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Game Reviews P

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The email addresses used are those submitted with the review, so naturally some of them may be out of date.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
    Paint!!!
    Pantomime
    Pass the Banana
    The Windhall Chronicles I: Path To Fortune
    The Pawn
    Perdition's Flames
    Perilous Magic
    Persistence of Memory
    Phantom: Caverns of the Killer
    Phlegm
    Photograph
    Photopia
    Phred Phontious and the Quest for Pizza
    Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle
    Pick Up the Phone Booth and Dye
    Piece Of Mind
    Pirate Adventure
    The PK Girl
    Plague Planet
    The Plague (Redux)
    Planet Of The Infinite Minds
    Planetfall
    The Plant
    Plundered Hearts
    Poor Zefron's Almanac
    The Potter and the Mould
    Prized Possession
    Prodly The Puffin
    Promoted!
    Provenance
    Punkirita Quest One: Liquid
    Purple
    The Pyramids of Mars
    Pytho's Mask

    Paint!!!
    From: Laurence Moore <laurence SP@G turntopage.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #40 -- April 12, 2005

    TITLE: Paint!!!
    AUTHOR: David Whyld
    EMAIL: me SP@G dwhyld.plus.com
    DATE: 2004
    PARSER: Standard
    SUPPORTS: Adrift
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/adrift/Paint.taf
    VERSION: Release 1

    Paint was originally intended for a one-room competition but that was
    aborted due to a lack of entries. In fact, only two games emerged: The
    Last Hour and Paint. You certainly couldn't find a bigger gap between
    the two.

    Initially, I thought that the one room concept would be impossible to
    work with (as a writer) and surely dull to play (as a player). Where is
    the fun in only describing events, characters and items in one room?
    Where is the fun in not being immersed in hundreds of locations? Well,
    To Hell In A Hamper, another one-room Adrift game, certainly showed the
    quality that can be produced in a one room adventure. With Paint, I feel
    there is a healthy second to such a benchmark classic.

    The premise of the story is typical of David Whyld material. If you're
    unfamiliar with his prolific work (and by prolific, I really do mean
    prolific, with 30 titles penned using Adrift) then you'll find the vein
    of comedy and silliness at its core. Personally, I don't really get
    comedy in IF. It takes quite a lot to raise a smile or even draw forward
    a laugh. So, for this game to have the money shot, it's definitely quite
    special.

    You are in charge of a crew of dozy painters who have to paint an
    office. Yep, that's it. Sounds simple, right?

    Of course not -- this is IF. As with other Whyld outings, we have an
    array of traditional text adventure puzzles from the sublime to the
    downright silly. This is tongue-in-cheek stuff and, unlike in some
    games, it really works here. I think that is because the initial
    scenario is plausible, credible and easy to imagine. It's madcap
    nonsense and all the better for it.

    From the start, and don't even try to pronounce your client's surname, I
    enjoyed having a nosy around the office, looking out the window and then
    telling my crew to snap to it with the work. All seemed sane until a
    meteor crashed through the roof...oh, yes, it's that kind of game.
    Interacting with your crew is vital in solving this game. They hold
    items you require and answers that you need. Other characters also pop
    in, including your client and a rather interesting female secretary.

    I won't give too much away but you'll encounter the meteor very quickly.
    From that point on it's one loony encounter after the other. I enjoyed
    the game. The witch doctor was my favourite encounter en route to
    completion. This is a tough game, but enjoyable, with enough clues --
    some subtle, some less. I came across no bugs or parse errors.

    A fun outing!

    8/10
    Recommended.

    ADRIFT .taf file

    Pantomine
    From: Mike Snyder (wyndo SP@G prowler-pro.com)
    Review appeared in SPAG #44 -- April 30, 2006

    TITLE: Pantomime
    AUTHOR: Robb Sherwin
    EMAIL: beaver SP@G zombieworld.com
    DATE: March 31, 2006
    PARSER: Hugo
    SUPPORTS: Any Hugo Interpreter or GLK Hugo
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/springthing/2006/pmime.hex
    VERSION: Release 1.00

    In the early morning minutes of October 1st, 2005, a list of IFComp entries (at
    the official IFComp website) showed 50 or so potential games. As titles were
    knocked off the list (probably because the authors never completed and uploaded
    them), the list dwindled down to 36. For those of us online at the time, it was
    an interesting thing to watch. Among those original intents, though, was Robb
    Sherwin's Pantomime.

    Now released for Spring Thing 2006, it weighs in on the light side (considering
    the competition's focus on medium- to long-sized games). As an intended IFComp
    entry, this makes sense. From chatting with Robb at his Hugo forum, I know that
    it took much effort and some sleepless nights even to finish for the Spring
    Thing deadline. Even short and perhaps rushed, Pantomime is a solid game with an
    entertaining story.

    In Pantomime, you live on Phobos, currently a moon of Mars, but soon to break
    apart into an orbiting ring of debris. It's the last place anyone would choose
    to be, even before the crisis. It's a world where cloning is commonplace, robots
    named after Unix commands are a man's best friend, and being good at chess is
    cause for embarrassment. This is a vision of the near future.

    I've only played the beginning of one or two Robb Sherwin games prior to this.
    That's probably why my reactions bounced between "whoa. did he really say that?"
    and "wow. what's it going to be *next*?" Somehow, even if he's holding back, it
    doesn't *feel* that way. Aside from a few typos - probably the result of the
    hurried effort to meet the deadline - the writing is great. It flows better
    because it's more casual. It's not just *how* Sherwin writes - it's also *what*
    he writes: the insults between characters, the one-off jokes, the clever
    descriptions and bits of back-story. I usually cringe at coarse passages and
    lowbrow humor in a game, but that's part of what makes Pantomime so interesting.
    Sherwin seems to write it in a convincing, honest way.

    Pantomime is what an episode of Futurama might be, if the script came from
    Cartoon Network's Williams Street crew and it aired on HBO after hours. The
    little censor that lives inside Robb Sherwin's mind has a freedom not given most
    other IF authors, save maybe Adam Thornton. I mean, if a wacked-out robot needs
    to sport a cloned copy of a male porn star's money-maker, Sherwin will work it
    into the story. And it'll be *funny*.

    The game *is* meant to be funny. I think. It's sometimes tongue-in-cheek humor.
    It's *definitely* black humor, where the absurd and the macabre come together.
    It might be an allegory for some of today's issues, but if so, I didn't really
    get that. More likely, it's just a strange but fascinating story.

    The puzzles aren't difficult (generally just a matter of figuring out what
    action to take to move things along), and inventory is almost non-existent.
    antomime is very story-driven. The most difficult bit may have been passing the
    spiked gate, but even that obstacle yields to some creative but simple reasoning
    (okay, okay - I solved it by blind luck and experimentation, but it made sense
    afterwards). Even the second-to-last confrontation doesn't require anything more
    complicated than following instructions and listening to the bad guy's diatribe.
    This should be particularly appealing to anyone who prefers IF to be more
    *fiction* than *game*.

    A few minor bugs remain in the competition release. They range from typos to an
    odd exit back to Kangaroo's Club - nothing game-killing. This seems to happen
    more toward the end. What's most likely to work against Pantomime, though, is
    that it doesn't seem long enough for a Spring Thing game. It also glosses over
    the additional detail in most places, when it comes to interacting with (even if
    only to "look at") scenery objects. Knowing Hugo, I think this could be fixed
    easily, even without real objects. Just add an "extra_scenery" property to each
    room, with lists of keywords that will cause a different reference message. It
    means the difference between something "not there" when it really is, and simply
    being "unimportant".

    A few plot points left me confused. Who sent me the vial? What was the purpose
    of the seemingly unnecessary gate code? And how drunk was Sherwin when he came
    up with the interaction that helps the PC escape the airlock? Other than that,
    everything is wrapped up tidily at the end, where a couple of fitting plot
    twists are thrown in.

    I enjoyed Pantomime, and I recommend it - especially if an update comes after
    the competition. Without hints, I finished in two and a half hours (plus some
    re-play of select earlier bits). It's definitely a game that wouldn't have been
    out of place in the annual IFComp, but even snack-sized by Spring Thing
    standards, it's a worthy entry.

    My Spring Thing score: "7"

    Hugo game file

    Pass The Banana
    From: Mike Roberts <mjr_ SP@G hotmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #19 -- January 14, 2000

    TITLE: Pass The Banana
    AUTHOR: Admiral Jota
    E-MAIL: jota SP@G tiac.net
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/inform/banana/banana.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    This disturbing study of a descent into madness is at once shocking and
    sublime. Yes, the symbolism is all here: candles in a dark-paneled room,
    a stage representing the subconscious mind with its flickering and
    fragile consciousness surrounded by the dark sea of the subconscious;
    the empty trophy case juxtaposed with the full junk closet, a
    devastating portrait of lost hope and failed dreams; a flaming skull
    alluding to nothing so much as Death caught in an inferno of alienation
    pervading modern civilization and ultimately consuming it; a monkey, a
    non-human animal so human in form as to mock our very identity as human,
    symbolic of our animal needs and the animal lurking, always lurking just
    beneath the surface of our rational facades; a robot, a machine in human
    form, the ultimate symbol of our dehumanization at the hands of our own
    cleverness; the plentiful seating, symbolizing man's inhumanity to his
    fellow man; and, of course, the banana, so strident in its symbolism
    that it paradoxically becomes subtle, like an angry couple at the
    supermarket whose loud, pointless bickering we try to pretend not to
    see.

    But even such powerful symbolism would be empty without narrative, of
    which we find more than we can handle. We pass a banana, tentatively at
    first, experimenting: to the monkey, perhaps, or to the robot? And what
    about the flaming head? Soon we build confidence, just as the hero in
    the prototypical mythological framework gains confidence from early
    tests, and start passing bananas more aggressively. Before we know it we
    are in a banana-passing frenzy - bananas everywhere, coming, going,
    faster than we can keep track of, just as we lose track of things in our
    daily lives: this banana an overdue bill, this one a friend we've lost
    touch with, this one the wreckage of a marriage. And then it stops,
    suddenly, and we find to our shock that we have no more bananas - but,
    in a bitter indictment of western society's glorification of hoarded
    wealth, this is how we win: just as the Japanese gardener considers her
    garden complete only when she has removed everything that she can
    remove, this game is not complete until we have no more bananas.

    Other games in this year's competition might have more plot, more
    puzzles, or more elaborate settings, but none have more bananas.

    Score: 2 (there's nothing to it, but what's there works)

    Directory with Inform .z5 file and walkthrough

    The Path to Fortune
    From: Stephen Granade <sgranade SP@G phy.duke.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #9 -- June 11, 1996

     NAME: The Windhall Chronicles I: Path To Fortune
     PARSER: Inform's usual
     AUTHOR: Jeff Cassidy and C.E. Forman            PLOT: Spacious
     EMAIL: ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net
     ATMOSPHERE: Well done
     AVAILABILITY: Shareware, IF Archive                    WRITING: Slightly uneven
     PUZZLES: From enjoyable to illogical            SUPPORTS: Inform Ports
     CHARACTERS: Static                              DIFFICULTY: Medium+

    Path to Fortune (PTF) is the first in the Windhall Chronicles series.  In
    it, you play Aerin, "a simple blacksmith's apprentice, nothing more."
    However, by a bizarre bit of reasoning on your village's part, you are
    chosen to save the village from taxation without representation by finding
    the treasure horde of Kirizith, a huge dragon.

    The game begins with most of the world available for exploration, and the
    world is large and complex.  There are many places to explore and many
    puzzles to attempt, which helps if you are stumped by one particular
    puzzle.  It would have been nice had the game not shown its whole hand at
    the beginning; additional areas which you can explore only after solving a
    puzzle hold my interest more than being able to visit (almost) everywhere
    at the beginning.  There were only three areas I couldn't visit without
    solving a puzzle, and all three involved at most two rooms.  After enough
    tromping about Windhall, I was ready for something new to explore.  Of
    course, "enough" is a relative term--as large as Windhall is, it took a
    long time before I was familiar with it.

    The open design of PTF weakened its plot somewhat.  At times I felt as if
    I were slogging through endless puzzles, marking time until I could find
    the dragon.  If you ask Denvil the elf about the fish dinner he wants you
    to supply, he says something to the effect that it is just one of those
    sub-plots adventurers are always fulfilling.  A lot of the game felt like
    that--sub-plots I had to finish in order to get to the dragon.  More
    direction towards the end goal was needed.

    The initial puzzles' difficulty range from fairly easy to slightly more
    difficult.  However, as time went on, I found the puzzles becoming more
    and more illogical, possibly due to my solving the logical ones early on.
    The puzzle involving a werewolf and ogre locked in battle struck me as
    completely unmotivated, even after I was helped by someone who had already
    finished the game.  Too often I had to resort to the brute force approach
    of trying every object out on every other object; I would have much rather
    reasoned how to solve the puzzles.

    The main strengths of the game, its size and number of NPCs, are also its
    main weaknesses.  Due to the size of the game and the number of NPCs, it
    felt as if none of the NPCs were fully realized.  The NPCs reacted to a
    large number of questions, but all were of the "ask xxx about yyy"
    category.  None of the NPCs had a life of their own.  Every day Baezil
    cursed over his unlit stove; every day Mielon and Idah stayed in their
    house.  There are an ogre and werewolf who are fighting to the death, day
    in and day out, for as long as you are willing to watch.  The NPCs could
    have been improved by having motivations of their own.

    I enjoyed playing PTF immensely, the above nitpicks notwithstanding.  The
    game is an excellent addition to the growing pantheon of Inform games, and
    well worth the time spent.  I look forward to seeing the next installment
    in the series.

    Inform File (.z8)

    Stepwise solution (Text)

    The Pawn
    From: Yuzo Takada a.k.a. Dark Fiber <entropy SP@G mpx.com.au>
    Review appeared in SPAG #12 -- December 13, 1997

    NAME:   The Pawn
    AUTHOR: Magnetic Scrolls
    DATE: Mid-80's?
    SUPPORTS: See review of Fish!
    AVAILABILITY: Commercial (see above)

    Ahhh, Magnetic Scrolls first illustrated text adventure and, like
    Infocom's first official game Zork, is just about as famous unless you
    lived in America in the the late 1980's of course, which is a pity.

    The story: you have been bushwacked on the way home from shopping at
    the supermarket and you wake to find yourself in the land of Kerovnia.

    Things aren't all gold and cheese in the land of Kerovnia though, and
    you find out why later.  The game starts off by not telling you what
    you are supposed to do, and you only find this out by talking to
    everyone you meet.  The characters you get to meet are a colourful
    bunch, Jerry Lee Lewis (yes, yes, the one and only), Kronos the
    Wizard, a horse with no legs, Honest John and a bloody irritable
    princess.

    The parser is quite good but has its niggles. Especially in reference
    to English and some objects.  The most noticable bug is the "white"
    one: you have in your inventory "you are carriny a white" which turns
    out to be a white light.  Kinda dodgy and should have been picked up
    in bug testing.

    The puzzles are very crafty and logical.  Hands up those of you who
    got stuck trying to move the boulder!

    Solution (Text)

    "A Tale of Kerovnia" novella from packaging (.pdf)

    Perdition's Flames
    From: Joe Barlow <jbarlow SP@G ipass.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #11 -- September 16, 1997

    NAME: Perdition's Flames
    AUTHOR: Michael Roberts
    DATE: 1993
    PARSER: TADS
    SUPPORTS: TADS ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/flames.zip
         ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/tads/flames_src.zip

    { This review was previously published in _Intelligent Gamer_, which
      explains the slightly different format. It is included here with the
      author's permission. -- MO }

    A couple of things about this review: please remember that it was
    written in 1994, before I knew anything about TADS [the Text Adventure
    Development System], which was used to create the game.  I touted a
    couple of the features in PF as being very unique, such as the ability
    to dump a transcript of the game to a text file.  Of course, that's a
    standard feature of all TADS games, but I didn't know it at the time.
    Also, at the time I reviewed it, the game was still commercial.
    Obviously, the comments about the game's copy-protection and all of
    the game's "included goodies" don't apply to the freeware version.  I
    am leaving them in the review, however, because the final rating the
    game received was due in part to its extensive Infocom-like packaging.
    Even without it, though, this game is well worth a look, especially
    for FREE!

       "I'm too young to die...."

    It has been said that man's greatest journey is the one he makes at
    death, and with good reason.  People have always been fascinated by
    what lies beyond our "mortal" world, and the book and film market have
    been quick to capitalize on this interest.  Even the computer gaming
    industry has explored the concept, much to the delight and surprise of
    many gamers.  More than one recent game has allowed players to explore
    the afterlife, including Sierra's King's Quest 6: Heir Today Gone
    Tomorrow, which offered would-be adventurers the chance to see the
    Realm of the Dead, complete with eerie background music and
    frightening graphics.  Now, California-based software publisher High
    Energy has taken a look at the afterlife (with tongue firmly
    in-cheek,) and death will never be the same again.  Let's face it: any
    game which opens with the message "*** You have died ***" can't be all
    bad!  Quite the contrary, in fact: Perdition's Flames is a marvelous
    adventure game, and the best way I've yet found to explore Hell
    without leaving the comfort of my own home.

    As the game begins, the player's soul is drifting down a river on a
    yacht, along with several other newly deceased people.  The player is
    free to wander around the ship, have a few drinks at the bar, chat
    with the crew, or just enjoy the scenery.  This opening sequence is a
    fantastic way of familiarizing yourself with the "feel" of the game.
    Wander around and enjoy the atmosphere.  Get used to being dead.
    You'll find out that it's not terribly different from the life you're
    used to.  (Hmmmm. I wonder if that's significant.)

    After a short while, the ship will arrive at a dock leading to the
    Hell mainland.  Once you leave the ship, you'll find yourself in the
    merry land of Hell, which is quite a bit different than most of us
    have been led to believe.  If the player wishes, he or she may attend
    a welcoming seminar, during which various other new arrivals will ask
    some hilarious "newbie" questions, and receive answers from the Hell
    Welcoming Committee.

    From the seminar, the player learns that Hell has decided to update
    its image.  Gone is the "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter" sign that
    used to hang atop the main gate.  Gone is the eternity of damnation
    and suffering that every church preacher in the history of the world
    has shouted and sweated about in his sermons.  Now, Hell is just like
    any other nice place to live, with shopping malls, suburbs, and a
    Department of Motor Vehicles.  (Somehow, we all knew that Hell would
    have one of these, didn't we?)

    What if a soul is uncomfortable in Hell?  No problem!  People are able
    to freely go back and forth between Heaven and Hell, staying as long
    as they like in either place.  Transportation to and from Heaven is
    accomplished via an enormous elevator in the middle of town, provided
    one has a ticket.

       Just think of it as Sim-Hell...

    Perdition's Flames (PF) features incredibly detailed descriptions of
    rooms and objects.  Its text-only interface recalls the greatness of
    Infocom (a software publisher from the late 1970s-late 1980s who wrote
    many text- only adventure games), without resorting to some of the
    shortcomings that were typical of even this mighty software giant.
    For starters, PF is "100% Certified Maze-Free!"  For folks like me who
    still occasionally wake up screaming in the middle of the night
    because of Zork III's Royal Puzzle, this is a heaven-sent (no pun
    intended) gift.  True questers will also be relieved to learn that
    it's quite impossible to get yourself in a position from which it's no
    longer possible to win.  This was my only real gripe with Infocom's
    games: all too often, if you didn't do something trivial way back at
    the beginning of the game, you were unable to solve a puzzle much
    later in your quest.  (The cheese sandwich puzzle from Hitchhiker's
    Guide comes to mind.)

       Hell on Wheels

    Moving around Hell is easy: the player simply types in which way he or
    she wants to go: "Go north," for example.  More complicated sentences
    are also allowed: the player may type something along the lines of "Go
    north.  Open the door then take the shiny gold coin."  Players can
    keep track of the items they are carrying with the standard
    "inventory" command.  One of the more unique features PF has that many
    other games do not is the ability to dump a transcript of the game in
    progress to a text file.  Infocom's classics allowed transcripts to be
    dumped to a printer, so the tradeoff is a fair one.  Even some of
    Infocom's more obscure commands like VERBOSE (turn on long descrip-
    tions) are present (and welcome) in PF.  All in all, this game is
    something I wouldn't be surprised to find on a hypothetical Lost
    Treasures of Infocom Volume 3.

       Is it hot in here, or is it just me?

    What makes PF stand out above the countless other text games currently
    on the market is its wonderful sense of humor.  The game makes some
    truly awful puns, pokes fun at everyone's notion of what Hell is
    "supposed" to be, and generally keeps you looking forward to coming
    back to Hell every time you have to leave the computer.  If the player
    should find a pitchfork in a barn, for example, the game mocks: "Now
    if you only had horns and a tail, you'd own this place!"  During your
    welcoming seminar, the player discovers that it is unwise to try and
    sue anyone in Hell because the Hell Judicial System is based on the
    one in the United States, and it will take an eternity (literally) for
    cases to come to trial.  And hearing the woman in front of you answer
    questions in the Celestial Security Office will make you laugh out
    loud, in the style of Douglas Adams' Bureaucracy.

    PF was written using TADS (Text Adventure Development System), a
    programming tool also published by High Energy.  TADS allows users to
    write games that are of Infocom quality, and, if PF is any indication,
    they ain't just whistling "Dixie" with this claim.

       "I may be going to Hell in a bucket, baby...
        but at least I'm enjoying the ride." - Grateful Dead

    PF's elaborate packaging is another way in which the folks at High
    Energy software have summoned the ghosts of Infocom.  PF comes with a
    handsome map, a detailed, well-written manual, a hint book, a
    reference card, and "The Official Tourist Guide to Hell," an
    illustrated, side-splitting pamphlet that contains the game's
    copy-protection, in addition to many amusing items of interest.

    Let's talk about the quality of the game's prose.  Although
    comparisons with Infocom are unavoidable when reviewing text
    adventures, the prose of PF is elegant, often funny and immensely
    enjoyable, equaling (and in some cases, even surpassing) many of
    Infocom's works.  (It easily beats out the Zork trilogy, for instance,
    and is on par with Deadline or even A Mind Forever Voyaging in terms
    of the quality, if not intensity, of its writing.)

    I loved the non-linear nature of the game.  Although by neccessity
    certain puzzles have to be solved before other puzzles can be reached,
    the game is tremendously flexible.  You truly feel like you are
    PLAYING the game, rather than being sent to Location A to get Object B
    to take to Location C to exchange it for Object D, etc. (Indeed, this
    free-style type of play is neccessary, since the game's goal is not
    revealed to you until quite late in the adventure.)

    Finally, I enjoyed the difficult *BUT STILL LOGICAL* nature of many of
    the puzzles.  While many Infocom games had brain-twisting challenges,
    the solutions were occasionally not very logical at all (I'm thinking
    particularly of the two Douglas Adams games here).  There are two
    great head-scratchers that particularly stand out in Perdition's
    Flames: the Haunted House/Ring puzzle and the Lion-Headed Statue
    puzzle.  These are two of the best puzzles I have ever seen in ANY
    interactive-fiction game, in both implementation and originality.
    Both of these obstacles were *very* difficult to solve, but in the end
    the solutions made sense, and I felt a sense of accomplishment after
    conquering them.

    System requirements for the game are tough to reveal: the review copy
    INTELLIGENT GAMER received from Michael Roberts (the author of
    the game) didn't list them, but they seem to be just about as minimal
    as you could expect.  The program uses a swap file to run on machines
    with small amounts of memory, and a hard drive is recommended.  The
    program ran equally well on my 286/12 and my 486/50.

    RATING: 9.5 out of 10.  Perdition's Flames is an incredibly
    entertaining game with an original premise, and would be a bargain at
    twice the price.  Fans of text adventure games will not want to miss
    this one.  If, however, you don't think you'll be able to see past its
    lack of graphics, you should probably look elsewhere.

    TADS .gam file and associated files (.zip)

    TADS Source code (.zip)

    Stepwise solution (Text)

    Perilous Magic
    From: Francesco Bova <fbova SP@G pangea.ca>
    Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #21 -- June 15, 2000

    How great an influence do the games of Infocom still have on today's IF?
    Hard to say, but there must be some presence there if an offhand remark
    in one of Infocom's manuals can turn into a game in its own right, as is
    the case with David Fillmore's Perilous Magic. The joke in question was
    a reference to a great fire--which, the manual said, was caused by some
    bureaucrat meaning to cast the ZEMDOR spell ("turn original into
    triplicate") but slipping up and casting the ZIMBOR spell ("turn one
    really big city into lots of tiny, little ashes"). It's a cute joke, and
    as long as you know the source, Perilous Magic is a cute game.

    There isn't a lot more to it than that: you end up causing the spell
    switch, and the whole thing's over in 15 moves. It's not flawless--it's
    possible to render the main puzzle unsolvable by doing things in the
    wrong order-- but there's not much wrong with it, either. The main
    appeal of the game is in the humor: there are Infocom references
    sprinkled here and there, and the wonder-what-happens-if-I-try-this
    results are suitably amusing. There isn't really enough here to call
    this a full-blown homage, but it's enough to capture the feel.

    Perilous Magic is a short but reasonably entertaining effort that
    suggests that IF authors and players have ridiculously good memories for
    throwaway jokes in manuals published in 1984. As a game, it's nothing
    special, but it's not a bad way to spend five minutes.

    Inform .z5 file

    Inform source code

    Persistence of Memory
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G colorado.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999

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

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

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

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

    Rating: 8.3

    HUGO file (.hex) (updated version)

    HUGO file (.hex) (competition version)

    Phantom: Caverns of the Killer
    From: Valentine Kopteltsev <uux SP@G mail.ru>
    Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    NAME: Phantom: caverns of the killer
    AUTHOR: Brandon Coker
    EMAIL: grimslade1135 SP@G yahoo.com
    DATE: 2005
    PARSER: Inform
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2005/zcode/
    phantom/Phantom.z5

    An example of an unsuccessful attempt at the genre. You play an archeologist
    trying to find the burial place of a legendary Egyptian warrior. Most of the
    game, you just wander around, collecting artifacts for non-obvious purposes. I
    expected them to become more clear later, but in vain -- said artifacts didn't
    affect the outcome of the story in any way, only reflecting themselves in the
    number of points I received. Although the author demonstrated intentions to
    inject atmosphere into his work, and to sorta build up tension towards the
    finale, the results turned out to be pretty pathetic. To a no small degree,
    this was the fault of the writing, and the many spelling mistakes.

    Phantom failed entirely as a representative of the horror genre, and hardly won
    any points back even as a puzzlefest. Most of its puzzles could be subdivided
    into two categories: (fairly generic) mazes (there were three of them), and
    "choose the right option or die". It seems the author invested a lot of work
    into making up intricate clues for the second ones, and believed them to be
    fairly challenging. However, he overlooked the fact they could be solved by
    brute force (pick option -- die -- undo -- pick another option -- repeat until
    solved).

    I don't want to offend anybody, but, speaking in F1 terms, this is the Minardi
    of our today's race.

    SNATS (Score Not Affecting The Scoreboard):

    PLOT: Generic (0.5)
    ATMOSPHERE: The author did his best to maintain it, but failed (0.5)
    WRITING: Clumsy and full of spelling mistakes (0.3)
    GAMEPLAY: Pointless treasure hunt (0.6)
    BONUSES: None I could think of (0.0)
    TOTAL: 1.9
    CHARACTERS: None
    PUZZLES: Rather unoriginal (0.2)
    DIFFICULTY: Nearly trivial (3 out of 10)

    COMP SCORE: 3

    COMMENTS: OK, I encountered a few games (even) worse than Phantom, and thus
              had to set it off a bit. Besides, the author's intentions clearly
              were good, his work didn't take too much of my time, and wasn't
              meant to annoy me -- all that was worth an incentive in the form
              of an additional point. Wasn't it.

    Zcode executable (.z5)
    Walkthrough

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

    NAME: Phlegm
    AUTHOR: Jason Dyer
    EMAIL: jdyer SP@G u.arizona.edu
    DATE: October 1996
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Inform Ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/phlegm
    VERSION: Version 1.0

    Ever wanted to see "Space Aliens Laughed at My Cardigan" on the
    Z-machine?  Here it is.  Enjoy.

    The scary part is that the author seems to know what he (she? it? none
    of the above?) is doing -- the writing is for the most part
    gramatically correct and game is not as buggy as "Cardigan," with the
    exception of some screwed-up directions and incomplete direction
    lists, which almost appear to be intentional.

    It's every bit as incongruous as the great Andre M. Boyle's work,
    though.  One minute you're in Ancient Mayan Ruins, the next at the End
    of the World.  Add a series of blatant, gratuitous rip-offs (the needle
    in the haystack from "Nord and Bert," the llama food and Restaurant at
    the End of the Universe from Douglas Adams' works) that don't fit in at
    all, and some thoroughly motivationless, illogical puzzles -- I'm
    guessing that NO ONE figured out how to use Leo the lemming to scare
    away the moose worshippers, right? -- and you've got a great contender
    for absolute rock-bottom last place.

    Perhaps "Phlegm" was intended as a satire of the likes of "Cardigan" and
    "Detective"?  If so, it ultimately fails because there is no discernable
    difference between the parody and the parodied.  Good for a number of
    cheap laughs (particularly Leo), but unlike "Kissing the Buddha's Feet,"
    few of them are genuine.  The title itself is also misleading - I found
    no phlegm anywhere in the game.  The author must have forseen all these
    problems.  His/her/its/whatever's name is left off the credits.  Wise
    choice, friend.

    Inform file (.z5) (updated version)

    Inform file (.z5) (competition version)

    Inform source code

    Photograph
    From: Suzanne Britton <tril SP@G igs.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #31 -- January 3, 2003

    TITLE: Photograph
    AUTHOR: Steve Evans
    EMAIL: trout SP@G netspace.net.au
    DATE: September 2002
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/zcode/photo/photo.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    "Photograph" is a vivid, professionally well-written and competently
    programmed work. It is story-based and nearly puzzleless, but manages to
    carry the player through the plot at a comfortable pace, without
    dissolving into the tedium that sometimes characterizes pure-story IF.
    There are things to do, problems to solve, and each project serves to
    drive the plot. Occasionally, though, the prodding feels a little too
    blatant, as if the player is being bounced from point to point (need to
    eat, need to sleep, etc.) with bits of story in between.

    "Photograph" is a rather dark character study, reminding one of
    "Rameses" from two years ago. It is the story of a man who fixates on a
    single "wrong turn" in his past, only to find, in the end, that the
    hollowness within him runs deeper than he knew. What most raises
    "Photograph" above the ordinary is the rich symbolism with which it
    embellishes this tale, particularly the use of Egyptian mythology. It
    skates the thin line between over-blatant and over-obscure, occasionally
    erring towards the former, but usually just right. One is left with a
    host of questions and intriguing ideas, especially regarding the
    parallel between the Akhnaten dream and the fate of the protagonist (a
    parallel reinforced throughout the story by subtle and not-so-subtle
    means).

    Akhnaten stands on the shore, awaiting the boat which will take him to
    the afterlife. Belatedly, he wonders if it was wise to reject the
    Egyptian pantheon in favor of Aten. But then he reaches under his robe
    and finds a cavity where his heart should be. This "doesn't auger well
    for [his] meeting with Osiris (the weigher of hearts).".

    Consider the protagonist, who also made a decision that he later
    regretted, and blamed that decision for the hollowness that grew within
    him. Yet when he gets a chance to go back and take the other branch of
    the fork, the epilogue describes a man who dies just as lost, just as
    empty. Akhnaten worried that his choice of deities might bar him from
    the afterlife, only to find in himself a deficiency so severe--a hollow
    heart--as to render the question moot. Perhaps Jack's deficiency is also
    pre-existing.

    This is but one of many lines of thought to follow. Another would
    explore the symbolism of the picture frame. Is it, as the final lines
    suggest, a shriveled organ, waiting in a jar for the boat of Ra? Was
    Jack's mistake in fixating on this frame--this single deciding moment in
    his life--to the exclusion of all else, much as Akhnaten threw away the
    richness of the Egyptian pantheon in favor of his pet god, Aten? But on
    the other path, Jack makes the same mistake of fixation: he gets
    swallowed up in his work.

    Whichever way you approach it, "Photograph" is irredeemably fatalistic.
    The protagonist seemed doomed from the beginning, by his own nature, to
    lose himself. I can't agree with such fatalism; nevertheless, the work
    is too rich and thought-provoking not to love.

    Zcode .z5 file (updated version)

    Directory with zcode .z5 file (competition version)

    Photopia
    From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G colorado.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999

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

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

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

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

    Rating: 9.9

    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From: Brian Blackwell <blackers SP@G netscape.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From: David Ledgard <dledgard SP@G hotmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999

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

    Inform file (.z5) (updated version)

    PC Executable (.exe) (updated version)

    Directory with Inform .z5 files and associated text files (competition version)

    Source code for menu conversation system (.inf)

    Phred Phontious and the Quest for Pizza
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #13 -- February 5, 1998

    NAME: Phred Phontious and the Quest for Pizza
    AUTHOR: Michael Zey
    E-MAIL: zeyguy SP@G aol.com
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/pizza/pizza.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    PLOT: Cliched but sometimes funny (1.2) ATMOSPHERE: Nope (0.8)
    WRITING: Not bad, but nothing special (1.1) GAMEPLAY: Uneven (1.0)
    CHARACTERS: Cardboard (0.8) PUZZLES: Some very clever (1.3)
    MISC: Problems, but still fun (1.1)
    OVERALL: 5.2

    And sometimes, well, the game just matches the title perfectly. The
    tone of Phred Phontious is relentlessly silly, so much so that several
    of the puzzles are quite difficult because they require offbeat
    thinking rather than simple logic. Though the premise is far from
    original, and though there are plenty of flaws, there is still plenty
    to enjoy here -- if you don't mind some dreadful puns.

    The setting is fantasy, sort of, but more joke-fantasy than
    Tolkien-fantasy; this is the sort of fantasy that allows for things
    like photographs and coffee and chainsaws. The plot is typical of
    fantasy, though, even though it's a joke here -- you have to hunt down
    the ingredients to a pizza, and deliver it safely. Along the way, you
    encounter a dragon and a vampire -- along with a gnu and a crazed
    dentist, of course. The layout is sufficiently unencumbered by sense
    that all sorts of things can sit side by side, such as a spice mine
    (why not?), a dragon's lair, a haunted cemetery and a travel
    agency. Obviously, Phred Phontious is not trying particularly hard to
    convey the scene or draw you into the world it describes; the player
    may safely register the given stock situation, figure out the twist,
    and never bother to try to visualize anything. The result is, while
    enjoyable for a while, oddly forgettable; I found that I could hardly
    recall the details of the game just hours after playing it. (The silly
    place names -- Thikk Forest, Idubeleevinspukes Cemetery, etc. -- don't
    help.)

    Implementation-wise, Phred Phontious needs work. One significant
    object is hidden in a scenery object that barely gets mentioned,
    another important object is never mentioned at all, an enemy notices
    your hiding place under one set of circumstances but not another --
    though it would be just as easy to spot you -- and another fellow goes
    on addressing you or preventing you from doing things even after he
    falls asleep. Other objects act _very_ illogically -- a rope in this
    game has some unexpected properties, and another object embedded in
    scenery must be dislodged by an action that I never would have
    guessed. At another point, you find yourself in a hole and are told
    that "it looks uncertain whether you'll ever make it out." Is the
    challenge to find some creative means of getting out? No -- just
    finding the right syntax. There are other things, illogical bits that
    didn't slow down gameplay but still left me wondering -- for instance,
    the character brandishing a key next to a locked cage, except that the
    key doesn't unlock the cage -- the cage is irrelevant to the game --
    but rather a gate far far away. There is a bottleneck right at the
    start of the game -- you have to discover a hidden closet, but the
    game gives no hint that it's there.  Elsewhere, you have a few turns
    to search certain scenery and get an object; if you don't find it
    then, the game closes off.

    Even amid gameplay problems, though, there are some memorable moments
    -- and even if the setting is clumsy more often than not, the author
    does manage to send up fantasy conventions in amusing fashion now and
    again. Two puzzles hinge on dreadful puns -- I, personally, enjoyed
    them, but then again I have a weakness for these things, and I don't
    advise that the author do this in the future. The way you get rid of
    the dragon is reasonably creative, and the gnu-milk puzzle -- the
    first part of it -- is clever, even if distasteful. And the endgame is
    quite rewarding, though made more difficult by the requirement of
    random scenery searching; I enjoyed the puzzles in the endgame more
    than any in the game. Though there are coding problems aplenty
    associated with the puzzles, many of them have excellent ideas; with
    some more time and attention to programming difficulties, the author
    might produce a first-rate -- and very challenging -- game. (One
    puzzle I never figured out: a "last lousy point" that's a clue from a
    British crossword.)

    Phred Phontious is large, hardly finishable within two hours unless
    the player relies heavily on the walkthrough, and the game both
    encumbers you with a lot of objects and limits your inventory
    severely. Perhaps the most welcome thing about the endgame was that
    the goal was clear and the territory to explore limited; there was no
    question of wandering around looking for the right object only to find
    that the solution actually turned on a bad pun. Moreover, the endgame
    is the only area where the room descriptions come alive -- and they do
    for a very obvious reason then, of course, but it does make things
    more vivid. And even though it's predictable, the ultimate ending
    does, somehow, feel satisfying -- no "to be continued" messages or any
    such thing.

    This is a game for the puzzle fan, in short, specifically the puzzle
    fan who likes to see fantasy sent up and doesn't mind some incoherence
    in the setting. Though the player should save often -- the game closes
    off without warning -- Phred Phontious is one of the few competition
    entries that I found enjoyable despite serious flaws, and I gave it a
    6 on the competition scale.

    Inform file (.z5)

    Pick Up The Phone Booth And Aisle
    From: Adam Myrow <myrow SP@G eskimo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #30 -- September 20, 2002

    TITLE: Pick Up The Phone Booth And Aisle
    AUTHORS: David Dyte, Steve Bernard, Dan Shiovitz, et al.
    EMAIL: Too many to list
    DATE: June 2001
    PARSER: Inform Standard
    SUPPORTS: Any Zcode interpreter
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/PUTPBAA.z5

    When several regulars of rec.arts.int-fiction got together and decided
    to do yet another parody of Pick Up The Phone Booth and Die, they
    decided to also parody Sam Barlow's Aisle while they were at it. The
    result is one of the most side-splitting things to ever be uploaded to
    the IF Archive. Not only do we see the two games mentioned above being
    ripped to shreds, there are more inside jokes than you can shake a stick
    at. This has Sins Against Mimesis beaten hands down.

    Basically, you find yourself in the town square with the phone booth
    from the original Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die. However, you quickly
    discover that like Aisle, this is a one-move game. You have exactly one
    move to do something and then it's over. However, unlike Aisle, it
    doesn't loop back to the start. You'll have to restart the game by
    typing restart or undo and try something else. It's too bad that they
    couldn't have done it like Sam Barlow, but that's the only flaw in what
    is supposed to be a big joke. Anyhow, every time you make a move, the
    response is totally off the wall. Nearly all Inform actions are handled,
    and there are few default responses to be had. Most of the responses
    bear no relation to each other, so forget trying to make a story out of
    it. The point is to have fun and I did. However, there is one set of
    responses involving a particular object that are related and I had fun
    trying to get them all. For a starter, try >INVENTORY.

    Here are a few of the responses to illustrate what I mean by inside
    jokes. I've cut out the restart/restore/quit prompt and the initial
    description since they never change.

       >kick booth
       The booth's eyes widen as you draw your foot back. "Terry, no,
       please, oh God you can't--" Its cries are cut short as your foot
       slams into it. With the sound of eggshells cracking, the booth
       fragments into countless pieces which are quickly lost in the mud.

           *** You have quit smoking ***

       >smell
       You inhale deeply, smelling for the background scent of this
       particular location. It smells like broth... no, wait, is that
       tortillas?

           *** You have been ruined ***

       >enter booth
       There are 56 fellow MIT students in there already, but one more and
       you get the WORLD RECORD. You somehow squeeze between Misty and
       Muffy, and end up sandwiched beside Mindy. Then the creaking begins.
       Then the cracking. Then the exploding. Fifty-seven MIT students end
       up scattered across the town square, many crippled for life, but
       every single one ends up in the Guinness Book of Records.

           *** You have been recognized ***

    So, only if you know something about the history of Infocom, a bit about
    Losing Your Grip, and have some familiarity with the Inform Designer's
    Manual will all those responses make sense. There are tons more like
    that. Be sure to try out your spells from the Enchanter series and of
    course, the magic words from Adventure.

    The bottom line is that an IF veteran who is looking for something to
    kill some time after a bad day should download this and give it a shot.
    A newcomer to IF might not understand a lot of the jokes, and if you've
    never played Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die or Aisle, you should play
    them before to understand why PUTPBAA works the way it does.

    Inform .z5 file

    A list of about 210 possible endings

    Pick Up The Phone Booth And Dye
    From: Stas Starkov <stas_ SP@G mail.rb.ru>
    Review appeared in SPAG #30 -- September 20, 2002

    NAME: Pick Up the Phone Booth and Dye
    AUTHOR: Eric Schmidt
    EMAIL: None given
    DATE: 2002
    PARSER: Inform Standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/boothdye.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    This game is a short one-joke game with a single puzzle. (And the joke
    is not very much in the style of "Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die",
    which I advise you to play first.) What to say about the game? Well, the
    game is quite accurately done. That is, it gives sufficient answers to
    player actions, without visible holes in implementation, or missing
    descriptions. But the wild psychedelic charm of "Pick Up the Phone Booth
    and Die" is not there! The only puzzle of the game is not bad, however
    -- and the game has been written to demonstrate the puzzle, I suppose.

    Completion time? From several seconds, to several minutes.

    Resume: If you like short-puzzle-one-idea games -- try "Pick Up the
    Phone Booth and Dye". It's worth the tiny bit of your time you'll spend
    on it.

    Zcode .z5 file

    Piece of Mind
    From: Christopher E. Forman <ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #10 -- February 4, 1997

    NAME: Piece of Mind
    AUTHOR: Giles Boutel
    EMAIL: boutel1g SP@G wcc.govt.nz
    DATE: October 1996
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Inform Ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/piece
    VERSION: Version 1.0

    Now here's a real dilemma.

    First, let me congratulate the author on a number of things:

            1) The switching of tense - from first-person past in the
               introduction, to first-person present in the main framework,
               to an omnipresent third-person tense for a sub-"plot" - is a
               very ambitious hack of the Inform grammar.
            2) I thought it was quite imaginative the way you divided one
               "room" into six different "locations."  A neat map twist.
            3) The "Outer Files" parody.  ROTFL!  Glad to see a fellow X-
               Phile writing I-F.  The truth is out there.  Trust no one.
            4) I was delighted to see the words of evil Professor Elvin
               Atombender of Epyx's "Impossible Mission" pop up.  Even ten
               years after the fact, I can _still_ hear that digitized voice
               perfectly, and it never fails to give me a nostalgic shiver.
               That was a GREAT game!  (And companies today think crap like
               "Phantasmagoria" can hold a candle.  Hmmph.)

    Now some (hopefully) constructive criticism:

            1) Typos.  Particularly in the revised default grammar messages.
               Lots of missing periods, misspelled words, missing line-
               feeds, etc.  Double-check these the next time around.
            2) Try to give your entry a little more plot and consistency.
               This year we've seen a lot of entries - "Phlegm," "Rippled
               Flesh," and "Of Forms Unknown" come immediately to mind -
               where plots have been thrown out completely in exchange for
               wandering from one situation to the next.  These get old
               after awhile.  The drawn-into-a-book subgame is not as
               polished as the T.S. Eliot scene in "Curses," and most of
               the rest feels like excerpts from someone's private life
               that I'd rather not know a lot about.  Most of the
               situations make no sense, even under the guise of drug-
               induced hallucination.

    Inform File (.z5) (updated version)

    Inform File (.z5) (competition version)

    Pirate Adventure
    From: David Jones <drj SP@G pobox.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #47 -- January 16, 2007

    TITLE: Pirate Adventure
    AUTHOR: Alexis Adams and Scott Adams
    E-mail: msadams SP@G msadams.com
    DATE: 1978
    Parser: Scott Adams (2 word)
    Supports: Originally custom format, since reverse engineered and translated to
    Z-code and others
    Availability: IF-archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/adamsinform.zip

    I'm playing using the zcode translations of the games found in scott-
    adams/games/zcode/adamsinform.zip in the IF Archive.

    Pirate Adventure uses a split-screen style where the top portion of the screen
    is permanently given over to displaying the location description ("I'm in a Flat
    in london" [sic]), the available exits, and the visible items.  I remember, from
    way back when, that when I was playing this game on a VIC-20 the split-screen
    effect was quite convenient; the VIC-20 had a text display of 22x23, and games
    rarely implemented scrollback (since memory used for scrollback would eat into
    the memory used to hold the game description, all of which had to be kept in
    RAM).  So it was actually quite nice to have the equivalent of LOOK permanently
    displayed.  These days the split-screen effect is more disturbing; I often use
    long windows so my focus keeps having to shift from where I'm typing (at the
    bottom) to the room description (at the top).  Many commands (eg GET SNEAKERS)
    have no response, they simply update the room description. This change is
    sometimes easy to miss, especially if it happens in one's peripheral vision or
    during a saccade.

    Needless to say the writing is extremely economical, but that doesn't really
    excuse the mistakes that are all too common: its/it's confusion, missing
    punctuation, and misplaced capital letters.

    Parsing is two word.  LOOK IN SACK and PUT THE TORCH OUT are way too complex.
    Forget the luxury of having synonyms or helpful hints from the parser.  A
    typical example that crops up early in the game is that there are stairs in the
    initial location, but neither UP nor DOWN works, GO STAIRS being the required
    invocation.  In the location at the other end of the stairs, DOWN works to
    return to the first location.  Is Adams just being stubborn here?  Or is he
    introducing the player to the required mechanics to solve later parts of the
    game?  I think I'd rather give Adams the benefit of the doubt here and say that
    requiring players to use GO STAIRS instead of UP is getting them to practice a
    puzzle in simple and obvious form so that later on less obvious uses for GO X
    can be introduced without the player thinking it harsh or unfair.

    The parser abbreviates all words to 3 letters and this somewhat makes up for the
    lack of now traditional abbreviations such as X (EXA) and I (INV).  Despite the
    parser's simplicity it does implement automatic disambiguation for some objects.
    CRA is recognised as "Sack of crackers" or "narrow crack" as appropriate,
    similarly with WIN.

    When we review an old game like this we are confronted with questions of
    purpose.  Why are we playing an old game?  We can play to gain some insight into
    the history, to see what it was like to play games of that era (although the
    experience will of course fall short because of the lack of context, just as
    attempts at, say, medieval cooking do.  That doesn't mean such attempts
    shouldn't be made of course); we can play to see what value such games hold now,
    as objects of entertainment; finally, we can play to see what value such games
    hold for the creators of modern works.  What lessons can we learn from this
    game?

    As a form of entertainment there is really very little to keep the modern player
    at the keyboard: no lavish descriptions; a fair number spelling mistakes and
    similar signs of inadequate proofreading; no cunning plots; the puzzles aren't
    particularly deep.

    It's worthwhile to compare the implementation of a bag in Pirate Adventure with
    how it would likely be implemented today.  Today it would be implemented as a
    container.  The player would be able to open it, close, take things out, put
    things in.  Adams avoids the complexities inherent in container objects
    (capacity, inclusion in self, description of contents, reaching beyond when the
    PC is inside, etc) by simply having OPEN BAG create a new object in the location
    with the response "Something falls out".  Adams has been spared the expense of
    implementing containers, and the player has been spared the pointless
    exploration of a containment simulation.  In the modern approach, implementing
    the BAG as a container, OPEN BAG would yield the response "Revealing an X" or
    similar, and GET X would get the object in question.  Adams solution has all the
    elegance of the modern implementation, but at a fraction of the cost (in terms
    of programming and debugging).  In either case the player types exactly the same
    sequence of commands, OPEN BAG. GET X.  What the player has lost is the ability
    to PUT X IN BAG (that would require a preposition in the parser), but that
    doesn't seem like a huge loss given that containers in adventure games are often
    used to merely delay the player in finding some object (that is, they are a
    barrier to getting some object from the container rather than something into
    which the player might usefully stow an object).  The lesson here is that
    simulation for simulation's sake is pointless.  If you implement a complex
    object then its complexity should be motivation by having an interesting purpose
    in the game.  One recent example which fails this test is the implementation of
    pockets in Eric Eve's competition release of The Elysium Enigma.  The effect of
    the pockets was to hide from the player objects carried by the PC (a false, and
    I suspect largely unintentional) widening on the player / PC gap).  I'm happy to
    say that Eric Eve has  made a new release which fixes this and brings this
    aspect up to the high quality of the rest of The Elysium Enigma.

    Structurally the game follows the classic trinity of beginning, middle, and end.
     The beginning consists of 5 locations in the London flat and lasts until the
    player discovers how to get to the islands.  The middle bit provides most of the
    game and takes places on an island with rather more than 5 locations (though you
    will also be revisiting the flat).  A final section (on another island) is
    reached after the solution to a key puzzle on the first island.  The
    anticipation of solving that key puzzle is quite good and solving it yields a
    genuine sense of achievement which is sadly deflated by the game's very
    lackluster response: "CONGRATULATIONS !!! But your Adventure is not over yet...
    " (that's Pirate Adventure being prolix).  When Pirate Adventure was first
    published the three-part structure had yet to become time honoured; Adams did
    well to note that the theatrical device could be employed here.  Sadly the final
    part of the game is a bit of a let-down.  Like many games (modern and old) it
    feels like the author ran out of time, steam, or implementation space,
    consequently the final part feels under-implemented, disappointing, and buggy
    (the one bug I found concerns an object found in the final section).

    Although old Pirate Adventure avoids a lot of puzzle cliches.  Several objects
    in the game have multiple uses; some change state and are used in different
    states. One of the NPCs both provides clues and is used directly to solve a
    later puzzle.  One NPC is an obstacle early on in the game, but needs to be
    exploited to overcome a puzzle later in the game.  Although some cliches are
    avoided lots are included: instant death; no UNDO; some puzzles require, for no
    obvious reason, repeating certain actions.  Some of puzzles seem pretty
    reasonable, others seem a bit arbitrary and you can easily unwittingly enter
    unwinnable states.  Fortunately the game isn't very large so restarting isn't
    very unpleasant and often leads to discovering something new.  There is an
    inventory limit (it never forms the crux of a puzzle, it just means more toing
    and froing) and a torch that can be exhausted.

    Pirate Adventure packs quite a lot of puzzles into its small space; the sketch
    of the puzzle-dependency diagram (DM4's "lattice diagram") that I started making
    reveals a surprisingly complex and interesting structure.  The effect is one
    that I find all too rare in lots of games: there are always several avenues to
    explore, always a few objects whose purpose you haven't fathomed, and a few
    strategies that remain to be tried.  There are quite a few pleasing moment when
    you realise that certain objects have multiple uses.  On the other hand I know
    of no puzzle in Pirate Adventure that has an alternate solution (apart from a
    trivial rephrasing); it's a notable lack in Pirate Adventure.

    The setting of the game, a tropical island (well, the game doesn't say it's
    tropical but let's assume it is), is both a strength and a weakness.  The text
    in the game is extremely minimal, yet the setting manages to be quite vivid.
    Adams achieves this primarily by placing the game in a setting that is familiar
    to most players: the classic desert island of adventure stories like Treasure
    Island and Robinson Crusoe.  Such stories were probably read by (or read to) the
    player as a child; the island takes on nostalgic and perhaps slightly magical
    qualities in the player's mind as a result.  It takes very few words for the
    player to be transported to a fantasy island with golden beaches, inviting
    lagoons, huts made from palm leaves, and a cave system in cliffs of soft rock.
    Those parts of the game are fine.  It's the additions that break the spell.  The
    cave system has a toolshed inside it apparently equipped with about half the
    necessary materials to build a boat, but the only access to the shed is either
    via a small crack or past a crocodile infested pit.  How did the equipment get
    in the shed?  How does the crocodiles' pit fill with water?  Why are the keys to
    a pirate's chest in [LOCATION WITHHELD]?  Historically this was totally
    acceptable, expected even, but these days many players would find it
    distasteful.

    Designers would do well to briefly dip into Pirate Adventure to observe how it
    manages to create a solid and evocative setting with so few words, and how the
    puzzles and objects are interlinked with such economy.  But that is all.  Pirate
    Adventure has little to commend itself to the modern player, though it was great
    in its day.

    Z-code ports of this and other Scott Adams games

    This and other Scott Adams games for use in the ScottFree interpreter

    Hugo port of the game featuring a full-sentence parser

    Walkthroughs for this and other Scott Adams games

    The PK Girl
    From: Mike Russo <russo SP@G its.caltech.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #31 -- January 3, 2003

    TITLE: The PK Girl
    AUTHOR: Robert Goodwin
    EMAIL: sakurafiend SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: September 2002
    PARSER: ADRIFT
    SUPPORTS: ADRIFT runtime
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/adrift/the_pk_girl/the_pk_girl.taf
    VERSION: IF Comp release

    This anime-inspired game takes a story-driven IF and mixes in a dating
    sim and whole mess of world interactivity. The amount of depth here is
    impressive; there's something like half a dozen girls you can woo, a
    bunch of nonessential locations that evolve as the game goes by, and a
    truly amazing number of objects you can find and play with.

    The central plot is nothing to write home about -- cute girls with
    psychic powers stalked by a mysterious conspiracy -- and dating sims in
    general strike me as somewhere between creepy and pathetic, but where PK
    Girl really shines is in the incredible amount of stuff you can do. I
    wound up picking up an ice-cube tray early in the game; later on, I
    managed to fill it with water, stick it in a freezer, pop out the
    finished cubes, and started to make a frozen dessert with it. There was
    no obvious puzzle associated with it, although I'm sure there was a use
    for it, perhaps in currying favor with one of the girls. That level of
    interactivity is present throughout the game; you can help a character
    cook dinner, for example, or help comb another's hair. The sheer wealth
    of different objects to play and experiment with, some useful to the
    plot, some not, really makes the game feel more interactive and engaging
    than much story-driven IF, to say nothing of the average dating sim,
    which typically relies on simplistic multiple-choice gameplay.

    I'm not a particular fan of this genre, which hurt its appeal a bit, but
    for a player with different sensibilities, PK Girl could well be the
    most enjoyable game in the comp, with enough replayability and depth to
    have a long lifetime beyond the judging deadline.

    Rating: 8

    ADRIFT .taf file (updated version)

    Directory with ADRIFT .taf file (competition version)

    Hints

    Plague Planet
    From: J. J. Farmer <J.J.Farmer-CSSE94 SP@G computer-science.birmingham.ac.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #6 -- July 26, 1995

     NAME: Plague Planet                             PARSER: Fair
     AUTHOR: Philip Hawthorne                        PLOT: Linear
     EMAIL: ???                                      ATMOSPHERE: Very Good
     AVAILABILITY: Shareware (BBC Micro),            WRITING: Very Good
                   Commercial (Archimedies)          SUPPORTS: BBC Micro,
     PUZZLES: Excellent                                        Acorn Archimedies
     CHARACTERS: Rather Shallow                      DIFFICULTY: Hard

    Let me start by saying this: Plague Planet is a BIG game.  Lots of locations,
    hundreds of puzzles, thousands of hours of fun for all the family, and at a
    very reasonable price.  Which is rather useful, since you will have to employ
    somebody to make your food, walk the dog, clean the house, etc., the moment
    you buy it.  Why?  Because this game is so addictive you won't be able to
    tear yourself away from it.

    The plot is nothing if not unoriginal: you are a peaceful farmer on the
    agrarian planet of Azura when a spaceship lands in your field.  And
    that's pretty much all you know when you start the game.

    Like many excellent games, however, you are left to discover the objective
    for yourself.  In fact, you actually create the objective whilst you are
    trying to do this.  I'm not spoiling the plot too much if I tell you: like
    a prize idiot, you break into the spaceship, releasing the plague virus that
    was contained within and condemning every man, woman and child (including
    yourself) on the planet to death.

    The puzzles in the game are, almost without exception, solvable with nothing
    more than the objects to hand and a little logical thinking.  There are a
    couple of mazes, but hints to the paths through them are lying around, and
    there is no need to fall back on the old "drop an object in every location"
    routine.

    Many puzzles are a joy to solve.  I particularly enjoyed learning to fly
    the spaceship and satisfying the talking door unhappy with its position
    in life.  And the sheer number of puzzles means that there is a tremendous
    variety, ranging from variations on traditional ones (a key in a lock on the
    opposite side of a locked door), to completely original conundrums.

    There is only one "what on earth is the author thinking of" puzzle; the
    meaning of the initials "BMUS".  Just think of a certain American science
    fiction serial...

    As for the other characters in the game - well, there aren't all that
    many.  A few robots, a few animals, a few religious maniacs who will kill
    you on sight, and one miner with a severe flatulance problem.  They don't have
    a wide variety of things to say, but there are various reasons why you can't
    spend much time talking to them, anyway.

    The atmosphere generated by this game is simply wonderful.  The descriptions
    are verbose without being longwinded, and the problems fit into it all
    perfectly - none are "glued on".  You could almost believe you are there,
    sneaking into a mine on the planet Zanthor, evading a Yillis Gorf on the
    planet Aquaria, meeting an "old friend" on the planet Arboreta.

    All in all, this game is simply marvellously addictive and amazingly
    enjoyable.  If you can find a copy, snap it up at once...

    The Plague (Redux)
    Space Horror I: Prey for Your Enemies
    From: Valentine Kopteltsev <uux SP@G mail.ru>
    Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    NAME: The Plague (Redux)
    AUTHOR: Laurence Moore
    EMAIL: adv SP@G turntopage.com
    DATE: 2005
    PARSER: Adrift
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2005/adrift/
    plague/The Plague - Redux.taf

    NAME: Space Horror I: Prey for Your Enemies
    AUTHOR: Jerald M. Cooney
    EMAIL: jcooney_email SP@G yahoo.com
    DATE: 2005
    PARSER: HTML-based CYOA
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2005/windows/
    space/space.exe

    These two games have a lot in common. First of all, both of them represent
    first episodes of their respective series, implying there's going to be a
    continuation, and thus stipulating their stories being incomplete. Then, both
    works don't entrust the arduous task of frightening the player to
    individualists, employing whole teams of eminently qualified specialists for
    those purposes -- Plague benefits from the services of old trusty zombies,
    while Space Horror resorts to the help of no less reliable murderous aliens.
    Finally, both games represent carefully implemented, solid, and well- polished
    efforts -- especially Space Horror, which only contained very slight glitches.
    On the other hand, the author of Space Horror probably has had it somewhat
    easier, since his work is a CYOA. At this point, it must be said I don' t share
    the rather widespread in the IF-community bias against that kind of game.
    Especially if it is done as careful as Space Horror -- with several fully
    fleshed out plot lines, well-defined characters (although, of course, they
    aren't too interactive), and great illustrations. The author even managed to
    squeeze in a couple of puzzles -- quite a feat, considering the game format.
    The puzzles are logical enough, and fit well into the story. All in all, once
    you let this game play on its home turf and don't cry for the moon, Mr.
    Cooney's work leaves nothing to be desired.

    Plague isn't as strong at presentation and multimedia effects -- it's a text-
    only adventure, but it possesses its own trump cards, which allow it to stay
    abreast. The very first of them is the game name -- with all due respect to Mr.
    Cooney, the title "Space Horror" is one of the leading contenders for the top
    ten of the Most Generic Names Chart. Besides, Plague has a much more intense
    beginning that sets the pace and atmosphere for the rest of the game. In fact,
    the atmosphere and the setting make up about 80 percents of it. They're best
    described with "bloody chaos". Of course, people could have different opinions
    on it, depending on their personal preferences -- some players would find it
    disgusting, others would dismiss it as rather hackneyed -- but as for me, I did
    like it.

    The characters... Now, Stacie, our main hero, was well defined from the
    emotional point of view, so that I found it easy to identify with her. Although
    the wondrous transformation of a rather inexperienced town girl into a rough
    zombie slayer came kinda sudden and thus seemed somewhat unrealistic, I guess
    it was part of the genre... or maybe I'm just underestimating inexperienced
    town girls (typical case of male chauvinism;). Other characters only have been
    good enough for a crowd scene -- maybe they'll hit the big time in the next
    episode(s).

    Plague is by no means a puzzle-oriented game; the puzzles present are kept
    rather easy, and their main virtue is not hampering the story too much. They
    cope with this task pretty well, except for one scavenger hunt requiring
    careful examination of lots of scenery objects. Fortunately, the walkthrough
    helped me to get over this unfavourable design choice without any losses.

    The conclusions. It's true there's nothing groundbreaking about either of these
    works -- they don't even try to expand the genre boundaries, and probably
    reproduce every cliche existing within them. However, it's no less true both of
    them represent solid, competently implemented efforts, and I don't regret any
    minute spent playing them. I honestly hope the authors won't be put off by the
    relatively low ranks they got in the Comp, and release the next episodes of
    their respective works.

    SNATS (scores before the slash apply to Plague, after the slash to Space
           Horror):

    PLOT: Adequate (1.2)/"Truly" branching (1.3)
    ATMOSPHERE: Makes up most of the game charm (1.5)/Exciting enough (1.2)
    WRITING: Supports the atmosphere very well (1.3)/Supports the atmosphere
             very well (1.3)
    GAMEPLAY: Now that one comes to think of it, it was pretty standard, but when
              playing, I was too thrilled to notice;) (1.3)/Well... CYOA (1.2)
    BONUSES: Identifying with the player character (0.9)/Graphics, fake websites
             and other similar stuff (1.1)
    TOTAL: 6.2/6.1
    CHARACTERS: Rather generic (0.8)/Nice, but not very interactive (1.0)
    PUZZLES: Not very remarkable, with at least one unfortunate design choice
             (0.9)/The very fact there are puzzles in a CYOA is a feat on its own
             (not rated)
    DIFFICULTY: You should have no troubles completing it (5 out of 10)/
                Again, this doesn't apply to a CYOA (not rated)

    COMP SCORE: 6

    COMMENTS: I think no comment is needed. No matter how you slice it, those are
              good, solid games.

    The Plague -- Adrift executable
    The Plague -- walkthrough (MS Word format)

    Space Horror -- Windows installer

    Planet Of The Infinite Minds
    From: Matthew Clemson <matthew.clemson SP@G keble.ox.ac.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #23 -- December 29, 2000

    TITLE: Planet Of The Infinite Minds
    AUTHOR: Alfredo Garcia
    E-MAIL: Five-0 SP@G oceanfree.net
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2000/tads/planmind/planmind.gam
    VERSION: 1

    Er. Um. It's... odd, there's no denying that. It's generally
    bug-and-typo free, but it's resoundingly... odd. It's what I'd imagine a
    Rybread Celsius game to be like if it was done, well, right. Some great
    puzzles, although there's rather a lot of guess-the-author's-mind - I
    had to use hints several times - we're back to the oddness again;
    indeed, parts of it kept reminding me of Nord and Bert. Indeed, like
    N&B, it's at times laugh-out-loud funny - the problems relating to the
    end of the universe spring to mind.

    Some puzzles, OTOH, are really ingenious, although they are, again,
    sometimes let down by the guess-the-author's-thoughts aspects; I
    particularly (gasp) *enjoyed the maze*; it was a different approach to
    any I'd known, and worked well. Mind you, most people would argue that
    it's not a maze :-).

    There was one puzzle towards the end which was a little out-of-sorts,
    though; and the author admits it in the walkthrough. All-in-all, I
    didn't dock a point for it, since I enjoyed the rest of the game so
    much; other people might be tempted to, and I'd understand it if they
    did. In retrospect, looking at the walkthrough, it's at least nice that
    they allowed a cleaner verb than the one I actually used, which probably
    says more about my mind than that of the author :-)

    It's a little too enthusiastic with 'last lousy points', but they do
    seem at least vaguely logical; OTOH, the entire response to Xyzzy is a
    whole new and intelligent approach that I've not encountered before. I
    didn't enjoy the game from the challenge and puzzle aspect - but from
    the entertainment aspect, I was enthralled.

    Rating: 7

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

    Walkthrough? Yes
    Genre: Speculative Fiction

             +------------------------------------------+
             |Overall Rating        A-|Submitted Vote  9|
             |Writing               A |Plot           B+|
             |Puzzles               B |NPCs           B |
             |Technical             B |Tilt           A-|
             +------------------------+-----------------+

    *** Initial Thoughts

    I'm definitely not the only person who liked this game, but I may be the
    only person who did not find the library puzzle baffling....

    *** Writing (A)

    The thing is, the writing was really funny.

    It wasn't actually as perfectly technically executed as my letter grade
    might imply; there were awkward turns of phrase here and there and the
    occasional misuse of punctuation. But it was very, very funny.

    One of my favorite bits (quite far into the game):

    "All at once you enter the chimney with a sound that can only be
    described as a Floop. All around is darkness. Then, with a
    Binco-diddy-diddy you career downwards through metal ledges and wire
    meshes. There is a resonating Ting as your body crashes against a curve
    in the pipe. You slide downward at this angle towards light. The light
    becomes brighter and brighter until it finally engulfs you, as you shoot
    out of a large fireplace and into a tasteful room."

    The subtitle of this game is "an interactive farce", and the author is
    not kidding. It doesn't take itself seriously. It doesn't take you
    seriously. It certainly doesn't take the protagonist or the NPCs
    seriously.

    Funny.

    *** Plot (B+)

    It's surreal, but it's cohesive... and that's a neat trick.

    Sort of a cross between 1950s sf, a physics major's worst nightmares
    (I'm betting the author is or was a physics major), and a comedy (well,
    it DID say 'farce'), the basic plot is... nearly incomprehensible, yet,
    strangely appealing, much like the sideshow freaks at a circus. Watching
    it unfold is somewhat akin to watching that guy in the sideshow who does
    terrible things to his own body: you wince, but you watch anyhow because
    it's fascinating, and you wonder how it's done.

    Whether or not the ultimate conclusion makes any sense isn't the point.
    The point is, it's fun to watch the progress.

    *** Puzzles (B)

    Some people found the puzzles baffling, inaccessible, incomprehensible
    on several levels. I used the walkthrough a lot myself. But they do make
    sense, and they contain an element of originality...

    ...and this game has, hands down, my favorite puzzle of the comp. It may
    not actually have been terribly original, but I don't recall having seen
    a puzzle quite like it before. Without giving away too much, there is a
    point at which you have a certain set of objects, and you must
    manipulate your environment such to match those objects. I found one of
    the things necessary to do this nearly impossible to figure out, but the
    rest was definitely a fun exercise.

    There was a puzzle at the end I found mildly objectionable, but it was
    obnoxious in a way some people might find funny. It involved a toilet.

    *** NPCs (B)

    You don't actually have a lot of control over your interaction with the
    NPCs, but for some reason this did not bother me. I actually found the
    characters (or, perhaps, caricatures) rather interesting, particularly
    one repeating encounter... poor man. I think most important is that they
    provided color that went well with the rest of the game.

    *** Technical (B)

    The aforementioned favorite puzzle, something I thought was a pretty
    good coding trick, was worth an extra point or two in technical score. I
    found no noticeable bugs.

    *** Tilt (A-) and Final Thoughts

    It's possible I enjoyed this game as much as I did because I used to
    make a career out of baiting my physics-major ex-boyfriend. (I used to
    tell him that physicists were just guessing anyhow, for instance.) Or
    maybe it's just that I have a soft place in my heart for 1950s bad
    science movies. But I think even without those biases, I would probably
    have found the game very amusing. Given the existence of the walkthrough
    for people stuck on the admittedly not always straightforward puzzles, I
    think I would recommend this to nearly everyone with a sense of humor.

    Directory with TADS .gam file and walkthrough (competition version)

    Planetfall
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995

      NAME:  Planetfall                   GAMEPLAY:  Infocom Standard
      AUTHOR:  Steve Eric Meretzky        PLOT:  Excellent
      EMAIL:  ?                           ATMOSPHERE:  Excellent
      AVAILABILITY:  LTOI 1, Zork Anth.   WRITING:  Excellent
      PUZZLES: <blank>                    SUPPORTS:  Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS: Excellent               DIFFICULTY: <blank>

            In Planetfall, you start as a deck scrubber on a starship in the far
    future.  When your ship is destroyed, your escape pod deposits you in a
    deserted high-tech building complex on an alien world.  With the help of your
    faithful robot companion B-19-7 (aka Floyd), you must discover what happened
    to the people, and correct various problems before your time runs out.
            Planetfall was the first Infocom game I played, and still my
    favourite.  Often billed as a science-fiction comedy, it really is not.
    There are many amusing sidelights and funny responses from the author to your
    failed actions, (one of my favourites is when you are looking at the planet's
    computer datafiles, and come across an Infocom catalog.  When you read the
    description for Zork, Floyd looking over your shoulder tells you that he
    played that game and solved all the puzzles...except for how to get into that
    little white house) but it is not at all a straight comedy in the same sense
    that Leather Goddesses of Phobos, or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    would be.  It merely feels like one because the game is constantly charming
    you in one way or another.  Floyd, generally remembered as Infocom's best NPC
    is useful for only three things in the game, but provides you with a constant
    stream of amusing banter, from relating tales of the time he helped someone
    find a lost paper clip, to passing along the latest hot gossip about Dr.
    Fizpick.
            Oftentimes text games fall into the syndrome of providing one and
    only one use for each item in the game, so that if you have found a use for
    an item you can throw it away, confident that it will not be called for
    again.  Not so in Planetfall (and Meretzky games in general).  Several items
    have more than one use, while others have no use at all.
            Planetfall's original edition contained Infocom's usual batch of
    interesting freebies (I still keep the Stellar Patrol ID card in my wallet
    mixed in with the credit cards).  However, it was also one of the games
    selected to be redone as a Solid Gold edition with onscreen hints.  Get both
    editions if possible.
            The IBM version of Lost Treasures of Infocom 1 contained an original
    version of the program.  The Macintosh version of LTOI 1 contains the Solid
    Gold Edition.  PC users who have Macintosh-using friends can of course try to
    get a copy of the datafile from the LTOI1-Mac version, and run it off an IBM
    interpreter.
            Planetfall was one of the games selected for novelization when Avon
    Books put out a series of Infocom Books several years ago.  The novel version
    of Planetfall is really a sequel to Planetfall (and Stationfall).  This book
    (not written by Meretzky) was much closer to the Battletech universe than
    Planetfall's, and was loaded with tiresome, sophomoric, un-clever humour.  I
    read most of the other Avon Infocom books in a day or so each, but Planetfall
    took almost a month to force myself through.
            On the brighter side though, another Planetfall sequel is the next
    game that Activision plans to release under the Infocom label.  The game, to
    be called "Planetfall 2: The Search for Floyd", is scheduled for release
    late in 1995.  As a prelude to this, they included the original (non-Solid
    Gold) Planetfall game in their recently released Zork Anthology.
            Still, Planetfall remains not only my favourite text game, but my
    favourite adventure game.

            [Well, we've all got our fingers crossed hoping that Activision
    doesn't fumble this game as badly as they did Return to Zork.  But I'm giving
    public notice, if Floyd looks like either R2D2 or a garbage can, the fur will
    fly. --GKW]

    From: Alex Freeman <freemanry SP@G aol.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #30 -- September 20, 2002

    Planetfall is one of the greatest adventure games I have ever played!
    All the puzzles are logical and have, more or less, the correct balance
    of difficulty. It's amazing how the puzzles can be solved once you just
    step back and think about them a bit. However, I think a little
    background is in order before I move on.

    You start off as an Ensign Seventh Class, and the scourge of your
    existence is Ensign First Class Blather, who acts like a drill sergeant.
    However, as fate would have it, some terrible disaster happens to the
    station whose floor you are being made to scrub, and you (should) take
    advantage of this opportunity by going into an escape pod. It takes you
    to a deserted planet, and you have to figure just what the heck you're
    supposed to do there. Along the way, you end up meeting the robot Floyd,
    whom every Planetfall player seems to like.

    This brings me to the characters. For interactive fiction, the
    characters are very well developed, since IF NPCs have the tendency to
    have little or no personality at all. Because of this, I feel that
    Planetfall's NPCs are big achievements, even though they wouldn't be
    considered well developed characters for non-interactive fiction since
    they are basically flat stereotypes. Floyd is basically like a cheery
    little child whom every player seems to find charming. I have to love it
    when he says how he was able to solve all the puzzles in Zork except how
    to get into the white house. Blather acts like a stereotypical drill
    sergeant, and most of his personality is revealed through your dreams
    since you must sleep during the game. I have to love that one dream
    sequence in which you refuse to scrub the scenery and throw your brush
    at him, only to have him go after "the valuable company property". ^_^

    Also, the atmosphere is pretty good. It has humorous touches amongst an
    interesting planet. It has a machine shop, some offices, some mess
    halls, and also a library. The writing is pretty good too. It gives fine
    descriptions of the rooms and is some of the funniest writing I've seen
    this side of the Space Quest series (which is remarkably similar in many
    ways). As for the parser, it's a typical Infocom parser, so it's quite
    good.

    Overall, Planetfall is easily one of the best adventure games I've ever
    played because of the balanced and logical puzzles throughout the game,
    the humorous writing, and the amusing characters. My only complaint
    about the game is that the laser wasn't described well enough, making
    two puzzles difficult. I thought that the laser was supposed to be like
    one of those laser pointers, but it's actually more like a laser gun.
    However, Planetfall is definitely one game you should check out!

    Solution (Text)

    The Plant
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

    From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G colorado.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999

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

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

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

    Rating: 9.0

    TADS .gam file & associated files (.zip) (updated version)

    Directory with TADS .gam file and walkthrough

    TADS source code (.zip)

    Plundered Hearts
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995

      NAME:  Plundered Hearts                PARSER:  Infocom
      AUTHOR:  Amy Briggs                    PLOT:  Good
      EMAIL:  ?                              ATMOSPHERE:  Very Good
      AVAILABILITY:  LTOI-2                  WRITING:  Good
      PUZZLES:  Not bad                      SUPPORTS:  Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS:  Not bad                   DIFFICULTY:  On the Easy Side

            Plundered Hearts is a romance novel set in the 1600's.  You must
    rescue your father from the clutches of an evil island governor with the aid
    of a pirate captain who lights your fire.
            Plundered Hearts takes a rather standard plotline and uses it to
    very good effect.  The writing feels very much like a Harlequin novel, with
    enough amusing puzzles and clever responses to keep me, a
    non-romance-novel-reader interested to the end.
            The puzzles are a little easier than the standard Infocom fare, but
    generally interesting ones that can be reasoned or inferred.  There are few
    "guess what the author is thinking puzzles".
            The game's strongest point though is in its characterization.  Not
    in the other characters; Crulley, Jamison, Lafonde and the others are rather
    standard, thus my character rating of 1.2.  Rather, this game characterizes
    you, the player, more than any other of Infocom's offerings.
            In most Infocom games, who YOU are is either unimportant or doesn't
    affect the plot much.  In Zork, you're just some anonymous guy who was
    walking by the white house.  You have no particular personality, or history
    before this point.  Planetfall makes an effort to paint your character with
    the enclosed diary, but it is all chrome.  None of it really affects the
    story once you're in it.  As a result, I always sort of imagined myself as
    the main character.  To some extent this was Infocom's intention; much of
    their early advertising talked about imagining yourself waking up inside a
    story.
            Plundered Hearts, more than any other game gave me the feeling of
    really being inside someone ELSE'S head.  Throughout the game, who you are
    plays an important part.  Disguising your identity and altering your
    appearance is important in several places to elicit a desired reaction from
    other characters (not to mention avoiding some undesired reactions).  As a
    result, the game scores very well in "intangibles", thus my high Wildcard
    rating.
         Plundered Hearts is one of Infocom's more underrated games.  A very good
    blend of puzzle solving and story.

    Solution (Text)

    Poor Zefron's Almanac
    From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G colorado.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #13 -- February 5, 1998

    NAME: Poor Zefron's Almanac
    AUTHORS: Carl Klutzke
    E-MAIL: cklutzke SP@G iquest.net
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/tads/almanac/almanac.gam
    VERSION: Version 1.0 (1997 competition release)

    Right about the time that Poor Zefron's Almanac (hereafter called PZA)
    starts feeling like another humdrum sword-and-sorcery game, it
    executes a nice surprising twist. To say too much more would be to
    give the game away, but the fact that the author bills PZA as "an
    interactive cross-genre romp" is a clue toward its direction. This
    twist made the game refreshing and fun again, especially after the
    frustration it caused me when I began playing it. More on that
    later. PZA does several things very well, one of which is its
    eponymous book, a tome owned by your wizardly master Zefron and left
    behind after his mysterious disappearance. This almanac contains a
    feature unique to all the CONSULTable items in IFdom (as far as I
    know): it can be BROWSEd. Browsing the almanac brings forth a random
    entry from within its pages; not only is it great fun to read these
    random entries, it also gives a sense of how thoroughly the almanac
    has been implemented. This device would be most welcome in other
    IF... how I'd love to browse the Encyclopedia Frobozzica or the
    Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy! Just having the book at hand lent a
    sense of scope and excitement to PZA.

    Unfortunately, my first 45 minutes or so of playing this game were
    extremely frustrating. PZA suffers from a couple of serious design
    flaws, the gravest of which is its repeated violation of the Fifth
    Right (from Graham Nelson's "Player's Bill of Rights"): not to have
    the game closed off without warning. Because of a fairly flexible (but
    extremely temporary) magic spell that becomes available at the very
    beginning of the game, I found myself repeatedly stranded, unable to
    proceed and forced to RESTART. This happened again later on in the
    game -- I committed a perfectly logical action and found out hundreds
    of turns later that this action had closed off the endgame. This is a
    frustrating experience, and one that could easily have been avoided
    with a few minor changes to the game's structure, changes which would
    not have had any discernible effect on puzzles or plot. In addition,
    there are a few areas in which the player character can be killed
    without warning, always an unwelcome design choice. PZA is (as far as
    I know) Carl Klutzke's first game, so chalk these flaws up to
    education. I look forward to playing another Klutzke game as
    well-implemented as PZA, but designed more thoughtfully.

    One nice element of PZA was its facility with IF homage. The game's
    "cluple" spell not only had a name that sounded straight out of
    Enchanter, it was virtually identical to that series' "snavig"
    spell. The almanac itself (as well as a number of other features) was
    a skillful allusion to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Finally,
    the XYZZY command response is one of the more clever I've seen in a
    while. Clearly PZA's author is a devotee of the old games, and his
    devotion shows in his work. I am hopeful that his next piece of IF
    will live up to his worthy aspirations.

    Prose: The prose in PZA is generally very good. Rooms, objects, and
    random events are described concisely but with attention to
    detail. Some of the locations are rather sparsely treated (for
    example, the town consists of one location), but such skimping is
    always done in service of the plot, and more detail would serve to
    distract rather than to enrich.

    Plot: This is definitely the strongest point of PZA. The game starts
    out with an engaging hook, and after the twist I was definitely
    enjoying the direction of the story quite a bit. In addition, the
    author has manipulated the scoring system in such a way as to give the
    feeling of multiple endings. Granted, many of those endings amount to
    one version or another of "*** You have died ***", but not all of
    them. There are more and less successful solutions to the story, and
    they are integrated so naturally into the endgame text that they
    almost escape notice. One of the nicest implementations of multiple
    endings in the competition.

    Puzzles: Here there were problems. What happens to PZA is that its
    individual problems are well-considered, and their solutions are
    perfectly logical. However, when the actions that comprise those
    solutions are attempted in other areas of the game, they all too often
    drive the narrative into a blind alley from which there is no
    escape. It's one of the hardest balancing acts in interactive fiction:
    how to have sensible puzzles logically integrated into the game,
    without making the narrative too linear, which in their elements
    create no dead ends for the player.  PZA doesn't pull it off.

    Technical:
    writing -- I found no technical errors in the writing.

    coding -- Once I played PZA on WinTADS, I had no problems with it.  I
    started out trying to use it on my old DOS version of TR, and before I
    could even get one command out it was giving me TADS "Out of Memory"
    errors. Whether this is a bug in the program of the interpreter, I
    don't know enough about TADS to say.

    TADS file (.gam)

    TADS source code (.zip)

    The Potter and the Mould
    From: Mike Snyder (wyndo SP@G prowler-pro.com)
    Review appeared in SPAG #44 -- April 30, 2006

    TITLE: The Potter and the Mould
    AUTHOR: Robert Street
    EMAIL: adrift.reviews SP@G gmail.com
    DATE: March 31, 2006
    PARSER: Adrift
    SUPPORTS: Adrift Runner and GLK Adrift
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/springthing/2006/mould.zip
    VERSION: Release 1

    The superhero genre isn't my favorite. I've never been a big fan of larger-
    than-life, hard-to-believe super powers. Sure, I enjoy the comic-based movie
    from time to time - Superman with his flying, strength, and x-ray vision;
    Spiderman with his spider-sense and web-slinging; Batman with his. super wealth;
    X-Men, of course. I've been known to read a superhero comic, although not
    recently. I've played superhero IF once or twice.

    In essence, I'm not the ideal fan for The Potter and the Mould. This is a story
    for superhero fans, and it comes complete with all the trappings. Origin story?
    Check. Mutant-like powers? Definitely. An imperfect, self-doubting protagonist?
    Uh huh. The mentor/student relationship? You bet. An evil but misunderstood
    villain? Sure. Motivation by revenge? Of course. It's everything you'd expect
    from a superhero story.

    What I like best about The Potter and the Mould is that it keeps moving. It will
    appeal most to superhero fans, but it's a frenetic and fast-paced adventure that
    kept me enthralled for the four hours it took to complete. It *feels* more
    difficult than it really is, which is a credit to the author's talent. The
    puzzles aren't hard enough to impede the action, yet they leave a sense of
    accomplishment in their wake. My longest sticking point involved a machine-room
    and a clay dog. After solving it - which was easier than I tried to make it - I
    realized that the puzzles were simple and understated. They work to keep the
    story moving, not to work against it, and that's probably the best kind.

    In most cases, Robert avoids text-dumps by way of action prompting. This
    typically comes as a nudge from an NPC, beginning with the rescue scene at the
    beginning, through Waterfall's revelations in the mall, to the hurried trip to
    the Potter's inner sanctuary. It works very well, and keeps things interactive.

    The story has some surprises and twists. It strays from the predictable formula
    particularly near the end. Even though I appreciate the change-up, the victory
    felt less than satisfying. It was like facing down Dr. Evil, and getting a back
    -stabbing Mini-Me instead. What follows is an exciting bit, but not what I
    expected.

    The writing in this, Robert Street's latest game, left me puzzled. Even though
    I've commented about this in prior reviews, it seemed more noticeable here;
    equally hard to pin down, but more prevalent. It could just be his style, but
    I'm not convinced that's it. Too many sentences (even some in close proximity)
    ended awkwardly with the word "though". There was a glaring lack of contractions
    throughout the text - not always, but in certain passages - making it more
    awkward. This alone isn't a sticking point, but coupled with some awkward
    phrasings in general, it just didn't always read *right*.

    Take the following - just one random example from hundreds of lines of text:

    "The shops in this corner seem to be trying to outdo each other with silly
    displays."

    The words "seem to be trying to" are the awkward bit. I might write this as:

    "The shops in this corner strive to outdo each other with silly displays."

    These kinds of things weave themselves throughout the text. The removed bit was
    clunky and passive. The replacement flows better, and it's more active. I
    usually qualify these kinds of comments with a reminder that I'm no expert. I
    have to look two or three times to figure out just what it is about a sentence
    that bothers me. Even in the example above, I might change "each other" to "one
    another". At times, the text in The Potter and the Mould felt like a first
    draft, as though it had been written once and then left alone. At other times,
    the text felt too heavily edited, as if the smooth flow and original expression
    had been lost under the weight of so much revision. Which the case may be, I
    don't know. Like I said, it might just be the author's unique style.

    Robert didn't skimp on details. Even though this is an ever-moving game, the
    extra effort shows in the responses, from looking around to trying various other
    actions. This isn't always the case in story-heavy works, where the only
    important thing is doing exactly what advances the plot. I liked that The Potter
    and the Mould stood up to some prodding.

    The hero's premise, now that I've come to it, is that he can "mould" his shape
    into various things. Robert implemented this in a logical, user-friendly way.
    Mould options are task-specific and presented in a list. This maintains the
    illusion that you're really able to morph into anything, where free-form input
    (John Evans's games come to mind) makes this very difficult. It also gives the
    PC some say-so as to how the player proceeds. In other words, the PC dreams up
    these forms so the player doesn't have to. More than that, it eliminates the "I
    tried to become a diamond-tipped drill, but it didn't work" complaints, at the
    expense of limiting the player's options. Occasionally, this let me figure out a
    puzzle where I wouldn't otherwise have had all the facts, but all in all, it was
    a good design.

    Next comes the obligatory Adrift discussion - but I'll keep it short. I'm a fan
    of Adrift's auto-mapping, even if I found some necessary exits unmarked on it.
    It can be a crutch sometimes, and I probably shouldn't have tried to rely on the
    map as much. I'm not a fan, however, of Adrift's pick-apart parsing. I call it
    that, because I don't know if it has a real name. This is most problematic when
    commenting a transcript. If you type something that has the word "undo" anywhere
    in it, Adrift believes you intend to undo your last move. If you comment about
    "he" or "she", Adrift starts matching pronouns, leading to some interesting
    responses. Knowing nothing about its inner workings, I still get the impression
    that grammar isn't built the way it is in Hugo and other IF languages. Adrift
    makes plenty of assumptions, and it doesn't conform to any grammar rules. If it
    finds what appears to be a verb, and what appears to be a noun referencing a
    known object, it reacts. At times, such as when it reacts on an NPC you haven't
    encountered yet, it can even be a little spoilery.

    Even though I'm not a superhero fan, I enjoyed The Potter and the Mould. It was
    trippy, but it was fun. It's a solid game, and a credit to the author's
    experience.

    My Spring Thing score: "8"

    Zip file containing ADRIFT game file and walkthrough

    Prized Possession
    From: Emily Short <emshort SP@G mindspring.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #27 -- January 4, 2002

    TITLE: Prized Possession
    AUTHOR: Kathleen M. Fischer
    E-MAIL: mfischer5 SP@G aol.com
    DATE: October 2001
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/inform/possess/Alys.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Given that I've liked Kathleen's other two major releases, I looked
    forward to this one with some eagerness, expecting another lighthearted
    and proficient period romance.

    Well, this could be considered a period romance, set as it is around a
    medieval woman faced with danger, death, disinheritance -- and the
    possibility of marriage.

    Lighthearted -- no. I found it fairly gloomy, actually. Which would not
    in itself be enough to doom the game, but it did drain some of the
    entertainment value out of the romance, which was rather vaguely
    sketched.

    Kathleen has since said that she did not intend Prized Possession to be
    a romance per se at all; so I am left to wonder why I considered it a
    failed one, rather than a successful something-else. Perhaps it's
    audience expectation, but I'd like to hope that I'm clever enough not to
    have put Kathleen into a specific niche on the basis of two games. I
    think the answer is that I found the primary NPC to be one of the
    driving influences of the plot; that most of the other characters were
    around for so little time that it was difficult to formulate a sense of
    my relationship to them. Where I did formulate such a sense, it was a
    sense that conformed to the stereotypical characterizations of the
    romance genre: there is, for instance, a character who fits the type of
    the Sinister and Ill-Meaning Guardian. All the game's clues seemed to
    push me towards the conclusion that that's what he was; I simply
    accepted that and went on.

    The other problem, from my point of view, is that it's possible to die
    or get a very unhappy ending in this game, not once, but over and over,
    on almost every turn, by picking the wrong one of two apparently
    equivalent options or by failing to do something nonobvious in the nick
    of time. I made a valiant effort, but went to the walkthrough and stayed
    there after the second scene or so. I never did feel as though I had a
    clear handle on what was going on, exactly: who everyone was, what they
    intended towards me, what I was trying to accomplish, or even exactly
    where I was. The height of my confusion came when I read some line about
    the curve of the heroine's belly, and presumed, from this clue, that she
    was in fact already pregnant, through some mischance, and that this was
    the reason for her apparent disgrace and travails on the road. I
    eventually decided that I'd misread or misinterpreted that, but it is
    evidence, I think, of how little the game gives the player to work with.
    The only aspect of the plot that I felt I really understood was the
    shadowy, vague beginnings of a romance with the main NPC. Doubtless this
    also affected my idea of what sort of game it was.

    Leaving aside all of those considerations, I think the game's choppiness
    tells against it in another way. I felt that I had no luxury to explore,
    to enjoy the things that one enjoys in IF. I agree that it would've been
    a dead bore to experience in full however many days we were on the road,
    or whatever, but possibly some happier medium could have been found than
    the rapid chapter jumps, which in places occur every couple of moves. It
    would be wrong to say that this game was not interactive enough:
    compared to something like Rameses, it's full of choices. The only
    problem is that most of those choices lead to disaster. I felt impelled
    to keep going, because I knew that my PC was in dreadful peril; there
    was no time to waste, not even on reading the game text more carefully.
    And then came panic and then disaster, or at least a long lifetime in
    the local nunnery.

    Summary: Railroady is not quite the word I want; the experience was more
    reminiscent of a rickety rollercoaster that started and slowed again
    unpredictably, and sometimes flung me out of the car entirely.
    (Litigation ensues.) Nonetheless, it still has the technical cohesion
    and decent writing one expects from a proven author, and if I was
    disappointed, it was relative to some high expectations.

    Directory with .z5 Zcode file and walkthrough

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

    NAME: Promoted!
    AUTHOR: Mike DeSanto
    EMAIL: desantom SP@G io.com
    DATE: October 1996
    PARSER: Homebrew
    SUPPORTS: OS/2 only.
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/promoted
    VERSION: Version 1.0

    The biggest drawback to this entry is its interpreter, which runs only
    under OS/2.  I sincerely hope that this isn't detrimental to its vote
    count, because it's a lot of fun, and deserves more attention than the
    (relatively) small OS/2 crowd can give it.

    Essentially, "Promoted!" is a zany satire of life in the corporate
    world, with a well-established mythos and lots of in-jokes that non-
    office players probably won't get much out of.  The biggest plus is
    that the setting is not just a bunch of inside jokes based solely on
    DeSanto's place of employment.  Anyone who's worked in a maze of
    twisty little cubicles (all alike) will be able to relate to the
    situations presented here.  DeSanto's take on corporate culture is
    amusing and well thought out, and he has a good grasp of what REALLY
    goes on in an office, though it's not quite up to the level of Scott
    Adams (and when I say Scott Adams here, I am of course referring to
    the "Dilbert" Scott Adams, not the SCOTT ADAMS Scott Adams).

    On the other hand, some of the puzzles could be improved.  There's
    lots of death without warning, a bit too much in a game without
    "UNDO," and some very text-adventurish situations.  The colored tape
    puzzle, for example, felt exactly like something that didn't quite
    make it into a "Zork" game.  The disguise puzzles, on the other hand,
    are neat, and quiz the player on the details of the world DeSanto has
    built.

    I also encountered some difficulty with Rexx-Adventure itself.  It's a
    neat engine, a snap to grasp, but a bit buggy.  Before I'd finished
    "Promoted!", I'd crashed the engine multiple times, receiving VX-REXX
    errors when I clicked among the lists a bit too fast, or when I tried
    to exceed my inventory's capacity.  Future bug fixes should eliminate
    this.  One advantage to the interface is the fact that its obviation
    of guess-the-verb paves the way for some obscure puzzles that wouldn't
    be acceptable with typed commands (i.e. "STRIP WIRES").  Here's hoping
    Rexx-Adventure sees ports to more systems.

    Directory With Rexx-Adventure Files

    Inform port (.z5)

    Provenance
    From: Jim Aikin <midiguru23 SP@G sbcglobal.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #46 -- October 17, 2006

    TITLE: Provenance
    AUTHOR: Corey W. Arnett
    EMAIL: coreywarnett SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: July 4, 2006
    PARSER: Adrift Generator 4.00
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://www3.telus.net/coreyarnett
    VERSION: 1.12.16 (10 Feb. 2006)

    I take it as axiomatic that interactive fiction is an entirely new art form.
    It bears, perhaps, the same relation to conventional fiction that film bears
    to theatre. Or possibly that's too grandiose a comparison.

    One difficulty we face in nurturing this new medium is that, because the
    community of enthusiasts is tiny and the forums through which new works can
    be discussed are few and unknown to the public at large, every new work
    that's released gets tossed into the common pool with all of the existing
    works, to sink or swim as best it can.

    The lack of stratification or hierarchy in the marketplace (using the term
    in a broad sense) puts a burden on novice authors. Where is the interested
    novice to get feedback and tutelage from more experienced authors, without
    being discouraged by scathing criticism? How are we to be fair and helpful
    when discussing the weaknesses of what can only be called student works?

    I started thinking about this after I spent a couple of hours wandering
    around in Provenance. Cory Arnett's first game is precisely a student work.
    The author shows promise, and I hope he'll work hard to hone his skills and
    release a more polished, thoughtful game, or several of them. Provenance
    itself, however, is unlikely to attract many players, or hold their
    attention for very long.

    The strength of the game lies in the touches of creepy, ominous atmosphere
    and in the grandeur of the scenery at certain locations. Its shortcomings
    are just as easily listed: The model world is thin, the story is incoherent,
    and the code is buggy.

    As the story opens you're in your carriage, riding through a forest. Night
    is falling and winter closing in. Shortly you reach a Victorian manor house,
    and a sinister-looking trail of blood droplets on the front walk leads you
    up to the door. As you explore the house and grounds, various momentary
    incidents hint that All Is Not Well. In the end, sad to say, these glimpses
    turn out to be a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

    The effect of the brooding atmosphere is undercut by bits of florid
    over-writing. Consider this, from the intro: "The sun has breached the
    horizon and its fervent intensity warms the land.... Only the sound of your
    horse's hooves break up the monotonous silence that permeates through the
    solitude." Note the grammatical error: "sound" is singular, so the verb
    should be "breaks up." Also, in this passage the sun is rising. A few
    sentences later, it's setting.

    The game fails to follow through consistently with the gloomy spell cast by
    winter: When you enter the garden of the manor house, you'll find roses and
    wisteria in bloom, as well as ripe tomatoes and strawberries. Curiously, you
    can pick eight varieties of vegetable in the garden (counting strawberries
    as a vegetable), but they have nothing to do with solving the game.

    The player character's goal is not initially clear, but the game turns out
    to be a treasure hunt. Most players will probably find, before long, a handy
    list of the things we're supposed to collect. Finding the key that will get
    you into the house is more challenging, however. I feel this puzzle is
    borderline unfair, because it requires that you examine scenery objects
    three deep. Without giving spoilers, you have to 'x abc', then when you
    notice a mention of def in the description of abc, 'x def', and finally 'x
    ghi' based on an object mentioned in the description of def. This is
    borderline unfair because many of the scenery objects mentioned in the room
    descriptions can't be examined at all. By the time the location of the key
    is reached, the average player may have wearied of examining things and
    gotten lazy.

    But if you're not lazy -- if you meticulously examine everything in sight,
    as you need to in order to get on -- you'll most likely get annoyed by how
    thin the model world is. I certainly did.

    Once you're inside the house, the scenery is a bit more varied. I found one
    way to get killed (without notice), and there's one extremely boring
    character I could attempt to talk to. This character wanders from room to
    room under the control of a random number generator, but does not respond in
    any way when you ask him questions to which he might be supposed to know the
    answers. I did find two topics he'd give brief, uninformative replies to.

    The author's enthusiasm for Victorian furniture quickly begins to seem
    obsessive. Various pieces are described in ways that include their precise
    measurements and the methods used to produce those beautiful wood finishes.
    Consider, for example, this description of the bathtub: "An amazing display
    of Victorian decorating taken to the ultimate limit, the cast iron bath tub
    has been painted a sea foam green on the outside with a scene of four sea
    fairies riding sailfish on large rolling waves. The inside of the tub has
    been painted white. Four gold plated claw feet support the tub." You can't
    sit in the tub, and you can't examine the sea fairies, the sailfish, or the
    claw feet. Ah, well -- it's certainly pretty.

    The writing of room descriptions appears to have been done at different
    times, or at least with insufficient thought as to how various descriptions
    relate to one another. In the upstairs hall we're told that the master
    bedroom, to the south, "dominates most of the upstairs." But when we enter
    the master bedroom we're told this: "Although called the master bedroom this
    room is no larger than the other small bedrooms. It is cramped, yet cozy."
    So much for dominating the upstairs. In a similar gaffe, a character (who
    never appears onstage and has nothing to do with the process of winning the
    game) is referred to in one document as Jacob, and in a different document
    as Jonathan.

    There are numerous minor bugs in the printouts. At one spot a sentence
    breaks off in the middle. At another a room exit is not mentioned in the
    "can't go" message, which usually lists all of the available exits. At a
    third spot, the NPC (okay, he's the butler) entered and said something that
    seemed urgent, but when I tried to ask him about it, the game reported, "The
    butler is not here." Things that don't exist if you try to examine them can
    occasionally be used, for example by putting other things inside them.

    The most significant bugs seem to be caused by the author's assumption that
    the player would perform certain actions in a given order. For instance,
    there's a locked box, to which you'll sooner or later find the key, in a
    certain location. When I unlocked it while going through the game on my own,
    it was empty. Or at least, no contents appeared; the verb 'search' is not
    implemented, so I couldn't search the box, only examine it. When I reached
    the same box using the walkthrough, I had just performed an action that
    caused a brief cut-scene -- and NOW the box had some objects in it.

    Even the walkthrough is buggy. The first time a certain map is mentioned is
    when you're told to drop it. Apparently the butler is supposed to give it to
    you ... but there's a bug in the software that somehow prevented him from
    doing so. And without the map, you can't win the game.

    The dramatic setup for the treasure hunt is contained in a Last Will &
    Testament, which you'll probably find before too long. This document
    contradicts itself with respect to the structure of the family that lives
    (or lived) in the house, and it contains, as far as I could see, no
    information that you actually need in order to win the game, until you reach
    the final codicil. All that legal boilerplate is numbingly irrelevant. Later
    there's a long and fairly sensible description of alchemy -- but again, it
    seems to be irrelevant to winning the game.

    At a couple of spots, the author seems to have been unable to figure out how
    to move the player back to the house from a remote location, so he simply
    puts the player character to sleep and has him or her wake up again in the
    master bedroom. No explanation of these transitions is ever offered.

    The final phase of the game involves negotiating a very large maze.
    Fortunately, the automatic map generator in Adrift makes short work of what
    would otherwise be an extremely tedious process. When you reach the center
    of the maze and perform the actions you've been instructed (in a certain
    document) to perform, the final result is simply, "You win!!!" That's it --
    no marching band, no sun bursting through the clouds, no hearty
    congratulatory handshake from the Vice President of Adventure Gaming
    Virtuosity. It's a letdown, but rather in keeping with the game as a whole,
    I'd have to say.

    Arnett is capable of moments of startling vision, and he clearly wants to
    engage readers by using evocative materials. (Those drops of blood are far
    from the only glimpses of savagery in Provenance.) In his next game I hope
    he'll trim the number of rooms in half, implement more verbs and scenery,
    invent more puzzles that aren't simply keys and locked doors, integrate the
    story elements a lot more firmly into the game scenario, give us a few NPCs
    with meat on their bones, and arm-twist a few beta-testers to put the screws
    to his code.

    That's all it would take, really.

    Zip containing ADRIFT game file, feelies, and solution

    Punkirita Quest One: Liquid
    From: John Wood <john SP@G elvw.demon.co.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #10 -- February 4, 1997

    NAME: Punkirita Quest One: Liquid
    AUTHOR: Rybread Celsius
    EMAIL: rybread SP@G cshore.com
    DATE: October 1996
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Inform Ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/liquid
    VERSION: Version 1.0

    Well, this one's got it all...unfortunately.  Spelling and grammatical
    errors in almost every sentence.  Random instant death.  Lots of
    locations where there's nothing to do, and scenery not recognised by
    the parser.  Exactly one object you can manipulate.

    On the plus side, the first puzzle's actually quite good if you cut
    away the misleading responses - I like the idea of dealing with a
    situation when you (apparently) have nothing that can help you.  This,
    however, is not enough to rescue the game.

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

    Hooboy.

    I tried to like this one (I really did!), but even after finishing it
    I felt I had virtually no grasp of the world the author was attempting
    to create.  It's fantasy, of course, but aside from the introduction,
    there is virtually no text to help players learn more about the world
    around them.  Most rooms are empty and useless, and many of them have
    obscure pop-culture jokes that appear hopelessly out of place.

    The major puzzles are quite illogical, and there's really no way of
    figuring them out without the walkthrough, as there are no characters
    to talk to or ancient tomes to consult.  The writing is unfortunately
    quite atrocious, with every kind of spelling, grammar, punctuation,
    and capitalization error imaginable, which makes it a chore to read.

    The author seems reluctant to add new verbs to the grammar: Help
    screens, footnotes, and some attempts at background information are
    stored in a separate text file.  (Then again, I did the same thing
    with MST3K1 last year, so I guess I'm not fit to cast the first stone
    here.)

    Perhaps this game might have turned out better in a longer format.  It
    seems the author had a lot more to put into this game, but was daunted
    by the two-hour limit.  I hope he's not overly discouraged by my
    criticism here.  Hopefully the next release will feature better world-
    building and the use of a spell-checker.

    Directory With Inform .z5 File and walkthrough

    Purple
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Directory with Inform .z5 file and text files

    The Pyramids of Mars
    From: Cedric Knight <ADDRESS REMOVED>
    Review appeared in SPAG #24 -- March 24, 2001

    TITLE: The Pyramids of Mars
    AUTHOR: Patrick Wigfull
    EMAIL: ?
    DATE: 1994
    PARSER: AGT, sub-Inform
    SUPPORTS/PLATFORM: AGT interpreters, comes with AGT runtime
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware?, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/agt/mars.zip

    Being a fan of the BBC TV show, "Doctor Who", I was pleased to see this
    in the archives. The game pays tribute to the show by adapting one
    popular story from 1976 when the central character was played by Tom
    Baker. This had a typical plot in that an ancient Egyptian god is
    discovered to be a powerful alien intent on laying waste to whole
    galaxies, yet the action centres around a quiet country house in 1911,
    reminiscent of the H.P. Lovecraft influence common in IF.

    This particular story might seem a good candidate for adaptation due to
    the technical puzzles that are solved, but in fact "do something
    terribly clever" isn’t handled well by most parsers. Therefore Wigfull
    has had to eliminate many of the obstacles of the TV series and replaced
    them with some plausible alternatives that will work in an adventure
    game while being in keeping with the original plot. So there’s still
    plenty of challenge for people with reasonably clear memories of the
    version released on video, although for people with no previous
    knowledge there will be challenge in the substantive problems as well as
    the minutiae. "Mars" is a faithful homage, which only Who obsessives
    would think of picking holes in. It is unfortunate that some of the new
    puzzles are very particular in their solution, e.g. "put gelignite on
    equipment" is legal, but not useful. There are also several ways you
    can get yourself into an unwinnable situation and have to restart. Most
    players can cope with this, although when you have explored the
    environment once, you have to wait for about 50 turns before events
    unfold enough for you to really start the action.

    The AGT interpreter for the PC that comes with this package gives a
    divide-by-zero error probably due to higher processor speeds, but the
    DA1 file runs reasonably well in AgiliTy except for a few
    considerations. In particular the hint/help system doesn’t work, neither
    do the cursor and function keys as described in the documentation, and
    opening the front door (an unnecessary action in any case) generates an
    infinite loop error.

    IF has of course moved on considerably since this game was written. One
    NPC here is very static, and may provide you with some useful
    information, while the others are of the variety that may flit by for a
    brief dramatic scene, although they get bumped off very early anyway.
    The Scarman brothers could be developed much more, instead Laurence
    unaccountably "sniffs the teapot" or "checks his fly". Most notable by
    her absence is Sarah, the Doctor's companion in the TV story. It’s often
    said of the TV companions that they were mostly there to ask stupid
    questions so the Doctor could explain the plot to the viewer, and Sarah
    was surplus to requirements here, but it was a shame the author did not
    take the opportunity to develop the character’s role for its own sake.

    PLOT: Momentous (1.4) ATMOSPHERE: Good in parts (1.2)
    WRITING: A few typos (1.0) GAMEPLAY: AGT (0.8)
    ADAPTATION: Difficult source (1.2)
    OVERALL: 5.6
    CHARACTERS: Single-purpose (1.1) PUZZLES: Sometimes illogical 1.0
    DIFFICULTY: Medium

    AGT game files (.zip)

    Solution

    Pytho's Mask
    From: Thomas Smith <heptagon SP@G swirve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #28 --March 20, 2002

    TITLE: Pytho's Mask
    AUTHOR: Emily Short
    E-MAIL: emshort SP@G mindspring.com
    DATE: 2001
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/pytho.z8
    VERSION: Release 2

    I want to marry Galatea. This is something that should be got out in the
    open, to avoid any later confusion. Galatea is stimulating, engaging,
    fun, not to mention one of the greatest -- probably the single greatest
    -- technical achievements in IF. And I want to marry her.

    Sadly, there is nobody in Pytho's Mask who I want to marry. This is
    probably a good thing. On the other hand, I do want to buy the palace
    and live in it. These strange desires should probably be a cause for
    concern and -- eventually -- expensive therapy; however, they do serve
    to point one thing out: the tremendous talent of Emily Short.

    There are other things that could point this out, of course. Things like
    the bravura opening: a few lines of cryptic dialogue are followed by an
    immediate scene-change, at which point you are engaged in conversation.
    This is impressive. Not necessarily because of the technical difficulty
    -- anyone can script an NPC to say a line -- but because of the sheer
    cheek of it: how many IF authors are there who even encourage you to
    converse with their NPCs, let alone draw your attention to them?

    Of course, this is done not out of cheek, but rather because this author
    -- almost uniquely in IF -- can get away with it; Emily Short's NPCs are
    far ahead of anyone else's, both technically and in terms of character.
    In fact, that could be said to be the only problem with Pytho's Mask:
    the technical aspects of this game represent such a leap ahead that the
    other parts of the game seem occasionally to struggle to keep up. The
    idea of combining ask/tell and menu-based conversation systems so as to
    keep the fluidity of the first but the sense of the second was utterly
    brilliant -- but there are many places where either so much has been
    implemented that it is possible to simply get lost in conversation, or
    others where the crucial topic is mysteriously lacking.

    Is it unfair to judge Pytho's Mask like this? By any other author's
    standards, the conversations in it are a hell of an achievement -- it's
    just that this isn't any other author, this is the author responsible
    for Galatea, and indeed the author responsible for this system. Not only
    that, but everything else about the game is superb. What seems like a
    slightly bizarre fantasy story rapidly settles into a whodunnit -- or
    rather, whos-going-to-do-it -- with added love interest, both of which
    are beautifully written and paced. The writing is good; the
    implementation is deep (although with some gaps). The game is shortish,
    but that isn't in itself a problem -- there's plenty packed in.
    Generally, then, this is not quite a perfect game, but it's getting
    pretty close.

    Blorb (.blb) file with Glulx version

    Original Inform version packaged with other SmoochieComp games

    Inform .z8 file of Version 3

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