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ISSUE #39 - January 7, 2005

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

                ISSUE #39 -- 2004 IF Competition Special

            Edited by Paul O'Brian (obrian SP@G colorado.edu)
                          January 7, 2005

               SPAG Website: http://www.sparkynet.com/spag

    SPAG #39 is copyright (c) 2005 by Paul O'Brian.
    Authors of reviews and articles retain the rights to their contributions.

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

    ARTICLES IN THIS ISSUE ----------------------------------------------------

    SPAG interviews the top finishers in the IF Comp who aren't its editor:
       * Chris Klimas
       * half sick of shadows
       * Jason Devlin

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

    All Things Devours
    Bellclap
    The Big Scoop
    Blink
    Blue Chairs
    Die Vollkommene Masse
    Goose, Egg, Badger
    The Great Xavio
    I Must Play
    Identity
    Luminous Horizon
    Mingsheng
    Ninja v1.30
    Order
    The Orion Agenda
    The Realm
    Splashdown
    Square Circle
    Sting Of The Wasp
    Trading Punches
    Who Created That Monster?
    Zero One

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

    Some while ago now, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next
    in IF. I had just finished LASH, which was very satisfying to write but
    also an incredible downer, what with all the research into the horrors
    of American slavery. I knew I wanted to write something light and fun,
    and for me, the natural choice was something to do with superheroes. I'd
    had an on-again, off-again love affair with the genre all my life,
    particularly with the kooky mutants and malcontents of the Marvel
    Universe. As I was contemplating this decision, good writers and
    editorial shakeups were breathing new life into that universe, so the
    affair was definitely on again.

    I hatched a plan. I would create a series of superhero games. They would
    be short and episodic, just like the comics, and each game would itself
    be broken into very small chapters, in imitation of the style used by
    Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the earliest issues of the Fantastic Four and
    others. The other great bonus of having the games be episodic was that
    they'd be the perfect size for competition entries. I decided I would
    enter each episode into that year's comp, which would both provide a
    very solid deadline and help me promote the series. I also thought for a
    while on the ways in which the flow of interactive fiction, interrupted
    rhythmically by the appearance of the prompt, is similar to the flow of
    comics, panels strung together by their intervening gutters and page
    breaks. The analogy was far from perfect, but I thought that if I kept
    it in mind, it could help me capture the exhilarating feel of my
    favorite superhero comics.

    In some ways, this was a ridiculous thing to be attempting. For one
    thing, a huge part of superheroes' appeal is visual, and I wanted to put
    them into a pure-text environment. I made this choice not because of
    some desire to keep text games unsullied by pictures, but because I
    possess a breathtaking lack of artistic skill. I would certainly have
    illustrated the games if I could think of any way those illustrations
    would enhance rather than detract from the experience. I couldn't.
    Secondly, one of the linchpins of superhero narrative is fighting, and
    fighting is something that IF isn't very good at rendering. Text is
    terribly unsuited to depicting the various subtle adjustments of
    position and approach that constitute much of combat tactics, and
    besides that, IF's turn-based nature and the long pauses available while
    deciding what to type at the prompt work against the sense of urgency
    that an action scene needs. I knew that I didn't want to write a
    full-fledged CRPG, especially since the superpowers were going to be
    trouble enough, packing my game environment with combinatorial TNT --
    not only would I have to account for all the normal actions an IF PC
    might take, I also had to make sure that the superpowers didn't break
    down at any point. I took heart from the fact that similar things had
    been done well; for instance, the Enchanter series is essentially about
    a superpowered character, and that character even gains greater powers
    as the games progress, a problem I wouldn't have to worry about.

    When it came to designing the story and characters, I drew inspiration
    from two sources: Stan Lee and Emily Dickinson. As I mentioned in SPAG
    #31, the game design phase took place at a time when my nightly reading
    was alternating comic books with Dickinson poems. Thus, Emily and Austin
    are named after Dickinson and her brother, and their superhero names and
    powers derive directly from the poet's focus on the grandeur of the
    natural world. From Lee and 1960s Marvel comics in general came much of
    the story's structure, and some part of its mood. I didn't want to be
    all heavy and cosmic, like some 1970s comics, nor grim and gritty like
    the 80s, and 90s deconstructionism was right out. Those comics trends
    were reacting to what came before, and superhero IF didn't have the same
    history, so I wanted my story to retain some feeling of innocence and
    wonder. However, unlike Freedom Force (which I love), I didn't want my
    characters talking in gee-willickers Cleaverspeak, nor making loud,
    unironic declamations. Instead, I tried to apply the old Marvel
    philosophy of having characters behave more realistically, like a real
    person would if granted fantastic powers. I don't claim that Emily and
    Austin are some perfect psychological picture of "superpowers in the
    real world", but I hope that on the superhero spectrum, their words and
    actions are closer to the realistic end.

    The first game was a major challenge, since I was creating the
    superpower code from scratch. I'm also apparently quite a bit slower at
    writing IF than most other people -- I'm always astonished when authors
    say that such-and-such amazing game was something they banged out in two
    months. Earth And Sky took me about a year, working approximately a
    half-hour per day, which made it a bit disheartening that the main
    response to the game was that it was too short. However, I paid close
    attention to all the game's reviews, and tried to address many of the
    concerns expressed therein while I was designing the second game, which
    I decided to call "Another Earth, Another Sky," with inspiration from
    Dickinson and from Lee's bombastic issue titles. It was also important
    to me that I found some independent and creative ways to improve upon
    the experience of the first game. (Actually, I want *each* of my games
    to contain innovations that the last one didn't -- I think a big part of
    Infocom's success was that they were always trying to outdo themselves,
    and I strive to emulate that ethic in my own work.) So at the time I was
    designing episode 2, Glulx had gained a foothold as an excellent
    platform that could be programmed in Inform but that could accommodate
    graphics. Meanwhile, I'd just bought Photoshop, and was excited about
    the kinds of art I could create without having to draw at all. The
    notion of bright, graphical sound effects appealed to me hugely,
    especially since I'd struggled to find ways to make the first game fun
    and colorful.

    Another Earth, Another Sky was successful beyond what I'd dared to hope.
    Winning the competition floored me -- it was a dream come true, and at
    the same time, it threw me into a bit of a tailspin. I feared I'd peaked
    too early. What would I do for an encore, and whatever I did, should I
    still enter the comp with it? In the end, I decided to go ahead and
    enter the comp with episode 3, since that had been the plan from the
    beginning with these games. Whatever happened with the third game, I'd
    subsequently stay away from the competition for a good long while, maybe
    permanently. Creating the game, however, was a bigger stumbling block. I
    knew that the innovations I wanted it to have were the ability to switch
    between characters, and an in-game hint system built into NPC
    conversation. People had been clamoring for more teamwork in these
    games, and rightly so: the first and second episodes are from one
    sibling's point-of-view, and each quickly finds a reason to get rid of
    the other person before the superheroics start in earnest. I figured
    that perspective-switching and sibling hinting would provide a team feel
    that the other games had lacked. What I didn't figure on was how much
    freaking work it would take to build a game that could gracefully switch
    between two PCs, along with a hint system that took its cues from PC
    behavior and expressed itself naturally in conversational form. Even
    though my design for Luminous Horizon was considerably more railroaded
    than the previous game, the POV-switching still amounted to a huge pile
    of work. Besides these challenges (and perhaps partly because of them),
    I found myself suffering from a lack of motivation, as I talked about in
    the editorial for SPAG #32. After a while, it became apparent that I
    wouldn't have Luminous Horizon ready for the 2003 IF comp, which was a
    big disappointment to me.

    After many self-pep-talks, and many many coding sessions to the
    motivational soundtrack of Pretenders II (thanks Chrissie!), I finished
    Episode 3. And... wow. I am absolutely gobsmacked to have won the
    competition *again*. It's an incredible honor to be voted into that top
    spot, especially against such sterling competition. In fact, I'm
    actually a little embarrassed about it. Comparing Luminous Horizon and,
    say, Blue Chairs is like putting X-Men 2 up against Requiem For A Dream.
    They don't even belong in the same sentence, despite what I just wrote.
    For that reason, I've decided not to arrange another "self-interview"
    for this issue of SPAG. Duncan Stevens interviewed me for the 2002 comp
    issue, which was great and a lot of fun, but I don't want or need SPAG
    to become the Society for the Promotion of Paul O'Brian. (Plus, SPPO?
    That's even worse than SPAG!) So in this issue, we talk with the 2nd
    through 4th place finishers in the 2004 IF Competition. I want to extend
    my sincere gratitude to the voters of the IF Comp and to everybody who
    helped me with Luminous Horizon. It's been great. On to the post-comp
    polishing!

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

    From:	Dave Leigh

    In response to David Cornelson's editorial dated in Issue #38...

    I think David has thought out his target market well, but I'd like to
    make one important point: when you redefine your market, you should also
    redefine your terms. By all means, these works should be sold in
    bookstores, but they should never be called "programs" or "games". They
    are BOOKS. Next-generation books, to be sure, but books nonetheless.

    A famous marketing example comes to mind. The ubiquitous ThighMaster
    wasn't developed for thighs at all, but was a general-purpose exerciser.
    It didn't sell at all. It wasn't until a brilliant marketer decided to
    target the use of the product that it sold, and when it did, it sold
    big. The endorsement of Suzanne Somers didn't hurt, either.

    Which brings me to the second point. In his article I think David has
    underestated the value of the high-quality author. "Star power", in the
    form of an endorsement through participation, is needed here, just as it
    was needed for the Thighmaster. Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide To The
    Galaxy game was a major success (in my mind) because of the involvement
    of Douglas Adams, who was already well-regarded outside of the field of
    IF before the game was conceived.

    To bring such star power into play, what's needed is a good sales job
    and collaboration. I think there are many fine authors who would
    participate in such a medium were it not for the intimidation of
    learning the mechanics of the gaming system. Most works of IF are
    written and produced by a single person. I think that, if you're truly
    thinking in commercial terms, this is a really Bad Idea (tm). While you
    have the rare person who is both technically and artistically inclined,
    you'll find that most people are one or the other. So pair a good
    technician with a good author. It's what we do all the time in software
    development with designers and programmers, and the results are almost
    invariably better than what can be done by either alone.

    This may hold further attractions for authors in that, in writing their
    fiction, they can now stretch themselves to think in non-linear terms.
    What is their character doing "in the meantime?" It allows them to think
    more in terms of characterization instead of the plain narrative, and
    the improved characterization can make for a better story. I think that
    many authors (and only one is needed at first) would jump at the chance
    to participate in such a project if only they knew how to do it (and
    collaboration lowers that hurdle); and that they would be rewarded for
    it (hence the business plan).

    Finally, in the same collaborative vein, there is one thing that I would
    most certainly recommend from a technical point of view. In playing
    successful modern games that are the closest to text IF (I'm thinking of
    the Myst series here), I find that the one element that does more than
    any other to establish a mood is sound. A little well chosen music and
    some ambient sound effects go a long way toward commercially polishing
    the product without in any way detracting from the playability of the
    otherwise text-only product.

    NEWS ----------------------------------------------------------------------

    COMPETITION RESULTS
    The IF competition reached its 10th anniversary this year, and maybe I'm
    a little biased, but I think this was a very good comp. As usual, heaps
    and heaps of credit go to illustrious organizer and all-around Comp
    Cheez Stephen Granade. Many, many thanks to him and all who aid him!
    Here are the full results of the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition:

    1.  Luminous Horizon, by Paul O'Brian
    2.  Blue Chairs, by Chris Klimas
    3.  All Things Devours, by half sick of shadows
    4.  Sting of the Wasp, by Jason Devlin
    5.  Square Circle, by Eric Eve
    6.  The Orion Agenda, by Ryan Weisenberger
    7.  Mingsheng, by Deane Saunders (writing as Rexx Magnus)
    8.  Splashdown, by Paul J. Furio
    9.  Gamlet, by Tomasz Pudlo
    10. Trading Punches, by Mike Snyder (writing as Sidney Merk)
    11. The Great Xavio, by Reese Warner
    12. Goose, Egg, Badger, by Brian Rapp
    13. The Big Scoop, by Johan Berntsson
    14. I Must Play, by Geoff Fortytwo (writing as Fortytwo)
    15. Identity, by Dave Bernazzani
    16. Murder at the Aero Club, by Penny Wyatt (writing as Penny)
    17. Bellclap, by Tommy Herbert
    18. Magocracy, by Anton Joseph Rheaume (writing as Scarybug)
    19. Typo, by Peter Seebach & Kevin Lynn
    20. Kurusu City, by Kevin Venzke
    21. Blink, by Ian Waddell
    22. Chronicle Play Torn, by Penczer Attila (writing as Algol)
    23. A Day In The Life Of A Super Hero, by David Whyld (writing as
        davidw)
    24. Order, by John Evans
    25. Who Created That Monster?, by N. B. Horvath
    26. Blue Sky, by Hans Fugal
    27. The Realm, by Michael Sheldon
    28. Redeye, by John Pitchers
    29. Stack Overflow, by Timofei Shatrov
    30. Zero, by William A. Tilli
    31. Zero One, by Edward Plant (writing as shed)
    32. A Light's Tale, by Zach Flynn (writing as vbnz)
    33. Getting Back To Sleep, by Patrick Evans (writing as IceDragon)
    34. Ruined Robots, by Nicholas, Natasha, and Gregory Dudek (writing as
        nanag_d)
    35. PTBAD 3, by Jonathan Berman (writing as Xorax)
    36. Ninja v1.30, by Paul Panks (writing as Dunric)

    NEW GAMES
    Normally, comp season is a pretty sleepy time for new games, but this
    time around there's a healthy number, fed partly by a flow of teeny-tiny
    games in reduced versions of Inform and TADS (see LET'S GET SMALL,
    below.) There's also a goofy satire of Dungeons and Dragons, a promising
    debut from a new author, and big announcements by major IF authors: Kent
    Tessman's commercial release is ready at last, and Andrew Plotkin has
    unveiled a new work aimed at newbies and experts alike.
       * Eric The Power-Mad Dungeon-Master by Mark Arenz
       * Moonglow by Dave Bernazzani
       * Roadside Adventure by Kevin Venzke
       * Catseye by Dave Bernazzani
       * Future Boy! by Kent Tessman
       * The Dreamhold by Andrew Plotkin
       * Isle Of The Cult by Rune Berg

    IF COMES ALIVE!
    On October 27th, an auspicious gathering occurred. Star C. Foster, Nick
    Montfort, Daniel Ravipinto, and Emily Short converged on the Kelly
    Writers House in Philadelphia to read from their IF works, with Scott
    Rettberg serving as interactor and host. The event was another step in
    IF's gradual filtration through the groves of academe, and a description
    of it is available at http://nickm.com/if/walkthroughs.html. In
    addition, Rettberg has written a brief summary of how the event fared at
    http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2004/10/29/if-walkthroughs/. That
    summary promises, among other things, that an audio recording of the
    show will be available soon! Watch Nick's web page and
    http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu for more info.

    A MAP FOR AUTHORS
    Dan Shiovitz has been a presence on the IF scene for over ten years now,
    and in that time he's written games, tools, reviews and more -- in fact,
    his review of John Evans' "Order" appears in this issue of SPAG. His
    latest contribution to the community is an essay entitled "How To Write
    A Great Game." This essay collects a number of Shiovitz's observations,
    with the goal of helping authors "increase the quality of the games
    they're writing." It's available at:
    http://www.drizzle.com/~dans/if/great-games.html

    LET'S GET SMALL
    The Commodore 32 is a machine that never was: a hardware Z-machine with
    an onboard slot for receiving cartridges full of executable Z-code. The
    only catch is that these "Z-carts" can only contain 32K of compiled
    code. Dave Bernazzani dreamed up this scenario and created a mini-comp
    that invited authors to submit games for this imaginary machine. Of
    course, having created mInform, an Inform replacement library that fits
    the whole parser and world model into 19K, he knows a little something
    about fitting good things into small packages. Six authors took up the
    challenge, and Samuel T. Denton's winning entry, "Endgame", weighs in at
    an amazing 30K. Details on the contest and the winners are on the C32
    home page at http://www.gis.net/~daveber/minform/c32.htm.

    IT'S NOT WHETHER YOU WIN OR LOSE, IT'S SUBMITTING A REVIEW AFTERWARDS
    I was very gratified to receive so many original competition reviews for
    this issue -- I think this competition edition of SPAG has a higher
    percentage of original content than any competition issue since I began
    as editor six years ago. Now I want to carry that momentum into the New
    Year (I'm greedy that way), so please send me your reviews of IF games
    for inclusion in SPAG #40! If you seek inspiration for what to review,
    find it below:

    SPAG 10 MOST WANTED LIST
    ========================
    1.  The Act Of Misdirection
    2.  Dead Reckoning (Nick Montfort's translation of Olvido Mortal)
    3.  The Dreamhold
    4.  1893: A World's Fair Mystery
    5.  The Enterprise Incidents
    6.  Eric The Power-Mad Dungeon Master
    7.  Future Boy!
    8.  Isle Of The Cult
    9.  Narcolepsy
    10. Return To Ditch Day

    THE SPAG INTERVIEW---------------------------------------------------------

    Every year since the competition began, SPAG has featured interviews
    with the authors whose games emerged at the top of the heap. As I said
    in my editorial, I'm altering the format a bit this year, since that
    editorial probably already provided more than you'd ever want to know
    about the Earth And Sky series. I'm proud to present Chris Klimas, half
    sick of shadows, and Jason Devlin, and I thank all three of them for
    taking the time to be interviewed.

     =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
     Chris Klimas, author of "Blue Chairs"
     -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

       SPAG: For starters, could you tell us a little about yourself? Who
       are you, what do you do for a living, and so forth?

    CK: I'm just an average Web monkey who was a hair too young to have
    experienced the .com bubble. I live outside Baltimore, Maryland and work
    for a state agency. In my other life, I co-edit Crunchable, an online
    zine (http://www.crunchable.net/) that's a mixture of a lot of things:
    personal essays, reviews, and political ranting.

       SPAG: How did you first become introduced to IF?

    CK: I got my dad a copy of "Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy" for his
    birthday, back when I was a kid and we had an Apple IIgs in the house.
    (My mom provided me with the financial backing for this escapade.)

    I didn't know a thing about interactive fiction or even Douglas Adams --
    it was just something he had put on his birthday list, and I loved
    computer games even then. So the night before my dad's birthday, I
    decided to check it out before I wrapped up his present. This was the
    Solid Gold edition, and somehow the packaging was set up so that you
    could browse through the manual without breaking any seals. (Or at least
    that's how I remember it.) I read the manual cover-to-cover about seven
    times that night -- the sample walkthrough fascinated me. I couldn't
    believe that a game like it could exist. It seemed like you could do
    anything at all.

       SPAG: After your debut with Mercy in 1997 and your contribution to
       the Textfire hoax, you disappeared from the IF scene for quite a
       while. How did you spend the intervening years, and what brought you
       back to IF?

    CK: I did a lot of growing up, and a lot of writing. (I wrote Mercy in
    high school, and I still feel kind of awkward about it.) I got
    dissatisfied with IF at a certain point: I felt like I couldn't create
    the kinds of stories I wanted to with it, or at least that the detail
    work that IF requires -- letting the player open everything that can be
    opened, writing (hopefully engaging) descriptions for the small,
    unimportant things you just threw into a room to make it stand out in
    players' minds -- got in the way of the story I was trying to tell.

    So for a long time, I just wrote regular old stories. I still played
    games -- usually I'd wait for the yearly comp to wrap up, and I'd play
    the top five or so.

    The fascinating thing was that even though I had more or less left the
    community, it hadn't left me. I got emails about Mercy years and years
    after its release -- I mean, I even got one message about it early this
    year.

    It took three games to bring me back to writing IF. Shade is the most
    beautiful work of interactive fiction I've ever played. And I knew that
    if I were reading a linear version of it, I would finished it, thought,
    "Hunh," and moved on. Taking the role of the protagonist made the story
    a hundred times more vivid and haunting. It was an effect you could only
    get through IF, and it was something I wanted to try myself.

    The second game was Slouching Towards Bedlam. I liked it a lot, but as I
    played I could feel myself critiquing it -- thinking about where I
    would've done things differently, starting to think like an
    author/designer again.

    And the final was Time Bastard, which was not really a game, but an
    entry in the walkthrough comp. It had the same effect on me as reading
    Kurt Vonnegut did -- it made me realize I should loosen up and write the
    way I really wanted to. You know, have fun with it instead of worrying
    about my prose style.

    (I'm sure that last sentence will cause people who didn't dig Blue
    Chairs to chortle. But it's the truth -- like true love, you'll never
    find your voice by looking hard for it.)

       SPAG: What was your creative process for constructing Blue Chairs?

    CK: I started on February 29 of this year -- I always write the date I
    start on in my source code. I didn't make a detailed plan of how I
    wanted the game to go. I had an rough sketch of the story in mind, but I
    worked out each section individually.

    This lead to a lot of nifty connections. Many of the things at the party
    that have resonance later in the game started off as things I threw in
    to give things more flavor. I mean, I pretty much knew what purpose the
    painting of the desert would serve, but the connection with the sleeping
    guy on the porch came in much later.

    Towards late spring, I started to lose interest -- but then I realized
    that I had already put in enough effort that I owed it to the story to
    finish it. I think IF is really killer in this regard. It takes a lot of
    effort to reach that point of critical mass.

    I had decided I had to give myself a month at minimum to beta-test, so
    this fit neatly with the deadline for intent to enter the competition. I
    just barely made it.

       SPAG: What's your reaction to the way the game has been received by
       the IF community? Are there any ideas expressed in the reviews that
       you'd like to reply to?

    CK: I love the fact that my game got the second-highest standard
    deviation in the comp. I don't mind the negative reviews -- I think a
    lot of it comes down to personal taste, and what you expect out of IF. I
    especially would like to thank everyone who wrote a review on the
    newsgroups, good or bad, or wrote me an email about the game. When
    you're doing things for love (not money), you live and die on feedback.

    The most interesting lesson I've learned from the reviews is that Blue
    Chairs probably would have been stronger had I backed off the puzzles a
    little bit. When you're playing a game like Blue Chairs, you're in it
    for the experience, and not so much the puzzling.

    When I was first designing, I was terrified that people would breeze
    through the game in half an hour and leave unimpressed. In retrospect,
    that was pretty silly. When you're writing a story, you don't think,
    "Gee, I'm not sure this is long enough. I'd better make up some new
    characters."

       SPAG: You recently wrote an essay for Crunchable about Grand Theft
       Auto: San Andreas, and the way that game allows a huge range of
       behavior from its PC. IF works with a single author tend to be more
       restricted, arguably of necessity, so how did you decide where to
       allow player freedom and where to restrict it in Blue Chairs?

    CK: There are two kinds of freedom, I think, in interactive fiction. (Or
    games that tell stories.) There's freedom in the model world, which is
    where GTA excels. Almost any car you see on the street can be driven,
    and almost anywhere you can see, you can go to.

    But there's also the freedom to affect the plot, and GTA offers almost
    none whatsoever. Your only choice is whether to continue the story or to
    go be a cab driver for a while instead.

    I tried hard to let the player shape the story of Blue Chairs. You get
    to decide some of the details of Dante and Beatrice's past relationship,
    but more than that, the ending really asks: what do you think of what
    you've just experienced? What would you like it to mean? Would you like
    a happy ending? What would a happy ending to a story like this be like?
    Is one even possible?

       SPAG: Do you anticipate being able to write more IF in the future,
       and if so what are your plans?

    CK: Working secretly is really the way to go when it comes to projects
    like this. There's nothing like the security blanket of knowing, "Well,
    if this doesn't work, I can just junk it and nobody will know any
    better."

    So... uh... I'm working secretly right now.

       SPAG: Apart from your own plans, what sort of IF would you like to
       see more of?

    CK: I would like to see stuff that relies less on genre conventions or
    gimmicks and more on telling a plain old interesting story. But that's
    just my personal preference.

       SPAG: What did you think about this year's competition? Any favorite
       games?

    CK: I'm a sucker for the fun but flawed games -- games like
    Reverberations or Chicks Dig Jerks. This year, it was Kurusu City. It
    had a wonderful sense of style to it, and I loved every word that came
    out of the protagonist's mouth. But it was so easy to get stuck!

       SPAG: Any advice you'd care to offer for prospective competition
       entrants?

    CK: Find a friend you can talk to about what you're working on. It's so
    helpful to be able to think out loud, and you'll need the encouragement
    when you get bogged down.

     =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
     half sick of shadows, author of "All Things Devours"
     -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

       SPAG: Your nom de IF is "half sick of shadows." I know it's a
       reference to Tennyson's "Lady Of Shallot," but what does it mean to
       you?

    TO: I have always liked the idea of having two names. Clearly one must
    be chosen at birth by your parents, but it is hard to make it
    particularly fit you, since they cannot know what you will become. With
    the widespread use of pseudonyms on the net, I thought it was a good
    chance to try to craft a new name. I experimented with various
    possibilities, rereading many pieces of poetry that are dear to me and
    settled upon 'half sick of shadows', which I now use a little on the
    net. It feels right to me, but as with poetry in general, it is
    difficult to say exactly why. It is a description -- rather like old
    names with meanings such as 'Strong' or 'Beloved of God' -- but it is
    more finely wrought and more appropriate. It speaks of restlessness,
    dissatisfaction with lies or imitations, yearning for truth and reality.
    Even the natural abbreviation 'half' tells something of longing and
    absence. As with all poetry, it loses something in the analysis, but I
    am happy with it.

       SPAG: How did you first become introduced to IF?

    TO: Playing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on a Mac Plus as a child. I
    (shame) had not yet been introduced to the books and thus needed a lot
    of help to get as far as I did, but it was clearly a most ingenious
    game. I really loved the level of involvement and the baroque gameplay.

       SPAG: In your "All Things Devours Wrap-Up" essay (posted on
       rec.games.int-fiction), you say you've only completed six IF games:
       Shade, Galatea, I- 0, 9:05, Common Ground, and The Frenetic Five vs.
       Mr Redundancy Man. What drew you to those games to start with?

    TO: Well, yes, when I look at them now, they do seem a rather strange
    collection. I think a slashdot story reintroduced me to IF and through
    that I found Shade and Galatea. They were something of an epiphany,
    being much more like small works of art than like games. I had often
    reflected sadly on the fact that interactive media was so heavily based
    around 'beating' puzzles or tests of reflexes. I recalled that it had
    taken film a while to become a medium for art and hoped that we would
    see high quality interactive art too. By 'art' I don't mean anything
    particularly avant garde, just something that communicates or inspires
    genuine emotion. Once I had refamiliarised myself with the parser and IF
    conventions (an atmosphere-breaking task if ever there was one) Shade
    and Galatea delivered in spades.

    I then found the others via positive reviews (Emily Short's site and
    Baf's guide?) and because they were quite short. I thought I-O, 9:05 and
    The Frenetic Five were very fun and I half connected emotionally with
    Common Ground. I think there was insufficient connection with the
    characters for the final dilemma to have much punch, but there were many
    moments that were very nice. While I never experimented much with it at
    the time, the partial recording and replaying of the player's actions
    gave me the germ of the idea for All Things Devours.

       SPAG: I'm impressed at the game's intricate design, and even more
       impressed that you were able to complete it in only two and a half
       months. What procedure did you follow for putting the code together?

    TO: Once I had the idea of a time travel game I came up with a time
    travel dynamic that would make sense and a few appropriate puzzles. I
    then planned an environment and map to base them in and got coding. I
    guess the fact that I had done a lot of programming in the past helped a
    lot with this part and, once I had implemented a version of those
    self-opening doors from the lovely DM4, I considered myself proficient
    in Inform and started the long process of getting the time travel to
    work. Actually, the recording and replaying of movement is quite easy,
    but the keeping track of all the objects and actions and bizarre
    paradoxes took a while to get right. I had to keep testing it myself and
    trying to break it. I also discovered a raft of interesting things along
    the way, such as the fact that after time travelling n times, you can
    have 2 to the power of n copies of a given item.

    Eventually, with the deadline drawing very near I filled out the
    descriptions and ending text until I was satisfied and submitted it. I
    enjoyed the writing and would have liked to spend longer on it, but
    without a deadline I guess it never would have been finished. I do mean
    this, for I would not have written it without the focus of a
    conveniently timed competition.

       SPAG: Okay, this is a very geeky question about ATD (and maybe
       slightly spoilery too): was the alarm button just a red herring? I
       thought for sure it would turn off the alarm while it was ringing,
       but all it would ever do for me is to turn the alarm on, which of
       course I didn't want. Was there something clever I could use it for
       that I just didn't come up with?

    TO: Ah, yes. The alarm button. It was originally added because it is the
    type of thing one finds on a security desk, but it soon found a use.
    There is a puzzle that can be solved using the alarm button, but it can
    also be solved without it. When I release a post competition version
    (early this year sometime) it will have a 'difficult' mode in which it
    will necessarily play a part, since the other solution will be blocked.
    I liked the non-linearity of the puzzles in ATD, and want to make the
    more difficult mode partly to bring the more obscure solutions to the
    fore. To partly answer your question, the only thing pressing it does is
    to set off the alarm (it does absolutely nothing if the alarm is already
    going). There is a reason you might want to do this, but I'm afraid I
    shouldn't spoil it yet.

       SPAG: I see from your web page [at http://www.amirrorclear.net] that
       you're a graduate student in philosophy at Oxford. Could you talk a
       little about the intersections you see between your academic
       interests and the subject matter of All Things Devours?

    TO: I have actually just been writing an essay connected to the
    philosophy of time and did read an article or two on time travel during
    my research. While I haven't really looked into the issue in any detail
    academically, it is quite a luxury to be studying a discipline where
    such topics regularly appear. One of the nice things about studying at
    Oxford is the wealth of guest lectures. The great philosophy of physics
    group here attract equally prestigious visiting philosophers and we end
    up with great seminars involving the foundations of quantum mechanics,
    space-time, chance and so on. Very fun.

    There are many other areas that I have looked at quite closely,
    including personal identity over time, non-standard models of
    computation and, more and more, moral philosophy. I had never really
    thought of getting direct inspiration from any of these areas that I
    study, but now that I think about it, there are quite a few
    possibilities (especially with the moral philosophy). I suppose All
    Things Devours came more from my desire to get to the bottom of an
    issue, asking a lot of questions and trying to work out the answers: a
    desire that is probably shared by a lot of philosophers and quite a few
    IF authors too. I know that ATD is exactly the type of game I would have
    loved to play, and it was great to hear the reactions from a few of the
    other students at College and from all the reviewers out there in the
    ether.

       SPAG: In your wrap-up essay, you mention that you don't know whether
       you'll write any more IF. If you don't, where do you see yourself
       focusing your creative energies?

    TO: Well, philosophy (and academia in general) offer a lot of
    interesting puzzles of their own and I always have a few things ticking
    over at any particular time. It also tends to follow you everywhere --
    you can be listening to a gig somewhere and mull over some thought
    experiment or find a hidden contradiction somewhere. I actually get most
    of my original work done out of hours: then there is just the matter of
    writing and research...

    Oh, and I do quite a bit of photography too. It is something I have
    dabbled in for the past few years and lets me try my hand at capturing a
    little of the beauty around me. You can see some of it here if you like.

    [http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowers/visual-art/my-photography/index.html]

    As to whether or not I'll write any more IF -- well, I'd like to, but
    I'm just so busy. We'll see.

       SPAG: What did you think about this year's competition? Any favorite
       games?

    TO: Unfortunately, I have reached the most intensely busy period of my
    course and have had almost no time to try them. I did play Mingsheng
    though, and thought it was wonderfully atmospheric and marred only by a
    little episode of:

     >N
    The door is in the way.
     >OPEN DOOR
    With what?
     >KEY
    You unlock the door.
     >N
    The door is in the way.
     >OPEN DOOR
    You open the door.
     >N

    The Inform library really needs to update the default door behaviour...

       SPAG: Any advice you'd care to offer for prospective competition
       entrants?

    TO: Well, implementing doors nicely will help... If in Inform, just copy
    the appropriate bits from the DM4. Reading the reviews from the last
    year will also help, as you could then be aware of the clichés and the
    classic bugs and player frustrations. Every entry really must pay
    attention to these things and have some adequate writing which has been
    well proofread. This really is the baseline requirement, but should
    guarantee you don't come in the bottom five or so.

    Obviously, however, you need some actual positives too: there must be a
    reason you are writing it. At this point it gets very difficult to
    advise since there are so many avenues to take, but surely going out and
    playing/experiencing more works of IF would help. I look forward to
    doing so myself when my workload eases off.

     =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
     Jason Devlin, author of "Sting Of The Wasp"
     -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

       SPAG: For starters, could you tell us a little about yourself? Who
       are you, what do you do for a living, and so forth?

    JD: Well, there really isn't much to say. I'm twenty; I live in Nanaimo,
    British Columbia. Currently, I'm half-way done my second year of my
    bachelor's of science, major in biology, minor in chemistry. But all
    this was in the about text of my game, so it really shouldn't be that
    interesting. To support myself I have some money from scholarships, and
    I work in the lab for a couple of hours a week. Despite the glamorous
    title of assistant chemistry technician, all I do is wash dishes (or
    "maintain glassware") and add powders to water (or, let's say, "prepare
    reagent solutions in known stoichiometric amounts").

    And as for my personal life. Well, I really don't have time for one: my
    courses have a brutal workload. I am kind of seeing someone, but it's
    very casual so if you're reading this Ian Finley...

       SPAG: Have you done other kinds of writing besides IF?

    JD: Besides from a couple thousand words of lab reports each week, no. I
    don't know, I have a funny relationship with writing and English. When I
    was in school I really liked it, but then I left for a few years, and
    when I came back I couldn't stand it. Well, couldn't stand it to be
    graded on at least. But writing SotW kind of rejuvenated me. At least
    now I know I can write something that people will enjoy reading and not
    just read because they have to mark it.

       SPAG: How did you first become introduced to IF?

    JD: Being born in '84, I was already kind of past Infocom's heyday, and
    I never even heard of them until maybe a year or two ago. But my brother
    and I did have a pirated copy of Magnetic Scrolls' "Guild of Thieves"
    when I was five or six. I remember I didn't quite understand it. For
    one, I think Magnetic Scrolls' is British and so some of the words were
    really weird. When you start a game on a jetty, and have no idea what a
    jetty is, it makes for a confusing experience. Also, I wasn't up to
    speed on the whole anachronism-is-cool-thing and so I was bewildered
    after travelling for a while through a number of "copses" (I had been
    convinced they were misspelling corpses) to end up at a very modern
    bank. Still, I loved the game and I tried my best to pass it. Of course,
    being a pirated copy, it had a password after 100 turns, and so I would
    play through, find the minimum number of steps, and try to do it that
    way. It didn't work. So then, I tried to put all my commands on one line
    like "west then north then take sack." But that still counted as a turn
    per command so I gave up and moved back to Dungeon Master or whatever
    other game I had at the time.

    I didn't get reintroduced to IF until a few years ago when I was
    browsing through the Underdogs (from piracy to piracy, the circle is
    complete). I had finished playing through all the "good games" (i.e. the
    ones with graphics) and thought what the hell. I went for the least
    objectionable of the IF (meaning the one with the most multimedia I
    could find) and wound up picking Photopia. I was blown away. I cried
    (only Tapestry has made me do that since). Of course, I really didn't
    understand it either (ooh, another circle): I thought the Photopia
    machine was showing Alley her future or something but I was amazed
    nonetheless. From there I went on to find out about r*if, the comp, and
    all the other good stuff in modern IF.

       SPAG: What inspired you to write about the dark side of the
       country-club world?

    JD: Well, I wanted to write a funny game (it's a lot less disappointing
    if you fail in humor than if you pour your heart into a gut-wrenching
    drama and fail, or worse, end up with a game people think is humorous).
    And then I realized I'm only really funny when I'm talking about sex,
    clothes, or drug use. From there, the choice seemed clear. Nowhere is
    that stuff more integral than in the upper-echelons of society (besides
    high-school, of course). The darkness came into play when I realized
    that this was still going to be a game, and the player still needed
    problems to face and villains to thwart. Walking around and overhearing
    bitchy comments might lose its appeal if there was no driving force
    behind it. There was no real social commentary here, as some reviewers
    pointed out, but that wasn't really the point. I just wanted to make a
    game that other people, and I, would enjoy playing.

       SPAG: Julia, the PC from Sting Of The Wasp, reminded me a lot of
       Primo Varicella in her snooty elitism and her willingness to dispose
       of rivals by any means necessary. Was Varicella among your
       influences? What other games influenced you?

    JD: I've heard that a lot, but sadly I never actually played Varicella
    through (the puzzles were too hard for my feeble brain and I didn't want
    to cheat through it: I said "if I want to play this game, I want to do
    it right"). But even reading the intro to Varicella, I can definitely
    see the connection. However, when you think about it, a Varicella or
    Julia-type character is probably the best way to implement an evilish
    PC. The snootiness gives them reasons not to feel bad, the vanity
    prevents them from doing anything too physical, and their concern with
    social status prevents them from behaving too inappropriately. The
    problem with evil PCs is trying to balance their ability to do anything
    without moral consideration with your desire to keep the game
    challenging. With a good PC, the parser can spit out a "That would make
    you feel bad" type answer, whereas with an evil PC that isn't really an
    option. You have to find other ways to constrain their behaviour.

    Well, that was quite a tangent. Anyway, back to the original question. I
    can't say that any games influenced me (consciously, at least). I got
    most of my ideas from twenty years of bad television. When I started
    writing SotW, Roseanne was just getting to the part of the series where
    they win the lottery and start hanging with the upper crust. Sure, that
    was the worst season, but it had the attitude I was going for (although
    maybe not the class). Also, Kitty Montgomery from Dharma and Greg was a
    big help. Whenever I think of any of the characters I picture them
    dressed like her. And finally, that episode of the Simpsons where they
    join the country club. The bridge players were originally going to be
    Rauberta and the gang before I got scared off from copyright threads.

       SPAG: You dedicate the game to Dara Barker, saying that her "sass,
       class, and ass" inspired its PC. Who exactly is Ms. Barker?

    JD: No need to make it sound so risqué! Dara's just a good friend of
    mine who is a lot like Julia. I can't count the times we've been outside
    between classes when she's pointed, cigarette held near the side of her
    face, to some tragically-dressed person and made a cruelly hilarious
    remark (as a whisper). Also, it was her birthday at about the time I
    finished and by dedicating the game to her I saved on a present.

       SPAG: If you were the casting director for a Sting Of The Wasp movie,
       who would you hire to play the various parts?

    JD: Hah! Now that's a great question! Well, for Julia, there's only one
    person it could be: Kim Catrall. She outstrips even Dara in the sass,
    class, and ass departments. For Keith I think I would go with Evan
    Marriott, from Joe Millionaire. For Cissy it's got to be Jennifer
    Coolidge (the step mom from that Cinderella/Lizzie McGuire movie).
    Melissa would probably Andie MacDowell. And Beverly would be a younger
    woman-that-plays-Will's-mom from Will and Grace.

       SPAG: Do you anticipate being able to write more IF in the future,
       and if so what are your plans?

    JD: I sure hope to, but I'm swamped right now and not sure when I won't
    be: maybe sometime this summer. I currently have a number of ideas
    kicking around in my head: a sci-fi one, a (semi) historical piece. I've
    done a lot of research for the historical one but I'm afraid that might
    mean it won't get done. There's so many things I want to include (some
    that contradict others, game-wise) that's it's bogged me down.

       SPAG: What did you think about this year's competition? Any favorite
       games?

    JD: Sadly, I was able to play only one: Blue Chairs. But I loved it. I
    went through all the intros when the games came out, more to scope out
    the competition than to play, and the one for Blue Chairs totally
    grabbed me. I didn't really get it after the start but the writing was
    so amazing that I couldn't stop (I didn't even take a smoke break). I
    really wanted to play more but, I didn't have the time. I doubt I'll get
    to play through a whole comp for a number of years yet, so please guys,
    keep it going.

       SPAG: Any advice you'd care to offer for prospective competition
       entrants?

    JD: Just start. Forget about learning the intricacies of coding or
    fleshing out your storyline to a tee, you can do that as you go along.
    Basically, just learn how to use Before and After (for Inform), scenery,
    and have a general idea of your story and go. I've been thinking about
    writing a specific game for a while now and every time I think I've got
    it, I realize something in the story has to change. It slows you down
    and since you aren't committed you're more inclined to stop. And once
    you do get it (roughly) finished, have it beta-tested. SotW went from
    140K to 245K (or whatever it's at) after testing and there's still more
    to be done. However, once you add all those kilobytes, be sure to get it
    tested again just as thoroughly as before. My betatesters were great but
    I used them for the first round mainly. I figured the rest would be
    fine. Boy was I wrong.

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

    Consider the following review header:

    TITLE: Cutthroats
    AUTHOR: Infocom
    EMAIL: ???
    DATE: September 1984
    PARSER: Infocom Standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: LTOI 2
    URL: Not available.
    VERSION: Release 23

    When submitting reviews:  Try to fill in as much of this info as you can.
    Authors may not review their own games.

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

    From:	Valentine Kopteltsev

    TITLE: All Things Devours
    AUTHOR: half sick of shadows
    EMAIL: devours SP@G amirrorclear.net
    DATE: 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/devours/devours.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    After completing All Things Devours, I was sitting for a while,
    wondering: how did a game with such an over-clichéd plot and a rather
    nondescript setting turn out to be so exciting? But let's deal with
    things one at a time.

    You play a young scientist who had been working on a world-shattering
    project, but was kicked out of it as the military took it over. Sensing
    the fatal consequences the continuation of those explorations might
    have, she decides to put an end to them by infiltrating her former lab
    and blowing it up with all its contents. Sure, all this sounds (and
    actually *is*) fairly generic, although the author hasn't left his main
    character entirely without background; he tried really hard to flesh her
    out (for instance, I liked the description of the photo on the PC's ID
    card). The thing is, the game format doesn't offer much space for that.
    The same goes for the room descriptions: although they are by no means
    sloppy, a secret research complex consisting mostly of almost identical
    (and rather dull) hallways just doesn't give one much of an opportunity
    to be elaborate, especially considering how the viewpoint character is
    extremely short on time.

    Another complaint regards the stretching points in the implementation of
    the complex's security system: two of them were so obvious one just
    couldn't pass by without stumbling over them, and on second thought, a
    few more came up. (On the third thought, however, I have to admit I
    hardly encountered any IF games depicting fully plausible top-secret
    establishments. On yet another thought (the fourth in succession), this
    is quite understandable -- detailed information on access control and
    protection system organization for such facilities isn't in the public
    domain for obvious reasons, and I suspect that in reality, successful
    infiltrations occur much less often than we're shown in films, told in
    books and, yeah, in works of interactive fiction. Even *if* an incident
    of this kind happens, the authorities in charge try to hush up the very
    fact of it, let alone its circumstances and the vulnerabilities the
    infiltrator(s) used, never leaving IF-authors any material to learn from
    in this respect... Uhm, sorry, I got carried away. ;)

    Anyway, after a while, all these issues didn't seem to matter. The
    reason for that was, well, let's call it the puzzle framework of the
    game. It's mostly based on the idea of time-travelling; sure, there are
    enough text adventures using this concept (beginning with the classic
    Sorcerer by Infocom), but scarcely any implementing it as consistent and
    consequent. And I use the term "framework" on purpose: the whole game is
    built around and determined by constructing a sequence of actions
    leading to success. (There are multiple paths to victory, by the way.)
    While doing that, the player has to account for a number of time-travel
    side effects and paradoxes, some of which he can use to his benefit,
    while others are to avoid. It was a real thrill.

    In fact, it was so much of a thrill that another feature some IF-purists
    might consider to be a drawback almost escaped my attention: in order to
    reach the winning ending, you'd need a few restarts -- a rather typical
    case of "learning from dying". Well, personally, I don't have anything
    against such a game device, but since modern IF-standards (whoever wrote
    'em ;) generally don't countenance it I've had to mention it here.

    Initially, I also was going to nag at the fact that the protagonist
    hadn't got a single chance to succeed in such a situation unless she was
    a clairvoyant, because a few strategic choices in the early stages of
    the game had to be made based on information she only would acquire
    later. However, a couple additional test playthroughs convinced me I had
    been wrong about it; there actually exists a way to victory that doesn't
    require the gift of foresight -- our PC merely has to be blessed with
    such abilities as ultra-fast acting and decision-making, an
    extraordinary analytical mind capable of calculating several moves
    ahead, and a memory as precise as that of a computer, all that combined
    with nerves of steel, as well as a thorough knowledge of the research
    complex. Of course, this all strains things a bit; still, there's
    nothing supernatural about the talents listed above. A more detailed
    discussion of the matter would automatically put this review in the SPAG
    Specifics section, which hasn't been my intention; thus, I'd just like
    to say that, in my opinion, the very existence of such a
    "non-contradicting" way to victory represents another proof for the vast
    amount of thought and efforts that have flown into All Things Devours.

    To sum up, this is a great game constructed around a very well
    thought-out and carefully implemented puzzle skeleton; the combination
    with the very original use of time-travelling effects makes it unique
    and therefore an absolute must to play.

    The SNATS (Score Not Affecting The Scoreboard):

    PLOT: Not very original (1.0)
    ATMOSPHERE: Tense (1.4)
    WRITING: Terse, but effective (1.4)
    GAMEPLAY: Exciting race with the time (1.6)
    BONUSES: Now, what do you do about a game you've liked a lot but
    can't give it a decent score, because it's focusing on puzzles, and
    puzzles aren't counted in the total rating? Correct -- you rate the
    BONUSES a 2;) (2.0)
    TOTAL: 7.4
    CHARACTERS: None present
    PUZZLES: One of the strongest in this Comp (1.8)
    DIFFICULTY: (7 out of 10)

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

    From:	Joao Mendes
    [Originally posted on rec.games.int-fiction]

    Whohoa! I think we have another winner here. After playing though 24
    games, and for the second time in this competition, I am duly impressed.
    You are a saboteur, armed with a timed explosive device, on a mission to
    destroy a research prototype, hopefully without killing anyone. Nothing
    new so far, and the story itself really doesn't go that much beyond it.
    However, the way events unfold as you play through this game make for a
    plot that is simply brilliantly delivered, if a bit on the short side. I
    won't go into many more details here, so as not to spoil it, but trust
    me, you won't be disappointed.

    To be fair, shortness of plot is just about the only way this game would
    work. The whole thing has a time limit, and indeed, in the ABOUT text,
    the author claims that the game might be unfair, since there are way too
    may ways to make it unwinnable. However, because it is so short, there
    really is no problem in playing through it quite a number of times, in
    search of an adequate solution.

    You might wonder if this might not be boring. The answer is no. It's not
    boring because it is so cleverly written. Yes, the style is rather
    terse, but it is in just the right tone to bring about a sense of
    hurriedness, which actually combines rather well with the game's time
    constraints, creating a feeling of impending doom. It's almost like you
    can't type fast enough to see if you've got it this time.

    The technical aspect is where the game really shines. As both a player
    and an author, it was easy for me to see the intricate ballet that the
    various pieces of code have to participate in, in order to create the
    desired effects, and the author pulls it off impeccably. Also, there are
    no spelling or grammar errors of any kind, which I could spot. I should
    note that the supporting website mentions a known bug, but I didn't come
    across it in about an hour's worth of playing and possibly 30 restarts,
    so I'm not going to take it into account.

    And finally, there are the puzzles. For the first time in this
    competition, I have found puzzles that are hard and yet fair. They are
    all rather deductive in nature. I did have to go to the hints twice, but
    I only because I was getting a bit tired of trying so many things in so
    many games. If this had been the first game I played, I would not have
    needed hints. Also, for the first time in a long while, this is a game
    where knowing the solutions is one thing, but pulling them off
    successfully is another. And I'm not talking about guess-the-verb, here;
    I'm talking about the need for careful planning and detailed execution.
    Again, the ABOUT text mentions unfairness, but I have to disagree. The
    solutions are plainly there, and no, they are not based on knowledge
    from previous lives, they are based on pure deductive reasoning. Kudos.

    Story: 3 (a basic premise, with a bonus point for a brilliant delivery)
    Writing: 2 (terse, but very well done, nonetheless; combines well with
    the game's puzzles)
    Technical: 2 (and it would still be a 2, even with the mentioned known
    bug)
    Puzzles: 2 (hard but fair; very imaginative)

    Final rating: 9

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

    From: Carolyn Magruder

    TITLE: Bellclap
    AUTHOR: Tommy Herbert
    EMAIL: cavebloke SP@G excite.com
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Inform altered
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/bellclap/bellclap.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Score: 9 out of 10.

    By the brief amount of time spent upon this game (I completed it in 8
    minutes), one might presume that I disliked it -- but, much to the
    contrary, I enjoyed it a great deal. I spent less time on it because it
    was late, I was tired, and I wasn't feeling particularly brilliant,
    which means that I hit the walkthrough in doubletime. (If you get the
    impression from reading my reviews that I'm a great believer in
    walkthroughs... you are absolutely right. I get stuck, I hate being
    stuck, and I like being unstuck. Bring on the hints and bring on the
    walkthroughs! I do this for the story, not for the frustration.)

    I loved the interface! The premise took only seconds to understand, and
    it was designed with a wonderful sense of quirky humor. In sum, you are
    a deity -- not an omnipotent one, but one who works through
    communication and inspiration. The main character is the hapless
    Bellclap, a pathetic shepherd who worships you and has taken shelter
    from a rainstorm in your temple. The parser is your obedient servant who
    relays your entries on the command lines to Bellclap and passes back
    information on Bellclap's actions. I don't think I've seen it done
    before, and, if it has been done before, I doubt it's been done as well
    as it was done here.

    The puzzles were a bit more cunning than I was ready to face without the
    walkthrough in hand, but they all left me with a delighted "ah-hah, what
    fun!" feeling. One command did not occur to me without the assistance of
    the walkthrough, but looking at the related object provided a cue for
    the command, so I would presume that other people would not have this
    difficulty.

    The writing was excellent, the PC was memorable, the major NPC was
    memorable, and I only found one bug in the whole game. (Admittedly, I
    wasn't looking for them, but still!) That bug dealt with an object
    failing to change its messaging in a fashion that I expected at the end
    of the game, and, while mildly annoying, it really didn't reduce my
    enjoyment.

    Thank you very much, Tommy Herbert! I can't help noticing that you
    haven't got any other fiction in the IF Archive... a pseudonym, perhaps?
    If so, I look forward to finding out what else you've written. I plan to
    play it as promptly as possible if I haven't played it already.

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

    From:	Joao Mendes
    [Originally posted on rec.games.int-fiction]

    TITLE: The Big Scoop
    AUTHOR: Johan Berntsson
    EMAIL: johan SP@G microheaven.com
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/scoop/scoop.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Wake Up: Disoriented

    Well, actually, the wake-up part applies only to the prologue, as you
    switch protagonists when the actual game starts. Namely, you start out
    as a woman being framed for murder who must escape an embarrassing
    situation, then switch over to a journalist who sets out to help her
    prove her innocence. Pretty standard stuff. Even the story behind the
    murder itself is a bit on the plain vanilla side, and the game even
    comes with its own "too-stupid-to-shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later"
    garden variety villain. This is not saying that it is badly done, mind
    you. Even with such a bland theme, the author does a competent job of
    putting together a well-paced story, complete with an action sequence at
    the end. Throughout, the game feels like a 50-minute episode from some
    80's detective TV show.

    The level of writing is rather decent, although there is a distinctive
    feel that English is not the author's first language. No glaring errors
    or grammar inconsistencies that I could spot, which is nice, but the
    whole thing lacks in force in some way. I felt like I was watching the
    show, rather than being part of it.

    Technically, again, not a bad job at all. I didn't hit any snags, and I
    enjoyed the implementation of the NPCs in the story. They all played
    their standard parts in the plot, rather flatly if one thinks about it,
    but they behaved so much exactly like I expected them to that they
    actually felt alive. There were a couple of points where I hit my head
    against parser limitations, however. That feeling of knowing exactly
    what you want to do but not knowing how to phrase it so the game
    understands it can bit a bit annoying.

    As for the puzzles, they neither add to nor detract from the story.
    Again, much like an 80's TV show, the things the characters do are
    rather self-contained, dealing with one problem at a time, and relying
    on what I like to call "script-writer luck" to get through some
    situations. One particular puzzle has a solution that is just contrived
    enough to make sense on TV but nowhere else. I can't go into details
    without being spoilery, but if you play it, I'm sure you'll know what I
    mean. Also, I confess I had to go to the hints for quite a number of
    times, but given the nature of my relationship to puzzles in general,
    that is to be expected.

    Story: 3 (basic, but bonus points for good pacing and internal
    consistency)
    Writing: 1 (competent and solid, but lacking in force)
    Technical: 1 (well-rounded and solid, but penalty for making me struggle
    against the parser)
    Puzzles: 1 (pretty standard stuff throughout, though competently done)

    Final rating: 6

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

    From: Carolyn Magruder

    TITLE: Blink
    AUTHOR: Ian Waddell
    EMAIL: ian SP@G the-underdogs.org
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/blink/blink.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Score: 8 of 10.

    "Blink" is a powerful, compact little game. In some ways, due to its
    length, it's hard to review it at all without spoiling it; I have to be
    very careful about what I do and don't say. The best summary I can give
    is that it involves a situation in which a man confronts the demons of
    his past and his morality. If I said anything more, I would run out of
    game.

    The writing is excellent and the game is very well implemented. Objects
    all have appearances, and, though it's menu-based, people have
    meaningful conversations and react well to what goes on around them.
    There are a few tiny grammar/spelling issues that could have been
    clobbered, but nothing I'd complain about heavily.

    I only found a couple things that bothered me in terms of parsing,
    implementation, and the like. In one case, I couldn't talk to someone
    who was talking to me. The game overrode me and provided both "You can't
    think of anything to say" and a built-in answer. In another, I couldn't
    kiss my own wife! If she's the love of my life, shouldn't I get more
    than a "no thanks" when I try? (I couldn't hug my son, either, but that
    seemed a bit more reasonable, considering the main character.)

    I talked my husband into playing this game, and he encountered a parser
    oddity when he tried to sit down on a chair that didn't exist. As a
    result, he almost sat on something that he would NOT have wanted to sit
    on. Yuck!

    This game is 95% puzzleless, but there is one puzzle, which was about to
    frustrate me before I had a stroke of luck and got it through chance.
    More experienced IF players may not have the same problem.

    Other people may find this game preachy. I did not. Others may find it
    too short; I did not. For what it was, it was precisely the right
    length, and filling it out further would have detracted from it. The
    game did promise different paths in its "about", and I didn't find them
    despite playing through it four times. (I found different responses, but
    not different endings; the different responses did not seem to be
    sufficiently different from one another to justify a "different paths"
    alert to me.) That was disappointing.

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

    [NOTE: The following review contains a bit of obscene language, quoted
    from the game. --Paul]

    From: Mike Russo
    [Originally posted on rec.games.int-fiction]

    TITLE: Blue Chairs
    AUTHOR: Chris Klimas
    EMAIL: klimas SP@G crunchable.net
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/bluechairs/bluechairs.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    This game shouldn't work. The literary allusions are forced and don't
    really cohere. The balance of realism and surrealism is cock-eyed, so
    that after the initial scene the player is swept away on an overlong
    wave of dream-logic that ultimately edges towards the monotonous. The
    puzzles are a mix of the reasonable, the evocative, and the peremptory.
    A central symbolic motif never quite swims into focus. It all wraps up
    with the hoariest cliché imaginable.

    Yet work it does, with more than enough panache to spare. Yes, all of
    the above problems are inarguably present -- the sequence in the
    maze-complex or whatever it is does drag on too long, there are some
    actions I'd never think to do if the walkthrough didn't tell me to, and
    the whole Dante-and-Beatrice angle made me roll my eyes. But man, it
    just doesn't matter. I'm willing to concede that a good part of my
    goodwill towards this game is a result of its peculiar aesthetic, and
    particularly the author's knack for description, which comes off like
    Clockwork Orange by way of Freaks and Geeks. Most of my notes for the
    game consist of memorable one-liners: the first NPC we meet is
    "simultaneously thinking of fucking some cheerleader's brains out and
    calculating how many XP a red dragon is worth," while "putting on a
    dungeonmaster grin". All of the dialogue at the party manages to be both
    clever and absolutely true-to-life, which is a neat trick indeed. The
    narration wonderfully conveys the PC's personality -- sardonic,
    detached, and yearning for meaning. Even when the prose doesn't need to
    do any heavy lifting, the author manages to toss off an offhand gem. I
    don't even remember the context for many of the lines littering my
    notes, but even on their own they're great: "A miracle of genetic
    instinct and secular humanism"; "a faint smell, the kind that ought to
    trigger an old memory but doesn't".

    The puzzles for the most part live up to the off-kilter yet sharp
    aesthetic of the prose. Nothing's more natural than the game's solution
    for how to dance better (or at least not notice that you're dancing
    poorly), and the sequence where you're forced to assign tag-lines to the
    major characters does a good job of forcing the player to recognize some
    of the thematic work that's going on beneath the surface. I do think
    they get noticeably weaker in the second half -- the entire sequence in
    the darkened passageways slows the game down, and the sharp NPC
    interaction which enlivened the party is conspicuously absent. Finding a
    hidden safe combination and navigating a maze that adds rooms as you go
    just didn't seem activities that inhabited the same universe as the rest
    of the game.

    The sequence in which the player trudges across the desert as George W.
    Bush, on the other hand, was brilliant. Possibly my personal beliefs
    brought more to this scene than the author intended, but floundering
    across the sand, attempting to justify a horrible mistake, definitely
    brought to mind the Iraq war, and made me feel the queasy sense of
    uncertainty that the PC suffered. I'm unsure how well this scene would
    work for anyone else, or indeed at any other point in time, but as far
    as I'm concerned it was the single most effective moment of the comp.

    Again, I don't mean to elide the game's real problems -- all of those
    above mentioned, and it must be conceded that the prose does lurch
    towards wordiness on occasion. But there's real ambition on display
    here, and the places where everything clicks, it works about as well as
    anything in IF can possibly work.

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

    From: Carolyn Magruder

    TITLE: Die Vollkommene Masse
    AUTHOR: Alice Merridew
    EMAIL: Omega SP@G catandrabbit.net
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: TADS
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Currently unavailable -- pulled from comp
    VERSION: comp release

    Score: 3 of 10.

    The premise of this game: you are a teenage female drow who has been
    captured by four warlords. You are now a prisoner in the castle, but, if
    you "please" (author's wording, not mine!) all of the warlords, you will
    be allowed to go free. This sounds significantly more pornographic than
    it actually is.

    In her introduction, the author notes, "Interactive fiction was just a
    stone’s throw for me, being an author by nature." As upbeat as this
    approach may be, it is simply not enough. I, too, have written my share
    of fiction, but the requirements of good interactive fiction are
    significantly different than the requirements of good writing. I cannot
    speak to the author's regular fiction, but this was simply not
    sufficient. At this point, what "Die Vollkommene Masse" actually needed
    was a massive round of NPC-fleshing followed by a lot of beta-testing.

    I didn't mind the menu-based conversation system except when it
    exploded. Time after time, I found myself stuck with only one option for
    conversation and able to enter that option over and over and over ad
    infinitum. The major NPCs were all quite active when I was in the room
    with them, which I appreciated -- it gave me a very good sense of their
    general personalities -- and having one travel from place to place was a
    nice touch. However, the NPCs were quite unresponsive when offered
    objects, giving me the same response over and over, which left me
    failing to offer them the correct objects for the plot because I had no
    reason to believe that they would react in any different way than the
    default.

    Others will doubtlessly disagree with me, but I liked the feature of
    listing the exits to the rooms -- it kept me from getting lost. While
    realism obviously took a step to the wayside in organizing the layout of
    the castle, I didn't mind that, either. I object to getting lost, and I
    didn't get lost; I dislike mapping, and I didn't have to map (even
    without checking the maps that she rather graciously included.) That was
    good. Some of the rooms had very nice descriptions, too; I particularly
    liked one line about how moonlight cast a milky glow around the room.
    Some of them had virtually no descriptions, or else had no actual
    substance save a list of objects (a dresser, a desk, a bed, etc.) That
    was annoying.

    Red herring objects: there were tons of them. I like the idea of lots of
    objects in a game, as it helps deflect the traditional adventurer's
    kleptomaniac tendencies, and I don't mind if they don't have an apparent
    purpose. However, this only holds true if they are adequately fleshed
    and implemented. These were not. As a general rule, the NPCs didn't care
    about them, and I couldn't do anything with them. (Why hand me a sword
    if you don't want me to kill people with it? At least let me try!)

    Serious bugs existed in this game, mostly related to differentiating one
    object from another. I wound up carrying around two copies of an object
    at one point without any ability whatsoever to affect either one because
    the game kept asking me which one I meant and they were identically
    named. I also discovered a number of mystery objects when the game asked
    me which one I meant in a peculiar fashion -- for example, ">examine
    window" led to "Which window do you mean, the window, or the ?" Argh.

    There were also a number of serious plot issues, all of which were
    heavily linked to the questionable morality and attitudes of the PC. The
    premise wasn't bad, but the implementation made me scream. My best (and
    least spoileresque) example is this: Very early in the game, I wandered
    outside the castle. Although the window of my fifth-story bedroom had
    been barred to prevent my escape, there were no guards in sight here.
    Super! Let's go! --but, I couldn't leave, because I didn't feel ready.
    This made and still makes no sense to me... in fact, the PC's
    ambivalence toward her captors bugged the heck out of me through the
    entire game. As far as I could tell, this wasn't a horrible prison for
    her, but a secret wish fulfillment fantasy in which she was the happy
    star as long as she could pretend that she didn't like it. The game
    warns in its beginning that it involves mature themes, but it doesn't.
    It involves an immature approach to potentially mature themes, which was
    quite disappointing.

    The introductory document promises that the game is mind-numbingly
    difficult. I will agree, but only because the author did not fully
    implement and flesh out her game. Given adequate incentive to explore
    and experiment with the NPCs, I could have finished this game quite
    swiftly and experienced minimal difficulty with the puzzles, as many of
    them were of a fetch-and-carry variety. As it was... no, I could not
    have solved it without a walkthrough... because I had no incentive to do
    so.

    The errors in spelling and grammar may not have been obtrusive to other
    people, but I found them annoying ("inticing", "There's nothing behind
    the Mbizi's bed"). The references to Mbizi's "shrunk" left me wondering
    if English was the author's native language -- the appropriate word
    seemed to be "trunk", but "shrunk" was the word repeatedly used instead
    by the author. If English isn't her native language, she did cover it
    quite well through 97% of the game, but the "shrunk" issue was bizarre.

    Partway through the game, I got tired and fell asleep. (The PC, not me.)
    Why? It was apparently night in the game, and I had been playing for
    quite some time, so I was willing to believe that the PC would fall
    asleep... but there seemed to be no point to it. This interlude could
    have been used in a very interesting fashion for a dream sequence or
    something similar, but she fell asleep, then woke up. There was no point
    to it.

    In closing, does anyone understand the meaning of the title? I am at a
    perfect loss as to how "The Perfect Mass" (as the author translates "Die
    Volkommene Masse") has anything at all to do with the game.

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

    From:	Mike Snyder
    [Originally posted at http://www.sidneymerk.com]

    TITLE: Goose, Egg, Badger
    AUTHOR: Brian Rapp
    EMAIL: rapp SP@G boutell.com
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Inform enhanced
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/geb/geb.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Brian Rapp's game is unique (at least in my not-so-extensive experiences
    with modern Interactive Fiction) in several ways. First, the
    multi-layered reality, through which you can move forwards and
    backwards, is very interesting. Second, the PC has urges in her
    inventory, which can be examined for tips on what to accomplish next.
    Third, the author uses a design gimmick, which is revealed in portions
    of the built-in tips and in the second walkthrough. I probably wouldn't
    have noticed this otherwise, and the game would have ranked 8.5 on my
    scale. I dropped half a point from the base, because it seems the game
    is mainly a vehicle for this design gimmick (the story is secondary),
    but because the gimmick appears to be so cleverly integrated beside the
    lesser solution (I scored 79 points out of 100 in the path I took), the
    implementation deserves the upward skew.

    The credits list numerous beta testers, and it shows. I noticed no flaws
    in the writing, and very few things that might be considered bugs. My
    notes show that the ape covers his ears when I'm singing, even though
    sometimes he wasn't there with me (this seemed to be immediately after
    finding him, and then returning to the north). It might be nothing. I've
    been known to misinterpret things before, seeing phantom bugs. [Note:
    This behavior is actually due to the fact that the ape follows the PC
    without the game explicitly saying so. --Paul]

    Coincidentally, this is the... hmmm, I have no idea how many now... but
    it's one of many games to begin with the protagonist waking up. I'm not
    the only one to notice it, I think. One guy emailed me about my entry,
    Trading Punches, and he made the same comment. Somebody else mentioned
    an interesting similarity between many of the entries (on R.G.I-F), and
    I bet this is what he meant.

    I can't really say much else about "Goose, Egg, Badger." I kind of
    thought it would turn out to be an elaborate version of the old logic
    puzzle -- take everything across the river one at a time (although the
    components don't really fit that). It's a puzzle game, and sometimes the
    solutions seem pretty obscure (I requested in-game hints several times).
    It's a good game, though, and the innovative gimmicks make it memorable.

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

    From: Jess Knoch

    TITLE: The Great Xavio
    AUTHOR: Reese Warner
    EMAIL: reese SP@G reesewarner.com
    DATE: 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/greatxavio/GreatXavio.z5
    VERSION: 1

    I got to The Great Xavio late in my list of games for the Comp, thanks
    to the so-called randomness of the Comp04.z5. I say "so-called" because
    my list had about five mystery games very late in the list. Clearly,
    this was the work of a mastermind computer program out to torture my
    poor brain. Not that I don't like mysteries! Well, okay, mystery games
    can vary in quality quite a bit. Let's talk about this one.

    I was a little put off at first by a missing punctuation mark, and the
    "about" text, which stated "There are hints available in the game,
    though you need to figure out how to find them yourself; WALKTHROUGH is
    available for one possible bare-bones path through the game." That set
    off some big warning flags in my mind: I normally have a tough time with
    puzzles and rely on hints to finish games in two hours for the comp. In
    addition, I am a firm believer that the walkthrough included with a
    competition game should take me down the best possible path, so that I
    can have the best possible view of your game. That is, if you want a
    good score. Anyway, it turned out that the walkthrough included with The
    Great Xavio is only bare-bones in the sense that it doesn't explain why
    you're doing all of what you're doing, or show all the different ways to
    solve each puzzle. That's not such a problem, actually, because by the
    time I turned to the walkthrough, I was almost completely done with the
    game, and just needed to solve one teensy tiny problem before ending it.
    I didn't know I was quite that close, but I was.

    I never did find the hints.

    Surprisingly (at least to anyone who's read other reviews of mine), I
    wasn't very upset about this. At all. Normally, I'm a hint junkie, but
    with The Great Xavio I found myself slowly making progress through the
    game. I had a goal, I had some tools, and perhaps most importantly I had
    various people watching me play the game in real life that I could
    complain to, who would say something reasonable like "maybe you can find
    a ___" and I would pause and think, "you know, that just might work" and
    head back to the game. The puzzles were actually intriguing enough to
    keep me involved -- especially once I had put about a half hour into it.
    The worst part was that what I saw as the first puzzle, finding and
    getting into the Great Xavio's hotel room, was actually the hardest and
    most-involved of any puzzle in the game. And you don't get any points
    until you've solved it. So, I played for quite a long time with "0 out
    of 101" points, with no indication as to how long the game would go on
    or when I would start earning these points.

    Anyway. Enough about puzzles: what about the story? Well, the character
    is a pretty interesting one, while still managing to be vague so that
    the player can identify with him easily: a grad student with only a last
    name, who teams up with a professor (Dr. Todd) to solve mysteries. Or
    maybe fight crime. Apparently they've been featured in other stories
    before, though this is their first interactive fiction game. The
    professor is a bit of a caricature, but amusing enough until he becomes
    annoying, which is probably how it's supposed to be. He could have used
    a bit more variety in his random actions.

    This review is backwards. Normally I start off talking about the
    characters and the premise, and move on to the puzzles, but in The Great
    Xavio the story is mostly an excuse to solve puzzles -- at least the
    puzzles make sense for the setting. The basic premise is that Dr. Todd
    suspects something fishy about a magician's performance, and wants to
    get to the bottom of it by searching the magician's hotel room for
    evidence. Most of the game for me was spent breaking into the hotel room
    of interest. From there, the story takes a bit of a turn and moves along
    quickly enough to a rather sudden end.

    The game starts with just a few punctuation errors, but as you get
    farther into it, a few programming bugs crop up. For example, once
    you've broken into the hotel room, you can convey to the professor the
    method of breaking in and he will give you the same speech he did before
    about what a brilliant idea of his it was. A few little things like
    this, and some annoyances with the elevator, and the fact that extra
    items get less and less well described as the game wears on, lead me to
    wish the entire game had the polish of the first few scenes I saw: the
    lobby, the bar, the basement. Towards the end, I even found a few
    solutions to puzzles by, more or less, exploiting bugs.

    Overall, The Great Xavio could use a second release (I suspect, as I sit
    here isolated from all goings-on in the IF community, it has already
    seen one). [It has. --Paul] But the puzzles are entertaining, and each
    can be solved in more than one way, giving even me (a pitiful puzzler) a
    chance to solve almost all the puzzles on my own. I don't think I would
    have gotten that last one even with extra time, so it's a very good
    thing a walkthrough was included. And as for the hints... if you make it
    a puzzle to find the hints in the first place, what happens to people
    who aren't very good at solving puzzles? They never get hints, that's
    what, and you risk leaving them out in the cold. Luckily, it worked
    here.

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

    From:	Joao Mendes
    [Originally posted on rec.games.int-fiction]

    TITLE: I Must Play
    AUTHOR: Geoff Fortytwo
    EMAIL: ifcomp2004Public SP@G g42.org
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: TADS3
    SUPPORTS: TADS3 interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/tads3/imustplay/IMustPlay.t3
    VERSION: 42.00.009

    A story of a little kid who sneaks into the video arcade after hours to
    play some games while the mean big boys are away. Cute but a bit
    pointless, if you ask me. Or not! The very first video machine I try. I
    find myself _inside_ a huge game of Tetris! This was a moment of
    realization for me, which is always nice.

    Unfortunately, once the novelty wears off, this becomes just another
    game with puzzles in it, although in its defense, I was able to figure
    out all but two of the puzzles on my own, and I only failed one of them
    because I have been awake for more than a few hours and am getting a bit
    tired. Of course, I think this game was meant to be very easy, and in
    that respect, it succeeds. There is one problem, though, and that is
    that the puzzles feel contrived. It doesn't feel like they're there to
    support the premise, rather, it feels that the premise was attained as a
    good means to collate all these random puzzles together.

    The writing in this game, though error-free, is rather bland. Then
    again, I suppose the author would have to be an absolute genius in order
    to manage to be powerful and evocative, given the subject matter. I
    mean, there's only so much you can say about Tetris. Also, technically,
    the game works very well. TADS3 handles itself beautifully, as expected,
    but the author isn't creditless either. Lots of attention to detail, and
    all the attempted actions seemed catered to.

    Story: 2 (basic, but well-rounded)
    Writing: 1 (error-free and gets the job done, but the subject matter
    lacks in power)
    Technical: 2 (a very competent use of the power of TADS3)
    Puzzles: 1 (easy and accessible, but rather contrived)

    Final rating: 6

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

    From:	Cirk Bejnar

    TITLE: Identity
    AUTHOR: Dave Bernazzani
    EMAIL: daveber SP@G gis.net
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/identity/identity.z5
    VERSION: Release 6

    Identity is an amnesia game set in a generic sci-fi setting. Your patrol
    ship has crash-landed on an unknown planet and you must unravel the
    mystery of its sabotage and find a way to get home. It bills itself as
    an Interactive Short Story, but I found the story element to be rather
    slight. Though the game told me that my memory was 100% complete at the
    end I was still none too sure of my character's name and had seen
    nothing to flesh out the backstory hinted at in the opening scene.
    Instead, pride of place is given to the puzzles which are generally well
    thought out and intuitive. There was one place where, when faced with a
    similar goal as in a previous puzzle, I tried the same solution and was
    not even given a good reason as to why it didn't work. In another vein,
    I couldn't find the radio because I missed an exit and so was in no mood
    to deal with its rather involved puzzle solution.

    The coding was strong overall and I found no explicit bugs. There were a
    few moments of awkward phrasing (why is attach implemented but not as a
    synonym of connect?), but I was able to make myself understood. The
    writing is serviceable but does not really shine. The real problem here,
    though, is the world. There is nothing strange or interesting about the
    spaceship with its standard issue escape pods and a supply closet.
    Likewise the planet is normal to the point of oddity. There is a yak in
    the mountains and a simple farming village whose friendly inhabitants
    converse with you freely. It makes a reasonable frame to hang the
    puzzles on, but gripping fiction it is not.

    All that said, I enjoyed Identity more than not. I got to figure things
    out on my own thanks to the simple puzzles and the planet seemed a
    rather nice place whose inhabitants I was happy to help.

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

    From:	Adam Myrow

    TITLE: Luminous Horizon
    AUTHOR: Paul O'Brian
    EMAIL: obrian SP@G colorado.edu
    DATE: September 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Glulxe interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF-Archive, freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/glulx/eas3
    Directory contains game file, readme, and another directory containing a
    virtual comic feelie which summarizes parts one and two.

    When Paul O'Brian announced that he wouldn't be finishing his third
    episode of Earth And Sky in time for the 2003 competition, I was
    slightly disappointed. Still, I knew that he would eventually finish.
    Well, he did, and once again, won the competition. In short, that extra
    year paid off. I said that part two was great, but part three is even
    better!

    One of the things that I wanted to see in part 3 was more team work.
    Well, that wish was fulfilled beyond my wildest dreams. In this, the
    final part of the story, you play both Emily and Austin Colborn. You can
    freely switch between controlling one or the other at any time. In fact,
    it is critical to do this in order to figure out which of them will have
    the needed super-power to get past whatever is blocking the path. This
    game is much more tightly timed than parts one or two. This is
    especially true of the final battle, which is a desperate race against
    the clock with little room for error. While the game has been designed
    so that it can't be put into an unsolvable state, that doesn't mean you
    won't meet a grisly end or fail to stop the bad guys. Most of the time,
    learning by dying annoys me, but not in this game. It helped to build
    the tension, and made me feel really proud of myself when I figured out
    what to do to survive.

    This final chapter in the story will bring the player face-to-face with
    the enemies they learned about in part two, and there will be a few
    surprises in store as well. Winning was a very satisfying experience
    indeed.

    More impressive than the battles and such, was the way Luminous Horizon
    handles the switching between the two characters. Both Austin and Emily
    are very well-developed in parts one and two, and the switches between
    them help to reinforce the attitudes of each. For example, Austin is a
    bit more level-headed than Emily, and there is both a little sibling
    rivalry and affection between them. Austin calls Emily "Em" for short,
    and she is occasionally annoyed at how Austin is somehow able to figure
    out things that go right over her head. Here are a few examples of room
    and object descriptions from each character's viewpoint. I've preceded
    each with either "as Austin:" or "as Emily:" to denote which character
    the player is in control of at the time of this description.

    As Emily:

       High Plains
       You've never been much of a fan of Westerns, but this area just seems
       to cry out for some cowboy to mosey through it. Everything's here --
       the scrappy little bushes, the rocky ground, the mountains in the
       eastern distance, and the sense of barren desolation. All that's
       missing is a lonely ghost town and a tumbleweed slowly bouncing
       across the frame. The air seems unusually still here, as if the
       landscape were holding its breath in anticipation.

       A damaged road sign lies at your feet.

       Austin is nearby, apparently lost in thought.

    As Austin:

       High Plains
       Scrub bushes and sparse grasses provide a little ground cover for the
       otherwise rocky, sandy soil of this area. Other than the jagged
       mountains looming a few miles to the east, this spot seems entirely
       barren.

       Emily is here, watching you.

       A damaged road sign lies at your feet.

    As Emily:

       >x vehicle
       The vehicle (assuming Austin has guessed right about its function) is
       large and sleek, roughly rectangular in shape but tapering a bit at
       one end. Its entire surface is covered in a mazy tangle of pipes.
       Pipes wind around each other and down every side and edge, some
       terminating in a flare at the ground and others opening dark holes at
       the ship's untapered end. Except for the fact that its color scheme
       is muted greys and blacks, it looks rather like something that might
       have appeared in Yellow Submarine. No entrance is apparent anywhere.

    As Austin:

       >x vehicle
       The vehicle is large and sleek, roughly rectangular in shape but
       tapering a bit at one end. Its entire surface is covered in a mazy
       tangle of pipes. Pipes wind around each other and down every side and
       edge, some terminating in a flare at the ground and others opening
       dark holes at the ship's untapered end. The whole thing looks a bit
       like an unfortunate collision between a shoebox and a French horn. No
       entrance is apparent anywhere.

    As these examples make clear, I really enjoyed switching back and forth,
    just to examine objects and rooms as each character.

    Yet one more feature of this piece of IF is that it actually can show
    the player one of several different introductions. At the beginning, you
    can optionally answer some questions about how previous sessions with
    the other two games in the series turned out, and the introduction will
    be customized to reflect your answers. In short, nearly everything has
    been thought of already and taken care of.

    Lastly, like the previous two Earth And Sky games, this one is broken up
    into sections. Each game has used a slightly different method of
    dividing itself up. Part one used titles like "Suit Yourself," at the
    start of each section. Part 2 used quotes from Emily Dickinson which
    were chosen to fit the situation. Part 3 gives the player a peek at what
    the villain is up to at the start of each section. This is yet another
    way of building the suspense up. Even before the game starts becoming
    tightly timed, I felt like I had to hurry to stop the villain.

    So, in short, I can't say enough good things about this game. It closes
    out the trilogy in style, and shows that taking the extra time to polish
    a game is well worth the effort.

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

    From:	Jennifer Maddox

    There are two types of games in Interactive Fiction: those that are
    puzzle-driven, and those that are story-driven. Luminous Horizon
    definitely falls under the latter category, and if you're the kind of
    player who enjoys that type I highly recommend this game. It is the
    third and final episode of the Colborn siblings' attempt to find their
    parents, a mission that has taken them from a quaint University town, to
    the Sierra Nevadas, to outer space, and finally strands them in the
    middle of nowhere, New Mexico.

    There are a number of good things about this game, one of which is that
    you really don't need to have played the prior two installments of the
    series in order to play and finish this game. But if you're going into
    this game and want a good recap of the story so far, the web comic
    feelie that accompanied the game does a great job of bringing you up to
    speed without giving away any spoilers whatsoever. It's well written and
    quite entertaining, two attributes that are prevalent throughout
    O'Brian's works. I'd also like to give kudos to J. Robinson Wheeler for
    his artwork. I'd recommend that you read the feelie even if you have
    played the previous games - it just ties in so well with the style and
    feel of the games.

    The included comic feels especially appropriate, as the characters in
    this game could have come straight out of a graphic novel. The banter
    and conversation that comes forth when Austin and Emily talk really make
    one believe they are brother and sister. I might like to have seen a
    little more sibling rivalry between the two, but considering that their
    parents are missing I guess this pair of super heroes have had to put
    other differences aside and learn to work together. While playing EAS3
    you can choose to inhabit either sibling, a great feature and addition
    from the previous games. This gives the player different perspectives on
    the events taking place, and really allows one to combine the powers of
    both the suits to defeat the forces of evil. Speaking of evil, I must
    say that the villains are equally well written and nicely wicked.
    Throughout the game the player is given glimpses of the pair, giving you
    not only a nice feel of what you're up against but also clues at what
    this devious duo is up to. This works well for the story; the occasional
    clues keep the tension going and leads the player towards the inevitable
    climax.

    Unfortunately, the competition release of EAS3 did contain a few
    noticeable bugs. It's good to note though, that none of them render the
    game into an unwinnable state and I hope the next release of the game
    fixes some of the more obvious bugs. As for the puzzles within the game,
    well... I did say before that this game falls under the heading of
    story-driven IF. The puzzles are simplistic and are in the "find key,
    unlock door" format. That is to say, they are not compounded or
    intricate, and the author is clearly more focused on the storyline and
    characters. And as for the previously mentioned climax, I must confess
    and say I was disappointed when I reached it. I had hoped for more, and
    found it easily overcome.

    The hint system in this game is in the format of talking to your sibling
    in order to get the help needed to overcome the obstacle. An intuitive
    move on the part of the author, but quite a leap from the previous
    game's hint system which was a web-based series of questions. It makes
    sense, if you think about it, to have your partner-in-crime-solving help
    you out as you try to get past the puzzles. I must say though, compared
    to the excellent hints from second game in the series I was dissatisfied
    by the hints received from the finale. They aren't as helpful -- being
    location based it's sometimes hard to know where you need to be focusing
    your attention on -- and once you have heard the final hint from your
    sibling there's no way to get them repeat themselves. It is therefore
    possible to have yourself stuck somewhere, unsure of what to do, and
    when you consult your hint source receive only "You've said all you can
    think of to say at the moment". It can be quite frustrating at times. I
    just felt that the format and quality of the hints from the second
    installment were superior, and would hope that O'Brian would continue in
    that fashion in his future games.

    Overall Luminous Horizon is a great way to pass the time and nice
    conclusion to the saga started by Earth and Sky. While it might not be
    the most challenging text adventure you're likely to come across, it is
    still amusing and certainly has made its mark in the annals of
    interactive fiction. If you're looking for a good challenge, however,
    might I recommend that you bypass this game and move onto the runners-up
    in the 2004 IF Comp: Blue Chairs and All Things Devours.

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

    From:	Cirk Bejnar

    TITLE: Mingsheng
    AUTHOR: Deane Saunders
    EMAIL: deane SP@G rexx.co.uk
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/mingsheng/mingsheng.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Mingsheng is an interactive retelling of the mythical origins of Tai
    Chi. The puzzles are not to difficult and are for the most part
    intuitive and well clued. Only the last one left me scratching my head.

    The writing is fairly strong and creates a good sense of place, through
    the occasional asides about Taoist philosophy were a bit much for me.
    The game inhabits a very different metaphysical space from my own and I
    found its more didactic moments off-putting. But there was never more
    than a temporary annoyance.

    The coding was competent and I found no bugs. The design was likewise
    strong with no wasted locations and clear connections between them.
    Items were only used once, but locations sometimes had more than one
    purpose. Special kudos for the design of the knowledge puzzle. I've seen
    several IF games attempt to test learning rather than merely item
    gathering but this is the best example that I've seen to date.

    To sum up, Mingsheng is a strong if not particularly outstanding entry.
    It is fairly short, even by comp standards and there are one or two
    places where additional polish would be nice. Nevertheless, it fully
    succeeds in what it set out to do, and does so with style and grace.

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

    From: Jacqueline Lott
    [Originally posted at http://www.allthingsjacq.com]

    I appreciate this piece on a couple of different levels.

    As a fellow author, I appreciate writing a piece of interactive fiction
    to explore a concept, to create a world in which themes can be
    envisioned and realized, to develop an atmosphere that nurtures the
    quiet that you embrace through your observance of the Tao. This isn't a
    game about achieving a goal so much as it's a piece about exploring the
    path. My guess is that Saunders wrote this as much for himself as he did
    for others (or perhaps more).

    As a player, I appreciate the concepts that shone through in the piece,
    even if they weren't fully realized: beauty, nature, complement,
    strength through peace; though this was not a good medium for what he
    was trying to achieve. I'm at a loss as to what method might be better
    suited for the task, though... short of experiencing the story in the
    real world.

    As someone who has spent a bit of time comparing the Tao and Buddhism
    (though not nearly enough), and as someone who practices daily
    meditation, and as someone who is fascinated and inspired by the
    traditional (not necessarily contemporary) Chinese love of nature, as
    someone who spends a disproportionate amount of time thinking about and
    interacting with nature, I enjoyed the experience as much as I could.
    It's difficult to appreciate the quiet of the piece while you're running
    about through the woods solving puzzles.

    The drive behind the plot will have meaning for some, I think, but not
    most. Again, however, I respect the author's reasons for writing this
    (though of course I'm only speculating as to his desires). This was an
    excellent attempt, but for some reason it just didn't grasp me in quite
    the way that I believe was intended. The appreciation of the subject
    definitely shines through, but somehow it's jumbled and confused and
    tarnished by the medium. It should have affected me more, and I suspect
    that I'm probably one of the competition players most open to the idea
    of a game like this.

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

    From: Carolyn Magruder

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

    Score: 1 out of 10.

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

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

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

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

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

    From: Carolyn Magruder

    TITLE: Order
    AUTHOR: John Evans
    EMAIL: jevans SP@G alum.mit.edu
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/order00/order00.z5
    VERSION: Release 0 (comp release)

    Score: 4 out of 10.

    The premise of "Order" is an interesting one. You are a spirit summoned
    from another place to help a group of wizards, properly armed with the
    power of creation. The introduction is strong, and the two NPCs are
    well-written and responsive when questioned. Most of the game is
    well-written, in fact, or I would have scored it significantly lower. I
    only wish the substance of the game stood up to the apparent skill in
    its writing.

    I found the game's puzzles to have three serious flaws, which I will
    attempt to address without spoiling anyone's enjoyment too severely by
    giving anything away.

    The first flaw: this game turned out to be an almost Diablo-esque
    killfest. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy Diablo rather a bit. Killing
    random monsters isn't generally what I'm looking for in interactive
    fiction, however, and, if killing them is required, I would like it to
    be a bit more complex than this. Not necessarily more difficult, but...
    more meaningful. I killed a monster, yay... so what?

    The second flaw: the one puzzle that is particularly complex relies upon
    scenery objects that, as far as I can tell, do not show up in the room
    description. I read the hint, and then I read the room description, and
    I looked around as much as I could. Without the hint's information, I
    could not find any way of determining that these rather significant
    objects even existed, and they would both have been rather difficult to
    miss if I were actually standing in that location in real life.

    The third flaw was an issue of mimesis. I eventually understood the real
    idea behind the PC from the context of the introduction, death, and
    success messaging, but I would *never* have tried some of the creation
    suggestions in the hint menu because they seemed so inappropriate to the
    game world. Instead of being further drawn into the game world, this
    knocked me for a spin. (One of the more appropriate suggestions in the
    hint list didn't actually work when I tried it, too. Phooey.)

    This game is also running under a time limit, and it didn't seem fair
    not to explicitly warn the player about the time limit in the beginning.
    I wanted to hang out and chat with the NPCs, after all, as the NPCs were
    the greatest strength of the game and far more interesting than the
    puzzles. I suppose it made sense for bad things to happen if I just
    stuck around chatting with NPCs, but perhaps the NPCs could have told me
    to hurry up or something?

    On a final note of disappointment, I had to play through the game twice
    to understand the ending. The name of one major NPC is sometimes given
    as the first and sometimes as the last, and failing to link the two
    confused me utterly.

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

    From:	Valentine Kopteltsev

    Right off the bat, I'd like to apologize to Mr. Evans for this review
    sounding somewhat didactic -- it really isn't meant to. I'm quite aware
    that a) I lack the necessary achievements in IF authoring to teach
    others how to write games, and b) even if I had such accomplishments,
    playing IF coach without being asked to would be rather importunate on
    my part. What follows is by no means a lecture -- just my personal
    thoughts; I honestly hope I managed to express them in such a way
    nobody's feelings are hurt. However, if I didn't, please be lenient to
    me -- it's not my bad intentions, it's just my clumsy pen.

    Mr. Evans is a regular participant in the IF-Comp since 2000, and the
    more games by him I played, the stronger grew my impression that a
    redundancy of inspiration might sometimes be as much a problem as its
    scarcity. I mean, with such a vast amount of creativity longing to break
    free, it's really difficult not to give in to the temptation of
    expanding a work that's supposed to be a modest two-hour piece into
    something monumental. Once the author gives in, however, (s)he
    automatically finds him/herself facing a number of serious challenges,
    with his/her chances of doing well in the Comp dropping dramatically.
    For one thing, it's very likely most players won't be able to complete
    such a long game, and thus will rate it lower than it deserves. For the
    other, a large work generally requires a lot more efforts to maintain
    its consistency, to neatly resolve its story without any loose ends, and
    to sufficiently beta-test it than a small one, so that the author takes
    the risk of not getting these tasks done properly before the deadline
    for the Competition. Which (I mean, not getting the aforementioned tasks
    done), in its turn, will impair the game's overall quality.

    Well, I had the feeling that all Mr. Evans' entries in the previous
    IF-Comps fell victim to the problems described above. In 2000, there was
    Castle Amnos, conceived as an epic, yet not completed by the author and
    not completable by the player. A year after, Elements followed, which
    had a promising (and very stylish) beginning, but unfortunately became
    unbelievably obscure in respect to both puzzles and plot later on.
    Competition 2002 introduced Hell: A Comedy of Errors, a work possessing
    some really quirky and elegant features; however, it was hardly
    enjoyable as a game. Finally, the previous year brought up Domicile, a
    wild pile-up of essentially unrelated fantasy worlds that I hadn't got
    the guts to finish in spite of playing from the hints.

    This year, however, fetched positive changes. It seems that with Order,
    Mr. Evans has finally managed to restrain his own creative power, and to
    produce a game of an appropriate size for the Competition, which is
    quite playable (and winnable!) without a walkthrough. But the best news
    is, although the obscurity had to go (being replaced by sense of
    proportion), the nifty ideas stayed!

    Actually, there is one nifty idea behind this game, which, however,
    seems more than enough. You play a spirit who has been summoned by a
    bunch of wizards to protect their realm. Instead of giving you weapons,
    they endowed you with the power of creating various objects.

    In fact, the whole story spins around this special ability of the player
    character, and it must be said that this aspect of the game is
    implemented with great care. All puzzles have to be solved by creating
    appropriate objects; even better, most puzzles have got multiple
    solutions (where "multiple" often means not just "more than one" but
    "more than two" or even "more than three"). There are quite a number of
    various objects you can create (including several obscure ones, but
    since they're not required for winning, that's no problem at all). Of
    course, my morbid imagination also provided for lots of things that
    couldn't be created, but this is the case where I perfectly understand
    one can't have everything: even my aforementioned morbid imagination
    isn't enough to envision the size a game allowing the creation of ANY
    object existing in the world would have!

    If anything, I'd rather say there were too many objects I could create.
    What I mean is the following: Order has a fantasy setting -- and yet, I
    found that I was able (and at one point, it even was necessary for
    winning) to create things like rolls of duct tape and fire
    extinguishers. That'd be perfectly fine for, say, an Unnkulian game, but
    Order acted deadly serious for the most part, so that such objects just
    didn't fit into the scene.

    There was, however, a much more serious problem: it appears that the
    author was so thrilled by implementing the main gimmick he more or less
    neglected most other crucial game aspects. This neglect showed through,
    for instance, in the way most standard responses remained unchanged, no
    matter how inappropriate they were (in particular, the "X ME" default
    "As good-looking as ever" didn't seem like a suitable description for a
    spirit). Also, the setting was lacking (there are barely any scenery
    objects implemented; besides, the first four rooms I visited in the game
    had descriptions starting with "A small, bare room", "This is a long,
    low room", "This is a very large room", and "This is the west end of the
    large main hall"). But its most noticeable manifestation certainly was
    the characters. To make my point clear, I'd like to cite a short
    fragment of the game transcript, with text in square brackets
    representing my immediate reactions during playing.

      >N

      South Main Hall
      This is a long, low room. Fitted stone makes up the floor, walls and
      ceiling. The room widens to the north, and south of you is a doorway.
      Gray light filters in through windows to the north.

      A man stands near you, of late middle age; balding, with a long
      grayish beard. He wears a shapeless gray robe, and looks at you with
      distracted bright eyes. "I'm pleased you made it out of our test," he
      says. "Well, I had no doubt, of course. My name is Sevryd." He sighs.
       "Please, will you help us?"

      The elderly Sevryd stands here, immersed in arcane manipulations.

      >YES
      That was a rhetorical question.

      [Ehm... The guy probably wants to be addressed directly.]

      >SEVRYD, YES
      Sevryd has better things to do.

      [???]

    Still, ol' chap Sevryd is the most versatile character in the game: at
    least, you can ask him about a number of topics (although the scope of
    his knowledge leaves much to be desired). Others are even less inclined
    to communication; presumably they "can't leave their tasks to assist
    you", even after you master these tasks for them. A fellow who can't be
    killed because "he's a little busy right now" tops off this mob of
    dummies.

    Uhm, again, I'm not saying I didn't enjoy Order at all. It's still a
    decent game, despite all its faults. However, some more attention to
    "minor" aspects could make it A LOT better, and possibly turn it into a
    gem. Well, there's still hope for Mr. Evans' entry in the next IF-Comp.

    The SNATS (Score Not Affecting The Scoreboard):

    PLOT: Fairly generic, but not without an interesting twist (1.1)
    ATMOSPHERE: One of the "minor" aspects that didn't get sufficient
                attention (0.8)
    WRITING: Certainly not the strongest part of the game (0.9)
    GAMEPLAY: Relaxed puzzle-solving (1.2)
    BONUSES: The very idea of object creation plus cleverly implemented
             multiple solutions (1.6)
    TOTAL: 5.6
    CHARACTERS: I know, "a mob of dummies" doesn't sound too nice, but it's
                the truth (0.6)
    PUZZLES: Smartly built around the PC's special ability (1.3)
    DIFFICULTY: Easy enough, although solving it is fun (5 out of 10)

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

    From: Dan Shiovitz
    [Originally posted on rec.games.int-fiction]

    Ah, John Evans. He exploded onto the IF scene with Castle Amnos,
    described by many as "an interesting fantasy game premise, but with some
    nasty bugs -- perhaps you should get some beta-testing." This was
    quickly followed with Elements and Hell: A Comedy of Errors, two games
    with interesting fantasy premises but in need of beta-testing and a
    fuller implementation. Last year he made a stunning break from tradition
    with Domicile, a game in need of beta-testing, though with an
    interesting fantasy premise, and finally, this year Evans presents
    Order, showing he has truly mastered the genre of games with interesting
    premises but that are, nevertheless, sadly in need of beta-testing. This
    one does have hints and is finishable, at least, even if major objects
    are lacking nouns mentioned in the room description. Anyway, Evans can't
    take a hint, so I guess the thing for me to do is give his games lower
    and lower scores each year from now on until I give up on them entirely.
    If you aren't feeling this jaded you may enjoy bits of Order. Then
    again, you may not.

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

    From:	Adam Myrow

    TITLE: The Orion Agenda
    AUTHOR: Ryan Weisenberger
    EMAIL: ryanwif SP@G comcast.net
    DATE: September 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF-archive freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/orion/orion.z5
    VERSION: Release 9 (comp version)

    This was one of several games in this year's competition involving space
    travel of some kind. It was also the most well-polished game I've ever
    encountered from a first-time author. Sure, it isn't perfect, but it's
    far better than many competition entries from first-time authors.

    The story is told in an unusual way. It starts out in the present, with
    you, the PC, waking up in a hole. Then, it flashes back to the past to
    explain how you got there. The majority of the game is in this
    flashback, and the end of the flashback marks the start of the endgame.
    I've run across this technique in books a few times, and I've always
    thought it was a great way of getting the reader's curiosity. Last year,
    Atomic Heart tried something similar, but because of the many problems
    in the game, it didn't work for a lot of players. In this game, the
    technique works quite well in my opinion.

    As for what the story is, you have recently been promoted to Captain.
    Your first mission is to accompany your partner down to the planet Orion
    on an investigation. For some reason, communications with the monitoring
    station on the planet have been lost. Your job is to find out why. Of
    course, there is one important rule. This rule is that you must not
    under any circumstances contaminate the alien culture. This is the rule
    that Star Trek calls the Prime Directive, and apparently, this
    similarity bothered some people. It didn't bother me at all. Of course,
    your mission won't turn out to be as easy as you thought it would be.
    Otherwise, there wouldn't be much of a story. You must learn about the
    people of this alien world, and there are lots of puzzles to solve. The
    game does a fairly good job of blending story and puzzles. While some
    thought the story was a bit too predictable, I liked it because it's
    classic science fiction. Finding out what was going on and doing
    something about it was very rewarding indeed.

    There are several neat features in this game. First, it's one of those
    rare games where your actions have a long-term effect. To say much more
    would be a spoiler, but suffice it to say, how you treat other people is
    more important than it usually is in most IF. Another thing that sets
    this game apart from most others is the fact that it is written entirely
    in first-person. While this isn't a new idea, there isn't one single
    place that I could find where this first-person point of view is broken.
    Again, reactions to this were mixed among the judges. I don't have a
    problem with first-person, as long as it is done well, and for that, The
    Orion Agenda can't be faulted.

    Lastly, this game avoids many mistakes often made by novice authors. For
    example, the first time a room is entered, the PC may remark on it, and
    those remarks won't get repeated. Sometimes, room descriptions will
    change, and those changes will be entirely appropriate. The only things
    I found wrong with the game were a few grammar errors and clunky
    parsing. However, it's clear the game has been tested, and it will
    handle a lot of player input that many games won't. It was a strong
    first offering, and I hope to see more from this author.

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

    From: Carolyn Magruder

    TITLE: The Realm
    AUTHOR: Michael Sheldon
    EMAIL: mike SP@G mikeasoft.com
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: TADS2
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/tads2/realm/realm.gam
    VERSION: comp release

    Score: 3 out of 10.

    The writing in this game varied unreliably between quite good and quite
    questionable. One of my favorite lines was in the first room: "Sunlight
    filters in through the small window above your bed, casting an
    accusatory light on your dirty room." Regrettably, there were two run-on
    sentences in the introduction immediately before it, and I swiftly
    discovered that my inventory included "a shoes" and "a boots". As well,
    most of the rooms were little more than a simple listing of directions
    -- a pity, considering the brief flashes of brilliance.

    One of the first objects I encountered was a guide pamphlet that
    substituted for a HELP command. While the idea was well-meant, it seems
    to me that anyone who knows enough to open a chest, take out the
    pamphlet inside, and read the pamphlet would benefit much more from a
    HELP or ABOUT than from the pamphlet.

    The puzzles could have been solved on the brute-force technique of "find
    the object, give the object". Aside from using the brute-force
    technique, I was at a loss as to how two of the puzzles would have been
    solved -- despite solving them with the walkthrough, they simply did not
    make sense to me. One puzzle had a rather elegant alternate solution,
    but it didn't occur to me to try it. Another of the puzzles was outright
    disgusting -- I suppose it was meant to be funny, but I just found it
    gross.

    I wasn't wild about the setting, I wasn't wild about the puzzles, and
    most of the writing was dismaying. I only found one bug, but it was an
    odd one -- I could ask myself questions and always get back the response
    "I don't know much about that." Those issues aside, though, the ending
    was very funny. It's almost worth playing the game just to see the
    ending... but I would rather see a better version of the game, instead
    -- one where the journey is just as pleasing as the destination.

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

    From:	Adam Myrow

    TITLE: Splashdown
    AUTHOR: Paul J. Furio
    EMAIL: pjf SP@G staticengine.com
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF-archive freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/splashdown
    directory containing PDF documentation, walk-through, and game.

    This was not only one of many games involving space travel this year, it
    was one of at least 3 games in which you wake up from cryogenic sleep to
    find that a disaster has taken place, and you are the only one who can
    do something about it. Why this particular story line was so popular
    this year is a mystery, but this is the best of the games to explore
    this subject. The game gives credit to Steve Meretzky for inspiring the
    author, and the influence is pretty obvious. For example, you will find
    lots of broken machines which need fixing, there is a robotic companion
    who makes cute remarks and follows you around, and of course, your
    companion is necessary to solve some of the puzzles. Of course, if you
    have played Planetfall, this will sound rather familiar. Continuing in
    the Infocom tradition, this game has several humorous bits. The included
    PDF documentation is a side-splitting parody of a travel brochure and an
    even better spoof of a legal document. When I discovered the exact
    reason for the cause of the disaster, I was left laughing out loud.

    As for the story, you are one of several other colonists who are
    traveling to a distant planet known as Ayria Prime 6. The trip will take
    over 30 years, so, of course, you are all put in cryogenic sleep to
    await your destination. So far, so good. However, when you finally do
    reach the planet, the ship crashes into the ocean. The computer wakes
    you up, and you have to rescue the other colonists. Naturally, you start
    out with a very tight time limit, and some obstacles to overcome. Once
    you have gotten past the first major puzzle and bought yourself some
    time, the game opens up for more relaxed exploration and planning.

    While this game is clearly inspired by Infocom, it thankfully leaves out
    some of the more annoying features. There is no starvation puzzle, and
    no sleep timer. Of course, there is a light with a limited battery, but
    it's unlikely that it will be a problem. If the player should get stuck,
    there are InvisiClue-style hints to help out. They are even sprinkled
    with fake questions, just like Infocom's were. So, for fans of Infocom,
    this game will suit them well. However, I'd suggest that they wait to
    see if a second release comes out. While the first release is perfectly
    playable, there are a few grammar errors, and some parser trouble. It's
    not bad, but just not quite at the high standards that it is trying to
    pay tribute to.

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

    From: Carolyn Magruder

    Score: 7 out of 10.

    This review includes an extraordinarily mild spoiler. If you want to
    avoid all chances whatsoever that you will see a spoiler, please leave
    this review or make sure that you stop reading at the [SPOILER ALERT]
    mark. [It is quite a mild spoiler, so I've left it in, along with the
    warning. --Paul]

    You awaken in a cryotube only to discover that there is a malfunction
    and your ship is in trouble. You have been selected randomly from the
    passengers on your sleeper ship to try to save the ship. (This is a
    seriously weird backup plan on the part of the ship's designers, but, oh
    well, I'll let it go.)

    Splashdown is a neat game. Its greatest strength is its setting, which
    carries a gritty sense of realism that I appreciate. I can see this
    place, with its puddles, its mist, its broken girders, and all the rest
    of it. The room descriptions show where to go in
    aft/forward/port/starboard notation, but it didn't actually insist on it
    -- it would still accept standard north/south/east/west instructions. I
    appreciated that, too, although I wound up writing out a paper map
    because it helped me with the layout. (I have trouble keeping directions
    to about more than six rooms at a time straight in my head, so this does
    not necessarily say very much. Your mileage will probably vary.)

    As well as having a neat setting, Splashdown had neat puzzles. The
    puzzles varied in difficulty, but every one made me say "Oh, I see, that
    made good sense" afterward, and none of them involved commands that were
    not straightforward and mimetic. Some puzzles required you to twist your
    brain intuitively (which I am less good at) and some required you to
    think logically through a pattern (which I am normally better at, but I
    have a few personal excuses that sum up why I hit the hints so fast,
    although I won't bore you by actually writing them down.) Both kinds
    were pretty good at rewarding you and making the puzzle matter.

    Those who particularly object to resource-rationed games should be aware
    that Splashdown has two rationing systems in play as the game begins.
    One involves the allocation of the power supply, and the other is a time
    limit. Both are logical for the game, and I did not object to either
    one. Between the two, however, I doubt that anyone will finish
    Splashdown on a first attempt without hitting the hints very heavily (or
    the walkthrough.)

    What else is interesting about Splashdown? As I play through a game with
    the purpose of reviewing it, I take short notes in a Notepad file, and I
    refer back to them when I write the review. My first note relates to a
    nice touch of foreboding in the opening sequence, and my second note
    reads, "That PDF file is bigger than the game itself! What on earth did
    he put in there, bricks?" So I opened up the PDF file, and then added to
    the second note, "No, he put in a pretty cool intro and briefing. That's
    a lot of work for a game that won't be longer than 2 hours. I approve."
    And I do approve, and a lot of work was plainly put into the PDF file
    (although the cover page could use some smoother, straighter lines on
    the ship-- the art didn't seem to match the flavor of the game's actual
    setting to me. This is such a minute whine that the author has every
    right to whine about me including that whine.) You can play the game
    just fine without the PDF, though, which is nice.

    In an odd way, Splashdown reminds me of the Fox cartoon Animaniacs.
    Animaniacs mixes a strong dose of kid humor with a whole lot of grown-up
    easter eggs, and the result is something that you can enjoy at quite a
    few levels of knowledge. Similarly, I could enjoy Splashdown without
    understanding the easter eggs and in-jokes that are constantly spewed
    forth by the game's sidekick, Spider the maintenance robot. As it
    happens, I am familiar with most of the in-jokes... and I hated him
    anyway.

    Aside from Spider, Splashdown is a beautifully crafted sci-fi piece with
    an intense, serious tone. Spider's casual lingo and constant in-joke
    commentary is seriously detrimental to this valuable tone. He feels like
    he was written for another game entirely, a comic parody of the genre,
    and then the author adapted him for Splashdown at the last minute. I'm
    sure that isn't what happened, as the author has shown a great deal of
    insight and care in all other aspects of the game, but hearing
    repetitive references to Planetfall every 20 moves or so left me ready
    to scream. In his capacity as an information-producer and puzzle-solving
    system, he is super. In his capacity as comic relief, I wish the game
    hadn't included any comic relief! (Your mileage may vary.)

    There is one more thing I want to touch on, which relates to the subject
    of easter eggs and in-joke humor. I thought about getting out of this
    review without it, but it did affect my enjoyment of the game.

    [SPOILER ALERT]

    I hit the hints bright and early, as I've mentioned above. One hint
    begins, "Is a colonist missing?" When I spotted that heading, all my
    mental bells and whistles went off -- "Ooh! Sabotage! This is going to
    be so neat!" When I got farther and farther and farther without learning
    more about the missing colonist, I finally looked, and seeing that it
    was only an easter egg was pretty disappointing. It was perhaps an
    appropriate punishment for checking the hints so fast, but I felt like
    I'd been promised something by the game that I never received. This
    wasn't fair.

    Almost everything else about the game was, though, so that makes up for
    it. Right? Right.

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

    From: Carolyn Magruder

    TITLE: Square Circle
    AUTHOR: Eric Eve
    EMAIL: eric.eve SP@G hmc.ox.ac.uk
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: TADS3
    SUPPORTS: TADS3 interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/tads3/squarecircle/SquareCircle.t3
    VERSION: 1.0 (competition release)

    Score: 8 out of 10.

    "Square Circle" is a detailed, interesting game with a cunningly
    designed plot. Playing it without assistance from the walkthrough would
    be a task of several days due to the length of the plot and the
    difficulty of some of the puzzles (for me, at least; your mileage may
    vary.) The image of the world that it puts forward is both satirical and
    chilling. As the game begins, you awaken in a cell with instructions
    that inform you that you will only be released from prison if you
    successfully create a "square circle." Although "main character has
    amnesia" premises are becoming quite time-worn, this game handled it
    with elegant flair, and I was caught properly flatfooted by revelations
    related to the amnesia (though I suspect that speaks more to my lack of
    proper attention than to the game itself.)

    That having been said, I should admit that I relied heavily upon the
    walkthrough all the way through, which I blame partially upon myself but
    partially upon the author. I try not to spoil things in reviews, so I
    will be as vague as possible. There was a puzzle in the very first room
    that I did not get... and the HINT command completely failed to
    recognize it as a puzzle. This seems unfair; I gained points after I
    completed it, so I should have been able to get a hint for it. (It
    wasn't quite "guess the verb", but I took something for granted that the
    system did not take for granted, and confusion ensued.)

    I stopped using the walkthrough after a bit, and, lacking its advice and
    support, I then did something that I thought was a correct course of
    action. After a great deal of frustration, I returned to the
    walkthrough, and that is when I discovered it is possible to do
    something that puts the game into an unwinnable state without warning.
    As far as I could tell, I was stuck at that point until I starved to
    death. I didn't look forward to starvation. (There may have been a way
    out even then -- the author of this piece was obviously more cunning
    than I was. I didn't spend too much time looking for it, though.)

    Two puzzles seemed telepathic to me -- one was a "guess the verb"
    situation, while another required me to abandon the grammar I expected
    to need in favor of another grammar structure. (Something like "(verb) X
    on Y with Z at A" seemed like the most logical grammar to me, and what
    the game wanted was "(verb) X at A". I really needed the game to give me
    more information there.) One puzzle in a later sequence seemed
    transplanted from another game idea entirely, and it did not seem to fit
    with the "feel" of the game world to me. Aside from those objections,
    all of the puzzles seemed both fair and intelligent. Many of the puzzles
    apparently had multiple solutions, which impressed me appropriately. In
    a similar vein, it was apparently possible to end the game in more than
    one way, which I appreciated.

    Guess-the-verb and trouble with the hint system aside, I liked the
    interface a great deal. This game went out of its way to be as helpful
    as possible to the player. Among other commendable features, you could
    mouse-click your way through the help system, through exits from the
    room, and through footnotes. I'm not sure how much of the system was
    inherent to TADS 3 and how much was written by the author, but it was
    quite nice. The conversation system was both quite powerful and quite
    subtle. When I was conversing with the NPCs, the game provided me with
    the exact syntax I needed to do the things I already wanted to do
    without beating me violently about the head and shoulders with it.
    Serious kudos.

    Although the NPCs and the setting were quite interesting, there were a
    few peculiar flaws in the game world. Considering the game world in
    question, I really couldn't understand why one specific NPC hadn't been
    taken out and shot long ago, especially considering his proximity to an
    area where he would be particularly unwelcome. (I hope that was both
    vague enough to avoid spoilers and precise enough to make sense!)
    Another major figure in the game world also had an inappropriate name...
    to wit, "Dunderhead". I could see the name as a placeholder until the
    author gave him a real one, but having this jokey name in such a serious
    game was very jarring. Yes, the situation had elements of satire, but
    that pushed me past my limit in the issue. Maybe others won't react that
    way. I can't be sure.

    Despite excellent writing and a chilling world view, there was something
    about the game world that I found quite dry. I could certainly picture
    the areas described in the various rooms, but that was in large part
    because they were so generic in their description and flavor. (You've
    seen one forest, you've seen them all?) On the flip side, I have the
    feeling that many of the areas were *supposed* to feel dry and generic,
    and there were often some remarkably subtle shifts in scene and
    situation (for example, an area that changed its room description
    depending upon whether or not I was wearing something specific.) I'm
    torn between whether or not the generic nature of the area was
    intentional. It lessened my enjoyment, but it enhanced the message of
    the game. Hrmph.

    One last issue: I was disappointed to have the PC remain such an enigma.
    I wanted to know what he actually looked like -- "you look much as you
    always did" was a serious disappointment. I understood his political
    motivations by the end, and that was good, but I wanted to set those
    motivations aside and learn some more about the PC as a person. The
    hints of emotion were wonderful, but I wanted more!

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

    From: Jess Knoch

    TITLE: Sting of the Wasp
    AUTHOR: Jason Devlin
    EMAIL: jdevlin1984 SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/wasp/wasp.z5
    VERSION: 1

    Overall: Me gusta mucho. A lot of fun to play, good characterization,
    great story, with room for improvement in certain areas.

    I think "Sting of the Wasp" (hereafter SotW) is the only "Interactive
    Damage Control" that I've played. It certainly seemed like an unusual
    premise: you've been caught in a compromising position, and someone took
    a picture. You've got to find out who and destroy the evidence before
    anyone has a chance to tell your husband.

    The game begins with a warning about the strong language and sexual
    references. I am almost universally in favor of these types of warnings,
    and I much appreciate being told about things like that ahead of time.
    The warning also says "Despite the first scene, this is not a
    pornographic game." That originally gave me a good deal of pause, but I
    decided to try it out anyway. It turns out to be mostly true: the game
    is not pornographic, but the first scene *is* -- or at least it's rated
    R. But none of that part is interactive, so those who are uncomfortable
    with such things can close their eyes until that first room description
    rolls around.

    The player character, Julia, is not the nicest person in the world -- we
    know from the first scene that she's having an affair -- but her
    personality is very distinct, and it is shown very well throughout the
    game. This description of her clothes says an awful lot about her:

       >x clothes
       Nothing but the best for you. Pumps from Prada, skirt by Yves Saint
       Laurent, a gorgeous silk blouse from the much-coveted Vera Wang
       collection which is currently hanging about your shoulders, exposing
       your three thousand dollar chest.

    The setting is the country club that the PC and her husband belong to.
    There are suspects everywhere -- apparently none of these people
    particularly care for the PC. Everyone is competing for status, snidely
    putting the PC down and trying to make each other look bad. Interaction
    with the NPCs is pretty thorough -- they even react (usually by making
    catty comments) to weird things you do as the PC, like search the
    bushes, or try to walk east when there is no exit that way. It's too bad
    the game doesn't recognize "talk to ", because that seems very
    intuitive and makes sense, especially given the special note in the help
    menu -- "talk to  about " *is* implemented.

    The hint menu has an attitude, which I like. The first hint I saw was an
    excellent one, which really gave me an idea of what I needed to do
    without making me feel like I had been told what to do. Unfortunately,
    not all of the hints were quite that helpful. For instance, a simple
    "Have you talked to Rodrigo" (names have been changed) doesn't do me
    much good if I don't remember who Rodrigo is, or know where he can be
    found. A different hint might tell me he's on the polo field (places
    have been changed), but if the only reference to the polo field I can
    find is a location titled "Outside Stable (next to the Polo Field)" with
    no mention of how to get there, then I'm still kind of lost. Especially
    since the game is pretty consistent about listing the exits in all the
    other rooms.

    Speaking of listing the exits... that brings me to the part of the
    review where I talk about the stuff that doesn't work so well in the
    game. There's one location that just flat-out lists the directions to
    other rooms wrong. It wasn't too hard to figure out, though. Worse was
    trying to figure out what to do when all of the hints said "don't
    continue until you've..." and I didn't qualify for any of them. A few
    misleading responses threw me off, like when I tried to take an object
    that I thought would come in handy (and indeed, was required to solve a
    certain puzzle): it said nah, let  take care of that. I
    didn't know I had to search for it before I could take it. I had just
    assumed if it was there that I would find it.

    I had a few troubles finding the syntax required for certain actions,
    but eventually (with the help of the hints) I made my way through the
    puzzles. And oh, what fun puzzles they were! If I have a choice between
    knowing what needs to be done but struggling with the syntax, and
    wandering around trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing,
    I'll take the former every day of the week. Still, I ran into trouble
    again when I needed to use the phone and the hints said "See 'Xavier
    won't let me use the phone!'", but I couldn't find any such hint. I
    thought I was in an unwinnable state, having missed my opportunity to
    use the phone, but it turned out I was wrong. The game was pretty
    forgiving, right up until the endgame, and I had plenty of warning that
    it wasn't going to be forgiving. I'm not sure how many times it would
    have taken me to solve that on my own, but I had the hints, and that
    took care of it nicely.

    But what about the story? you ask. It wasn't just all running around
    solving puzzles, giving x to y and unlock doors, was it? Well, maybe,
    but it didn't feel like that because of the characters. You see, in
    order to get what she wants, Julia (the PC) has to find out some secrets
    of the other people at the country club and exploit them. The parts that
    I started guessing ahead of time (like the two people I suspected were
    "an item") were very satisfying to confirm! Then I suspected that
    someone else was after someone else -- the whole thing was a cross
    between a soap opera, a detective story, and some type of show where
    you're the criminal and you have to cover your tracks. I can't think of
    what that would be. Anyways, I liked it.

    Oh, and SotW doesn't get full marks for writing/story because of some
    punctuation issues. Not a big deal, just something to clean up. I did
    give it full marks for entertainment/puzzles, because it was just that
    much fun to play through and figure out. Extra-fun, in fact.

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

    From:	David Whyld
    [Originally posted on rec.games.int-fiction]

    TITLE: Trading Punches
    AUTHOR: Mike Snyder, writing as Sidney Merk
    EMAIL: sidneymerk SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Hugo
    SUPPORTS: Hugo interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/hugo/trading/trading.hex
    VERSION: 1.6

    To begin with I was quite impressed with Trading Punches. The opening
    graphic gave it a very professional look that is rare in text adventures
    these days and it seemed like I might be onto a real winner here. It was
    also one of the first games I played in this year's Comp, which was also
    a positive thing: finding a game of professional quality so early. Then
    the game started and I became less and less impressed with it the more I
    played.

    Which isn't to say this is a poorly written game. It isn't. The location
    descriptions are lengthy and nice for the most part, even if a little
    overly excessive in their use of the language. This piece from the first
    location was a classic example of excessive:

       Colorful peacrows relinquish their places in the few nearby elmpine
       trees, flying then across the open expanse, beyond the cabin, over
       the hills and away to regions unknown. Others arrive from the west,
       stopping for a moment to rest in the same few elmpines before
       continuing on a similar migratory route across the estate.

    While interesting to read, it was too flowery for my tastes and I found
    myself wishing for a shorter and to the point description. But that's
    probably just me.

    The storyline itself seems like a well-thought-out one for the most
    part. A race known as the Sheeears seem to have taken over the world and
    the human race are living uneasily alongside them. Your father is some
    kind of ambassador of the humans with their dealings with the aliens and
    this is a role you seem to assume later in the game. It's hardly a new
    or original idea but it was nicely done and could have made for a very
    interesting game, instead of a very frustrating one.

    What quickly rid me of my initial feeling of being impressed with the
    game is the way it practically forces you along the path it wants you to
    take. Take, for example, the prologue to the game. You and your brother
    Thyras are on a river bank. Thyras is throwing stones across the river.
    On the bridge are your father and uncle deep in discussion about some
    topic or other. The whole point of the prologue is to reach the stage
    where a creature known as a dactyl attacks your father, but the way this
    is reached is so poorly done you'll probably be aching to attack your
    father just to hurry matters on a little. You have to find some rocks
    and skip them across the river with Thyras. Several times. Simply
    waiting around doesn't do the trick and neither are you able to talk to
    any of the characters (or not in a way that I discovered anyway). You
    just have to follow a series of set actions which doesn't make for a
    very interesting game. Strangely enough, throwing the stones across the
    river doesn't do the trick; you have to skip them. Apparently your
    father and uncle don't want to start speaking in front of someone who
    throws stones instead...

    This being forced along a set path seemed to bog down the rest of the
    game (or as far as I reached in the two hour time limit anyway) and
    while Trading Punches had started off looking as though it might be a
    modern classic, the feeling I had when I stopped playing was that the
    writer, unfortunately, had become more concerned with the minor details
    than the big picture. The second part of the game involves wandering
    around a lot of very similar locations and filling several different
    glasses from several different punch bowls then giving the drinks to
    several different people. As far as puzzles go, this was a desperately
    dull one and without the walkthrough to help me I'd have just quit at
    that stage. I quit before too much longer anyway, as my initial
    favourable impression of the game had become somewhat lost and I was
    seriously struggling to keep my enthusiasm. Sometimes, even an
    interesting storyline and a compelling writing style just can't compete
    with mind-numbingly tedious puzzles.

    Despite my misgivings, I think I'll probably return to Trading Punches
    again at some point in the future as there's an interesting game here.
    But it's one I suspect will require a considerable amount of patience to
    get through.

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

    From:	Chris Molloy Wischer

    TITLE: Who Created That Monster?
    AUTHOR: N. B. Horvath
    EMAIL: nbhorvath7 SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: TADS2 standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS2 interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/tads2/whocreated
    VERSION: Release 1 (Competition version)

    Who Created That Monster is a satire memorable for its effectively
    nightmarish vision of Iraq in the not-too-distant future. It contrasts
    an ultra-capitalist state installed by the post-war administration
    against a highly regulatory security system, which fails to control the
    ongoing terrorist problem. Horvath's Iraq is populated by passers-by
    acting out strangely polite little interactions, politicians both weird
    and terrible, conspiracy theorists, guards and of course the
    aforementioned terrorists. Some of the NPCs are extraordinarily
    eccentric, which adds to the bewildering and somewhat unsettling
    atmosphere of the game.

    The plot, in which an investigative journalist delves into the dirty
    past of Western involvement in Saddam's activities, isn't really up to
    much, and the central mystery seems to have a completely arbitrary
    solution within the confines of the game world. Some of the writing is
    rather peculiar, with bits and pieces of geography, history and
    speculation showing up as non-sequiturs, sometimes in room descriptions
    and sometimes out of thin air.

    The programming incorporates a number of imaginative solutions to some
    long-established problems. For example, there is plenty of combat, which
    under normal circumstances would create an ever-increasing abundance of
    corpse objects, cluttering the map and causing parser problems. WCTM
    quietly steps around the problem by equipping the characters with
    weapons which transform their victims into fleeting clouds of smoke. The
    first few times it seems odd and slightly silly, but it does fit nicely
    into the almost surreal style of the game.

    However, the combat system is my main complaint about the game.
    Terrorists pop up like dwarves, becoming progressively more difficult to
    kill. Faced with the possibility of getting killed by some unlucky dice
    rolls, I very quickly went for the walkthrough in order to get the game
    finished before the combat became too threatening. Unless a game is
    specifically about defeating monsters and levelling up, I really do not
    appreciate combat which has the same overall effect as random
    deathrooms.

    _Who Created That Monster_ is an intriguing jumble with an effective
    setting; I gave it 7 out of 10.

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

    From:	Cirk Bejnar

    TITLE: Zero One
    AUTHOR: Edward Plant
    EMAIL: shed_plant SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: ALAN
    SUPPORTS: ALAN interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/alan/01/01.acd
    VERSION: Beta Version 1.2

    My first abandoned research complex game of the comp! Well, really it's
    more of a prison, but you are an experimental subject so it's close. The
    game was written last year just after the comp and the author has been
    sitting on it since then. Can I be the first to say, "Don't do this."
    Release what you've written! We want to play games all year round, not
    just in October!

    As for the game itself, it is pretty slight. The author claims that it
    shouldn't pose any problems for the player, yet almost immediately I was
    fighting with the parser about disambiguation. This was an issue
    throughout the game. The problem was especially severe with not being
    able to refer to items by their adjectives. Scope was also handled
    poorly, making it easy to refer to things that you can't see and
    shouldn't know about. Similarly "take all from drawer" was parsed as
    'take all'-including the drawer and my clothes.

    The writing was fine for the most part, though occasionally a bit over
    the top. Design was less strong, such as a blocked door that leads back
    to where you have already been and a padlock on which you can't try the
    keys you find. In addition, I would have liked at least a little more
    backstory. Who am I? How do I know the man is named Terry? Mystery is
    all well and good but confusion is not.

    Overall, Zero One was a competent text adventure, but, for me at least,
    not particularly fun. I lacked all but the most basic motivation, and
    the contrast between graphic violence and silly humor was off-putting as
    well as mimesis breaking.

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

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