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Game Reviews N

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The email addresses used are those submitted with the review, so naturally some of them may be out of date.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
    Narcolepsy
    Nevermore
    Necrotic Drift
    A New Day
    A New Life
    A Night At The Museum Forever
    9:05
    Ninja v1.30
    No Time To Squeal
    Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It
    Not Just A Game
    Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina
    Nothing More, Nothing Less

    Narcolepsy
    From: Jose Manuel Garcia-Patos <josemanuelinform SP@G josemanual-gp.jazztel.es>
    Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    TITLE: Narcolepsy
    AUTHOR: Adam Cadre
    EMAIL: acmail SP@G adamcadre.ac
    DATE: December, 2003
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Glulx interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/glulx/narco.zip

    VERSION: Version 1.07

    The first modern IF game that I ever played was I-0. I downloaded it because
    its description began with the words: Warning: sexually explicit. It actually
    wasn't that explicit, but I enjoyed it anyway, and I thought that its author,
    Adam Cadre, was someone whose career deserved to be followed. This was the year
    2001, or maybe 2002. So suffice to say I wasn't making any new nor slightly
    original discovery.

    But then there was nothing. I mostly forgot about him and his works. I decided
    I wanted to write my own games, so I had to learn Inform well enough as to
    accommodate it to the ideas I had. One of these ideas was this story that I
    wanted to tell in this particular non-linear way. One day, while I was already
    struggling with the program, a friend came home and asked me what I was working
    on, an so I told her. She inmediately said: `That looks a lot like Photopia.'
    `What's that?' `It's a piece of IF written by Adam Cadre. It's pretty good,
    though I missed the puzzles. It's almost puzzleless.' I am the optimistic kind,
    so I didn't let that bring me down. `I have another idea. It's completely
    different. In this one the PC dies several times before completing the game. I
    like it because it's stretching the limits of the genre, you know, the death of
    the PC as the real end of the game and all that.' `Oh', she said. `Oh, what?',
    I asked, surprised by her lack of amazement at my talent. `That's Shrapnel.'
    `Shrapnel?' `Another game by Adam Cadre.' `No shit.' `No shit at all.' `Oh.'
    Now I'm glad I didn't tell her about my last idea: a game in which the PC
    assumes to be someone that he later finds out he was not. Anyway, that was the
    moment when I began to hate Adam. And it explains too why I haven't written any
    games to date. I'm still waiting for an idea he hasn't had yet.

    Narcolepsy is my favorite IF game. And that's because it is, in a way, the
    ultimate game. It's not that I think you can't do any better, I just don't
    believe that anyone can make something substantially different with the current
    development tools. Adam (with the help of his collaborators) has not pushed the
    limits any further on this one, he just has reached them.

    So, let me get this straight, are you saying that IF has reached its limits
    with this game? No. What I'm saying is that certain development tools are
    finally falling short for IF writing.

    Look at books. Real books from your shelves. Do you think we have reached the
    limits of them as a form of expression? And they've been here for more than
    five hundred years (in their printed form). How could IF, which has been around
    for barely thirty, reach its own? I think we need new development tools, and we
    need to base them on a new paradigm, because all those that exist today have
    not been made with that idea in mind. Most have been designed following this
    reasoning: Well, I have Inform, but Inform has this limitation I want to
    overcome, so I'm gonna create my own system and it will let me do what I need.
    But what you want or need is not the ultimate frontier of IF. It's just
    Inform++.

    We need a paradigm, something that clearly defines what IF is and is not, and I
    think this should be the book. The real book. Remember some of the surrealists'
    works, remember Finnegans Wake. (I'm not talking about Literature here, but
    about aesthetics, about typography, about Fine Arts applied to the
    communication of the written word. Why can't I as an author place the elements
    of a game precisely on the screen and expect that every player could see what I
    intended them to see and just the way I wanted to independently of the device
    and platform the game is run on? Is it possible to write games in Greek, or
    even just words in exotic alphabets? How easy it is to translate a game?) Have
    we got that far yet? No. And we still should add the features that come with
    interactivity and computing. (Can you easily change the way the parser works so
    it can accept, for example, input in a programming language or even in an
    invented one?) So how can Narcolepsy be the end of IF? It just can't. It just
    can't. It's all a matter of freedom. If you're writing a book, you can't make a
    movie, but you still can decide if you want to write poetry or a novel or an
    essay or a play. Or mix formats or whatever. You know what you cannot do, you
    know your limits, but, inside those, you must be allowed to do what you want
    any way you want to and to do it easily. Right?

    But I digress, so let's get back to the game. In it you play a narcoleptic, and
    this gives the whole thing a surrealistic atmosphere. When you live in dreams
    as much time as you do in reality, almost everything that happens to you, no
    matter how strange, looks like normal, because your own situation is weirder.
    And that's the exact sensation you get when playing Narcolepsy. That you may be
    the only normal person in town and all the rest be weirdos, but, at the same
    time, if you're the only one who's normal, that means you're the weirdo.

    One question: Did any of you identify with the PC? I didn't, and that made me
    feel a kind of double-sided estrangement: one between the PC and his world, and
    the other between the PC and me. But it was a good thing, because it stimulated
    that sense of alienation the author --I think-- wants us to experience. Quick
    theoretical note: Is it important to feel identified with the PCs?

    On the technical side, the game is outstanding (I especially like the way he
    creates a complete and believable world without making the interaction too
    complicated, as it did happen --in my humble opinion-- in Slouching Towards
    Bedlam, for example). Probably the best thing about it, though, is that it is
    fun, tons of, as all his other games; the worst being that it is dumb. That's
    why most people will love it while they're playing, but will easily forget
    about it afterwards. So what?, you might say. Yeah, I guess it all depends on
    what you're looking for in a game. I, for one, would like to see ideas.
    Something I could take home, like I did with Photopia. Games with ideas are as
    scarce as hen's teeth, and they are not always the most praised ones.
    Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why it is impossible to talk about
    real IF criticism. Criticism's main goal is to promote discussion based on the
    contents of some artwork, discussion that may lead to the evolution of that
    form of art or even of our own lives. Something that is made only for fun can't
    be discussed, because it is intellectually void. You can't criticise The Da
    Vinci Code, because what would be the point? Would it make you wiser? Criticism
    is not meant as a recommendation ("Oh, I wanna go to the movies. Let's see what
    Roger Ebert says it's good.") just like wine is not meant to get you drunk. In
    its ideal form it should be read a posteriori so it could be a dialogue (or a
    monodialogue, as Unamuno put it) between the critic and the reader. A
    discussion. An enhancement of the pleasure of the game/book/movie/whatever. If
    there are no ideas in games, what can we say about them? Yeah, it was fun. I
    hope you agree. Yes, I do. Oh, great. Well, bye. Bye. Lack of ideas and lack of
    author's freedom. Those are the challenges the IF community (if such exists)
    should face in the foreseeable future. That is, if they want to call themselves
    artists and not just amateurs.

    IF is still in its teens, and we know only people like Mozart or Rimbaud have
    done something really valuable and mature in their teens.

    As for the author, I'll just say this: John Carpenter used to distinguish
    between two kinds of film directors: the Hitchcocks and the Hawks. His point
    was that in Hitchcock you can see what he's doing, you can see why he is so
    good; Howard Hawks, on the other hand, is just as good, but he's invisible.
    Adam Cadre is a Hitchcock. His brilliance is (mostly) in what you see. IF seems
    to be for him an intellectual game. What can I do now that hasn't been done
    yet? I wish he was not so brilliant, but more profound (what can I say now that
    hasn't been said yet?). I wish he was a Billy Wilder.

    Glulx executable

    Nevermore
    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #23 -- December 29, 2000

    TITLE: Nevermore
    AUTHOR: Nate Cull
    E-MAIL: culln SP@G xtra.co.nz
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/never/never.z5
    VERSION: Release 10

    Literary adaptation is an underpopulated IF genre, and Nate Cull's
    Nevermore is a thoughtful and well-intentioned attempt at bringing Poe's
    "The Raven" to the world of IF. While what emerges isn't a bad game,
    it's less the poem than a series of events in a similar setting with a
    somewhat similar mood, In other words, if you're a particular fan of the
    poem, you might not well not be a fan of this game.

    As it happens, I committed "The Raven" to memory when I was in seventh
    grade or so, and I still like the poem even though I've somewhat
    belatedly realized that it's not a very good poem. (It's been said that
    the popularity of Poe's poems varies inversely with their quality, and
    while that's not strictly true--he wrote some lousy poems that remain
    thoroughly obscure--the three Poe poems that are probably the best
    known, "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and "The Bells", are far from his
    best.) That is, I like it despite its repetitiveness and its tendency to
    use 20 words when two or three would do, simply because I like the drama
    of it. No one would ever call "The Highwayman" a great poem, but it's
    definitely a good ghost story in verse form that's well suited for being
    read aloud; ditto, I think, for "The Raven," and I still enjoy being
    able to recite it--and "The Highwayman" and others--from memory. So when
    I saw the initial premise of Nevermore, my first reaction was something
    between "Cool!" and disappointment that I hadn't gotten there first,
    because it was an idea I'd been kicking around (very casually). And when
    I saw that the game was using snippets from the poem but not binding the
    player to the text, I said, aha, perfect--use the poem's story, its
    strong point, but don't bind us to the text, which isn't its strong
    point. Just use the text for echo effect.

    It was about five moves into the game that the author's vision of the
    poem diverged from mine, however, and it continued to diverge more and
    more over the course of the game. This, in a sense, is good: had the
    author felt constrained not to offend fellow fans of the poem and
    slavishly followed the text, the result wouldn't have been much
    different from reading the text itself. But I had such a hard time
    squaring the author's vision with mine that before long I simply forgot
    the origin of the game and no longer associated it with my mental images
    of the setting as portrayed in the poem; it was just, in other words,
    another comp entry. This is partly because the plot of Nevermore
    involves elements like alchemy, pagan rituals, and lots of drugs, and it
    would have been an odd coincidence if both the author and I had imagined
    those things as part of a more fleshed-out story--but it's more that the
    mood differed from the mood as I imagined it. To take one among many
    examples, the protagonist of Nevermore takes cocaine approximately every
    20 moves; if you don't, you're told that "a dull, dark weariness drifts
    over you," which leads to death in a few moves if not corrected with
    cocaine (at which point "a sense of raw alertness rushes through your
    nerves, setting them all on edge"). It's certainly not implausible to
    view the mood of the poem's subject as more generally consistent with "a
    dull, dark weariness" than a cocaine-fueled "raw alertness," though--I
    mean, it's a pretty melancholy poem--and I simply couldn't fit the
    protagonist of Nevermore into my preconceived image. (Well, okay, the
    poem's subject summons up some energy toward the end, but there's an
    obvious cause that isn't cocaine.) In short, the author has his own
    rather distinctive vision of who the protagonist is and what the poem's
    about, and Your Mileage May Vary.

    All that aside, the game works reasonably well, though it's not
    flawless. The cocaine habit mentioned about doesn't add much to the
    game, and it recurs frequently enough to be irritating after a while.
    The puzzles also depend on a set of books that you're required to read,
    while is fine except that (a) the snippets in the books are randomized,
    so it's possible to miss one even if you've seen all the other snippets
    twice or more, and (b) the snippets are written in a sort of
    pseudo-medieval English that takes an awful lot of work to make sense
    of. (Impenetrable poetry I can deal with; impenetrable puzzle-solving
    instructions are more of a problem.) It's also easy to push the game
    into unwinnable states, and though there's a WINNABLE command (which
    informs you whether the game is presently in such a state), I would have
    preferred game design that simply makes it a little harder to screw up
    (or, better, is more forgiving when you do screw up). The opacity of the
    instructions also had me stumped for a while toward the end--it turned
    out that I'd left out a key step in the puzzle-solving and hadn't
    realized it (and there aren't really contextual hints that could suggest
    what you might have done wrong).

    This is sounding more negative than I mean to be, because there were
    parts of Nevermore that I genuinely enjoyed. The ending, for one thing,
    is terrific--dark and dripping with irony. (In that respect, quite
    faithful to Poe himself.) Some of the action turns on flashbacks, which
    also struck me as genuinely Poeish--a protagonist for whom the past is
    more real than the present absolutely belongs in this game. The writing
    is strong--economical and atmospheric--and the box quotes from Edgar are
    nicely placed (though, curiously, the last and most dramatic part of the
    poem is largely absent). The personality of the protagonist even felt
    right--an odd mix of sentimentality and obsessiveness.

    Nevermore does a lot of things right, and you could argue that it did as
    well as any work of IF could do in adapting this particular poem; it's
    certainly a worthy attempt. Through no fault of the game, however, it
    didn't really connect with me, and I gave it a 7 in the competition.

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

    Necrotic Drift
    From: Sam Kabo Ashwell <ska24 SP@G cam.ac.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #38 -- September 28, 2004

    TITLE: Necrotic Drift
    AUTHOR: Robb Sherwin
    EMAIL: beaver SP@G zombieworld.com
    DATE: 2004
    PARSER: Hugo
    SUPPORTS: Hugo interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/hugo/ndrift.zip
    VERSION: Release 1

    Necrotic Drift contains all the elements you'd expect of Robb --
    bittersweet schmaltz, randomised combat, human, sympathetic characters,
    tangential epigrammatic title, brilliant squick-out humour, big
    textdumps and a streak of geek a mile wide. There are plenty of
    references to previous Sherwin games, particularly Fallacy of Dawn and
    Chicks Dig Jerks. It's his biggest and most skilful game to date.

    Big, but linear. You have an intro section (near-isomorphic to the
    Fallacy of Dawn intro), then another intro, then a run-up, and *then*
    the game proper starts. After that, you have an endgame and an epilogue.
    At most significant steps, there will be a great big textdump; I don't
    object to these too much, but they certainly add to the game's apparent
    size. Nonetheless, it plays relatively quickly; most of the puzzles are
    pretty straightforward, and the game gives you a pretty good idea about
    what you should be aiming at next. (Sometimes this is a little
    heavy-handed, as in the bit where an ally starts clearing a barrier and
    suggests you look around for items that might be useful beyond said
    barrier; generally they're pretty good, though).

    Compared to previous games of Robb's, it's much more technically sturdy;
    not too many awfully obscure puzzles, no jagged edges a betatester
    should have caught, better implementation all-round. The old problems
    are still there, though; the one item you need to use in a room is
    generally strikingly prominent, scenery objects are often very flat and
    unresponsive. Of course, the scenery is brought alive very well in room
    descriptions and so on -- it just doesn't handle interactive poking
    around too well. One or two puzzles seemed very illogical or badly
    flagged up, and I underwent a lot of frustrating death at one point
    before seeking out hints; most were along the lines of 'you just found
    this item so it must be the one for the next puzzle'. I also note that
    Sherwin has at last developed his combat system above the 'I attack, but
    miss, the skeleton! The skeleton attacks and hits me!' level that so
    thoroughly killed A Crimson Spring, albeit only to add amusingly awkward
    battle-cries. Of course, since the thing is a D&D parody, formulaic
    combat descriptions are par for the course. I doubt it'd lose much to
    audiences unfamiliar with D&D, however; everything that needs to be
    explained is explained, and there are contextual jokes but not really
    any in-jokes.

    The game managed to convey a pretty damn good feeling of the urgency of
    the situation and the trepidation about moving into unknown areas. On
    the other hand, when the annoyingly low inventory limit forced you to
    scuttle back and forth looking for abandoned items at far corners of the
    mall, this effect was lost somewhat. (This also tended to happen during
    Dramatic Confrontations, which were kind of undermined by having the
    ability to run off and come back multiple times). There's a principle in
    IF theory that, in character-driven games, descriptive writing should
    convey as much about the character and his world as about the object
    described; this game goes joyously and superbly over the top with this
    principle. This compensates for the lack of physical detail to a great
    extent. The confinement and triviality of the Mall (and the intimate
    knowledge Duffy has of it) give us a very good idea of how narrow
    Duffy's horizons are. While in FoD New Haz felt like a sprawling
    metropolis or at least a very big town, here it feels like a
    claustrophobic little dead-end.

    The multimedia works and it doesn't work. The use of images has improved
    significantly; in FoD, the images were used kind of inconsistently, with
    some inventory items having objects and others not. In ND they're
    sharper and better used. There are a great many images, they contribute
    greatly towards setting the mood and establishing characters, and it's
    obvious that a monumental amount of care and effort has gone into them.
    Some images of characters still seems a little awkward and
    obviously-posed, however. Subject-matter makes things tougher, too --
    even if you've got a multi-million CGI and modelling team behind you, if
    you're depicting the undead you've only got a one in three chance that
    it won't look ludicrous. Given that, much of this was pretty impressive,
    and where it was cheesy it was forgivable.

    The use of music wasn't as good. I found it kept fading out into
    nothing, and then when a new piece of music was triggered it'd cut in
    jarringly. I get the distinct impression that Robb, like quite a few
    other authors, is trying to use IF as a poor man's cinema; perhaps
    consciously so. The thing is, music is hard to get right with IF. Both
    are non-static media, but IF's non-static nature is interspersed with
    static blocks of reading time, particularly in this game. You'll get a
    dramatic chord and -- whoa, a zombie image! -- but you'll have read down
    three lines of text before the zombie *actually* jumps you. It's like
    watching a movie where the dialogue is properly in sync but the music is
    a few beats off. I think music has applications to IF, potentially, and
    I can see that this is more or less going in the right direction -- it's
    aimed at atmospheric background mood-setting stuff, and as such it's
    well-chosen. Those cut-ins need work, though I don't know how you'd
    manage that ideally.

    The Love Interest is, zombies aside, the real focus of the story, and
    it's handled well. It becomes pretty obvious that undead-fighting --
    much like D&D -- is a great excuse for Duffy to ignore his relationship
    crisis. The relationship stuff isn't deeply original or earthshakingly
    moving, but it's very human. It works least well, perhaps, at the more
    tender moments -- much like the protagonist's life-affirming speech to
    the demon wherein he explains why he plays D&D. Sherwin is eminently
    comfortable with crafting humour, but it feels that there's less craft
    in the heartfelt stuff. No shame in that; writing heartfelt stuff is
    hard. The typical authorial error (thinking heartfelt stuff needs *less*
    craft because it's heartfelt) doesn't look as if it's been committed
    here, but I think this is an area that could do with being addressed.
    Modern audiences have been saturated with tacky pop-culture
    representations of the subject; it's a cliche minefield. Re-used phrases
    and sentiments seethe around it. They need to be avoided like the
    plague.

    I played in tandem with Jacqueline Lott; she objected vehemently to the
    unavoidable ending. The problem I have with it is that the emotional
    guts of the piece are kept at arm's length from the player, either
    entrenched in the middle of big passages of text or as involuntary
    actions. For Jacqueline, this was annoying because you couldn't
    influence the outcome; for me, it was annoying because it made me less
    involved with the outcome and hence cared less about it. Inevitable
    outcomes are fine in my book, but the bulk of an IF story (and hence its
    major developments) should really be interactive.

    Now, I loved Fallacy of Dawn to bits, and this is clearly a better game,
    on many many levels, than Fallacy of Dawn. (Sorry for going on and on
    with the comparisons, but this game invites comparisons, plies them with
    hors d'oeuvres and wine, and then suggests an S&M orgy to them once
    they're good and drunk). So why do I feel more indifferent towards
    Necrotic? Mostly, I think, because it's not enough of a departure. We
    have crudely wisecracking geeks in a grimy, dystopic future,
    well-employed graphics, a sassy girlfriend and a crass best buddy who
    follow us about... to be honest, it feels more like a liberal remake
    than a sequel. And y'know how remakes are never looked on as fondly even
    if they're technically superior? Right.

    From: Jeff Howell <howell.jeff SP@G gmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #38 -- September 28, 2004

    The first thing a potential player is likely to notice about Necrotic
    Drift is its size. 38MB is a huge filesize for what we've become used to
    thinking of as 'text adventures'. It's worth the download if you've got
    even reasonably fast dial-up, and anyone with broadband shouldn't even
    be thinking twice about it. Included in this package is a .pdf manual,
    presented as a copy of 'Which Witch?' magazine. It's a nice feelie, and
    although the language is needlessly colorful in parts, is good for a
    chuckle. Instructions for playing the game are included in the .pdf, and
    integrated nicely as part of the magazine.

    The game starts off fairly slowly. The opening scenes really don't mesh
    well with the rest of the game, and some of the dialogue and two of the
    main character's friends are truly unpleasant. I can see the point to
    some of what goes on here: it does establish some of Jarret's (the main
    character) personality and his situation in life. All of this is in
    retrospect, though. At the time, it just felt sort of forced,
    occasionally amusing, and largely pointless. The beginning of a game
    should grab a player's interest, not make them think "I'll give it a few
    more turns to see if anything more interesting happens." The game does
    pick up nicely, thankfully. The writing is superior after the slow
    start, and both the audio and graphical aspects, not normally seen in
    IF, add a great deal to the experience.

    At its most basic, Necrotic Drift is Survival Horror in IF style. Jarret
    can only take so much damage before the game ends, and there are a
    number of 'surprise' attacks in darkened corridors. But there's a lot
    more here than blasting everything in sight, primarily because standard
    weapons aren't in great supply. This is IF, and in IF, puzzles rule.
    There are specific ways to get past every obstacle, all very logical,
    but all requiring that the player pay very close attention. There's a
    lot to notice, many small details that the author has added that really
    add to the atmosphere of the game, and many of those are important. More
    than likely, you won't manage to get through on the first attempt, but
    that makes success that much more satisfying when it comes.

    None of the puzzles are all that difficult on a second attempt, if the
    player is paying attention, but that's not really the point of the game.
    The conversations and encounters drive what is, at it's heart, a story
    about relationships. There's as much being said here about loss, love,
    and friendship as there is about beasts that go bump in the night, and
    that's what really marks Necrotic Drift as a superior game. The plot is
    linear, and there seem to be some unavoidably tragic parts, but that's
    okay. The story is a quality one and if there's some sadness to go along
    with that, well, sometimes a bit of sorrow is necessary to make the
    happiness seem that much more valuable.

    Zip archive with Hugo game file, graphics, and music

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

    NAME: A New Day
    AUTHOR: Jonathan Fry
    E-MAIL: jfry SP@G skidmore.edu
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/newday/newday.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    PLOT: Interesting but uneven (1.2)     ATMOSPHERE: Er, not much (1.0)
    WRITING: Fairly good (1.2)          GAMEPLAY: Frustrating in spots (0.8)
    CHARACTERS: One very good one (1.3)   PUZZLES: Nothing special (0.9)
    MISC: Very interesting idea (1.3)
    OVERALL: 5.5

    Jonathan Fry's A New Day is another in a fairly long list of games
    that were nice in theory but not a real joy to play. Though the
    premise is interesting and though the plot is well-designed, mostly,
    the challenges of A New Day felt more like annoyances, and I never
    really got into the game.

    The plot, in all its self-referential glory: you are venturing
    into/playing a partially completed text adventure whose author, one
    Jonathan Fry, has died mysteriously; you confront a sentient being
    named Winston who seems to be running the show inside Jonathan's
    computer. The "incomplete" element means that objects are there but
    not mentioned, and some room descriptions are entirely absent or very
    terse. Even if you understand what you're doing in the game -- not all
    that likely -- it's still hard to make any sense of what you, the
    player, are supposed to do next, since you don't get much direction;
    as is typical, you are tossed into settings and given things to
    do. (As has been pointed out, there is a built-in excuse here for
    flaws in the game -- "it's an unfinished game, dummy" -- but I assume
    that Mr. Fry won't take refuge in that.)

    There are some problems that can't be put down to the unfinished-game
    element, though, like a location requiring that the player SEARCH
    three times -- finding something on the first and third times but not
    on the second (and, obviously, no clue that there's something more
    when you search the second time). Syntax for getting a cat across a
    street is rather unlikely, and the solution to a puzzle involving a
    guard assumes considerable stupidity on the guard's part. And try as I
    might, I could _not_ visualize the last puzzle, nor figure out why the
    solution suggested by the hints was correct.

    One of the more interesting decisions that Mr. Fry made was to make
    one of the sections of the game simulate a software crash of sorts, so
    that the text comes out garbled -- or, I should say, @#$^ s@#$ft@#@e
    cr@#!sh s} th8723 the t523xt c&*@es @%@#$t ga^%23482@(*bled. I
    exaggerate only slightly -- a sample sentence:

        Spli0LAS99x
        Broken gla31s and dsi8 wiring de76f746t the deca##]
        wo_)2den49053en walls of this room.

    There are very few moments in IF that I have wanted to be over as
    quickly as I wanted this one to be over, and, unfortunately, it took a
    while to end, since there's a not-all-that-intuitive puzzle to solve
    that assumes you have VERY sharp eyes. All this gets points for
    verisimilitude, I guess, but giving the player a headache is not the
    sort of verisimilitude we're striving for, nor even the k2342nd of
    veris27@#^@^@#de we're str][;,ving for.

    A New Day is, for the most part, technically proficient; other than
    the unfairnesses mentioned above, there aren't many design problems,
    and no bugs at all as far as I could tell. Somehow, though, I didn't
    enjoy it; I didn't feel like the plot went anywhere, and the story
    felt uninvolving.  Well, the plot did go somewhere, true, but it
    didn't precisely progress there; you're given a situation at the
    beginning, you do a bunch of things that don't relate directly to the
    situation, and then the situation changes suddenly at the end. Perhaps
    some hints at the final revelation -- perhaps things that you discover
    along the way that point to it, rather than having it all dumped on
    you without warning -- might help in that respect; for me, that
    development was a sort of "oh, really?" bit. I hadn't really been
    thinking about it, to be honest, as I'd been busy trying to solve
    unrelated puzzles. If the idea is to figure out how Fry died, it might
    be good to have some of the puzzles actually concern him or the
    setting of his death, lest the whole thing feel disconnected. (I
    recognize that the behavior of a certain character may be intended to
    point to that, but it didn't really work for me.)

    My, I do seem to be complaining, don't I? There are plenty of
    well-done things about A New Day as well. The ending feels genuinely
    suspenseful -- though a little mysterious, since you have very little
    idea of what's going on. There are multiple solutions to several
    puzzles, a welcome touch, though I admit I only found a few. At one
    point, you get bad advice from an NPC, and though normally it would
    feel unfair to do something like this -- when there's no obvious
    reason not to trust the NPC -- it works well here, I found. (At least,
    I was sufficiently unsure about the NPC not to take the advice.) One
    puzzle involving crossing a street breaks IF conventions in a
    thoroughly welcome way; it does something that seems like common sense
    but is almost never actually implemented, and I was glad that this
    game rewarded common sense (though, for those who have been playing IF
    for a while, it's actually not common sense anymore). More generally,
    the idea is well-thought-out and intriguing, even if I never got into
    the plot, and there's potential for a much longer and more- involved
    game where the plot might move along better. At least, it seems so to
    me; it seems like there's much that can be done with exploring a
    computer. (Find a file directory tree and chop it down. Hee hee hee.)
    Though this particular effort is a little short (though I shouldn't
    fault Mr. Fry for obeying the two-hour limit, I know), it has ideas
    that could make a longer game quite intriguing.

    Even so, there are difficulties in A New Day that, while not fatal to
    its playability, made it less than enjoyable for me; perhaps it's a
    matter of taste, but I don't claim to be sufficiently objective to
    transcend these things. Though this is a good effort, and Mr. Fry is
    clearly a good programmer, I gave this one a 6 on the competition
    scale.

    Inform file (.z5) (updated version)

    Inform file (.z5) (competition version)

    A New Life
    From: Mike Snyder <wyndo SP@G prowler-pro.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    TITLE: A New Life
    AUTHOR: Alexandre Owen Muñz
    EMAIL: munizao SP@G xprt.net
    DATE: October 1, 2005
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2005/zcode/goblin/
    goblin.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Once again, I have jumped ahead to a game later in my list. This time, it’s
    because A New Life was recommended to me. If I really won’t have time to finish
    all the games before November 15th, I might as well take them in any order,
    right?

    I’ll probably go back to the list now. I enjoyed this game, but I found it
    incredibly difficult. Maybe it’s just me and my sub-par puzzle-solving
    abilities, but I was only able to complete the game down the path set by the
    walkthrough. I was already over two hours into the game my own way, using the
    built-in hint system more and more, and I had exhausted all of those options. I
    may have been in an unwinnable state. I’m not sure.

    It’s a very unique story, hinting at parallel realities and mythical races
    where a person’s gender can be changed from time to time. While playing, I kept
    wondering if the goblins were really humans and vice-versa, but this was never
    confirmed. A New Life has a lot going on, and much of it surfaces as memories
    (a “remember” command does this), or as considerations when examining scenery
    or talking to the game’s characters. The back-story is an epic tapestry of
    magic and mystery. Much of the fun comes from learning more and more about the
    unique world in which the game is set, and about the people who inhabit it.

    The biggest problem is, it’s sometimes (okay, often times) unclear what to do
    without getting pointers from the hints. Even then, it can be a little
    confusing. This is the kind of game that would be great outside the competition,
    where it might be played over the course of three or four nights without that
    two-hour mark looming ahead. I think it would be more rewarding taken at
    leisure. I spent three hours on it, and the last of that was just typing from
    the walkthrough. My original path might have been interesting, if I had been
    able to figure it out. The thing with the three bags and the two staffs was
    pretty clever, but even putting them to use, I never quite felt as though I had
    solved everything. On my own plot branch, I couldn’t figure out what was
    important about the stars and panels, even though I could make them light up as
    described in the hints.

    This is either a really great game I just didn’t fully understand, or a pretty
    average game that does a great job of seeming to be a really great game I
    didn’t fully understand. If taken without recommendation, I might have based it
    at 6.5 or 7.0 – lower because of the complicated puzzles, and the lack of clear
    objectives. This is the trap we fall into when judging a game we know is or
    isn’t liked by others. If I’m to trust in someone else’s opinion, I have to
    believe the game is better than it seems. And now it’s my turn, to pass my
    opinion along to others by way of this review.

    The writing in A New Life is excellent. This is one of the few games where the
    text just flowed right. It wasn’t forced, it wasn’t overdone, and it wasn’t
    choppy. Good writing makes a game seem more real, and when the unique world
    seems to be the focus, that’s important. This is the basis for my +0.5 skew,
    from a base of 7.5. A New Life may fare well in the competition. It’s a good
    enough game: worth the time, but not my favorite. I recommend playing it
    without expecting an easy, two-hour experience. Don’t rush, ease into it with
    exploration and experimentation (looking, remembering, asking), and you’re
    likely to have a great time.

    Zcode executable (.z5)
    Walkthrough

    A Night At The Museum Forever
    From: Magnus Olsson <mol SP@G df.lth.se>
    Review appeared in SPAG #7 -- October 14, 1995

      Name: A Night At The Museum Forever     Parser: TADS
      Author: Chris Angelini                  Plot: Linear, rather clever
      Email: cangelin SP@G uoguelph.ca             Atmosphere: Weak
      Availability: F, IF Archive                    Writing: Adequate
      Puzzles: Simple, not too original       Supports: TADS ports
      Characters: None                        Difficulty: Quite simple

    This game has been endowed with a slightly misleading title: it does
    take place in a museum, but neither in one night or forever - three
    thousand years would be more appropriate! The museum is a strange one
    indeed: a temporal museum, with exhibits collected from both the past
    and the future. Abandoned for a thousand years, it has been ransacked and
    all the exhibits stolen.  All the exhibits, that is, but one. A priceless
    diamond ring remains, and it is your mission to retrieve it, a task which
    is harder than it seems, since the ring's presence involves a temporal
    paradox.  Fortunately, the museum's time machine is still in working
    order...

    Resolving the paradox and retrieving the ring isn't that difficult;
    in fact, the game is quite small and easy, just as the competition
    entries should be. Both in style and execution it's quite similar to
    an early Infocom game (a treasure hunt through a deserted house
    containing some interesting gadgets as well as more commonplace
    objects, all conveniently placed where you can find them). The writing
    is not quite up to Infocom's standards, but quite adequate; the
    puzzles may not be very original but are clever and logical; the plot
    is simple but quite clever and the time travel is handled nicely.

    My only big complaint about the game is its almost total lack of
    atmosphere. After all, you're exploring a mysterious, deserted museum
    where many explorers/looters before you have vanished in a temporal
    paradox, you're travelling thousands of years back and forward in
    time, and yet the author conveys almost no sense of wonder. It's almost
    as if the hero would say "OK, so I've resolved a temporal paradox
    and retrieved a priceless ring before lunch today. Maybe I should take
    the dog for a walk this afternoon?"

    In some circumstances, leaving the museum leads to sudden death. This
    may be motivated by the plot, and anyway you can undo. What's worse,
    however, is that leaving the museum under certain other circumstances
    will cause the game to think you want to quit, and you're just taken
    out of the program without even the chance to undo.  This is really a
    Bad Thing since it's easy to take a wrong turn in the corridors - it
    happened several times to me.

    Despite these complaints, the game is quite clever and enjoyable. It
    nicely meets the One Rule of the contest: to be solvable in two hours,
    which is more than one can say for most of the more sophisticated
    entries.

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

      NAME: A Night at the Museum Forever     PARSER: TADS's usual
      AUTHOR: Chris Angelini                  PLOT: None
      EMAIL: cangelin SP@G uoguelph.ca             ATMOSPHERE: Poor
      AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive             WRITING: Poor
      PUZZLES: Not very logical               SUPPORTS: TADS ports
      CHARACTERS: None                        DIFFICULTY: Impossible

    I didn't enjoy playing this at all.  Ninety percent of the game seemed
    to consist of tramping back and forth along the corridor in the
    different time zones, and the remaining ten percent was somewhat dull.
    No people, no interesting puzzles, no colourful background, no
    awe-inspiring future technology, nothing.  The game seems to have not
    been playtested, and it raises rather more questions than it answers.

    Why is the McGuffin something as prosaic as a diamond ring in a game
    wanting for colour, when it could have been an exciting Heechee (tm)
    gadget with miraculous properties?  Is the coal/diamond puzzle a
    reference to "Zork I," or is it just serendipity?  And anyway, how on
    earth did the coal turn into a diamond when it was just buried in a hole
    for 2000 years?  Why is there a starvation time limit when there is no
    food in the game?  Is this just the infamous "TADS has starvation and
    sleep deprivation time limits unless you explicitly turn them off" bug,
    or is it deliberate?  Why does the walkthrough think I can refer to the
    "glass cover" as a "case"?  And so on.

    TADS .gam File w/ Walkthrough (.zip)

    9:05
    From: Michael Macwilliam <m.macwilliam SP@G virgin.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Inform .z5 file

    Brief notes on 9:05, by the author

    PC Executable

    Ninja v1.30
    From: Carolyn Magruder <carolynmagruder SP@G yahoo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #39 -- January 7, 2005

    TITLE: Ninja v1.30
    AUTHOR: Paul Panks
    EMAIL: dunric SP@G yahoo.com
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Rudimentary
    SUPPORTS: DOS/Windows
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/windows/ninja/ninja.exe
    VERSION: 1.30

    Score: 1 out of 10.

    I started to write a rather cruel review, which started, "Why? Was there
    a point? If so, what was it?" Then it abruptly occurred to me that there
    might be a walkthrough, so I went looking for it. There wasn't one, but
    the associated text file cued me off to the idea that "enter shrine"
    might be different than "go shrine". Sure enough, it was, and I entered
    the shrine. Shortly afterward, I won the game. (Trust me... it doesn't
    take much.) So there was a point. Sort of.

    You start in an ungrammatical, boring room, which includes a shrine that
    you cannot enter and mountains that are too far away even to be
    examined. Aside from various peculiarities of syntax and parsing, there
    is one painfully obvious puzzle to be solved. I solved it. I won, or, at
    least, I think I did. It didn't help that the game changed its idea of
    what the maximum possible score was each time that I played it. I never
    got the maximum possible score, but the part where an object disappeared
    from existence after I picked it up may have something to do with it.

    As well as the issues that were specific to the game, the system had
    some issues of its own. I recommend Inform, TADS, HUGO, ADRIFT, or any
    other developed and well-tested system to the author. This home-grown
    system has to go. It kept flashing "20" on my input line past a certain
    point, and it had lag on my input. Bleah!

    I can't recommend playing this game for any reason.

    Directory with PC executable, BASIC source code, and readme

    No Time To Squeal
    From: Stephen Bond <bonds SP@G maths.tcd.ie>
    Review appeared in SPAG #27 -- January 4, 2002

    TITLE: No Time To Squeal
    AUTHOR: Robb Sherwin and Mike Sousa
    E-MAIL: beaver SP@G zombieworld.com, mjs SP@G rss.com
    DATE: October 2001
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/tads/ntts/ntts.gam
    VERSION: Release 1.0

    When I play a Robb Sherwin game, I expect to see loads of ass-kicking
    dialogue and inspired, crazed imagery. So the opening of this game was
    quite a surprise: it all seemed strangely calm and muted, and even
    dangerously close to being boring. But not so close that I stopped
    playing immediately. As it turned out, the muted style is appropriate
    for the fairly sombre events of the first section.

    There is a lot of character-establishing text at the start, maybe too
    much, but it was effective in drawing me into the role. After a while I
    really became the PC. I wanted to make that deal, I was genuinely
    shocked at seeing my wife unconscious, I genuinely wanted to save the
    baby. That the game was able to make me feel that way shows it was doing
    something right.

    But then, after the second section, I stopped playing. Why? Maybe it's
    something to do with the 'you die, then restart' gimmick. After spending
    all that time in one character, suddenly I'm wrenched out and thrust
    into a new one, and I have to go through the whole process of getting to
    know them again. And that just seems too tiring. On the face of it, the
    PC-changing in this game is not too different from the PC-changing in
    Photopia: but in Photopia, the breaks between PCs were cleaner and more
    fluid than the ones here, and they happened regularly enough that I
    didn't feel disoriented every time the character changed.

    Skimming through the walkthrough, it looks like there is a lot of stuff
    that I missed in this game, though, so maybe I'll come back to it
    sometime.

    Directory with TADS .gam file and readme

    Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995

      NAME:  Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It
                                          GAMEPLAY:  Infocom Standard
      AUTHOR:  Jeff O'Neill               PLOT:  Very Good
      EMAIL:  ?                           ATMOSPHERE:  Excellent
      AVAILABILITY:  LTOI 2               WRITING:  Excellent
      PUZZLES:  Very Good                 SUPPORTS:  Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS:  Very Good              DIFFICULTY:  Standard

            Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It is a collection of
    interactive short stories, all revolving around the common theme of restoring
    the town of Punster, and based on the idea that you can alter the nature of
    reality merely by engaging in wordplay with it.
            The concept is difficult to explain, so some examples from the game's
    sample transcript may illustrate it without giving away any of the actual
    story.  You wake up, knocking over your alarm clock and a glass of water.
    The only way to avoid the debris is to get up on the wrong side of the bed.
    Asked to mail your father's tax return, you discover you can't find it.  But
    that scruffy guy in the corner with the IRS tee shirt, who you're told is
    barely male can be transmogrified with the homonym "mail". The return isn't
    stamped?  You can fix that by Spoonerizing your father's stone lamp into a
    lone stamp.  And so on.
            To prevent this from becoming incredibly confusing, each short story
    deals with only one specific type of wordplay.  The stories can be played in
    any order, except for Meet the Mayor, which must come last.
            The parser is a bit better than the usual Infocom one.  Compass
    directions and mapping are dispensed with entirely, as the Status Line
    constantly lists all the areas that you can travel directly to.  As the maps
    are generally small (one story has only two locations), the map can be easily
    internalized in the player's mind.
            The puzzles are not the very best.  The nature of such a game means
    that many of the puzzles will be of the "guess what the author is thinking"
    type.  Also, since the puzzles don't necessarily build on each other, but
    often stand separately, you may finish a story only to be told that there
    were more things you could have done, and be forced to return later.
    However, since ALL versions of Nord & Bert have on-screen hints, there is no
    chance of getting permanently stuck.
            The real strength of the game is in its Writing and Atmosphere.  The
    mood created is delightfully surreal, and the constant clever descriptions
    and responses make this one of the best "reading" text games ever produced.
    Text game players like to argue that well-written text produces more
    evocative images than graphic games do.  Nord and Bert goes beyond this, not
    merely doing things BETTER than a graphics game could, but doing things that
    a graphics game could never do at all.  Definitely one of Infocom's most
    underrated classics.

    Solution (Text)

    Not Just A Game
    From: Duncan Stevens <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Inform .z5 file

    Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina
    From: Karen Tyers <karvic SP@G btinternet.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From: Duncan Stevens <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

               FLOGG & GRABBY'S STUFFTOWN
                        EST. 1974

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

    ...to faintly silly:

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

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

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

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

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

    Inform .z8 file

    Nothing More, Nothing Less
    From: Francesco Bova <fbova SP@G pangea.ca>
    Review appeared in SPAG #25 -- June 20, 2001

    NAME: Nothing More, Nothing Less
    AUTHOR: Gilles Duchesne
    EMAIL: lonecleric SP@G bigfoot.com
    DATE: February, 2001
    PARSER: Hugo
    SUPPORTS: Hugo interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    VERSION: 1.21
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/hugo/NMNL.hex

    Nothing More, Nothing Less (NMNL) was a late entry to the 2001
    SmoochieComp by a first-time author who, in his own words, "used the
    SmoochieComp as an excuse to learn an IF language", so as you might
    expect there were some first time growing pains and perhaps a few
    awkward game design choices, and I hope that the author takes the
    following review as the constructive criticism that it is intended to
    be. To his credit, the author attempts a few novel game design
    initiatives and that's what I'll be focusing on for the first part of
    this review.

    NMNL is a fairly small game that takes place in the protagonist's (and
    most likely the author's) small apartment, with the usual rooms (i.e.,
    bedroom, bathroom, living room) accounted for. There is no use of
    cardinal directions in the game. Movement through the apartment is
    simply done through the typing in of room titles. I found this fairly
    easy to get used to, even though I've grown accustomed to mapping out a
    landscape in my head with the use of cardinal directions. The room
    descriptions are fairly succinct, describing the basic necessities of
    life that surround the PC and his girlfriend, but room descriptions
    change depending on what challenge the PC is facing. No doubt, this is
    an attempt by the author to clue the player in to a certain problem by
    bringing current dilemmas to the foreground of the player's perception.
    For example, during a section of the game involving the PC's
    girlfriend's cat, the living room changes from this:

       Living Room
       This is the part of the apartment in which I spend most of my waking
       hours. This is due to three important pieces of furniture here: the
       large oak desk that holds my much-used computer; the TV, favorite
       appliance of my beloved after a long day a work; and the futon which
       we both like to cuddle upon.

    TO

       Living Room
       This is the place where my girlfriend's evil cat sleeps... when it's
       the least convenient, of course. From here, I can reach the kitchen,
       the dining room, and the hallway.

    Not a big deal, right? Except, there's no longer any mention of the TV,
    computer or futon; all objects which are still in scope but aren't
    described in the room's current description. In certain rooms, you have
    to manipulate some of these "hidden" objects to boot. When I ran into
    the repeated problem of trying to remember what had been in each room
    the only remedy was to save my position, restart the game, get a good
    look at what was in each room, then use that prior knowledge during my
    saved game. Thankfully, the game was only a few rooms big so the saving
    and restoring wasn't too overwhelming. Still, it was probably more
    trouble than it should've been.

    Another interesting game design choice involved progressively revealing
    items of importance throughout the course of the game. So, for example,
    a cursory look in a certain room may not reveal much of interest the
    first time around, but another look a few turns later may reveal
    something new and useful. Other reviewers of NMNL have enjoyed this
    feature, but I found it kind of tedious. I'm of the opinion that if
    something's in scope at the beginning of the game and hasn't been
    manipulated somehow then it should always be in scope. What ended up
    happening when I faced a challenge was that I'd just type in each room
    name, take a look around, and mysteriously bump into what I needed.
    Again not a big deal, but from a playing experience I could effectively
    turn my brain off until I stumbled into what I needed and as a result,
    it wasn't as much fun as it might have been.

    The game's focus was unfortunately a little off-kilter, too, for what is
    an extremely linear game. When the intro tells me my goal is to bring in
    a photo receipt (which incidentally, is the ultimate goal of NMNL),
    that's generally what I'm aiming to do, but every time I tried to exit
    my apartment the game would come back with an, "Oh, wait you forgot to
    do ". This again isn't a big deal
    but perhaps a smoother game design would have had one puzzle finishing
    then linking to the beginning of another puzzle, as opposed to
    segregating them.

    There is also a novel hint system included which spirits you away to a
    car being driven by the author and his girlfriend where you can ask or
    tell the author about a subject and get responses. Unfortunately the
    responses aren't terribly helpful; more descriptions about objects than
    a nudge in right direction. The hint system actually serves more as a
    backdrop for some banter between the author and his girlfriend where we
    learn about the author's experience concerning the city he lives in,
    participation in the IF community, and other more menial activities.
    Inadvertently most likely, the author also designed the hint system so
    that I, for the life of me, couldn't find my way out of it. Typing in
    random words finally got me to 'PLAY', which kicked me back into the
    game.

    So, to sum up so far: Some interesting game design choices, some of
    which were not overwhelming successes but most of which I'd certainly
    applaud as a good attempt at something novel. Outside of the game's
    infrastructure though, how does the game stack up in the prose and plot
    department? Well before I address those areas, I'd like to do something
    they taught us never to do back in IF Review school: I would like to
    discuss the author as opposed to the game and to start off, I'd like to
    make the assumption that you the protagonist are in fact the author.
    Where does this assumption come from? Well number one, all the responses
    are cast in the first person as opposed to the second and two, the
    familiar tone of the work when the author describes his surrounding
    would indicate to me that he's talking about himself.

    If this assumption was in fact the author's intent, then I think it's
    also fair to say that the author is pretty crazy about his girlfriend.
    The initial indications come from the banter between the author and his
    girlfriend during the hint system piece but the real proof comes from
    the fact that almost every object description is framed by how it
    relates to her. For example, look at the following:

       >examine bed
       It's a big a comfy bed, with plenty of space for us both. Even if my
       beloved wasn't living here when I bought it, I thought I should play
       safe... and I was right. She moves a lot during her sleep, you know?
       (Well, come to think of it, I don't think I want you to know.)

    OR

       >examine sink
       I basically need to use this sink for four things: washing my teeth,
       combing my hair, washing my hands and... oh, make that three things.
       I used to shave daily, but in the recent weeks my beloved has taken a
       fancy to the bearded look, and I have been willing to oblige her.

    Boy that's sweet; sugary, feeling-it-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach sweet.
    Which of course is completely acceptable for a SmoochieComp game, but
    would get to be a bit much for me personally were it just a normal
    non-thematically based release. The game is so sweet in fact, that it
    reads to me more like a homage to the author's girlfriend with the plot
    and puzzles added after the fact as simple window dressing. There is of
    course absolutely nothing wrong with that, but the personal nature of
    the piece may not be to everybody's taste. Now to really go out on a
    limb, considering the release date for the SmoochieComp games (February
    14th), I think it may also be the case that this platform experiment
    turned out to be a pretty nice valentine for someone special.

    It could also be the case that I'm assuming way too much and we all know
    that when people assume: they make an 'ass' out of 'u' and 'me', so
    maybe I should stop before I get myself into too much trouble. To wrap
    up then: NMNL as far as a piece of first-time IF and platform experiment
    is pretty average and pretty much what I'd expect, to be honest, but as
    a publicly accessible piece that expresses love for someone special
    (which I believe, perhaps incorrectly, NMNL to be) NMNL is mostly a
    success, and one a few of us could probably take some lessons from.

    Hugo .hex file

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