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ISSUE #12 - December 13, 1997

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

                                ISSUE # 12

                 Edited by Magnus Olsson (zebulon SP@G pobox.com)
                            December 13, 1997.

             SPAG Website: http://www.afn.org/~afn55673/spag.html
            Contest Website: http://www.afn.org/~afn55673/contest/

    SPAG #12 is copyright (c) 1997 by Magnus Olsson.
    Authors of reviews retain the rights to their contributions.

    All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine
    with the traditional 'at' sign.

    REVIEWS IN THIS ISSUE -----------------------------------------------------

    Acorn Court
    Bastow Manor
    Everybody Loves a Parade
    Fish!
    John's Fire Witch
    Mercy
    The Meteor, the Stone, and a Long Glass of Sherbet
    Mystery Island
    The Pawn
    So Far
    The Space Under the Window
    Time: All Things Come To An End
    Unnkulia Zero: The Search for Amanda
    The Wedding
    Zork I
    Zork II
    Zork III

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

    Finally - a new issue of SPAG. A bit late, I'm afraid; my IF
    activities are in a bit of an Avalonish state at the moment. I can
    only hope that you will find the contents worth the wait.

    Christmas is drawing near, but I'll refrain from dubbing this the
    Holiday Issue - if only for the fact that there is nothing
    Christmas-related at all in this issue. I will, however, use the
    season as a pretext to indulge in something not uncommon at this time
    of year: a bit of looking back, perhaps even some nostalgia.

    One of the reviews in this issue happens to be of a game called
    "John's Fire Witch". This was one of the first games I reviewed for
    SPAG (in issue #4, March 1995), and I remember being quite
    enthusiastic about it. Why? Because it's a good game, of course, but
    also because back then, in the grey mists of antiquity (almost three
    whole years ago!), we IF fans weren't exactly spoiled with new
    releases. New games were few and far between, and each new release was
    quite an event in the IF community.

    Things have changed a lot since then. Today, it's difficult to keep up
    with all the new IF, especially during the contest season, the
    net-wide IF community has grown considerably, and general interest in
    IF seems to be re-emerging - an IF Rennaissance after the Dark Ages
    that followed the decline and fall of Infocom.

    Yes, it's been three great years for us IF fans! And just as European
    artists and scientists of the Rennaissance were beginning to realize
    that it was possible to go beyond the achievements of the ancients, so
    we're beginning to see new IF that's in many ways better than the
    Infocom classics.

    It is very fitting that this issue of SPAG contains reviews both of
    classics, such as the Magnetic Scrolls games; new works in the classic
    tradition, such as last year's competition winner "Sherbet", and
    efforts in entirely new directions, such as "Space Under The
    Window". And as a final nostalgic end-of-the-year touch, the review
    section ends with Duncan Steven's reviews of the Zork trilogy (yes, I
    know that we've put up a moratorium on Infocom reviews; but rules are
    made to break).

    But on to the reviews. The next issue will probably be dominated by
    this year's competition and have no space for looking back. I'm
    eagerly looking forward to what next year has in store for the IF
    community!

    				Magnus Olsson

    NEW GAMES--------------------------------------------------------------------

    For obvious reasons, there aren't many new releases this time - apart
    from the competition entries, of course.

    Two hardy souls have braved the risks of drowning in the competition
    deluge, however, and released new Inform games:

    The Zuni Doll, An Interactive Horror Story, by Jesse Burnenko
    (ftp://ftp.gmd.de/games/infocom/doll.z5)

    Kook U, An Interactive Kook Adventure, by sbfaq SP@G genesis.nred.ma.us
    (ftp://ftp.gmd.de/games/infocom/kooku.z5)

    { To stay impartial regarding the ongoing competition, I'll refrain
      from making any "Editor's Pick" this issue }

    SUBMISSION POLICY ----------------------------------------------------------

    SPAG is a non-paying fanzine specializing in reviews of text adventure
    games, a.k.a. Interactive Fiction. This includes the classic Infocom
    games and similar games, but also some graphic adventures where the
    primary player-game communication is text based.

    Authors retain the rights to use their reviews in other contexts. We
    accept submissions that have been previously published elsewhere,
    although original reviews are preferred. At the moment, we are
    reluctant to accept any more reviews of Infocom games (though
    exceptions happen).

    KEY TO SCORES AND REVIEWS----------------------------------------------------

    Consider the following review header:

    NAME: Cutthroats
    AUTHOR: Infocom
    EMAIL: ???
    DATE: September 1984
    PARSER: Infocom Standard
    SUPPORTS: Infocom ports
    AVAILABILITY: LTOI 2
    URL: Not available.

    When submitting reviews:  Try to fill in as much of this info as you can.
    Also, scores are still desired along with the reviews, so send those along.
    The scores will be used in the ratings section.  Authors may not rate or
    review their own games.

    More elaborate descriptions of the rating and scoring systems may be found
    in the FAQ and in issue #9 of SPAG, which should be available at:

            ftp://ftp.gmd.de:/if-archive/magazines/SPAG/

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

    From: agt20 SP@G phy.cam.ac.uk (Alistair G. Thomas)

    NAME: Acorn Court
    AUTHOR:	Todd S. Murchison
    DATE: September 1997
    PARSER:	Inform Standard
    SUPPORTS: Infocom ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp.gmd.de//if-archive/games/infocom/acorncourt.z5

    You start Acorn Court in the courtyard of the title, with no idea what
    you're trying to achieve. This early location shows the effort that's
    been made to imbue the setting with a distinct atmosphere. A bit
    overdone, in my opinion, but I was pleased the effort had been made
    and was looking forward to exploring this world. However, 'twas not to
    be. There's a reason why you have no idea what's going on - nothing
    is. This is a one-location game, containing one relatively
    straightforward puzzle, and no plot. I can't really give examples of
    the text or sub-puzzles without revealing a fair proportion of the
    game. I don't know if this was written as a get-to-grips-with-Inform
    exercise? If so it's fine. The one quite complex object is quite well
    programmed, and while there's the odd quirk (You are carrying: twelve
    tennis balls, six tennis balls and) and the odd misleading response
    when you don't quite get the author's preferred wording, there are no
    major problems.

    Have a look if you fancy a five or ten minute puzzle, or better still,
    see if there's larger game by the same author.

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

    From: Yuzo Takada a.k.a. Dark Fiber

    NAME: Bastow Manor (The Secret of Bastow Manor)
    AUTHOR: Softgold
    EMAIL: ???
    DATE: very early 1980's
    PARSER: Scott Adams Standard
    SUPPORTS: C64 and C64 Emulators (many platforms)
    AVAILABILITY: IF archive
    URL: ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/c64/bastow.gz

    Bastow Manor is one of those old classic Commodore 64 games. In a fit
    of nostalgia I hunted high and low for this and a bunch of other
    classic games (see the review of Mystery Island as well), some of
    which I managed to find with the help of Andrew Williams.  Bastow
    Manor is one of those C64 text graphic games where the C64 ASCII
    character set is used to its full advantage to draw the graphics.
    This form of textgraphic was basically confined to the C64 genre of
    games.

    The graphics in this game (and the other Mountain Valley and Softgold
    games) are some of the best C64 textgraphic ASCII pics you're likely
    to ever come across.  Every location has its own individual picture of
    about half screen height and full screen width (This changed in later
    games to half screen height and half screen width).

     All the Softgold and Mountain Valley games are very reminiscent of
    the Scott Adams games.  They are very small sized games with few
    locations and objects.  Most every location serves a purpose and every
    item has at least one use in the game.  Bastow Manor uses the standard
    verb-noun parser.

    The story behind the game is err, I don't really know.  You're not
    told in any introduction at the start of the game.  Maybe there was a
    nice lead-in in the manual or documentation but none of that is
    available, so I shall give you what I assume to be the lead-in.  The
    aim is to get into Bastow Manor and find its secret cache of gold and
    escape!!  Err, yes.  Were you expecting something else?

    Text in the game is minimal at best and I suspect the picture is meant
    to explain more about your surroundings than the "You are in a shed"
    "You are outside the manor wall" descriptions.  Objects have no
    description whatsoever.  A knife is a knife is a knife is a knife.  An
    interesting side effect of the game is that it was very poorly
    programmed, so that you must "look" at an object multiple times to
    find out all you can about it.  Take for example the mail box, you
    need to look at it twice or you will miss a valuable clue!  There are
    a few other examples of this through out the game.

    Some of the puzzles in Bastow Manor are logical and some are stupid.
    One of the puzzles I'll give away to you here and now, as it's
    impossible to complete it without looking at the source to the game
    (an error on part of the programmer), in that there is a panel above
    the desk in the study.  There is no mention of this panel anywhere in
    the game at all, and thats all I'll give away to you ^_^.  Fortunately
    you don't have to play guess the verb to complete any of the puzzles.

    Like Scott Adams' games, Bastow Manor is small and well designed in
    places.  Location exits and the layout of the house are fairly
    logical, i.e. the mad scientist's laboratory is not connected to the
    upstairs ensuite.  Some of the puzzles are a bit frustrating and death
    is quick to follow a wrong move.  If you don't save often before you
    try something you will find yourself back at the start of the game.
    It IS unfortunate that you have to die once or twice before you
    realise that it's a puzzle that needs to be overcome (re: the puzzle
    to do with the suit of armour, the apple puzzle).

    With exception of one dodgy puzzle (re: panel in the study) the game
    is fairly easy and can be completed in a few hours.  The nostalgia
    factor is a good reason to play this game, if any, or if you have two
    hours to spare.

     If you already have a copy of this game but you did not get it from
    the IF archive, I strongly suggest you get the one from the archive as
    I have patched and bugfixed it so you can save/load at any point and
    some of the more nasty bugs were removed (the knife/clock bug for
    instance).

    Emulator users: PC64 is not a good choice for this game as it gets
    the colours wrong, well not wrong just not... right ^_^.  Frodo or
    C64s get the browns and greens the correct shades.

    In scoring this game out of 10, note that I am using Scott Adams as a
    benchmark. I would give this game a 7 out of 10.  The nostalgia factor
    gives the overall score a +1 so its really 6/10.

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

    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April

    NAME: Everybody Loves a Parade
    AUTHOR: Cody Sandifer
    E-MAIL: Dunno
    DATE: 1996
    PARSER: TADS advanced
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/Parade.gam
    VERSION: Release 2.1

    Everybody Loves a Parade manages a difficult feat: it's an enjoyable
    and rewarding game in its own right, whose puzzles take real thought,
    but it also essays an important innovation in IF playing style and
    carries it off brilliantly. That innovation will not be revealed here,
    as the surprise is part of the value of the innovation and giving it
    away would spoil the fun for future players, but I know I was
    thoroughly caught off guard at a certain point late in the game. On
    the face of it, that development is only a small part of the game and
    its effect on gameplay is minimal--but when players who have completed
    the game remember it, I think it is safe to say that one particular
    moment, more than any other, will remain with them. At first, I
    questioned the author's judgment in engineering the moment in the way
    he did--but eventually decided that his approach, more than any other
    (well, aside from similar strategies), grabbed the reader's attention.

    The plot is entertaining and reasonably original. You are an engineer
    sent across the country to start a new job, but you bog down in the
    wilds of Arizona with almost no gas, stuck behind a parade for a "rock
    festival"--and no, Janis Joplin is not in town. The events that ensue
    are engagingly cartoony; though most of the parade elements amount to
    amusing but irrelevant sideshows, the silliness adds to the charm. (A
    gravel float? A tank full of jars of pebbles?) The characters are also
    well done, though better developed in some cases than in others; the
    humor value of the New Age bikers is considerable, but it might have
    been nice to see what they do when you ask them about things like
    inner peace, meditation, truth, etc. (Not to nitpick, but the line
    "The bikers toss an unruly customer out of the pub and forgive
    themselves for their trespasses" is a little silly. Since when do New
    Agers care about sin?) The encounter with the bikers does, if the
    randomized movements come out right, produce this exchange...

    	As the words pass before your eyes, your spirit energies ebb
    	and flow between hidden layers of conscious awareness, broken
    	judgment, and unspoken truth. Once the trance lifts, your soul
    	speaks of love and respect through haiku verse, the natural
    	language of inner peace.

    	The old man turns his pockets inside out to search for spare
    	change.

    ...which one could take as a commentary on quite a lot of things if so
    inclined. At any rate, though the characters never lose the feel of
    being props or obstacles, they do provide considerable amusement.

    Everybody Loves a Parade is not extremely difficult once the first
    puzzle is solved -- but that first puzzle involves searching of
    scenery that just barely gets a mention, and as such might take quite
    a while to solve. Two other puzzles later in the game require a fairly
    large intuitive leap, and a willingness to pursue courses of action
    that don't seem initially helpful (and which are, well, largely
    motivationless), and those moments pose considerable stumbling blocks
    among mostly logical puzzles. (Though one solution in particular is
    rather clever, and rewards careful reading.)  The quality of the
    puzzles can be appreciated once they are solved, but the intuitive
    leaps required can be a bit daunting at times. (I'm not sure what it
    says about me, though, that the final puzzle -- at least, the way to
    get the final 10 points -- seemed like a natural reaction to the
    previous line, and it was the first thing I tried.) There is much
    amusement to be had in the game even when stuck, though, just from
    wandering around and trying things -- it seems safe to say that this
    game has the most particularized responses to SMELL [object] in the
    history of IF.

    Mechanically, Everybody Loves a Parade works well; the TADS parser is
    adequate for the job, and there are several synonyms for most
    words. The writing is also quite good, though not exceptionally
    descriptive--few of the scenes actually came alive from the writing,
    though admittedly that would have been difficult given the bizarre
    quality of the situations. The author trades absurdity for realism,
    mostly, and does quite well with it--but creating absurd scenes is a
    different task from creating real ones, and it is therefore hard to
    compare the writing to a game that seeks to bring a place or event to
    life. Cody Sandifer creates a carnival atmosphere, but a carnival
    atmosphere is hard to sustain on repetition--a bouncy or silly room
    description fades on the tenth reading in a way that a menacing or
    dreary mood does not. All this is not, obviously, to say that
    Everybody Loves a Parade is not written effectively, merely that the
    intent is more to amuse and entertain than to create lasting
    images. Well, actually, as noted above, that isn't true -- there is
    one image that does last, and quite well -- but the circumstances for
    that are unusual.

    Mr. Sandifer clearly spent quite a while writing Everybody Loves a
    Parade: it's full of humor that indicates real thoroughness. There are
    several irrelevant objects -- "objects", perhaps -- that cannot quite
    be considered red herrings because it would be difficult to consider
    most of them potential solutions to problems, and which reduce the
    feel of "am I done coding yet?" that sometimes plagues IF. (An author
    who takes the trouble to code a "pulsing hunk of supernatural
    hypermatter" is an author who cares about his finished product.) That
    some scenes made me wish for more development is more a testament to
    the amusing ideas at work than any laziness about coding; I certainly
    can't say that there were many logical responses that went unprovided
    for.

    Perhaps of my initial objection to the twist alluded to above was that
    it didn't fit the game, but when I thought about it more, I revised
    that assessment. Only in a romp like this could the author pull the
    player up short in the way Mr. Sandifer does -- and there are (at
    least, it seemed so to me) very unfunny (as in, not a laughing matter)
    issues at stake when it does happen, both within and outside the
    game. There is certainly a place for games like "Tapestry," where the
    player has to shut his or her eyes and ears to miss the Important
    Underlying Message, but the IF world should not underrate the power of
    this game's approach in making the player think.

    There is, on the whole, much to like about Everybody Loves a Parade,
    and though there are slow points and though the humor slows a bit when
    the player has traipsed through the few locations several times, such
    is the nature of humorous IF; Mr. Sandifer carries off his ideas
    well. It is a testament to the author's skill that the player can look
    back on Everybody Loves a Parade as both entertaining and thoroughly
    thought-provoking.

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

    From: Yuzo Takada a.k.a. Dark Fiber

    NAME: Fish!
    AUTHOR: Magnetic Scrolls
    DATE: Mid-80's?
    SUPPORTS: See note below
    AVAILABILITY: Commercial (se note)

    Fish rocks dammit! Magnetic Scrolls kill Infocom dead! You heard me!
    This game is full to the gills with puns. The game is one big pun.
    Magnetic Scrolls is a Pommy company and all its games have that Pommy
    feel and "English" spelling.

    The story concerns you, who are an interdimensional secret agent whose
    job it is to warp into worlds and thwart the terrorists of the Seven
    Deadly Fins.

    The start of the game sees you relaxing inside the body of a fish in a
    fishbowl.  Your first task is to solve three mini puzzles of an
    "intermediate" toughness, then its onto the "large" portion of the
    game in the land where everyone is a fish.

    The puzzles are very clever and logical and the text is very "Magnetic
    Scrollsish" and makes for a great read.

    The parser is probably the best of all the Magnetic Scrolls games and
    is as good, if not better than the Infocom parsers.

    I absolutley loved this game.

    { Editor's Note concerning Availability:

      The Magnetic Scrolls games were sold commercially. Second-hand copies
      occasionally turn up for sale in the games newsgroups. Reliable
      sources also tell us that they are available from certain well-known
      FTP sites (though not from the IF-archive). Of course, the illegality
      of such distribution channels forbids us from mention them here...

      The good news is that you don't need a semi-antique computer to play
      these games (however you manage to get a copy): Niclas Karlsson has
      written a portable interpreter called _Magnetic_ which runs on a
      variety of platforms. See
      ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/magnetic-scrolls/interpreters/magnetic/
    }

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

    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April

    NAME: John's Fire Witch
    AUTHOR: John Baker
    E-MAIL: baker-j SP@G ix.netcom.com
    DATE: 1995
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Lunchware (buy author lunch to register)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/firwitch.gam
    VERSION: Release 1.01

    There isn't a lot to John's Fire Witch; it's relatively short (250
    moves or thereabouts required, and much of that is traveling hither
    and yon) and the puzzles and characters are simple. What's there,
    though, is refreshingly well put together, with very few obvious bugs
    or gameplay problems; as first efforts go, this is one of the better
    ones you'll find.

    You, the player, have come to visit your friend John Baker -- who, for
    an author included in his own game, takes quite a verbal beating; we
    certainly don't get a very good impression of John's habits and
    tastes.  There is no sign of John in the apartment, though, other than
    junk scattered here and there and a diary left in the bedroom
    suggesting that John has stumbled into a confrontation between a Fire
    Witch and Ice Wixard residing in his basement. (This suggests to you
    about John that "years of heavy drinking have finally destroyed his
    mind.") Nevertheless, you investigate the hole in the basement and,
    sure enough, find all manner of strange things, none of them obviously
    supporting the claim that an Ice Wizard and Fire Witch are in the area
    (until the very end) but intriguing in their own right. The best of
    the puzzles is one involving a devil and the task he assigns you: the
    solution requires an intuitive leap of sorts, but a sensible one, if
    that makes sense; though most are fairly clever and rewarding to
    solve.

    There are few moments in John's Fire Witch that break the spell, so to
    speak, by drawing the player's attention to the mechanics of the
    game. One is a painful guess-the-verb moment, coupled with some
    illogicalities on the solution to the relevant puzzle (why one
    particular solution to the ring problem is deemed correct, and another
    incorrect, is less than obvious to me). There is a puzzle that cannot
    be solved until a certain number of turns have passed -- and if you
    move through the earlier part of the game efficiently, you may find
    yourself a bit puzzled about why there's no apparent way to move the
    game forward. (Or simply irritated about having to wait 50 or so turns
    for something to happen.)

    The inventory limit is fairly small and requires some step-retracing
    (arguably, this is more rather than less realistic, since the classic
    adventurer seems to have eleven hands, but it does complicate things),
    and there are a few situations that require somewhat exact syntax. But
    most nouns and verbs have several substitutes, though the game
    occasionally fails to fill in logical gaps (for instance, "sleep" with
    a bed in front of you puts you to sleep on the floor). Moreover, the
    game is free from scenery-object confusion, free from disambiguation
    problems, as far as I could tell ("which do you mean..."), and takes
    the trouble to code many specific responses to non-useful actions,
    lending to the polished feel. In short, even if there isn't much
    there, problems that distract from what is there are relatively few.

    The writing is mostly good, though it has its rough moments -- the
    death of an adversary is somewhat unnecessarily gruesome, something as
    unusual as a bridge made of ice gets virtually no description, and the
    game takes it upon itself to tell you when you stumble into a crystal
    grotto that "the overall effect is quite beautiful." Let me conclude
    that, John. You just tell me what's there. Still, most of the writing
    is solid, though some of the better descriptions are in the apartment
    rather than in the tunnels, which often feel, well, just a bit
    generic, and occasionally a tad clumsy.  For example:

    	 Long Tunnel (1)

    	 This is a long tunnel leading north and south.  It has
    	 definitely been purposefully made, being tiled with crafted
    	 stone.  It looks like something that would have been created
    	 centuries ago.  You can see the Red Crystal Grotto to the
    	 north, and a side corridor leads off to the east.

    Not awful, certainly, but there are more adept ways to suggest that
    the tunnel didn't just come about than "it looks like something that
    would have been created centuries ago." Like the rest of John's Fire
    Witch, though, the writing is good enough to keep the game enjoyable
    (and focus the player's attention on the puzzles, for that matter;
    more striking prose would give the game an exploratory feel, which
    might mesh oddly with its role as a diversion with some clever
    puzzles. And many moments have a certain deadpan charm, e.g. when
    you're about to be frozen:

           There is a loud and horrible rushing noise in your ears, and
           the room appears to be filling up with what you would describe
           as steam if it were not so very very cold.

    John's Fire Witch was designed as a short diversion, and it fills that
    purpose -- and more elaborate descriptions or development of the plot
    might distract from that purpose. As it is, the player need only grasp
    the essentials of what's going on (actually, not really even that)
    before plunging in and starting to solve puzzles -- and the
    unobtrusive writing is consistent with the overall feel. The ending
    points to a sequel, which may or may not be more elaborate -- but as s
    short "snack-sized" game, this one works quite well. Its general
    solidity (in comparison to much of what is produced nowadays)
    testifies to the undeniable truth that putting together workable,
    polished IF is not easy. On the whole, John's Fire Witch is not
    especially remarkable for anything in particular it does right, a few
    clever puzzles aside, but especially for a first effort, it deserves
    recognition for the many things it avoided doing wrong.

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

    From: Steve Bernard

    NAME: Mercy
    AUTHOR: Chris Klimas
    EMAIL: christopher.klimas SP@G washcoll.edu
    DATE: August 1997
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-Machine
    AVAILABILITY: GMD
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/Mercy.z5

    Your name is Dr. Peter Basham.  Your job is Mercy, if you can call it
    that.  There's nothing you or your colleagues can do about the recent
    outbreak of smallpox but help people to die as easily as possible.
    Once you were a pediatrician; now all you do all day is "euthanize"
    (the medical profession's nice term for "kill").

    Chris Klimas' "Mercy" is probably my favorite of all the games to be
    released this year, including the competition.  It can hardly be
    called a game, though.  As the author says, it's more of a short
    story.  It's heavily plot oriented, but flexible enough that the
    player can still make many choices along the way and take different
    branches.  The character is predetermined with feelings and background
    supplied by the game, but it avoids the pitfall of simply telling the
    player that they feel a certain way.  Rather, the character
    interjections fit so well with the plot and the atmosphere they never
    seem forced.

    The make-it-or-break-it aspect of "Mercy" is its lack of puzzles.
    That's right folks, "puzzle-less I-F"...  That isn't to say that your
    actions don't affect how the story turns out, but it does mean no
    locked doors to open, no odd futuristic machines to operate, and no
    "find the smallpox cure in some obscure location" situations.  But to
    be honest, I hardly noticed the absence of puzzles until after I was
    done.  Seriously, the story and atmosphere are engaging enough that
    the inclusion of puzzles would probably take away from the game as a
    whole.

    Flaws?  Well yes, there are a few.  A couple spelling mistakes or
    extra typos occur here or there.  There's a verb or two that could be
    recognized and a couple objects in room descriptions that the player
    might want to refer to but can't.  Honestly, I assume the author has
    noticed or been notified of these things already.  I just hope he'll
    put out a Release 2.

    It's weird, if I just described the game quickly (i.e. No puzzles,
    predefined character, clear plot from beginning to end...), it
    wouldn't sound very enticing.  In fact, it sounds like it would be a
    bad game if you boil it down to just that.  "Mercy" proves that these
    descriptions are not bad in and of themselves.  By no means do the
    standard I-F conventions need to be adhered to in order to produce
    quality work.

    Chris Klimas says that he hopes "Mercy" is something new in the
    interactive fiction universe.  I don't know if that's true or not, but
    it certainly was a breath of fresh air for me to play and it clearly
    is different.  I love the feelings it stirs in me, the disturbing
    moodiness that hangs over the whole thing, the "love story", as it
    were...  I kinda wish he'd kept it until the competition.  It would
    have grabbed *my* highest rating.

    My Rating: I give it an 8.5.  I felt guilty at first for giving it a
    rating comparable to such long, great games as Trinity or Jigsaw.
    Thing is, I really did like it that much.  The comparison really isn't
    fair, though: you don't judge short stories against novels.  I liked
    "Mercy" for different reasons.

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

    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April

    NAME: The Meteor, the Stone, and a Long Glass of Sherbet
    AUTHOR: Angela M. Horns, a.k.a. Graham Nelson
    E-MAIL: graham SP@G gnelson.demon.co.uk
    DATE: 1996
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Inform ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/sherbet.z5
    VERSION: Release 2

    It is virtually a film cliche nowadays: early on, one character tells
    another everything the audience might need to know, sometimes in
    circumstances justifying such a tale but sometimes not. It's a clumsy
    device, but it keeps the audience from having to work too hard, always
    a vital element. Graham Nelson's Meteor... preempts that approach by
    setting out the plot in menu format, distinct from gameplay, a wholly
    laudable move in this particular game -- for the backstory that Nelson
    elects to give us is exhaustive enough that it would clutter gameplay
    considerably were it thrown in Hollywood-style. But it also catches
    the player somewhat off balance to find that the complicated setup is
    only minimally relevant to the game -- at least, to puzzle-solving; no
    puzzles require knowledge found in the backstory.

    Rather, Meteor... reduces the "solve puzzles because they're there to
    solve" feel by embedding the motivations for the player's action in
    the story, so that the plot makes sense of your actions while not
    requiring you to consult the setup constantly as a guideline. The game
    gives you an initial plot and set of motivations -- you are an
    ambassador from a small province sent to investigate strange doings
    while keeping relations amicable -- that provides credible reasons for
    your required actions. This is not to say that there are no holes or
    improbabilities, but there are remarkably few, considering how
    complicated the story become. It may not seem like the most notable
    feature of the game, but it's an element rarely seen in IF nowadays: a
    reasonably involved storyline that, suitably understood, makes sense
    of the game, even though the game is quite playable by itself.

    Well, mostly. Considering its authorship (*bow* *genuflect*),
    Meteor... is encumbered with a surprising number of gameplay problems,
    as in Stuff An Author Really Shouldn't Do. Among the less flagrant is
    a puzzle that involves waiting around, by my count, 23 turns before a
    solution is possible. Granted, there's nothing to do for those 23
    turns anyway, and yes, a few things of some (but only some) interest
    happen while you're waiting around -- but given that the relevant
    event is not a one-turn happening when it does come along (you notice
    something that is henceforth there for the examining until you figure
    out what to do with it), it seems like the author could have hurried
    things along a tad. Now, yes, the point of the scene in question is to
    establish boredom, and it's certainly effective in that respect -- but
    mightn't effective writing have the same effect? In short, it's a
    questionable decision that risks annoying the player out of the game.

    More egregious are guess-the-verb moments -- a few relatively mild,
    one absolutely horrendous. (When you get there -- you'll know -- the
    relevant verb is "give." You're welcome.) It isn't at all clear what
    happened, besides, perhaps, that the author was rushed in putting the
    game together. There are other puzzling glitches -- some unlisted
    exits (one that made a puzzle's solution a complete surprise to me)
    and a description that I found wholly inadequate to convey the
    scene. (It relies on a better understanding of the term "scree" -- a
    Britishism? perhaps -- than I had, anyway.) One puzzle in particular
    toward the end of the game, involving the correct combination for a
    dial, is not blessed with huge whopping amounts of sense, and several
    other actions involve painfully exact wording that slows down the
    game. At one point, you lose some of your possessions unless you take
    steps to safeguard them -- but while it doesn't seem so unreasonable
    to have them appear again beside you if you've taken the right steps,
    the game requires a long circuitous route to retrieve the stuff. None
    of this makes the game unplayable or less than enjoyable, but it's a
    bit disconcerting in an otherwise strong entry.

    The puzzles are excellent; many involve a certain large-scale thinking, an
    awareness of how the game environment fits together as a whole, that feels
    genuinely fresh. A few, true, involve semi-suicidal actions, but they're
    so strongly hinted at by the game that they're more or less reasonable to
    try. (And what player really rejects actions on grounds that they're
    semi-suicidal anyway?) A few are a bit obscure, true, but not unguessable;
    the only one that seemed unfair was the result of a poor setup, as
    mentioned above, not the puzzle itself.

    The game is a tad inconsistent about what it rewards with points -- I
    was initially convinced I was wasting a needed resource on the wrong
    puzzle because I wasn't given a point for solving it -- but that's a
    minor blip on a set of very good puzzles. The reliance on physics and
    common sense recalls the appeal of the Zork series: the puzzles
    required understanding and using conventional objects to achieve your
    ends, even in fantastic settings, rather than mastering complicated
    systems or foreign concepts. In that way, the Zork games were always
    accessible -- lack of a scientific bent was never a bar -- and here,
    similarly, the puzzles reward logic and logical experimentation.
    (Particularly good is the problem requiring use of the stick, and the
    way you use the hornet is certainly intriguing.) The game manages to
    recapture the magic element of the Enchanter trilogy without making
    your puzzle-solving largely magic-based; a few of the puzzles involve
    magic, but few enough that trying all your spells in a given situation
    is not generally reliable. In short, the puzzles in Meteor... are
    generally good, and even memorable in a few cases. As for the format
    of magic itself, the "learn spell" routine -- well, it never troubled
    me much, but apparently it makes many weep and gnash their teeth. It
    fits the feel here, wherein magic is only being rediscovered, but it
    isn't, strictly, necessary.

    A game that purports to return to the Zork universe -- given, that is
    not Meteor's express claim, and its plot is far more involved than
    that, but that is part of its premise -- must understand and recapture
    its feel, and in that Meteor... succeeds admirably. The central
    location -- an inverted cedar -- is vivid and strikingly written:

    	This is a slate-littered shelf high up at the northwest eaves
    	of a dark, vaulted cave, from which a meadow-fresh breeze
    	blows. The ledge broadens down a slab "staircase" to the east
    	but wastes away into a tight squeeze southwest. Natural
    	passages extend like tendrils into the rock all around this
    	cavern, but only one is accessible from here, back north under
    	the lintel.

    	Hanging down toward the dim, distant cave floor is a
    	flourishing, inverted cedar, its roots grappling the roof, its
    	nearest outflung branch a good 10 feet across the abyss from
    	here.

    Moreover, it is fantastic in a way that suits the genre well,
    intriguingly unusual but not so bizarre that the player can't imagine
    it easily. As with the Carousel Room in Zork II (or, even, the living
    room and its various entries in Zork I), mastering the layout means
    getting the hang of traveling through that location, and the geography
    here makes sense once the player accepts the premise. Just as
    successful is the bridge between fantasy and reality, especially since
    that relationship is central to the game -- the real-life element is
    thoroughly (if tediously) established before you, the ordinary fellow,
    are cast into the fantasy side, and the conclusion ties things back
    together nicely. As a result, the player need only suspend disbelief
    in a few elemental ways -- the existence of magic, for instance --
    because the original "ordinary" persona is believable. It may not seem
    like much, but it's an element that the original Zork games certainly
    never tried to capture. And there is even a sense of perspective on
    Zork and its progeny, captured in an encounter with an adventurer's
    ghost that concludes thus:

          The Adventurer, having now acquired the whole nearby wealth of
          treasure, spreads his arms around the pile of loot. As he does
          so, he and they vanish like the dawn into the past where,
          perhaps, they belong.

    It might be said, therefore, that Meteor... returns you to the Zork
    universe but does not send you there as an adventurer, as such, merely
    a chance visitor, and even with the variety of Infocom references --
    including the living room from Zork I and several of the original
    treasures -- the plot given, not "exploring the Zork universe," drives
    the story and keeps things moving along.

    As noted, the writing is strong, particularly in the way it conveys
    the hanging cedar and the surrounding scene; Nelson, as with the best
    game authors, paints each scene vividly in just a few
    sentences. Particlarly effective is the way the locations that are
    intermediate between ho-hum everyday life and the fantasy Underground
    Empire hint at the latter -- they point to something unusual but avoid
    telegraphing it in overly obvious terms. To wit:

    	     Bubbling Pool

    	     This is a red-brown earthy bole, a cavity in hardened
    	     soil with but a single crawl leading out to the
    	     southeast. The ground is covered with autumn leaves,
    	     russet and variegated.

    	     In the centre is a bubbling pool of spring water,
    	     glinting with shades and flickers of green
    	     phosphoresence.

    Intriguing enough on its face -- and why are there autumn leaves
    underground? Why is the pool "bubbling"? Nelson draws the player in
    through a series of increasingly intriguing discoveries, rather than
    throwing the entire Zork universe into one momentous discovery. There
    are a few somewhat overwritten moments...

        ...And suddenly, there is the Power! It crackles through your
        whole body, sparking at your fingernails and toenails, sending
        shivers along your limbs. You feel suddenly afraid to imagine,
        afraid that you can no longer tell imagination from reality.

    ...but only a few, and they don't distract much from the game. Moreover,
    the humor integral to Infocom's fantasy efforts is here in spades, with a
    wryness that avoids an "I'm being funny now" feel. For example:

    	>examine elephant

    	The magnificent grey beast is wrinkled and has a wise look
    	(but then, after an entire day of Amilia's conversation, your
    	average potato would have a wise look). His two great ears
    	flap a little up at the front sides of the basket, his trunk
    	curls and pokes at the air.

    Equally amusing are the dummy spells you can encounter late in the
    game, including "gloth," referred to in Spellbreaker (fold dough 83
    times), and others to "paint picket fence orange" and "reduce herbs in
    over-spiced stew." As Infocom liked to do in its day, these bits help
    make magic amusing rather than fearful and awe- inspiring. And there
    are the usual Nelson touches -- an Eliot reference here, references to
    obscure science fiction authors there -- and there is a spell to "view
    the past" that allows perspective on every location in the game, givin
    the game a sense of completeness (though the spell is not necessary to
    win the game, nor is it even useful).

    As is in the case in the best games, there is much more going on here
    than the bare plot and puzzles; the wealth of extraneous details give
    Meteor considerable explorability and replayability, and allow the
    player to keep discovering more about the game on subsequent
    attempts. There are no alternate paths -- in fact, no puzzles have
    alternate solutions -- but there are many things to ponder along the
    way that the initial gameplay might not necessarily reveal. Just as
    importantly, though, even when the puzzles are simply there to solve
    rather than part of the story, the writing preserves the feel --
    ordinary fellow discovers extraordinary things -- and reminds you now
    and again of who you are. (For example, upon reading a document:
    "Scratchy handwriting adorns this text, and the writing's in a dialect
    almost unrecognisable today. But, like any diplomat worth his salt,
    you've a way with language..." Touches like this diminish the sense of
    puzzles grafted into the game, and help merge plot and gameplay -- not
    entirely successfully, but skillfully enough.

    In sum, Meteor is a worthy return to, and comment on, the Zork world,
    and an entertaining game in its own right. While not as polished as
    many of Nelson's works, it certainly stands among the better games out
    there (though it was rather long for a competition entry, with more
    than 300 turns required). Glitches aside, there is enough Graham
    Nelson here to make it well worth any player's while.

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

    From: Yuzo Takada a.k.a. Dark Fiber

    NAME: Mystery Island
    AUTHOR: Mountain Valley Software
    EMAIL: ???
    DATE: I would guess circa 1985?
    PARSER: Scott Adams Standard
    SUPPORTS: C64 and C64 Emulators (many platforms)
    AVAILABILITY: IF archive
    URL: ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/c64/

    Aaaaah another classic C64 game I remember from my youth.  This game,
    reaaally harks back to the Scott Adams days.  Its a treasure hunt,
    which for a large percentage of IF players means you should hit page
    down to get to the next review.

    As with Bastow Manor, this game is by one of two "companies" that
    produced IF on the C64 using the text textgraphic format for a good
    result.  Graphics in this game are good and if not in some places,
    above anything you would expect.  Unlike Bastow Manor and other
    Softgold adventures, Mountain Valley Software uses the half screen
    height, half screen width for pictures.  The top right quarter of the
    screen is used for the room graphic, the top left quarter is used to
    display your exits, visable items, etc whilst the bottom half is your
    text input area.

    Like Bastow Manor, there is not lead-in text or "what do I have to do
    to complete the game" type introduction.  I have completed it so I can
    give you a rough synopsis.  You are the lone occupant of this island
    you find yourself on and the aim is to collect the ten treasures
    scattered and hidden throughout the island.

    This is a treasure hunting game, the puzzles and items you will come
    across are not logical.  The puzzles you do come across are of the
    push button, say magic word, store magic item variety.  It plays a lot
    easier than Bastow Manor.  There is nothing unique or outstanding in
    this game that comes to mind.  What is obvious when you play the game
    is that it WAS designed.  It's evident that the author did not just
    plonk items willy nilly around the landscape.  Some of the items you
    must retrieve are give-me items and some you must work for.  Where the
    games planning does fall down is that only one treasure you pick up is
    actually used!  The rest of the treasures are just scoring fodder.

    Sudden death does not lurk around every corner but every second one.
    There are about 10 or so ways you can die in this game and some of
    them are only if you really do stupid things, other killing methods
    are the standard "do something normal and get killed" type things.
    Fortunatly those types of problems are here in a lesser presence than
    in Bastow Manor, and if you're good you won't actually die in this game
    before you finish it.

    Mystery Island does suffer from the same affliction as Bastow Manor in
    that you must look at things mutliple times in order not to miss items
    and clues.  The puzzles in the game are very easy to overcome and if
    you've been taking notes whilst playing, the final "tough" puzzle is
    not very tough.  This game is a lot easier than Bastow Manor, it's
    also not as bugged (i.e. I completed it without having to make any
    fixes to the code).

    The island itself is tiny with only about 15 to 20 locations and a few
    red herring items.  The game is winnable inside 20 minutes depending
    on your typing speed, once you know what's what in the game, otherwise
    I'd say it would most likely take an hour or so to complete on your
    first go.

    A good beginners game.

    I will score this game 6/10, some harder puzzles would have pushed the
    score up to 7.  Recommended for the nostalgia freaks and people of
    limited adventuring knowledge.

    Hopefully I will have finished Lost City Adventure and Castle of Mydor
    (which I think is Mountain Valley's version of Bastow Manor) by next
    issue!

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

    From: Yuzo Takada a.k.a. Dark Fiber

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

    Ahhh, Magnetic Scrolls first illustrated text adventure and, like
    Infocoms 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!

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

    From: agt20 SP@G phy.cam.ac.uk (Alistair G. Thomas)

    NAME: So Far
    AUTHOR:	Andrew Plotkin
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, gmd
    EMAIL: erkyrath SP@G netcom.com
    DATE: December 1996
    PARSER:	Inform
    SUPPORTS: .z8 compliant Inform interpreters
    URL: Story File: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/sofar.z8
         Invisiclues: http://www.bioc.rice.educ/~lpsmith/IF/sofar.html

    So Far has been around for a while now, having been released in late
    96, but for some reason it's never been reviewed in SPAG News. Magnus
    reckons we're all too daunted by it. Given that it won the awards for
    Best Game, Best Writing and Best Puzzle in the 1996 interactive
    fiction awards, organised by XYZZY News, I thought it was about time
    it was written up here. It's a noteworthy title, for a whole slew of
    reasons. IF's traditional features have been handled extremely well,
    in that the writing, the puzzles and the coding are as near flawless
    as they come. There are further aspects however, concerning the
    game-world and the player's place within it, that add new and
    thought-provoking elements. I'll go through all of these.

    In reviewing any adventure, there's a balance to be struck, between
    describing the game and giving the game away... In this case
    especially, where so much is so inventive, I really don't want to reel
    off the places and events that make up the story. I'll try and
    describe the style and the approach, and I'll quote a little, and
    hopefully you'll get some idea of what's different about So Far.

    On beginning, the first thing to strike you is the quality of the
    writing.  Most of the text is in traditional fantasy style,
    i.e. plenty of adjectives, plenty of drama, plenty of verbal
    swoosh. From a writer of limited ability, this can be fairly
    cringe-inducing, but the author here brings it off extremely
    well. There are dramatic moments, exotic settings, and strange,
    half-understood events throughout this game, and the prose never
    flags. I would say this is the best writing, in this style, that I've
    seen in IF.

    	West Portico

    	More people are relaxing here, perhaps because of the kegman
    	who sells his beer under the theater portico. The main street
    	bakes in sunlight to the south; the front of the theater
    	continues to the north, adorned by some decorative potted
    	shrubs.

    	A couple of people nearby are discussing the moons. That's
    	right; tonight is the night that the astronomers have been
    	going on about. You'll have to be sure to watch. Snuggled in a
    	blanket, ideally... if you ever find Aessa.

    	You feel the faintest cool breath of air.

    	Wait. Wait. What's ever cool in this suffocating summer heat?
    	It comes again, slight, smoky, deep with autumn. Impossible.

    	>x sky

    	You lean out of the shade and look up. The sun scorches you
    	from one side of a metal-blue sky. The moons are also
    	visible. Warel is already high; Amwal is just rising, but she
    	will soon be catching up, approaching tonight's lunar event.

    Early in the game, the settings are pretty much fantasy staples, but
    they're varied and well realised. The player has no particular idea of
    their role, or even their identity, but without giving too much away,
    the game is a journey, an exploration of worlds weird and
    wonderful. While some of the places to be found are standard
    adventure-fare, frozen wastes, castle moats and the like, others are
    fresh and fascinating. These tend to be the inhabited stretches. The
    author creates the impression of some rich and living cultures, by
    virtue of things happening in the background, with virtually nothing
    in the way of Ask XXX About YYY. Coming across these people, observing
    their strange activities, it's eerily reminiscent of the early Star
    Treks, when Kirk was always beaming down to strange new civilisations,
    picking his way cautiously amongst the 'aliens'.

    These people are a good example, in fact, of the style the author has
    adopted throughout the game. The world is not there for the player's
    benefit. It does not revolve around him. On seeing a building, a
    street, a door, an object, there's no guarantee that you'll be able to
    do anything useful with it. It may well be there for some reason which
    doesn't concern you. This is not to say these things can't be referred
    to, or looked at or under or manipulated, just that they won't
    progress the story, or at least, not the story of the
    player. Conversely, as you find yourself in strange places, with
    strange items to be had, some of these things most definitely are
    useful, if only you can work out how to do whatever it is they do.

    	>x box

    	The box is strange, even stranger for being so simple. Just
    	polished wooden sides, trapezoidal, no two faces parallel. But
    	the joinings are precise; no seams show. The craftwork is
    	exact. No mark shows on the rich reddish wood, except for the
    	natural grain; and also a row of paler circles on each
    	side. These seem to be inlaid discs of a blond wood, flush
    	with the surface, each incised with a deep star-shaped mark.

    	>x discs

    	The discs are each about as long as the last joint of your
    	thumb. They are arranged in precise rows of three discs each,
    	one row on each face of the box. Each disc is incised with a
    	mark in the shape of a three-pointed star.

    Often you'll have no idea why or how things do what they do, you just
    have to figure out how to make them do it

    Moving through things and places, that you know nothing about, but
    that you have to make some sense of to move on, gives the story an
    eerie, other-worldly feel. In the early stages this feeling, of things
    going on that no-one is telling you about, is evoked by impassable
    locked doors, streets the locals won't let you enter, arcane power
    sources for derelict machinery.

    You're reminded of Europe, in the later 19th century, where one of the
    influences that produced the Impressionists was the new availability
    of prints from Japan. These, shockingly, included pictures of objects
    half-in/half-out of the frame, cutting people or scenery in half, with
    seeming disregard for the careful composition of scenes characteristic
    of Western art until that time. In the real world, whatever you choose
    to look at, you catch unconnected things in shot. The author has
    achieved that effect here. It's a subtle, quite brave thing to do,
    pretty much new in IF.

    Later on, things become less conventional yet, and the familiar
    traipse round the map, looking for objects, becomes a fond memory.

    Read this example. In this dark place, seeing nothing, you're battered
    by sound, different sounds as you move around, some so loud that they
    block your progress, some deadly. The solutions to these problems
    depend on sound as well, but you never know just why or how they work,
    or exactly what you've done, or why this place is like this.

    	Darkness

       	It is too dark to see.

       	You are nearly deafened by unseen clangor. A thousand bells
       	might be roiling a foot above your head. The noise is dampened
       	to the east, where you can hear an occasional sharp rap, and
       	to the north, where an echoing plipping noise gives the
       	impression of dripping water.

    	>listen to the bells

    	The noise is a thousand incessant bells, from an ice-sweet
    	chime to a fierce, deep gongen. Not one of them pauses, for
    	one moment.

    	Somewhere behind the noise, there is an indistinct voice,
    	chanting: "Hear the tolling of the bells... iron bells..."

    	>listen to the bells

    	Somewhere behind the noise, there is an indistinct voice,
    	chanting: "What a world of solemn thought their monody
    	compels..."

    	>listen to the bells

    	Somewhere behind the noise, there is an indistinct voice,
    	chanting: "To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells..."

    	>listen to the bells

    	Somewhere behind the noise, there is an indistinct voice,
    	chanting: "From the jingling and the tingling of the bells."

    Metaphysical moments come thick and fast towards the end. You find
    yourself drifting among clouds, with vague feelings of attraction and
    resistance interfering with your progress. You see shapes acting out
    scenes you don't understand; you don't know where you have to be. When
    they ask you questions, you don't know what they mean. In most games,
    this would mean you'd missed out the bit where you found out the
    answers. In So Far, the author has pushed the idea that in a strange
    world, the player might well face strange incomprehensible things, and
    to pass through that world, he might well have to figure out what they
    can do for him. He is not the focus of this world; it has its own
    history, its own concerns. The player will not get his hand held here.

    The idea that things need not be explained, as long as they exhibit an
    internal logic, is probably the defining characteristic of So Far.
    Metaphysical choices, vital and incomprehensible objects, whole worlds
    which aren't north-south-east-west-strolls: these really require a new
    view of the player's place in his world. It asks what IF does, what it
    can do, and so what it should do. And this, is Modernism. In IF. If
    this carry-on doesn't stop, we'll be a proper grown-up medium before
    you know it. Lordy.

    But moving quickly on now, um... puzzles.

    The puzzles are generally very good. There are only a few problems
    which come down to find & use, and even these tend to be unusual
    objects and uses. There are also some excellent, more complex
    problems, which are imaginative and very satisfying to solve. (XYZZY
    News voted the immense gate the best problem of 1996, although I
    preferred the bizarre animals. I had to consult the invisiclues for
    the light source...) These problems (and there are a few) involve
    several stages, and are thankfully well coded, with the possibilities
    arising from each step dealt with intelligently.  There's very seldom
    a single action which the player has to find. More likely, a range of
    choices will be apparent, most of which will end with the player
    feeling rather sheepish, with the actual solution requiring quite some
    thought. Indeed, the range of things the player can do at each stage
    of one of these problems is part of what makes them difficult.

    And this is a difficult title. The puzzles are not re-hashes of things
    we've seen before, and the stranger ones will definitely have you
    scratching your head. The significant freedom the player has can let
    him screw things up completely. There is apparently a walkthrough
    available, although I haven't seen it, and in fact Lucian Smith has
    gone to the effort of producing some online invisiclues, which I had
    to use for the later sections, and would recommend above a
    walkthrough. Screwing up is generally worth doing a few times however,
    just to read what's gone wrong this time.  Black humour, metaphysical
    angst... you'll be on the end of it all.

    On the technical side, coding is robust enough to deal with even the
    complex, multi-stage problems encountered. Basics like spelling and
    grammar are just about perfect, and guess the word problems are almost
    non-existent, although in some weird situations, you may find yourself
    producing weirder suggestions than the parser is expecting.

    In conclusion, I'd recommend So Far to anyone. Some of its new ideas
    won't be to everyone's taste, but they're certainly worth looking
    at. The more traditional parts are imaginative and involving and make
    a cracking game in their own right. Go get it.

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

    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April

    NAME: Space Under the Window
    AUTHOR:	Andrew Plotkin
    E-MAIL:	erkyrath SP@G netcom.com
    DATE: 1996
    PARSER:	Inform, thoroughly hacked
    SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/sutwin.z5
    VERSION: 2

    Not sure if it's reviewable, but I'll try. Andrew Plotkin's Space
    Under the Window is a work of "experimental" interactive fiction, as
    part of a project that produced a variety of creative works under that
    title -- and it's hard to imagine how the others could have pushed the
    boundaries as much as this one does. The point of Space... is to let
    the player interact with the environment without conventional IF
    commands -- and what, exactly, is the player doing? It's hard to say,
    but it's certainly worth trying.

    The mechanics are simple: given a block of text, ranging from a
    sentence to several paragraphs, you type a word appearing somewhere
    within the text, which may or may not affect the narrative. If it
    does, the screen clears and you are given a new block of text --
    sometimes changed only by a word or two, sometimes with a new
    paragraph, sometimes entirely different, and you start once again
    trying words. The effect is not quite EXAMINE [object], as the
    following shows:

    	  The window is open, so you climb down inside. The table is
    	  set for two.

    	  >two

    	  The window is open, so you climb down inside. The table is
    	  set for two -- a surprise; you didn't think you were
    	  expected.

    No one would type "examine two", but the change manages to elaborate
    on the concept, somehow, and suggest that you have learned more about
    the idea. The closest analogue in real life might be a storyteller
    whom you are invited to interrupt constantly to explain something more
    fully, though the storyteller apparently declines sometimes to
    elucidate whatever it is. (Sometimes, a word that led to development
    may not later, even if that word is still on the screen.) The progress
    is thoroughly nonlinear -- most words, if typed a second time, will
    reverse the effect of the first input, though that isn't always
    true. As a result, there is minimal need to restart even if you've
    sent the narrative somewhere you'd rather not, since you can undo the
    effects of any command (either with a well-placed word or "undo"), and
    a few commands can send the story back to the beginning.

    This could be mechanical and fairly dull without some imagination --
    it could become conventional IF with only EXAMINE available -- but
    Plotkin is up to the task. Many words yield unexpected results, and
    trying to manipulate the story to do something in particular is almost
    invariably a failure -- it is more accurate to say that you discover
    the story as you go along. In that sense, this is closer to
    conventional fiction than traditional interactive fiction, since you
    only affect what particular story you see -- you are not, really,
    writing the story yourself. The levels on which you change the story,
    though, are several; there is a wide variety of input by which you can
    affect what you "see". One of the more intriguing involves light, and
    its effect -- this is one transition:

    	   The window is open, so you climb down into dimness. The
    	   table is set for two -- a surprise; you didn't think you
    	   were expected. The cold shadow lifts a little. Yes. An
    	   empty vase, white glass, stands beside a single lit
    	   candle. A smile touches you; it feels like the first one in
    	   some time.

    	   You are arranging your flowers when the door opens.

    	   >dimness

    	   The window is open, so you climb down into dimness. The
    	   table is set. An empty vase glows, white glass catching the
    	   light of a single candle. The rest of the room shades into
    	   obscurity.

    	   You are arranging your flowers when the door opens. (You
    	   slip back into the shadow of a corner.) A figure climbs
    	   out, and lowers the door closed.

    Primary among the adjustments for the seasoned IF player is losing the
    "goal" feeling -- the need to type in the right combination of
    commands that will produce a "You have won" or some equivalent. That,
    to say the least, is not the point of Space Under the Window, and
    insisting on it leads to frustration; there are certainly many endings
    to the story, but not many of them resolve much, such as who you are
    and what you're trying to do.  Moreover, many of them are frustrating
    in some respect: they seem to represent failures of one sort or
    another. A lost connection here, an ignominious flight from an
    encounter there, distrustful silence that never gets broken. Those
    that aren't expressly negative are at best neutral, and the player
    learns to appreciate intriguing twists as developments in the story
    rather than goals achieved.

    Space... is superior in that respect to other "experimental" works of
    IF, such as "In the End", that never quite lose the feel of
    "accomplish something." The mechanics are part of it -- though you
    occasionally say things, the player has no control over the words, nor
    when they are said, and the effect is sometimes like a novel centered
    around a main character who is not always sympathetic. Not being able
    to exercise control over the character -- yet playing in the second
    person nonetheless -- is a strange and disconcerting feeling, and the
    haphazard ways that your input affects events reinforce the sense that
    you are witnessing rather than participating in the narrative. The
    result is subversive in its way -- it questions the assumption that
    you are sent to an interactive-fiction environment to do something
    concrete, make an effect, rather than experience what's there. In
    effect, it makes the scene itself, and what happens there, more
    important than you, the player (though you as the player are distinct
    from "you", the character), since your importance is mostly to enter
    commands that allow you to see more. In that the setting is almost
    entirely fixed in one location, Space... also forces the player to
    appreciate the minute details that Plotkin brings out.

    There are a few red herrings that I found somewhat distracting. One of
    the few choices you can make sends some signals suggesting it will
    affect the plot, but in fact it doesn't -- it merely affects a certain
    room description. There are plotlines that simply can't be followed --
    it looks like they might lead to several-paragraph narratives, but
    they simply stop, and all input either reduces the text or sends the
    player down a different line. And it is best not to try to understand
    the cryptic bits of conversation by cross-referencing between
    different storylines, since the comparison yields little insight; it's
    ultimately more rewarding simply to regard the exchanges as cryptic
    and appreciate the way they change with your commands.

    At one point, a certain input will add to a fairly innocuous account
    of a woman's movements the following: "(Always careful, and always
    quiet. It took months before you saw past that.)" You never discover
    what the "months" reference meant, nor enough to say what you "saw",
    which certainly intensifies the air of intrigue; it's difficult to say
    whether Space... would be more or less satisfying with fewer
    unanswered questions. There is certainly intrigue aplenty in the
    movements you observe, all the more because they reflect a history
    unavailable to you. The above addition also provides a moment of
    insight into your own character -- the scorn in the tone of that
    statement reminds the player that he or she is not, despite the second
    person, dealing with a blank slate.

    The writing is skillful: Plotkin makes the scene changes reflect your
    input while limiting your ultimate control over what you see. (The
    experience is sometimes like throwing a rubber ball in the general
    direction of an object -- we know it will change things around, but we
    can't reliably predict how.) Sentences and phrases are added to
    existing text, with considerable effect:

    	 The window is open, so you climb down inside. The table is
    	 set for two -- a surprise; you didn't think you were
    	 expected. Yes. An empty vase, white glass, stands beside a
    	 single lit candle.

    	 >surprise

    	 The window is open, so you climb down inside. The table is
    	 set for two -- a surprise; you didn't think you were
    	 expected. The cold shadow lifts a little. Yes. An empty vase,
    	 white glass, stands beside a single lit candle. A smile
    	 touches you; it feels like the first one in some time.

    Again, the change is more psychological than perceptual; your
    character begins to perceive something differently, and the change
    affects later interactions. In the hands of a less effective writer,
    this sort of thing could feel clumsy, as if our attention were
    deliberately drawn to whatever it is that's affected -- but, here, an
    inattentive player might miss the significance of the change and how
    it influences later developments. An equally effective example is the
    difference between the following two descriptions, depending on a
    certain input earlier on:

    	"I never dreamed it would." She tosses her head back
    	suddenly. "It seemed appropriate, that's all. Here. Finally."
    	The flame of the candle flickers uncertainly, but her voice is
    	still steady. "...Shall we go?"

    	"I never dreamed it would." She tosses her head back suddenly,
    	her lips falling one more time into that wry smile. "It seemed
    	appropriate, that's all. Here. Finally." The flame of the
    	candle flickers uncertainly, but her voice is still
    	light. "...Shall we go?"

    Not so remarkable when examined side by side, but it takes a good
    writer to know when to make changes minor rather than waving flags at
    the player that might disrupt the feel of the narrative. Plotkin's
    writing almost never intrudes on the structure of the story (the
    sequence with the flowers is one of the few exceptions), and it
    rewards close attention to the various paths. Perhaps the best thing
    about Space... is the spareness of it: the reader is left to infer
    details from the way various pieces of the setting flicker in and out
    with light changes. And there, as well, the writing is well-calculated
    to tell the player just as much as needed to paint the picture.

    It's hard to categorize this one, obviously; some will quickly grow
    bored with it on ground that not much happens, and some will be
    frustrated with how limited the player's control is, as if different
    commands opened pages of a novel at random. And the feeling of not
    having anything as such to do requires some attitude adjustment,
    true. But there is much to appreciate in Space Under the Window,
    notably some of the more satisfying or upbeat endings, and even
    without a "right" way to play it, finding a previously undiscovered
    narrative trail is just as intriguing as any new discovery in
    conventional IF. If you can set aside your assumptions for a little
    while, give this one a shot.

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

    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April

    NAME: Time: All Things Come To An End
    AUTHOR:	Andy Phillips
    E-MAIL:	pmyladp SP@G unix.ccc.nottingham.ac.uk
    DATE: 1996
    PARSER:	Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/tatctae.z8
    VERSION: Release 6

    As a reviewer should, I took it upon myself to replay Andy Phillips'
    Time: All Things Come to an End before reviewing it, thereby to
    produce a transcript. The exercise, such as it was, afforded some
    insight: when the solutions to puzzles are so illogical or obscure
    that they stump me completely -- even when I've _already_ finished the
    game once -- something is gravely amiss. When getting through the
    first half of the thing, even after I remember the solutions to the
    puzzles, takes many, many tries because I forget stupid little items
    that prove essential much later on, it says nothing positive about a
    game. And when I am unable to keep a coherent transcript because of
    all the saving and restoring required to get through the
    every-move-accounted-for sections, well, the resulting review will be
    less than glowing.

    Trashing Andy Phillips has, admittedly, become a trend of late, so I
    will try to be as positive as possible in reviewing Time... To wit:
    somehow, for some reason, I plowed through this thing to begin with;
    it kept me interested enough to forgive its faults and push on to the
    end. I can't explain what it was now, and I certainly don't feel
    compelled to slog through games I genuinely dislike. But on some
    level, for me at least, Mr.  Phillips did manage to craft a game that
    held my attention, and he deserves recognition for that.

    On, then, to the game. As has been pointed out, Time... is an example
    of a heavily linear game, meaning that fairly narrow sections of the
    thing are available at any given time -- and, moreover, past sections
    become unavailable once apparently disposed with. Handled well, this
    sort of game can tell an interesting story and keep the plot moving
    along with the game; handled poorly, it can be both frustrating and
    dull -- because the confines of the plot can keep the player in a
    small section of the game for a long time, with nothing to do but
    examine the same objects over and over and beat his head against the
    wall. More importantly, if not designed well, the player can lock
    himself out of winning the game without realizing it.

    And Time..., I'm sorry to say, is linear in just about the worst way a
    game can be. Things like manipulating the scenery, holding onto
    objects that seem fundamentally single-use, and obtaining objects with
    no apparent use -- all are required actions for unforeseeable later
    events. Players are advised never, NEVER, to assume an object has
    exhausted its usefulness, or to leave a game area -- for the first
    quarter or so of the game, you'll be doing that every few moves --
    without taking absolutely everything that isn't nailed down. Except,
    of course, for those objects that get you killed if you keep carrying
    them past a certain point. And then there's the object that you break
    in one scene but pick up and use later, and the murder weapon that you
    are expected to take with you and use in an unforeseeable way, and, of
    course, the many puzzles that you must solve for no other reason than
    that there are some strange objects sitting around... I trust the
    problems are becoming apparent.

    There are many and various puzzles in Time... that require knowledge
    obtained by death. The most egregious of them involves an apartment
    where, let's see, failing to hide your means of getting into the
    apartment (since they are noticed by a search that begins only after
    you enter the apartment) and otherwise cover your tracks before anyone
    actually starts looking for you, failing to realize that the police
    are outside watching the apartment and will charge at the least sign
    you are there, failing to realize that the police will kill you if you
    are holding certain items when they get there, failing to realize that
    another person will kill you if you are holding certain different
    items when the police get there, and failing to disable an bomb that
    will kill the police when they get there, all result in death -- plus,
    of course, there are items to obtain while you're there, and the whole
    thing is time-sensitive. If this one section of the game didn't screen
    out quite a few would-be players, the IF world is more persistent than
    I realized.

    The problem with learning by death, quite aside from the realism issue
    ("I'd better drop the gun because I remember from the last time that
    the police will kill me if I'm holding it when they get here"), is
    that it makes a game less enjoyable; there's nothing like playing
    through a scene 50 times to make it unspeakably boring. The advantage
    of linearity is that the author can control the story he tells, but
    Mr. Phillips largely sacrifices that advantage by making the puzzles
    so obscure that the story does not exactly move along.

    How unfair are the puzzles in Time?... There are sections where the
    plot resembles an action movie and the puzzles require action-movie
    suspensions of disbelief, like, say, that no one notices you stealing
    a helicopter, that you can learn to pilot the helicopter instantly
    (well, that a reasonably with-it first grader can pilot a helicopter,
    I guess), that you can get into a second-floor apartment using the
    materials that come to hand -- and these, while a bit annoying, are
    part of the genre. But there are far worse moments -- for example, the
    instructions at one point are that you should "use the stasis field,"
    which I found less than helpful. You miraculously sense that a statue
    is actually something completely different in disguise, with no hints
    to that effect. You wait seven turns in a location for the means of
    solving a puzzle to appear -- though it was there all along; you just
    hadn't "noticed" it. Other things are likewise hidden until you type
    certain sensory commands, and so on.

    The game is largely devoid of helpful hints, requires absurdly exact
    syntax in many cases -- notably, getting out of the map room, which
    required both a huge intuitive leap regarding the procedure and a game
    of guess-the-verb for the final action. Another puzzle involving a
    crate is looking for a certain verb that is, in truth, used fairly
    frequently in IF these days -- but not in the context you find it
    here.  Magical/technologically advanced objects (the line between them
    is fairly blurry here) do things that could not possibly be foreseen
    -- the same object, even, will have several uses that have little in
    common. There is a time-paradox puzzle that, well, seems frankly
    absurd -- not only for the objects that cannot logically exist, but
    for the reactions to you by someone who, even accepting the paradoz,
    could not have encountered you before. (It also serves no real purpose
    in the game -- it provides information that could easily have been
    provided another way.) One puzzle requires such a ludicrous disregard
    of scale that when I saw it in the walkthrough, I assumed I had missed
    something important earlier on. And whenever you are under duress --
    meaning that someone is about to kill you, which is the case virtually
    every moment -- objects in your backpack are unavailable on grounds
    that you have more important things to do than "fiddling with"
    whatever -- and inventory management before the scenes (requiring
    amazing foreknowledge of what you'll need) is, of course, necessary.

    And then, of course, there's the writing. There are worse sins than
    the occasional comma splice, but the writing here is littered with
    them -- e.g. "A fire burns in one corner of the room, its red glow is
    highly appropriate to the surroundings." The syntax of many room
    descriptions is so tortured that the idea doesn't come across, as in:
    "To the north of you is the vast expanse of the park's solitary lake,
    looking dull, a reflection of the dark sky and equally dark feeling
    about this whole place." Er, what? There is a genuine attempt here to
    provide atmosphere, but too often it produces results like these:

    	A well-worn road running from west to east, with the park
    	gates to the north. Some distance to the east, the street ends
    	in a bricked up wall, while it opens up into some kind of
    	large square to the west. The area is deserted, almost as if
    	the inhabitants have given up on this terrible world.

    	You are in what appears to be the central area of the town,
    	market stalls lie abandoned and a few people hurriedly walk
    	from one area to another, as if in a hopeless attempt to avoid
    	this apparent centre of the evil. Most areas have been
    	cordoned off, except for the seemingly important stone
    	building to the south.

    Good writing usually tries to show the reader the scene and let him
    infer from there, rather than telling him outright what to feel or
    think; the scenes above might have been quite effective if they had
    included, say, descriptions of passers-by who walk by with their heads
    down without speaking to each other, or if the player had encountered
    someone who was clearly afraid of a certain building and nervous about
    speaking too loud.  As it is, the atmosphere here becomes
    self-parodying, since evil and menace are so obvious and ubiquitous
    that they become unremarkable. ("And our weather report: partly
    cloudy, with an undercurrent of evil throughout the afternoon.") At
    times, the author lays off the brooding menace and dread, and the
    results are effective...

    	The moonlight casts eerie shadows onto the buildings that
    	surround the central courtyard. The western edge is dominated
    	by a building seemingly still in use, but the Schloss is
    	otherwise deserted.

    ...but those moments are, alas, all too few. In one region, you are
    given the message "Somewhere nearby someone screams with pain, you
    don't even want to imagine the horrors taking place in these depths"
    so often, with no variation, that it loses whatever power it had to
    shock. Ho-hum, more screams of pain. Now and again, the prose turns
    deep purple:

    	The shocking handiwork of your murderous psychotic enemy is
    	evident again, notably from the red marks left by the
    	murderous tool on the man's neck.  From the depths of the
    	lifeless eyes seems to come a pleading for mercy which was
    	coldly rejected by the smiling sadist responsible for this
    	barbaric slaughter.

    The point of all this is not simply to make fun of the writing,
    tempting though that might be after slogging through a game worth of
    it, but to show that bad writing can reduce enjoyment of a game by
    wrecking the scene it tries to set.

    True, many readers will forgive excess -- but when you force a player
    to inhabit a small section of the game for a while, and hence
    encounter the same descriptions again and again, it behooves you as a
    writer to make those descriptions effective -- or, at least, not
    ridiculous. The "enemy" is an obvious example here; she is everywhere,
    her motivations are wildly unclear, and upon your every encounter with
    her, she spouts bad-guy lines from action movies that break whatever
    tension had been achieved. ("You fools, did you really think you could
    oppose the ultimate race?" "You know, I'm going to have to put a stop
    to your interferences.") Said by someone like John Malkovich, things
    like this are forgivable; as written text, no. So often did I stop to
    chuckle at this or that in Time...that the plot became rather
    uninvolving after a while. And a game this big needs to be involving
    -- the writing needs to be passable -- to keep the player's attention.

    It should be reiterated that there are enjoyable moments in Time... --
    one scene involving assumption of another's identity does build up
    tension well (even if the situation is a bit oversimplified), and
    there is a genuinely clever, if not wholly logical, puzzle involving
    the repair and use of a strange machine. And the author is quite good
    at the principle of providing payoff for puzzles solved -- virtually
    every discovery rewards you with a good bit of text and more things to
    explore -- which helps in a game with lots of puzzles. The climax is
    suitably climactic (though unfairly difficult -- very time-sensitive
    and involving a thoroughly obscure riddle), and even the overwritten
    scenes have their interesting moments, notably the segment in
    London. On the whole, though, there is more to learn here about what
    can go wrong in a game than about what can go right.

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

    From: Lars Jodal

    NAME: Unnkulia Zero: The Search for Amanda
    AUTHOR: Dave Leary
    EMAIL: dleary SP@G umabnet.ab.umd.edu
    DATE: 1993
    PARSER: TADS
    SUPPORTS: TADS Ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware(!), GMD anytime
    VERSION: Version 1.2

    Adventions has decided to make their games freeware. Since this should
    spur well-deserved interest in Unnkulia Zero (and since I just
    finished said game a few hours ago) a review seems due.

    The game once more brings us to the landscape known from Unnkulian
    Underworld, but this time back in the days of yore when the Valley
    King ruled. The king's betrothed Amanda has been kidnapped by the evil
    unnkulians, and you, the king's most trusted warrior, is given the
    task of finding her.

    Unnkulia Zero adds immensely to the universe set up in Unnkuliuan
    Underworld I and II, clarifying and expanding on old myths as well as
    providing new ones. Compared to most other adventure games Unnkulia
    Zero is very rich in text and has detailed descriptions of almost
    everything mentioned in the game. The plot may be a bit linear at
    points, but not more than should be expected when one wants a coherent
    plot. The puzzles in the game are generally tough but in most cases
    fair. A few of the puzzles cannot be said to be logical, though. At
    least they require the special unnkulian logic that in many cases
    turns things upside down. The player is adviced to read carefully,
    since the text contains many clues and subtleties.

    The weakest point of the game is that even the careful player can end
    up in a no-win situation without knowing it. Some objects may simply
    be overlooked until it is too late, others can too easily be lost
    during the game. In at least one situation you have to give up some
    objects at a time when you cannot be 100% sure of what will be needed
    later in the game.

    All in all Unnkulia Zero is a remarkable game that was fully worth the
    money when it was commercial and which is a must now that it is free!

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

    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April

    NAME: The Wedding
    AUTHOR: Neil Brown
    E-MAIL:	Not available
    DATE: 1996
    PARSER:	Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/wedding.z5
    VERSION: Release 4

    Genuinely character-driven IF, as in stories whose plot and puzzles
    revolve around interacting with people rather than manipulating
    objects, is extraordinarily difficult to realize. Infocom's mysteries
    are some of the best attempts at this, but many of the characters even
    in those feel mechanical; it is all too obvious that there is a short
    list of keywords with appropriate responses. Neil Brown's The Wedding
    is not, admittedly, a fully character-driven game, but it does have
    that element -- and it illustrates just how difficult a goal it is to
    accomplish, even on a limited scale. On the whole, there are many good
    things about The Wedding -- but the moments that require interaction
    with the various NPCs simply fall flat.

    This is not to say that they are bad NPCs; they manage to be
    relatively realistic, to respond to an adequate variety of prompts,
    and even supply a modicum of humor. But, as so often happens, the
    puzzles involving them, though well-imagined, feel painfully
    artificial; they reduce the people to robots who will wait 100 turns
    for the next line of dialogue, say, or who don't notice notable events
    going on around them because they're not told to. One puzzle in The
    Wedding, in fact, requires that a character ask you a randomized
    question, you wander away surreptitiously and find out the answer, and
    then wander back and answer the question as if it were one
    conversation. Now, there is an attempt at realism here, in that the
    game mocks you if you try to find out the answer on the spot -- but it
    trades one silliness for another, in effect, in reducing character
    interactions to videotapes that can be stopped and returned to at
    will.

    The above is a minor absurdity, but there are more significant ones as
    well -- for instance, a certain character will (and must) follow you
    at a certain point, but not before then, and there is no logical
    explanation to the change. Another character's responses to you depend
    on your having discovered a certain fact about that character,
    regardless of what you do.  The security guard positioned by the front
    door is so remarkably dense that it troubles him not a bit that you
    come out of that door repeatedly; he simply refuses to allow you back
    in. Again, it should be said that these and other flaws in "The
    Wedding" illustrate the difficulty of coding realistic people more
    than any inadequacy on the part of the author; simple move-the-objects
    games are far less taxing. But when it comes to realism (and let's
    face it, the major charm of character-driven games is that they can
    approximate real life in some measure), there are snags aplenty. It
    may be a side effect of building a game around characters rather than
    objects that there are quite a few plot holes, some of them
    acknowledged by the author in the end credits; one of the main things
    that puzzled me was why someone buried something obviously worthless.

    The plot of The Wedding is apparently simple: your school chum
    Malcolm, due to be married, has disappeared, and you have been called
    in to help out -- but, because of family tensions, your mission is
    secret, so secret that you have to figure out alternative ways of
    getting into the house because the guard hasn't been authorized to let
    you in. (My question: if you're such a good friend of this Malcolm
    fellow and you're invited to the wedding, why do you have to sneak
    into the house?)

    After a few elementary clues about what's going on, you commence
    solving puzzles in classic "here's a nail, so I'll go look for a
    hammer" style; you have a series of puzzles to solve because they're
    there, and some are not obviously puzzles at all. (A surly teenager
    won't say anything to you? Isn't that just a fact of life, not
    something to worry about?) Some of the puzzles are rather clever and
    involve use of household gadgetry that, while not wildly inventive in
    terms of common sense, requires some steps that few works of IF bother
    with. (Put another way: The Wedding is situated so firmly in the realm
    of everyday life that it takes some mental adjustment to solve such
    down-to earth puzzles.) One hidden item requires an annoyingly exact
    command to find, though, and it's possible to bog down and not realize
    what's holding you back, and another mechanical puzzle requires
    something of an intuitive leap for the proper verb -- but, by and
    large, the puzzles are fairly good. Trouble is, as noted, they use the
    NPCs in ways that make them little better than props.

    The gameplay is likewise a bit uneven -- lots and lots of useless
    scenery, for instance (for which you get "that's not something you
    need to refer to..." messages, mostly), and some illogicalities, like
    a supermarket bag that can hold anything and everything, including a
    spade. (There is one character who wants a certain food item -- but
    once you bring the food, you can drop it on the floor and he'll never
    pick it up, or you can eat it yourself without any protest from him.)

    The Wedding has the usual Inform benefits, along with a very limited
    hint menu (plus other limited sources of hints worked into the game),
    and there are plenty of synonyms for most words -- and the game itself
    is wide enough that there are at least a few puzzles to work on at any
    given moment. (One puzzle (the dungeon problem) that seems to cry out
    "I have more than one solution!" does not, though -- maybe in a later
    release?) Dialogue is a bit clumsy as well -- "yes" in response to a
    direct question doesn't work; you must type "answer yes" or "say yes
    to" whoever, somewhat grating in a game where you learn many things
    from the various characters.

    The writing is mostly good, though it has rough spots -- there are
    some things in room descriptions that perhaps shouldn't be. For
    instance, when you first reach the front hall, you get this:

    	The great entrance hall of D'Arcy manor evokes a twinge of
            jealousy within you -- the grand wooden polished floors and
            staircase, the expensive chandelier hanging from the high
            ceiling, the priceless Compton painting hanging on a wall. Why
            can't you inherit something like this? Leaving aside feelings
            of bitterness...

    Fine. Well-written, realistic. Except that you probably shouldn't feel
    it the tenth or eleventh time you enter the room -- I mean, you've
    probably seen hardwood floors before. Most of the room descriptions
    are well done -- descriptive, but controlled -- though I wasn't sure
    whether this one was supposed to be straightforward or sarcastic:

    	This room offers refuge from the tastelessness that seems to
    	prevail around the rest of the house. Framed pictures of
    	famous film actresses, Garland, Dietrich, Midler and Streisand
    	in particular, hang proudly on the sky-blue walls, alongside
    	two extra-large pink and red ribbons. The abundance of style
    	extends to the curtains, the most attractive you have ever
    	seen. If only the rest of the house, to the south, had been
    	decorated as well as this.

    Me, I never saw Bette Midler and Barbra Streisand posters as the
    epitome of good taste -- nor, for that matter, huge pink and red
    ribbons -- but perhaps it's just me. (If this is supposed to be
    ironic, it's not well done.) These are quibbles, though, because the
    writing here is generally solid and effective -- reasonably
    atmospheric and genuinely funny. When you confront one character late
    in the game, you get this:

    	"Okay, muggins," you say, "spill the beans, squeak, start
    	talking, loosen your tongue..." Then you realise that you are
    	getting carried away, and drop the tough cop act.

    Not laugh-out-loud hilarious, but amusing nonetheless. There are many
    such moments -- the game is littered with Easter eggs, some of which
    are pointed out in a "fun stuff" file available when the gane is done
    -- that illustrate real interest in making the game enjoyable. (A
    television has 8 different channels, all with 10-15 randomized funny
    scenes depending on the channel -- the soap opera channel is one of
    the best, I think.) Brown has a feel for compact but effective room
    descriptions, as in the following:

    	Considering the high technology that has gone into guarding
    	this area, the cellar is surprisingly lo-tech. One very dull
    	fluorescent tube casts gloomy light over the brick walls. The
    	air is damp; cobwebs line the ceiling. A tunnel disappears off
    	into the darkness to the northeast, and a set of stone steps
    	lead east up to the passageway.

    For a concept like The Wedding to work, it needs good writing -- there
    are few things duller than trying to interact with badly written
    characters, or inhabiting a small game environment where the author
    hasn't bothered to make the locations interesting or believable. And
    the writing here is easily good enough to keep the player involved and
    prevent the game from becoming tedious even when nothing is going on,
    puzzle-wise, though a few too many of the rooms break the description
    by inserting your thoughts or reactions. There are many genuinely
    funny moments, as noted, and the whole thing is mercifully free from
    signs of taking itself seriously.

    There is much to like about The Wedding, in short, and its
    shortcomings are more due to the difficulty of its undertaking than to
    poor writing or programming; there are enough clever puzzles and
    humorous asides for the game to be involving despite the shortcomings
    in the plot and setup.  Despite its flaws, The Wedding is a solid
    entry in the IF library.

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

    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April

    NAME: Zork I
    AUTHORS: Marc Blank and David Lebling
    E-MAIL: WHO WANTS TO KNOW?!
    DATE: 1981
    PARSER:	Early Infocom
    SUPPORTS: Infocom ports
    AVAILABILITY: Commercial (GMD)
    URL: N/A
    VERSION: Release 88

    Consideration of the relative merits of Zork I, in 1997, is difficult
    to undertake fairly. Infocom's achievement in publishing such a game
    in 1981 -- to fit the limitations of tiny microcomputers, in a
    language that they had written themselves -- was considerable, and
    flaws in the game cannot be considered in the same critical light as
    those of games written today. Numerous bugs have been corrected since
    the original release, but the game is still essentially the same --
    none of the bugs addressed design flaws that affected the plot or
    structure of the game; its limitations were not serious enough to
    warrant fundamental changes.

    Nor was the popularity of Zork I a fluke. Novelty was part of its
    appeal, certainly, and the game suffers in comparison to later, more
    polished efforts, but the attempt to create a plausible game
    environment with only text was sufficiently successful that many, many
    people were genuinely absorbed -- by the challenge of the puzzles and
    by the story, such as it is.  The versatility of the parser was
    doubtless part of it -- to get the true experience of playing
    Infocom's games in the early '80s, struggle through some Scott Adams
    or the like and its volume of "go tree" and "look rock" commands. The
    primitiveness of the game environment of Adams and the like is not an
    indictment, given cost and size limitations, but the wizardry of
    Infocom in overcoming those limitations should be recognized through
    the comparison as near genius.

    Graeme Cree's bug list inventories some of the design flaws of Zork I,
    some of which have been corrected, some not. My personal favorite,
    from the first release, involves "give troll to troll," whereupon the
    troll eats himself and disappears. There are some problems that live
    on, though -- for example, the player is given an extensive
    description of the jewel-encrusted egg upon first encountering it, but
    that description can never be reached again once the egg is moved --
    it began with "In the bird's nest...", but the rest of the description
    relates only to the egg and would be relevant in any setting. Some of
    the synonyms are a bit off -- "examine passage" yields "there's
    nothing special about the way."

    Among the stranger red herrings are the tool chests at the dam, which
    "are so rusty and corroded that they crumble when you try to touch
    them," and they certainly do crumble -- after that response, the
    chests are gone, apparently melting into dust and blowing away. There
    are numerous small illogicalities -- how does one raise and lower a
    basket up and down a mine shaft from the bottom of that shaft? Remote
    control? How does it happen to be that one inevitably happens upon a
    small object when digging in a room, without prior guidance? Is the
    thief really so clever -- or are you really so dumb -- that he can
    steal your light source? Why is it that a room filling up with water
    obligingly stops filling and waits for you to return if you leave?

    Many of the rules that IF players have come to expect designers to
    follow came about as a result of bad experiences with the early games,
    and Zork I is no exception. Though the inclusion of alternate
    solutions to problems is welcome, some of the alternate paths are a
    bit strange -- it is handy to know the shortcut to the thief's
    hideaway, but there is no way of guessing that shortcut without taking
    the long, arduous route, and players might well feel they have been
    put through needless aggravation. There are quite a few save-restore
    puzzles -- the "squeaky sounds" are hardly adequate warning for the
    bat puzzle, nor is it obvious that you, the player, will be so dumb as
    to puncture the boat by boarding it with a sword or other sharp
    object. The maze is large and irritating -- and the addition of the
    thief to the mix, while an amusing innovation on Colossal Cave, makes
    things worse. And most frustrating of all, of course, is the
    randomized combat, with no way to improve your chances -- an element
    that Infocom largely set aside after Zork I, thankfully.

    The writing is somewhat uneven, frankly. There are many rooms whose
    descriptions are cursory -- whereas Colossal Cave had clearly drawn on
    explorers' accounts of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky in its attention to
    geological detail, providing a measure of realism, there are many Zork
    I descriptions like this: "This is a circular stone room with passages
    in all directions. Several of them have unfortunately been blocked by
    cave-ins." Such a variety of settings comes in such a short space --
    chasm, canyon, lake -- and with so little description that the reality
    of the environment suffers at time. Most room descriptions begin with
    something like "You are in a small room," which says little. Like, how
    small, man?  Bread-box? Closet? There are moments of fairly thorough
    description in largely irrelevant locales, notably the canyon outside,
    and there are places where the descriptions are so terse that one
    wonders whether the intent was humor:

    	Land of the Dead

    	You have entered the Land of the Living Dead. Thousands of
    	lost souls can be heard weeping and moaning. In the corner are
    	stacked the remains of dozens of previous adventurers less
    	fortunate than yourself. A passage exits to the north.

    Here I am in Hades. *yawn* Wonder if there's a gift shop around. Well,
    back to the adventure. Examining the remains elicits the response "You
    see nothing special about the pile of bodies." But though Zork I had
    little of the atmosphere that would mark later Infocom efforts, the
    very spareness of its prose was sometimes effective, as in the Troll
    Room:

    	This is a small room with passages to the east and south and a
    	forbidding hole leading west. Bloodstains and deep scratches
    	(perhaps made by an axe) mar the walls.

    	A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all
    	passages out of the room.

    	Your sword has begun to glow very brightly.

    Where a more thorough description of blood and gore might have seemed
    excessive, the brief reference to "bloodstains and deep scratches"
    allows the imagination to conjure up the scene -- and the description
    followed by the mention of the troll, while provided to separate out
    objects from scenery, heightens the effect of first impression -- the
    ominous decor -- and sudden realization of the source of that decor,
    as if the player were peering around the room and saw the troll
    last. Equally effective is the experience of dying once past a certain
    point in the game and wandering around as a ghost -- being told that
    your hand passes through objects, finding exits from the dungeon
    barred; the feel is reminiscent of Sartre's "Les jeux sont faits."
    Though the lack of an endgame seems strange to experienced IF players,
    the final reference to the sequel is genuinely tantalizing.

    Zork I does work, in the end, though it's hard to pinpoint just why.
    Collect-the-treasures as a plot is a weary old device, and it doesn't
    only seem that way to IF players -- it had, after all, been the
    subject of innumerable fantasy novels and games before IF hit the
    scene. But its recurring presence points to some appeal that Zork I
    managed to tap into -- the allure of getting rich, and of obtaining
    things as diverse as the coffin of Ramses II, a songbird's bauble, and
    a dead adventurer's bag of coins, keeps the intrigue of finding the
    next treasure alive, somehow.  Vital to the enterprise is, of course,
    the humor, even if the barrage of self-reference becomes wearying;
    responses like "Only Santa Claus climbs down chimneys" make the game
    feel more intelligent than a "You can't do that" response would have,
    and moments like the description of the vampire bat and the behavior
    of the thief break up the traipsing-from-room-to-room feel that
    sometimes plagued Colossal Cave. For my part, I still enjoy this
    response:

    	>zork

    	At your service!

    The variety of responses to "jump" -- a command with, of course, no
    practical value in the game -- and the provision for other
    nonessential verbs points to the pains that Infocom took from the very
    beginning to make the environment genuinely interactive, rather than
    the minimum of nouns and commands needed to get the player through the
    game. The value of that is hard to measure, but Zork I, with its many
    Easter eggs, is a good exxample of a game that felt worth the price
    because of its breadth -- much to do, many responses to try.

    Playing Zork I now is indeed worthwhile, both to see how far IF has
    come and to appreciate its origins, despite the annoyances. It is a
    credit to its design that it remains an enjoyable game, well worth its
    popularity.

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

    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April

    NAME: Zork II
    AUTHORS: Marc Blank, David Lebling
    E-MAIL:	No, 'e don't
    DATE: 1982
    PARSER:	Early Infocom
    SUPPORTS: Infocom ports
    AVAILABILITY: Commercial (Masterpieces)
    URL: N/A
    VERSION: Release 48

    Zork II picks up where its predecessor left off in many ways -- the
    beginning deposits you inside the barrow that had marked the end of
    Zork I, your trusty lamp and sword are by your side, and your mission
    seems at the outset to be more treasure-gathering. But Zork II parts
    company with the first of the series in a variety of important ways as
    the game progresses -- that sword is useful, but in a way far more
    interesting than hack-and-slash -- and the changes suggest that the
    folks at Infocom were interested less in putting out more of the same
    than in refining their product and heightening ths challenge.

    One way in particular that the designers of Zork II chose to raise the
    difficulty level bears mention because it seems to have been deemed a
    failure as a game device, and rightly so: the reliance on random
    events.  Two major elements of Zork II are random -- the role of the
    Wizard and the function of the Carousel Room -- and while each can be
    disabled over the course of the game, each makes the normal course of
    gameplay rather tiresome while active. An ill-timed Wizard appearance
    can actually render the game unwinnable at several points, making Zork
    II the only Infocom game I can think of (well, Zork I had randomized
    combat, true, but unforeseeable random events -- meaning save-restore
    cannot be relied upon in the same way as with combat -- are different)
    where one can lose the chance to finish a game through no fault of
    one's own. Usually, this happens because his spells disrupt a
    time-dependent sequence that only happens once (actually, I just
    discovered that becoming the object of a "float" spell in the volcano
    spells death, though an amusing death), but there is one spell which,
    if cast, instantly cuts off the possibility of winning, in a way that
    the player could not possibly be expected to guess. This is a cruel
    trick indeed, and later Infocom games eschew unfairness of this sort
    -- but first-time players of Zork II should be warned that frequent
    saves are in order.

    While the plot, as noted, seems at first to be an extension of the
    scavenger theme, it turns out to be something quite different; the
    treasures have a use that marks a change in emphasis of sorts for your
    character, from gathering booty to exploring the deeper recesses of
    the cave -- and in that, perhaps, one might say that the plot thickens
    slightly over the course of the game. The paragraph at the end of the
    game suggests a larger mission, one that will come as a surprise to
    the merry treasure-hunter -- and yet it makes some sense, in that it
    suggests that the valor tha player has demonstrated in getting that
    far points to a more important goal.

    Magic is prevalent in Zork II, more so than in the original,
    appropriately so since it is a wizard's domain that you are exploring
    -- and the progress of the game moves you from object and victim of
    the magic to its controller, to some extent at least, in that you
    outwit a variety of magical traps and learn to use some magic items to
    your own ends. The magic is haphazard -- no hint of the more organized
    system of the Enchanter trilogy -- but there is a real sense by the
    end that you, the unskilled but savvy adventurer, have beaten the
    wizard at his own game, and it helps deepen the admittedly thin sense
    of a plot. Magic is also played up for humor value, including the
    wizard's failed spells ("There is a loud crackling sound, and blue
    smoke rises from the wizard's sleeve. He sighs and disappears.") and
    such sidelights as the "fudge" spell. (Though I was hoping that there
    would be amusing applications of the power you gain toward the end of
    the game, and I didn't find many.)

    Several of the puzzles are lifted from the original "Dungeon"
    mainframe game, though most of that had ended up in Zork I. (Though,
    at one point, you see, from a distance, a location that had existed in
    Dungeon but had dropped out of Zork I -- slightly confusing to the
    uninitated.) One of the puzzles has a drastically different -- and
    much more creative -- solution than in the original "Dungeon" game,
    though it's more a "wonder what happens if I do this" solution than an
    "oh, I know, I should do this" solution. The quality of the puzzles is
    uneven: one requires some trial and error, amusing in its effects when
    you get it wrong but trial and error all the same. The Bank of Zork
    puzzle has drawn some criticism for being possible to solve without
    fully understanding, though the rationale behind it is elegant enough
    that it seems a minor problem -- and another puzzle requires that one
    largely set aside one's knowledge of how liquids work (meaning that
    what I suspect was supposed to be among the easier puzzles stumped me
    completely when I first played the game).

    There is, of course, one notoriously bad puzzle toward the end -- bad
    for its "guess-what-I'm-thinking" aspect and for its inaccessibility
    to the non-American -- and for pretending to be a maze when not
    one. And the final puzzle is, I think, ridiculously hard -- the
    required action is motivationless and the game gives not the slightest
    nudge in the right direction. Infocom rated Zork II "advanced," but
    their sense of how to make a game hard without making it unfair was as
    yet not fully developed.

    Zork II feels much more polished than Zork I; the geography of the
    game is somewhat more coherent, there are fewer illogicalities, and
    the layout is less a series of puzzles than a set of locations that
    revolve -- literally -- around a central area. The writing --
    substantially better than that of Zork I -- confirms that impression;
    there are virtually no rooms without a complete description, and at
    times the writer manages to paint quite a vivid picture. The tunnel at
    the beginning, while otherwise irrelevant, draws the reader in
    effectively and provides atmosphere and attention to detail that had
    been absent in the first game; it's as if the player has become less
    intent on treasure and more apt to notice the surroundings now and
    again. There are many locations worth picturing in one's own mind in
    the course of Zork II, this among them:

    	North End of Garden

    	This is the northern end of a formal garden. Hedges hide the
    	cavern walls, and if you don't look up, the illusion is of a
    	cloudy day outside. The light comes from a large growth of
    	glowing mosses on the roof of the cave.  A break in the hedge
    	is almost overgrown to the north. A carefully manicured path
    	leads south. In the center of a rosebed is a small open
    	structure, painted white. It appears to be a gazebo.

    And this:

            Menhir Room

    	This is a large room which was evidently used once as a
    	quarry. Many large limestone chunks lie helter-skelter around
    	the room. Some are rough-hewn and unworked, others smooth and
    	well-finished. One side of the room appears to have been used
    	to quarry building blocks, the other to produce menhirs
    	(standing stones). Obvious passages lead north and south.

    	One particularly large menhir, at least twenty feet tall and
    	eight feet thick, is leaning against the wall blocking a dark
    	opening leading southwest. On this side of the menhir is
    	carved an ornate letter "F".

    Providing the salient details as the player looks around the room
    makes the experience more real and adds to the illusion of stumbling
    on a world rather than a series of puzzles; many of the most memorable
    images or scenes in the trilogy are in Zork II simply because the game
    authors gave the settings so much attention. (When I first played this
    -- I was 7 -- I had dreams about the Bank of Zork.) Even the
    after-death sequence was intriguing, and points to mysteries that
    unravel as the game progresses.  Part of the appeal of the writing in
    Zork II is that it genuinely felt like a series of caves, with
    geological detail noted and occasional references to a natural light
    source.

    In summary, the appeal of playing Zork II lies less in the puzzles
    than in the game environment, and this installment is best enjoyed at
    a measured pace, with time to read room descriptions and visualize the
    scene. Notable for the way it changes the feel of the series, Zork II,
    despite its flaws, points to Infocom's developing skills.

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

    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April

    NAME: Zork III
    E-MAIL:	One of the world's great mysteries
    DATE: 1983
    PARSER:	Early Infocom
    SUPPORTS: Infocom ports
    AVAILABILITY: Commercial (Masterpieces)
    URL: N/A
    VERSION: Release 17

    To say merely that Zork III represents a departure from the first two
    entries in the series is to understate the case. Though much in this
    game will be familiar to the experienced Infocom gamer, and though it
    resolves the series reasonably coherently, Zork III works on a
    thoroughly different premise from the first two -- and to the extent
    that it succeeds, it does because the player is willing to set aside
    expectations built up by Zorks I and II.

    This is not, of course, to say that Zork III is a letdown, or not an
    enjoyable game, but it is hardly enjoyable on the same terms as the
    other parts of the series. The humor, to take an obvious example, is
    subordinate to the story in Zork III and appears at odd moments,
    Easter eggs typical of Infocom's writing (listening to the guards in
    the museum is a good example, or reading the plaque in the Jewel Room
    after you solve the puzzle). But there is little humor in the
    storyline itself -- nothing, for example, along the lines of cakes
    that cause you to evaporate, or wizards casting spells like "Fudge,"
    or thieves making sardonic remarks, or a room that mocks mocks your
    your syntax syntax until until solved solved. There is one slightly
    jokey puzzle, true, but the game doesn't really play up the humorous
    aspect as it might; it is the resolution to a problem that is, like
    most of the game, thoroughly solemn. The main NPC of the game, when
    you encounter him toward the end, offers minimal interaction -- and it
    seems that, considering his identity, something amusing could have
    been coded in (I certainly never found anything). (No, the bugs
    involving what happens when he follows you around don't count.)

    Again, this is not to say that Zork III is humorless -- but the plot
    feels deadly serious and there is little of the comic in any vital
    element to the game. (Compare, for instance, the rainbow and bat
    puzzles in Zork I, or the lizard or Cerberus in Zork II.) The reasons
    for that are debatable, but my own feeling was that it was a product
    of the structure of the game; more on that in a moment.

    The writing reinforces the feel; most of the locations you visit are
    either on barren landscape or in abandoned rooms evocative of the
    decayed empire. Though the quality of writing is similar to that of
    Zork II, the mood created is different: where Zork II's images
    depicted a mysterious and slightly dangerous cave, with breathtaking
    views juxtaposed with cramped caverns, Zork III gives us gloom and
    emptiness. In a sense, though there are a few NPC interactions, no one
    is there; you are wandering around a region where no one is or has
    been for a while, and no one wants to be. For example:

            Land of Shadow

    	You are standing atop a steep cliff, looking west over a vast
    	ocean. Far below, the surf pounds at a sandy beach. To the
    	south and east are rolling hills filled with eerie shadows. A
    	path cut into the face of the cliff descends toward the
    	beach. To the north is a tall stone wall, which ends at the
    	cliff edge. It was obviously built long ago, and directly
    	north is a spot where you could climb over the rubble of the
    	decaying wall.

    Or:

    	Scenic Vista

    	You are in a small chamber carved in the rock, with the sole
    	exit to the north. Mounted on one wall is a table labelled
    	"Scenic Vista," whose featureless surface is angled toward
    	you. One might believe that the table was used to indicate
    	points of interest in the view from this spot, like those
    	found in many parks. On the other hand, your surroundings are
    	far from spacious and by no stretch of the imagination could
    	this spot be considered scenic. An indicator above the table
    	reads "IV".

    	Mounted on one wall is a flaming torch, which fills the room
    	with a flickering light.

    It is hard to put a label on the mood of Zork III -- "brooding,"
    perhaps, but that would make it more ominous than it is. If anything,
    it seems like a T.S. Eliot scene, with its barren landscapes and wisps
    of mist and enigmatic encounters with unidentified characters. (As I
    spent last winter in Scotland -- on the North Sea coast, even -- the
    Land of Shadow description above feels familiar indeed.) The adjective
    "gray" never appears, as far as I can tell, in any of the room
    descriptions in Zork III, and yet there is a grayness about the game
    environment that makes the feel of the game far more real, more
    coherent, than the other two, even if the scenes themselves are less
    picturesque than those of Zork II. The description of the clifftop
    captures the study in contrasts:

    	 Cliff

    	 This is a remarkable spot in the dungeon. Perhaps two hundred
    	 feet above you is a gaping hole in the earth's surface
    	 through which pours bright sunshine! A few seedlings from the
    	 world above, nurtured by the sunlight and occasional rains,
    	 have grown into giant trees, making this a virtual oasis in
    	 the desert of the Underground Empire. To the west is a sheer
    	 precipice, dropping nearly fifty feet to jagged rocks
    	 below. The way south is barred by a forbidding stone wall,
    	 crumbling from age. There is a jagged opening in the wall to
    	 the southwest, through which leaks a fine mist. The land to
    	 the east looks lifeless and barren.

    A vivid scene, indeed -- a glimpse of the life above ground in full
    awareness of the bleakness of the setting, and, implicitly, color
    contrasting with drabness, the look up toward the hole in the cavern
    balanced against the look down, over the cliff. There is much to
    appreciate in the writer's ability to accent the pertinent visual
    details.

    The plot -- well, thereby hangs a tale. Though, as in the first two
    entries, you discover what the plot is as you progress, you are given
    a sense in the prologue of what you are looking for, and it quickly
    becomes clear that no crystal tridents or golden statuettes are at
    issue this time around. The scoring system -- you have seven major
    tasks to perform and are given a point for each, though the game will
    be far from over when the seven tasks are done -- reflects the new
    approach. "Seek me when you feel yourself worthy!" proclaims the
    figure of the prologue, and prowess is not established by a propensity
    for gathering loot. It can be argued that the substitute makes little
    more sense, but my own reaction was that I was on the trail of
    something more interesting than another chunk of gold -- and Zork III
    does try as well, though not very successfully, to put a different
    face on the skillful adventurer. (Suffice it to say that your final
    encounter gives a touch of Matthew 25:31-46 to the rest of the game.)

    There is a tension here between the two sides of what you are
    accomplishing over the course of the game, and my own feeling was that
    it would have been a more interesting tension with more development of
    the second, more subjective angle, the element not measured by items
    acquired.  (As it is, there are still shades of the more
    tried-and-true scavenger-hunt approach, though the objects sought are
    different.) The outcomes in the museum and at the top of the cliff
    particularly play up how the player's assumptions must change -- in a
    sense, the central puzzles are those of a child presented with a
    cookie jar. It is certainly worth pondering how the nature of your
    escapade with the ring fits into the character-development angle --
    and it seems like the sword-in-the-stone angle might have been
    reworked to fit that idea better. To discuss the plot any more
    specifically would give away too much of the game, but whatever the
    failings of the storyline in Zork III, it does offer food for thought,
    and brings the would-be looter, fresh from amassing two games' worth
    of bounty, up short. (And the ultimate ending offers, in a sense, the
    ultimate twist.)

    The puzzles vary widely -- some are memorable, some are nothing
    special, and some are just irritating -- and there aren't many. There
    is one that there seems little possibility of guessing -- the player
    hits on it by chance if at all. One required series of actions is
    time-sensitive in a thoroughly nonobvious way; it is easy to lock
    yourself out of victory simply by waiting too long to settle a certain
    matter. The infamous Royal Puzzle is not the hardest puzzle in the
    game; once the player grasps the mechanics, it is a matter of careful
    planning more than anything else. But small slips can, again, lock one
    out of completing it (and there is disappointingly little payoff to
    solving it, other than survival).  Others -- the museum and viewing
    room puzzles, in particular -- are rather rewarding, though, and the
    latter even explains one of the odder red herrings from Zork II. And
    the mirror box, while it takes considerable mental aerobics to picture
    and use properly, is one of the more intriguing Infocom contraptions;
    mastering its more complicated purpose without help is no small
    feat. I found the last puzzle a bit unfair -- I learned later that a
    clue to it appeared where no clue had been before, but, silly me, I
    didn't think to check. But the novice should be warned that a few of
    Zork III's puzzles are difficult indeed, and require some trial and
    error -- considerable, actually -- to solve.

    There are many small things to enjoy along the course of Zork III,
    including the obligatory bits of self-reference; like Infocom or hate
    it, it certainly did come up with novel ways to plug upcoming games,
    and the advertisement for Enchanter in Zork III is no exception
    (though it's something of a bitter taste). Some of the problems
    involve Zork in-jokes of sorts, humor appreciable mainly for its
    cumulative effects through the first two games -- at the ocean and
    south of the lake, in particular, and upon examining the plaque in the
    Jewel Room. And there are genuinely riveting moments, in particular
    your last glimpse of the hooded figure from the Land of Shadow and
    your encounter, successful or not, with the Guardians of Zork. A game
    as skillfully written as Zork III need not describe every room
    elaborately, simply because the more lengthy descriptions are more
    than adequate to set the scene in the player's mind; I know I could
    picture the hallway of the Guardians of Zork vividly, though the room
    descriptions were fairly cursory. Though the gameplay is sometimes
    clumsy -- at one point, "enter the flaming pit" elicits "You hit your
    head against the flaming pit as you attempt this feat", and "climb
    wall" yields "There's no tree here suitable for climbing" -- the
    parser is usually strong enough to smooth things over.

    To appreciate Zork III, I think, the player needs to appreciate what
    the game authors were setting out to do -- and it was not simply to
    end the series, because a final spectacular treasure hunt would have
    done that perfectly well. To have solved Zork III is to have looked
    critically at some of the cliches of the fantasy genre, some obvious
    -- the treasure element -- but some less so, such as the expectation
    of spectacular or striking locations. By setting much of the game on
    what could be an English moor or heath -- the Crystal Grotto is a
    somewhat jarring exception -- or an American plain and mountainside,
    the designers subvert those expectations and make your quest, if
    anything, prosaic -- at least, prosaic relative to the expectations of
    the genre. The many locations that are not significant for any puzzle
    reinforce the same effect, as do details like "The ground here is
    quite hard, but a few sickly reeds manage to grow near the water's
    edge." There are few mighty deeds in Zork III -- no dragon to slay or
    gates of Hades to enter; instead, the puzzles involve cleverness or
    survival, and using fairly conventional tools to achieve your
    ends. Perhaps most interestingly, there is minimal magic in Zork III,
    and you have minimal control over anything magical; logic and
    mechanics are at issue in the puzzles.

    Certainly, not everything about the game is fresh -- the overarching
    plot is not, after all, especially original -- but the experience of
    playing the game yields something unfamiliar to the fantasy
    enthusiast. In a sense, the nature of the world of Zork III brings the
    person sitting at the keyboard into the game in a way that the Zork II
    player was not likely to feel, unless he or she was used to
    encountering wizards and unicorns.

    In the end, the success of Zork III depends on how open the player is to
    the game's peculiarities. The game is less fun in the most obvious sense
    than its two predecessors; it indulges in fewer amusing antics and has
    fewer rewarding things to do. But it ties up the series in a way that more
    of the same would not have; it marks the end of a process that had been
    hinted at in Zork II, a process whereby the player's interests and
    priorities change, and there is more impetus to see and understand than
    simply to secure what is valuable and bolt. The ending provides a certain
    perspective on the adventurer that was, particularly in light of the
    ending of Zork Zero, and the endgame -- centered around prison cells -- is
    appropriately down-to-earth for the feel of Zork III. There are many good
    things about Zork III, in the end, and perhaps the best of them is that,
    in most respective, it goes against the fantasy-game grain.

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

    An apology is in order here: I have _still_ not updated the
    Scoreboard. Rest assured, however, that I'm archiving all ratings and
    will do my best to update the scores before the next issue.

       Notes:

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

     Name                  Avg Sc  Chr  Puz  # Sc  Rlvt Ish       Notes:
     ====                  ======  ===  ===  ====  ========       ======
    Adventure               7.7    1.1  0.7    2     8      F_INF_TAD_ETC_GMD
    Adventure 350           6.5    0.0  1.5    1     x
    Adv. of Eliz. Highe     3.1    0.8  0.3    1     5      F_AGT
    All Quiet...Library     4.5    0.7  0.7    3     7      F_INF_GMD
    Amnesia                 7.7    1.3  1.4    1     9      C_AP_I_64
    Another...No Beer       2.4    0.2  0.8    2     4      S10_IBM_GMD
    Arthur: Excalibur       8.6    1.8  1.7    1     4      C_INF
    Awe-Chasm               2.4    0.3  0.6    1     8      S?_IBM_ST
    Balances                6.4    1.0  1.3    2     6      F_INF_GMD
    Ballyhoo                7.0    1.8  1.5    3     4      C_INF
    Beyond Tesseract        3.7    0.1  0.6    1     6      F_I_GMD
    Beyond Zork             8.1    1.5  2.0    3     5      C_INF
    Border Zone             6.7    1.4  1.4    4     4      C_INF
    Broken String           3.1    0.5  0.6    1     x      F_TADS_GMD
    Bureaucracy             8.3    1.8  1.6    3     5      C_INF
    Busted                  5.2    1.0  1.1    1            F_INF_GMD
    Castaway                1.1    0.0  0.4    1     5      F_IBM_GMD
    Change in the Weather   6.1    0.8  1.1    2     7      F_INF_GMD
    Christminster           8.6    1.8  1.7    3            F_INF_GMD
    Corruption              6.7    1.4  1.4    1     x      C_I
    Cosmoserve              8.7    1.3  1.4    2     5      F_AGT_GMD
    Crypt v2.0              5.0    1.0  1.5    1     3      S12_IBM_GMD
    Curses                  8.3    1.3  1.7    7     2      F_INF_GMD
    Cutthroats              6.4    1.4  1.2    5     1      C_INF
    Deadline                7.0    1.3  1.4    4     x      C_INF
    Deep Space Drifter      5.5         1.4    1     3      S15_TAD_GMD
    Demon's Tomb            7.4    1.2  1.1    2     9      C_I
    Detective               1.1    0.0  0.0    4     4-5    F_AGT_GMD
    Detective-MST3K         6.0    0.6  0.1    3     7-8    F_INF_GMD
    Ditch Day Drifter       7.1    1.2  1.6    1     2      F_TAD_GMD
    Dungeon Adventure       6.8    1.3  1.6    1     4      F_SEE REVIEW Issue #4
    Dungeon of Dunjin       6.2    0.5  1.5    2     3      S20_IBM_MAC_GMD
    Electrabot              0.7    0.0  0.0    1     5      F_AGT_GMD
    Enchanter               7.1    0.9  1.4    5     2      C_INF
    Enhanced                N/A                0     2      S10_TAD_GMD
    Eric the Unready        7.4    1.5  1.4    1     x      C_I
    Fable, A                2.0    0.2  0.1    1     6      F_AGT_GMD
    Fish                    7.1    1.2  1.5    1     x      C_I
    Forbidden Castle        4.8    0.6  0.5    1     x      C_AP
    Gateway                 7.5    1.6  1.5    1     x      C_I
    Great Archaelog. Race   6.5    1.0  1.5    1     3      S20_TAD_GMD
    Guardians of Infinity   8.5    N/A  1.3    1     9      C_I
    Guild of Thieves        6.8    1.1  1.2    1     x      C_I
    Gumshoe                 6.3    1.3  1.1    2     9      F_INF_GMD
    Hitchhiker's Guide      8.0    1.6  1.6    5     5      C_INF
    Hollywood Hijinx        5.7    1.0  1.5    4     x      C_INF
    Horror30.Zip            3.6    0.0  0.9    1     3      S20_IBM_GMD
    Horror of Rylvania      7.7                1     1      C20_TAD_GMD (Demo)
    Humbug                  7.4                1     x      S10_GMD (Uncertain)
    Infidel                 7.0         1.4    7     1-2    C_INF
    Inhumane                3.6    0.2  0.7    1     9      F_INF_GMD
    Jacaranda Jim           7.0                1     x      S10_GMD (Uncertain)
    Jeweled Arena, The      8.0    1.5  1.5    1     x      ?
    Jigsaw                  8.7    1.6  1.6    3     8,9    F_INF_GMD
    Jinxter                 6.7    1.1  1.3    1     x      C_I
    John's Fire Witch       7.2    1.1  1.6    5     4      S6_TADS_GMD
    Journey                 6.9    1.3  0.8    1     5      C_INF
    Jouney Into Xanth       5.0    1.3  1.2    1     8      F_AGT_GMD
    Klaustrophobia          7.3    1.2  1.4    4     1      S15_AGT_GMD
    Leather Goddesses       7.8    1.4  1.7    5     4      C_INF
    The Legend Lives!       8.2    0.8  1.5    1     5      F_TADS_GMD
    Lethe Flow Phoenix      7.5    1.7  1.5    1     9      F_TADS_GMD
    The Light: Shelby's Ad. 8.0    1.6  0.5    1     9      S?_TADS_GMD
    Lurking Horror, The     7.1    1.4  1.3    5     1,3    C_INF
    MacWeslyan(PC Univ.)    5.6    0.7  1.0    1     x      F_TADS_GMD
    Magic.Zip               4.5    0.5  0.5    1     3      S20_IBM_GMD
    Magic Toyshop, The      3.6    0.5  1.0    1            F_INF_GMD
    Mind Electric, The      5.1    0.5  0.8    2     7-8    F_INF_GMD
    Mind Forever Voyaging   8.5    1.4  0.6    4     5      C_INF
    Moonmist                5.9    1.4  1.3    5     1      C_INF
    Mop & Murder            4.9    0.5  1.0    1     4-5    F_AGT_GMD
    Multidimen. Thief       5.6    0.4  1.0    3     2,9    S15_AGT_GMD
    Mystery House           4.1    0.3  0.7    1     x      F_AP_GMD
    Night at Museum Forever 4.1    0.0  1.0    3     7-8    F_TAD_GMD
    Nord and Bert           4.8    0.5  1.0    2     4      C_INF
    Odieus': Flingshot      3.3    0.4  0.7    2     5      F_INF_GMD
    One Hand Clapping       7.1    1.1  1.3    2     5      F_ADVSYS_GMD
    One That Got Away, The  6.4    1.2  0.9    2     7-8    F_TAD_GMD
    Oo-Topos                5.7    0.2  1.0    1     x      C_AP_I_64
    Path to Fortune         6.8    1.4  0.8    1     9      S_INF_GMD
    Pawn, The               6.5    1.0  1.2    1     x      C_I_AP_64
    Perseus & Andromeda     3.4    0.3  1.0    1     x      ?
    Planetfall              7.5    1.7  1.6    6     4      C_INF
    Plundered Hearts        7.8    1.4  1.3    2     4      C_INF
    Quarterstaff            6.1    1.3  0.6    1     9      C_M
    Sanity Claus            9.0                1     1      S10_AGT_GMD
    Save Princeton          5.8    1.2  1.3    2     8      S10_TAD_GMD
    Seastalker              5.5    1.1  1.0    4     4      C_INF
    Shades of Grey          8.0    1.3  1.4    4     1-2    F_AGT_GMD
    Sherlock                8.2    1.5  1.6    2     4      C_INF
    Shogun                  7.1    1.5  0.5    1     4      C_INF
    Sir Ramic Hobbs         5.0    1.0  1.5    1     6      F_AGT_GMD
    Sorceror                7.3    0.6  1.6    5     2      C_INF
    South American Trek     0.9    0.2  0.5    1     5      ?_IBM_GMD
    Space Aliens...Cardigan 1.8    0.5  0.4    4     3      S60_AGT_GMD
    Spellbreaker            8.2    1.2  1.8    4     2      C_INF
    SpellCasting 101        7.0    1.0  1.2    1     x      C_I
    SpellCasting 201        7.8    1.5  1.6    1     x      C_I
    SpellCasting 301        7.5    1.4  1.5    1     x      C_I
    SpiritWrak              6.6    1.0  0.6    1     9      F_INF_GMD
    Spur                    7.2    1.4  1.2    1     9      F_HUG_GMD
    Starcross               7.0    1.1  1.3    5     1      C_INF
    Stationfall             7.6    1.6  1.6    5     5      C_INF
    Suspect                 6.2    1.3  1.2    2     4      C_INF
    Suspended               7.5    1.3  1.2    4     8      C_INF
    Theatre                 6.8    0.9  1.2    3     6      F_INF_GMD
    TimeQuest               8.6    1.5  1.8    1     x      C_I
    TimeSquared             4.3    1.1  1.1    1     x      F_AGT_GMD
    Toonesia                6.3    1.1  1.2    2     7      F_TAD_GMD
    Tossed into Space       3.9    0.2  0.6    1     4      F_AGT_GMD
    Treasure.Zip            N/A                0     3      S20_IBM_GMD
    Trinity                 8.8    1.4  1.7    8     1-2    C_INF
    Tube Trouble            3.3    0.5  0.4    1            F_INF_GMD
    Uncle Zebulon's Will    7.6    0.9  1.3    3     7      F_TAD_GMD
    Undertow                5.2    1.0  0.8    1            F_TAD_GMD
    Undo                    1.9    0.1  0.4    2     7      F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian One-Half      7.0    1.3  1.7    4     1      F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Unventure 1   7.1    1.2  1.6    5     1-2    S10_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Unventure 2   7.2    1.4  1.5    4     1      S10_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Zero          9.0                1     1      C25_TAD_GMD (Demo)
    Waystation              5.7    0.7  0.9    2     9      F_TAD_GMD
    Windhall Chron. 1 - See Path to Fortune.
    Wishbringer             7.6    1.3  1.3    4     5-6    C_INF
    Witness, The            7.2    1.7  1.2    5     1,3,9  C_INF
    Wonderland              7.5    1.3  1.4    1     x      C_I
    World                   6.5    0.6  1.3    2     4      F_SEE REVIEW Issue #4
    Zanfar                  2.6    0.2  0.4    1     8      F_AGT_GMD
    Zork 0                  7.1    1.3  2.0    2     x      C_INF
    Zork 1                  6.0    0.7  1.5    9     1-2    C_INF
    Zork 2                  6.4    0.8  1.5    7     1-2    C_INF
    Zork 3                  6.1    0.6  1.4    5     1-2    C_INF

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

    The Top Five:

    A game is not eligible for the Top Five unless it has received at
    least three ratings from different readers. This is to ensure a more
    democratic and accurate depiction of the best games.

     1. Trinity             8.8     8 votes
     2. Jigsaw              8.7     3 votes
     3. Christminster       8.6     3 votes
     4. Mind Fvr Voyaging   8.5     4 votes
     5. Curses              8.3     7 votes
        Bureaucracy         8.3     3 votes

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

    That wraps it up for this time. I'm aiming to make the next issue the
    Competition Special - provided, of course, that I receive enough
    competition game reviews to fill an issue. Keep 'em coming.

    And, last but certainly not least:

    A Merry Christmas to all SPAG subscribers!

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