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Game Reviews O

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

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

The email addresses used are those submitted with the review, so naturally some of them may be out of date.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

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    Table of Contents
    Odieus' Quest for the Magic Flingshot
    Of Forms Unknown
    Off the Trolley
    OMNIQuest
    On The Farm
    Once and Future
    The One That Got Away
    1-2-3...
    Oo-Topos
    Order
    The Orion Agenda

    Odieus' Quest for the Magic Flingshot
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #5 -- April 19, 1995

      NAME:  Odieus' Quest for the Magic Flingshot
                                            GAMEPLAY:  Problematic (0.8)
      AUTHOR:  Unknown                      PLOT:  Below Average
      EMAIL:  ?                             ATMOSPHERE:  Below Average
      AVAILABILITY:  IF Archive, F                 WRITING:  Below Average
      PUZZLES:  Below Average               SUPPORTS:  LADS, AGT, Inform
      CHARACTERS:  Poor                     DIFFICULTY:  Easy

         Odieus has rather an interesting history.  It was originally
    uploaded to the Compuserve Gamer's Forum in 1987 by an unknown author
    who wrote it using the LADS compiler.  That version seems to have
    disappeared, but the game lives on.  About a year later David
    Malmberg, author of the Adventure Game Toolkit converted it to AGT
    format as a coding exercise.  Recently Teo Kwang Liak converted the
    game to Inform, also as a coding exercise.
         In the game, you play Odieus, whose magic Flingshot has been stolen
    by the evil Blackwing.  You are tossed by a giant into the approximate
    location and must solve a series of puzzles to retrieve it.  The game
    is fairly short and simple, having fewer than 25 locations, and one and
    only one use for each item (which may explain its apparent value as an
    exercise).
         Surprisingly, the older AGT version plays better than the newer
    Inform one, as the Inform version is a bit buggy.  I saw a review of
    Odieus in another magazine which stated that the author couldn't even
    finish the Inform version due to a difficulty in cooling down the hot
    springs, which was accomplished easily in the AGT version.  Whenever
    you try to do it, you get a nonsensical message that says "Alas, it is
    closed".  I fiddled with the game until I found the proper command
    which was 16-12-1-14-20  2-12-21-5  2-5-1-14 (for those who wish to
    decipher this spoiler, simply convert the letters to numbers; i.e. 1=A,
    2=B, 3=C, and so forth).
         A few of the puzzles are altered in the Inform version.  Your light
    source, for example, is totally different.  A couple of other items are
    changed, and a useless room is given signifigance.  Nevertheless, when
    I played the Inform version I only got 148 out of 150 points, and
    haven't yet bothered to go back and track down the other 2.
         A couple of the puzzles are completely arbitrary.  There is no
    clue at all to as how to open the lock at the end, unless you have
    figured out the pattern that each item has a single use.
         In any case, the game is not bad, and makes a nice little
    diversion.  It shouldn't take more than a half hour to solve it.

    Inform (.zip)

    AGT files with PC Executable runtime (.zip)

    AGT Source (.zip)

    Inform Source (Text)

    Solution (Text)

    Of Forms Unknown
    From: C.E. Forman <ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #10 -- February 4, 1997

    NAME: Of Forms Unknown
    AUTHOR: Chris Markwyn
    EMAIL: MARKWYNC SP@G carleton.edu
    DATE: October 1996
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Inform Ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/forms
    VERSION: Version 1.0

    An attempt to continue the "expressive" I-F tradition of "So Far" -
    that is, an interactive Bergman film that dwells on exploration,
    shifting between various areas representing human thoughts and
    feelings, and old-fashioned puzzle-solving, with little or no genuine
    plot to tie the experiences together.

    I'm not sure I like this new trend.  To give credit, "So Far" is a very
    imaginative, ground-breaking new style of I-F, but the derivativeness of
    "Forms" shows (the author himself admits this).  I fear that a glut of
    this type of game will quickly make it tiresome and unpopular, much like
    having too many "hunt-the-treasures-and-store-them-somewhere" games.

    The writing is good, but painfully derivative while lacking much of
    the depth of "So Far." The puzzles in "Forms" are thoroughly
    motivationless, and they didn't hold my interest as well as Andrew
    Plotkin's work did.  (Even with Plotkin's work, I felt I was forcing
    myself through a few parts of it.  I guess I'm just not crazy about
    this type of game.)  I was able to figure out most of the early
    puzzles, but the later ones required delving into the built-in hints
    to find out, for instance, the right place to dig.  The final puzzle
    exhibits inexcusably frustrating parsing, made more difficult by the
    fact that the hints are in error - you must turn the _device_, not the
    wheel, but the hints say the wheel.  (I played the original uploaded
    version, not the revised one that appeared a few days after the
    deadline, so maybe this is fixed.)

    Enjoyable at first, but tiresome toward the end.

    Inform File (.z5) (updated version)

    Directory With Inform .z5 File

    Off the Trolley
    From: DJ Hastings <djhastings SP@G centurytel.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #45 -- October 17, 2006

    TITLE: Off The Trolley
    AUTHOR: Krisztian Kaldi
    EMAIL: krisztian.kaldi SP@G tie.hu
    DATE: October 1, 2005
    PARSER: TADS2
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2005/tads2/offthetrolley/offthetrolley.gam
    VERSION: Release 1

    Huh?

    That was my first comment upon reading the opening text of Off the Trolley,and
    not coincidentally it was also my final comment after the game was finished.
    The game gave me an overall goal to accomplish early on, but even after
    finishing I can't figure out why I would want to accomplish it. (Or, for that
    matter, why the character I was playing would want to do so.) I considered
    insanity, but there didn't seem to be any indications that my character was
    insane. And *I* feel perfectly normal. So I'm guessing that there was some
    reason the PC wanted to do what he did, and the author just forgot to tell me
    about it.

    Basically, you play the part of an old trolley driver on his last day of work,
    who decides to crash the trolley into one of the buildings along his route.
    When I first started the game and saw that I got to be a trolley driver, I was
    expecting it to be pretty dull. But to my surprise, I actually enjoyed
    operating the trolley. The author gave me a variety of things to do without
    letting anything get over-complicated. On the whole, the trolley was a nicely
    designed toy, and I had fun playing with it.

    The puzzles were all related to operating the trolley, and none of them felt
    like they were "tacked on". They also had reasonable solutions that stayed
    pretty close to real life. I like this design, where the author gives me an
    interesting toy and spends the entire game having me play with it. Of course,
    this depends on the toy being an interesting one, but since the trolley was,
    the game worked for me.

    The PC was also well done. The game really got me to feel like a quiet old
    trolley driver going through the same scenery I'd seen for decades. I actually
    think I identified with the PC in this game more than any other in the
    competition. That was part of what made the conclusion so confusing; I felt
    like I knew the character (at least a little), and couldn't figure out why on
    earth he would want to crash his trolley or destroy the building.

    There were a number of minor problems- a few grammar errors, an awkward
    phrasing or two, a couple of bad words (which dropped my score for the game by
    a point), and a couple of very mild "guess-the-verb" and "guess-the-noun"
    problems. But the only major problem I saw was the lack of motivation for the
    PC, and all of these problems should be fairly easy to fix. In spite of needing
    some polish and a few bug fixes, Off the Trolley is a well done game.

    TADS 2 game file

    Plain text solution

    OMNIQuest
    From: Michael Martin <mcmartin SP@G gmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #45 -- July 17, 2006

    TITLE: OMNIQuest
    AUTHOR: Chris Barden and Chris Ethridge
    EMAIL: Unknown
    DATE: March 26, 2006
    PARSER: Inform 6
    SUPPORTS: Z-Code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/omniquest.z5
    VERSION: Release 2

    This is a port of a 1988 game written in Commodore BASIC, and it shows most of
    the characteristics of the old school as a result: no real intro, puzzles that
    need to be solved because they're there, and a sizable, if inconsistent and
    sparsely implemented map.  This was also a reimplementation, not a direct port,
    so the parser is full Inform standard.  As such, it really needs to be evaluated
    at two levels at once; as an old game, and as an Inform game.

    As a game, taken on its own terms, it's not that bad.  The map is well-designed,
    though there's some illogic (most notably a thoroughly modern intrusion into a
    supposedly ancient cave in an abandoned ruin). Its cruelty rating is "Nasty",
    and is actually the first game I've seen that operated at that level instead of
    one of the extremes. Despite this, I actually only ran into a single situation
    where I wound up actually locking myself out of victory without being able to
    UNDO my way out of mistakes.  Not only is it obvious you've done something
    irrevocable in OMNIQuest, it's also generally obvious that it was a mistake.

    One puzzle that I saw has an alternate solution.  However, I wouldn't have
    worked the solution out had I not hit the source code (or looked at the object
    tree, given that debugging verbs were not disabled in the binary release).

    As an Inform port, it's sort of interesting in that it is the most deeply
    implemented sparse game I've seen.  That is to say, almost nothing is actually
    interactive, and the descriptions that actually are implemented are perfunctory
    at best.  Nevertheless, every first-level noun is implemented.  It's just that
    it's implemented as "You see nothing special about the [noun]."  Flipping
    through the source code, I found that each of these props was given its own
    object, as well, so some effort put into descriptions would put this at the
    complexity and depth one would usually expect of a competent comp-sized puzzle
    game.

    There's also a lot of excitement and circle-of-personal-friends in-jokes in it
    which I am guessing were ported directly from the 1988 CBM BASIC version.  These
    feel a bit jarring when compared to the rest of the IF-Archive, and would
    probably do well with being removed.

    In summary: I rolled my eyes a few times while I was playing it, but I did play
    it through and enjoyed it.  If you can deal with the excesses and the omissions
    of late-80s hobby games, this is worth playing.  A hypothetical Release 3 that
    removes the excited-high-schooler bits and actually expands the scenery to
    include descriptions (and possibly some additional interactions) would be
    recommendable with no reservations whatsoever.

    Zcode (.z5) game file

    Inform 6 source code

    On The Farm
    From: Duncan Stevens <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #19 -- January 14, 2000

    TITLE: On the Farm
    AUTHOR: Lenny Pitts
    E-MAIL: ten365bye SP@G yahoo.com
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/tads/otf/otf.gam
    VERSION: Release 1 (I think)

    Lenny Pitts's On the Farm isn't the most memorable or innovative entry
    in the '99 competition, but it's worth checking out anyway: it features
    two of the best-developed NPCs in recent memory, and the premise,
    helping those NPCs to get along, is based on a relationship rather than
    a more tangible objective, a highly unusual notion for IF. While the
    rest of the game is too uneven to live up to the premise, it's still a
    likable little game.

    The aforementioned NPCs are your grandparents, and you (you're a small
    child) have been sent off to stay with them for a few days, and you find
    them in the middle of an argument--and your objective becomes smoothing
    things over. Now, admittedly, the way you end up going about this is a
    little clumsy; what might have been a complex psychological puzzle ends
    up more like a locked door that's opened with a certain key. In other
    words, what appears to be a rather subtle objective eventually becomes
    less subtle when the game turns out to be a series of object-based
    puzzles that lead to one final object, not unlike IF that takes no
    notice of relationships at all. Still, On the Farm deserves some credit
    for the attempt, even if the result is only moderately successful.

    It should also be stressed that there's more to the game than the
    obvious goal--there are some incidental facts that flesh out the story
    but don't help you get to the end. This approach--separating the
    backstory from the puzzles that lead to the end of the game--worked well
    for me (much better than making the puzzles turn on some fact you
    discover somewhere, which often feels rather artificial), but it also
    raised a problem, namely that gathering the facts was much more
    interesting than solving the puzzles. That is, the various details you
    pick up, and ask your grandparents about, bring the story to life,
    whereas the other puzzles you solve just feel like puzzles. Of course,
    if On the Farm had consisted only of information-gathering, it probably
    would have felt distancing, uninvolving; the player needs some sort of
    objective. But here the objective was so disconnected from the
    information-gathering that the two parts to the game felt rather
    unrelated, and the one was markedly more interesting than the other.

    Part of the reason the backstory and its development is interesting is
    that the facts you learn help flesh out the NPCs, your grandparents.
    These are not at all sentimentalized figures--they both come across as
    stubborn, cantankerous, and thoroughly set in their ways--but they also
    feel like real grandparents; they're presented warts and all. Your
    grandfather spits tobacco juice and leaves his dentures lying around,
    and your grandmother snipes at him behind his back. They both respond to
    a variety of ASK/TELL prompts, they react to several other cues, and
    they have responses for most things they should respond to--which is all
    that can be expected of good NPCs, really. The realism is not
    complete--they don't comment on your picking up everything that isn't
    nailed down, for instance--but it's still a good effort.

    The implementation of On the Farm is a bit clumsy in a few respects,
    however. For one thing, it is not initially apparent that the backstory
    is not useful for the main objective of the game, meaning that there are
    a few puzzles that ultimately end up being red herrings, somewhat
    confusingly so. One part of a puzzle involving a rope is just flat-out
    silly, and another relies on your grandparents being rather stupid. The
    game also can't seem to decide whether it's keeping score--"score"
    elicits "There is no score in this game," but you'll be told your score
    anyway (it'll always be 0, as far as I can tell) if you die along the
    way. There's a cumbersome hint system (each "topic" has only one hint)
    that provides only the vaguest of nudges for one rather nonintuitive
    puzzle (though there's also a walkthrough provided), and one key feature
    of the landscape is rather misleadingly described, so that it's possible
    to get the wrong idea about what to do with it. (I.e., it initially
    seems that you need to repair it, but 'tain't so.) More generally, the
    whole thing initially feels a little directionless, and it takes a good
    deal of wandering around before you have any idea about what to do.

    The setting is likewise a mixed bag. The farm is supposed to be
    abandoned, nonworking, and there are plenty of nicely done stray details
    that convey decay and neglect, such as a barn door hanging by a hinge, a
    rusted-out tractor with a dead battery, a groundhog-eaten garden, and a
    mildewed haystack. In that respect, it's a vivid setting--it's a
    specific rather than a generic farm. There are also lots of unexplained
    details, however (notably a huge ball of twine and a metal hook whose
    presence and function remain mysterious), and the writing is uneven at
    best--punctuation errors and unfortunate phrasings. For example, a sign
    says "Ventilation fan must be running to safely enter pit," making the
    alert reader wonder what will happen to the fan if it enters the pit
    while not running. More generally, some pieces of the backstory come
    across well, but some do not--how have your grandparents been supporting
    themselves on this nonworking farm?--and it feels like there could have
    been much more to the story than there is had the game suggested that
    your objectives include helping the farm start working again. The
    introduction, moreover, suggests that the game will be telling you what
    you think or feel--it registers that you find the prospect of hanging
    around the farm terribly boring--but nothing else in the game mentions
    what you think about anything.

    Nevertheless, there's a lot of charm in On the Farm--it's not the
    character study it initially appears to be, but it's an interesting
    effort nonetheless, particularly for the vividness of the NPCs and the
    farm setting. It's not the best game of this year's competition, but I
    did give it a 6.

    Directory with TADS .gam file and associated files

    Once and Future
    From: Adam Thornton <adam SP@G princeton.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #16 -- November 28, 1998

    NAME: Once And Future
    AUTHOR: G. Kevin Wilson
    E-MAIL: whizzard SP@G pobox.com
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: TADS
    SUPPORTS: all TADS ports
    AVAILABILITY: Commercial, published by Cascade Mountain Publishing
            (sold by mail order only)
    URL: http://www.cascadepublishing.com
         [Note: As of 4/1/01, OAF was made available as freeware on the IF
          Archive. --Paul]
    VERSION: 1.0 (Reviews based on the final BETA version from July 1998)

    It's here.

    The most-eagerly awaited IF event of the millenium, I think it's fair
    to say, has finally arrived.

    That event, of course, is the advent of Gerry Kevin Wilson's epic
    tale: Once and Future.

    By now, everyone knows the outline of the plot, right?  Right?  Well,
    you're Frank Leandro, U.S. soldier in Vietnam.  And you jump on a
    grenade to save your buddies.  But instead of finding yourself dead,
    you find yourself on the isle of Avalon, after a little lecture from
    King Arthur about using the grail to resurrect yourself and "keep
    something very bad from happening in the real world."

    And then there you are in Avalon.  And there's quite a lot to do
    before you even can begin to get on with your quest, since you first
    have to figure out where Merlin might be, and then get yourself over
    to Faerie somehow.  There's the Lady of the Lake, and a little
    demon-possessed girl-oracle, and a mermaid with a siren song, and
    birds and snakes (no aeroplanes) and moles and mice.  Not to mention
    figuring out where the rest of the Arthurian legends come into this
    and dealing with the demons of your own past.

    And then you start piecing together what it is you're supposed to do.
    Not that it ultimately comes as much of a surprise.  If you had to
    pick the turning point where America Went Wrong This Century, I'd be
    amazed if GKW's choice was not among your top three.  And unlike
    Jigsaw, where you have to protect the past at all costs (and might not
    the world have been a better place in the absence of the First World
    War?), here you're given an opportunity to put things right.

    There are all the usual suspects: Merlin, Galahad, Lancelot, Mordred,
    the Faery Queen.  We have the second appearance in a game this year of
    True Thomas, too.  And Arthur is not the only King to be found in the
    game.  All of these--except the last, darkly alluded to but not
    specified (find him yourself!)--are characters you'd expect to find in
    a game about Camelot and the Arthurian myth-cycle.  And, as you'd
    expect, they act like you think they ought to.  Further, there's a lot
    of really terrific interaction *between* the NPCs.  This is harder
    than it looks, and I think the reason GKW did it at all is that he'd
    coded the first bits of it before he ever heard the term
    "combinatorial explosion."  The animosity between Galahad and Merlin
    is well portrayed and often funny; there are apparently about 600
    separately coded NPC responses.

    But it's not *those* NPCs at all that make the impression.  It's the
    ones that Kevin has made up for his story that really grab my
    attention.  I have a huge crush on Snookums, the brain-damaged mole
    saved by Jesus.  She's a magnificent NPC.  She's also a tool for
    solving puzzles, but she comes across as, well, lovable.  The Vietnam
    buddies that you have to "save" in various ways, too, are well-done.
    There's a nice subtle "A Christmas Carol" riff hiding in there
    somewhere, too.  The demon you encounter along the way is
    well-executed: an updated Screwtape, who sounds like a junior partner
    straight out of a New Jersey law firm rather than a don from the musty
    libraries of Oxbridge.

    The NPCs have the most varied topic lists and behaviors I have seen in
    any game.  The only one who comes close to their knowledge is Bob in
    She's Got A Thing For A Spring, and he doesn't have to follow the
    player around or interact with other NPCs.

    However, maybe the best parts of the games aren't the wholly original
    ones.  GKW has taken some very old thematic archetypes and rewoven
    them into new cloth.  The Hunter is not new, exactly, and neither is
    his Hound; but both of them appear as forceful and terrifying
    characters.  Particularly, the scene at the Crossroad Of Dreams where
    you're fleeing the Hound is magnificent.  Kevin knows what he's doing
    with the old stories, and for the most part wields them with a
    practiced hand and delicate touch.

    The game as a whole is technically very competent.  A few unsquashed
    bugs remain: just tonight I tried a new syntax for filling the buckets
    in the old lady's house, and got a TADS runtime error (fortunately not
    fatal), but the prose is well-crafted and free of typos and
    grammatical errors.  This is doubtless due in large part to the game's
    extensive beta-testing.  The prose is uneven, and I, with the
    betatester's privileged eye, can tell you why: Kevin is a much better
    writer now than he was in 1993.  Those parts of the game's
    descriptions that come from the early days are not nearly as
    well-polished or paced as the more recent pieces of prose.

    As I mentioned, I've been a betatester for OaF.  I've been a
    betatester for a very long time now: I first saw OaF source code in
    early 1994 when I visited Kevin at Berkeley; I'd been testing it for
    some months prior to that.  I therefore cannot review this game in any
    sort of an objective sense.  I have been playing it for so long that
    it has become a fixture in my life.  I can no longer tell you which
    puzzles are fair and which aren't.

    What I can do is to provide a little historical perspective on the
    game.  In short, the question everyone is going to be asking is "was
    it worth the wait?"  In short the answer is "yes" but with a few
    reservations.  And it is those reservations and what they tell us
    about where IF has gone since GKW began OaF so long ago that make the
    story interesting.

    OaF was begun in, I think, the summer or fall of 1993.  Possibly
    somewhat earlier.  The earliest cuts might even have been in TADS 1.x,
    and thus may have predated the 2.0 Great Change.  I know Challenge of
    the Czar, the long-awaited (much longer than OaF, by now--but it's no
    longer under active development) game from Sean Molley was begun in
    TADS 1.2.  But I digress.

    In any event, TADS was the only development system for serious IF.  If
    anyone used Inform besides Graham (if Inform even existed) we didn't
    know about it.  We were at what we can now recognize as the end of the
    Dark Ages: that long period between the death of Infocom and the
    Renaissance we currently enjoy.  AGT is what had been used universally
    up until the at-that-point quite recent development of TADS; the best
    AGT games, as we're all aware, fall far short in terms of parser
    sophistication of even mediocre Infocom (despite what the
    alt.games.xtrek crowd seems to think).

    Maybe it's better to think of late 1993 as the High Middle Ages: the
    first couple Unkuulian games had come out, demonstrating that
    entertaining and relatively sophisticated adventures were being
    produced.  The dusty tomb of IF had been found, and a few brave souls
    were sweeping away the cobwebs.  IF meant "text adventure" meant
    "puzzle game."

    The Horror of Rylvania had just been released, and was one of the
    first games with much of a moral edge to it.  It introduced the
    player-as-monster theme, and had opened up some of the issues OaF was
    to confront.  And, unfortunately, no one ever played it, because it
    cost money.  And let us not forget, this was long before the release
    of The Legend Lives, which was the first piece of post-crash IF to
    deal with religious issues head-on.  (Not that the mid-80s commercial
    treatments were particularly deep and sophisticated).  Even such an
    elementary concept as "mazes suck" had not been finalized (Rylvania,
    for one, had a gratuitous and annoying maze in it).

    So, OaF, in tackling heavy-duty moral and ethical issues, was really
    at the cutting edge of the avant-garde in a field defined by the
    puzzle game; here was a concept that put an intricate plot under its
    puzzles; the NPC interaction was far more extensive than anything
    hitherto seen.  Its conceptual scope was humongous; far bigger in
    terms of locations than anything else since, probably, Time Zone.

    Let's look at where we are now.  The big hits of the year have been
    Spider and Web, the first game I know of to rely on the Unreliable
    Narrator as the central feature of the game, Losing Your Grip, a game
    that happens almost entirely inside the protagonist's own
    hallucinations and has very little to it besides psychological
    allegory, and Anchorhead, a Lovecraftian puzzle-solving romp that also
    manages to be downright scary.  Additionally, there has been Firebird,
    which, like OaF, leaps right into its available pool of myth (although
    Firebird manages to be a much gentler adventure, perfect for
    introductory IF), albeit Russian rather than Arthurian.

    And Big Games?  We've seen plenty: Jigsaw comes to mind, although it's
    not actually all that many locations.  Spiritwrak is an enormous game.
    So is Anchorhead.  Not to mention UU0, which is an immense sprawling
    collection of locations.  OaF is big, maybe even huge, but it feels
    more constrained than, say Spiritwrak.  I have not yet drawn up a map
    for it, but I intend to, to see how big it actually is.

    Atmosphere?  Does anyone else remember how radical Rylvania was in
    that it stuck to its gothic-horror guns and did not yield to the then
    near-total temptation to throw cutesy and anachronistic stuff into the
    game?  The random bits of amusing anachronism have a long history in
    adventure games, of course, dating all the way back to Colossal Cave,
    but found in most Infocom games as well.  OaF has a few goofy moments,
    but on the whole the atmosphere within each scene is kept remarkably
    consistent (the Isle of Avalon, having been written first, is the
    least so).  Since the setting and atmosphere change so much between
    the three major set-pieces of the game (Avalon, Faery, and
    Stonehenge), it's really a rather impressive feat.

    And what's happened in the world of IF?  The competitions have grown
    each year since their inception in 1995.  And--thanks largely to
    Kevin--Activision has woken up.  GKW *programmed* the first official
    GUE text adventure released in a decade, for goodness' sake!  Laird
    Malamed honestly wants our opinions on games and what *we* feel
    Activision should do.  Michael Berlyn has started a company to
    publish, among other things, IF (including, of course, OaF itself).
    We're routinely turning out games far more technically sophisticated
    than anything Infocom ever did (for example, the branching tree
    conversation system implemented in the TextFire hoax); granted,
    nothing yet has quite come up to the level of _Trinity_, but it's not
    for lack of technical skill.

    IF is no longer dead.  In fact, it's alive and kicking.  It's never
    again going to be living in that fancy mansion on the hill in
    Cambridge like it was in 1986, but it's out of the gutter, it's
    showered off the barf and put on a clean suit, and is once again
    mentionable in polite company.  And much of that is due to GKW's
    proselytizing.

    And so, what about OaF?  Had it been released in 1994, it would have
    been an absolutely astounding _tour de force_.  It still is an
    excellent game, and one that makes the player think.  But it's no
    longer all that avant-garde.  We've seen games about difficult moral
    and ethical choices; we've seen games about psychological
    introspection; we've seen games that self-consciously exploited mythic
    archetypes for dramatic effect.  We've worried about the
    specified-protagonist versus generic-adventure-game-indeterminate-POV.
    Heck, we've even seen an ironic deconstruction of the nebulous
    adventurer in Zork: Grand Inquisitor.

    After all of these games, parts of OaF seem strangely dated.  There
    are puzzles that are simply too much tedious monkey-manipulation: the
    Crown of Earth and the flaming braziers come to mind.  There,
    thankfully, are no mazes (there is one place that looks like a maze,
    but isn't).  However, some of the puzzles seem to exist for the sake
    of having puzzles: fundamentally, the whole underground scene with
    Snookums exists to get the necklace; now, there's nothing wrong with
    that, exactly, but Snookums is a wonderful character, and I wish there
    had been some way to meet her such that it didn't feel like she was a
    tool of the problem-solving process; I think removing the gratuitous
    plank puzzle would have helped a lot here.  Mordred, too, feels less
    like a character than like an obstacle; a door with a multi-part key,
    as it were.

    In short, OaF suffers from having been conceived at a time when it was
    assumed that the puzzles were the point of the game.  A game that
    manages to strike a slightly better balance in this department is
    Stephen Granade's recent Losing Your Grip, which, while having some
    puzzles that seem like random hoops for the player to jump through,
    achieves better integration of plot and puzzle.  However, OaF's
    puzzles generally seem to require less authorial mind-reading than
    Losing Your Grip.

    This is not to say that OaF's puzzles are all like this.  The final
    showdown with the Hunter is handled with remarkable grace and skill,
    and is integrated absolutely seamlessly into the narrative.  The
    sequences involving saving the Vietnam buddies are also smooth and
    thematically appropriate.

    There are a dizzying array of times and places presented; most are
    handled with a great deal of skill.  There is the Isle of Avalon, the
    Land Beyond the Faery Ring, the Crossroads of Dreams, a brief future
    sequence, a couple different snippets of Vietnam, a simulation of
    Stonehenge so detailed I still haven't completely figured out the
    geography, and a well-researched final sequence.  In short, there's an
    awful lot of game here, and not something one will get tired of
    quickly.

    Overall, it's an immersive game.  I must admit that the final
    sequence--and the love interest--left me scratching my head and
    wondering what I'd missed.  I found the clues that lead up to it, but
    I remain emotionally unconvinced; Kevin could, I think, have thrown in
    a bit more background for that.  That's the biggest hole in the game.
    I buy the central quest, and the subquests along the way are
    convincing, often riveting.  The treatment of the ways in which Frank
    has to go back and "save" his three Vietnam buddies that he saves from
    death-by-grenade in the opening sequence is a really interesting look
    at the nature of responsibility, wrapped up in some well-executed
    puzzles.

    As might be expected, the themes of forgiveness and forgetfulness run
    throughout the work.  One of the best time-travel sequences I've yet
    seen--not as difficult or as satisfying as the time-loop in Sorcerer,
    but really amazing for what it does to your perception of Frank's
    character when played through by two different viewpoints--is built
    into the game.  In fact, the puzzles associated with this little
    time-loop are not hard, but they are stunningly effective in drawing a
    picture of Frank Leandro and what his responsibilities are doing to
    him, as well as what Frank looks like to the outside world while he's
    doing this.

    This game makes you think a lot about the relationship between memory
    and moral culpability, and manages to do so without being
    heavy-handed.  The theology is slightly worrying and a bit simplistic
    for my tastes, but effective within the game's context, although given
    the rest of the game's high-fantastic-mythic-heroic bent the
    Screwtapish demon seems oddly out of place.

    All in all, it's a magnificent, enormous piece of work.  Is it worth
    your $25?  Absolutely.  Is it the apocalyptic culmination of the IF
    genre we've all been waiting for as a sign that the millenium
    approacheth?  No, probably not.  Is it a damn fine story?  Yes.  One
    caveat: stick with it.  Some of the text describing the Isle of Avalon
    is pretty clunky; it's four years old and the author's inexperience at
    that point shows.  It gets much, much better.

    Kevin should be proud.  He has written a damn fine game, and brought
    to a close a story that extends over half a decade.  Without his
    passion for text games, it is safe to say that much of the current
    Renaissance in IF could not have happened.  This is the project that
    was driving that passion, and I think you will find that the years of
    effort he has poured into it have paid off handsomely.

    From: David Dyte <ddyte SP@G cc.lucy.swin.edu.au>
    Review appeared in SPAG #16 -- November 28, 1998

    Frank Leandro gave his life to save his buddies. For this, he was
    given a second chance - to save them all over again. And save much
    more besides.

    In Once and Future, you are Frank Leandro, charged with a quest that
    takes you from Vietnam to mythic England to the domain of Faerie to
    any number of other places, too. No-one said Frank's quest would be
    easy, and it's not exactly easy for the player either. This game is
    spectacular, very very big, and has two or three puzzles that may just
    leave you longing for the simplicity of making a Babel fish appear in
    a hidden hedge maze location using only the verb 'TAKE'.

    For all that, it's well worth the effort. Kevin Wilson has crafted
    some remarkable prose here, with each new paragraph a delight to
    savour. We've come to expect as much, I guess- it's been a long wait
    for OaF, punctuated by such gems as Lesson of the Tortoise. But the
    game has justified the time spent. OaF provides for all sorts of
    alternative actions and solutions a lesser author may have ignored,
    has NPCs with real depth and personality, and a plot that kept me
    hanging on right to the very end.

    Players can look forward to meeting the likes of Merlin and Galahad,
    solving the already infamous Mountain King puzzle, seeing Stonehenge
    in a whole new light, playing a friendly game of bones, being sent on
    quests within quests by multiple monarchs, and doing some very strange
    things I'd better not spoil.

    At $29.95 from Cascade Mountain, I urge fans of Interactive Fiction to
    leap at the chance and buy this historic game- the first commercially
    available text IF in some years, and one of the finest it's been my
    pleasure to play.

    From: Gunther Schmidl <sothoth SP@G usa.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #16 -- November 28, 1998

    After years and years of waiting, it's finally here: Once and
    Future. And what can I say but that it has been worth the wait?  The
    game opens in a small tent in Vietnam, when you as Frank Leandro, a
    tiny puppet in this immense war, play poker with your friends. But all
    is soon to change when a hand grenade interrupts your game, and you
    give your life for your comrades...

    Then, the story really starts. After receiving the grail, you are
    stranded in the gigantic land of Avalon with a mission to save the
    future. The map is really massive, but thanks to the easy layout, I
    had no problems of orientation after going everywhere once.

    Primarily, your task is to find the famous holy artifacts of Arthurian
    legend, but that won't be so easy: it'll be very long before you can
    have all of them. During that time, you'll be transformed into a mouse
    and interact with the most instantly likable NPC since Floyd, a mole
    named Snookums. She is so unbelievably cute it makes you forget she
    isn't "real," and I was really sorry I had to leave so soon.

    You will also be visiting Faerieland, the part of the game that has
    the very best of the writing. When underways, you are suddenly
    snatched away by the Hunter, a mysterious being that is after your
    soul, and whom you have to get away from in dream sequences. And those
    sequences were the ones that utterly gripped me and didn't let me stop
    playing for hours at an end. They are so amazingly well-written and
    stirring they constantly reminded me of "classic" I-F moments like the
    end of "Losing your Grip" and the unforgotten Floyd Death Scene - only
    they took longer. Also, all of the puzzles in this scene fit in so
    seamlessly with the story it seems totally clear what to do at every
    point. I have since replayed them countless times (and not only
    because of beta-testing :-).

    When you finally arrive in Faerieland, you are again presented with a
    gigantic landscape to explore; don't be afraid, though, most of it is
    just scenery to show you the wonders of an alien world (succeeding
    well). Though not very many locations have a use in either Avalon or
    Faerieland, you're never bored because there is always something to
    look at.  Faerieland is where the main puzzles are, and it also is
    where the hardest puzzles are. A particular offender is the Mountain
    King puzzle, which I am still groaning over. But I have to admit it
    *is* the only puzzle of its size, and it's not that hard when you
    know the solution ;-)

    You also get to meet interesting characters, like the Straw Man (the
    writing there is absolutely great, as are the morals behind the story
    - you'll know when you get there), the mischievous elvin queen, and
    lots of other more or less helpful inhabitants of the land.

    However, as every game has its down sides, so has OaF. But I am only
    nitpicking - there is hardly anything I didn't like (except for that
    Mountain King puzzle - but I think Whizzard is going to lynch me if I
    mention it ONCE more). I found some of Merlin's remarks to be a little
    too "modern" - I wouldn't expect "cool" sentences and the like from an
    age-old wizard - but maybe that's just me.

    The endgame is gripping, and highly replayable - I found three
    different endings at first, then replayed to get the optimum
    ending. It is *very* rewarding, to say the least. There are also dark
    endings, which I liked even better, but that *is* just my twisted
    soul.

    The best rank you can reach is "Knight of the Round Table", but you'll
    have to do a lot of optional stuff to reach it. Note that most of that
    optional stuff came to me just because I thought it would be
    appropriate at that moment - and I was amazed that the game (or
    rather, it's author) had expected that. Now *I* felt like the puppet
    on the string of a master storyteller :-)

    Note that the transcript of the whole game is 128 print pages in Times
    New Roman, font size 10. Wow. Hats off to Whizzard! All hail the King!
    :-)

    From: Leon Lin
    Review appeared in SPAG #16 -- November 28, 1998

    Prose

    The prose is well written, and very atmospheric. Most of the game
    takes place in a natural setting of some sort, either real or
    fantastic, and the descriptions of the various forests, caves, and
    such are beautifully done.

    The dialogue was quite good, if somewhat melodramatic at times (like
    when Merlin cries out to God). (See section on NPCs for more.)

    Difficulty

    OaF appears to be of average difficulty. Most puzzles are easily
    solvable with a careful reading of the text and some common sense. As
    far as I could tell, you can't put the game into an unsolvable state,
    unless you're going to die very soon, in which case you might as well
    restore.

    The game does go to some lengths to prevent you from straying too far
    off the mark.  For example, in the endgame, the game prevents you from
    wandering all over town by reminding you where the crucial event is
    supposed to take place. This keeps the player from getting stuck much
    of the time (as well as lets the author off the hook from putting in
    any more locations than there already are!)

    It is possible to die in OaF, but the deaths are for the most part
    avoidable with some foresight. (Of course, there's that one trick near
    the end, but thoughtful players will see it coming.)

    Technical

    Coding: There were a few bugs in the version I played, but they were
    minor and overall the game was pretty clean. The author covers a lot
    of the possible actions by the player, though many of the actions are
    disallowed on the grounds that the hero, Frank, wouldn't do them.

    One of the most impressive sequences in the game is the final fight,
    in which many different things can happen depending on what equipment
    you've got on. I replayed this sequence many times trying different
    things. In general, the game encourages experimentation like this,
    even if it gets you killed.

    Some of the other impressive technical coding feats in OaF are the
    transformation of yourself into a mouse, the diamond puzzle, and the
    interaction between Merlin, Lancelot, and Galahad.

    There is also a particularly fun Easter egg involving the magic sword,
    though I have no idea how you'd figure it out without being told.

    Writing: I didn't catch any grammar or spelling mistakes. Pretty
    solid.

    Plot

    Though it's easy to boil the whole plot down into one sentence --
    "Soldier goes on quest to prevent a disastrous event" -- a lot happens
    between the surprising and shocking beginning to the final
    confrontation. I didn't catch everything the first time through, and
    there's some symbolism and foreshadowing that doesn't become apparent
    until the end. (The relation between you and some of the characters in
    the game don't become apparent until the final scene of the game.)

    The plot is somewhat non-linear, with certain major sections of the
    game blocked off until certain puzzles are solved. The endgame is very
    linear, though that's appropriate considering the time-dependent
    situation you find yourself in at the end.  Other than the hectic end,
    the game's pace is easy-going, even in a few places you might expect a
    greater sense of urgency (like escaping from the demon's chamber).

    NPCs

    The NPCs are well done, although most of them have simple purposes and
    actions.  Where they mainly shine is in dialogue, both speaking with
    you and other NPCs. Merlin is easily the best of the lot, responding
    to many actions and queries by the player as well as interacting with
    Lancelot and Galahad. He's full of wit and cynicism, and does many
    humorous things, like getting chased up a tree by a unicorn and
    breaking the thunderbolt, which make him seem more human and
    falliable. His only real fault (and perhaps this is nit-picking) is
    that some of the technobabble he spouts (like when he opens the time
    portal) doesn't quite sound right.

    The two knights are also well done, with definite personality. They
    don't quite act as expected, with Lancelot acting cowardly in a
    certain context and Galahad acting snooty and uprighteous, but that
    adds depth to their characters.

    The only NPC I felt a little disappointed with was Nina, who popped up
    once near the start of the game (when you get Excalibur) and suddenly
    becomes all-important during the final confrontation.

    Puzzles

    The puzzles appeared to be divided into two groups: puzzles that
    advanced the plot and puzzles that were obstacles to advancing the
    plot. To wit: the player, in solving most of the puzzles, advances the
    story and learns more about the game's world. Such puzzles include
    saving Rob from prison and helping to kill the dragon. While solving
    these puzzles I didn't feel like I was completing a crossword so much
    as I was participating in the story.

    Some of the other puzzles are "7th Guest" style puzzles designed to
    stymie the player and themselves don't add much to the story. The
    diamond and the Mountain King puzzles are examples. They were
    challenging and intellectually stimulating, but I got the feeling that
    most any other kind of puzzle (like a sliding tile puzzle, or a game
    of Minesweeper, and so forth) could have been substituted in their
    place.

    Overall, I felt the game's emphasis was more on the story than the
    puzzles, but the puzzles were important enough to keep the player
    involved. Games which emphasize puzzles tend to have flimsy plots
    wrapped around them, but games which emphasize story over puzzles play
    like movies in which the gamer has to press buttons in order to
    advance. I think OaF strikes a good balance.

    Overall

    OaF isn't a game you swallow all in one go. It's complex and long. The
    sheer amount of text may be intimidating to some, and the plot a bit
    confusing at first, but there's a fascinating story which is worth
    replaying the game to read.

    From: M. Sean Molley <mollems SP@G mindspring.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #16 -- November 28, 1998

    DISCLAIMER: I have been a beta tester for Once and Future for the last
    several years, and have watched it grow and evolve through many
    versions.  Those who feel that I am therefore too biased to
    objectively review it should take note of this fact.

    TOTAL SCORE: 8.0 (Note: I don't believe in score inflation -- 8.6 is my
                      highest score ever)
    ATMOSPHERE:  1.7 (Richly detailed, a huge game world, beautiful
                      descriptions)
    GAMEPLAY:    1.0 (Solid, although several puzzles are non-intuitive
                      or annoying)
    WRITING:     1.9 (Excellent attention to detail, vivid and powerful prose)
    PLOT:        1.6 (The "main idea" is brilliant and the subplots are rich)
    WILDCARD:    1.8 (A labor of love, a compelling story, and a truly epic
                      game)
    CHARACTERS:  2.0 (The NPC's are the best part of the entire game)
    PUZZLES:     1.0 (With one or two notable exceptions, the puzzles are only
                      average)

    When writing about Once and Future, one of the most notorious titles
    in the history of modern interactive fiction, I hardly know where to
    begin.  This is the game that has tantalized denizens of the Usenet
    newsgroups devoted to IF for years.  Whizzard (Gerry Kevin Wilson, the
    game's author) has become one of the best-known and most prolific
    contributors to the IF scene over the last five years.  He's
    contributed numerous short games and stories, founded SPAG and the
    Interactive Fiction Competition, and offered dozens of articles on
    game design and other issues over the years.  Running in the
    background of all these contributions has been a consistent promise:
    "just wait until Avalon comes out!"

    Well, OaF is finally coming out, contrary to the expectations of many
    who have seen lesser titles fall by the wayside as their creators
    moved on to bigger, better, and more lucrative things.  Just to save
    you the suspense of wading through the rest of this review, I'll go
    ahead and say it now: It's been a long wait, but the wait has been
    justified.  OaF is an excellent game.  Kevin has found a publisher,
    Cascade Mountain (founded by longtime IF stalwart Michael Berlyn,
    himself a contributor to many great Infocom titles), and OaF will be
    available by the time you read this.  This review was written based on
    the final beta version, which I am assured is almost entirely
    identical to the final commercial version with the exception of a few
    bug fixes and corrections to the text.

    For those who haven't been following the game over the years, I'll
    briefly describe the scenario.  You portray Frank Leandro, a private
    in the Vietnam War.  Near the beginning of the game, Frank sacrifices
    his life to save the lives of his best friends, thus launching himself
    into an adventure that will span time and space, cross the boundary
    between the "real" world and the world of Faerie, and have a profound
    effect upon the past and future of all humanity as Frank struggles to
    right ancient wrongs along his way to rewriting history and redeeming
    his own soul.  If that sounds like a bit much to do before breakfast,
    let me warn you: OaF is both long -- it takes me about four hours to
    play from start to finish using an optimized walkthrough -- and
    incredibly deep.  You can expect to invest many hours in this one.

    All of the great figures from Arthurian legend are here: King Arthur,
    Merlin, Lancelot, Galahad, Morgan le Fay, Mordred, the Lady of the
    Lake, and many others have critical roles to play.  Each of these
    characters is richly detailed, with very real personalities that come
    out through their innumerable pages of dialogue.  The characters are
    "aware" of one another, and when you are in a room with more than one
    NPC, they have more conversations amongst themselves than they do with
    Frank.  Many of these conversations have absolutely nothing to do with
    the story, but are present only to add depth and feeling to the
    characters themselves.  Some of the exchanges between Merlin,
    Launcelot, and Galahad are truly hilarious, while others are deeply
    touching.  The amount of detail in these NPC's is nearly unprecedented
    in IF.  OaF, more than any game I've seen, is "about" its characters.
    All NPC's are also highly interactive; in addition to talking with one
    another, they will also work with (or against) Frank in a staggering
    variety of ways.  Because of the non-linear nature of the game's
    structure and the sheer number of possible combinations of NPC's and
    puzzles that can be happening at the same time, it is quite possible
    for two players to go through the game in entirely different ways.

    The isle of Avalon itself is quite detailed, with many different areas
    to explore.  The structure is mostly non-linear, with only a few
    puzzles dependent on the completion of earlier actions.  Frank must
    search out and acquire a number of legendary artifacts, including
    Excalibur and its sheath.  With Merlin as companion and guide, Frank
    will explore fantastic vistas while confronting many dangerous
    adversaries that will test his mettle.  Indeed, Avalon is the
    strongest area of the game, with every piece of the puzzle fitting
    together nicely and a series of interesting and entertaining
    challenges to be overcome.  The writing is fluid and rich -- the game
    reads like a book in many places.  Key plot points are amply described
    with powerful and evocative text that is as good as anything which has
    ever appeared in an IF game.

    Actually, when playing OaF I am most reminded of David Baggett's game
    "The Legend Lives", which also featured a number of scenes where pages
    and pages of text spilled across the screen.  My personal bias is that
    these kinds of "cut-scenes" add a lot to the story and are well worth
    the investment; other players might not find them as enjoyable.  You
    will do a tremendous amount of reading before you finish the game.
    However, Kevin's writing is good enough that I think you'll find it a
    pleasure.  In many cases the game will cause you to laugh out loud; in
    others, you'll flinch from the power of the imagery created.  The game
    does not shy away from controversial subjects or language; parents of
    young children might want to be aware that the game does contain some
    profanity and other disturbing images.  However, there is nothing that
    I would consider "gratuitous" in the sense that it isn't called for by
    the story.

    Although the Isle of Avalon is a major focus of the game's action,
    there is a second major area within the game, reached through a
    mushroom ring within Avalon itself: the land of Faerie.  Faerie
    contains its own plots -- many of them only tangentially related to
    the "main" plot of the game -- and has a huge amount of geography to
    explore.  One of the nicer aspects of the game is that Faerie and the
    Isle of Avalon, while both being large and complex areas in their own
    right, are basically not interdependent.  With only one or two
    exceptions, puzzles in one part of the game don't require items from
    the other, and the parts themselves can be completed in either order.
    Indeed, it's possible to travel back and forth between Faerie and
    Avalon, working on puzzles in both realms in basically any order you
    see fit.  The whole effect is well done and keeps the player from
    feeling constrained to a narrow path through the story.

    Faerie is very different from Avalon, and from the "real" world, just
    as you would expect.  Descriptions of objects and rooms are whimsical,
    even nonsensical, but with their own internal logic that can be
    figured out by the clever player.  Faerie contains several of the
    game's best puzzles, which are very challenging to solve but
    ultimately rewarding once they have been overcome.  The room
    descriptions are beautiful to read: Kevin is a great writer, and has
    spent considerable time and care crafting the descriptions to convey
    the sense of utter unreality that is Faerie.

    Both this area and the main Isle of Avalon are huge, with many rooms
    to explore.  One potential knock against the game, indeed, is that
    there are so many rooms that travelling from place to place sometimes
    becomes tedious.  The Fairy Queen's castle, for example, is in the
    absolute remotest corner of Faerie.  As Frank must travel there on a
    number of occasions, moving back and forth over and over again becomes
    repetitive and annoying.  Locating the Queen's castle in the center of
    Faerie, with the various regions radiating outward from it like spokes
    around a wheel, would have saved some wear and tear on Frank's poor
    feet without detracting from the game.

    Indeed, here I must raise a few important quibbles with OaF.  The plot
    and story are very well done, and the various sub-plots and twists
    within the game are excellent.  As a book, this would probably have
    been a notable work in its own right.  As a game, it suffers a bit in
    the execution.  (Hence the low mark for gameplay as opposed to the
    other areas of the score).  There are many places where the player
    simply has to wait in a location while the story unfolds; repeatedly
    typing "Z" is basically equivalent to turning the pages of a novel,
    while breaking the suspension of disbelief needed to keep the player
    locked into the game world.  In a similar fashion, the vast amount of
    traipsing about the world that is required as Frank shuttles back and
    forth becomes irritating (although Kevin's room descriptions are some
    of the best I've ever seen, they're no better the 20th time than they
    were the first).  This is not to say that the game as a whole is
    non-interactive; by and large the player is shaping the plot rather
    than watching it unfold around him.  Nevertheless, there are a few
    places where the pacing could have been tweaked a bit.

    The puzzles are also a mixed bag, ranging from the sublime to the
    unpleasant, with the majority falling on the "difficult" side of the
    challenge scale.  The game is difficult, but the puzzles are mostly
    fair.  A few of them are awkwardly done, however, and the potential
    for "guess the verb" exists in one or two places.  There is one puzzle
    in Faerie which appears to serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever,
    other than to give the player a simple blob of wax which is needed
    back in Avalon (this is also the game's only example of a connection
    between the two realms).  The puzzle involves pushing on lighted
    buttons to cause a particular pattern to appear; much like the sliding
    tiles puzzle in "Curses", it doesn't work very well in the text
    medium, and serves no useful purpose other than to annoy the player
    and slow the game down.  This puzzle could have been removed, and the
    blob of wax put someplace within Avalon itself, without hurting the
    plot in any way, and doing so would make life a lot easier for the
    player.  Hopefully this will be addressed in a future version of the
    game.  On the other hand, several of the puzzles and areas are nearly
    flawless; the "mole area" near the beginning of the game and the
    "reverse rowboat" in Faerie are very memorable indeed.

    The game's plot is impressively deep, with a number of sub-plots that
    are extremely compelling.  Frank must redeem his own soul and the
    souls of others along the way to completing his quest.  He will
    revisit Vietnam, do battle with the Master of the Hunt, save his own
    life in a "Sorcerer"-esque episode, escape from the clutches of an
    evil witch, and do battle with dragons, demons, and other assorted
    evildoers.  He will be assisted by Merlin, Sir Launcelot, and Sir
    Galahad, as well as a number of other interesting characters,
    including a clever mole and a curious cat.  In the end it is the
    player who benefits, as these "side quests" are immensely entertaining
    and serve to illustrate the richness and depth of Frank's character.
    OaF is one of the few IF games to really develop the player's
    character: Frank is very real, and his own comments are sprinkled
    liberally throughout the game.  Some players will find this
    off-putting, but I found it quite easy to empathize with Frank and get
    into the role of the main character.  He is very believable and a
    noble character.

    Once Frank has secured the magical artifacts, purified the Holy Grail,
    and obtained the assistance of the Queen of Faerie, he and Merlin will
    embark upon the true quest: preventing a terrible catastrophe in
    Earth's past which threatens the future of Earth and Faerie both.  I
    won't go into the details, since that would spoil a major part of the
    game, but suffice it to say that the quest is very appropriate to the
    overall plot of the game -- indeed, the concept is brilliant -- and
    many of the diverse threads which the player has unraveled in Avalon
    and Faerie will be tied up in the end.  (A number of other issues are
    left unresolved by the game's ending; deliberately, it turns out, from
    reading the author's notes.)  The game moves pretty quickly once Frank
    learns his final quest; you'll rush through the last few stages pretty
    quickly, as the puzzles aren't too difficult (with the exception of
    the very last puzzle, which is pretty non-intuitive and hurts the flow
    of the narrative) and the pace increases, with the final scene played
    out under a tight time limit as the story builds to the ultimate
    confrontation between Frank and the forces of evil.

    Upon completing OaF, I am left to answer the final question: does it
    live up to the hype?  The answer is, "of course not."  OaF is perhaps
    the most-anticipated game of the modern IF era, if for no other reason
    than Kevin has been building it up and promising to release it for
    years and years now.  Given that kind of buildup, there's no way the
    game would be able to be all things to all people.  And it does suffer
    from some shortcomings; Kevin is telling a truly epic story here, and
    it's hard to format such a story to fit the particular requirements of
    IF.  But the player who sticks with it and looks past the game's
    mechanical flaws will find that OaF is a highly polished jewel of a
    story, the rare game that tackles deep issues and confronts them
    head-on.  There are so many messages and allegorical themes in the
    game that it would be impossible to list them all; and I won't even
    try, because half the fun is discovering them for yourself.

    OaF is a very literary game; it is a rich and complex tapestry.  A few
    of the threads haven't been tied off quite right, but there are no
    "crash" bugs and nothing which should prevent a reasonably intelligent
    and experienced IF'fer from completing the game without needing to
    resort to a walkthrough.  In summary, I would call it a "must-read" as
    well as a "must-play."  OaF reaches for the brass ring by trying to
    combine such an epic story with a puzzle-based game mechanic; when
    compromises had to be made, they were made to preserve the story and
    at the expense of gameplay.  It is unfortunate that any compromises
    had to be made at all, but the whole is definitely greater than the
    sum of the parts.  OaF does not disappoint -- I say again, it was
    worth the wait.  I would place OaF on the same list as "The Legend
    Lives," Brian Moriarty's "Loom", and Steve Meretzky's "A Mind Forever
    Voyaging."  All of these games share a common trait: they are
    experienced, rather than played.  For me, the experience of OaF has
    been a wonderful one.  I hope that yours will be, too.

    From: Magnus Olsson <zebulon SP@G pobox.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #16 -- November 28, 1998

    At last, it's here. For years we waited eagerly for it. Some of use
    gave up hope of ever seeing it; others probably didn't even know it
    was for real, but thought it was just a metaphor for something
    unattainable; "When Avalon is released" became a synonym for "When
    pigs will fly".

    And then, suddenly, here it is. Of course, it's not called "Avalon",
    but "Once and Future", but it's here; the most anticipated IF release
    ever. Maybe pigs do fly, after all.

    So does it live up to the expectations? Yes and no: some people have
    expressed great disappointment that it didn't live up to their
    expectations, but I wasn't among them. I think it's fair to say,
    however, that "OaF" has been the subject of so much discussion and -
    to be blunt - hype (it is, after all, a commercial release), that it
    can't possibly live up to all expectations. So, in the following I'll
    try not to compare it too much with what's been said about it before
    its release.

    Before starting on the review, let me state that I was not one of the
    playtesters. I had never seen the game before the review copy
    arrived, so this review is based on fresh impressions.  I have a
    confession to make, however: I haven't finished the game yet. I ran up
    against what turned out to be a fatal bug (an NPC who was supposed to
    provide some essential information, but didn't), and decided to put
    the game aside for a while, waiting for my "real" copy to arrive (my
    review copy was a pre-release version), so I had more to look forward
    to than just the pretty packaging. This happened rather near the end -
    I've completed most of the game, but I can't comment on the way the
    plot is finally resolved.

    I mentioned a fatal bug, so let's deal with a less pleasant aspect of
    the game first, so we get that out of the way. I can't help feeling
    that "OaF" could have done with some more beta testing. Fortunately, I
    found just one killer bug, but I did run into quite a lot of parser
    problems, mainly missing vocabulary. Let me stress that (apart from
    the NPC bug) I didn't have any real problems with this - I encountered
    no guess-the-verb "puzzles", for example, just some missing synonyms -
    but still a bit irritating. There's been talk on rec.games.int-fiction
    about an upcoming patch from the publisher - let's hope it fixes these
    problems once and for all.

    OK, so it's somewhat buggy and it may not live up to everybody's
    expectations. What's it _like_? The main plot outline should be well
    known by now: you play a soldier who's killed in Vietnam, but brought
    back to life by King Arthur, and sent on a quest. But this doesn't
    really say very much about the game, does it?

    So let me start by characterizing "OaF": First and foremost, it's a
    classic adventure game in the Infocom tradition. In many aspects, it
    goes beyond - sometimes rather far beyond - Infocom's achievements,
    but it's a matter of evolutionary, not revolutionary, progress. I
    think that this is much a matter of timing: some aspects of "OaF"
    *would* have been revolutionary if it had been published according to
    the original schedule, four years ago. It's just that tremendous
    developments have taken place in the IF scene during those four years,
    and others have explored this new territory first.

    I wrote that "OaF" is first and foremost a game. This doesn't mean
    that it isn't a story, or that the story is just an excuse to string
    puzzles together, far from it. But unlike many modern works of IF
    (like, for example, this year's competition winner "Photopia"), it's
    not an interactive story that uses puzzles just as a way of forcing
    the audience to participate; it's a computer game that tells a story
    (or, rather, many stories). Puzzles are prominent, but subordinate to
    the story: with few exceptions they don't feel extraneous to the plot,
    and almost all of them don't obscure the underlying themes but serve
    to enhance them and advance the plot.

    I suppose that this means that you'll probably be disappointed if you
    don't like puzzle games, but are looking forward to a "pure"
    interactive story. But, as I wrote, the puzzles don't obscure the
    plot, and there's plenty of literary value in "OaF". "OaF" isn't "just
    a game"; it's a work of art in the form of a game.

    On the other hand, if you don't care much for the story aspects, and
    approach "OaF" as a pure game, you'll probably *not* be disappointed.
    You'll miss a lot if you ignore the story aspects, though.

    Puzzles are a prominent part of "OaF", and there are quite a lot of
    them; enough, it seems, for several medium-to-large-sized adventures -
    "OaF" is a large game. Most of the puzzles aren't too difficult;
    they're quite logical, with satisfying solutions, Infocom-style. The
    comparison to Infocom is meant as praise: in fact, I've seen few
    recent adventures with so many enjoyable puzzles. There are almost
    none of the "guess what the author was thinking" puzzles that are
    common in amateur IF. Some of the puzzles are a bit mechanical,
    perhaps, and some of them feel rather dated in a similar way that
    mazes feel dated nowadays - one of the signs that "OaF" has been under
    development for a long time and that our taste in IF has evolved
    during that time. Unfortunately, none of the puzzles are of the really
    brilliant variety, the one where the solution feels like a revelation,
    but on the other hand there are no real bottlenecks that block your
    progress totally, killing the plot in the process. On the whole, I
    think the balance between puzzles and plot is satisfying.

    I mentioned that "OaF" is a large game. In fact, it's very large. The
    funny thing is that for most of the time I was playing, it didn't feel
    very large; but several times, when I felt that I had explored
    everything and the game was stagnating, new vistas opened up, whole
    new worlds as large as the previously explored parts of the game. This
    is a rather rare experience - my experience is that most games (new or
    old - this is true for many, if far from all Infocom games as well)
    are either rather small, or partitioned into segments that are small
    games unto themselves, and quite separate from each other. On the
    other hand, "OaF" never felt so large and open-ended that I was
    overwhelmed by the task of exploration.

    "OaF" manages to strike a balance here, with just enough territory to
    explore that the game world feels large, but not like a huge
    desolation, and the device of rewarding puzzle solving with new lands
    to explore is used effectively. The map is mostly connected in a way
    that allows you to travel freely between the various segments of the
    game; there are no watertight partitions.

    Or almost none - because the story takes place on several planes at
    the same time (or, rather, different times), and at some junctures
    you're transported to different worlds to face different challenges in
    a different subplot. Which leads us on to the literary aspects of "OaF".

    Let's start with genre. "OaF" can, of course, be characterized as
    fantasy, but it's not the usual, stereotypic RPG-inspired fantasy of
    most adventure games, but mythical fantasy - Arthurian myth, of
    course. There's a lot of the fairy-tale elements present in many
    Arthurian tales - talking animals and such - but, despite this, "OaF"
    is not the kind of watered-down, trivialized Arthur-as-storybook-
    character world of "The Sword in the Stone", or Infocom's "Arthur".
    Like all true myths it addresses the big, existential questions;
    fortunately, it's not all about cute talking animals or heroic
    save-the-world quests. "OaF" is neither a children's story nor an
    action movie.

    Unfortunately, this isn't very apparent in the first part of the game
    (after the Vietnam introduction), where you have to explore the isle
    of Avalon and complete a number of sub-quests before you can begin to
    figure out what your real quest is about; this part of the game is
    actually quite conventional, almost shallow, with no strong sense of
    purpose or direction. This is a pity, because if the player is unlucky
    (the game is rather non-linear, so it's possible to see different
    sub-plots in quite different order) he or she will spend rather a lot
    of time before getting really involved in more than rather standard
    adventure-questing. There are a couple of quite touching
    stories-within-the story here (such as the one about the mole), but
    they involv you more as a spectator than as a participant.

    But things get better, plotwise. Once the player is involved in the
    main plot, he (I'll be using the male gender since I'm referring more
    to the player character, Frank Leandro, than to the actual
    player/audience controlling him) has to face not only his quest, but
    demons from his past, his present and his future - this sends him back
    to Vietnam in some very powerful sequences - as well as archetypal
    forces such as the mysterious Hunter. Finally, he'll have to deal with
    one of the pivotal moments in history; alas, I can't comment on that,
    since I haven't reached the actual endgame yet.

    The choice of pivotal moment in history seemed rather strange, almost
    silly, to me at first. Perhaps it's because I'm not American, and
    "OaF" is in a sense a very American game (though, fortunately, no
    knowledge of baseball is required). I can think of a reason for the
    odd juxtaposition of Arthur, Vietnam, and this historical event,
    though: Arthur is perhaps the most powerful of Anglo-American myths,
    and the two other elements, while historical, seem to have become
    almost archetypical in American culture. (No, Elvis is not involved).
    There is thought behind the choice of quest, even though it may seem
    unlikely when you first hear it.

    As mentioned before, the game is quite non-linear; most of the time,
    you have a choice of things to do and several puzzles to attack. This
    means that the plot can't drive events in the way it does in more
    "literary" IF; rather, the plot - and subplots - form a sort of
    substratum that motivates your actions and comes back to haunt you
    from time to time. The drawback to this is that at times there's no
    strong sense of purpose; you can spend quite a lot of time wandering
    around and solving puzzles just because they're there, just like in
    Zork. Unlike in Zork, however, there is a sense of unity; I'm not sure
    how all the threads are tied together at the end, or if they are -
    sometimes the plot structure gets a bit out of hand, it seems (I'm not
    sure that it will ever be resolved exactly what's going on between
    Frank and the Hunter, for example), but I'll have to pass on this for
    now.

    On the other hand, some of the subplots (most notably the Vietnam
    ones) are quite linear; you're a "prisoner in someone else's story",
    to quote Espen Aarseth. But these parts of the game are rather short.

    I did notice some minor problems caused by the non-linearity: some
    descriptions and plot events seem a bit suboptimal when encountered in
    the wrong order, but I didn't encounter any real killers. Of course, I
    can't help thinking that it may be possible to break the game by doing
    things in the wrong order, but I didn't actually manage to do so, and
    the author seems to have covered most possibilities.

    If you look at what the player is actually doing during most of the
    game in terms of plot, much of the time is spent on sub-quests and in
    subplots that don't seem to relate directly to the main plot. This
    can, of course, be criticized; but I think it's actually in character
    (I'm no expert on the Arthurian mythos - Arthur is not really a
    central part of my cultural heritage at all - so I may be totally off
    base here): much of the Arthurian mythos consists of stories about
    Arthur's knights being diverted from the quest for the grail by
    seemingly unrelated adventures, which turn out not to be so unrelated
    in the end. And the subplots in "OaF" all seem to touch on issues that
    either have directly to do with Frank's personal development, or with
    the underlying themes and conflicts. In this context, I'd like to
    point out that "OaF" is one of the few works of IF I've seen that deal
    with religious issues (though it doesn't really hit you across the
    face with them).

    The writing varies from competent to excellent to rather over the top
    - you can tell that "OaF" was written over a long period of time, and
    Kevin obviously matured as a writer during that time. Some parts,
    especially the room descriptions in the early parts of the game, are
    rather terse (but still expressive), Infocom-like, while others are
    more verbose and some passages are a bit on the purple side. In some
    places the author seems to be overreaching a bit, but those are the
    exceptions.

    The writing doesn't quite compare to the beautifully poetic "So Far",
    the haunting dream-like moods of "Losing your Grip", or the polished
    pefection of "Photopia", but it's quite competent.  The author gets
    his message across, usually very effectively, and there are some very
    powerful scenes; some scenes and NPC's remained in my memory for quite
    some time after I stopped playing.

    Finally, some words about NPCs. One area where "OaF" has been a bit
    hyped is the quality, number and depth of its NPCs. When it comes to
    the sheer number of NPCs, this is no exaggeration: there are lots of
    them. However, the NPCs are rather uneven.

    Some NPCs are quite sophisticated: they'll follow you around, talk to
    you, have answers for most questions and spontaneously comment on
    things you're doing. Some NPCs interact with each other, commenting
    each other's lines (typically, you do something, an NPC answers, and
    another NPC comments that). This is all very solidly implemented, but
    there's nothing really revolutionary going on; no AI techniques, no
    new conversation strategies or so on, just ordinary TADS actors. But
    so much effort has gone into providing them with a personality and
    with things to do and say that they take on a depth few IF NPCs can
    exhibit.

    On the other hand, many NPCs are much less interesting than that. One
    NPC is just a variation on the "lock and key" puzzle, and others play
    very minor parts: they do a few things, and then exit. What is worse
    is the unfortunate fact that one of the first NPCs you encounter is
    quite an important figure in the Arthurian mythos, yet he basically
    just stands around, has rather limited conversational abilities, and
    doesn't seem very lifelike at all. You don't encounter the "good" NPCs
    until quite a bit later.

    But all in all, the most memorable parts of this game are the NPC:
    Snookums, Merlin, True Thomas, The Hunter, The Demon, Frank's alter egos.

    To summarize, "Once and Future" may not be the Great American
    Interactive Novel. It may not be a revolutionary feat of innovation or
    a literary masterpiece. But it is a very enjoyable, solidly
    implemented (despite the bugs - remember that this is a one-person
    project) game, with an engaging plotline (once you get into it) and
    some very memorable characters.

    And what makes "OaF" exceptional is the sheer size of its world, and
    that's not empty space, but interrelated, interacting objects,
    locations and characters, all unified by a compelling story. $29.95
    will buy you a lot of exploration, puzzle solving, NPC interaction -
    more than enough for four or five normal-sized games - but, above all,
    immersion in a detailed world and participation in a deeply engaging
    story.

    The One That Got Away
    From: Magnus Olsson <mol SP@G df.lth.se>
    Review appeared in SPAG #7 -- October 14, 1995

      Name: The One That Got Away             Parser: TADS
      Author: anonymous                       Plot: Linear, simple
      Email:                                  Atmosphere: Superb
      Availability: F, IF Archive                    Writing: Outstanding
      Puzzles: Rather simple                  Supports: TADS ports
      Characters: Very good                   Difficulty: Below average

    Among the joys of fishing, perhaps the greatest is telling about it
    afterwards; stories not just about the fish you caught, but above all
    about the ones that got away. This game is about the grandfather of
    all the fish that ever got away - the Old One, a fish of mythical
    proportions, reputed to be centuries old, showing itself only once
    every thirty years. By some strange chance, one of its appearances
    happens to coincide with your fishing holiday. Of course you can't
    resist the challenge of succeeding where everybody else has failed,
    and bagging the Old One...

    This game tells the story of your encounter with the Old One. The
    emphasis is on the word "tells," since this game is more a piece of
    interactive literature than a traditional game. There certainly are
    puzzles, but the important thing is the story, not the puzzle solving.

    As a reading experience, "The One That Got Away" is very enjoyable
    indeed. The writing is perhaps the best I've ever seen in an adventure
    game; not as poetic or beautiful as in "The Sound Of One Hand
    Clapping," but perfect for telling this kind of story. There's rather
    a lot of it, too: the introduction alone takes up more than two screen
    pages. The author manages to create just the right setting and
    atmosphere for his (her?) story, and the only real NPC, old Bob in the
    bait shop, is nicely characterized and has a lot to tell if you ask
    him.

    This emphasis on writing doesn't mean that the gameplay aspects are
    neglected. On the contrary, the game flows nicely and the author seems
    to have thought of almost everything, providing appropriate - and
    often very funny - responses to most of the weird things an adventurer
    might try doing. The puzzle involving the actual fishing is perhaps a
    bit awkward, but implementing fishing at the level of detail it's done
    in this game is not a simple feat. To help you get an idea of what
    you're supposed to do there's a very humorous and detailed transcript
    of another fishing adventure available online. If you get totally
    stuck, the author has included a walkthrough in the distribution - not
    that it should be needed, since the game is quite simple.

    So far for the good sides of this game, and they are good indeed.
    What's not so good is what happens once you're ready for some action.
    After the monumental introduction and a lot of build-up during your
    conversations with Bob and your attempts to get the right bait, you're
    ready for a monumental struggle, but instead you're presented with quite
    an anticlimax. After finishing the game, one can't help but to get a
    feeling of "Was this all?"

    Still, despite the anticlimax, its literary quality makes this game
    a truly memorable one, one worth playing and replaying several times,
    just as one returns to a favourite novel.

    From Gareth Rees <gdr11 SP@G cl.cam.ac.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #8 -- February 5, 1996

      NAME: The One that Got Away             PARSER: TADS's usual
      AUTHOR: Leon Lin                        PLOT: Linear, very short
      EMAIL: unknown                          ATMOSPHERE: Excellent
      AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive             WRITING: Superb, funny
      PUZZLES: Not so good                    SUPPORTS: TADS ports
      CHARACTERS: Excellent                   DIFFICULTY: Easy

    My favourite entry in the competition.  The puzzles aren't up to much,
    but who cares?  The writing is superb, atmospheric, and very funny.  I
    usually find myself impatient with long sequences of text in adventure
    games, but even though "The One that Got Away" was brimful with text, I
    enjoyed it immensely.  I must have spent ten times as long thinking of
    things to say to Bob as I did trying to catch any fish.  I suppose I
    have a soft spot for this kind of mock American pioneer folklore.

    I laughed out loud at some of the more purple passages, especially the
    example game sequence in the pamphlet, which is an accurate pastiche of
    the Infocom style of sample transcripts and at the same time a hilarious
    take on "Moby Dick":

        "Curse you, Doby the Mackrel, curse you!"  Pete exclaims, shaking
        his fist at the sea.  "From Hell's heart I stab at thee."

    I have a nitpick about an inconsistency in the text: if you type ""kiss
    bob", then Bob replies, "I've been lonely since the missus died," but
    according to his other speeches, he has been mourning his first love
    Nellie all his life and has never married: "I always thought Nellie
    might come back, and I've waited, just minding this store, but I guess
    it'll never be."

    However, I think it's a good sign when characters have enough background
    that I can worry about consistency like this.  No other game in the
    competition had anything like this level of backstory.

    Carl Muckenhoupt <baf SP@G tiac.net> wrote the following in the
    newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction:

        I'd put ["The One that Got Away"] the category of "could have been
        written in AGT with no appreciable decline in quality" [...] I like
        detail.  I like background objects that are fully fleshed-out.  I
        like doodads with lots of parts that can be poked at individually.
        I like characters that do more that just stand there, waiting to
        respond to your actions.  These are all things that AGT handles
        clumsily, if at all.  Neither "Toonesia" nor "The One" gave us much
        beyond Rooms containing Objects.

    I think this criticism is unfair.  The complexity of implementation of a
    game should be just as complex as required by the story and
    characterisation, and no more.  Just because it is possible to write a
    sliding-block puzzle in Inform or TADS, doesn't mean that every game
    should have some similar piece of complex machinery.  Similarly, just
    because computers are large enough to store hundreds of thousands of
    words of prose, doesn't mean that every game should have pages and pages
    of irrelevant descriptive text (which is very hard to write vividly).
    It's kinder on the player to just say "that's not important" than to
    produce a dull description that nonetheless has to be read carefully for
    clues.

    When I play "Adventure" today, I don't think, "This game would have been
    much improved if the lamp had a wick that had to be cut and adjusted
    every 100 turns, or if the nasty little dwarves had Eliza-style natural
    language parsers so that `dwarf, why do you throw knives at me' would
    produce the response `Is the fact that I throw knives at you the reason
    why you are unhappy?'".

    If a story can be told well using only objects and rooms, then why not
    tell it that way?  "The One that Got Away" was a very effective piece of
    fiction because it was concerned with people and their feelings and
    motivations, rather than mechanical puzzles.  I agree that it doesn't
    expand the boundaries of what is possible with interactive fiction, but
    other entries in the competition (notably "Undertow") demonstrated that
    it's extremely difficult to expand these boundaries without losing a lot
    of valuable qualities that "The One that Got Away" had.  To put it
    another way, a genre has boundaries to explore *because* there's a solid
    core of technically routine but artistically successful work to react
    against.

    I hope that Lin writes more interactive fiction, and that he continues
    to orient his work towards strong characters.  Other peoples' comments
    in the newsgroup suggest that he should work on the structure of the
    game -- "The One" was too easy to finish without ever having to quiz Bob
    about the history behind the game; instead, the puzzles should have been
    an inducement to explore the background -- and on the quality and number
    of the puzzles.

    TADS .gam file (updated version)

    TADS .gam file and walkthrough (competition version)

    1-2-3...
    From: Tina Sikorski <tina SP@G eniac.stanford.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #23 -- December 29, 2000

    TITLE: 1-2-3...
    AUTHOR: Chris Mudd
    E-MAIL: muddchris SP@G netscape.net
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/123/1-2-3.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Walkthrough?  Yes
    Genre: Psychological Drama

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

    *** Initial Thoughts

    Okay, I know that some people thought this was terrible, that some were
    completely turned off by the very idea, that there were definitely
    problems (yes, even I agree) with implementation, and that it may
    qualify as the most controversial entry in the comp. But damn it, I
    liked the idea, and I gave it a 6 because despite the flaws I want to
    encourage people to continue to work in this genre.

    *** Writing (C)

    Yes, there were some really bad spots in the writing. I will agree fully
    with anyone who says that. In particular, the conversational style was
    really irritating (but that's really more a technical flaw). But the
    game did do a good job on several occasions of evoking the inner mind of
    the psychopath, and that's something that I enjoyed.

    One of my favorite bits is early on:

       >l at me
       What you see disturbs you, but there is nothing -- absolutely nothing
       -- you can do about it. Something has clicked within you. Your time
       is now.

    With two short lines, the game lets you know that something very odd is
    going on, and that the person you are playing feels helpless to stop it.
    It, along with the first room description in the game, though both very
    short, give you chilling atmosphere, a hint to plot, and a bit of
    mystery and intrigue all at once. -That- is part of why I rated the game
    more highly than many other reviewers did, and why I thought it showed
    such potential.

    Alas, I will be the first to admit that some of this potential went to
    waste, but I do think the game showed promise. If only the
    conversational style had lived up to these initial descriptions, I would
    have rated it far more highly in this category at least.

    I would like to encourage the author, however, to continue developing
    and honing that skill, learning to apply it to other portions of the
    writing. I think that with some practice, some damn fine games could
    result.

    *** Plot (C+)

    Understand that this score is predicated more on what I felt the author
    was -trying- to do than on the actual execution. Had it been executed
    properly... well, I suspect had it been executed properly, fewer people
    would have been quite so down on the game. After all, movies like
    _Seven_ and _Silence of the Lambs_ and _Kiss the Girls_ are -very-
    popular. More than that, I would have probably been in love with the
    game; serial killer stories, particularly ones that attempt to delve
    into the mind of the killer, fascinate me.

    The two biggest plot-related flaws were both predicated on timing: the
    actual flow of the game (chock full of nose-leading) and the
    conversational style, the latter of which I will expand on under NPCs.

    No doubt about it, the execution of the pieces of the story left
    something to be desired. While I truly enjoyed the perspective shifts,
    the method of revealing the storyline was haphazard, seemed unconnected
    to the player actions to a great degree, and was, in a word, 'choppy'. I
    found myself unable to determine 'what to do next' until I realized that
    basically the answer was 'talk to people and wait for scene changes'.

    This works for some games, and it probably even could have worked for
    this one, but the attempt to drive the player this way really -did- feel
    like an attempt to 'drive' the player. I would hesitate to do more than
    speculate, but I wonder if perhaps the author has written static fiction
    and was trying to convert it to an IF format; it has that feel to it.

    In summary: Good idea that I'd like to see better developed.

    *** Puzzles (D+)

    Really, there weren't any to speak of, except for conversational choice
    puzzles. I found to be 'take woman' fairly obvious given the inner
    monologue before then, and of course, every veteran IF player knows to
    always check the fridge. That's about it...

    *** NPCs (D+)

    The conversational style was, in a word, painful. We are not talking
    about "I dropped a brick on my toe" painful or even "I just gave birth
    to a 10 lb child" painful (unless you are a male, in which case we may
    be). We are talking about "I just had every inch of my skin scoured by
    sandpaper" painful. So, as you can see, I did in fact have a bad opinion
    of a portion of this game.

    So, by now, almost everyone who has played this game or read a review
    has commented on "Don't you want to ask me about her breasts?"
    Therefore, I see no need to revisit that line. What I -would- like to
    focus on is the following exchange, which I think fully illustrates my
    problem (and most other folks') with the conversation system:

       > ask him about woman
       He smiles an empathetic smile. "Don't you want to ask me about the
       victim, Riessa?" he asks.

    Yes. that's why I said 'woman'. She was a woman. Yes?

    Synonyms are very, very much your friend. They are quite useful. I will
    grant that the higher the synonym count, the higher the chance of a
    disambiguation problem, but in this case I don't believe it applies --
    or even if it does, I think it could have been handled far more
    gracefully than it was.

    Forcing the player to word questions a very, very precise way (such as
    the worst example, "ASK HIM ABOUT WHEN HE THINKS THE MURDERER WILL
    STRIKE AGAIN") with very little in the way of a good feedback system
    (hint: telling me precisely how to phrase it really isn't a good
    feedback system, honest) is a very, very annoying choice, and should be
    discarded and replaced with something else, even if that 'something
    else' is a menu of questions, something that would not be my -first-
    choice for this particular type of game but which would have been a
    serious improvement under the circumstances.

    Since the game is driven by completing conversations, this presents even
    more of a problem than it looks like on the first glance; you simply
    can't go somewhere else and do something (that choice isn't available)
    and then come back when you have a new idea. I suspect this lay at the
    heart of many folks' frustration with this entry.

    *** Technical (C)

    I found no bugs; the only real flaw was conversation-style related.
    Character and location switching is not a terribly impressive trick but
    it at least took a bit of forethought.

    *** Tilt (B-) and Final Thoughts

    As I mentioned above, I really do enjoy serial killer stories, and
    really think that this game has potential. With some reworking of the
    conversational style, a bit more depth to the world and the people, and
    perhaps a slightly longer path to the solution, I think it could have
    been a solid game. Perhaps not to everyone's taste, but then, what is?

    Directory with Inform .z5 file and walkthrough (competition version)

    Oo-Topos
    From: Christopher E. Forman <ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #9 -- June 11, 1996

    NAME: Oo-Topos                                 GAMEPLAY: 1 or 2-word commands
    AUTHOR: Michael Berlyn                         PLOT: Strictly rudimentary
    EMAIL: ???                                     ATMOSPHERE: A few nice touches
    AVAILABILITY: Commercial (Sentient Software)   WRITING: Minimalist
    PUZZLES: Not overly difficult                  SUPPORTS: C64, Apple II, IBM
    CHARACTERS: Lifeless obstacles                 DIFFICULTY: Medium

    [This review is based on the Apple II version of the game.]

            "Oo-Topos" is an oldie but a goodie.  It was written billions and
    billions of years ago (to be exact, 1981), during the dawn of the home
    computing era.  It was also the very first game written by Michael Berlyn,
    before he went on to write "Cutthroats," "Infidel," and "Suspended" at
    Infocom.  (Incidentally, to add to the recent "Where Are They Now?" article
    in April's "Computer Game Review," Berlyn also worked at Accolade for some
    time, where he did the "King's Quest"-like "Altered Destiny" a few years
    back, and was also part of a team which created Sega and Super Nintendo games
    -- he worked on the original "Bubsy," for instance.)
            The plot is very straightforward as sci-fi stories go: You were
    transporting a shipload of scientific equipment and a serum to cure an Earth-
    bound plague, when aliens caught your ship in their tractor beam and grounded
    it on their homeworld of Oo-Topos.  You begin the game in a cell, having
    forced the door open, and must escape the prison, collect the scattered
    cargo, and locate the necessary parts to put your ship back together.
            You interact via a two-word parser superimposed on a minimal
    interface -- there's no prompt, just a cursor, and the text spans 40 columns,
    all in caps.  Still, it looks more like the Infocom format than the Scott
    Adams adventures -- "Oo-Topos" has full (albeit rather sparse) room
    descriptions as opposed to a simple room name and a list of objects, which
    makes it feel less mechanical.  Even so, there's not much of a command set.
    There are no synonyms, it's impossible to examine room scenery, and you can't
    even examine objects unless you're carrying them.  (There are a few
    exceptions to the last one.)
            According to the sleeved package the game comes in (mine has a $32.95
    price tag still attached -- wow!), Berlyn spent a year and a half writing and
    programming the game.  The writing is passable for such an early effort, but
    it's very prosaic, nowhere near the level of Berlyn's books.  (He's had four
    science-fiction novels published: "The Integrated Man," "Crystal Phoenix,"
    "Blight," and "The Eternal Enemy.")  Players get little sense of wonder as
    they wander the corridors of the alien prison, as the text suffers from the
    sparse minimalism of early adventures.  The aliens themselves are particularly
    lifeless, serving only as obstacles to impede the player's progress.
            The puzzles, though no doubt original at the time, are pretty simple
    by today's standards.  A 2-word parser doesn't allow for something as complex
    as, say, the Enigma machine in "Jigsaw."  Don't forget that the game had to
    fit on a 180K single-sided floppy as well.  Much of the game is derivative of
    the original Crowther and Woods Adventure (when you die, you're resurrected,
    but your possessions are lost, etc.).  A few bits of text pay humble tribute
    to Adventure (such as eating the food -- you're told that it's "pretty tasty
    food").  Most puzzles embody the characteristic cause-and-effect logic --
    setting up conditions so a solution can occur -- but there's no veil of
    atmosphere or plot to conceal the fact that these are simple logic puzzles.
            Sprinkled throughout the game are a number of drop-an-object mazes.
    These are hard, no two ways about it.  You'll have to make maps if you expect
    to get through them.  Maze-haters will likely become fed up very quickly.
    But, considering that the game's date places it in the company of "Adventure"
    and the "Zork" Trilogy, I'm willing to let that slide.
            Despite these criticisms (which can largely be excused because the
    game is so old), I had a lot of fun with "Oo-Topos," and have scored it
    accordingly, breaking several rules of the SPAG rating system in an effort to
    keep it from being slighted.  If you can appreciate the adventure game at its
    most primitive level, you'll enjoy "Oo-Topos."  I felt a little thrill in
    watching the red disk-access LED on my Apple II light up, as I waited for the
    next location to be loaded into memory.  "Oo-Topos" is a piece of I-F history,
    a nostalgic trip down memory lane, a perfectly preserved relic from an age of
    computer gaming whose mystical aura can only be recaptured by those of us who
    were there to watch the computer adventure grow up.

    AppleII (.zip)

    Solution (text)

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

    TITLE: Order
    AUTHOR: John Evans
    EMAIL: jevans SP@G alum.mit.edu
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/order00/order00.z5
    VERSION: Release 0 (comp release)

    Score: 4 out of 10.

    The premise of "Order" is an interesting one. You are a spirit summoned
    from another place to help a group of wizards, properly armed with the
    power of creation. The introduction is strong, and the two NPCs are
    well-written and responsive when questioned. Most of the game is
    well-written, in fact, or I would have scored it significantly lower. I
    only wish the substance of the game stood up to the apparent skill in
    its writing.

    I found the game's puzzles to have three serious flaws, which I will
    attempt to address without spoiling anyone's enjoyment too severely by
    giving anything away.

    The first flaw: this game turned out to be an almost Diablo-esque
    killfest. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy Diablo rather a bit. Killing
    random monsters isn't generally what I'm looking for in interactive
    fiction, however, and, if killing them is required, I would like it to
    be a bit more complex than this. Not necessarily more difficult, but...
    more meaningful. I killed a monster, yay... so what?

    The second flaw: the one puzzle that is particularly complex relies upon
    scenery objects that, as far as I can tell, do not show up in the room
    description. I read the hint, and then I read the room description, and
    I looked around as much as I could. Without the hint's information, I
    could not find any way of determining that these rather significant
    objects even existed, and they would both have been rather difficult to
    miss if I were actually standing in that location in real life.

    The third flaw was an issue of mimesis. I eventually understood the real
    idea behind the PC from the context of the introduction, death, and
    success messaging, but I would *never* have tried some of the creation
    suggestions in the hint menu because they seemed so inappropriate to the
    game world. Instead of being further drawn into the game world, this
    knocked me for a spin. (One of the more appropriate suggestions in the
    hint list didn't actually work when I tried it, too. Phooey.)

    This game is also running under a time limit, and it didn't seem fair
    not to explicitly warn the player about the time limit in the beginning.
    I wanted to hang out and chat with the NPCs, after all, as the NPCs were
    the greatest strength of the game and far more interesting than the
    puzzles. I suppose it made sense for bad things to happen if I just
    stuck around chatting with NPCs, but perhaps the NPCs could have told me
    to hurry up or something?

    On a final note of disappointment, I had to play through the game twice
    to understand the ending. The name of one major NPC is sometimes given
    as the first and sometimes as the last, and failing to link the two
    confused me utterly.

    From: Valentine Kopteltsev <uux SP@G mail333.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #39 -- January 7, 2005

    Right off the bat, I'd like to apologize to Mr. Evans for this review
    sounding somewhat didactic -- it really isn't meant to. I'm quite aware
    that a) I lack the necessary achievements in IF authoring to teach
    others how to write games, and b) even if I had such accomplishments,
    playing IF coach without being asked to would be rather importunate on
    my part. What follows is by no means a lecture -- just my personal
    thoughts; I honestly hope I managed to express them in such a way
    nobody's feelings are hurt. However, if I didn't, please be lenient to
    me -- it's not my bad intentions, it's just my clumsy pen.

    Mr. Evans is a regular participant in the IF-Comp since 2000, and the
    more games by him I played, the stronger grew my impression that a
    redundancy of inspiration might sometimes be as much a problem as its
    scarcity. I mean, with such a vast amount of creativity longing to break
    free, it's really difficult not to give in to the temptation of
    expanding a work that's supposed to be a modest two-hour piece into
    something monumental. Once the author gives in, however, (s)he
    automatically finds him/herself facing a number of serious challenges,
    with his/her chances of doing well in the Comp dropping dramatically.
    For one thing, it's very likely most players won't be able to complete
    such a long game, and thus will rate it lower than it deserves. For the
    other, a large work generally requires a lot more efforts to maintain
    its consistency, to neatly resolve its story without any loose ends, and
    to sufficiently beta-test it than a small one, so that the author takes
    the risk of not getting these tasks done properly before the deadline
    for the Competition. Which (I mean, not getting the aforementioned tasks
    done), in its turn, will impair the game's overall quality.

    Well, I had the feeling that all Mr. Evans' entries in the previous
    IF-Comps fell victim to the problems described above. In 2000, there was
    Castle Amnos, conceived as an epic, yet not completed by the author and
    not completable by the player. A year after, Elements followed, which
    had a promising (and very stylish) beginning, but unfortunately became
    unbelievably obscure in respect to both puzzles and plot later on.
    Competition 2002 introduced Hell: A Comedy of Errors, a work possessing
    some really quirky and elegant features; however, it was hardly
    enjoyable as a game. Finally, the previous year brought up Domicile, a
    wild pile-up of essentially unrelated fantasy worlds that I hadn't got
    the guts to finish in spite of playing from the hints.

    This year, however, fetched positive changes. It seems that with Order,
    Mr. Evans has finally managed to restrain his own creative power, and to
    produce a game of an appropriate size for the Competition, which is
    quite playable (and winnable!) without a walkthrough. But the best news
    is, although the obscurity had to go (being replaced by sense of
    proportion), the nifty ideas stayed!

    Actually, there is one nifty idea behind this game, which, however,
    seems more than enough. You play a spirit who has been summoned by a
    bunch of wizards to protect their realm. Instead of giving you weapons,
    they endowed you with the power of creating various objects.

    In fact, the whole story spins around this special ability of the player
    character, and it must be said that this aspect of the game is
    implemented with great care. All puzzles have to be solved by creating
    appropriate objects; even better, most puzzles have got multiple
    solutions (where "multiple" often means not just "more than one" but
    "more than two" or even "more than three"). There are quite a number of
    various objects you can create (including several obscure ones, but
    since they're not required for winning, that's no problem at all). Of
    course, my morbid imagination also provided for lots of things that
    couldn't be created, but this is the case where I perfectly understand
    one can't have everything: even my aforementioned morbid imagination
    isn't enough to envision the size a game allowing the creation of ANY
    object existing in the world would have!

    If anything, I'd rather say there were too many objects I could create.
    What I mean is the following: Order has a fantasy setting -- and yet, I
    found that I was able (and at one point, it even was necessary for
    winning) to create things like rolls of duct tape and fire
    extinguishers. That'd be perfectly fine for, say, an Unnkulian game, but
    Order acted deadly serious for the most part, so that such objects just
    didn't fit into the scene.

    There was, however, a much more serious problem: it appears that the
    author was so thrilled by implementing the main gimmick he more or less
    neglected most other crucial game aspects. This neglect showed through,
    for instance, in the way most standard responses remained unchanged, no
    matter how inappropriate they were (in particular, the "X ME" default
    "As good-looking as ever" didn't seem like a suitable description for a
    spirit). Also, the setting was lacking (there are barely any scenery
    objects implemented; besides, the first four rooms I visited in the game
    had descriptions starting with "A small, bare room", "This is a long,
    low room", "This is a very large room", and "This is the west end of the
    large main hall"). But its most noticeable manifestation certainly was
    the characters. To make my point clear, I'd like to cite a short
    fragment of the game transcript, with text in square brackets
    representing my immediate reactions during playing.

      >N

      South Main Hall
      This is a long, low room. Fitted stone makes up the floor, walls and
      ceiling. The room widens to the north, and south of you is a doorway.
      Gray light filters in through windows to the north.

      A man stands near you, of late middle age; balding, with a long
      grayish beard. He wears a shapeless gray robe, and looks at you with
      distracted bright eyes. "I'm pleased you made it out of our test," he
      says. "Well, I had no doubt, of course. My name is Sevryd." He sighs.
       "Please, will you help us?"

      The elderly Sevryd stands here, immersed in arcane manipulations.

      >YES
      That was a rhetorical question.

      [Ehm... The guy probably wants to be addressed directly.]

      >SEVRYD, YES
      Sevryd has better things to do.

      [???]

    Still, ol' chap Sevryd is the most versatile character in the game: at
    least, you can ask him about a number of topics (although the scope of
    his knowledge leaves much to be desired). Others are even less inclined
    to communication; presumably they "can't leave their tasks to assist
    you", even after you master these tasks for them. A fellow who can't be
    killed because "he's a little busy right now" tops off this mob of
    dummies.

    Uhm, again, I'm not saying I didn't enjoy Order at all. It's still a
    decent game, despite all its faults. However, some more attention to
    "minor" aspects could make it A LOT better, and possibly turn it into a
    gem. Well, there's still hope for Mr. Evans' entry in the next IF-Comp.

    The SNATS (Score Not Affecting The Scoreboard):

    PLOT: Fairly generic, but not without an interesting twist (1.1)
    ATMOSPHERE: One of the "minor" aspects that didn't get sufficient
                attention (0.8)
    WRITING: Certainly not the strongest part of the game (0.9)
    GAMEPLAY: Relaxed puzzle-solving (1.2)
    BONUSES: The very idea of object creation plus cleverly implemented
             multiple solutions (1.6)
    TOTAL: 5.6
    CHARACTERS: I know, "a mob of dummies" doesn't sound too nice, but it's
                the truth (0.6)
    PUZZLES: Smartly built around the PC's special ability (1.3)
    DIFFICULTY: Easy enough, although solving it is fun (5 out of 10)

    From: Dan Shiovitz <dans SP@G drizzle.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #39 -- January 7, 2005

    Ah, John Evans. He exploded onto the IF scene with Castle Amnos,
    described by many as "an interesting fantasy game premise, but with some
    nasty bugs -- perhaps you should get some beta-testing." This was
    quickly followed with Elements and Hell: A Comedy of Errors, two games
    with interesting fantasy premises but in need of beta-testing and a
    fuller implementation. Last year he made a stunning break from tradition
    with Domicile, a game in need of beta-testing, though with an
    interesting fantasy premise, and finally, this year Evans presents
    Order, showing he has truly mastered the genre of games with interesting
    premises but that are, nevertheless, sadly in need of beta-testing. This
    one does have hints and is finishable, at least, even if major objects
    are lacking nouns mentioned in the room description. Anyway, Evans can't
    take a hint, so I guess the thing for me to do is give his games lower
    and lower scores each year from now on until I give up on them entirely.
    If you aren't feeling this jaded you may enjoy bits of Order. Then
    again, you may not.

    Directory with .z5 Zcode file and .png feelie

    The Orion Agenda
    From: Adam Myrow <amyrow SP@G midsouth.rr.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #39 -- January 7, 2005

    TITLE: The Orion Agenda
    AUTHOR: Ryan Weisenberger
    EMAIL: ryanwif SP@G comcast.net
    DATE: September 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF-archive freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/orion/orion.z5
    VERSION: Release 9 (comp version)

    This was one of several games in this year's competition involving space
    travel of some kind. It was also the most well-polished game I've ever
    encountered from a first-time author. Sure, it isn't perfect, but it's
    far better than many competition entries from first-time authors.

    The story is told in an unusual way. It starts out in the present, with
    you, the PC, waking up in a hole. Then, it flashes back to the past to
    explain how you got there. The majority of the game is in this
    flashback, and the end of the flashback marks the start of the endgame.
    I've run across this technique in books a few times, and I've always
    thought it was a great way of getting the reader's curiosity. Last year,
    Atomic Heart tried something similar, but because of the many problems
    in the game, it didn't work for a lot of players. In this game, the
    technique works quite well in my opinion.

    As for what the story is, you have recently been promoted to Captain.
    Your first mission is to accompany your partner down to the planet Orion
    on an investigation. For some reason, communications with the monitoring
    station on the planet have been lost. Your job is to find out why. Of
    course, there is one important rule. This rule is that you must not
    under any circumstances contaminate the alien culture. This is the rule
    that Star Trek calls the Prime Directive, and apparently, this
    similarity bothered some people. It didn't bother me at all. Of course,
    your mission won't turn out to be as easy as you thought it would be.
    Otherwise, there wouldn't be much of a story. You must learn about the
    people of this alien world, and there are lots of puzzles to solve. The
    game does a fairly good job of blending story and puzzles. While some
    thought the story was a bit too predictable, I liked it because it's
    classic science fiction. Finding out what was going on and doing
    something about it was very rewarding indeed.

    There are several neat features in this game. First, it's one of those
    rare games where your actions have a long-term effect. To say much more
    would be a spoiler, but suffice it to say, how you treat other people is
    more important than it usually is in most IF. Another thing that sets
    this game apart from most others is the fact that it is written entirely
    in first-person. While this isn't a new idea, there isn't one single
    place that I could find where this first-person point of view is broken.
    Again, reactions to this were mixed among the judges. I don't have a
    problem with first-person, as long as it is done well, and for that, The
    Orion Agenda can't be faulted.

    Lastly, this game avoids many mistakes often made by novice authors. For
    example, the first time a room is entered, the PC may remark on it, and
    those remarks won't get repeated. Sometimes, room descriptions will
    change, and those changes will be entirely appropriate. The only things
    I found wrong with the game were a few grammar errors and clunky
    parsing. However, it's clear the game has been tested, and it will
    handle a lot of player input that many games won't. It was a strong
    first offering, and I hope to see more from this author.

    .z5 Zcode file (updated version)

    .z5 Zcode file (competition version)

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