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Game Reviews V

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The email addresses used are those submitted with the review, so naturally some of them may be out of date.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
    Vacation Gone Awry
    Varicella
    Vespers
    Vicious Cycles
    VirtuaTech
    Voices
    Voices of Spoon River

    Vacation Gone Awry
    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #28 --March 20, 2002

    TITLE: Vacation Gone Awry
    AUTHORS: Johan Berntsson, Fredrik Ramsberg, and Staffan Friberg
    E-MAIL: vacation SP@G ramsberg.net
    DATE: 2001
    PARSER: Inform, modified somewhat
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Vacation.z5
    VERSION: Release 2

    I must acknowledge that Vacation Gone Awry got my attention right away
    -- but not with the cleverness of its premise or with a nifty hook. No,
    what grabbed me was the copyright notice, which described the game as
    "copyright (c) 1988-2002." Not many works of any kind are fourteen years
    in the making, and IF has a sufficiently short shelf life that putting
    that much time into an IF game is worthy of note. More to the point,
    though, the world of IF changed more than a little between 1988 and
    2002, and I wondered just how retro Vacation Gone Awry would feel. The
    short answer: fairly. But not unpleasantly so.

    One of the aspects that makes Vacation feel a little dated is that the
    plot is a bit on the ostensible side. You're vacationing with your
    family when a big causal event happens, which leads to various puzzles
    involving getting into a research lab, which leads to standard
    research-lab situations and mildly artificial puzzles, many of the
    there-must-be-*something*-important-behind-this-obstacle variety. There
    are NPCs, to be sure, but most are cardboard at best; their saving grace
    is that most of them do move around without, as far as I can tell,
    tripping over any bugs. Most importantly, though, nothing much happens
    after the first third or so of the game, besides that you solve puzzles;
    most IF of more recent vintage is somewhat more story-driven, in that
    solving puzzles will lead not only to more puzzles but also to some sort
    of plot development, but in Vacation the plot is pretty much given to
    you whole at the beginning. This stuff isn't the kiss of death, I
    suppose, but it does give the game a certain flavor.

    As a puzzle- rather than a plot-driven game, however, Vacation is a
    reasonably good, though by no means perfect, example of the form. Lessee
    -- the good: there's a timing puzzle that involves a certain amount of
    large-scale thinking (figuring out who's where when) and some advance
    planning, though some trial and error is necessary as well. The bad:
    that same puzzle requires an astounding amount of stupidity from a
    certain NPC; let's just say that most people, when they encounter
    someone walking away from a suspicious event, don't just wave them by.
    The good: the game's world is built in a way that does a passable job of
    modeling a real research lab -- not every locked door can be opened, for
    instance, and certain locations are there because realism requires them,
    not because they're essential to a puzzle. The bad: some of the red
    herrings are simply confusing and don't appear to be driven by realism,
    as there's no particular reason why the features in question should
    appear where they do (which tends to suggest to the savvy player that
    puzzles are at work). The good: a puzzle that involves delving into an
    NPC's past. The bad: the way you put that knowledge to use is (a) cruel,
    (b) far from subtle, and (c) made unnecessarily hard by the point in the
    game -- i.e., very early -- where the puzzle comes up. As in, the game
    closes off if you don't take advantage of a specific opportunity at a
    specific time, and taking advantage of that opportunity requires
    knowledge that you're unlikely to have gathered by that point. The good:
    a multi-room puzzle that's an homage of sorts to a pretty good puzzle
    from Lurking Horror. The bad: here, unlike there, solving the puzzle in
    the way you do really should attract some attention, but the attention
    never comes.

    You get the idea. The design problems aren't severe by any means, and
    most probably wouldn't have been considered design flaws at all in 1988;
    a lot of them amount to NPC stupidity or cardboardness, and those things
    haven't always been considered major warts. Still, the game simply
    doesn't try all that hard in that department -- there are quite a few
    things that the NPCs should be able to talk about but can't, and you can
    carry around all sorts of suspicious items without any comment from
    them. There's also the larger problem that, even though you're supposed
    to be working with some scientists in a lab, no one seems particularly
    interested in actually working with you, and you can go about your
    puzzle-solving business without anyone asking what you're doing. The
    puzzles themselves are clever in their way; it's just that the player
    who says to himself "but I could never get away with that" may get onto
    the wrong track.

    The writing is adequate, though largely unexceptional -- most of the
    descriptions are pretty workmanlike, but there are flashes of
    personality here and there. Trying to charge off into a storm elicits
    "Hey! There's a blizzard going on, in case you forgot," and "search
    jeans" brings "You figured out the difference between boys and girls a
    long time ago. You know what is in the jeans." There are some clumsy
    moments as well, though -- for some reason, Inform's default "That's
    hardly portable" for stationary objects has been replaced by "That seems
    unmobile," not an improvement, and this description of a sound, "There's
    that whistling sound again. It does sound like someone whistling," is
    simply redundant. This paragraph is representative:

       The corridor, entering from the south, ends at a heavy door made of
       steel. Judging from the temperature, being somewhat lower here than
       in the rest of the building, you jump to the conclusion that the door
       could lead out into the cold (or into a giant freezer, perhaps...)

    The "being somewhat lower" phrase is clumsy and "judging from the
    temperature" is a little wordy, but "jump to the conclusion" and "giant
    freezer" are pretty funny, in a wry way. The writing is also marred by
    sprinkling of typos and misspellings that recurs just often enough to be
    noticeable. The problems -- e.g., "Suddenly high-pitched alarm signals
    start emerging from hidden loudspeakers"; do sounds really "emerge"? --
    aren't so awkward that they make things unclear, however, and on the
    whole the writing isn't a major flaw.

    The technical aspect is okay, on the whole -- the NPC movement daemons
    work particularly well, and one complex object in the castle was well
    handled. There are also very few library responses, though some of the
    replacements are less helpful than the library; one that I found
    particularly irritating was, as a generic failure message, "You do. Not
    that it seems to change anything," even though more often than not the
    action in question had not been "done." I wrestled with the syntax a few
    times, but mostly when I was on the wrong track anyway, and synonyms are
    reasonably plentiful. The problems lie more in the design.

    How grave those problems are is, as usual, a matter of taste. As most of
    the puzzles are reasonably well-conceived, some will enjoy this
    thoroughly; as the logic is often less than thorough, particularly
    around the edges, some will find this annoying. For my own part, I ended
    up somewhere in the middle, but a given player's attitude will more than
    likely depend on how that player feels about IF created circa 1988.

    PC package with Windows interpreter

    Inform .z5 file

    Varicella
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #18 -- September 15, 1999

    TITLE: Varicella
    AUTHOR: Adam Cadre<
    E-MAIL: ac SP@G adamcadre.ac
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/vgame.zip
    VERSION: Release 1.00

    Varicella, Adam Cadre's third game, has almost nothing in common with his
    first two, I-0 and Photopia--which, in turn, have just as little in common
    with each other. (One wonders how long Adam can go without producing IF
    that bears any resemblance to anything he's already written.) "Almost" is
    operative because Varicella does have a few things in common with Adam's
    previous works. The writing is terrific, of course; this is one of the
    best-written works of IF ever, bar none. Beyond that, though, such a
    wealth of intelligence went into the designing of this game that, even
    when the playing experience is unedifying, the player can only appreciate
    the author's artwork.

    The premise: you're Primo Varicella, the Palace Minister in the palace of
    Piedmont, a small Italian city-state (and the product of a somewhat
    reworked history, since the setting is modern enough to include telephones
    and electronic surveillance). The king is dead, leaving a five-year-old
    heir, you're bent on seizing power for yourself- -and you have no apparent
    compunctions about how you get that power. Your primary tool for the
    purpose is murder; for your purposes, evidently, your rivals are only out
    of the way when they're dead. Fortunately, all your rivals for the throne
    are as evil as you, so the player is unlikely to feel any qualms--and all
    sorts of nasty stuff ensues.

    Varicella is a black comedy, with the accent on "black"--mayhem and
    self-aggrandizement are your character's primary objectives. It follows
    the lead of last year's "Little Blue Men" in making the PC amoral, driven
    by greed and unimpeded by sentimental things like compassion--but it
    addresses a factor that Little Blue Men did not, namely the problem of
    expecting the player to go along with the PC's objectives. All of the
    rivals you bump off, or arrange to have bumped off, are profoundly evil;
    most of them seem to enjoy abusing or exploiting those weaker than
    themselves. (It is arguable whether you, the PC, are just as evil, but
    certainly your enemies are unsavory folks.) The player can see Varicella
    as a sort of avenging force, therefore, even if there are no signs that
    Varicella actually feels that way or cares about the various evils
    perpetrated by his enemies except insofar as they affect him personally.
    It's a rationalization, but a useful one.

    Varicella himself is one of the most intriguing PC's in memory, but also
    one of the most frustrating. He is fastidious to the point of caricature;
    the game regularly keeps you from touching or exploring things because the
    character finds the idea "unseemly." In fact, "unseemly" is Varicella's
    favorite word; he uses it as a sort of all-purpose denigration, and it
    gets applied indiscriminately to actions like walking into a wall
    inadvertently, lying on the floor, or dying messily. His tastes in
    interior decoration are exacting, and he feels compelled to comment on the
    furnishings of virtually every room in the palace--in fact, redecorating
    seems to be among his main objectives in seizing the throne. The persona
    that emerges is a sort of C-3PO gone Machiavellian, whose main concern in
    seizing power is ensuring that there are no bloodstains on the carpets.
    Varicella is an amusing invention, to be sure, but accomplishing his aims
    while observing his scruples can be aggravating; the verb TELL is almost
    never useful, as the game invariably returns "You're not about to divulge
    your secrets to a hysterical female," or with some substitute for the
    "hysterical female." In fact, though Varicella speaks in the beginning of
    a "flawless plan," I had the impression that this sort of character would
    ordinarily fuss over details and never actually dispose of anyone--and
    that it's the player's intervention that makes him a murderer. If so, it's
    a disturbing spin on the player-PC relationship.

    Unfortunately, none of the other characters are nearly as vivid, and most,
    with the exception of Miss Sierra, the cynical, clear-eyed prostitute, are
    wearily familiar. There's the dissolute younger brother, the corrupt
    priest, the ambitious War Minister, and others. To be sure, Adam gives
    many of them backstories that put their behavior in context, but they
    don't do much that could be considered surprising. Miss Sierra is the
    exception, though; she has definite opinions on everything that goes on,
    and the perspective that she affords on every aspect of the game is rather
    disconcerting. (In fact, she seems to function as the author's
    mouthpiece.) If there is a defect to Miss Sierra, it is that she speaks
    cynically about everything and initially seems to care personally about
    nothing, so that discovering something that does touch her personally
    leaves one wondering why. (It seems, in other words, that she could
    perfectly well shrug it off as typical of the depraved world she inhabits
    and understands so well, and it's not clear why she reacts as strongly as
    she does.) On the other hand, the point of Varicella is served just as
    well without 10 exhaustively developed characters; the author does what he
    sets out to do quite well with only a few.

    Lots and lots goes on in Varicella, and the timing for your required
    actions is very tight; ascertaining what you need to do requires several
    games' worth of information-gathering, along with considerable logistical
    planning so that you can time everything properly. Constant restarting
    isn't my favorite mode of gameplay, but it's acceptable in Varicella
    because the game is so short--with less than a hundred moves to replay,
    starting from scratch isn't such a chore. (There's even an inside joke
    toward the end of the game on this very subject: Varicella says to one of
    his rivals, "None of us really has the luxury of going back and trying it
    all over again until we get it right, now do we?" Varicella, of course,
    has had that very luxury.) The other reason why repetition isn't as
    irritating as it might be elsewhere is that, as mentioned, Adam is a hell
    of a writer, and reading his prose is consistently enjoyable no matter how
    often it goes by. Notable, but by no means atypical, is the following
    passage in the prologue:

         For if this letter you've just received is correct, just such a disease
         has claimed the life of the King. This leaves the principality in the
         hands of his son, Prince Charles. Prince Charles is five years old.
         Piedmont, it seems, will be requiring the services of a regent for the
         foreseeable future. And you can think of no better candidate than
         yourself.

    One can almost see the character rubbing his hands together (in a
    fastidious sort of way, of course) at the prospect of snatching the
    regency. The phrasing captures his personality nicely--"requiring the
    services of a regent" is the sentence construction of a man who has spent
    most of his life trying to phrase indelicate matters delicately. The
    mock-serious tone of "you can think of no better candidate than yourself"
    likewise implies that the narrator has spent lots of time thinking it
    over, really, and is prepared to justify the conclusion to his superiors
    as a Palace Minister must. The writing reflects Varicella's personality
    throughout the game, and is almost invariably mordantly funny.

    Playing through Varicella is quite an experience; as noted, the player
    must devote himself to thoroughly unwholesome ends, sought for no
    particularly good reason, which isn't necessarily such a pleasant
    sensation. Beyond that, though, the game requires that you unearth all
    sorts of unsavory details about your fellow aspirants to the regency--and
    the nature of the things you learn is, by and large, unpleasant. Giving
    the relevant players their comeuppance is superficially satisfying, but it
    doesn't address or rectify the evils already done--and the ultimate ending
    reflects that fact. In that sense, the game is thoroughly depressing;
    there's such a remarkable concentration of evil in the game's world that
    the walls practically drip with it. (In fact, in a sense, they do.) Yes,
    it's fiction, but the story told is unremittingly bleak--part of the
    game's message is that evil inevitably engenders more evil (and, moreover,
    a purer and more monstrous evil). It's in the nature of IF that telling a
    story of dirty deeds leaves the player feeling a bit soiled himself.
    (Footnote: playing Varicella can also be a tad annoying for those who
    don't share the author's views, particularly on matters religious: the
    character who represents religion also emanates hypocrisy and cruelty, and
    the mouthpiece mentioned above gets to excoriate all religious doctrines
    as "sugary lies." Subtle.)

    But Varicella is a well-told tale, and that it's depressing and unedifying
    is a testament to how well it's put together; it arguably wouldn't serve
    the author's purposes as well if it were simply malicious fun. The ending
    pulls the player up short, forces her to reconsider what came before;
    suddenly, there are consequences to casual cruelty. That point wouldn't
    come across nearly as well if the player didn't have a sense of complicity
    in the events of the game (which she certainly should). There is another
    process loose in the palace--an infestation of a nefarious green
    substance--that tells its own story: the palace itself is decaying
    rapidly, though no one seems to notice but you, and if the decay goes
    unchecked, the whole place will shortly become unlivable. The infestation
    serves ably as a metaphor for the evil afoot. (The setting is vaguely
    reminiscent of the end of Hamlet, in fact, when the "rotten" remnants of
    Denmark destroy each other and what is left is overrun by Fortinbras and
    his army. The system's internal contradictions cause it to implode. As it
    happens, there's also an Ophelia-like character in the game who repeatedly
    quotes Ophelia.)

    This, in short, is one of the best pieces of IF ever to be produced; it
    works brilliantly on several different levels, from entertainment to IF
    theory. As IF, and as fiction, it's quite an achievement.

    Inform file (.z8)

    PC Executable (.exe)

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

    TITLE: Vespers
    AUTHOR: Jason Devlin
    EMAIL: jdevlin1984 SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: October 1, 2005
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/vespers.z8

    VERSION: Release 1

    Vespers feels a lot like Name of the Rose.  I know, I promised I'd stop with
    the using other works of fiction to make comments, but I'm not so  much drawing
    functional comparisons as I am pointing out topical and thematic similarities
    here, so according to my head it's all right.  The primary reason why I bring
    this up isn't to do something so dreary as to accuse the author (responsible
    for last year's Sting of the WASP, an excellent but very different game) of
    lack of originality or anything like that - in IF as in every other medium,
    it's all about execution, and the best creators are plunder-happy magpies,
    ripping off ideas from wherever they can find them.  I mention the Eco
    connection mostly to disclose that I liked Name of the Rose a lot, am a sucker
    for Medieval Catholic eschatology, and therefore might be biased towards
    Vespers due to an affinity for the subject matter and residual good-will for
    works which hoed much the same row.

    So with that out of the way, I can now start praising Vespers.  It has
    numerous strengths, but I think the most important is how well paced it is.
    The introduction slopes in gradually, and while I generally like to have some
    idea of what I should be accomplishing from the very beginning, here the more
    leisurely approach worked well - knowing that plague was loose and the
    monastery was locked in made things more interesting than the standard wander-
    corridors-until-something-happens opening, and front-loading much of the
    exploration allowed later sequences to play out tauter, since the player knows
    exactly where everything is.  The number of NPCs is initially a little
    overwhelming, but the author does a very good job of giving each of them a
    distinctive feature, so that the player soon remembers which is the crazy one,
    which is the terse, practical one, and so on.  Besides,  things pick up fairly
    quickly once the player's visited all the important areas - Cecilia's arrival
    kicks off a string of clear, well-motivated puzzles, and from there
    interaction with her serves to give the player character his next objective.

    The narrative doesn't just progress, though - it deepens.  As time passes and
    the malady which has laid claim to the player character does its work,
    descriptions change quite strikingly, which is a very nice touch - not only
    does it effectively convey the character's deteriorating mental state and
    effectively underline the thematically central mood of decay, it also makes re-
    visiting already-explored areas a pleasure rather than an invitation to tedium.
    The player is also allowed to complete major goals along the way, which lead
    fluidly on to the next.  The arcs of individual monks are continually resolved
    (usually, sad to say, this involves their death), which each add something to
    the larger puzzle.  The game also does a good job of unlocking new areas to
    explore in a controlled fashion; the player is introduced to a few new
    locations at a time, generally already knowing what he wants to do, which
    helps create a fleshed-out world without unnecessary disorientation.

    Speaking of avoiding unnecessary disorientation, the puzzles are another
    strong suit of Vespers.  The player knows about most of the major puzzles
    (finding the hidden diary, gaining access to the cellar)  from the early
    stages of the game, which serves to alert him to any tools or clues which might
    help with those tasks.  Smaller-scale, more immediate puzzles (the avalanche,
    the wolf attack), often confined to one particular area, are introduced cleanly,
    usually requiring some quick thinking but no items from previous scenes.  The
    prayer system is  particularly elegant, almost serving as get-out-jail-free
    cards - I  think in every case, the player can find a solution which doesn't
    involve prayer, but if you're having trouble coming up with the answer, a
    saint's intercession will do the job, without forcing recourse to the hints
    file. This middle ground of providing the player with a limited number of
    expendable puzzle-solving tokens is very good game design,  and evocative too -
    before bedding down on the first night, I thought  the good abbot should say
    his nightly orisons, and was pleasantly surprised by the fact that this
    preemptively solved a puzzle which otherwise might have required a die-and-
    undo!

    So Vespers is already a very good game, before you get to the endgame and the
    rug gets pulled out.  Not only is the narrative twist nicely  done - it both
    comes out of nowhere and had me slapping my forehead for not noticing it
    sooner - there's also a mechanical twist, as this whole time the game has been
    keeping track of the sins you've  committed.  It would be very easy to have put
    the mechanic front and center and transparently informed the player when he's
    moved down on the degeneration track, but keeping it hidden was definitely the
    right call, as this way the player isn't even aware he's being judged until
    it's too late, and it's never obvious which particular decisions were decisive.
    My only objection is that I think the scale might be too unforgiving - my
    first time through, I got the "evil" ending, even though of course I think my
    transgressions were relatively minor (I'd once prayed to Cecilia, and attacked
    the unknown figure I'd tripped down the stairs since I wasn't sure if he was
    incapacitated from the  fall).  Still, given the setting, an unforgiving
    morality is definitely appropriate.

    Flaws?  A few.  The mystery of what Constantin's been up to is a major driver
    of the narrative, so the rather hasty reveal felt abrupt and therefore had
    less impact than it might have.  The last scene, while a nicely calculated
    sucker-punch, also has about it a faint redolence of a heavy-metal album-cover.
    And sometimes the header quotes (which are nicely done, by the way, like the
    scenery descriptions starting out familiar, almost banal, but slowly growing
    strange and threatening as the plague progresses) wouldn't properly erase, so
    that bits of earlier quotes would stick around and overlap on the new ones.
    But that's literally all I can come up with, which is pretty impressive, given
    how much of a stickler I can be.  My notes don't record any disambiguation
    issues or typos; they're basically just reminders not to forget how neat
    particular elements were.

    Overall, Vespers was my favorite game of the comp.

    Zcode executable (.z8)

    Inform source code

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

    TITLE: Vicious Cycles
    AUTHOR: Mark Simon
    E-MAIL: marksimo SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: October 2001
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/inform/cycles/cycles.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Sweet. A game that Requires Knowledge Of Past Lives, and gets away with
    it! The "gimmick" of Vicious Cycles is a real gem, serving as the
    fulcrum for the clever, interlocked puzzles that form the meat of the
    game, and deftly flouting the Player's Bill of Rights. There were many
    pleasant "aha!" moments, and not a single puzzle that felt tacked-on.

    With the addition of excellent writing and competent programming, the
    game is well worth a top score. I noticed just a handful of minor bugs
    (missing synonyms, illogical defaults, etc.) and no spelling or grammar
    errors. I was struck by the sharp, effective precision of the author's
    storytelling and mood-setting: very Plotkinesque. I remember
    particularly the casual mention of "knuckles whiten(ing) around a hand
    grip". Though the story is full of opinionated characters, the narrator
    is all "show", no "tell": he gives you the cues and lets you read into
    them for yourself.

    The boy and girl were a nice extra touch. I liked the fact that you
    could talk with the boy, and also that the repair man answered to many
    more topics than was necessary for puzzle-solving. Mimesis wore thin
    almost nowhere. All in all, this is an impressive offering by a
    relatively new name on the IF scene.

    .z5 Zcode file (updated version)

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

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

    NAME: VirtuaTech
    AUTHOR: David Glasser
    E-MAIL: virtuatech SP@G ifcompetition.org
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/tads/vtech/vtech.gam
    VERSION: Release 1

    Captivating visions of the future are fairly old hat in science
    fiction, though, like most things, they're not quite as overdone in
    IF. The challenge in such stories is usually to introduce the player
    to some new technology and make it both impressive--full of exciting
    possibilities and dangers--and easily accessible. David Glasser's
    VirtuaTech doesn't quite meet that challenge; though it's simple and
    reasonably fun, the equipment that the player has to use is not as
    accessible as it might be, and the whole thing just doesn't feel all
    that enthralling.

    You are a college student who must get to class with a copy of your
    report in some limited amount of time--though it doesn't seem the game
    actually limits the time, unfortunately; it might give the task some
    urgency. Your goal, actually, is one of the best features of the
    game--it drives all your actions, it gives the puzzles meaning, and
    you are never allowed (at least, there isn't much room) to go check
    out the sights. Many games simply thrust the player into an
    environment--far too often a fairly humdrum one--with a goal only
    vaguely defined and not obviously connected to any of the initial
    things he or she does. There is much to be said for a small, tightly
    plotted game environment. Anyway, you find that the power is
    out--though some rather power-heavy equipment seem to work just
    fine--and then that your computer has bugs, and you must use the
    virtual-reality technology available to solve the problems. There is
    an additional puzzle afterwards that I found hilarious, at least in
    terms of the images it produced; I wished the author had made more of
    it in the writing. (I also wished that the author had explained why
    "the world for miles in each direction is cursed with blight and
    chill"; that sounds a little overwritten to be talking about winter,
    but if not, what is it talking about?)

    Among the main problems here is that the technology is such a pain to
    use that it hardly seems labor-saving at all. For example, you have a
    "scanner" that must be plugged into the phone for the latter to work;
    the phone dials whatever number is on the scanner. The number on the
    scanner, though, is whatever you last scanned into it, and there is no
    apparent way to "save" a number on it and come back to it later, after
    dialing other numbers. Worse, you have to pick up the scanner to scan
    anything into it, and to do that, you have to disconnect it from the
    phone and then reconnect it afterwards--and why those complications
    are necessary is beyond me. Actually, I have a guess--the existing
    setup prevents the player from going to a virtual site (via the phone)
    while still holding the scanner, which would admittedly cause
    problems. But it doesn't seem so impossible to either prevent the
    player from disappearing into VR while still holding the scanner or
    have it fall to the floor when he does. It feels, in short, like the
    author should have made it easier by skipping the scanner and allowing
    the player to CALL whoever once he knows the number. I mean, there are
    programmable phones _now_. Did progress go backwards? The author
    can't, however, be accused of laziness, in that the places you access
    to finish the game have a wide range of irrelevant options to simulate
    the feel of actual tech support; that element, at least, feels real.

    Which brings up the other main problem. Tech support? This is a good
    way to make your innovation thoroughly unappealing. Mightn't it be
    possible to go somewhere else, somewhere fun? It might be in the
    course of the given plot--you have to visit your cool friend to get
    some sort of information for your report, or go to Bermuda to
    investigate something. I dunno. But this is not a vision of the future
    that gets me all that excited--I mean, it's barely different from
    existing technology, and getting transported to drab little rooms
    doesn't feel like much progress. (After all, what happens in any of
    the virtual scenarios that couldn't have been done just as easily with
    an ordinary phone and computer? And how is the experience any more
    interesting?) The interior of the computer is all right (though, like
    with A New Day, I wanted to do more with it, like chop down a
    directory tree or sift through the trash or explore a dark and spooky
    sector), though compass directions break the spell a bit, and the
    translation from solid objects in real life to virtual objects-- and
    back--is plausible and well done. (And the daemon is cute, I must
    admit, even if you can't do much with him.) But you can't really do
    enough in the computer for me to get into the idea.

    Oddly, it was the last part of VirtuaTech (well, it doesn't have to be
    last, but that's how it worked for me and I suspect that most players
    had the same experience) that I enjoyed the most, though it required
    major suspensions of disbelief about several things. It was just--I
    dunno--a funny way to solve the puzzle, though it seemed like there
    was another, more obvious way to do substantially the same thing. It
    was also something that the player can actually visualize--the other
    parts of the game are written so sparsely that they don't exactly come
    alive. And, to be frank, it was more interesting than calling tech
    support.

    VirtuaTech isn't bad; structurally, there isn't much wrong with it. I
    just felt like it needed some things--perhaps more things along the
    lines of the last puzzle--to spice it up and make it fun to play; had
    I read about such a game in the GMD archive, I doubt I would have been
    inspired to play it. Though mostly solid, there isn't a lot here to
    keep the player's interest.

    Directory with TADS .gam file and text files

    Voices
    From: Adrian J. Chung <ajchung SP@G yahoo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #29 -- June 20, 2002

    NAME: Voices
    AUTHOR: Aris Katsaris
    EMAIL: katsaris SP@G otenet.gr
    DATE: February 2001
    PARSER: Infocom Standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://www.plover.net/~emily/smoochie/voices.z5
    VERSION: Release 1 (SmoochieComp original)

    I debated with myself whether or not I should submit a review for this
    one. The recent jump in the adventure gaming audience swayed me in the
    affirmative. Stating that newcomers who were expecting a game are in for
    a surprise would be a bit of an understatement. The opening text:

       Voices
       An Interactive Romance
       (...)
       Ladies' Tree
       We like to play and dance in this place around the tall beech,
       (...)  but I've never seen them myself. Nor have I ventured alone
       much to the south of here - the town of Domremy is in the north.

    suggests a romance told in the first person -- features of the Comp98
    2nd place game, "Muse". As it turns out, this work really orbits in the
    same system as the Comp98 1st placer, "Photopia". The tightly scripted
    (almost on rails) story and heavy reliance on "talk to" are the features
    to which I refer. Not to mention the interface manipulation gimmicks
    pioneered by "Shrapnel" -- one gimmick is also to be found in another
    SmoochieComp game, "Pytho's Mask". Enough references for you?

    There's not much more I can say without contributing to the spoilery for
    a work as short as this -- it takes no more than ten minutes to
    experience. The prose conveys some rather strong emotions via a story
    design that can be debated for days, which is exactly what happened on
    r*if. If emotional impact per line of non-library source code were a
    valid measure, this would probably rank as high as Photopia or Shade;
    perhaps even higher due to the sparse implementation. It takes courage
    to use the minicomp format (and SmoochieComp, no less!) to tackle much
    debated philosophy and religious theology. Admittedly my Catholic
    upbringing could be a factor in my slight disagreement in the portrayal
    of some of the major characters. It was also disconcerting to have to
    make decisions for them at critical points in the story. The rapid
    switching of person perspectives -- between 1st and 2nd, interspersed
    with 3rd -- only added to this discomfort. Maybe this was intentional.

    At least it avoids the risks of trivialising the belief systems of a
    major religion as can often happen in this medium. This is testimony to
    the author's writing skill and well-planned design. Did I mention the
    historical setting? There is almost too much packed into something of
    this size. Does it work? I'd venture a conditional yes. But like I said,
    it depends greatly on what expectations you bring to the table. Perhaps
    that's why it was released in a minicomp.

    Updated post-comp release

    Original version packaged with all SmoochieComp games

    Go to the previous page of reviews (U)
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    Voices of Spoon River
    From: Jimmy Maher <maher SP@G grandecom.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #45 -- July 17, 2006

    TITLE: Voices of Spoon River
    AUTHOR: Creative Learning Environments Lab at Utah State University
    EMAIL: brett.shelton SP@G usu.edu
    DATE: June, 2006
    PARSER: Inform 6
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://cle.usu.edu/VOSR_r1.22a.zip
    VERSION: Release 1

    Voices of Spoon River was developed by a group of graduate students studying
    instructional game theory at Utah State University.  Its purpose is to
    illuminate a minor classic of American literature, Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon
    River Anthology.  Before discussing the IF work, perhaps we should talk briefly
    about the book on which it is based.

    First published in 1915, Spoon River Anthology is a collection of over 200 short
    poems.  Each is written in the form of a first-person epitaph, describing a
    citizen of the small Midwestern town of Spoon River.  The stories these citizens
    tell about their lives are not, with only the occasional exception, uplifting,
    as Masters digs deep beneath the surface of small-town middle American life
    to reveal the quiet desperation in which even the upstanding and successful
    live.  Although each can stand alone, the poems form a web of interrelationships
    to be puzzled out by the reader.  Thus we see hopelessly dysfunctional marriages
    from the standpoint of both spouses and sometimes the husband's other woman, and
    hear from both a criminal and the judge who put him away.  The poetry is frankly
    not very good, but the stories told are often compelling, and piecing together
    the various plotlines of the town from fragments of testimony is fascinating.
    Equally approachable in any order the reader chooses, these poems would make a
    fertile subject of study for students of non-linear, multi-formal literature
    even if the Spoon River IF work had never been created.  But what of that work?

    Voices of Spoon River begins about where one might expect it to, in the middle
    of the Spoon River graveyard.  All around are tombstones bearing Masters' poetic
    epitaphs.  The player soon learns that she has a task to perform.  She must
    restore peace to these lost souls by performing various actions that will
    reconcile them to their fates.  To do this, of course, she must first determine
    just what, or in many cases who, is disturbing their rest.  Here enters the
    didactic focus of the work in earnest, for in order to solve the game the player
    must grapple fairly intimately with the literary world Masters has created.

    It is quite a clever conceit, actually, and it works quite well.  At its best,
    Spoon River gives the feeling of actually getting inside a work of literature
    and exploring in a way I have seldom if ever experienced before.  One could,
    however, argue that the IF work is not really true thematically to the original
    work it purports to celebrate.  After all, much of the power of Masters' poems
    arises from the pathetic futility of all these broken, unsatisfied lives.  The
    game, though, undermines that by giving the player the opportunity to tack happy
    endings of sorts on top of Masters' miniature tragedies, even though the very
    lack of tidy resolutions like these is sort of the point of Masters' work.  For
    Spoon River to work as a game, though, perhaps this conceit is necessary.

    Once she determines what needs to be done to satisfy each lost soul, the player
    will find some simple puzzles to solve to actually accomplish each good deed.
    None are particularly creative -- indeed, you will probably not remember the
    details of a single one five minutes after solving the game -- but, thankfully,
    none are obscure or unfair.  Working out what needs to be done and then solving
    the necessary puzzles together give a nice glow of accomplishment that keeps the
    player moving through the game, and that is more than enough.  Complicated brain
    twisters are just not what this one is about.

    Spoon River's geography is fairly expansive by modern standards.  In addition to
    the graveyard of lost souls, the player will also explore the deserted town of
    Spoon River itself, full of locations offering further insight into Masters'
    characters.  Of course, one could ask just why the town is deserted.  Where are
    the descendants of those in the graveyard?  Still, the emptiness suits the
    haunted, dreamlike nature of the work, so we will allow it its artistic license.

    Although implemented widely, Spoon River is not implemented very deeply.
    Scenery is generally non-manipulatible, and character interaction with the
    ghosts is rudimentary at best.  It does not really matter, though.  The
    implementation is generally good enough to accomplish the game's goals, and the
    player is never left at a loss for how to phrase a command or converse with
    others.  The game's non-Masters derived prose is similarly workmanlike, being
    competent but uninspired.  On the other hand, Masters' poetic skills are far
    from his greatest strength, and thus the game's prose and Masters' poetry do not
    clash horribly at all.  One could even attribute to the whole a certain
    rough-hewn charm.

    More disconcerting is the game's lack of overall polish.  It claims that there
    are 100 points available to be scored, but I saw no way of reaching even 70.
    Typos are not overwhelming, but they are there.  Worst of all is the game's
    ending, which seems hopelessly bugged.  A secret, "bonus" area is apparently
    supposed to open up once the player has put all of the souls at peace, but this
    does not happen.  Luckily, another bug means that the player can enter this area
    at any time, even on the first move of the game, so one need not miss anything.
    Still, I hope that a cleaned-up, bug-fixed release will be forthcoming at some
    point, as the game is definitely worth it.

    My biggest disappointment with Spoon River is that there is not more of it.
    Only a dozen or so of Masters' 200-plus stories are told here.  It is not a
    particularly small game by modern standards, and will probably give the careful
    player a good two or three hours of enjoyment, but I wanted to spend even more
    time in its, and Masters', world.  That is perhaps the best compliment I can pay
    to it.  I hope we will see more IF like it in the future, and encourage
    educators everywhere to give it a serious look for possible classroom use,
    particularly if some of its rough edges get a bit of polishing sometime soon.

    Zip containing the Zcode (.z8) game file, documentation and interpreters for Windows and Mac