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ISSUE #8 - February 5, 1996

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      The  |___/ociety for the |_|reservation of  |_|_|dventure  \___|ames.
    				ISSUE # 8
            Edited by G. Kevin Wilson (whizzard SP@G uclink.berkeley.edu)
    			      Feb. 5, 1996.

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

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

    	Well, it's been about three months since last we joined together in
    the communal effort that is SPAG.  Life has simplified itself, and I now have
    a really spiffy school schedule: Tuesday and Thursday classes only.  The rest
    of the week is all mine, barring homework, and I can't wait to get to it.
    	It seems like the I-F community has been really busy without me. I
    can count at least 2 or 3 new games that I haven't got around to beating yet,
    one of the most notable being the _Windhall Chronicles_.  But don't think
    that I'm neglecting _Shelby_ or _Broken String_.  I just haven't gotten
    really into them yet, and I plead a busy Christmas.
    	Arrangements are moving into place for the 1996 I-F Competition.  It
    looks like we may have as many as twenty entries, but I'm not sure yet.  If
    so, it will be an exciting event, to say the least.
    	Just so as not to break the pattern, I have to talk about Avalon for
    a sec.  It's not done.  It's in its final stages of development.  I am
    investigating printshops for the manual.  When will it be done?  I really
    don't know.  Maybe this year.  I hope.

    				G. Kevin Wilson
    				"Whizzard"

    LETTERS TO THE EDITOR--------------------------------------------------------

    From: "Christopher E. Forman"

    Dear SPAG,

         What follows is something I've been mulling over for several days now,
    something I think should be heard by everyone involved in playing and/or
    writing text adventures.
         The I-F medium should serve to provide a two-way street for the
    facilitation of communication between players and authors.  Players should
    feel free to discuss how they think I-F should be, authors need to be able to
    draw on that discussion when writing their own works, and players need to
    give feedback (both positive and -- pardon the gratuitous euphamism --
    "otherwise") to those authors informing them of how closely their work
    exhibits the qualities players feel are inherent and necessary in I-F.
         Unfortunately, the last of these three basic needs appears, to myself
    anyway, to be largely unfulfilled.  In short, I just haven't been receiving
    the quantity or quality of feedback I'd like to get regarding my work, and I
    suspect that many other authors have experienced the same problem.  Oh,
    there's the occasional "this is a really great game" post on UseNet, but,
    aside from requests for hints, that's all I ever see.  While such statements
    are nice to hear, they tend to lack specific details about just what it is
    that the player thinks is "really great".
         I bring this to the attention of players because about a week ago, I
    discovered in my e-mailbox a lengthy, extremely well-written evaluation of my
    work, revealing what one player found favorable about it, and, more
    importantly, a number of aspects he rather disliked.  This was a revelation
    to me, as he'd made some excellent points I'd never considered when coding
    the game, and it gave me something to really think about.  Although I did
    disagree with a few of his statements, and found some others too time-
    consuming to be implemented at the present, I most certainly plan to take
    everything he said into account to at least some degree over the course of
    future projects.
         The point of all this is that, believe it or not, game authors will
    listen to your comments.  They want to hear them.  They need to hear them.
    Heck, they DESERVE to hear them.  Writing a text game means setting aside a
    lot of time and taking a lot of effort to give computerists a little fun.
    So the next time you play through a game, if it made any sort of impression
    on you at all, take ten or fifteen minutes out of your own life to let the
    author know what you think of his/her creation.  Anything -- positive,
    negative, or both -- on any topic -- writing, plot, puzzles, characters,
    etc. -- will be appreciated.  If you don't tell us what pleases you and what
    doesn't, how can we be expected to find out?  While we may not agree on
    everything (differences of opinion are inevitable within any entertainment
    medium), it's encouraging to see just what those differences are.
         As a final note, don't let shareware games scare you away from such a
    practice.  I suspect that many shareware authors suffer a lack of feedback
    because players don't want to feel obligated to register, and admitting that
    they've finished the game invites such feelings of duty.  I'm of the belief
    that one should only pay the registration fees if one deems the game worthy
    of such a price (although my shameless UseNet promotions may seem to indicate
    otherwise B-).  Most shareware authors are not going to pressure you into
    paying for their games just because you've admitted you've played them.
    While receiving a little extra cash from a game is nice, there's more to
    writing I-F than that.
         With a little help, authors should be able to create games that not only
    merit but encourage intelligent discussion everywhere.  SPAG and UseNet can
    help, but they can't do it alone.  That little help also has to come through
    direct feedback from the playing public itself.

                                                     -- C.E. Forman

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

    Consider the following review header:

     NAME: Cutthroats                                PARSER: Infocom Standard
     AUTHOR: Infocom                                 PLOT: Two Seperate Paths
     EMAIL: ???                                      ATMOSPHERE: Well Done
     AVAILABILITY: LTOI 2                            WRITING: Good
     PUZZLES: Good                                   SUPPORTS: Infocom Ports
     CHARACTERS: Not Bad                             DIFFICULTY: Medium

    	First, you'll notice that the score has been removed, and replaced
    by one or two word ratings.  These are pretty arbitrary, and should allow
    more freedom to the reviewers.  The EMAIL section is for the e-mail address
    of the game author, not the reviewer.  AVAILABILITY will usually have either
    Commercial ($price), Shareware ($price), or Freeware.  If the commercial
    price varies in stores, then it will just say Commercial.  If it has been
    released in the LTOI collection, this line should say so.  Lastly, if it is
    available on ftp.gmd.de, the line should add GMD.  (Demo) if it's a demo
    version.  The body of the review hasn't changed.

    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.

    SPAG accepts reviews of any length, letters to the editor, the occasional
    interesting article on text adventures (no reprints please), and even just
    ratings for your favorite game, if you don't have the time to do a full
    review.  Please though, at least send me info for each game you have rated
    equivalent to the review header for Cutthroats, above.  All accepted
    materials will be headed by the submitter's name and e-mail address, unless
    you request that they be withheld, or do not supply them, in which case the
    header will read as "Anonymous."

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

    	The only game out of the three that I mentioned in my editorial that
    could vaguely be referred to as new at this late date is _The Broken String_.
    I have seen the game, and in my opinion, the potential is there, but the
    authors did not go the extra mile.  They needed more betatesting, a native
    english-speaking editor (The authors themselves are not.) and some careful
    polish.  It is also a tad crude at the beginning.  But hey, it's a punk
    adventure, so some crude is permissible there.  I simply question the
    neccessity of it.  I suggest waiting for a future release, but at last
    count, it was found at ftp.gmd.de:/if-archive/unprocessed/gamebs.zip.

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

    >From "Graeme Cree" <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>

     NAME:  Adventure                       GAMEPLAY:  Two Word parser
     AUTHOR:  Will Crowther                 PLOT:  Good
     EMAIL:  I wish I knew                  ATMOSPHERE:  Tolkienic
     AVAILABILITY:  GMD                     WRITING:  Very Good
     PUZZLES:  Many trial & error           SUPPORTS:  Practically all
     CHARACTERS:  Few, but memorable        DIFFICULTY:  Average

         Adventure, aka Colossal Cave, is the oldest, most famous, most
    modified, most ported, and most pirated game in the history of
    Interactive Fiction.  Written in the antiquity of the mid 70's, it was
    bootlegged to practically every university in the country on magnetic
    tape.  It was commercially released by several companies (such as The
    Software Toolworks), and has been ported to AGT, TADS, Inform, and
    several others.
         It has also been expanded several times.  Many authors have taken
    the layout of the original game and simply added new rooms, items, and
    puzzles.  For this reason, the game is usually referred to by the
    maximum number of points that can be scored.  For instance Adventure
    350 (the original version), Adventure 370, Adventure 550, Adventure
    1000, and so on.
         Adventure could also be said to be indirectly responsible for the
    entire Infocom product line.  The original mainframe Zork was begun
    when the authors played Adventure and believed that they could improve
    on it, especially vis a vis the parser.  Zork, the product of their
    efforts, was the foundation of Infocom, and owes heavily to Adventure.
     The words "xyzzy" and "plugh" will draw a response, and the thief's
    maze is lifted directly from the game.
         All in all, one might conclude from this that Adventure is the
    greatest Adventure game ever written, but this is not quite the case.
     It's continued popularity stems from a) it's hauntingly compelling
    atmosphere, b) it's colourful imagery, c) the fact that for many it was
    their first adventure game, and d) the fact that many people first
    played it 70's style.
         Playing a game 70's style was very different from playing today.
    Since there were few personal computers, playing a game usually
    involved a trip to the local university computer room, generally after
    hours, with a bag lunch in tow (since the session would usually last
    quite a while).  My own first experience with Adventure involved
    late-night trips to IBM with my programmer father.  The long trek
    through dimly-lit windowless corridors to the terminal room was
    practically an adventure in itself, and since you couldn't
    just go and play whenever you wanted to, the game had plenty of
    opportunity to grow larger in the imagination in between sessions.
         Also, a player is more likely to be forgiving of a first game than
    later ones.  When you have never seen such a game before and are not
    quite sure what it can understand or do, you won't mind a simple
    two-word parser, such as Adventure has, unless it is positively
    user-unfriendly.  Adventure's parser while simple, is adequate for the
    game, and produces a good effect by frequently addressing the user
    directly ("You don't expect me to do a decent reincarnation without any
    orange smoke, do you?").
         Adventure is loaded with memorable imagery (Witt's End, the maze
    of twisty little passages, the Pirate, the breath-taking view, "xyzzy",
    et cetera) that generally stays with a player long after the game is
    completed.
         The atmosphere is wonderfully authentic.  The game map was based
    on Bedquilt Cave in Kentucky, part of the Mammoth Cave labyrinth.
    While there are no dragons in Bedquilt, it is said that first-time
    visitors have been able to find their way around by virtue of having
    played the game.  While Zork is simply a collection of interesting
    locales that just happen to be underground, Adventure resembles a real
    cavern much more, featuring dead ends, fissures, blocked passages, and
    passages in the floor.  As in Tolkien, magic in Adventure is present,
    but tantalizingly remote; not coming out the wazoo, as it is in Zork
    and most other fantasy games.
         Nevertheless Adventure is not without its problems.  As mentioned
    previously, the parser is rather primitive, at least in the original
    version (the TADS and Inform ports have state-of-the-art parsers).
         Also the puzzles are frequently meant to be solved by trial and
    error rather than deduction.  How are you supposed to figure out what
    to do with the rod, or how to kill the dragon, or how to bring light to
    the Dark Room, or how to recover the Golden Eggs, or how to get that
    final point, anyway?  By experimenting, that's how.  Of course, in a
    first game players are often much more inclined to experiment with it
    to discover its capabilities.
         That's not to say that there aren't some good puzzles as well.
    The object that you need to win at the end is very cleverly concealed,
    and only the keen-eyed will detect the subtle difference between the
    vending machine maze and the Pirate's maze that allows you to map the
    former without dropping objects (unfortunately, this feature is not
    present in the Inform version).
         There are no save/restore puzzles as such.  It is possible to win
    on the first playthrough, but not to achieve the maximum score.  If you
    take too long (and you will), you will be forced to expend one of your
    treasures to recharge your lamp (thus lowering your score), but after
    you have solved the game, it will be a simple matter to optimize your
    time and win before this becomes necessary.
         Adventure is an adventure game that every text gamer should play
    some  time in their lives; the only game that has a genre named after
    it.  But it would be best to stick with Adventure 350 in either its
    original form, or the TADS or Inform ports.  The add-ons of the larger
    versions simply make the game bulkier and clunkier without improving
    the gaming experience.

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

    From: "Christopher E. Forman"

    NAME: The Awe-Chasm (a.k.a The Chasm of Awe, a.k.a. Snatch and Crunch II)
    PARSER: C Adventure Toolkit
    AUTHOR: Tony Stiles                              PLOT: Dungeon Quest
    EMAIL: ???                                       ATMOSPHERE: Very little
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, GMD                      WRITING: Decidedly unfunny
    PUZZLES: Generic/pseudo-logical                  SUPPORTS: PCs, Atari STs
    CHARACTERS: Unresponsive                         DIFFICULTY: Painful to play

            Start with a rather straightforward late-1970s style dungeon
    quest/treasure hunt.  Now add a remarkably crude and unpretentiously juvenile
    sense of humor.  Stir in a frustrating parser and some poorly-implemented, at
    best semi-logical, puzzles.  Blend into this a sloppy overall design, and, to
    give a slight flavor of anti-logic, top the whole thing off with a dash of
    sheer incomprehensibility.  Following this recipe, the resulting mixture is a
    serious candidate for the very worst text adventure ever written.
            In this case, author Tony Stiles has cooked up an unappetizing little
    dish titled "The Awe-Chasm", a.k.a "The Chasm of Awe", a.k.a. "Snatch and
    Crunch II".  (Personally, I've never seen or heard of "Snatch and Crunch I",
    but it must have been good enough to justify the making of this sequel.)
            Snatch and Crunch, the two main characters in this game, are, in the
    author's own words, a "pokey pervert" and a "monolithic mutant", respectively.
    For reasons unknown (good old-fashioned greed perhaps?), they're out to
    explore the many caverns and passageways of the Awe-Chasm in search of
    treasure.  During the course of the game, the I-Fer can type "BECOME SNATCH"
    or "BECOME CRUNCH" to switch control back and forth between Snatch and Crunch,
    using each one in tasks for which he is specifically suited -- some puzzles
    can only be solved using one of our two explorers.  Snatch and Crunch can
    also work together, with Crunch picking up the smaller Snatch and carrying
    him along on his shoulders.
            While this may sound promising, the game doesn't really put forth
    the extra effort necessary to make it work.  Neither Snatch nor Crunch seems
    to have much personality, so it's hard to figure out who can do what unless
    the game specifically tells you (which, in most cases, it doesn't).  Perhaps
    the player is expected to bring this knowledge over from the first "Snatch
    and Crunch" game.  Further, unless Snatch is being carried, the duo doesn't
    move around together -- the player must move Snatch and Crunch individually,
    and having to retrace your steps is tedious.  It would have worked much
    better to have the pair stay together for the most part, providing a special
    "SPLIT" command for the few times when they need to go their separate ways.
            Complicating matters is the sloppy overall design of the game.  It's
    very linear at the start, until the player figures out how to buy a lamp.
    This had me stuck until I stumbled across a walkthrough of the first few
    puzzles amongst the myriad seemingly useless files zipped in with the game
    executable.  My problems were more due to parser quirks than anything else.
    Did I talk about the parser yet?  Perhaps I should do that now.
            The author wrote his own adventure design system, called the "C
    Adventure Toolkit" to create this game.  While I must bow slightly to such an
    impressive feat, the sad truth of the matter is that the parser just isn't
    very good -- it's barely adequate for the game.  There are very few synonyms
    for nouns -- you can't call a pond a "lake", for instance -- and some commands
    only work properly if prepositions are used -- "GET EMILY" fails; you must say
    "GET EMILY FROM POND".  (Emily, in this case, happens to be a fish with whom
    Crunch, the "monolithic mutant" is infatuated, and...oh, just forget it.)  For
    simple interactions (directional moves, two-word commands, etc.) the parser
    works okay.  For longer, more complex sentences, though, it's not even up to
    the standards of AGT, let alone Inform and TADS.  (It's dated 1989, BTW.)
            But now back to the game, which becomes more frustrating once the
    player acquires a lamp and descends into the Awe-Chasm ("a chasm of orgasmic
    proportions", the game shamelessly announces).  There are several levels to
    the chasm, some of which have openings leading to tunnels.  What's
    particularly noteworthy here is that, when climbing between levels, there's a
    good chance you'll fall to the bottom of the chasm and have to climb back up
    several levels again.  This happens far, FAR too often to even be called
    infuriating.  After five or six times, you'll want to quit right then and
    there.  (I didn't even get a quarter of the way through the 500-point game.)
            The tunnel openings themselves are equally frustrating to navigate.
    They are listed in room descriptions as "an opening", but no compass
    directions for them are given or recognized.  Players must type "ENTER
    OPENING" to go inside, and "ENTER OPENING" again to come back.  Doors must be
    traversed in the same manner.  What's so difficult about allowing directional
    commands?
            "The Awe-Chasm" showcases an astoundingly juvenile sense of humor.
    It almost seems as though the author is attempting to imitate the style used
    by Steve Meretzky in some of his racier titles.  But Meretzky's writing
    exudes personality, and his characterization in "LGOP" and the "SpellCasting"
    series makes the "naughty" bits more charming than offensive.  "Awe-Chasm"'s
    writing offers little characterization and little personality, and the
    overall result is decidedly distasteful.
            On top of all this, the game just isn't very well planned out.  The
    best dungeon adventures (by which I mean "Colossal Cave" and the "Zork"
    series) employ a degree of continuity between their locations, adding realism
    to the layout.  In "Awe-Chasm", rooms are slapped together clumsily and
    objects are thrown about with no thought whatsoever.  One tunnel, for
    instance, harbors a band of sex-starved nymphomaniacs to assault our heroes.
    Yet for some reason, they've never ventured into the throne room a few levels
    down to visit King Tony (another personal appearance by a game author
    degenerating into a very tired and unfunny inside joke).  Other thrills and
    chills awaiting you include a slew of locked doors (at least three more than
    ANY adventure game needs), the "magical mystery maze" (three guesses as to
    what this is, and the first two don't count), and the "Oh sh*t, all my
    treasures have been scattered" room (crusaders for fairness in I-F need not
    apply).
            The game is not without its cult value, however.  Fans of truly
    abysmal I-F should get plenty of howls out of the flaws inherent in "The
    Awe-Chasm", but everyone else is better advised to leave the "monolithic
    mutant" and the "pokey pervert" to fend for themselves.
    	(Both versions are packaged in the same .ZIP file, at
    /if-archive/games/pc/awechasm.zip)

                                                -- C.E. Forman

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

    >From "Gareth Rees"

      NAME: A Change in the Weather           PARSER: Inform's usual
      AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin                  PLOT: Highly branching
      EMAIL: erkyrath+ SP@G cmu.edu                ATMOSPHERE: Good
      AVAILABILITY: Freeware, GMD             WRITING: Excellent
      PUZZLES: Very neat, very clever         SUPPORTS: Inform ports
      CHARACTERS: None                        DIFFICULTY: Hard

    My second favourite of the competition games, after "The One that Got
    Away".  This was a fun experiment and a deserved winner of the Inform
    category.  I found it very challenging, but it wasn't outright
    impossible (unlike one or two of the other games in the competition), so
    I think the difficulty was well-judged.  Three aspects of "A Change in
    the Weather" were excellent: the quality of the writing, the changing
    descriptions of the scenery, and the way the components of the puzzle
    interacted.  I was reminded of my decision in "Christminster" to keep
    the player indoors from seven p.m. until ten so that I didn't have to
    write descriptions of the sun going down!  Andrew Plotkin tackled this
    problem head on and the result was very impressive.

    What I didn't like was the very short time limit and the way it was
    incredibly easy to get stuck.  To finish "A Change in the Weather"
    required an enormous amount of patience: going back to a saved game,
    trying something new, observing the consequences, going back again and
    trying something else, and on and on.  The puzzles themselves were quite
    elegant, but I didn't appreciate them very much because I was a bit
    fatigued by the process of solving them.  I also felt the game lacked
    for NPCs (the fox was better than nothing), and the dream was just
    willfully obscure.

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

    >From "Gareth Rees"

      NAME: Detective                         PARSER: Inform usual
      AUTHOR: Christopher Forman              PLOT: None
      EMAIL: ceforma SP@G rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu     ATMOSPHERE: Unusual
      AVAILABILITY: Freeware, GMD             WRITING: New material is good
      PUZZLES: None                           SUPPORTS: Inform ports
      CHARACTERS: Unoriginal, but good        DIFFICULTY: Trivial

    I'm only aware of "Mystery Science Theatre 3000" through the genre of
    MST3k parodies on Usenet, so I have no idea how faithfully Christopher
    Forman reproduced the flavour of the television program.  I thought that
    this game was interesting as an experiment, and I did find bits of it
    funny, but a lot of it was completely meaningless to me, especially the
    introduction and the endgame, and I probably wouldn't play another
    similar game.

    I'm not sure at all that text adventure games are suitable for this kind
    of parody by ridicule, and especially free or shareware games produced
    by amateurs.  Bad films are interesting targets for ridicule because
    they are the result of the labours of intelligent adults who should have
    known better, and because millions of dollars were wasted on their
    production.  On the other hand, "Detective" was probably the result of a
    couple of hours' work by a twelve-year-old kid, whose main mistake was
    to upload it to a bulletin board for the world to laugh at (although the
    adventure games I wrote when I was twelve were better than "Detective",
    I have more sense than to let anyone see them now!).  Activision's
    expensive multimedia game "Return to Zork", with live actors pretending
    to be characters from an adventure game, would be a much more appropriate
    (though also much more challenging) target.

    I think that parody of adventure games is very tricky to do well,
    because most adventure games sit rather uneasily on the dividing line
    between seriousness and humour, and generally incorporate elements of
    self-parody already (think of the ongoing Flathead jokes in the "Zork"
    series, or the ridiculous names of the spells in "Enchanter" et al),
    whereas parody succeeds best when its target is relentlessly humourless
    (think of "A Modest Proposal" by Swift or "The Pooh Perplex" by
    F.C.Crews).  There are some supposed parodies of Infocom games at the
    IF-archive ("Pork" and "Disenchanted"), but they end up being pastiche
    rather than parody or satire, and rather weak pastiches at that.

    >From "Graeme Cree" <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>

      NAME:  DETECTIVE:  An Interactive MiSTing
                                             GAMEPLAY:  Inform Parser
      AUTHOR:  C. E. Forman                  PLOT:  Trivial
      EMAIL:  ceforma SP@G rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu   ATMOSPHERE:  Demented
      AVAILABILITY:  GMD incoming            WRITING:  Pathetic
      PUZZLES:  None                         SUPPORTS:  All Inform Ports
      CHARACTERS:  Cardboard                 DIFFICULTY:  None at all

         Normally, looking at the above category descriptions (such as
    "Trivial", "Demented", and "Pathetic") one would expect a pretty bad
    game.  Yet, such is not the case here.  In the zany world of Mystery
    Science Theater 3000, (MST3K for short) where schlock is fun, and all
    involved want "More cheese, please", such descriptions denote an
    excellent game.  Detective, the game least likely to be ported now
    exists (with enhancements) for Inform.
         A little background is in order to understand this game.  SPAG #4
    featured a review of an AGT game called Detective, which stated that
    the author had made every possible mistake, and that the game should be
    avoided.  In SPAG #5 I wrote a second review in which I stated that the
    game, though awful, was in fact loaded with unintentional laughs and
    bizarre incongruities that were sure to entertain the player, and that
    the game would make an excellent episode of Mystery Science Theater
    3000.
         For those who don't know, MST3K is a cable television show (soon to
    be a major motion picture) on Comedy Central, that involves a man shot
    into space by two mad scientists and forced to watch bad movies so that
    his reactions can be monitored.  Throughout the movie we can see the
    silhouettes of Mike and his robot companions (whose outer casings are
    made out of things like a gumball machine, a bowling pin, and a
    lacrosse helmet) at the lower right-hand corner of the screen, and hear
    them deliver a barrage of sarcastic remarks, pop-culture references,
    and suggestive dialogue.  For example in "Godzilla vs. Megalon", a
    close-up of Godzilla waving his arms and bellowing drew the response "I
    am Kirok!!", a reference to a classic bit of Shatner overacting in Star
    Trek's "The Paradise Syndrome" episode.  In "Marooned", when three
    astronauts, stranded in space are arguing over who will leave the ship
    (there was only enough oxygen to sustain two until the rescue ship
    arrived) one of the robots observed "they could toss a coin, but it
    would never come down."
         The show is in its 7th season, and each episode is two hours long.
     Their bread-and-butter is schlocky sci-fi movies, but they have hit
    almost every genre, including the occasional biker movie.  Before and
    after the show, as well as during intermissions, they do short amusing
    skits, often based on scenes from the movie.
         Chris Forman has taken this format and adapted it into a text
    game, almost seamlessly.  The original Detective game has been transferred
    verbatim to Inform, even retaining the AGT default responses, and snappy
    responses from Mike and the robots have been inserted everywhere; into room
    descriptions, item descriptions, response descriptions, et cetera.
    Repetition is avoided, enhancing believability.  The first time you enter a
    room you get one set of responses.  The second time you will get either a
    different set, or none at all.  The jokes are generally top quality, turning
    an already (unintentionally) amusing game into a laugh riot.  The level of
    imitation is flawless; if you have seen the show, you can almost hear
    the dialogue coming out of the actors' mouths.
        A typical MST3K episode features a short skit and an invention exchange
    with the mad scientists before the movie actually begins.  Mr. Forman has
    represented this by including a special introductory text file that
    highlights the robots attempting to write their own text games, and Dr.
    Forrester's "fictionary", a device that inputs the vocabulary of a text game
    directly into the player's mind, with hilarious results.
         The only thing that could put anyone off about this game might be
    found in Stefan Jokisch's original SPAG #4 review:  "we should not
    forget that Matt [the original author of Detective] wrote this game
    with good intentions and he offered it for free, so who are we to mock
    at his efforts?"  Matt Barringer's game is "mocked" here, but previous
    MST3K episodes have had movies featuring the likes of Gregory Peck,
    Gene Hackman, Linda Evans, Peter Graves, James Earl Jones, and Bela
    Lugosi, putting Mr. Barringer in very august company indeed.
         This may not be my all-time favourite text adventure, but it is
    one of the few that I would recommend to absolutely everyone.

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

    From: "Christopher E. Forman"

    NAME: Jigsaw                                  PARSER: Expanded Inform
    AUTHOR: Graham Nelson                         PLOT: Complex and entertaining
    EMAIL: nelson SP@G vax.ox.uk                       ATMOSPHERE: Excellent
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, GMD                   WRITING: Stylish & imaginative
              (.Z5 and .Z8 versions)              SUPPORTS: Infocom ports
    PUZZLES: Varying, clever & logical            DIFFICULTY: Hard
    CHARACTERS: Accurate but primarily
            underdeveloped

         The turn-of-the-millennium party at Century Park is something of a
    letdown, with little to do but run out the clock and, ultimately, let
    yourself succumb to the festive spirit that's already claimed all the other
    partygoers.  Unless, of course, you found something else to take your
    attention away from it all.  Something like a time machine, perhaps?
         "Jigsaw," the latest wonder from Graham Nelson ("Inform" and "Curses",
    for those of you who've been in comas for the last three years) promises to
    be every bit as fascinating a diversion as his previous works.  As players
    jump back and forth through twentieth-century history, they discover pieces
    to complete the aforementioned time machine, which is in actuality a large
    jigsaw board.  In that respect, "Jigsaw" really _is_ a large puzzle to be
    solved by the player.
         Each of the sixteen timeplaces houses a critical event that needs to be
    resolved so that history as we know it can proceed.  Solving an area means
    you must determine where you are, figure out the critical event that's about
    to take place, take action to ensure that it happens as history tells you it
    did, and escape back through time to the jigsaw board.
         Complicating matters is a mysterious stranger in black, whom you
    recognize from the party, alternately hindering and (sometimes seemingly
    inexplicably) helping you.  As the game progresses, a relationship develops
    between yourself and "Black," whose intentional lack of a specified gender
    sparked a brush-fire of discussion across r.g.i-f in the weeks following the
    release of "Jigsaw."
         Comparisons to Nelson's previous work is inevitable.  "Jigsaw" stacks
    up very well to "Curses," although IMHO, it's not quite as extravagant as
    the popular attic search.  Perhaps this is because "Curses" was released
    during a severe I-F drought, and its superior parser and excellent gameplay
    immediately astounded players.  There was nothing out there even remotely
    close to it at the time.  Now that the shortage is comfortably over, "Jigsaw"
    suffers a little.
         Don't get me wrong, though.  It's still one of the very best games out
    there, and it does manage to overcome the (few) problems "Curses" had.  For
    instance, the jigsaw board gives the game's layout a more structured feel,
    whereas the whole of "Curses" always seemed slightly fractured and
    incoherent, with several seemingly unrelated puzzles simply thrown together
    (again, only my opinion).  And whereas "Curses" took awhile for me to really
    get into, "Jigsaw" drew me in right away with the powerful first meeting
    between White (as the player is referred to) and Black, in Sarajevo.
         Virtually all of the timeplaces are self-contained and require no
    outside information to solve, but this doesn't make the game any less
    challenging.  Some of the puzzles here are very, very hard -- the ghost
    plane, the moon, and the Enigma machine were particularly taxing.  Everything
    has a satisfying, logical solution to it, and the clues aren't buried quite
    as deeply as in "Curses," although you still need to examine everything.
         Another game to compare "Jigsaw" to would be Legend Entertainment's
    cult classic "TimeQuest," as both share a similar premise -- that of jumping
    back and forth between historical events to preserve the timestream's
    integrity.  Personally, I found the historical figures in "Jigsaw" to be
    handled more realistically than those in "TimeQuest."  While the "Jigsaw"
    player gets to see many of them up close, direct interaction is usually
    minimized.  "TimeQuest" required the player to speak and act around its
    historical personages to influence their actions, often in unrealistic,
    sometimes almost laughable, ways.  The atmosphere in "Jigsaw" is better,
    giving its areas a dark, gritty edge that's necessary to make it convincingly
    realistic (in particular, the Berlin chapter is one of my favorites).  Sadly,
    while the NPC's are very accurate (Graham Nelson did his research), aside
    from Black, they are not as interactive as I'd hoped.  It would have been
    nice to be able to ask them about a larger number of things, for instance.
    "TimeQuest" offers a much wider variety of (amusing) queries.
         I found "TimeQuest" quite overwhelming at the start, though, with nearly
    eighty timeplaces open for exploration at the very beginning (although the
    game does make some effort to point you in the right direction).  "Jigsaw,"
    by contrast, keeps just enough timeplaces open at once to give the player a
    variety of alternatives to choose from.  This furthers the structured,
    episodic feel of the game: At the start, you have a small number of places to
    visit; in the middle-game, nearly half the board is unexplored; and as the
    endgame draws near, the number of unsolved pieces is again reduced.
         Speaking of the endgame, I must confess that I felt it tended to drag on
    considerably, with nothing for the player to do but solve an extremely linear
    sequence of puzzles chasing after a single object.  Saying more would
    necessitate spoilers, so I'll close by saying that the endgame in the Land is
    by far the weakest portion of "Jigsaw."  Once the player gets through it,
    though, a satisfying conclusion awaits.
         "Jigsaw" also sports a nifty performance of the Z-Machine assembler, in
    the appearance of the board and puzzle pieces.  Graham Nelson again works
    wonders with his Inform compiler (but I noticed that "Jigsaw" uses version
    6.0, currently unavailable to the rest of the I-F community).
         If you haven't played "Jigsaw" yet, then by all means, do so.  You won't
    regret it.

                                  -- C.E. Forman

    From: "Adam J. Thornton"

    	[Beware, Adam's review borders on a few spoilers near the end, though
    I edited out what I could. -GKW]

    _Jigsaw_ is the second full-size game from Graham Nelson, author of
    _Curses_ and the Inform compiler.  As one would expect, then, it has
    been written in Inform, and is thus an Infocom-format story file.  There
    are actually two separate versions of each release: one the familiar .z5
    Version 5 story file, such as used in _Trinity_, in which the game and
    footnotes are separated into separate files, and one in the new Version
    8 format.  Infocom never wrote a .z8 story file; the format itself is
    new, and was developed by the author as a way to lift the restrictions
    of v5 analogously to the way v5 removed certain v3 limitations.

    This, then, is the first Inform game that could not, in principle, have
    been an Infocom product.  That is to say, the sheer quantity of this
    game places it outside the scope of even late-period textual Infocom.
    The game is certainly one of the biggest currently existing.  For sheer
    amount of text, only _The Legend Lives_ and possibly _Avalon_ (of the
    games in my experience) come close; both of those are TADS games, and
    therefore have a different set of limitations and restrictions with
    which to cope.

    However, quantity does not, of course, imply quality.  We need only to
    look at the sixteen (?) floppy diskettes of _Leather Goddesses of Phobos
    II_.  _Jigsaw_ is big.  Is it good?

    I'll cut the suspense short: yes, it's good.  It's very, very good.  It
    is clearly intended by Nelson as his _Trinity_.  I consider this an
    awfully ambitious goal, as _Trinity_ is, in my opinion, Infocom's finest
    hour.  No one else currently working in IF could, I think, write
    anything approaching another _Trinity_.  This is not to disparage any of
    the fine works that have recently appeared or soon will be appearing.
    _Avalon_ is a fine game; it also involves a lot of time travel,
    modularized puzzles, and a plot of cosmic significance.  But it doesn't
    try to be _Trinity_; _Legend_ has lots of travel--this time spatial
    rather than temporal--between worlds and a plot of cosmic significance,
    although its puzzles tend to be much less self-contained; however, it
    too does not attempt to be _Trinity_.

    The structural similarities between _Jigsaw_ and _Trinity_ are striking.
    Both have a motif of a central place from which portals lead to other
    worlds; in _Jigsaw_ these worlds are found within the puzzle of the
    title; _Trinity's_ mushrooms provide its portals.  In each, there is a
    specific problem in each world which must be fixed for the game to
    proceed.  In each game, the fate of the world hangs in the balance, and
    devolves onto the player, initially just another IF protagonist--in
    _Jigsaw_, a millenarian partygoer, and in _Trinity_ a boorish American
    tourist. There are more subtle parallels as well: each game abounds in
    animals, and both are liberally sprinkled with quotations from external
    sources.

    Remember _Trinity's_ quotations?  I do.  "Tomorrow never yet/ On any
    human being rose or set."  "Time isn't holding us/ Time isn't after us/
    Same as it ever was/ Same as it ever was."  "Tempus edax rerum."  It was
    the first time I realized that IF was heir to the same wealth of
    allusion that traditional fiction is; if you like, the first time it hit
    me that IF could be Art rather than mere recreation.  Nelson has managed
    to find the same sensitivity in choosing appropriate quotations; like
    _Curses_, _Jigsaw_ bears the stamp of someone gifted not only with his
    own words, but with knowing when to use those of others.

    _Trinity's_ historical research was good, particularly in the
    painstakingly correct layout of Trinity Site.  _Jigsaw_ has raised the
    stakes again.  It is clear that a great deal of reading has gone into
    the recreation of its historical set-pieces: Kitty Hawk, the S.S.
    Titanic, Proust's apartment, and others.  This, of course, suggests the
    other comparison between _Trinity_ and _Jigsaw_.  Where do they differ?
    _Trinity_ has eight worlds; _Jigsaw_ sixteen.  _Trinity_ has the
    lemmings, the bees, the magpie, the German shepherd, the lizard, the
    rattlesnake, and, of course, the roadrunner.  There are sixteen
    sketchable animals in _Jigsaw_, and a host of others that make cameos.

    "Sketchable?" I hear you cry.  Patience.  All will be revealed.  Up to
    now I have told you how _Jigsaw_ is and isn't _Trinity_, but very little
    as to what it is.  One way of characterizing it might be: _Trinity_, but
    with a love story and a sketchbook.

    You play White, the generic IF protagonist; you start at a quarter to
    midnight in Century Park, somewhere in London, on the evening of
    December 31, 1999.  You have a party invitation; it instructs you to
    wear white--hence your character's appellation--and have seen a brief
    glimpse of an attractive stranger, dressed all in black.  Shortly after, you
    come upon a giant jigsaw piece, and a very bizarre statue of a very
    bizarre man, one Grad Kaldecki, whose fault all this will turn out to
    have been.  Then a monument to him.  There's also a strange device, a
    rucksack that looks--and acts--surprisingly like the one in _Curses_,
    and a sketch book belonging to a girl named Emily, intended to hold
    drawings of animals.  WIth luck, you can figure out what to do before
    the celebrations start and you are sucked into the merriment.

    What you find is a giant jigsaw puzzle; and you're already carrying a
    piece.  Add to this a lovely Victorian clock, and you have the makings of an
    adventure, as, when a piece is correctly placed, it opens up a portal to
    another area of the game.

    There are sixteen pieces.  Each one is a self-contained puzzle; in no
    place do you need an object from any other, although a certain gadget
    found in one scene can be used in another, but is then lost--and
    therefore must be put to its intended use before being taken to that
    world, and one animal can only, I think, be sketched with the use of an
    object from another piece of the puzzle.

    Through the course of the puzzles, there seem to be three ongoing goals:
    you need to collect the remaining pieces of the jigsaw, you ought to
    sketch the animals you find, and you get to know Black, the Mysterious
    Stranger, somewhat better.  The motivation is admittedly weak here:
    putting together the puzzle and sketching the animals are both things
    done only because the materials to do so are at hand.  While the
    rationale behind the puzzle pieces appears early on, until the epilogue
    is reached, there is no indication of the point of the sketchbook.

    Graham Nelson has done an amazing job with the White-Black romance.
    Black is never assigned a gender: she or he can be whatever you want him
    or her to be, as long as it's attractive.  Black has stayed a caucasian
    female for me, though White's gender has fluctuated.
    Rec.games.int-fiction has had a long discussion on the technique used.
    It is, I think devastatingly effective.  I have a theory that Black's
    gender may, in fact, be determined, but to give my speculation would
    give away a great deal of the game.

    Black, it turns out, is trying to modify the course of the Twentieth
    Century to make it better, or at least, what Black feels to be better.
    After realizing that allowing Black to make his or her changes is fatal
    to the progress of the game, it becomes clear that your job, as White,
    is to keep history the way it was, or, at least within the context of
    the game, should have been.  This means thwarting Black at (almost)
    every turn; the tension between preserving your future and courting
    Black is ridiculously persuasive, despite that fact that Black is no
    more interactive than your standard IF NPC and that the depth of your
    crush on Black, within the game, makes little sense.  This is another of
    my criticisms of the game: for someone on whom you're so hung up, you
    can do curiously little to elicit responses from Black.  And one feels
    that, given Black's behavior throughout the game, you may well be
    heartily sick of the poltroon by the end.

    The endgame takes place in The Land; it includes knowing winks to
    _Colossal Cave_ and _Zork_, and is basically one long Rube
    Goldberg/Heath Robinson puzzle: what you have to do is obvious, but, as
    you try to do it, like the Babel Fish in _Hitchhiker's Guide To The
    Galaxy_, obstacles keep interposing.  It's charming, and reasonably
    climactic.  And just when you think it's all over, there's an epilogue,
    which (finally) reveals the purpose of the sketchbook, brings closure to
    the tension with Black, and, like _Trinity_, drops you back into the
    circle of time.

    The game fares well as narrative; but how is it as a game?  In short,
    just fine.  There a a few flaws: one has to "look under" too many
    things. The Barge scene needs a bit more of a clue; as it stands, it's a
    "guess the author's intention" puzzle.  For someone so central to the
    game, one would hope that Black were more interactive, but he/she
    doesn't seem to ever want to talk to you.  There is one puzzle of
    exhaustion: the Enigma machine.  One feels that Nelson was so pleased
    with what a spectacular bit of programming modeling an Enigma Machine
    in Inform was that he forgot to ask whether it would be a good puzzle.
    If one more stecker were given, reducing the problem to brute-forcing
    one steckering and one wheel setting, it would be a less annoying
    puzzle.  There is one maze, thankfully brief and not a standard
    drop-and-map maze.  There is one egregious "guess-the-verb" puzzle.

    There are also a few wonderful puzzles.  The Ghost Bomber is one such;
    although I've seen complaints from the rgif readers about it, I found it
    logical, well-motivated, and well-executed.  Berlin is small, but
    tightly constructed and entertaining.  In fact, most of the worlds have
    tight and satisfying puzzles.

    At the end of the day, _Jigsaw_ is a masterful game.  It lacks the
    endearing silliness of _Curses_; it is a much more serious game.  It
    could not have come from Infocom, and I suspect could never have been
    produced as a commercial venture: too much effort went into the research
    to have been commercially viable.  It is arguably the finest piece of IF
    yet written.  That includes _Trinity_.  I have not yet decided whether I
    prefer _Jigsaw_ or _Trinity_; for once, trying to compare _Trinity_ to
    anything else is not comparing apples and oranges.  However, _Jigsaw_
    ranks, on my personal scale of games, comfortably within the top two,
    followed at some distance by _Spellbreaker_.

    I close with an observation and three questions: first, I would like to
    see a full bibliography rather than just the scattered notes at the end
    of each section's footnote.  Since the v8 format is huge, and since the
    v5 footnote file is small, could we not also have a list of "Have you
    tried..." as we had in Curses?  Second, shouldn't the bowl in Paris
    contain lime, rather than jasmine, tea?  Finally, who is Emily?

    	[By the way, before everyone starts asking if Avalon is done again,
    noticing Adam's comments in his reviews, I'd better head you off and say that
    no, it isn't, and Adam is one of my betatesters, hence he's actually seen the
    thing.]

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

    From: "Christopher E. Forman"

     NAME:  A Journey Into Xanth                  PARSER:  AGT Standard
     AUTHOR:  Neil Sorenson                       PLOT:  Quite linear
     EMAIL:  None Given                           ATMOSPHERE:  Well-adapted
     AVAILABILITY:  GMD                           WRITING:  Prosaic, with good
       (:/incoming/if-archive/agt/xanth.zip)        spelling but poor grammar
     PUZZLES:  Easy, typical, but plot-related    SUPPORTS:  AGT Ports
     CHARACTERS:  Nicely developed                DIFFICULTY:  Easy - Medium

            No, this is not the graphical "Companions of Xanth" game released by
    Legend Entertainment a couple years ago.  Rather, it's a text adventure, set
    in the magical land of Xanth, that I stumbled across on GMD (in rather an
    odd place, as the header shows).
            Xanth (the world, not this game) is the creation of author Piers
    Anthony, and is explored in a couple dozen books comprising the popular
    series.  Unlike our world, known in Xanth as "Mundania", everything about
    Xanth is magical, and puns are taken quite literally -- a "card table" is
    literally a table made out of a giant playing card!  Each inhabitant of
    Xanth has a single magical talent, and no two talents are identical.
            "A Journey Into Xanth", a charming I-F adaption of Anthony's world,
    succeeds admirably in capturing the same whimsical appeal of the books.
    Author Neil Sorenson is obviously a dedicated fan -- his game is chock-full
    of places, plants, and personages from Xanthian lore, as well as truckloads
    of the really bad puns that Xanth is famous for.  (You _will_ cringe.  I
    guarantee it.)
            Sorenson's "Xanth" puts the player in the role of Mim, a young
    Xanthian with the ability to summon a magical mirror, which he can use to
    communicate with anyone else in Xanth.  A lengthy but well-written
    introduction sets up the plot.  When the Sen-Trees (told you you'd cringe!)
    that guard Castle Roogna mysteriously wither and die, leaving the palace
    defenseless, King Trent sends for your friend Lief, the only one with the
    power to restore them.  Because you have knowledge of swordsmanship, as well
    as the ability to communicate with the king via your magic mirror, you are
    chosen to go along as Lief's companion and guide.
            The game handles better than most AGT packages I've had experience
    with.  There are usually plenty of good synonyms, and some amusing responses
    (although there's no escaping some of those goofy-sounding AGT defaults).
            What impressed me most about "Xanth" and convinced me to write a
    review of it were the NPCs, particularly Lief.  Rather than attempting to
    successfully implement a convincing "ASK  ABOUT " or
    ", " routine, Sorenson restricts all NPC interactions to
    the simpler "SHOW", "GIVE", and "TALK TO" commands, and leaves plot
    advancement to the more lengthy strings of dialogue produced by the actions.
    Although it may appear somewhat unrefined by TADS or Inform standards, this
    method _works_ here, and it's well-programmed.  Dialogues appear when they're
    supposed to, and produce different responses based on game circumstances.
    This creates the illusion of some of the most realistic NPCs seen in an AGT
    game, although they are fleshed out through primarily non-interactive methods.
            Unfortunately, while the dialogue routines are quite nicely done, the
    rest of the game's writing is marred by a great deal of rather poor grammar.
    I found no spelling errors (a plus), but few of the room descriptions are
    particularly memorable, and run-on sentences abound.  Also, there are no
    double-spaces or indentations between the lines of dialogue, which makes it
    hard to read in places.  Occasionally an event description will be printed
    out of order in some locations (a common problem with AGT games) which
    furthers the somewhat ramshackle appearance.
            While most of "Xanth" is fairly logical (though sometimes in a
    strange, punnish kind of way), a few problems -- crossing the river in
    particular -- determine success or failure (i.e. life or death) based
    entirely on the outcome of a random number generator, a very, VERY big no-no
    in my book.  Also, while many of the puzzles make perfect sense after you've
    solved them, there is often little indication beforehand that a particular
    solution is the correct one.  Perhaps this is due to the somewhat
    inconsistent nature of the AGT play system more than anything else.
            It's hard to knock "Xanth" completely though, because it tries so
    hard.  The author has gone to great lengths to make the game as easy to play
    as possible, even including a set of brilliantly rendered ASCII maps (a great
    time-saver) with the game files.  There's also a walkthrough in case you find
    some of the puzzles a bit too obscure.  Speaking of the puzzles in "Xanth",
    although they aren't terribly difficult or imaginative, they do serve to
    actually advance the plot, a feature sadly lacking in so many text games.
    The plot itself is a pretty standard fantasy journey, and quite linear.
    Unless you do most things in a particular order, you'll either become halted
    or stuck.  But because of the author's ability to make a good story with a
    somewhat limited development tool, I decided to score him fairly high on the
    wildcard points, even if the game is otherwise unspectacular.
            As an adaption of sorts, the appeal of "A Journey Into Xanth" is
    limited primarily by the size of its target audience.  It's obviously aimed
    at fans of the books.  Players familiar with Piers Anthony's world should get
    a kick out of it if they can bear the AGT parser.  If you're not at all
    familiar with Xanth, or if you've tried the Xanth series but didn't care for
    it, you'd be advised to look elsewhere, perhaps into a more mundane game.

                                                     -- C.E. Forman

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

    >From "Gareth Rees"

      NAME: The Mind Electric                 PARSER: Inform's usual
      AUTHOR: Jason Dyer                      PLOT: None
      EMAIL: jdyer SP@G indirect.com               ATMOSPHERE: Good
      AVAILABILITY: Freeware, GMD             WRITING: Good
      PUZZLES: Impossible, bizarre            SUPPORTS: Inform ports
      CHARACTERS: None                        DIFFICULTY: Impossible w/o hints

    I enjoy playing a game in which I am plunged into a new universe with
    unfamiliar but logical laws which I can discover by experimentation and
    careful thinking.  "The Mind Electric" seemed to promise that, but it
    didn't deliver.  The world it presented made no sense as a real world,
    and still made no sense when interpreted as some kind of "Neuromancer"-
    style virtual reality (i.e., the objects and landscapes are visual
    representations of programs and data in the memory of a network of
    computers).  I didn't feel as though I was in a world with logical laws
    that I could deduce; I felt instead that I was in a world where an
    ad-hoc rationalisation could be produced for any event, however
    meaningless.  I think the majority of those who commented on "The Mind
    Electric" on rec.arts.int-fiction (and it was the game which seemed to
    receive the most debate) would agree with me.

    For example, at some point in the game I need to pick out one of ten
    thousand boxes, or else I will die.  There is an intelligent cube which
    cannot talk, but wants to tell me the number of the correct box.  There
    are several easy and straightforward ways it might do this.  One way
    would be binary chop: the cube blinks if the number I guess is too high,
    and nods if I guess too low.  Another way would be for the cube to
    communicate the number directly: "The cube blinks four times, then
    pauses, then blinks three times, then pauses...".  But instead it
    insists on playing "Mastermind" with me, which might have been
    appropriate in "The Magic Toyshop", but not in a life and death
    situation!

    One possibility for improvement would have been to give a set of rules
    at the start.  Infocom's games "A Mind Forever Voyaging" and "Suspended"
    are similar in some ways to "The Mind Electric", and those games come
    with manuals explaining the nature of the world into which the player is
    plunged, and details on the kind of commands that might be expected to
    work in that world.  The shareware game "Enhanced" doesn't come with a
    manual, but it does have a gentle introductory section in which the
    player is prodded into experimenting with the game's capabilities.
    Either of these approaches, followed by a consistent way of interacting
    with the virtual world, would have helped "The Mind Electric" become
    playable.

    Even ignoring the debate about the nature of the world and the
    difficulty of the puzzles, it was just a dull game!  The backstory (who
    are the Kaden and the Souden? what was I spying on and why? how did I
    got into this mess in the first place? who is the mysterious character
    who is trying to get me out?) sounded much more interesting than what
    actually happened in the game.  Jason Dyer's responses in
    rec.arts.int-fiction suggest that he had a much more clearly worked-out
    rationalisation for the events in "The Mind Electric" than actually
    appears in the game:

        As for the paper puzzle, well, the paper was a gift from the tall
        man.  He had access to the passwords, but, was unable to send
        messages that were too long without being detected [...] logically
        speaking, knowledge of how a duplicator operates is one thing not
        erased in loyalty transfers since both Kaden and Souden use it.

    Perhaps there should have been more of this background (and maybe a
    character or two?).

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

    >From "Gareth Rees"

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

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

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

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

    >From "Gareth Rees"

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Carl Muckenhoupt  wrote the following in the
    newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction:

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From: "Brian Reilly"

    NAME:  Save Princeton               PARSER:  TADS
    AUTHOR:  Jacob Weinstein	    PLOT:  Rescue Princeton from
    				           terrorists.
    EMAIL:  jacobw SP@G cap.gwu.edu	    ATMOSPHERE:  Good
    AVAILABILITY:  GMD, shareware,$10   WRITING:  Good
    PUZZLES:  FAIR			    SUPPORTS:  TADS Ports
    CHARACTERS:  FAIR		    DIFFICULTY:  Moderate

    Egads!  Gun-toting radicals have infiltrated the Ivy League.  Nope, it's
    not Columbia of '69, but Princeton of today.  As a mild-mannered
    perspective Princetonian, you duck away from your tour of Princeton
    out of boredom and begin to explore the the campus on your own,
    only to be startled by the sounds of gunfire erupting in the usually
    tranquil Princeton, NJ.  When you come out of hiding, you can tell that
    something has gone drastically wrong.

    Your explorations around Princeton soon lead you to discover that the
    Administration Building has been seized, and the President of Princeton
    is being held hostage.  Now, it's up to you to oust the terrorists, and
    rescue President Shapiro.  The puzzles in this game are done fairly well,
    but some tend to be rather illogical or bizarre.  The game is full of a
    good amount of humor, although a lot of it is dependent on Princeton
    history or a familiarity with the campus.  The characters add to the
    humor of the game, although many of the characters could have been more
    developed.  I do have to add though, that I was ecstatic when I realized
    that the maze was a non-maze, and did not have to spend hours mapping.
    All in all, Save Princeton is a fun, enjoyable game.

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

    From: "Christopher E. Forman"

    NAME: Shades of Gray                       GAMEPLAY: Surprisingly responsive
    AUTHORS: Mark Baker, Steve Bauman, Belisana Magnificent, Mike Laskey,
             Judith Pintar, "Hercules", Cindy Yans
    PLOT: Complex and absolutely fascinating
    EMAIL: ?                                   ATMOSPHERE: Generally well-done
    AVAILABILITY: GMD, CompuServe (Freeware)   WRITING: Generally well-done
    PUZZLES: Above average                     SUPPORTS: PCs
    CHARACTERS: Varying degrees of realism     DIFFICULTY: Average - Difficult

            The AGT programming language was designed to be easy to use, to give
    non-programmers the power to create their own games.  Yet in games I've seen,
    its parser has been almost consistently flawed, leading me to believe that
    users didn't find this aspect of the programming as user-friendly as AGT's
    developers had intended.
            But "Shades of Gray" is different.  The annoying quirks that plague
    every other AGT game simply are not present.  The parser generally accepts
    multiple methods of phrasing, a move in a wrong direction does NOT repeat
    the entire room description, and trying to examine something that isn't
    there gives a better message than the annoying "You see nothing special",
    which always seems to imply that something is there when it really isn't.
    Add to this the fact that the writing approaches the very best in _any_
    text adventure, and you've got something well worth downloading.
            What fascinates me about "Shades of Gray" is the fact that it wasn't
    written by a single author, or even a creative pair.  This game is the
    combined efforts of _seven_ authors, from both the U.S. and the U.K.  Not
    only that, but the authors' only means of communication has been through a
    private CompuServe Gamers' Forum!  Having collaborated with a co-author
    myself, I can appreciate the difficulty in trying to merge the products of
    two creative minds into a single streamlined work of art, but SEVEN...!  One
    would think that conflicting ideas and plot details would crop up incessantly,
    reducing the end product to a cluttered, incomprehensible mess.  But,
    astoundingly, it doesn't.
            In fact, "Shades of Grey" has the most fascinating plot I've ever
    seen in a work of I-F.  You begin with no clue about who you are or what
    you're supposed to be doing, shifting back and forth between hallucinations
    and reality.  Eventually you gain the help of the clairvoyant Lady Magdalena,
    whose Tarot cards seek to provide insight into your existence.  (I often
    wonder if this game was Graham Nelson's inspiration for the Tarot puzzles in
    "Curses.")  As you learn more about yourself, and your past and future, you
    act out the roles of yourself as a young child, a soldier, and Robin of
    Locksley and the Sheriff of Nottingham, all culminating in a complex
    political thriller surrounding Haiti.  To say more would certainly spoil the
    entire game, but rest assured that everything fits together beautifully in
    the end, after you've faced every facet of yourself and put the events
    together.
            The use of seven authors leads to a rather segmented design, but
    linearity serves the story well.  The individual episodes vary in style and
    quality (both in the writing and the overall design), yet somehow this
    creates the effect of many pieces coming together.  And the whole of "Shades
    of Grey" is far, far more than the sum of the parts.
            Still, it's not perfect.  The parser still isn't up to TADS level,
    but it's the closest I've seen from AGT.  And there are some small mazes and
    a few puzzles that involve trying to guess the author's frame of thinking.
    But the rest of the game is so breathtaking that these flaws are easy to
    ignore.
            Give this one a play.  Even if you normally hate the AGT system,
    you'll enjoy it.

                                                -- C.E. Forman

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

    >From "Graeme Cree" <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>

      NAME:  Suspended                    GAMEPLAY:  Early Infocom
      AUTHOR:  Michael Berlyn             PLOT:  Save the World
      EMAIL:  ???                         ATMOSPHERE:  Changing viewpoints
      AVAILABILITY:  LTOI1, Sci-Fi Coll   WRITING:  Good
      PUZZLES:  Save/Restore              SUPPORTS:  All Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS:  All-Robot              DIFFICULTY:  Expert

         The implicit promise of a good adventure game is that the gaming
    experience is just like really being there, or as one of Infocom's
    early brochures put it, "It's like waking up inside a story."  In
    Suspended, the promise is broken; deliberately.  You aren't really
    there, and you don't wake up.
         In Suspended, you play the part of an alien being frozen in an
    underground cryogenic chamber that is part of an underground complex
    that controls the planetary weather control devices.  In the event of
    emergency, your mind (but not your body) is activated in order to
    coordinate repair efforts.  The main characters are your six repair
    robots; Auda, Sensa, Iris, Poet, Whiz, and Waldo (Where's Waldo?), who
    perform the game's vital tasks, and report to you what they see and do.
     Each one has different abilities (one can only see, one can only hear,
    et cetera), and must be directed by you to the point where they will do
    the most good.
         Suspended is a game that will appeal to some players and infuriate
    others.  It is the ultimate save/restore game.  It is flatly impossible
    to solve it on the first play through; you must acquire vital knowledge
    through failures before you can put it all together to be able to win
    the game.
         Also, simple knowledge is not enough.  The game works on a very
    strict time limit, and to win, you must not only know what to do, but
    be able to optimize the time it takes to do it.  Since the robots take
    time to travel through the complex, you must have the foresight to have
    them in the proper locations at the proper times, which means ordering
    them there earlier.  If you take too long, a team from the surface will
    enter the complex to take control from you.
         It might be best not to think of Suspended as a work of
    Interactive Fiction at all.  It is a pseudo-simulation game, written
    before software technology was developed enough to develop real
    simulation games.  It is a game for frustrated would-be air traffic
    controllers who enjoy coordinating multiple activities from a central
    location, much more than it is a work of fiction.  It is a game for
    people who like to play WITH games, not merely play them.
         To help you, the game supplies a game map (the only Infocom game
    apart from Seastalker to do so), and markers to track the movements of
    your robots.  The original edition gave a good, mounted map with rubber
    markers.  The thin-paper map included with Lost Treasures I is much
    more difficult to work with.  I haven't yet seen the components for
    Activision's new Science-Fiction Collection.
         The parser is one of Infocom's early ones, and is missing several
    convenient abbreviations that players will be used to.  Not merely "x"
    for examine, but also "z" for wait, and "g" for again are missing.  The
    very handy "Oops" feature is also missing.
         Suspended features three different levels of play, of increasing
    difficulty, designed to give the game more replay value.  It might not
    be the best computer game ever written, as Rolling Stone said in their
    review, but it is worth a look.

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

    >From "Gareth Rees"

      NAME: Toonesia                          PARSER: TADS's usual
      AUTHOR: Jacob Weinstein                 PLOT: Mostly linear
      EMAIL: jacobw SP@G infi.net                  ATMOSPHERE: Good
      AVAILABILITY: Freeware, GMD             WRITING: Good
      PUZZLES: Very nice                      SUPPORTS: TADS ports
      CHARACTERS: Fair (a bit static)         DIFFICULTY: Easy

    I enjoyed playing "Toonesia".  It captures a good deal of the flavour of
    the cartoons it pastiches, and makes excellent use of the logic of the
    cartoon world it takes place in: I found all of the puzzles were
    solvable on the first attempt, and the majority were very good.

    There were problems with the descriptions (the directions on the mesa
    were reversed), and a few minor bugs (e.g., you could type "enter hole"
    from the mesa and get there directly, rather than messing about with the
    blindfold), but the main reason why I ranked "The One that Got Away"
    higher was because "Toonesia" seemed to lack energy.

    Palmer Davis  wrote the following in the
    newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction:

        The writing could use a bit more polish, but still manages to
        capture the spirit of Saturday morning.  The NPCs don't, however --
        if you encounter Daffy Duck or the Tasmanian Devil in a "real"
        cartoon, he'll be in your face until Porky Pig shows up for the
        fadeout, rather than just standing around like they do here.

    I agree entirely; the characters in "Toonesia" are too static, and the
    game is directed too much by the player's own wanderings to be a
    completely successful pastiche.  In a typical cartoon, Bugs would appear
    right at the start and his running battle with Fudd would continue to
    the end, with Fudd setting traps for Bugs and Bugs always escaping and
    turning the tables.

    You can make an NPC more interesting by giving him or her a strong
    motivation and an ability to do things on his or her own initiative, not
    just in response to the player's actions.  They are more interesting if
    they react to each other's actions as well as to the player's.  And it
    helps a lot just to give them many different things that they can do.
    So in "Toonesia", the player should have had to make several attempts to
    deal with Bud, with interaction at each stage.  The other characters
    should have had their own motivations and schemes which would either
    provide additional hindrances, or present opportunities for subversion
    by the player, or be just there for background.

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

    >From "Gareth Rees"

      NAME: Tube Trouble                      PARSER: Inform's usual
      AUTHOR: Richard Tucker                  PLOT: Linear, short
      EMAIL: rit10 SP@G cl.cam.ac.uk               ATMOSPHERE: Claustrophobic
      AVAILABILITY: Freeware, GMD             WRITING: Good
      PUZZLES: Good, very complex             SUPPORTS: Inform ports
      CHARACTERS: Not interactive enough      DIFFICULTY: Hard

    I played this game on a BBC micro several years ago, and I was impressed
    by the neatness and complexity of the puzzle: I had a feeling of going
    round and round on a complex Heath-Robinson mechanism that I had to
    nudge a little bit each time it went round until finally I could step
    off where I wanted.  I did my to best to capture this feeling in the
    opening sequence of "Christminster".

    From: "Palmer Davis" <>

        Not as sketchy as _Toyshop_, and not as pedestrian as _Library_,
        this entry still falls prey to the major shortcomings of both games,
        to lesser degrees.  You are stuck inside the London Underground,
        and must find a way to extract food from a run-down old vending
        machine in a tube station.

    Unlike _Toyshop_, _Tube_'s rather laconic style succeeds in much
    the same fashion as _Enchanter_ at making the setting seem real.
    Much of the tube station is left to the player's imagination to
    fill in, but the setting is familiar enough, and the handful of
    words carefully enough chosen to evoke the appropriate image from
    the player.  Likewise, the vending machine looks and works just
    like you'd expect.  Of course, relying on a shared experiential
    context to fill in atmosphere is hazardous; players in rural areas
    who do not normally encounter urban mass transit stations may not
    have enough background to provide the needed imagery.

    Unfortunately, the limited vocabulary and amount of interaction with
    the NPCs (one of whom enters and then promptly vanishes before you
    can interact with her at all!) turns a good portion of the puzzle
    into a guessing game.  This entry may have been an attempt at the
    "sudden" IF concept described in Whizzard's Supplement #1, but the
    reduced set of possibilities that the author implemented jars the
    player out of the tenuous sense of immersion that the writing creates.
    Keeping words, locations, and objects to a minimum works if done
    correctly; restricting the player's actions without providing a
    reason why (beyond "I don't understand ____ as a verb") doesn't.

    No help at all was provided, and the author didn't include a
    walkthrough, so I still haven't seen a fairly sizeable portion of
    the game.  Combined with the rather circumscribed nature of reality
    and the generally unexciting goal, that fact has kept me from wanting
    to return to finish the game.  Authors of future entries that don't
    implement help systems might want to keep that in mind and at least
    provide a walkthrough.

    BOTTOM LINE: Tightly written, but misses the train.

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

    >From "Gareth Rees"

      NAME: Uncle Zebulon's Will              PARSER: TADS's usual
      AUTHOR: Magnus Olsson                   PLOT: Linear
      EMAIL: mol SP@G df.lth.se                    ATMOSPHERE: Good
      AVAILABILITY: Freeware, GMD             WRITING: Competent but dull
      PUZZLES: One great, rest pedestrian     SUPPORTS: TADS ports
      CHARACTERS: OK (there's only one)       DIFFICULTY: Easy

    My third favourite of the competition games, after "The One that Got
    Away" and "A Change in the Weather".  I was reminded very strongly of
    Infocom's game "Hollywood Hijinx": there's a mysterious will, a hunt
    through a deserted house, and plenty of descriptions which are enlivened
    by references to my childhood memories of the place.  I almost expected
    to find Uncle Zebulon still alive at the end, menaced by my evil cousin
    Hector.  Perhaps the fabled city of "Cyr-Dhool" which I reach at the end
    of the game is some kind of reference to Liz Cyr-Jones, co-author of
    "Hollywood Hijinx"?

    The background to the game suggested a world in which magic takes the
    place of science and technology.  (The genre is known as "elfpunk" and
    is exemplified by the novel "The Iron Dragon's Daughter" by Michael
    Swanwick.)  This was very interesting, although it was perhaps too
    subtly done, and didn't seem as relevant to the game as it could have
    been.  I wondered if the "train strikes" mentioned in the opening text
    (rather than, say, "magic carpet strikes") were evidence that the
    background wasn't part of the original design.  Certainly the Greek
    mythology sits rather uneasily with either the elfpunk world in which
    the game starts or the generic-fantasy land in which it ends.

    I enjoy games where I have to sift through lots of information to find
    material that's relevant to the puzzle I'm working on, and "Uncle
    Zebulon's Will" was good in this respect: two letters, a torn note, a
    scroll and a poem on a bronze plate.  There was a point where I wondered
    if I was going to have to replicate Zebulon's alchemy experiments
    (shades of "Christminster" here).  But it quickly became apparent that
    most of the information was redundant, and from there on I found it
    an easy game to finish.

    The main impression I had of the game was that it was a very solid piece
    of work.  There were no bugs, all the pieces of the plot fitted together
    smoothly, the hook at the start was intriguing, and the ending was good,
    though not as much of a surprise as it should perhaps have been.

    There were various aspects that disappointed.  Apart from the one-object
    restriction, which was excellent despite needing a completely gratuitous
    demon to enforce it, the puzzles seemed a bit pedestrian.  There are
    four objects hidden in obvious places and *two* puzzles involving
    collecting a set of related objects.  The writing was very flat and
    lifeless, managing to be lengthy without being either vivid or
    humourous.  Half a dozen descriptions have some variation on "This room
    has been ransacked by your greedy relatives".  Magnus Olsson commented
    in rec.arts.int-fiction:

        I tried not to be too literary; the more flowery the prose, the more
        time one has to spend polishing it.

    I'm afraid that it shows; perhaps a bit more floweriness would have
    helped.  And I was hoping for at least some people in the land of Vhyl
    to welcome me.  Perhaps the sequel will reveal where they've all gone.

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

    >From "Gareth Rees"

      NAME: Undertow                          PARSER: TADS's usual
      AUTHOR: Stephen Granade                 PLOT: Mystery
      EMAIL: sgranade SP@G phy.duke.edu            ATMOSPHERE: Good
      AVAILABILITY: $10 requestware, GMD      WRITING: So-so
      PUZZLES: Obscure                        SUPPORTS: TADS ports
      CHARACTERS: Don't convince              DIFFICULTY: Hard

    This is a very ambitious work unfortunately let down by its
    implementation.  Interactive fiction has to come to grips with
    characterisation and complex character interaction, but it has to do
    that while allowing suspension of disbelief and remaining interesting
    and playable.  This kind of material was something I considered doing
    for the competition, but rejected because I didn't have time, and
    because in any case I don't know how to do it!  So I think Stephen was
    very brave to tackle it.  It's just a shame that the result isn't very
    good.

    The characters in "Undertow" don't seem to have the knowledge that they
    should have, based on what they've seen me do.  For example, suppose I
    tell Carl that I have seen Thom's body in the water.  Later on, I still
    get the exchange

        "What is it?" you ask him [Carl] en route.
        "Thom. We've found him dead."

    which was clearly written for the case when I hadn't seen Thom's body at
    all.  The game let's me attack the other characters, but they don't seem
    to treat me any differently afterwards than they did before.  Then there
    are perfectly sensible actions that are prevented for arbitrary and
    stupid reasons.  The worst such problem I found was that I couldn't pick
    up Ashleigh's purse or get her gun!  Surely no-one in such a situation
    -- a murdered man just discovered -- would leave a gun lying around on
    the deck for anyone to pick up?  The game says that if I'm seen with a
    gun, then people will think I killed Thom.  Well then, let me pick up
    the gun, and implement the other characters' suspicions!

    "Undertow" seems not to have been play-tested much (if at all), when in
    fact the mystery genre demands extremely rigorous testing.  It's hard to
    be a detective when you get responses like

        > ask ashleigh about carl
        Carl is no longer here.

        > carl, tell me about ashleigh
        You can't reach that from the dinette bench.

    There are lots of little bugs, such as "The battery cover is closed,
    revealing a nine-volt battery", the consistent misspelling of "gauge" as
    "gague", and the way the "shape" in the water that looks like Thom's
    body is still present after Thom's body has been pulled out of the sea.
    There are also far too many objects: try typing "tell all about thom" in
    the Forecastle -- I counted 25 scenery objects in that one room alone!
    This clutter obscures rather than illuminates.

    There are basic problems with the way the story develops.  After an
    extremely hectic opening, suddenly nothing else seems to happen until
    the boat explodes (a situation which reminds me of "Plundered Hearts"),
    and the player is left with no idea of what to do.

    There does seem to have been a lot of work put into this, but the task
    facing authors of this kind of game would seem to be greater still.
    "Undertow" was too ambitious for the competition, but I'd be intrigued
    to see what Stephen Granade could produce if he went back to the code
    without any deadlines or time constraints and tried to finish writing
    the game.  (If you need another play-tester, e-mail me).

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

    From: "Christopher E. Forman"

    NAME: Zanfar                              PARSER: Good ol' AGT
    AUTHOR: YAK (Your Adventure Kreator)      PLOT: Explore-the-old-mansion
    EMAIL: ???                                ATMOSPHERE: Very, very ordinary
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, GMD               WRITING: Unremarkable
    PUZZLES: Generic                          SUPPORTS: AGT Ports
    CHARACTERS: Cardboard                     DIFFICULTY: Easy, if you can
                                                force yourself through it.

            There are a number of ways for authors to draw attention to their
    games: by promoting them through newsgroups, web sites, and e-zines; by
    creating a favorable (or unfavorable) impression on players, who spread it
    by word of mouth; et cetera.  A more imaginative trick is to give the game
    a name that places it dead last in an alphabetic directory listing on an
    FTP archive, so it grabs attention by being the very last thing a user sees
    when doing a "dir".  Well, it worked on me, anyway.  The title I refer to is
    "Zanfar", an appellation that seems to have absolutely no significance in the
    game itself, apart from the promotional scheme I've just outlined.
            In fact, there's very little about "Zanfar" that's significant.
    Though it boasts 140 rooms, there just isn't much there.  Very few of the
    rooms are more than padding, and it's painfully obvious what's important and
    what's not (the game doesn't allow you to examine ANY scenery).  The
    rudimentary plot simply tells you that you're someone who enjoys exploring
    old houses like the one in the game, despite the fact that the locals warned
    you there's something dangerous there.  Before long, though, you find out
    that the whole thing is just another collect-all-the-treasures operation,
    with no innovations to recommend it.
            The puzzles are so cheesy and cliched, they could have come out of a
    white box labelled "Acme Jenerik Advenchur Puzzuhlz."  Your exploits in
    "Zanfar" range from obtaining a light source for dark rooms, to unlocking
    things with keys (Did I say "The Awe-Chasm" had a lot of locks?  "Zanfar" has
    even more!), to solving a drop-an-item-in-each-room maze, to dealing with a
    group of cookie-cutter NPCs -- there's an enraged wizard, a "Junk Food
    Junkie", and a "Humongeous [sic] Bat", to name a few.  All this is strung
    together with wholly unremarkable writing.
            As a result, "Zanfar" is neither good enough to gain widespread
    popularity nor awful enough to be a must-play for bad game aficionados.  It's
    the kind of game that you forget all about a couple days after you solve it.
    If nothing else, "Zanfar" deserves recognition as the most _ordinary_ text
    adventure I've ever had the privilege(?) of having played.

                                                -- C.E. Forman

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

       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.)
            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               8.1    1.3  0.7    1     8      F_INF_TAD_ETC_GMD
    Adv. of Eliz. Highe     3.1    0.8  0.3    1     5      F_AGT
    All Quiet...Library	4.2    0.5  0.7    2            F_INF_GMD
    Another...No Beer	2.5    0.1  1.0    1     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 Zork		8.1    1.5  2.0    3	 5	C_INF
    Border Zone		6.7    1.4  1.4    4	 4	C_INF
    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   4.5    0.6  0.8    1            F_INF_GMD
    Christminster           8.1    1.8  1.6    1            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            6.7    0.7  1.1    1     x      C_I
    Detective		1.1    0.0  0.0    4     4-5    F_AGT_GMD
    Detective-MST3K		5.1    0.1  0.1    2     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       7.0    1.0  1.5    1     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
    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
    Guild of Thieves        6.8    1.1  1.2    1     x      C_I
    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
    Jacaranda Jim		7.0		   1	 x	S10_GMD (Uncertain)
    Jeweled Arena, The	8.0    1.5  1.5    1     x      ?
    Jigsaw			8.6    1.5  1.7    2     8	F_INF_GMD
    John's Fire Witch	7.1    1.1  1.5    3     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
    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
    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	5.3    0.4  1.0    2     2      S?/F_AGT_GMD
    Night at Museum Forever 4.3    0.0  1.0    2     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
    Perseus & Andromeda     3.4    0.3  1.0    1     x      ?
    Planetfall		7.4    1.7  1.6    5	 4	C_INF
    Plundered Hearts 	7.8    1.4  1.3    2	 4	C_INF
    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		7.9    1.2  1.4    3	 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
    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			6.1    0.7  1.0    2     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    0.6  0.2    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	7.7    0.7  1.0    1            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	8.0    1.3  1.7    3     1-2	S10_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Unventure 2	7.2    1.4  1.5    3     1	S10_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Zero  	9.0 	           1     1	C25_TAD_GMD (Demo)
    Waystation		8.0    1.2  1.5    1     x      F_TAD_GMD
    Wishbringer		7.6    1.3  1.3    4	 5-6	C_INF
    Witness, The		7.1    1.6  1.2    4     1,3	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
    Zork 0			7.1    1.3  2.0	   2	 x	C_INF
    Zork 1			6.0    0.7  1.5	   8	 1-2	C_INF
    Zork 2			6.5    0.9  1.5	   6	 1-2	C_INF
    Zork 3			6.1    0.6  1.4	   5	 1-2	C_INF

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

    The Top Three:

    	A game is not eligible for the Top Three 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. Mind Forevr Voyagn. 8.5	4 votes
     3. Curses		8.3	7 votes
        Bureaucracy		8.3	3 votes

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

    Editor's Picks of the Month:

    	My two picks for this issue are _Shelby's Light_ and
    _The Path to Fortune: Volume 1 of the Windhall Chronicles_.  Both are
    engrossing, somewhat difficult (I'm still stuck in both), and well
    implemented.  _Fortune_ has a ton of characters to play around with, which is
    a plus in my opinion.  _Shelby_, while less populated, has an intricate plot
    that has kept me interested through the entire game so far.
    	Both of these are available on the ftp.gmd.de FTP site.  Shelby is a
    TADS game, available in /if-archive/games/tads/shelby.zip, I believe.
    Windhall is a v8 Inform program, and as such requires jzip rather than zip to
    run.  I don't have the info on me, but jzip is on ftp.gmd.de as well.
    Windhall is in /if-archive/games/infocom/windhall.z8.

    ADVERTISEMENTS---------------------------------------------------------------

    	[Well, better late than never, I suppose. -GKW]

    Soon, the unlikeliest of heroes will be chosen to embark on the unlikeliest
    					   of adventures.../\
                                                             /    \
                                                    / \    /     /
                                                    \   \/     /
                                                      \      /
             THE PATH TO                              / \   \
             ___________                            /    /\   \
            |  _________|                         /    /    \ /
            | |_________                       _/    /
            |  _________|  ______   _____   __| |__/  _   _   _____   ____
            | |           |  __  | |  ___| |__   __| | | | | |  _  | | o__|
            | |           | |__| | | |    /   | |_   | |_| | | | | | | |__
            |_|           |______| |_|  /    /|___|  |_____| |_| |_| |____|
                                       |___/
                       VOLUME ONE OF "THE WINDHALL CHRONICLES"
                           BY JEFF CASSIDY AND C.E. FORMAN

    Windhall has fallen upon hard times.  Lord Osrich, ruler of the realm of
    Rysch, has threatened to reclaim the tiny village and send its inhabitants
    away, unless a great debt is paid.  The town's only hope lies in finding
    and recovering the treasure of the great dragon Kirizith, hidden and nearly
    forgotten for so many centuries...

    Meet Aerin.
    A simple blacksmith's apprentice, nothing more.  Certainly not the hero
    selected by the village to seek out the dragon's lair...

    ...Or is he?

    Meet the cast.
    Fifteen fully-developed characters help and hinder Aerin in his quest:

      Borthur, the dwarven blacksmith, Aerin's mentor and best friend.
      Mielon, the mayor of Windhall (since no one else wanted the job).
      Idah, his wife, the finest storyteller in the land.
      Baezil, preparer of Windhall's finest culinary delights.
      Sir Gunther IX, the most incompetent and tongue-tied knight in Rysch.
      Creston the cleric, master of alchemy...when he feels like it.
      Kytan the thief (guard your gold closely).
      Denvil, the jovial (or is it pain-in-the-neck?) wood elf.
      Midknight, swordsman extraordinaire.
      Kaela, the enchanting young wizardess of Aerin's dreams.
      Mighty Nostrophidius, an ancient sorcerer whose powers are unmatched.
      The ever-rhyming Mire Cat, master of riddles and wordplay.
      The Haughty Chameleon, appearing and vanishing in the blink of an eye.
      Grrarr, werewolf of the Forest of Ansalon.
      And of course, the mighty Kirizith himself.

    Meet the quest of a lifetime.
    In a world where magic is the ultimate power of mortals,
               where only the most skilled warrior can survive,
               where only the most clever explorer can uncover the secret,

                               ADVENTURE IS INEVITABLE.

                                "The Path to Fortune"
                       Volume One of "The Windhall Chronicles"

                       Available on a ZIP Interpreter near you.

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

    	Excitement abounds.  The 1996 I-F Competition looms in September.
    For those of you planning to enter, here are some preliminary things to keep
    in mind:

    1. Your game can be written in any format: TADS, Inform, C++, whatever.  But,
    	if it isn't played and voted on by at least 10 people, it will be
    	disqualified.  Votes will be on a scale of 1 to 10 for each game. and
    	authors and betatesters may not vote.

    2. All the games are in the same category this year.

    3. The final deadline looks like it will be Sept. 30, 1996.

    4. Betatesters will be made available for your use starting in April.  They
    	are not mandatory.

    5. All entries must be freeware, and should be playable in under two hours by
    	the average player.

    6. We need prize donations still. for this year's winners.

    7. I will not be accepting votes this year.  There is another who has
    	shouldered the burden.

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