT
    Afternoon Visit           4.1     1.0     0.8       1
    Alien Abduction?          7.9     1.7     1.7       1
    All Quiet...Library...    4.7     0.8     0.7       4      7 F_INF_GMD
    Amnesia                   7.8     1.5     1.7       2      9 C_AP_I_64
    Another...No Beer         2.4     0.2     0.8       2      4 S10_IBM_GMD
    Arthur: Excalibur         8.0     1.3     1.6       4  4, 14 C_INF
    Awakened                  7.7     1.7     1.6       1
    Awakening                 5.4     1.0     1.0       1
    Awe-Chasm                 2.4     0.3     0.6       1      8 S?_IBM_ST
    Babel                     8.2     1.7     1.3       2     13 F_INF_GMD
    Balances                  6.6     0.7     1.1       5      6 F_INF_GMD
    Ballyhoo                  7.7     1.8     1.5       4      4 C_INF
    Bear's Night Out          7.7     1.2     1.5       1     13 F_INF_GMD
    Beyond the Tesseract      3.7     0.1     0.6       1      6 F_I_GMD
    Beyond Zork               8.1     1.6     1.9       4      5 C_INF
    BJ Drifter                7.3     1.5     1.5       1
    Border Zone               7.3     1.4     1.4       6      4 C_INF
    Broken String             4.2     0.5     0.6       2        F_TADS_GMD
    BSE                       6.6     1.0     1.0       1
    Bunny                     6.6     1.0     1.4       1
    Bureaucracy               7.5     1.6     1.3       6      5 C_INF
    Busted                    5.2     1.0     1.1       1        F_INF_GMD
    Castaway                  1.1     0.0     0.4       1      5 F_IBM_GMD
    Castle Elsinore           5.3     1.0     1.2       1
    Change in the Weather     7.4     0.8     1.5       7  7, 14 F_INF_GMD
    Chicken under Window      6.9     0.0     0.0       1
    Christminster             8.6     1.8     1.6       6        F_INF_GMD
    Corruption                7.8     1.6     1.1       3      x C_I
    Cosmoserve                8.7     1.3     1.4       2      5 F_AGT_GMD
    Crypt v2.0                5.0     1.0     1.5       1      3 S12_IBM_GMD
    Curses                    8.4     1.3     1.7       9      2 F_INF_GMD
    Cutthroats                6.2     1.4     1.2       6      1 C_INF
    Dampcamp                  6.0     1.0     1.4       1
    Deadline                  6.9     1.2     1.3       6      x C_INF
    Delusions                 8.4     1.8     1.6       1
    Deep Space Drifter        5.5             1.4       1      3 S15_TAD_GMD
    Delusions                 7.4     1.3     1.5       2      14F_INF_GMD
    Demon's Tomb              7.4     1.2     1.1       2      9 C_I
    Detective                 1.0     0.0     0.0       5   4, 5 F_AGT_GMD
    Detective-MST3K           6.1     0.8     0.1       4   7, 8 F_INF_GMD
    Ditch Day Drifter         7.1     1.2     1.6       1      2 F_TAD_GMD
    Dungeon                   7.4     1.5     1.6       1        F_GMD
    Dungeon Adventure         6.8     1.3     1.6       1      4 F_SEE REVIEW
    Dungeon of Dunjin         5.8     0.7     1.4       3  3, 14 S20_IBM_MAC_GMD
    Edifice                   7.5     1.5     1.7       3     13 F_INF_GMD
    Electrabot                0.7     0.0     0.0       1      5 F_AGT_GMD
    Emy Discovers Life        4.1     1.0     1.0       1
    Enchanter                 7.1     0.9     1.4       6      2 C_INF
    Enhanced                  5.0     1.3     1.3       1      2 S10_TAD_GMD
    Eric the Unready          6.9     1.5     1.5       2      x C_I
    Everybody Loves a Parade  7.3     1.2     1.3       1
    Fable                     2.0     0.2     0.1       1      6 F_AGT_GMD
    Fear                      7.6     1.5     1.6       1        F_GMD
    Firebird                  8.1     1.7     1.6       1
    Fish                      7.6     1.2     1.7       3      x C_I
    Foggywood Hijinx          7.6     1.7     1.7       1
    Forbidden Castle          4.8     0.6     0.5       1      x C_AP
    Frenetic Five             5.1     1.2     0.2       1
    Friday Afternoon          6.3     1.4     1.2       1     13 F_INF_GMD
    Frobozz Magic Support     8.0     1.6     1.7       1
    Gateway                   7.5     1.6     1.5       1      x C_I
    Glowgrass                 7.4     1.6     1.5       2     13 F_INF_GMD
    Great Archaelog. 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          7.3     1.2     1.6       3      x C_I
    Gumshoe                   6.3     1.3     1.1       2      9 F_INF_GMD
    Hitchhiker's Guide        7.6     1.4     1.5       8      5 C_INF
    Hollywood Hijinx          6.4     0.9     1.6       7      x C_INF
    Horror30.zip              3.7     0.3     0.7       2      3 S20_IBM_GMD
    Horror of Rylvania        7.5     1.5     1.3       2      1 F_TAD_GMD
    Humbug                    7.0     1.7     1.5       2      x F_GMD
    Ice Princess              6.2     1.1     1.6       1
    I didn't know...yodel     1.7     0.3     1.0       1     17 F_IBM_GMD
    Infidel                   6.9     0.0     1.4       9   1, 2 C_INF
    Inhumane                  3.6     0.2     0.7       1      9 F_INF_GMD
    I-0: Jailbait on Inte     8.0     1.7     1.3       4        F_INF_GMD
    Jacaranda Jim             7.9     0.9     1.0       2      x F_GMD
    Jeweled Arena             8.0     1.5     1.5       1      x ?
    Jigsaw                    7.7     1.4     1.5       7   8, 9 F_INF_GMD
    Jinxter                   6.4     1.1     1.3       2      x C_I
    John's Fire Witch         7.1     1.1     1.6       6      4 S6_TADS_GMD
    Journey                   7.8     1.6     1.3       3      5 C_INF
    Jouney Into Xanth         5.0     1.3     1.2       1      8 F_AGT_GMD
    Kissing the Buddha's      8.1     2.0     1.2       1
    Klaustrophobia            6.7     1.2     1.3       5      1 S15_AGT_GMD
    Leather Goddesses         7.1     1.3     1.5       8      4 C_INF
    Legend Lives!             8.9     0.9     1.6       2      5 F_TADS_GMD
    Lessen of the Tortois     8.1     1.6     1.6       1        F_TADS_GMD
    Lethe Flow Phoenix        6.8     1.4     1.5       3      9 F_TADS_GMD
    Light: Shelby's Adden     8.3     1.8     0.9       2      9 S?_TADS_GMD
    Lists and Lists           7.5     1.5     1.8       1
    Losing Your Grip          8.2     1.3     1.4       2      14S_TADS_GMD
    Lost New York             8.2     1.6     1.6       1
    Lost Spellmaker           5.4     1.2     0.8       1     13 F_INF_GMD
    Lurking Horror            7.2     1.3     1.3      11   1, 3 C_INF
    MacWesleyan / PC Univ     5.6     0.7     1.0       1      x F_TADS_GMD
    Magic.zip                 4.5     0.5     0.5       1      3 S20_IBM_GMD
    Magic Toyshop             4.3     0.7     1.1       2        F_INF_GMD
    Matter of Time            1.4     0.3     1.4       1      14F_ALAN_GMD
    Mercy                     9.2     2.0     0.7       1
    Meteor...Sherbet          8.5     1.6     1.9       1        F_INF_GMD
    Mind Electric             5.1     0.6     0.8       3   7, 8 F_INF_GMD
    Mind Forever Voyaging     8.4     1.3     0.8       7      5 C_INF
    Moist                     8.4     1.7     1.6       1
    Moonmist                  5.7     1.2     1.0      11      1 C_INF
    Mop & Murder              5.0     0.9     1.0       2   4, 5 F_AGT_GMD
    Multidimen. Thief         5.6     0.4     1.0       3   2, 9 S15_AGT_GMD
    Mystery House             4.1     0.3     0.7       1      x F_AP_GMD
    New Day                   5.5     1.3     0.9       1     13 F_INF_GMD
    Night at Museum Forev     4.2     0.3     1.0       4   7, 8 F_TAD_GMD
    Nord and Bert             6.1     0.8     1.3       4      4 C_INF
    Odieus...Flingshot        3.3     0.4     0.7       2      5 F_INF_GMD
    One Hand Clapping         6.9     1.2     1.4       3      5 F_ADVSYS_GMD
    One That Got Away         6.7     1.3     1.2       3   7, 8 F_TAD_GMD
    Oo-Topos                  5.7     0.2     1.0       1      x C_AP_I_64
    Path to Fortune           6.8     1.4     0.8       1      9 S_INF_GMD
    Pawn                      6.5     1.0     1.2       1      x C_I_AP_64
    PC University: See MacWesleyan
    Perseus & Andromeda       3.4     0.3     1.0       1      x ?
    Phred Phontious...Pizza   5.2     0.8     1.3       1     19 F_INF_GMD
    Planetfall                7.4     1.6     1.5       9      4 C_INF
    Plundered Hearts          7.2     1.3     1.1       5      4 C_INF
    Pyramids of Mars          6.0     1.2     1.2       1
    Quarterstaff              6.1     1.3     0.6       1      9 C_M
    Ralph                     7.3     1.7     1.5       1
    Reruns                    5.2     1.2     1.2       1
    Ritual of Purification    5.8     2.0     1.0       1     17 F_GMD
    Sanity Claus              9.0                       1      1 S10_AGT_GMD
    Save Princeton            5.8     1.2     1.3       2      8 S10_TAD_GMD
    Seastalker                5.5     1.2     0.9       6      4 C_INF
    Shades of Grey            8.0     1.3     1.4       4   1, 2 F_AGT_GMD
    Sherlock                  7.3     1.4     1.4       3      4 C_INF
    She's Got...Spring        7.8     1.8     1.8       2     13 F_INF
    Shogun                    7.1     1.5     0.5       1      4 C_INF
    Sins against Mimesis      7.7     1.7     1.6       1
    Sir Ramic Hobbs           5.0     1.0     1.5       1      6 F_AGT_GMD
    Small World               5.9     1.4     0.9       1
    So Far                    8.7     1.4     1.8       4        F_INF_GMD
    Sorcerer                  7.3     0.6     1.6       5      2 C_INF
    South American Trek       0.9     0.2     0.5       1      5 ?_IBM_GMD
    Space Aliens...Cardigan   1.6     0.4     0.3       5      3 S60_AGT_GMD
    Space under Window        7.3     0.0     0.0       1
    Spellbreaker              8.3     1.2     1.8       5      2 C_INF
    Spellcasting 101          7.0     1.0     1.2       1      x C_I
    Spellcasting 201          7.8     1.5     1.6       1      x C_I
    Spellcasting 301          7.5     1.4     1.5       1      x C_I
    Spider and Web            8.5     1.7     1.7       3      14F_INF_GMD
    SpiritWrak                6.7     1.3     1.1       2      9 F_INF_GMD
    Spur                      7.2     1.4     1.2       1      9 F_HUG_GMD
    Starcross                 7.0     1.1     1.3       5      1 C_INF
    Stationfall               7.6     1.6     1.6       5      5 C_INF
    Stiffy - MiSTing          4.2     0.1     0.1       1
    Sunset Over Savannah      8.3     1.3     1.5       1     13 F_INF_GMD
    Suspect                   5.8     1.2     1.0       3      4 C_INF
    Suspended                 7.2     1.3     1.3       5      8 C_INF
    Tapestry                  6.9     1.2     0.7       2      14F_INF_GMD
    Tempest                   5.6     1.0     0.6       1     13 F_INF_GMD
    Theatre                   7.0     1.1     1.3       5      6 F_INF_GMD
    TimeQuest                 8.6     1.5     1.8       1      x C_I
    TimeSquared               4.3     1.1     1.1       1      x F_AGT_GMD
    Toonesia                  6.4     1.2     1.3       4      7 F_TAD_GMD
    Tossed into Space         3.9     0.2     0.6       1      4 F_AGT_GMD
    Travels in Land of Erden  6.2     1.5     1.5       1
    Treasure.Zip                                               3 S20_IBM_GMD
    Trinity                   8.6     1.3     1.7      11   1, 2 C_INF
    Tryst of Fate             7.1     1.4     1.3       1
    Tube Trouble              3.3     0.5     0.4       1        F_INF_GMD
    Uncle Zebulon's Will      7.1     0.9     1.4       8      7 F_TAD_GMD
    Undertow                  5.2     1.0     0.8       1        F_TAD_GMD
    Undo                      1.9     0.1     0.4       2      7 F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian One-Half        7.0     1.2     1.6       7      1 F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Unventure 1     7.1     1.2     1.6       6   1, 2 F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Unventure 2     7.2     1.4     1.5       4      1 F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Zero            9.0                       1      1 F_TAD_GMD
    Veritas                   7.9     1.6     1.7       1
    Waystation                5.7     0.7     0.9       2      9 F_TAD_GMD
    Wearing the Claw          6.8     1.1     1.1       2        F_INF_GMD
    Wedding                   8.0     1.7     1.6       1
    Wishbringer               7.4     1.4     1.3       7   5, 6 C_INF
    Witness                   6.9     1.6     1.2       7  1,3,9 C_INF
    Wonderland                7.5     1.3     1.4       1      x C_I
    World                     6.5     0.6     1.3       2      4 F_SEE REVIEW
    Zanfar                    2.6     0.2     0.4       1      8 F_AGT_GMD
    Zero Sum Game             7.5     1.7     1.2       1     13 F_INF_GMD
    Zork 0                    6.3     1.1     1.4       5      14C_INF
    Zork 1                    6.3     0.8     1.5      12   1, 2 C_INF
    Zork 2                    6.5     0.8     1.5       8   1, 2 C_INF
    Zork 3                    6.1     0.7     1.4       6   1, 2 C_INF
    Zork Undisc. Undergr.     6.5     1.0     1.2       1     14 F_INF

    If you've voted, but haven't seen any change in the scores above,
    please note that I've received a few votes which haven't yet been
    entered into the score list. They will appear in time for the next
    issue.

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

    The Top Five:

    A game is not eligible for the Top Five 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.

    There are no changes in the top five list since the last issue:

     1.   So Far              8.7     4 votes
     2.   Trinity             8.6    11 votes
     3.   Christminster       8.6     6 votes
     4.   Spider and Web      8.5     3 votes
     5.   Curses              8.4     9 votes

    CLOSING REMARKS -------------------------------------------------------------

    I really hope that you won't have to wait as long for the next issue
    as for this one. There are lots of interesting games out there to
    review, so keep the reviews coming! We also hope to cover the first IF
    Art Show in the next issue.

    Until the next issue: Happy Adventuring!

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