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ISSUE #16 - November 28, 1998

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

    	      ISSUE # 16  -  "ONCE AND FUTURE" SPECIAL

    	     Edited by Magnus Olsson (zebulon SP@G pobox.com)
    			November 28, 1998.

    	      SPAG Website: http://welcome.to/spag

    SPAG #16 is copyright (c) 1998 by Magnus Olsson.
    Authors of reviews retain the rights to their contributions.

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

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

    Once And Future

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

    This is a rather special issue of SPAG. For the first time ever, the
    entire issue is devoted to a single game: G. Kevin "Whizzard" Wilson's
    "Once and Future" (the game formerly known as "Avalon"), recently
    released from Cascade Mountain Publishing. (There has been one theme
    issue before, SPAG 5, which was devoted to David Baggett's "The Legend
    Lives", but that issue contained reviews of many other games as well).

    The release of "Once and Future", or "OaF" for short, is a landmark in
    more ways than one. Not only is it the first commercial release of a
    text-only game in many years, but "OaF" is one of the most eagerly
    awaited games ever; in fact, it's been discussed on the IF newsgroups
    ever since Whizzard made the - monumentally premature - announcement
    back in 1993 that a game called "Avalon" would be released shortly.
    The name "Avalon", by the way, turned out to be taken (unlike book
    titles, game titles can be trademarked), so the game had to be renamed
    at the last minute (so late, in fact, that I had to do a global
    search-and-replace through the text of the reviews below).

    So, does "OaF" live up to the expectations? Hopefully the reviews
    below will begin to answer this question.

    It should be noted that all reviews except one in this issue were
    written by beta testers of "OaF". I know that there's been some
    controversy about beta testers reviewing games - the question is, can
    a beta tester review a game impartially? Personally, I think so,
    though there are clearly some problems (which are also pointed out by
    some of the reviewers). SPAG would therefore like to publish more
    reviews of "OaF" by non-testers - positive or negative makes no
    difference.

    These reviews are advance reviews, based on pre-release
    versions of the game, so some things may have changed in the published
    version. Incidentally, this is what was behind all my strange
    utterances about "secret" material delaying SPAG 15: I had originally
    planned to publish these reviews in SPAG 15, but had to delay
    publication until after the release of "OaF". Those of you who feared
    strange conspiracies behind the secret material that had to be delayed
    can feel relieved (or disappointed); this is really all there was to
    it.

    This issue also sees the return to SPAG of Sean Molley, a.k.a. "Molley
    the Mage", one of the pioneers of rec.arts.int-fiction, and one of the
    most prolific contributors in the first issues of SPAG. Welcome back!

    Footnote: The abbreviation "OaF", which is used freely throughout this
    issue, is "sanctioned" by Whizzard himself. I mention this because my
    copy of the Oxford Reference Dictionary defines an oaf as "an akward
    lout", but I don't think anybody using the abbreviation would think
    there's anything very oafish about "OaF".

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

    Apart from the release of "Once And Future", the big news on the IF
    front is that the voting in the 1998 IF Competition has been
    concluded.  The results:

    1:  Photopia, by Adam Cadre
    2:  Muse: An autumn romance, by Christopher Huang
    3:  The Plant, by Mike Roberts
    4:  Arrival, by Stephen Granade
    5:  Enlightenment, by Taro Ogawa
    6:  Mother Loose, by Irene Callaci
    7:  Little Blue Men, by Michael Gentry
    8:  Trapped in a One-Room Dilly, by Laura Knauth
    9:  Persistence of Memory, by Jason Dyer
    10: Downtown Tokyo. Present Day, by John Kean
    11: Informatory, by Bill Shlaer
    12: The Ritual of Purification, by Jarek Sobolewski
    13: The City, by Sam Barlow
    14: Where Evil Dwells, by Steve Owens and Paul Johnson
    15: Purple, by Stefan Blixt
    16: Four in One, by J Robinson Wheeler
    17: Research Dig, by Chris Armitage
    18: CC, by Mikko Vuorinen
    19: Spacestation, by David Ledgard
    20: Cattus Atrox, by David Cornelson
    21: In the Spotlight, by John Byrd
    22: Lightania, by Gustav Bodell
    23: Acid Whiplash, by Cody Sandifer and Rybread Celsius
    24: I Didn't Know You Could Yodel, by Andrew Indovina and Michael Eisenman
    25: Fifteen, by Ricardo Dague
    26: The Commute, by Kevin Copeland
    27: Human Resources Stories, by Harry Hardjono

    The next issue of SPAG will be the 1998 Competition Special, with
    (hopefully) lots of reviews, interviews, complete results, etc. Until
    then, you can find more information about the Competition at the
    official website:
    http://www.ifcompetition.org

    The games can be downloaded from
    ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition98

    ERRATA -----------------------------------------------------------------

    In SPAG 15, the byline on one of the reviews of "Firebird" was omitted
    by mistake (mea culpa). That review was written by Duncan Stevens
    a.k.a. Second April .

    In the same issue, the review of "There's a Hole in your Bucket"
    stated that "Adventure Probe" is published by Karen Tyers. Karen has
    written to point out that the 'zine is in fact published by a lady
    called Barbara Gibb. SPAG apologizes for the confusion.

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

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

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

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

    Consider the following review header:

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

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

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

    	ftp://ftp.gmd.de:/if-archive/magazines/SPAG/
     and at http://welcome.to/spag

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

    From: Adam Thornton

    NAME: Once And Future
    AUTHOR: G. Kevin Wilson
    E-MAIL: whizzard SP@G pobox.com
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: TADS
    SUPPORTS: all TADS ports
    AVAILABILITY: Commercial, published by Cascade Mountain Publishing
    	(sold by mail order only)
    URL: http://www.cascadepublishing.com
    VERSION: 1.0 (Reviews based on the final BETA version from July 1998)

    It's here.

    The most-eagerly awaited IF event of the millenium, I think it's fair
    to say, has finally arrived.

    That event, of course, is the advent of Gerry Kevin Wilson's epic
    tale: Once and Future.

    By now, everyone knows the outline of the plot, right?  Right?  Well,
    you're Frank Leandro, U.S. soldier in Vietnam.  And you jump on a
    grenade to save your buddies.  But instead of finding yourself dead,
    you find yourself on the isle of Avalon, after a little lecture from
    King Arthur about using the grail to resurrect yourself and "keep
    something very bad from happening in the real world."

    And then there you are in Avalon.  And there's quite a lot to do
    before you even can begin to get on with your quest, since you first
    have to figure out where Merlin might be, and then get yourself over
    to Faerie somehow.  There's the Lady of the Lake, and a little
    demon-possessed girl-oracle, and a mermaid with a siren song, and
    birds and snakes (no aeroplanes) and moles and mice.  Not to mention
    figuring out where the rest of the Arthurian legends come into this
    and dealing with the demons of your own past.

    And then you start piecing together what it is you're supposed to do.
    Not that it ultimately comes as much of a surprise.  If you had to
    pick the turning point where America Went Wrong This Century, I'd be
    amazed if GKW's choice was not among your top three.  And unlike
    Jigsaw, where you have to protect the past at all costs (and might not
    the world have been a better place in the absence of the First World
    War?), here you're given an opportunity to put things right.

    There are all the usual suspects: Merlin, Galahad, Lancelot, Mordred,
    the Faery Queen.  We have the second appearance in a game this year of
    True Thomas, too.  And Arthur is not the only King to be found in the
    game.  All of these--except the last, darkly alluded to but not
    specified (find him yourself!)--are characters you'd expect to find in
    a game about Camelot and the Arthurian myth-cycle.  And, as you'd
    expect, they act like you think they ought to.  Further, there's a lot
    of really terrific interaction *between* the NPCs.  This is harder
    than it looks, and I think the reason GKW did it at all is that he'd
    coded the first bits of it before he ever heard the term
    "combinatorial explosion."  The animosity between Galahad and Merlin
    is well portrayed and often funny; there are apparently about 600
    separately coded NPC responses.

    But it's not *those* NPCs at all that make the impression.  It's the
    ones that Kevin has made up for his story that really grab my
    attention.  I have a huge crush on Snookums, the brain-damaged mole
    saved by Jesus.  She's a magnificent NPC.  She's also a tool for
    solving puzzles, but she comes across as, well, lovable.  The Vietnam
    buddies that you have to "save" in various ways, too, are well-done.
    There's a nice subtle "A Christmas Carol" riff hiding in there
    somewhere, too.  The demon you encounter along the way is
    well-executed: an updated Screwtape, who sounds like a junior partner
    straight out of a New Jersey law firm rather than a don from the musty
    libraries of Oxbridge.

    The NPCs have the most varied topic lists and behaviors I have seen in
    any game.  The only one who comes close to their knowledge is Bob in
    She's Got A Thing For A Spring, and he doesn't have to follow the
    player around or interact with other NPCs.

    However, maybe the best parts of the games aren't the wholly original
    ones.  GKW has taken some very old thematic archetypes and rewoven
    them into new cloth.  The Hunter is not new, exactly, and neither is
    his Hound; but both of them appear as forceful and terrifying
    characters.  Particularly, the scene at the Crossroad Of Dreams where
    you're fleeing the Hound is magnificent.  Kevin knows what he's doing
    with the old stories, and for the most part wields them with a
    practiced hand and delicate touch.

    The game as a whole is technically very competent.  A few unsquashed
    bugs remain: just tonight I tried a new syntax for filling the buckets
    in the old lady's house, and got a TADS runtime error (fortunately not
    fatal), but the prose is well-crafted and free of typos and
    grammatical errors.  This is doubtless due in large part to the game's
    extensive beta-testing.  The prose is uneven, and I, with the
    betatester's privileged eye, can tell you why: Kevin is a much better
    writer now than he was in 1993.  Those parts of the game's
    descriptions that come from the early days are not nearly as
    well-polished or paced as the more recent pieces of prose.

    As I mentioned, I've been a betatester for OaF.  I've been a
    betatester for a very long time now: I first saw OaF source code in
    early 1994 when I visited Kevin at Berkeley; I'd been testing it for
    some months prior to that.  I therefore cannot review this game in any
    sort of an objective sense.  I have been playing it for so long that
    it has become a fixture in my life.  I can no longer tell you which
    puzzles are fair and which aren't.

    What I can do is to provide a little historical perspective on the
    game.  In short, the question everyone is going to be asking is "was
    it worth the wait?"  In short the answer is "yes" but with a few
    reservations.  And it is those reservations and what they tell us
    about where IF has gone since GKW began OaF so long ago that make the
    story interesting.

    OaF was begun in, I think, the summer or fall of 1993.  Possibly
    somewhat earlier.  The earliest cuts might even have been in TADS 1.x,
    and thus may have predated the 2.0 Great Change.  I know Challenge of
    the Czar, the long-awaited (much longer than OaF, by now--but it's no
    longer under active development) game from Sean Molley was begun in
    TADS 1.2.  But I digress.

    In any event, TADS was the only development system for serious IF.  If
    anyone used Inform besides Graham (if Inform even existed) we didn't
    know about it.  We were at what we can now recognize as the end of the
    Dark Ages: that long period between the death of Infocom and the
    Renaissance we currently enjoy.  AGT is what had been used universally
    up until the at-that-point quite recent development of TADS; the best
    AGT games, as we're all aware, fall far short in terms of parser
    sophistication of even mediocre Infocom (despite what the
    alt.games.xtrek crowd seems to think).

    Maybe it's better to think of late 1993 as the High Middle Ages: the
    first couple Unkuulian games had come out, demonstrating that
    entertaining and relatively sophisticated adventures were being
    produced.  The dusty tomb of IF had been found, and a few brave souls
    were sweeping away the cobwebs.  IF meant "text adventure" meant
    "puzzle game."

    The Horror of Rylvania had just been released, and was one of the
    first games with much of a moral edge to it.  It introduced the
    player-as-monster theme, and had opened up some of the issues OaF was
    to confront.  And, unfortunately, no one ever played it, because it
    cost money.  And let us not forget, this was long before the release
    of The Legend Lives, which was the first piece of post-crash IF to
    deal with religious issues head-on.  (Not that the mid-80s commercial
    treatments were particularly deep and sophisticated).  Even such an
    elementary concept as "mazes suck" had not been finalized (Rylvania,
    for one, had a gratuitous and annoying maze in it).

    So, OaF, in tackling heavy-duty moral and ethical issues, was really
    at the cutting edge of the avant-garde in a field defined by the
    puzzle game; here was a concept that put an intricate plot under its
    puzzles; the NPC interaction was far more extensive than anything
    hitherto seen.  Its conceptual scope was humongous; far bigger in
    terms of locations than anything else since, probably, Time Zone.

    Let's look at where we are now.  The big hits of the year have been
    Spider and Web, the first game I know of to rely on the Unreliable
    Narrator as the central feature of the game, Losing Your Grip, a game
    that happens almost entirely inside the protagonist's own
    hallucinations and has very little to it besides psychological
    allegory, and Anchorhead, a Lovecraftian puzzle-solving romp that also
    manages to be downright scary.  Additionally, there has been Firebird,
    which, like OaF, leaps right into its available pool of myth (although
    Firebird manages to be a much gentler adventure, perfect for
    introductory IF), albeit Russian rather than Arthurian.

    And Big Games?  We've seen plenty: Jigsaw comes to mind, although it's
    not actually all that many locations.  Spiritwrak is an enormous game.
    So is Anchorhead.  Not to mention UU0, which is an immense sprawling
    collection of locations.  OaF is big, maybe even huge, but it feels
    more constrained than, say Spiritwrak.  I have not yet drawn up a map
    for it, but I intend to, to see how big it actually is.

    Atmosphere?  Does anyone else remember how radical Rylvania was in
    that it stuck to its gothic-horror guns and did not yield to the then
    near-total temptation to throw cutesy and anachronistic stuff into the
    game?  The random bits of amusing anachronism have a long history in
    adventure games, of course, dating all the way back to Colossal Cave,
    but found in most Infocom games as well.  OaF has a few goofy moments,
    but on the whole the atmosphere within each scene is kept remarkably
    consistent (the Isle of Avalon, having been written first, is the
    least so).  Since the setting and atmosphere change so much between
    the three major set-pieces of the game (Avalon, Faery, and
    Stonehenge), it's really a rather impressive feat.

    And what's happened in the world of IF?  The competitions have grown
    each year since their inception in 1995.  And--thanks largely to
    Kevin--Activision has woken up.  GKW *programmed* the first official
    GUE text adventure released in a decade, for goodness' sake!  Laird
    Malamed honestly wants our opinions on games and what *we* feel
    Activision should do.  Michael Berlyn has started a company to
    publish, among other things, IF (including, of course, OaF itself).
    We're routinely turning out games far more technically sophisticated
    than anything Infocom ever did (for example, the branching tree
    conversation system implemented in the TextFire hoax); granted,
    nothing yet has quite come up to the level of _Trinity_, but it's not
    for lack of technical skill.

    IF is no longer dead.  In fact, it's alive and kicking.  It's never
    again going to be living in that fancy mansion on the hill in
    Cambridge like it was in 1986, but it's out of the gutter, it's
    showered off the barf and put on a clean suit, and is once again
    mentionable in polite company.  And much of that is due to GKW's
    proselytizing.

    And so, what about OaF?  Had it been released in 1994, it would have
    been an absolutely astounding _tour de force_.  It still is an
    excellent game, and one that makes the player think.  But it's no
    longer all that avant-garde.  We've seen games about difficult moral
    and ethical choices; we've seen games about psychological
    introspection; we've seen games that self-consciously exploited mythic
    archetypes for dramatic effect.  We've worried about the
    specified-protagonist versus generic-adventure-game-indeterminate-POV.
    Heck, we've even seen an ironic deconstruction of the nebulous
    adventurer in Zork: Grand Inquisitor.

    After all of these games, parts of OaF seem strangely dated.  There
    are puzzles that are simply too much tedious monkey-manipulation: the
    Crown of Earth and the flaming braziers come to mind.  There,
    thankfully, are no mazes (there is one place that looks like a maze,
    but isn't).  However, some of the puzzles seem to exist for the sake
    of having puzzles: fundamentally, the whole underground scene with
    Snookums exists to get the necklace; now, there's nothing wrong with
    that, exactly, but Snookums is a wonderful character, and I wish there
    had been some way to meet her such that it didn't feel like she was a
    tool of the problem-solving process; I think removing the gratuitous
    plank puzzle would have helped a lot here.  Mordred, too, feels less
    like a character than like an obstacle; a door with a multi-part key,
    as it were.

    In short, OaF suffers from having been conceived at a time when it was
    assumed that the puzzles were the point of the game.  A game that
    manages to strike a slightly better balance in this department is
    Stephen Granade's recent Losing Your Grip, which, while having some
    puzzles that seem like random hoops for the player to jump through,
    achieves better integration of plot and puzzle.  However, OaF's
    puzzles generally seem to require less authorial mind-reading than
    Losing Your Grip.

    This is not to say that OaF's puzzles are all like this.  The final
    showdown with the Hunter is handled with remarkable grace and skill,
    and is integrated absolutely seamlessly into the narrative.  The
    sequences involving saving the Vietnam buddies are also smooth and
    thematically appropriate.

    There are a dizzying array of times and places presented; most are
    handled with a great deal of skill.  There is the Isle of Avalon, the
    Land Beyond the Faery Ring, the Crossroads of Dreams, a brief future
    sequence, a couple different snippets of Vietnam, a simulation of
    Stonehenge so detailed I still haven't completely figured out the
    geography, and a well-researched final sequence.  In short, there's an
    awful lot of game here, and not something one will get tired of
    quickly.

    Overall, it's an immersive game.  I must admit that the final
    sequence--and the love interest--left me scratching my head and
    wondering what I'd missed.  I found the clues that lead up to it, but
    I remain emotionally unconvinced; Kevin could, I think, have thrown in
    a bit more background for that.  That's the biggest hole in the game.
    I buy the central quest, and the subquests along the way are
    convincing, often riveting.  The treatment of the ways in which Frank
    has to go back and "save" his three Vietnam buddies that he saves from
    death-by-grenade in the opening sequence is a really interesting look
    at the nature of responsibility, wrapped up in some well-executed
    puzzles.

    As might be expected, the themes of forgiveness and forgetfulness run
    throughout the work.  One of the best time-travel sequences I've yet
    seen--not as difficult or as satisfying as the time-loop in Sorceror,
    but really amazing for what it does to your perception of Frank's
    character when played through by two different viewpoints--is built
    into the game.  In fact, the puzzles associated with this little
    time-loop are not hard, but they are stunningly effective in drawing a
    picture of Frank Leandro and what his responsibilities are doing to
    him, as well as what Frank looks like to the outside world while he's
    doing this.

    This game makes you think a lot about the relationship between memory
    and moral culpability, and manages to do so without being
    heavy-handed.  The theology is slightly worrying and a bit simplistic
    for my tastes, but effective within the game's context, although given
    the rest of the game's high-fantastic-mythic-heroic bent the
    Screwtapish demon seems oddly out of place.

    All in all, it's a magnificent, enormous piece of work.  Is it worth
    your $25?  Absolutely.  Is it the apocalyptic culmination of the IF
    genre we've all been waiting for as a sign that the millenium
    approacheth?  No, probably not.  Is it a damn fine story?  Yes.  One
    caveat: stick with it.  Some of the text describing the Isle of Avalon
    is pretty clunky; it's four years old and the author's inexperience at
    that point shows.  It gets much, much better.

    Kevin should be proud.  He has written a damn fine game, and brought
    to a close a story that extends over half a decade.  Without his
    passion for text games, it is safe to say that much of the current
    Renaissance in IF could not have happened.  This is the project that
    was driving that passion, and I think you will find that the years of
    effort he has poured into it have paid off handsomely.

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

    From: David Dyte

    Frank Leandro gave his life to save his buddies. For this, he was
    given a second chance - to save them all over again. And save much
    more besides.

    In Once and Future, you are Frank Leandro, charged with a quest that
    takes you from Vietnam to mythic England to the domain of Faerie to
    any number of other places, too. No-one said Frank's quest would be
    easy, and it's not exactly easy for the player either. This game is
    spectacular, very very big, and has two or three puzzles that may just
    leave you longing for the simplicity of making a Babel fish appear in
    a hidden hedge maze location using only the verb 'TAKE'.

    For all that, it's well worth the effort. Kevin Wilson has crafted
    some remarkable prose here, with each new paragraph a delight to
    savour. We've come to expect as much, I guess- it's been a long wait
    for OaF, punctuated by such gems as Lesson of the Tortoise. But the
    game has justified the time spent. OaF provides for all sorts of
    alternative actions and solutions a lesser author may have ignored,
    has NPCs with real depth and personality, and a plot that kept me
    hanging on right to the very end.

    Players can look forward to meeting the likes of Merlin and Galahad,
    solving the already infamous Mountain King puzzle, seeing Stonehenge
    in a whole new light, playing a friendly game of bones, being sent on
    quests within quests by multiple monarchs, and doing some very strange
    things I'd better not spoil.

    At $29.95 from Cascade Mountain, I urge fans of Interactive Fiction to
    leap at the chance and buy this historic game- the first commercially
    available text IF in some years, and one of the finest it's been my
    pleasure to play.

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

    From: Gunther Schmidl

    After years and years of waiting, it's finally here: Once and
    Future. And what can I say but that it has been worth the wait?  The
    game opens in a small tent in Vietnam, when you as Frank Leandro, a
    tiny puppet in this immense war, play poker with your friends. But all
    is soon to change when a hand grenade interrupts your game, and you
    give your life for your comrades...

    Then, the story really starts. After receiving the grail, you are
    stranded in the gigantic land of Avalon with a mission to save the
    future. The map is really massive, but thanks to the easy layout, I
    had no problems of orientation after going everywhere once.

    Primarily, your task is to find the famous holy artifacts of Arthurian
    legend, but that won't be so easy: it'll be very long before you can
    have all of them. During that time, you'll be transformed into a mouse
    and interact with the most instantly likable NPC since Floyd, a mole
    named Snookums. She is so unbelievably cute it makes you forget she
    isn't "real," and I was really sorry I had to leave so soon.

    You will also be visiting Faerieland, the part of the game that has
    the very best of the writing. When underways, you are suddenly
    snatched away by the Hunter, a mysterious being that is after your
    soul, and whom you have to get away from in dream sequences. And those
    sequences were the ones that utterly gripped me and didn't let me stop
    playing for hours at an end. They are so amazingly well-written and
    stirring they constantly reminded me of "classic" I-F moments like the
    end of "Losing your Grip" and the unforgotten Floyd Death Scene - only
    they took longer. Also, all of the puzzles in this scene fit in so
    seamlessly with the story it seems totally clear what to do at every
    point. I have since replayed them countless times (and not only
    because of beta-testing :-).

    When you finally arrive in Faerieland, you are again presented with a
    gigantic landscape to explore; don't be afraid, though, most of it is
    just scenery to show you the wonders of an alien world (succeeding
    well). Though not very many locations have a use in either Avalon or
    Faerieland, you're never bored because there is always something to
    look at.  Faerieland is where the main puzzles are, and it also is
    where the hardest puzzles are. A particular offender is the Mountain
    King puzzle, which I am still groaning over. But I have to admit it
    *is* the only puzzle of it's size, and it's not that hard when you
    know the solution ;-)

    You also get to meet interesting characters, like the Straw Man (the
    writing there is absolutely great, as are the morals behind the story
    - you'll know when you get there), the mischievous elvin queen, and
    lots of other more or less helpful inhabitants of the land.

    However, as every game has it's down sides, so has OaF. But I am only
    nitpicking - there is hardly anything I didn't like (except for that
    Mountain King puzzle - but I think Whizzard is going to lynch me if I
    mention it ONCE more). I found some of Merlin's remarks to be a little
    too "modern" - I wouldn't expect "cool" sentences and the like from an
    age-old wizard - but maybe that's just me.

    The endgame is gripping, and highly replayable - I found three
    different endings at first, then replayed to get the optimum
    ending. It is *very* rewarding, to say the least. There are also dark
    endings, which I liked even better, but that *is* just my twisted
    soul.

    The best rank you can reach is "Knight of the Round Table", but you'll
    have to do a lot of optional stuff to reach it. Note that most of that
    optional stuff came to me just because I thought it would be
    appropriate at that moment - and I was amazed that the game (or
    rather, it's author) had expected that. Now *I* felt like the puppet
    on the string of a master storyteller :-)

    Note that the transcript of the whole game is 128 print pages in Times
    New Roman, font size 10. Wow. Hats off to Whizzard! All hail the King!
    :-)

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

    From: Leon Lin

    Prose

    The prose is well written, and very atmospheric. Most of the game
    takes place in a natural setting of some sort, either real or
    fantastic, and the descriptions of the various forests, caves, and
    such are beautifully done.

    The dialogue was quite good, if somewhat melodramatic at times (like
    when Merlin cries out to God). (See section on NPCs for more.)

    Difficulty

    OaF appears to be of average difficulty. Most puzzles are easily
    solvable with a careful reading of the text and some common sense. As
    far as I could tell, you can't put the game into an unsolvable state,
    unless you're going to die very soon, in which case you might as well
    restore.

    The game does go to some lengths to prevent you from straying too far
    off the mark.  For example, in the endgame, the game prevents you from
    wandering all over town by reminding you where the crucial event is
    supposed to take place. This keeps the player from getting stuck much
    of the time (as well as lets the author off the hook from putting in
    any more locations than there already are!)

    It is possible to die in OaF, but the deaths are for the most part
    avoidable with some foresight. (Of course, there's that one trick near
    the end, but thoughtful players will see it coming.)

    Technical

    Coding: There were a few bugs in the version I played, but they were
    minor and overall the game was pretty clean. The author covers a lot
    of the possible actions by the player, though many of the actions are
    disallowed on the grounds that the hero, Frank, wouldn't do them.

    One of the most impressive sequences in the game is the final fight,
    in which many different things can happen depending on what equipment
    you've got on. I replayed this sequence many times trying different
    things. In general, the game encourages experimentation like this,
    even if it gets you killed.

    Some of the other impressive technical coding feats in OaF are the
    transformation of yourself into a mouse, the diamond puzzle, and the
    interaction between Merlin, Lancelot, and Galahad.

    There is also a particularly fun Easter egg involving the magic sword,
    though I have no idea how you'd figure it out without being told.

    Writing: I didn't catch any grammar or spelling mistakes. Pretty
    solid.

    Plot

    Though it's easy to boil the whole plot down into one sentence --
    "Soldier goes on quest to prevent a disastrous event" -- a lot happens
    between the surprising and shocking beginning to the final
    confrontation. I didn't catch everything the first time through, and
    there's some symbolism and foreshadowing that doesn't become apparent
    until the end. (The relation between you and some of the characters in
    the game don't become apparent until the final scene of the game.)

    The plot is somewhat non-linear, with certain major sections of the
    game blocked off until certain puzzles are solved. The endgame is very
    linear, though that's appropriate considering the time-dependent
    situation you find yourself in at the end.  Other than the hectic end,
    the game's pace is easy-going, even in a few places you might expect a
    greater sense of urgency (like escaping from the demon's chamber).

    NPCs

    The NPCs are well done, although most of them have simple purposes and
    actions.  Where they mainly shine is in dialogue, both speaking with
    you and other NPCs. Merlin is easily the best of the lot, responding
    to many actions and queries by the player as well as interacting with
    Lancelot and Galahad. He's full of wit and cynicism, and does many
    humorous things, like getting chased up a tree by a unicorn and
    breaking the thunderbolt, which make him seem more human and
    falliable. His only real fault (and perhaps this is nit-picking) is
    that some of the technobabble he spouts (like when he opens the time
    portal) doesn't quite sound right.

    The two knights are also well done, with definite personality. They
    don't quite act as expected, with Lancelot acting cowardly in a
    certain context and Galahad acting snooty and uprighteous, but that
    adds depth to their characters.

    The only NPC I felt a little disappointed with was Nina, who popped up
    once near the start of the game (when you get Excalibur) and suddenly
    becomes all-important during the final confrontation.

    Puzzles

    The puzzles appeared to be divided into two groups: puzzles that
    advanced the plot and puzzles that were obstacles to advancing the
    plot. To wit: the player, in solving most of the puzzles, advances the
    story and learns more about the game's world. Such puzzles include
    saving Rob from prison and helping to kill the dragon. While solving
    these puzzles I didn't feel like I was completing a crossword so much
    as I was participating in the story.

    Some of the other puzzles are "7th Guest" style puzzles designed to
    stymie the player and themselves don't add much to the story. The
    diamond and the Mountain King puzzles are examples. They were
    challenging and intellectually stimulating, but I got the feeling that
    most any other kind of puzzle (like a sliding tile puzzle, or a game
    of Minesweeper, and so forth) could have been substituted in their
    place.

    Overall, I felt the game's emphasis was more on the story than the
    puzzles, but the puzzles were important enough to keep the player
    involved. Games which emphasize puzzles tend to have flimsy plots
    wrapped around them, but games which emphasize story over puzzles play
    like movies in which the gamer has to press buttons in order to
    advance. I think OaF strikes a good balance.

    Overall

    OaF isn't a game you swallow all in one go. It's complex and long. The
    sheer amount of text may be intimidating to some, and the plot a bit
    confusing at first, but there's a fascinating story which is worth
    replaying the game to read.

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

    From: M. Sean Molley

    DISCLAIMER: I have been a beta tester for Once and Future for the last
    several years, and have watched it grow and evolve through many
    versions.  Those who feel that I am therefore too biased to
    objectively review it should take note of this fact.

    TOTAL SCORE: 8.0 (Note: I don't believe in score inflation -- 8.6 is my
    		  highest score ever)
    ATMOSPHERE:  1.7 (Richly detailed, a huge game world, beautiful
    		  descriptions)
    GAMEPLAY:    1.0 (Solid, although several puzzles are non-intuitive
    		  or annoying)
    WRITING:     1.9 (Excellent attention to detail, vivid and powerful prose)
    PLOT:	1.6 (The "main idea" is brilliant and the subplots are rich)
    WILDCARD:    1.8 (A labor of love, a compelling story, and a truly epic
    		  game)
    CHARACTERS:  2.0 (The NPC's are the best part of the entire game)
    PUZZLES:     1.0 (With one or two notable exceptions, the puzzles are only
    		  average)

    When writing about Once and Future, one of the most notorious titles
    in the history of modern interactive fiction, I hardly know where to
    begin.  This is the game that has tantalized denizens of the Usenet
    newsgroups devoted to IF for years.  Whizzard (Gerry Kevin Wilson, the
    game's author) has become one of the best-known and most prolific
    contributors to the IF scene over the last five years.  He's
    contributed numerous short games and stories, founded SPAG and the
    Interactive Fiction Competition, and offered dozens of articles on
    game design and other issues over the years.  Running in the
    background of all these contributions has been a consistent promise:
    "just wait until Avalon comes out!"

    Well, OaF is finally coming out, contrary to the expectations of many
    who have seen lesser titles fall by the wayside as their creators
    moved on to bigger, better, and more lucrative things.  Just to save
    you the suspense of wading through the rest of this review, I'll go
    ahead and say it now: It's been a long wait, but the wait has been
    justified.  OaF is an excellent game.  Kevin has found a publisher,
    Cascade Mountain (founded by longtime IF stalwart Michael Berlyn,
    himself a contributor to many great Infocom titles), and OaF will be
    available by the time you read this.  This review was written based on
    the final beta version, which I am assured is almost entirely
    identical to the final commercial version with the exception of a few
    bug fixes and corrections to the text.

    For those who haven't been following the game over the years, I'll
    briefly describe the scenario.  You portray Frank Leandro, a private
    in the Vietnam War.  Near the beginning of the game, Frank sacrifices
    his life to save the lives of his best friends, thus launching himself
    into an adventure that will span time and space, cross the boundary
    between the "real" world and the world of Faerie, and have a profound
    effect upon the past and future of all humanity as Frank struggles to
    right ancient wrongs along his way to rewriting history and redeeming
    his own soul.  If that sounds like a bit much to do before breakfast,
    let me warn you: OaF is both long -- it takes me about four hours to
    play from start to finish using an optimized walkthrough -- and
    incredibly deep.  You can expect to invest many hours in this one.

    All of the great figures from Arthurian legend are here: King Arthur,
    Merlin, Lancelot, Galahad, Morgan le Fay, Mordred, the Lady of the
    Lake, and many others have critical roles to play.  Each of these
    characters is richly detailed, with very real personalities that come
    out through their innumerable pages of dialogue.  The characters are
    "aware" of one another, and when you are in a room with more than one
    NPC, they have more conversations amongst themselves than they do with
    Frank.  Many of these conversations have absolutely nothing to do with
    the story, but are present only to add depth and feeling to the
    characters themselves.  Some of the exchanges between Merlin,
    Launcelot, and Galahad are truly hilarious, while others are deeply
    touching.  The amount of detail in these NPC's is nearly unprecedented
    in IF.  OaF, more than any game I've seen, is "about" its characters.
    All NPC's are also highly interactive; in addition to talking with one
    another, they will also work with (or against) Frank in a staggering
    variety of ways.  Because of the non-linear nature of the game's
    structure and the sheer number of possible combinations of NPC's and
    puzzles that can be happening at the same time, it is quite possible
    for two players to go through the game in entirely different ways.

    The isle of Avalon itself is quite detailed, with many different areas
    to explore.  The structure is mostly non-linear, with only a few
    puzzles dependent on the completion of earlier actions.  Frank must
    search out and acquire a number of legendary artifacts, including
    Excalibur and its sheath.  With Merlin as companion and guide, Frank
    will explore fantastic vistas while confronting many dangerous
    adversaries that will test his mettle.  Indeed, Avalon is the
    strongest area of the game, with every piece of the puzzle fitting
    together nicely and a series of interesting and entertaining
    challenges to be overcome.  The writing is fluid and rich -- the game
    reads like a book in many places.  Key plot points are amply described
    with powerful and evocative text that is as good as anything which has
    ever appeared in an IF game.

    Actually, when playing OaF I am most reminded of David Baggett's game
    "The Legend Lives", which also featured a number of scenes where pages
    and pages of text spilled across the screen.  My personal bias is that
    these kinds of "cut-scenes" add a lot to the story and are well worth
    the investment; other players might not find them as enjoyable.  You
    will do a tremendous amount of reading before you finish the game.
    However, Kevin's writing is good enough that I think you'll find it a
    pleasure.  In many cases the game will cause you to laugh out loud; in
    others, you'll flinch from the power of the imagery created.  The game
    does not shy away from controversial subjects or language; parents of
    young children might want to be aware that the game does contain some
    profanity and other disturbing images.  However, there is nothing that
    I would consider "gratuitous" in the sense that it isn't called for by
    the story.

    Although the Isle of Avalon is a major focus of the game's action,
    there is a second major area within the game, reached through a
    mushroom ring within Avalon itself: the land of Faerie.  Faerie
    contains its own plots -- many of them only tangentially related to
    the "main" plot of the game -- and has a huge amount of geography to
    explore.  One of the nicer aspects of the game is that Faerie and the
    Isle of Avalon, while both being large and complex areas in their own
    right, are basically not interdependent.  With only one or two
    exceptions, puzzles in one part of the game don't require items from
    the other, and the parts themselves can be completed in either order.
    Indeed, it's possible to travel back and forth between Faerie and
    Avalon, working on puzzles in both realms in basically any order you
    see fit.  The whole effect is well done and keeps the player from
    feeling constrained to a narrow path through the story.

    Faerie is very different from Avalon, and from the "real" world, just
    as you would expect.  Descriptions of objects and rooms are whimsical,
    even nonsensical, but with their own internal logic that can be
    figured out by the clever player.  Faerie contains several of the
    game's best puzzles, which are very challenging to solve but
    ultimately rewarding once they have been overcome.  The room
    descriptions are beautiful to read: Kevin is a great writer, and has
    spent considerable time and care crafting the descriptions to convey
    the sense of utter unreality that is Faerie.

    Both this area and the main Isle of Avalon are huge, with many rooms
    to explore.  One potential knock against the game, indeed, is that
    there are so many rooms that travelling from place to place sometimes
    becomes tedious.  The Fairy Queen's castle, for example, is in the
    absolute remotest corner of Faerie.  As Frank must travel there on a
    number of occasions, moving back and forth over and over again becomes
    repetitive and annoying.  Locating the Queen's castle in the center of
    Faerie, with the various regions radiating outward from it like spokes
    around a wheel, would have saved some wear and tear on Frank's poor
    feet without detracting from the game.

    Indeed, here I must raise a few important quibbles with OaF.  The plot
    and story are very well done, and the various sub-plots and twists
    within the game are excellent.  As a book, this would probably have
    been a notable work in its own right.  As a game, it suffers a bit in
    the execution.  (Hence the low mark for gameplay as opposed to the
    other areas of the score).  There are many places where the player
    simply has to wait in a location while the story unfolds; repeatedly
    typing "Z" is basically equivalent to turning the pages of a novel,
    while breaking the suspension of disbelief needed to keep the player
    locked into the game world.  In a similar fashion, the vast amount of
    traipsing about the world that is required as Frank shuttles back and
    forth becomes irritating (although Kevin's room descriptions are some
    of the best I've ever seen, they're no better the 20th time than they
    were the first).  This is not to say that the game as a whole is
    non-interactive; by and large the player is shaping the plot rather
    than watching it unfold around him.  Nevertheless, there are a few
    places where the pacing could have been tweaked a bit.

    The puzzles are also a mixed bag, ranging from the sublime to the
    unpleasant, with the majority falling on the "difficult" side of the
    challenge scale.  The game is difficult, but the puzzles are mostly
    fair.  A few of them are awkwardly done, however, and the potential
    for "guess the verb" exists in one or two places.  There is one puzzle
    in Faerie which appears to serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever,
    other than to give the player a simple blob of wax which is needed
    back in Avalon (this is also the game's only example of a connection
    between the two realms).  The puzzle involves pushing on lighted
    buttons to cause a particular pattern to appear; much like the sliding
    tiles puzzle in "Curses", it doesn't work very well in the text
    medium, and serves no useful purpose other than to annoy the player
    and slow the game down.  This puzzle could have been removed, and the
    blob of wax put someplace within Avalon itself, without hurting the
    plot in any way, and doing so would make life a lot easier for the
    player.  Hopefully this will be addressed in a future version of the
    game.  On the other hand, several of the puzzles and areas are nearly
    flawless; the "mole area" near the beginning of the game and the
    "reverse rowboat" in Faerie are very memorable indeed.

    The game's plot is impressively deep, with a number of sub-plots that
    are extremely compelling.  Frank must redeem his own soul and the
    souls of others along the way to completing his quest.  He will
    revisit Vietnam, do battle with the Master of the Hunt, save his own
    life in a "Sorcerer"-esque episode, escape from the clutches of an
    evil witch, and do battle with dragons, demons, and other assorted
    evildoers.  He will be assisted by Merlin, Sir Launcelot, and Sir
    Galahad, as well as a number of other interesting characters,
    including a clever mole and a curious cat.  In the end it is the
    player who benefits, as these "side quests" are immensely entertaining
    and serve to illustrate the richness and depth of Frank's character.
    OaF is one of the few IF games to really develop the player's
    character: Frank is very real, and his own comments are sprinkled
    liberally throughout the game.  Some players will find this
    off-putting, but I found it quite easy to empathize with Frank and get
    into the role of the main character.  He is very believable and a
    noble character.

    Once Frank has secured the magical artifacts, purified the Holy Grail,
    and obtained the assistance of the Queen of Faerie, he and Merlin will
    embark upon the true quest: preventing a terrible catastrophe in
    Earth's past which threatens the future of Earth and Faerie both.  I
    won't go into the details, since that would spoil a major part of the
    game, but suffice it to say that the quest is very appropriate to the
    overall plot of the game -- indeed, the concept is brilliant -- and
    many of the diverse threads which the player has unraveled in Avalon
    and Faerie will be tied up in the end.  (A number of other issues are
    left unresolved by the game's ending; deliberately, it turns out, from
    reading the author's notes.)  The game moves pretty quickly once Frank
    learns his final quest; you'll rush through the last few stages pretty
    quickly, as the puzzles aren't too difficult (with the exception of
    the very last puzzle, which is pretty non-intuitive and hurts the flow
    of the narrative) and the pace increases, with the final scene played
    out under a tight time limit as the story builds to the ultimate
    confrontation between Frank and the forces of evil.

    Upon completing OaF, I am left to answer the final question: does it
    live up to the hype?  The answer is, "of course not."  OaF is perhaps
    the most-anticipated game of the modern IF era, if for no other reason
    than Kevin has been building it up and promising to release it for
    years and years now.  Given that kind of buildup, there's no way the
    game would be able to be all things to all people.  And it does suffer
    from some shortcomings; Kevin is telling a truly epic story here, and
    it's hard to format such a story to fit the particular requirements of
    IF.  But the player who sticks with it and looks past the game's
    mechanical flaws will find that OaF is a highly polished jewel of a
    story, the rare game that tackles deep issues and confronts them
    head-on.  There are so many messages and allegorical themes in the
    game that it would be impossible to list them all; and I won't even
    try, because half the fun is discovering them for yourself.

    OaF is a very literary game; it is a rich and complex tapestry.  A few
    of the threads haven't been tied off quite right, but there are no
    "crash" bugs and nothing which should prevent a reasonably intelligent
    and experienced IF'fer from completing the game without needing to
    resort to a walkthrough.  In summary, I would call it a "must-read" as
    well as a "must-play."  OaF reaches for the brass ring by trying to
    combine such an epic story with a puzzle-based game mechanic; when
    compromises had to be made, they were made to preserve the story and
    at the expense of gameplay.  It is unfortunate that any compromises
    had to be made at all, but the whole is definitely greater than the
    sum of the parts.  OaF does not disappoint -- I say again, it was
    worth the wait.  I would place OaF on the same list as "The Legend
    Lives," Brian Moriarty's "Loom", and Steve Meretzky's "A Mind Forever
    Voyaging."  All of these games share a common trait: they are
    experienced, rather than played.  For me, the experience of OaF has
    been a wonderful one.  I hope that yours will be, too.

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

    From: Magnus Olsson

    At last, it's here. For years we waited eagerly for it. Some of use
    gave up hope of ever seeing it; others probably didn't even know it
    was for real, but thought it was just a metaphor for something
    unattainable; "When Avalon is released" became a synonym for "When
    pigs will fly".

    And then, suddenly, here it is. Of course, it's not called "Avalon",
    but "Once and Future", but it's here; the most anticipated IF release
    ever. Maybe pigs do fly, after all.

    So does it live up to the expectations? Yes and no: some people have
    expressed great disappointment that it didn't live up to their
    expectations, but I wasn't among them. I think it's fair to say,
    however, that "OaF" has been the subject of so much discussion and -
    to be blunt - hype (it is, after all, a commercial release), that it
    can't possibly live up to all expectations. So, in the following I'll
    try not to compare it too much with what's been said about it before
    its release.

    Before starting on the review, let me state that I was not one of the
    play testetser. I had never seen the game before the review copy
    arrived, so this review is based on fresh impressions.  I have a
    confession to make, however: I haven't finished the game yet. I ran up
    against what turned out to be a fatal bug (an NPC who was supposed to
    provide some essential information, but didn't), and decided to put
    the game aside for a while, waiting for my "real" copy to arrive (my
    review copy was a pre-release version), so I had more to look forward
    to than just the pretty packaging. This happened rather near the end -
    I've completed most of the game, but I can't comment on the way the
    plot is finally resolved.

    I mentioned a fatal bug, so let's deal with a less pleasant aspect of
    the game first, so we get that out of the way. I can't help feeling
    that "OaF" could have done with some more beta testing. Fortunately, I
    found just one killer bug, but I did run into quite a lot of parser
    problems, mainly missing vocabulary. Let me stress that (apart from
    the NPC bug) I didn't have any real problems with this - I ecountered
    no guess-the-verb "puzzles", for example, just some missing synonyms -
    but still a bit irritating. There's been talk on rec.games.int-fiction
    about an upcoming patch from the publisher - let's hope it fixes these
    problems once and for all.

    OK, so it's somewhat buggy and it may not live up to everybody's
    expectations. What's it _like_? The main plot outline should be well
    known by now: you play a soldier who's killed in Vietnam, but brought
    back to life by King Arthur, and sent on a quest. But this doesn't
    really say very much about the game, does it?

    So let me start by characterizing "OaF": First and foremost, it's a
    classic adventure game in the Infocom tradition. In many aspects, it
    goes beyond - sometimes rather far beyond - Infocom's achievements,
    but it's a matter of evolutionary, not revolutionary, progress. I
    think that this is much a matter of timing: some aspects of "OaF"
    *would* have been revolutionary if it had been published according to
    the original schedule, four years ago. It's just that tremendous
    developments have taken place in the IF scene during those four years,
    and others have explored this new territory first.

    I wrote that "OaF" is first and foremost a game. This doesn't mean
    that it isn't a story, or that the story is just an excuse to string
    puzzles together, far from it. But unlike many modern works of IF
    (like, for example, this year's competition winner "Photopia"), it's
    not an interactive story that uses puzzles just as a way of forcing
    the audience to participate; it's a computer game that tells a story
    (or, rather, many stories). Puzzles are prominent, but subordinate to
    the story: with few exceptions they don't feel extraneous to the plot,
    and almost all of them don't obscure the underlying themes but serve
    to enhance them and advance the plot.

    I suppose that this means that you'll probably be disappointed if you
    don't like puzzle games, but are looking forward to a "pure"
    interactive story. But, as I wrote, the puzzles don't obscure the
    plot, and there's plenty of literary value in "OaF". "OaF" isn't "just
    a game"; it's a work of art in the form of a game.

    On the other hand, if you don't care much for the story aspects, and
    approach "OaF" as a pure game, you'll probably *not* be disappointed.
    You'll miss a lot if you ignore the story aspects, though.

    Puzzles are a prominent part of "OaF", and there are quite a lot of
    them; enough, it seems, for several medium-to-large-sized adventures -
    "OaF" is a large game. Most of the puzzles aren't too difficult;
    they're quite logical, with satisfying solutions, Infocom-style. The
    comparison to Infocom is meant as praise: in fact, I've seen few
    recent adventures with so many enjoyable puzzles. There are almost
    none of the "guess what the author was thinking" puzzles that are
    common in amateur IF. Some of the puzzles are a bit mechanical,
    perhaps, and some of them feel rather dated in a similar way that
    mazes feel dated nowadays - one of the signs that "OaF" has been under
    development for a long time and that our taste in IF has evolved
    during that time. Unfortunately, none of the puzzles are of the really
    brilliant variety, the one where the solution feels like a revelation,
    but on the other hand there are no real bottlenecks that block your
    progress totally, killing the plot in the process. On the whole, I
    think the balance between puzzles and plot is satisfying.

    I mentioned that "OaF" is a large game. In fact, it's very large. The
    funny thing is that for most of the time I was playing, it didn't feel
    very large; but several times, when I felt that I had explored
    everything and the game was stagnating, new vistas opened up, whole
    new worlds as large as the previously explored parts of the game. This
    is a rather rare experience - my experience is that most games (new or
    old - this is true for many, if far from all Infocom games as well)
    are either rather small, or partitioned into segments that are small
    games unto themselves, and quite separate from each other. On the
    other hand, "OaF" never felt so large and open-ended that I was
    overwhelmed by the task of exploration.

    "OaF" manages to strike a balance here, with just enough territory to
    explore that the game world feels large, but not like a huge
    desolation, and the device of rewarding puzzle solving with new lands
    to explore is used effectively. The map is mostly connected in a way
    that allows you to travel freely between the various segments of the
    game; there are no watertight partitions.

    Or almost none - because the story takes place on several planes at
    the same time (or, rather, different times), and at some junctures
    you're transported to different worlds to face different challenges in
    a different subplot. Which leads us on to the literary aspects of "OaF".

    Let's start with genre. "OaF" can, of course, be characterized as
    fantasy, but it's not the usual, stereotypic RPG-inspired fantasy of
    most adventure games, but mythical fantasy - Arthurian myth, of
    course. There's a lot of the fairy-tale elements present in many
    Arthurian tales - talking animals and such - but, despite this, "OaF"
    is not the kind of watered-down, trivialized Arthur-as-storybook-
    character world of "The Sword in the Stone", or Infocom's "Arthur".
    Like all true myths it addresses the big, existential questions;
    fortunately, it's not all about cute talking animals or heroic
    save-the-world quests. "OaF" is neither a children's story nor an
    action movie.

    Unfortunately, this isn't very apparent in the first part of the game
    (after the Vietnam introduction), where you have to explore the isle
    of Avalon and complete a number of sub-quests before you can begin to
    figure out what your real quest is about; this part of the game is
    actually quite conventional, almost shallow, with no strong sense of
    purpose or direction. This is a pity, because if the player is unlucky
    (the game is rather non-linear, so it's possible to see different
    sub-plots in quite different order) he or she will spend rather a lot
    of time before getting really involved in more than rather standard
    adventure-questing. There are a couple of quite touching
    stories-within-the story here (such as the one about the mole), but
    they involv you more as a spectator than as a participant.

    But things get better, plotwise. Once the player is involved in the
    main plot, he (I'll be using the male gender since I'm referring more
    to the player character, Frank Leandro, than to the actual
    player/audience controlling him) has to face not only his quest, but
    demons from his past, his present and his future - this sends him back
    to Vietnam in some very powerful sequences - as well as archetypal
    forces such as the mysterious Hunter. Finally, he'll have to deal with
    one of the pivotal moments in history; alas, I can't comment on that,
    since I haven't reached the actual endgame yet.

    The choice of pivotal moment in history seemed rather strange, almost
    silly, to me at first. Perhaps it's because I'm not American, and
    "OaF" is in a sense a very American game (though, fortunately, no
    knowledge of baseball is required). I can think of a reason for the
    odd juxtaposition of Arthur, Vietnam, and this historical event,
    though: Arthur is perhaps the most powerful of Anglo-American myths,
    and the two other elements, while historical, seem to have become
    almost archetypical in American culture. (No, Elvis is not involved).
    There is thought behind the choice of quest, even though it may seem
    unlikely when you first hear it.

    As mentioned before, the game is quite non-linear; most of the time,
    you have a choice of things to do and several puzzles to attack. This
    means that the plot can't drive events in the way it does in more
    "literary" IF; rather, the plot - and subplots - form a sort of
    substratum that motivates your actions and comes back to haunt you
    from time to time. The drawback to this is that at times there's no
    strong sense of purpose; you can spend quite a lot of time wandering
    around and solving puzzles just because they're there, just like in
    Zork. Unlike in Zork, however, there is a sense of unity; I'm not sure
    how all the threads are tied together at the end, or if they are -
    sometimes the plot structure gets a bit out of hand, it seems (I'm not
    sure that it will ever be resolved exactly what's going on between
    Frank and the Hunter, for example), but I'll have to pass on this for
    now.

    On the other hand, some of the subplots (most notably the Vietnam
    ones) are quite linear; you're a "prisoner in someone else's story",
    to quote Espen Aarseth. But these parts of the game are rather short.

    I did notice some minor problems caused by the non-linearity: some
    descriptions and plot events seem a bit suboptimal when encountered in
    the wrong order, but I didn't encounter any real killers. Of course, I
    can't help thinking that it may be possible to break the game by doing
    things in the wrong order, but I didn't actually manage to do so, and
    the author seems to have covered most possibilities.

    If you look at what the player is actually doing during most of the
    game in terms of plot, much of the time is spent on sub-quests and in
    subplots that don't seem to relate directly to the main plot. This
    can, of course, be criticized; but I think it's actually in character
    (I'm no expert on the Arthurian mythos - Arthur is not really a
    central part of my cultural heritage at all - so I may be totally off
    base here): much of the Arthurian mythos consists of stories about
    Arthur's knights being diverted from the quest for the grail by
    seemingly unrelated adventures, which turn out not to be so unrelated
    in the end. And the subplots in "OaF" all seem to touch on issues that
    either have directly to do with Frank's personal development, or with
    the underlying themes and conflicts. In this context, I'd like to
    point out that "OaF" is one of the few works of IF I've seen that deal
    with religious issues (though it doesn't really hit you across the
    face with them).

    The writing varies from competent to excellent to rather over the top
    - you can tell that "OaF" was written over a long period of time, and
    Kevin obviously matured as a writer during that time. Some parts,
    especially the room descriptions in the early parts of the game, are
    rather terse (but still expressive), Infocom-like, while others are
    more verbose and some passages are a bit on the purple side. In some
    places the author seems to be overreaching a bit, but those are the
    exceptions.

    The writing doesn't quite compare to the beautifully poetic "So Far",
    the haunting dream-like moods of "Losing your Grip", or the polished
    pefection of "Photopia", but it's quite competent.  The author gets
    his message across, usually very effectively, and there are some very
    powerful scenes; some scenes and NPC's remained in my memory for quite
    some time after I stopped playing.

    Finally, some words about NPCs. One area where "OaF" has been a bit
    hyped is the quality, number and depth of its NPCs. When it comes to
    the sheer number of NPCs, this is no exaggeration: there are lots of
    them. However, the NPCs are rather uneven.

    Some NPCs are quite sophisticated: they'll follow you around, talk to
    you, have answers for most questions and spontaneously comment on
    things you're doing. Some NPCs interact with each other, commenting
    each other's lines (typically, you do something, an NPC answers, and
    another NPC comments that). This is all very solidly implemented, but
    there's nothing really revolutionary going on; no AI techniques, no
    new conversation strategies or so on, just ordinary TADS actors. But
    so much effort has gone into providing them with a personality and
    with things to do and say that they take on a depth few IF NPCs can
    exhibit.

    On the other hand, many NPCs are much less interesting than that. One
    NPC is just a variation on the "lock and key" puzzle, and others play
    very minor parts: they do a few things, and then exit. What is worse
    is the unfortunate fact that one of the first NPCs you encounter is
    quite an important figure in the Arthurian mythos, yet he basically
    just stands around, has rather limited conversational abilities, and
    doesn't seem very lifelike at all. You don't encounter the "good" NPCs
    until quite a bit later.

    But all in all, the most memorable parts of this game are the NPC:
    Snookums, Merlin, True Thomas, The Hunter, The Demon, Frank's alter egos.

    To summarize, "Once and Future" may not be the Great American
    Interactive Novel. It may not be a revolutionary feat of innovation or
    a literary masterpiece. But it is a very enjoyable, solidly
    implemented (despite the bugs - remember that this is a one-person
    project) game, with an engaging plotline (once you get into it) and
    some very memorable characters.

    And what makes "OaF" exceptional is the sheer size of its world, and
    that's not empty space, but interrelated, interacting objects,
    locations and characters, all unified by a compelling story. $29.95
    will buy you a lot of exploration, puzzle solving, NPC interaction -
    more than enough for four or five normal-sized games - but, above all,
    immersion in a detailed world and participation in a deeply engaging
    story.

    INTERVIEW WITH G. KEVIN WILSON -----------------------------------------------

    SPAG: First of all, our congratulations on not only finishing your
    great project, but also finding a commercial publisher for it. Could
    you tell us a little about your feelings, now that your quest is
    nearing its end?

    GKW: I think Homer Simpson said it best: Woo hoo!

    SPAG: I think the last-minute name change took us all by surprise. The
    legal necessities aside, is it a great disappointment for you to have
    to change the title of the game?

    GKW: Well, it was a bummer, but hey, you do what you have
    to.  The new name is pretty good, which takes much of the sting
    out.

    SPAG: You've been working on this game for, let's see, at least four,
    maybe five years. Would you have embarked on this project if you'd
    known how long it would take?

    GKW: I really couldn't tell you.  I mean, in retrospect, it was certainly
    worth it.  I got to learn a lot about game design and writing.  Once and
    Future (OAF) is certainly a good chunk of what made me what I am today.

    SPAG: In retrospect, what were the principal reasons it took so long
    to complete? And why did you underestimate the amount of time needed
    by so much?

    GKW: Inexperience and over-reaching ambition, mostly.  I never really
    understood back then what a huge undertaking I was attempting, nor do
    I realize how much college was going to get in the way.

    SPAG: "Once and Future" strikes me as a very large game, but how large
    is it, really? How many rooms, objects, NPCs are there? And how many
    lines of code? Have you made any comparisons with other large games,
    such as "Curses"?

    GKW: Well, here are my estimates, rounded off.  I haven't made any
    comparisons except to note that nothing of Infocom's was as big.

    	Rooms: 300
    	Objects: 1300
    	NPCs: 40
    	Lines of Code: 35,000

    SPAG: It is often claimed that the amount of work needed to write a
    game rises exponentially with the size of the game. Does this agree
    with your experience? If so, what do you think the reasons are?

    GKW: Most certainly.  The more objects you have interacting with each
    other, the more effort is necessary.  Simply, if you have 15 objects,
    and add a 16th, you only have to worry about it interacting with the
    other 15.  If you have 500 objects, and add a 501st, you must look at
    how it interacts with the other _500_.

    SPAG: One of the most impressive aspects of "Once and Future" is the
    NPCs. Speaking as a game author myself, I know from bitter experience
    just how fiendishly hard NPC programming can be. Did you develop any
    new, revolutionary NPC coding techniques for "Once and Future", or did
    you just apply lots and lots of elbow grease? Any NPC coding tips to
    aspiring authors out there?

    GKW: Elbow grease, and lots of it.  All told, the NPCs have about
    500-600 'ask x about y' topics between them.  NPCs that move around
    have an array of things to say upon entering certain locations, and
    encountering other NPCs, and of course, many events have multiple
    versions depending on which NPCs are currently accompanying the
    player.

    NPC coding tips?  Hmm.  KISS.  Keep it simple, silly.  Don't add more
    complexity than your game needs.  OAF emphasized the characters a lot,
    so I needed reasonably complicated NPC behavior.  Lesson of the
    Tortoise, on the other hand, only asked each NPC to do one or two
    things, so I greatly simplified things in that game.

    SPAG: Speaking of NPCs, which of the NPCs in the game is your own
    favourite? Why?

    GKW: Well, actually, my personal favorite NPC would probably be the
    Straw Man.  As for why, well, that would be telling.  If you reworded
    the question to include all characters in the game, then my favorite
    would be Frank Leandro, the character that the player controls.  He's
    a very noble figure, and I think he came across quite well,
    considering that at the time it was seen as stifling the player if you
    gave the PC a personality.

    SPAG: Where did you get your inspiration for the game? For example,
    what caused you to write about the Arthur mythos? And what about the
    Vietnam angle? Is there any connection between the two?

    GKW: Well, I've always been into Arthurian myth.  I play Dungeons &
    Dragons, which draws a lot of material from the Knights of the Round
    Table.  As for the Vietnam angle, well, that's hard to say.  Maybe I
    just chose it because there were so many moral dilemmas involved in
    that war.

    SPAG: I think that the influence from the classic Infocom games is
    rather obvious - and how could it be otherwise? But were you inspired
    by the newer developments in IF that took place while you were writing
    "Once and Future"?

    GKW: Sure, to some extent.  I really enjoyed "The Legend Lives!" and
    something of that game found its way into OAF.  That was probably my
    biggest modern influence.

    SPAG: What do you think of the future of text-based IF?

    GKW: Looking good, folks.  Just keep plugging away at it.

    SPAG: Any plans for the future? Do you intend to continue writing IF?

    GKW: I don't know yet.  I might.  There's always room for improvement.
    But for right now I'm going to relax awhile and get my career in
    motion.  I'm hoping to get a job writing roleplaying games.

    SPAG: Finally, what would you like to say to all the people who were,
    let's say, a bit overly sarcastic about the chances of "Avalon" (as it
    was known then) ever being completed?

    GKW: Ahem.  HAAA hah.

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

    NOTE: The scoreboard has been updated with ratings submitted until
    October 15, 1998. I also have a small backlog of ratings submitted
    after that date. Unfortunately, the ratings list on the SPAG web page
    has not been updated since SPAG 14, so it is a bit out of date.

       Notes:

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

    Name		  Avg Sc    Chr  Puz  # Sc  Issue   Notes:
    ====		  ======    ===  ===  ====  =====   ======
    Aayela		  8.6     1.6  1.7  1	     F_TAD_GMD
    Adventure (all variants)6.6     0.7  1.0  7     8       F_INF_TAD_ETC_GMD
    Adventureland	   4.0     0.5  1.5  1	     F_GMD
    Adv. of Elizabeth Highe 3.1     0.5  0.3  2     5       F_AGT
    Afternoon Visit	 4.1     1.0  0.8  1
    Alien Abduction	 7.9     1.7  1.7  1
    All Quiet...Library     4.7     0.8  0.7  4     7       F_INF_GMD
    Amnesia		 7.8     1.5  1.7  2     9       C_AP_I_64
    Another...No Beer       2.4     0.2  0.8  2     4       S10_IBM_GMD
    Arthur: Excalibur       8.0     1.3  1.6  4     4,14    C_INF
    Awakened		7.7     1.7  1.6  1
    Awe-Chasm	       2.4     0.3  0.6  1     8       S?_IBM_ST
    Babel		   8.2     1.7  1.3  2     13      F_INF_GMD
    Balances		6.6     0.7  1.1  5     6       F_INF_GMD
    Ballyhoo		7.7     1.8  1.5  4     4       C_INF
    Bear's Night Out	7.7     1.2  1.5  1     13      F_INF_GMD
    Beyond the Tesseract    3.7     0.1  0.6  1     6       F_I_GMD
    Beyond Zork	     8.1     1.6  1.9  4     5       C_INF
    BJ Drifter	      7.3     1.5  1.5  1
    Border Zone	     7.3     1.4  1.4  6     4       C_INF
    Broken String	   4.2     0.5  0.6  2	     F_TADS_GMD
    BSE		     6.6     1.0  1.0  1
    Bunny		   6.6     1.0  1.4  1
    Bureaucracy	     7.5     1.6  1.3  6     5       C_INF
    Busted		  5.2     1.0  1.1  1	     F_INF_GMD
    Castaway		1.1     0.0  0.4  1     5       F_IBM_GMD
    Castle Elsinore	 5.3     1.0  1.2  1
    Change in the Weather   7.4     0.8  1.5  7     7, 14   F_INF_GMD
    Chicken under Window    6.9     0.0  0.0  1
    Christminster	   8.6     1.8  1.6  6	     F_INF_GMD
    Corruption	      7.8     1.6  1.1  3     x       C_I
    Cosmoserve	      8.7     1.3  1.4  2     5       F_AGT_GMD
    Crypt v2.0	      5.0     1.0  1.5  1     3       S12_IBM_GMD
    Curses		  8.4     1.3  1.7  9     2       F_INF_GMD
    Cutthroats	      6.2     1.4  1.2  6     1       C_INF
    Dampcamp		6.0     1.0  1.4  1
    Deadline		6.9     1.2  1.3  6     x       C_INF
    Deep Space Drifter      5.5	  1.4  1     3       S15_TAD_GMD
    Delusions	       7.4     1.3  1.5  2     14      F_INF_GMD
    Demon's Tomb	    7.4     1.2  1.1  2     9       C_I
    Detective	       1.0     0.0  0.0  5     4,5     F_AGT_GMD
    Detective-MST3K	 6.1     0.8  0.1  4     7,8     F_INF_GMD
    Ditch Day Drifter       7.1     1.2  1.6  1     2       F_TAD_GMD
    Dungeon		 7.4     1.5  1.6  1	     F_GMD
    Dungeon Adventure       6.8     1.3  1.6  1     4       F_SEE REVIEW Issue #4
    Dungeon of Dunjin       5.8     0.7  1.4  3     3, 14   S20_IBM_MAC_GMD
    Edifice		 7.5     1.5  1.7  3     13      F_INF_GMD
    Electrabot	      0.7     0.0  0.0  1     5       F_AGT_GMD
    Emy Discovers Life      4.1     1.0  1.0  1
    Enchanter	       7.1     0.9  1.4  6     2       C_INF
    Enhanced		5.0     1.3  1.3  1     2       S10_TAD_GMD
    Eric the Unready	6.9     1.5  1.5  2     x       C_I
    Everybody Loves Parade  7.3     1.2  1.3  1
    Fable		   2.0     0.2  0.1  1     6       F_AGT_GMD
    Fear		    7.6     1.5  1.6  1	     F_GMD
    Firebird		8.1     1.7  1.6  1
    Fish		    7.6     1.2  1.7  3     x       C_I
    Foggywood Hijinx	7.6     1.7  1.7  1
    Forbidden Castle	4.8     0.6  0.5  1     x       C_AP
    Frenetic Five	   5.1     1.2  0.2  1
    Friday Afternoon	6.3     1.4  1.2  1     13      F_INF_GMD
    Frobozz Magic Support   8.0     1.6  1.7  1
    Gateway		 7.5     1.6  1.5  1     x       C_I
    Glowgrass	       7.4     1.6  1.5  2     13      F_INF_GMD
    Great Archaelog. Race   6.5     1.0  1.5  1     3       S20_TAD_GMD
    Guardians of Infinity   8.5	  1.3  1     9       C_I
    Guild of Thieves	7.3     1.2  1.6  3     x       C_I
    Gumshoe		 6.3     1.3  1.1  2     9       F_INF_GMD
    Hitchhiker's Guide      7.6     1.4  1.5  8     5       C_INF
    Hollywood Hijinx	6.4     0.9  1.6  7     x       C_INF
    Horror30.zip	    3.7     0.3  0.7  2     3       S20_IBM_GMD
    Horror of Rylvania      7.5     1.5  1.3  2     1       F_TAD_GMD
    Humbug		  7.0     1.7  1.5  2     x       F_GMD
    Ice Princess	    6.2     1.1  1.6  1
    Infidel		 6.9     0.0  1.4  9     1,2     C_INF
    Inhumane		3.6     0.2  0.7  1     9       F_INF_GMD
    I-0: Jailbait...	8.0     1.7  1.3  4	     F_INF_GMD
    Jacaranda Jim	   7.0	       1     x       F_GMD
    Jeweled Arena	   8.0     1.5  1.5  1     x       ?
    Jigsaw		  7.7     1.4  1.5  7     8,9     F_INF_GMD
    Jinxter		 6.4     1.1  1.3  2     x       C_I
    John's Fire Witch       7.1     1.1  1.6  6     4       S6_TADS_GMD
    Journey		 7.8     1.6  1.3  3     5       C_INF
    Jouney Into Xanth       5.0     1.3  1.2  1     8       F_AGT_GMD
    Kissing Buddha's Feet   8.1     2.0  1.2  1
    Klaustrophobia	  6.7     1.2  1.3  5     1       S15_AGT_GMD
    Leather Goddesses       7.1     1.3  1.5  8     4       C_INF
    Legend Lives!	   8.9     0.9  1.6  2     5       F_TADS_GMD
    Lessen of the Tortoise  8.1     1.6  1.6  1	     F_TADS_GMD
    Lethe Flow Phoenix      6.8     1.4  1.5  3     9       F_TADS_GMD
    Light Shelby's Addendum 8.3     1.8  0.9  2     9       S?_TADS_GMD
    Lists and Lists	 7.5     1.5  1.8  1
    Losing Your Grip	8.2     1.3  1.4  2     14      S_TADS_GMD
    Lost New York	   8.2     1.6  1.6  1
    Lost Spellmaker	 5.4     1.2  0.8  1     13      F_INF_GMD
    Lurking Horror	  7.2     1.3  1.3  11    1,3     C_INF
    MacWesleyan / PC Univ.  5.6     0.7  1.0  1     x       F_TADS_GMD
    Magic.zip	       4.5     0.5  0.5  1     3       S20_IBM_GMD
    Magic Toyshop	   4.3     0.7  1.1  2	     F_INF_GMD
    Matter of Time	  1.4     0.3  1.4  1     14      F_ALAN_GMD
    Mercy		   9.2     2.0  0.7  1
    Meteor...Sherbet	8.5     1.6  1.9  1	     F_INF_GMD
    Mind Electric	   5.1     0.6  0.8  3     7,8     F_INF_GMD
    Mind Forever Voyaging   8.4     1.3  0.8  7     5       C_INF
    Moist		   8.4     1.7  1.6  1
    Moonmist		5.7     1.2  1.0  11    1       C_INF
    Mop & Murder	    5.0     0.9  1.0  2     4,5     F_AGT_GMD
    Multidimen. Thief       5.6     0.4  1.0  3     2,9     S15_AGT_GMD
    Mystery House	   4.1     0.3  0.7  1     x       F_AP_GMD
    New Day		 5.5     1.3  0.9  1     13      F_INF_GMD
    Night at Museum Forever 4.2     0.3  1.0  4     7,8     F_TAD_GMD
    Nord and Bert	   6.1     0.8  1.3  4     4       C_INF
    Odieus...Flingshot      3.3     0.4  0.7  2     5       F_INF_GMD
    One Hand Clapping       6.9     1.2  1.4  3     5       F_ADVSYS_GMD
    One That Got Away       6.7     1.3  1.2  3     7,8     F_TAD_GMD
    Oo-Topos		5.7     0.2  1.0  1     x       C_AP_I_64
    Path to Fortune	 6.8     1.4  0.8  1     9       S_INF_GMD
    Pawn		    6.5     1.0  1.2  1     x       C_I_AP_64
    PC University: See MacWesleyan
    Perseus & Andromeda     3.4     0.3  1.0  1     x       ?
    Phred Phontious...Pizza 5.2     0.8  1.3  1     19      F_INF_GMD
    Planetfall	      7.4     1.6  1.5  9     4       C_INF
    Plundered Hearts	7.2     1.3  1.1  5     4       C_INF
    Pyramids of Mars	6.0     1.2  1.2  1
    Quarterstaff	    6.1     1.3  0.6  1     9       C_M
    Ralph		   7.3     1.7  1.5  1
    Reruns		  5.2     1.2  1.2  1
    Sanity Claus	    9.0	       1     1       S10_AGT_GMD
    Save Princeton	  5.8     1.2  1.3  2     8       S10_TAD_GMD
    Seastalker	      5.5     1.2  0.9  6     4       C_INF
    Shades of Grey	  8.0     1.3  1.4  4     1,2     F_AGT_GMD
    Sherlock		7.3     1.4  1.4  3     4       C_INF
    She's Got a Thing...    7.8     1.8  1.8  2     13      F_INF
    Shogun		  7.1     1.5  0.5  1     4       C_INF
    Sins against Mimesis    7.7     1.7  1.6  1
    Sir Ramic Hobbs	 5.0     1.0  1.5  1     6       F_AGT_GMD
    Small World	     5.9     1.4  0.9  1
    So Far		  8.7     1.4  1.8  4	     F_INF_GMD
    Sorcerer		7.3     0.6  1.6  5     2       C_INF
    South American Trek     0.9     0.2  0.5  1     5       ?_IBM_GMD
    Space Aliens...Cardigan 1.6     0.4  0.3  5     3       S60_AGT_GMD
    Space under Window      7.3     0.0  0.0  1
    Spellbreaker	    8.3     1.2  1.8  5     2       C_INF
    Spellcasting 101	7.0     1.0  1.2  1     x       C_I
    Spellcasting 201	7.8     1.5  1.6  1     x       C_I
    Spellcasting 301	7.5     1.4  1.5  1     x       C_I
    Spider and Web	  8.5     1.7  1.7  3     14      F_INF_GMD
    SpiritWrak	      6.7     1.3  1.1  2     9       F_INF_GMD
    Spur		    7.2     1.4  1.2  1     9       F_HUG_GMD
    Starcross	       7.0     1.1  1.3  5     1       C_INF
    Stationfall	     7.6     1.6  1.6  5     5       C_INF
    Stiffy - MiSTing	4.2     0.1  0.1  1
    Sunset Over Savannah    8.3     1.3  1.5  1     13      F_INF_GMD
    Suspect		 5.8     1.2  1.0  3     4       C_INF
    Suspended	       7.2     1.3  1.3  5     8       C_INF
    Tapestry		6.9     1.2  0.7  2     14      F_INF_GMD
    Tempest		 5.6     1.0  0.6  1     13      F_INF_GMD
    Theatre		 7.0     1.1  1.3  5     6       F_INF_GMD
    TimeQuest	       8.6     1.5  1.8  1     x       C_I
    TimeSquared	     4.3     1.1  1.1  1     x       F_AGT_GMD
    Toonesia		6.4     1.2  1.3  4     7       F_TAD_GMD
    Tossed into Space       3.9     0.2  0.6  1     4       F_AGT_GMD
    Travels...Land of Erden 6.2     1.5  1.5  1
    Treasure.Zip			      0     3       S20_IBM_GMD
    Trinity		 8.6     1.3  1.7  11    1,2     C_INF
    Tryst of Fate	   7.1     1.4  1.3  1
    Tube Trouble	    3.3     0.5  0.4  1	     F_INF_GMD
    Uncle Zebulon's Will    7.1     0.9  1.4  8     7       F_TAD_GMD
    Undertow		5.2     1.0  0.8  1	     F_TAD_GMD
    Undo		    1.9     0.1  0.4  2     7       F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian One-Half      7.0     1.2  1.6  7     1       F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Unventure 1   7.1     1.2  1.6  6     1,2     F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Unventure 2   7.2     1.4  1.5  4     1       F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Zero	  9.0	       1     1       F_TAD_GMD
    Veritas		 7.9     1.6  1.7  1
    Waystation	      5.7     0.7  0.9  2     9       F_TAD_GMD
    Wearing the Claw	6.8     1.1  1.1  2	     F_INF_GMD
    Wedding		 8.0     1.7  1.6  1
    Wishbringer	     7.4     1.4  1.3  7     5,6     C_INF
    Witness		 6.9     1.6  1.2  7     1,3,9   C_INF
    Wonderland	      7.5     1.3  1.4  1     x       C_I
    World		   6.5     0.6  1.3  2     4       F_SEE REVIEW Issue #4
    Zanfar		  2.6     0.2  0.4  1     8       F_AGT_GMD
    Zero Sum Game	   7.5     1.7  1.2  1     13      F_INF_GMD
    Zork 0		  6.3     1.1  1.4  5     14      C_INF
    Zork 1		  6.3     0.8  1.5  12    1,2     C_INF
    Zork 2		  6.5     0.8  1.5  8     1,2     C_INF
    Zork 3		  6.1     0.7  1.4  6     1,2     C_INF
    Zork Undisc. Undergr.   6.5     1.0  1.2  1     14      F_INF

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

    The Top Five:

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

    Since the last issue (when "Trinity" headed the list, followed by "Curses"
    and "Christminster"), there have been some dramatic changes:

     1.   So Far	      8.7     4 votes
     2.   Trinity	     8.6    11 votes
     3.   Christminster       8.6     6 votes
     4.   Spider and Web      8.5     3 votes
     5.   Curses	      8.4     9 votes

    Not only has "So Far" gone from nowhere (that is, less than 3 votes)
    to the top of the list, but "Spider and Web" by the same author
    (Andrew Plotkin) has squeezed in between "Christminster" and "Curses"!

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

    The next issue will be the 1998 Competition Issue. We're aiming for
    reviews of all the competition games.

    Until then: happy adventuring!

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