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Game Reviews F

These reviews are in alphabetical order according to the name of the game reviewed. The index also has a few extra features. First and foremost of these is the instant gratification feature. If you see the SPAG button:

Then you can click on it to retrieve the file from ftp.ifarchive.org, or to go to that file's directory on the archive (in the case of competition games).

The email addresses used are those submitted with the review, so naturally some of them may be out of date. All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine with the traditional 'at' sign.

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    A Fable
    A Fable: An Interactive MSTing -- see Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents "A Fable"
    Façade
    FailSafe
    Fallacy of Dawn
    Fate
    Fear
    The Fellowship Of The Ring
    Fifteen
    Film At Eleven
    Final Selection
    Finding Martin
    Fine-Tuned
    Firebird
    The Fire Tower
    First Things First
    Fish!
    Flat Feet
    Floatpoint
    Foggywood Hijinx
    For A Change
    Fort Aegea
    Four In One
    The Frenetic Five vs. Mr. Redundancy Man
    The Frenetic Five vs. Sturm Und Drang
    Friday Afternoon
    Frobozz Magic Support
    Frozen
    Frustration: see Jim MacBrayne games
    Future Boy!

    A Fable
    From: Julian Arnold <jools SP@G arnod.demon.co.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #6 -- July 26, 1995

      NAME: A Fable                                   PARSER: Poor
      AUTHOR: Stan Heller                             PLOT: I couldn't find one
      EMAIL: Unknown                                  ATMOSPHERE: Kafka-esque
      AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive                     WRITING: Reasonable
      PUZZLES: Virtually nonexistant                  SUPPORTS: AGT
      CHARACTERS: Non-interactive                     DIFFICULTY: Couldn't say

    Well, what can I say?  In _A Fable_, a game originally written in 1985 by one
    Stan Heller, and apparently rewritten three years ago by David Malmberg and
    Mark Welch with AGT 1.35, you guide the actions of Max, a somewhat confused
    man.  Unlike most IF _A Fable_ uses the third person (ie, `Max feels suddenly
    like a huge cloud has lifted him up and taken him away').  This adds to the
    detached, dreamlike atmosphere which the author has attempted to create.  The
    introduction tells how Max has gone for an evening stroll through his
    neighbourhood in order to `find himself'. Wrapped in self-obsession he is
    unaware as his world rapidly disappears, and Max soon finds himself in a
    strange place, enveloped in fog.

    Apart from a few foggy areas each location (there are apparently only fifteen
    so the game is mercifully short) is a one or two paragraph scene reminiscent
    in style, but without the content, of some of Kafka's shortest works.  They
    are apparently unrelated to each other, except that each seems as pointless
    and pretentious as the other.  In most of these locations there is one item
    which you can manipulate, but to what end I could not say.

    The only puzzle which I could find (and I quit with a score of 70/75)
    involved unlocking a lock with a key...  Wow!  Admittedly the key was hidden,
    but very obviously.  The score seems to go up for no reason (maybe for moving
    to a new location) and also goes down for no reason.

    I guess Max is wandering around his own mind and each location is meant to
    reveal something to him about himself, but if this is the case it hasn't
    worked. Oh, this is silly.  Even four paragraphs is too long a review for
    this.  Unless I have missed something crucial this game is utter drivel.
    Don't bother.

    AGT files with PC Executable runtime (.zip)

    AGT Source code (.zip)

    Façade
    From: Nick Montfort <nickm SP@G nickm.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #41 -- July 15, 2005

    TITLE: Façade
    AUTHOR: Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern
    EMAIL: feedback SP@G interactivestory.net
    DATE: July 2005
    PARSER: Custom
    SUPPORTS: Windows, >= 1.6 GHz, >= 256MB RAM, OpenGL
    AVAILABILITY: http://www.interactivestory.net/download/
    URL: http://www.interactivestory.net/
    VERSION: 1.0

    Not another one-room game set in an apartment!

    Well, actually, you probably couldn't call Façade a game in the typical
    sense -- even though a pre-release version was a finalist in the 2004
    Independent Games Festival, and the New York Times called the system
    "the future of video games." Façade may or may not even be IF, for that
    matter. But it's clearly something closely related to it, and whether
    you're willing to award it the IF label or not, there are good reasons
    that a lot of people -- myself included -- think that Façade is a
    tremendous advance in interactive storytelling.

    This "one act interactive drama" is the outcome of a research project
    that has spanned more than five years, one that you can read more about
    in the two creators' dozen-odd academic papers and in Mateas's
    dissertation, done as the last publication of the Carnegie Mellon
    University Oz Project. Façade is not just good research, though. It can
    provide an intense, compelling experience, even though a session can be
    played in about fifteen minutes.

    When you download and fire up the system, you'll get to visit with your
    old friends Trip and Grace -- 3D illustrated characters whose statements
    have all been recorded by voice actors -- as their marriage falls apart.
    You'll be able to type short statements to converse with them, move
    around the room using the arrow keys, and use the mouse to manipulate
    objects. Façade lacks adventuring, a clear way to win, and the typical
    IF command structure -- if you type "PICK UP THE MAGIC EIGHT BALL"
    you'll be saying that to Trip or Grace, not instructing your character
    in what to do. You can manipulate objects, however, and can say whatever
    short statements you like to the two other characters. If you manage to
    keep your comments fairly relevant to the conversation, or apartment, or
    situation, the two are likely to react appropriately, both in an
    immediate sense and in terms of the overall development of the
    conversation and the drama.

    Before getting deeper into why Façade is so great, I'll mention that the
    two authors and developers, Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, do happen
    to be my good friends and fellow bloggers with me at Grand Text Auto,
    where I made the official announcement of the release of Façade. So, you
    may choose to take my evaluation of the system with a grain of salt. But
    then, if no one reviewed interactive fiction by people they knew, there
    would be a lot less reviewing going on.

    I'll also mention a few other things by way of preface: Façade is a
    working prototype, one quite capable of providing a powerful experience
    that is both interactive (in a meaningful way) and dramatic (in the
    tradition of drama, going back to Aristotle). But it's also capable of
    breaking. Trip and Grace can fall eerily, permanently silent and remain
    planted in the same spot. You can get stuck walking in the door. Things
    that you type can be interpreted by the system in what seems to be
    exactly the wrong way. As is the case with interactive fiction, you have
    to learn something about how to interact fruitfully before you can
    interact fruitfully. Trying to play along, and not getting it quite
    right, can lead to frustration. Façade's excellence is not that it has
    some sort of dramatic Turing-Test-like ability to handle everything you
    can throw at it; there are plenty of ways to run aground, even when
    you're not trying to.

    The thing about Façade, though, is that when things go right, which
    isn't all that difficult to achieve, they can go brilliantly right. Your
    conversation can take you in an exhilarating free ride over the Freytag
    diagram of Trip and Grace's soul-searching and their coming to terms
    with their relationship, a ride that is not just funny, but manages to
    be touching. And, it's a ride that you get to steer: once a good typist
    is keyed into the way to talk to Trip and Grace, he or she can provoke
    reactions, draw the conversation to different topics, side with one or
    the other character, and nudge the drama in different directions. Grace
    and Trip are not stateless Elizas; they are closer, if anything, to
    Galateas, but they also maintain an awareness of the way the
    conversation has progressed so far, and they work together to achieve
    dramatic goals, and they use a complex behavior control system to blend
    their high-level and low-level actions together smoothly.

    The Oz Project at CMU, the major academic effort in interactive drama so
    far, sought to develop systems that were "highly interactive," that is,
    ones that allowed the player to move, talk, and act at any point, rather
    than only at the end of a turn. Façade realizes this goal, among others.
    Grace and Trip react fluidly to comments from the player at any point,
    given the somewhat asymmetric typed text interface. They player is
    always free to move around and check out things in the apartment. The
    system structures events beginning at the level of the dramatic beat (a
    visible action and reaction) and allows the player to intervene between
    beats or to interrupt a beat.

    Façade is also impressive in how it deals with language. It is able to
    understand many statements that are relevant to the current situation,
    and to correctly handle jokes, praise, agreement, disagreement,
    flirting, rudeness, and so on. Not that every possible statement is
    always correctly classified and acted upon, of course. But the natural
    language understanding system works well enough, enough of the time, for
    the drama at hand. Again, the amazing thing isn't that this system is
    flawless. It's that players can manage to get through an entire act
    without a noticeable slip-up -- even though this framework for
    interaction, unlike the venerable ">" prompt in IF, has few precedents,
    and players can't build on their previous knowledge of how to interact.
    It's as if you found someone who had never played interactive fiction
    before, sat this person down at a new version of Adventure, and found
    that after a few minutes of typing the game understood practically all
    the input it was getting and the newcomer was having a great time.

    While Façade looks more like a graphical adventure or a strange
    first-person shooter than like most text-based IF pieces, the insights
    that Mateas and Stern have gained in working on the system can certainly
    trickle into more traditional IF. It's not the place of a review to
    start outlining all the ways in which they might do that, but I will
    note that Mateas, with his student Mark Nelson, has already looked into
    how some of the techniques employed in Façade can be used in the context
    of an existing interactive fiction. Those two discuss this topic in a
    paper presented at the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital
    Entertainment conference, "Search-based Drama Management in the
    Interactive Fiction Anchorhead."

    Currently Façade only runs on Windows XP, 2000 or ME. It's pretty
    processor intensive, and will refuse to run on processors slower than
    1.6 GHz. It's also an 800 MB download via BitTorrent. (You can spend $14
    plus shipping to get Façade on two CDs, which Mateas and Stern sell at
    cost.) If you're an IF fan with an adequate Windows machine, it's
    certainly worth the download time or CD cost. I had to ask around my
    department for a while to find a suitable computer to borrow for Façade
    installation and play, so I envy those who only have to wait for the
    download to finish. A Mac version is planned, and will happen whenever
    the two developers (hopefully with some volunteer help) can manage the
    port, but it isn't imminent. In the meantime, if you're lucky enough to
    have a system on hand that will run Façade, check it out! I'd venture to
    guess that it will be the most impressive one-room game in an apartment
    that you'll play all year.

    FailSafe
    From: Adam Myrow <myrow SP@G eskimo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #24 -- March 24, 2001

    NAME: FailSafe
    AUTHOR: Jon Ingold
    EMAIL: ji207 SP@G cam.ac.uk
    DATE: December, 2000
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/FailSafe.z5
    VERSION: 1? (no version info shown and version command ignored)

    This is possibly the strangest piece of IF I've ever encountered. It's
    fairly short -- in fact, I think even the slowest person could complete
    it in 30 minutes. The story is confusing. So far as I can tell, you are
    at a base or something. You get a distress call on an emergency
    frequency and you have to respond. It seems that a small space pod has
    been attacked and there is only one survivor who is trying to fix the
    engines before the ship crashes. To make matters worse, there is a war
    going on and the enemy is massing for an attack. That's really all I can
    tell without giving the end away, although really, that's all I'm sure
    of. The ending is sure to be a surprise, and there are at least three
    different endings that I am aware of. It's hard to tell if you've won or
    lost, you just completed the story. The other odd thing is that all of
    the standard meta commands (score, save, script, version, etc.) are
    disabled. I think the author is trying to provide tension by making you
    feel that you don't have much time and you can't save in real life.
    However, he could have at least left scripting enabled so that it would
    be easy to provide a transcript of something. The only way you could do
    this now is to copy and paste.

    As for the writing itself, it is intentionally choppy. The idea is that
    the signal is really poor, almost inaudible in fact. If you type an
    invalid command, the response is to the effect that the other person
    can't hear you due to the static. Here is a sample to give a taste of
    this game. This is actually what you get after the opening credits.

       Bzzt. Crackle. *Static*

       "...hello? Hello? Can... me? .. Anyone! Hel.... Need.. hello?"

       Bleep - PLEASE WAIT - Locating/Tuning signal...

       ..

       ".. help. Repeat, can anybody hear me? Can you hear me? Hello.."

        >>yes
       "Hello? Hello! The ..  pretty bad. Are you receiving this?
       Over."

        >>yes
       "Oh, thank God. Thank God.. ..emergency frequency.. We need help.
       This is the space pod 'Serpentine'. We've been attacked, a small
       cruiser. They.. they came out of nowhere.. tried to board us..
       ...stly dead.. systems are all messed up, we're drifting.. I need
       help to fix this.."

       "I'm by the console, there's wires everywhere. The computer flashing
       something. What do I do? Hello?"

    Note the double prompt. This makes it obvious from the start that
    this isn't your traditional game. A poster on rec.games.int-fiction
    called this game "Suspended for dummies," but I don't see it that
    way. The only similarity to Suspended that I could see is the fact
    that you are dropped into the middle of a disaster without much
    warning. I really don't think there's anything like this in
    existence. It's certainly a unique way to tell a story, but I am not
    sure if I like it or not. Perhaps if the multiple endings were a bit
    more descriptive, but they continue the choppy nature of the
    beginning with multiple signals being received in some cases. The
    bottom line is that people who like to fill in stories from bits and
    pieces will probably like this particular game more than those who,
    like me, enjoy a rich, detailed world.

    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #25 -- June 20, 2001

    The "narrative at war with a crossword" that describes most IF
    games--the competing demands of plot and puzzles, and the attempt to
    accommodate both without sacrificing either--is actually, as many have
    noted, a stand-in for a more fundamental question: how to involve the
    player in the story the author wants to tell while still telling that
    particular story? The answer is usually "with puzzles that don't detract
    from the structure/pacing/logic of the plot," but not always--it's
    possible to get the player involved in a story by means other than
    puzzles. Jon Ingold's FailSafe is a might-have-been in this
    respect--it's a story that could, I think, have stood on its own, and
    which is hindered more than helped by the puzzles it includes.

    The protagonist is the only one alive on a spaceship which has taken a
    beating after a battle with an alien ship, and is radioing to you, the
    player, for help. Specifically, the protagonist wants you to help him
    get the ship back in order before the next attack comes along. The
    signal isn't very good, though, and the protagonist is less than fully
    coherent, so ascertaining what's going on (or has gone on) secondhand is
    something of a challenge. (Particularly because all of the standard
    system commands--QUIT, SAVE, UNDO, the whole lot of them) are
    disabled--the better to reproduce the sense of actually communicating
    with someone, of course.) It's an interesting challenge,
    though--reconstructing past events (for purposes of gaining insight into
    a present situation) is an underused and potentially fruitful IF
    technique.

    As it happens, though, that's not the focus of what goes on here--there
    are a few puzzles, and then you reach one of a variety of endings. The
    puzzles aren't especially good; one amounts to trial and error (made all
    the more irritating by the absence of UNDO), and another is hindered by
    some thoroughly unhelpful syntax. (Yes, admittedly, a person is not a
    parser, and it's not entirely realistic to expect a person's
    comprehension to work the same way as a parser, but guess-the-syntax is
    guess-the-syntax.) The endings are good--thought-provoking and well
    worth reaching--but the puzzles, to my mind, don't fit.

    Here, it seems, you have a premise that makes the interactive hook, in
    the form of puzzles, largely unnecessary. The *game* is a puzzle in
    itself; you' re trying to figure out what exactly happened, and you're
    battling the protagonist's vagueness and confusion and the chaos
    inherent in a partly wrecked ship. The nasty/strange/welcome surprises
    that you come across should be able to tell the story and keep the
    player involved all by themselves, particularly when the game is this
    small. (Well, okay, it would probably have to be a little larger if
    there were no puzzles.) There's also room for more story development in
    the distance between player and protagonist: do they trust each other?
    What do each of them know that the other doesn't? (FailSafe does hit
    that angle at one point, but there's more that could be done with it.)

    Unnecessary puzzles aside, though, FailSafe has its moments. One
    particularly effective touch is a series of messages that the player
    receives from a computer analyzing what's happened and who was aboard
    the damaged ship, messages that the protagonist doesn't receive; the
    juxtaposition between the player's semicoherent account and the
    computer's records is occasionally chilling. The inadequate descriptions
    are part of what makes the game compelling--when several turns of static
    pass before the protagonist's voice returns, there's genuine suspense.
    There are also some nicely done red herrings--while there isn't as much
    exploration potential as there might be, there's enough to keep the game
    from feeling like a small set of puzzles. And the endings are genuinely
    surprising (though spoiled somewhat by the game's XYZZY award
    nomination; don't read the nominee list before you play the game), and
    force the player to rethink what's come before.

    FailSafe's small size works against it, I found--there's too little
    there for the player to be really pulled up short by any surprising
    turns. (The player doesn't spend long enough interacting with the
    protagonist, and getting a mental picture of the story, to be truly
    caught off guard by unexpected events; the assumptions and mental
    pictures aren't around long enough to cause much surprise when they're
    challenged or disproved.) Still, it's got an intriguing premise and it's
    creatively done, and its spin on the player-PC relationship makes it a
    must-play for IF theorists.

    Inform file (.z5)

    Fallacy Of Dawn
    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #28 --March 20, 2002

    TITLE: Fallacy of Dawn
    AUTHOR: Robb Sherwin
    E-MAIL: beaver SP@G zombieworld.com
    DATE: 2001
    PARSER: Hugo standard
    SUPPORTS: Hugo interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/hugo/dawn.zip
    VERSION: 1.02

    One of the more interesting products of the revolution that has taken
    place in IF over the past few years is Robb Sherwin. Okay, technically,
    Robb (presumably) preexisted the revolution, but the style of his games
    didn't, to my knowledge, and somehow I can't see anything he has written
    getting created in 1996. What do I mean? Simply, Robb pretty clearly
    doesn't write his game for the puzzles, and players familiar with Robb,
    I'm guessing, don't play them for the puzzles either; rather, it's the
    writing -- the setting, the dialogue, the turns of phrase that he
    scatters around -- that makes his games worth playing, and everything
    else is an afterthought at best. Fallacy of Dawn, Robb's latest and
    longest, devotes more attention to puzzles than had his previous efforts
    (Chicks Dig Jerks and Crimson Spring), but the effect is still much the
    same.

    What's going on in Fallacy of Dawn? Well, it seems you live in a
    dystopian city gone even worse and work in a retro video arcade -- your
    life's passion appears to be '80s video games -- but you've been the
    victim of a mugging that's left you with brain damage of sorts, and you
    really need to scrape up cash for surgery. From there, the story careers
    wildly here and there for a while, without much intervention from you;
    your character has a habit of making important decisions during
    noninteractive sequences. The upshot, however, is that you eventually
    find yourself with two companions and a weapon, ready to accumulate some
    money by any means necessary...

    ...and that's where things pretty much stop, plot-wise, for most of the
    game. As in, you wander around performing random tasks that give you
    money, and eventually you have enough, and the plot picks up again. The
    middle section is more than half of the game, however, and it amounts to
    a long meander. Worse, it's easy to run out of things to do and end up
    wandering hither and yon asking for spare change. Not literally, but
    close enough; it's not exactly interesting stuff. In that respect,
    Fallacy of Dawn is a step back from Crimson Spring -- there's more to
    the plot here than there was there, but there at least the plot kept
    moving rather than going nowhere for most of the game. It's not even
    accurate to call the digression a segue into puzzle IF rather than plot
    IF, as there aren't really any puzzles to speak of; the gameplay usually
    amounts to doing something extremely obvious, or following someone's
    instructions very closely, in order to earn money (or, alternatively,
    engaging in randomized combat, which hasn't been anyone's idea of a good
    IF puzzle since 1982). Nor, even, is there character development to
    speak of in this section -- your two companions tag along and say very
    little. The raison d'etre, as far as I can tell, is to force you to
    experience the setting in all its grimy glory, and that it does, ad
    nauseam. But as gameplay, this is roughly on the level of a Towers of
    Hanoi puzzle.

    There are more problems. I mentioned above that Fallacy of Dawn devotes
    more attention to puzzles than did Robb's previous games, but by that I
    mean "has more of them," not "has more creative ones." There's the
    puzzle where a vital item is under one of a whole bunch of objects, but
    of course you have no way of knowing which one, nor even that anything
    is under anything. (There's one thoroughly oblique hint, as far as I can
    tell, but that's it.) There's the puzzle that you solve by doing
    something over and over again, causing a certain NPC to (for reasons
    that aren't wholly clear) act like a loon. There's the puzzle that you
    solve when you're entirely incapacitated because the game, for no
    particular reason, lets you do one thing. There are the "puzzles" that
    amount to "try randomized combat, then try it again until you happen to
    kill the bad guy." And don't even get me started on the ending sequence,
    which requires insanely exact syntax under a tight time limit.

    Nor are the problems only design-related. There's more unimplemented
    scenery in Fallacy of Dawn than you can shake a stick at, and fewer
    synonyms than you can, um, fail to shake a stick at. The graphics
    regularly encroach on the text, and the gauges that are supposed to
    represent your health and your need for a drug fix (really) are
    represented by some strange high-ASCII characters. Toward the end, the
    game appears to forget about compass directions and require an awful lot
    of ENTER DOOR and such, for no discernible reason. And it's pretty easy
    to run out of things to say (via conversation menus) to the various
    NPCs, even when they really should have more on their minds; to some
    extent, I suppose, that's par for the course with menus, but when, for
    example, you have a romantic interlude -- at least, I think that's what
    it was supposed to be -- you really should be able to say more than one
    or two things.

    But the writing -- ah, the writing. It's probably fair to say that
    Robb's writing is an acquired taste, and it's not one that I've wholly
    acquired -- the gore, for example, is just a tad too lovingly described
    -- but I like it enough that I stick around to the end of a game that
    doesn't have much more to offer than good writing. (Well, okay, there's
    a plot, and outside sources had given me reason to believe that the
    story would start up again eventually, but I doubt that would have been
    enough.) Bizarre digressions abound -- this one, for instance, from the
    opening text, in the middle of the description of the attack:

       It wasn't a very good showing for either my face or my TLA, in fact
       it brought my knowledge of Vegas handicapping factoids up to two: you
       always bet against the Bills in the Super Bowl, and you always take a
       vapourizer and a pair of fists against my face and my personal
       property. Even if you're getting the points, natch.

    Funny one-liners abound (when you realized you failed to follow up on a
    romantic opportunity, "How on earth did I mess this up? I need to stop
    leaving the house without a personal social calendar assistant"), as do
    memorable images (apartments in a certain complex "feel, when you're in
    them, as well-crafted and sturdy as a margarine-slathered house of
    playing cards"). And it's not a matter of an occasional humorous tidbit
    -- there are amusing or memorably loopy lines in virtually every
    paragraph. (Pizza that's getting cold "has a half-life of skittish
    californium.") Fallacy of Dawn won its Best Writing XYZZY for a reason;
    with a less skilled writer at the controls, this would be a fourth-rate
    game, and I probably wouldn't have given it more than ten minutes.

    As it is, well, it's worth experiencing, though I found myself wishing
    for a text-dump utility more than once. The plot is second-rate sci-fi
    at best, but even second-rate sci-fi is worth playing along with if it's
    memorably written. I can't imagine what sort of IF Robb would write if
    he turned his attention to some of the basic principles of game design,
    and I wouldn't say that his writing makes up for every sin -- I wouldn't
    recommend Chicks Dig Jerks to anyone. As much as Fallacy of Dawn does
    wrong, however, I can't in good conscience refuse to give it a chuckle
    and a thumbs-up.

    Hugo .hex file and resource files

    Fate
    From: Justin Pot <justinpot SP@G gmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #49 -- August 18, 2007

    TITLE: Fate
    AUTHOR: Victor Gijsber
    E-MAIL:  victor SP@G lilith.gotdns.org
    DATE: April 2, 2007
    PARSER: Inform 7
    SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF-Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/springthing/2007/Fate.z8
    VERSION: Release 1

    To some, changing fate is a contradiction in terms. Victor Gijsber's Spring
    Thing winner Fate disagrees, as can be surmised before the player so much as
    presses a key:

    "Men at some time are masters of their fates:
    The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
    But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
    -- Cassius to Brutus in 'Julius Caesar', Act I, Scene 2

    Fate is about one woman trying to change an unhappy future. The protagonist and
    player-character, Catherine, is a young queen hours away from giving birth.

    Oh, and she also has a crystal ball that's fortelling her son's untimely demise.

    The objective here is to prevent said demise -- and Catherine has an arsenal of
    spells to do so. Spells are cast by the gathering of components as directed by
    the grimoire (spell book) found early in the game. It is by using these spells
    in creative ways that Catherine is able to alter fate, and it is the gathering
    and using of components that makes up the bulk of the game's puzzles. These
    puzzles are very fair while remaining fun; for those who do get stuck, however,
    A well implemented context-sensitive hint system is in place.

    Despite the lack of a set time limit, a sense of urgency is created by the
    impending birth of Catherine's son. The player is periodically reminded that
    Catherine is very pregnant, often by painful descriptions. This sense of urgency
    blurs some of the moral and personal decisions Catherine must make in order to
    change her sons fate. Not wanting to spoil anything, I'll just say that some of
    these moral dilemmas are quite effective at disturbing a player who feels
    complicit to the wrongdoing.

    There are several possible endings to this game, each depending on how far
    Catherine is willing to go for her unborn son. When the player is satisfied with
    the fate the crystal ball presents she can wait in her den and birth the child.
    The game refrains from explicitly pointing out whether an ending is winning or
    losing, leaving that to the player to decide and discover which is best. The
    result makes for a solid game with a number of endings to discover.

    For all the game's strengths this piece has, one weakness that stands out is the
    use of a menu-driven conversation system for NPCs. While there are certainly
    examples of this system being used successfully (Adam Cadre's Photopia being the
    most obvious) such games are typically not puzzle driven. Because certain
    puzzles in Fate require eliciting a given response from a character, Fate
    occasionally becomes a guess-and-test game of "navigate the conversation menus,"
    detracting from any realism the conversations may have had.

    This aside, the game is easy to love. The judges of Spring Thing 2007 apparently
    agree, and gave it First Place amongst the four entrants.

    Z-Code game file

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

    NAME: Fear
    AUTHOR: Chuan-Tze Teo
    EMAIL: ctt20 SP@G hermes.cam.ac.uk
    DATE: October 1996
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Inform Ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/fear
    VERSION: Version 1.0

    An imaginative exercise in using memories and symbolic puzzle-solving
    to overcome your fears of heights, sounds, spiders, and the dark.  The
    puzzles are, for the most part, refreshingly unique, and difficult.
    You really have to envision the scenes in your mind to win.  In
    particular, the 4-octave chord was very ingenious.  These puzzles are
    HARD, though, and I ended up sneaking a peek at most of their hints in
    order to finish the game within two hours.

    Unlike "House of the Stalker" and "Rippled Flesh," presents a
    more psychological, self-confrontational horror, also seen in "Shades
    of Gray" and this year's entries "Tapestry" and "Delusions."  "Fear"
    isn't quite as gripping as any of these, but it's a creepy, paranoid
    game with an ending that leaves just enough to the imagination to keep
    the player slightly ill at ease.

    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #24 -- March 24, 2001

    One of the forgotten treasures of the 1996 competition, Chuan-Tze Teo's
    Fear, is subtitled "An Interactive Nightmare"--but though the setting
    (alone in your house) and apparent initial premise (beginning of opening
    text: "You are running for your life down dark, labyrinthine corridors,
    your heart pounding almost as loudly as the heavy boots of your
    relentless pursuer") evokes horror/slasher IF, this is actually
    something quite different. The drama is more psychological than literal,
    and the object is more akin to therapy than to saving your skin as
    such--and while it's not a perfect effort, it's notable in a few
    respects.

    You're irrationally afraid of spiders, heights, sounds, and the dark,
    and you wake up in the middle of the night, completely unable to move
    around your house normally because of your fears. You end up conquering
    your fears in a series of episodes--one of them seemingly a flashback,
    two others apparently dreams--triggered by various objects you encounter
    in your house. The way in which the flashbacks are triggered is a bit
    tortured, but it's a minor sin--the episodes themselves are
    imaginatively done, with reasonably logical connections to your various
    phobias.

    The atmosphere is nicely done: the game doesn't so much portray a scary
    setting as portray an ordinary setting, with details magnified out of
    proportion. E.g., "You feel suddenly claustrophobic as you hear a
    rustling nearby. What lurks in the shadows, waiting to pounce?"
    Sometimes, the events that set off your alarms are entirely internal:
    "As you try to compose your mind, dark memories wash over you:
    explosions, death, the tolling of funeral bells, gloom, isolation."
    Arguably, this is one of the few works of IF where the PC's mind is as
    well rendered as the physical setting. If there's a flaw, it's that you
    don't get much about *how* you became so mentally crippled--there are
    vague allusions to memories, but nothing concrete. It seems like
    confronting whatever caused the fear in the first place would be both
    more effective and more interesting, in terms of characterization.

    Most of the puzzles take place in the phobia episodes, and they aren't
    easy; a few of them, in fact, verge on the unfair. The worst case
    involves an object that you have to destroy in order to use--and it's an
    object that seems like it would be useful in its original states for
    solving the puzzle at hand. The solutions are logical, but in a few
    cases in particular, there isn't much in the game to signal that you're
    on the right track, so things are harder than they should be. Adding to
    the difficulty is a guess-the-syntax problem in one episode that may
    prevent you from realizing that you're on the right track even when you
    are. The last puzzle suddenly introduces a time limit, and it's a pretty
    tight time limit at that--you're likely to miss it a few times while
    you're figuring out what the game wants of you. There's a comprehensive
    hint system, so the problems aren't intractable, but it'd be nice if the
    game's execution were as good as its concept; puzzles as hard as these
    risk requiring so much mental energy of the player that he/she loses
    sight of the plot, which is the best thing the game has going for it.

    The concept is good enough to overcome the game design problems, though,
    and it's not simply an excuse for outlandish puzzle settings. The PC's
    neuroses are sufficiently real that failing to do certain things to keep
    them at bay actually kills you; saying "snap out of it" to the PC isn't
    an option, of course. In that sense, you're forced to be the character
    in a way that's still uncommon in IF (and was even more so in 1996,
    before experimental IF was in vogue). The vividness of the setting lies
    not in what you see but in how you experience it--i.e., through the eyes
    of the phobic PC. It may not sound revolutionary, but getting the player
    to focus not on the PC's external goals but on the internal barriers he
    has to clear represents a real shift in goal-orientation--and even if
    the puzzle-solving gets projected into external tasks, it's still worth
    pondering. (That is, you don't actually delve into your own head, a la
    Losing Your Grip--though one scene comes close. But what's in your head
    is sufficiently close to the surface throughout the game that your
    puzzle-solving is almost the same thing.)

    As a set of challenging puzzles or as an exercise in atmosphere, Fear
    works, on the whole--well enough to be worth rediscovering five years
    later.

    Inform file (.z5)

    The Fellowship Of The Ring
    From: J.D. Berry <berryx SP@G earthlink.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #30 -- September 20, 2002

    TITLE:         The Fellowship of the Ring
    AUTHOR:        One of the Bruces (Adam Thornton)
    EMAIL:         bruce SP@G fsf.net
    DATE:          2002 (Originally released as an IntroComp entry)
    PARSER:        None (menu options)
    SUPPORTS:      Atari 2600 emulators
    AVAILABILITY:  IF Archive -- ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/atari-8bit/fotr2600.tgz
    URL:           http://www.fsf.net/stella/

    From the "Fellowship of the Ring" manual:

       For starters, on the face of it, an Atari 2600 text adventure is
       ridiculous. An Atari 2600 text adventure that attempts to compress
       several hundred pages of densely-written prose into a 4K ROM image is
       even more ridiculous. It should be obvious even to the dimmest that
       the game is not intended as a serious interpretation of one of the
       most complex works of fiction ever put on paper, although it may in
       fact be about the best one can do given the limitations of the
       medium.

       Fellowship of the Ring is intended as a gentle spoof of the
       retro-gaming community, the mindset that attempts to produce
       derivative works in woefully inadequate media, fanfic authors in
       general, and the rec.arts.int-fiction and IFMud communities in
       particular.

    Nothing conveys these sentiments more than the "Fellowship of the Ring"
    (FotR) "cover" artwork. Robb Sherwin's magnificently-drawn battle scene
    between Gandalf and the balrog could lead a player (if he were born
    yesterday, perhaps) to expect an epic of modern cinematography and
    Doom-like gameplay. Such a player would be more than a wee bit
    disappointed.

    This deception follows tradition. The Atari cartridge jacket for
    "Baseball" conjured images of America's game that would have made Ken
    Burns envious. The actual game featured two block figures and four tiny
    bases on an all-green background. The jacket for "Combat" made you run
    for cover as jets screamed across the smoky sky and fell tanks overran
    your camp. The actual game featured two block figures and four tiny
    bases on an all-green background. (Kidding. The background was blue.)

    But even Atari wouldn't have had the temerity to release FotR in the
    late '70s. Not from any moral qualms, but from a marketability
    standpoint. Sure, reduce a work of epic scope to a few blips and doinks.
    Go ahead, imply that the spectacular action and grand strategy depicted
    on the cover occurs in the game. But, for goodness sake, you gotta have
    replay value.

    So, can you play FotR? Yes, you can play it. This isn't just a clever
    joke, is it? No, it's not. But you must clear some hurdles, first. I had
    to download and install an Atari emulator. Then I spent several minutes
    tinkering with flicker rates and color, never really getting them to
    satisfaction and settling for "close enough." This is not the game's
    responsibility, of course, but a prospective player whose system isn't
    already wired for hot Atari-2600 action should plan for a few minor
    aggravations setting up the environment.

    With that accomplished, you assume the role of Frodo, the ring-bearer.
    You'll encounter key scenes from Tolkien's "Fellowship of the Ring" with
    none of that boring travel stuff. The top of the screen briefly
    describes the current situation. The bottom displays one of several
    possible actions. You scroll with your joystick (or your keyboard keys
    of choice) and when you reach the action you want to perform, you press
    the fire button (for my money, nothing says "big red button" like
    alt-tilde-F3.)

    When your action matches what Frodo did in the book, you advance to the
    next scene. Doing the wrong thing results in a "no, silly, that didn't
    work" type message and an implied invitation to try again. If you've
    read the book, you'll have a fifteen-second head start for each
    encounter. You'll finish the entire game in five or six minutes,
    depending.

    Disclaimer: no socks were knocked off in the playing of FotR. But I did
    feel a strange beauty with its competent simplicity. The meta-experience
    implied in the manual wouldn't have worked without a functioning game
    underneath. Adam mixes practical joke with compassion, satire with
    devotion. And unlike "Baseball", FotR has no blocky graphics that remind
    you you're playing a game. Nope, just text and your own imagination.
    Hey...

    Atari 2600 cartridge image, manual and source code

    Atari 2600 cartridge image only

    Atari 2600 cartridge image (IntroComp version)

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

    NAME: Fifteen
    AUTHOR: Ricardo Dague
    E-MAIL: trikiw SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/fifteen

    VERSION: Release 7

    I quite enjoyed this game although it was very simple. Clearly a first
    adventure. The main item in the game is the Fifteen Puzzle which is
    implemented like one of those simple text games, you used to see in
    computer pre-history a bit like Robots, by Torbjörn Andersson,
    available from the IF archive. I remember playing Wrap and Zombies (a
    variant of Robots) on a Commodore Pet (yes, computers did once exist
    that used Tape Drives, and had memory measured in single 1K units),
    kind of nostalgic, showing my age.

    The rest of the game is very simple, locked doors, put the treasures
    on the table etc... I worked out the remote control program in about
    half a microsecond, but then I am a seasoned IF hand. I had a bit of
    trouble working out how to use the ladder, a guess the verb problem,
    which could be fixed. The game is short on narrative, with a lot of
    short room descriptions, which could be fleshed out a bit. Clearly
    this game was never going to have a good showing due to its
    simplicity, but it was enjoyable none the less.

    Directory with Inform .z5 file and stepwise solution

    Film At Eleven
    From: Stephen Bond <bonds SP@G maths.tcd.ie>
    Review appeared in SPAG #27 -- January 4, 2002

    TITLE: Film At Eleven
    AUTHOR: Bowen Greenwood
    E-MAIL: greenwood SP@G lvcm.com
    DATE: October 2001
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/inform/eleven/eleven.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    This game is apparently inspired by I-0, so the first time I played it I
    spent the whole time doing I-0 type things: I stripped off everywhere
    and waited to see how people would react. But the reactions were somehow
    disappointing, and the descriptions were somehow disappointing, and I
    felt a bit let down. I got the same feeling I get when reading Terry
    Pratchett -- all very light-hearted, and the author is having a good
    time, and the characters are having a good time, and everyone involved
    is having a good time, and... I'm not, really.

    One difference between this and I-0 is that the latter is much more
    richly described and imagined. To take a concrete example, I-0 gives me
    a very good picture of what Tracey Valencia's breasts look like. The
    description of Betty Byline's boobs, on the other hand, is "You've never
    had any complaints about them", which is so vague that she might as well
    be wearing five woolen sweaters. Does "You've never had any complaints
    about them" conjure up images in anyone's mind? No. And it's not that
    I'm only slavering after good descriptions of T&A: a lot of the writing
    here is similarly unevocative. I-0 it ain't.

    The second time I played, however, I tried to appreciate Film at Eleven
    on its own terms, and I found it a lot more likeable. In fact I found
    the whole thing rather sweet and endearing. I liked the PC and her
    infectious enthusiasm, I liked the quirky small-town inhabitants, and I
    liked the friendly, gently chiding voice that was narrating. There's
    nothing particularly memorable here, but Eleven makes a pleasant enough
    way to pass an hour or two.

    .z5 Zcode file and solution (updated version)

    Directory with .z5 Zcode file and solution (competition version)

    Final Selection
    From: Valentine Kopteltsev <uux SP@G mail.ru>
    Review appeared in SPAG #49 -- August 18, 2007

    TITLE: Final Selection
    AUTHOR: Sam Gordon
    E-MAIL:  sam_r_gordon SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: May 14, 2006
    PARSER: Inform 6
    SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF-Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/games/zcode/selection.z5
    VERSION: Release 3

    Sure enough, there are a lot of ways to classify text adventures in general,
    and the puzzle-oriented of them, in particular. One of them is, to subdivide
    puzzlefests into games where the puzzles more or less naturally spring from
    the setting (one good example is Heist by Andy Phillips), and those where the
    puzzles are just forcibly thrown together, without anything in particular
    holding them in place (The Magic Toyshop from the first If-Comp, and
    Labyrinth from the last one).

    Somehow, I tend to like the games of the first sub-category a little bit
    more. However, Final Selection represents a lucky exception of this rule:
    while its meta-puzzle certainly is constructed artificially (you play here a
    candidate for the position of the Director of the Museum and Institute for
    Puzzles and Problem Solving, who is only going to get the job if he passes
    the test his predecessor has prepared for him), its structure is thought-out
    so carefully, and the overall implementation level is so deep that immersion
    (or, more precise, the lack of immersion) never was an issue for me during
    playing.

    To complete the game, one has to hunt for words. I always feel a little
    suspicious about that kind of puzzles, because the authors pretty often make
    them overcomplicated -- say, by inventing obscure cyphers, and the like.
    Final Selection, however, managed to dispel my apprehensions in this respect,
    as well. While its puzzles are challenging enough, barely any of them require
    tedious trial and error treatment, special knowledge, or confusing
    deductions. On the other hand, there are enough red herrings to make the
    player occasionally think that's exactly what the game expects of him;).
    Thus, Final Selection fooled me into outsmarting myself, so that I tried to
    interpret the hints I got in most perverse ways, and even solved one of the
    puzzles in a tedious semi-brute force manner. To tell you the truth, I think
    this was partly caused by my solving the puzzles "in a wrong order"; it
    happened that I found the solution to one of the key problems that gave
    away what exactly I had to do only towards the very end of the game; like, I
    had all the jigsaw pieces yet had no clue where to put them to form a
    picture.

    As I mentioned before, the depth of implementation in Final Selection is
    amazing. The author had to stuff a lot of objects into the only room of the
    game (it was entered in the One Room Comp, after all!), and it must be said
    he found a very elegant way to do this without overwhelming the player by
    overlong "You see  here" messages. He expanded the
    concept of the room somewhat, dividing it in several areas. It doesn't break
    the competition rules, because the room description doesn't change when you
    move from one area to the other, and *all* objects in the room are reachable
    from any part of it. Still, it makes the object managing task much more
    convenient for the player. Another enhancement that makes the player's life
    easier is a notepad of sorts, where any information you gain while playing
    that could potentially be useful is jotted down automatically for later
    reference.

    The only (and pretty small) issue I encountered were some disambiguation
    problems. This is a result of having so many objects in one room; some of
    them inevitably have pretty similar names. For example, there was a box with
    several buttons labeled from 1 to 15 in the game, and a scale with several
    weights, their face values indicated. Somehow, any time I tried to "push 3",
    the game would make me push the "weight 3", and "getting 3" resulted in the
    attempt of taking the "button 3". Always typing in the whole object
    descriptions was a little bit tedious, although I just might have been
    unlucky. Anyway, I think this is more a problem on the part of the
    interpreter than of the game itself.

    But enough nitpicking -- this certainly isn't a game that makes one feel like
    looking for faults. It even nourished my self-confidence by being both pretty
    challenging and quite completable without hints. To put it short -- a
    must-play for any puzzle-lover.

    SNATS (Score Not Affecting The Scoreboard):

    PLOT: Not what this game was written for (1.0)
    ATMOSPHERE: Victorian study (1.4)
    WRITING: Solid as a piece of Victorian furniture (1.4)
    GAMEPLAY: Exciting word-hunting (1.6)
    BONUSES: Deep implementation level, the quality of the puzzles, the approach
             to object management  (1.6)
    TOTAL: 7.0
    CHARACTERS: There are some, but they don't deserve to be rated (-)
    PUZZLES: Well though-out and balanced (1.6)
    DIFFICULTY: Challenging, but passable (7 out of 10)

    Z-Code game file

    Finding Martin
    From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G colorado.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #45 --July 17, 2006

    TITLE: Finding Martin
    AUTHOR: Gayla K. Wennstrom
    EMAIL: gayla SP@G qrivy.net
    DATE: 2005
    PARSER: TADS
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/fm.gam (Archive)
         http://www.qrivy.net/~gayla/ (game home page)
    VERSION: 1.12

    In an era of bite-sized IF, Finding Martin is a 12-course meal. Actually, it's
    more like one of those progressive dinners, where you go from one house to the
    next, a different course at each house, for a total of 12 courses in the
    evening. Except it's more like going to one of those every night for two weeks.
    Seriously, this game is HUGE. This is the kind of game where you might find an
    item with ten different modes, many of which can be used to adjust the item to
    one of its 720 different settings (and some of which do other things entirely),
    settings which are split into twelve different themed sections, many of which
    give hints, some of which give red herrings, and some of which perform game
    functions. I am not exaggerating. And that's just one item out of dozens and
    dozens you'll find in this game way way way before you get anywhere near finding
    Martin himself.

    If you love yourself a big, juicy puzzlefest, Finding Martin is cause for
    celebration. It's several times larger and more complex than anything Infocom
    ever attempted, and it's generally quite well-implemented. I encountered a
    number of glitches in my journey through the game, but they were all minor --
    typos, missing synonyms, and underimplemented parsing mostly. There are a few
    logic errors here and there, but nothing game-crashing, and in fact very little
    that even caused me any trouble with a puzzle. Moreover, these problem areas are
    a very small percentage of the game itself, and this is a game that implements
    some highly complex behavior. A few errors here and there are quite forgivable
    in a game this ambitious in scope.

    As for the puzzles themselves, the news is again mostly good. Most of the
    challenges are logical, and some are quite clever indeed. In particular, there's
    a puzzle (or maybe it would be more accurate to call it a suite of puzzles)
    toward the end of the game that is astoundingly intricate and deeply satisfying,
    the kind of a puzzle that would make up the entirety of another game. It's a
    time-travel scenario that takes the groundwork laid by Sorcerer and expands it
    by an order of magnitude, asking you to consider the relations between a number
    of different time-slices as well as to coordinate the actions of multiple past
    selves with the actions of your current self in order to bypass certain
    barriers. However, well before you reach that puzzle you'll have made your way
    through a large number of obstacles that should scratch any inveterate puzzler's
    itch.

    Not only that, the puzzles frequently build on each other, and most of the goals
    require several components to achieve. Finding Martin's world can feel
    astonishingly layered and convoluted. I frequently found that the discovery of a
    new item or command would add new dimensions to the pieces of the game I'd
    already uncovered, and that their interactions would open up new avenues for
    exploration. Of course, the flip side to this is that such a discovery would
    often compel me to explore the game's giant world yet again, trying the new key
    to see if it would unlock any heretofore unseen doors. At time, the gameworld
    feels like an obsessive-compulsive's paradise, but at least most of the
    interactions seem logical once they've been found.

    Unfortunately, not all the puzzles manage to meet the same high standards. There
    are a number of read-the-author's-mind stumpers spread throughout the game. Some
    of these just require induction stretched absurdly far, but for several others I
    still have no idea how I was supposed to come up with the solution. There's
    another category, too: puzzles whose solution required some kind of cultural
    referent which I lacked, a la Zork II's baseball puzzle. Finding Martin's
    pedigree consists mostly of geek lore like Monty Python and Douglas Adams, and
    that stuff I've got covered, but a couple of puzzles require knowledge of Asian
    customs that I only learned from the walkthrough.

    On the flip side of read-the-author's-mind are "puzzles" whose solution is
    entirely arbitrary but so heavily clued that the game pretty much just tells you
    what it is. Imagine a dark room with a description along these lines: "It's
    impossible to see anything in this room -- this must be what a cinnamon roll
    feels like when it's in the oven!" And lo and behold, you just happen to find a
    cinnamon roll later in the game, so when you bring it into the dark room and eat
    it, the cinnamon-oriented olfactory sensors in the walls detect it and turn on
    the lights, just as they've been programmed to do by the house's exceedingly
    eccentric and patient owner. That example isn't from the game, but there are
    several puzzles in there that are cut from the same cloth.

    The substandard puzzles are a minority, and they certainly aren't enough to ruin
    the game, but my advice is: don't be afraid to bust out the walkthrough. Yes,
    sometimes you may find that a perfectly logical solution was staring you in the
    face, but other times you'll be relieved to just take the rather farfetched
    solution and move on with your life. Happily, the author is kind enough to
    provide a walkthrough on her web page that is broken up into 5-point clusters so
    as not to give away too much at once. However, if I may offer one more piece of
    advice: download the full walkthrough from that page and tuck it away somewhere
    on your hard drive. Otherwise, you may find yourself, as I did, stuck two-thirds
    of the way through the game and panicking because the author's site has gone
    down. Luckily for me, the page came back up the next day and I found some cached
    bits on Yahoo in the meantime, but I could have saved a good deal of time and
    stress if I'd just had the full walkthrough to fall back on.

    Finally, take heed of the author's advice in the intro text: save your game a
    LOT. There were quite a number of times I found myself returning to an earlier
    savegame because I was trapped without a necessary item, or I wanted to undo
    something I'd done a bit improperly a few hundred moves earlier. Actually, that
    brings me to one of my chief gripes about Finding Martin: it sets a few
    arbitrary limits, ostensibly in the name of realism but functionally just to
    irritate the player. Chief among these is an inventory limit. Let's face it:
    this is not a game that holds realism particularly dear. Many of its puzzles
    consist of caprice and whimsy, and its entire plot is metaphysical to say the
    least. However, for some reason it decided that the player should only be able
    to carry a limited number of objects, and it failed to provide any kind of
    bottomless sack-type object to circumvent this limit. Not only that, there's a
    puzzle component that steals items when they're dropped on the ground. Even more
    confoundingly, commands like PUT ALL ON TABLE are met with the response, "One
    thing at a time, please." And of course, there are many many journeys to pocket
    worlds whose obstacles require that the player has brought a particular item.
    Frequent were the times I cursed at this game for the way it forced me into
    numbingly dull inventory management tasks when I wanted to be having fun
    instead. Also, there are several instances of the game being pointlessly obtuse,
    along these lines:

       >READ BIG BOOK
       First you'd need to open it.

    Come on. This is 2006 -- we know by now that READ implies OPEN. Such
    obstructionist world-modeling benefits nobody.

    I'm not sure if responses like this one and the response to PUT ALL are TADS
    default behavior. I do know that I sometimes wished this game had been written
    in Inform, so that I could get certain pieces of the Inform default
    functionality. Besides the lack of a sack_object, I was jonesing hard for an
    OBJECTS verb that would let me see all the items in the game I'd found up to
    that point. Similarly, a FULLSCORE command that told me all the puzzles I'd
    solved so far would have been most welcome, especially given how many times I
    had to restore back to an earlier saved game. Finally, having just played
    Bronze, I really missed conveniences like GO TO that allow me to traverse the
    game world without rattling off memorized directions to the parser.

    Okay, I've been complaining for a while, which makes it sound like I didn't
    enjoy the game. That's not true -- overall I had plenty of fun. It's just a
    similar feeling to what I had when playing Once And Future, another enormous
    old-school puzzlefest. Like OAF, Finding Martin provides lots of opportunities
    to feel that satisfying *click* as logical components snap together, but forces
    a little too much tedium on the player after that click has happened. It's the
    figuring-out that's the fun part of a puzzle, not the follow-through of putting
    twenty pieces in just the right place once you know where they're supposed to
    go. Several of this game's puzzles would have been much more fun if they'd
    provided some way of automating that follow-through once the player has
    demonstrated understanding of the basic concept.

    Enough about the puzzles anyway. What about the story? Well, actually, the story
    is pretty much MIA for the first third or so of the game. We begin with a
    reasonably compelling premise: your brilliant but peculiar friend Martin has
    disappeared, and his family has asked you to explore his house in hopes of
    finding him. Why you and not, say, the police? Well, it seems that you may just
    be close enough to Martin's highly bizarre mindset to understand how to find him
    when the police wouldn't even be able to get in the door. Strong echoes of
    Hollywood Hijinx abound as you poke through rooms laden with fascinating devices
    and hidden exits, but there's not much more story to be had for a while.
    Finally, the game begins doling out plot in awkward lumps, but about two-thirds
    of the way through, these lumps smooth out and the story begins to tie together
    as more and more interconnections between Martin's family and friends, as well
    as his past, present, and future, reveal themselves. By the time I was rolling
    toward the endgame, I had felt genuinely moved several times. In fact, a couple
    of times Finding Martin hits a real IF sweet spot, where the solution to a
    puzzle not only advances the story but carries strong emotional content about
    the PC's role in the other characters' lives. I recall one moment in particular
    that gave me goosebumps, as I figured out how something I had done in a past
    time-travel scenario had affected the future, and how someone in that past had
    sent a message forward in time to me.

    Remember how I mentioned the game's geeky pedigree? There are a number of
    references woven throughout the story that are pulled straight from the geek
    handbook: Star Trek meets Hitchhiker's meets Tolkien. Some of these made me
    smile, and some made me squirm. At times I felt like saying, "Yes, yes, I get
    it. You like Monty Python." Also, the writing around these references can
    sometimes feel a bit flat and ingratiating, as when the PC encounters a used
    paperback:

       >x novel
       It's a book by Douglas Adams, entitled "So Long and Thanks for All
       the Fish". Apparently this is the fourth book in the "Hitchhiker's
       Guide to the Galaxy" trilogy. It occurs to you that publishing the
       fourth book of a trilogy must be the toungue-in-cheek behavior of
       someone with a fantastic imagination and an audacious taste for the
       bizarre.

    Ho ho ho. Nothing like belaboring that "fourth book in the trilogy" joke. I get
    it -- you like Douglas Adams. Also, "tongue".

    Aside from that, though, the writing worked well. Most of the time it was
    transparent, but there were some clever twists and turns throughout, as well as
    a few good jokes. Having finished this game at last, and finally found Martin, I
    have to express my admiration. It must have been an unbelievable amount of work
    to put together a game of this size and scope, and for the most part it's done
    really well. If you're hungry for puzzles, Finding Martin should keep you fed
    for several weeks. Even if you're not a puzzler, grab a walkthrough and explore
    this game -- there are pleasures here for many tastes.

    TADS2 game file

    Fine-Tuned
    From: Jacqueline A. Lott <jacqueline.a.lott SP@G gmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #28 -- March 20, 2002

    NAME: Fine-Tuned
    AUTHOR: Dionysius Porcupine (a.k.a. Dennis Jerz)
    EMAIL: jerzdg SP@G uwec.edu
    DATE: 2001-2002
    PARSER: Inform Standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/FineTune.z8
    VERSION: Release 5

    "The life of a daredevil adventurer leaves precious little time for
    rest. There's always wickedness to thwart, innocence to preserve, and
    honour to uphold." ...and with that short yet intriguing introduction,
    you find yourself in the shoes (and goggles) of Troy Sterling, a man
    well ahead of his time.

    Fine-Tuned, in my opinion, is one of the better light-hearted games to
    come along in quite awhile. Though early releases of the game were known
    for being buggy, release five seems to be free of such distractions, and
    is well worth setting aside an evening or two to enjoy. If you're
    familiar with earlier versions of Fine-Tuned, release five has some
    extra features as well, including enhanced interaction between the
    characters, different solutions to some of the puzzles, a modified point
    system, and additional implementation in certain areas of the game.

    Dennis Jerz, writing as Dionysius Porcupine (a pen name which is
    explained in the credits of the game), does a fantastic job of creating
    an enjoyable game world, filled with memorable NPCs. As a player, I
    normally don't enjoy games which are heavily scripted; I don't feel like
    I'm playing the game so much as being dragged along through the plot.
    Fortunately, Fine-Tuned is written in such a playful and imaginative way
    that the player tends to forget that their fate is pre-determined.
    Multiple solutions exist for some of the puzzles, and though each
    solution garners the same number of points, the play differs somewhat,
    giving the game replay value. Instead of arbitrarily forcing the plot,
    chapters serve to break up the puzzles, allowing the player to focus on
    the right objects in the right order, without that terrible "Led By The
    Hand" feeling. The chapters also give you the opportunity to explore
    other characters in the game aside from Troy Sterling, which makes for
    interesting twists on how different characters think, feel, and interact
    with the situations that are presented to them.

    I could go on and on about who will enjoy this game. In short, I think
    anyone with a sense of humor will have a fantastic time. If you've
    played a variety of other IF titles, or are familiar with some of the
    current authors of IF, you'll enjoy it a bit more. Beyond that, I found
    that Jerz pulls in varied bits and pieces of real life from all over the
    place. I laughed at loud several times because the game hit home on a
    personal level, and I don't think I'm alone in this respect.

    It is really little wonder that Fine-Tuned received nominations for Best
    Setting and Best Player Character for the 2001 Xyzzy Awards. At the time
    of this writing, the awards have not yet been handed out, and
    Fine-Tuned's nominations wait alongside other deserving nominees.
    Regardless of how the awards are distributed, Fine-Tuned is deserving of
    both honors. Normally, I prefer to imagine that it's me in the game, but
    for once, I really enjoyed playing the part of a highly developed PC.
    Troy Sterling is a man of fashion, a hero for the younger generation,
    defender of the environment and protector of the weak. He has definite
    flair, and it's just plain fun to imagine yourself in his world - a
    world with great friends, malicious enemies, fun puzzles, and humor at
    every turn. All this, combined with Jerz's well-developed story, make
    playing Fine-Tuned a delight.

    Inform .z8 file

    PC Executable

    Solution

    Firebird
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #15 -- October 11, 1998

    NAME: Firebird
    AUTHOR: Bonnie Montgomery
    E-MAIL: firebird SP@G pobox.com
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/firebird.gam
    VERSION: Release 1.0

    PLOT: Charming, appropriately fairy-tale (1.4)  ATMOSPHERE: Appropriate
    (1.3)
    WRITING: Strong, often amusing (1.6)  GAMEPLAY: Uneven at times (1.1)
    PUZZLES: Not too hard, some a bit random (1.2) CHARACTERS: Amusing (1.4)
    MISC: Whimsical and very playable (1.5)
    OVERALL: 6.9

    Some genres of literature have become common stomping grounds for IF,
    but fairy tales are not among them: the dearth of children's stories
    in the IF library means that Firebird attempts something distinctly
    new, and the Russian themes make it all the more unique. Though many
    traditionally fairy-tale tropes are present, including evil wizards,
    captured princesses, and a series of marriages at the end, the author
    gives the work more than enough humor and creativity to carry it off
    successfully.

    For what it's worth, you're the third son of a tsar, and you've been
    chosen to bag the Firebird of the title, which has been stealing the
    golden fruit from your father's orchard. Once you do catch the bird,
    you get sent on a Quest to defeat the Evil Nasty Guy, overcoming scary
    obstacles along the way and even getting Useful Social Guidance as
    well, namely that you should be kind to animals. (Moreover, everything
    seems to come in sets of three, a common number--along with seven--in
    these stories.) Russian folk tales are not, it appears, drastically
    different from those of Western Europe, such as the Brothers Grimm and
    Hans Christian Andersen, certain not in their hallmarks. But there is
    also plenty of humor along with the stock scenes and characters,
    fortunately: a series of dimwitted guards, even if repetitive (you
    defeat all of them with the same ploy), is sufficiently comic to make
    the idea feel fresh.  There is plenty of absurdity as well: you get
    help from an army of Japanese cooks at one point, who attack with
    pepper grinders (really), and kissing a frog turns it into...an axe
    murderer. The humorous bits and the small size of the game keep the
    game moving along despite the more time-worn elements.

    The authenticity of the references to actual Russian stories cannot be
    verified, but judging from the bibliography and the footnotes
    sprinkled here and there, the author seems to have done plenty of
    homework along the way, which helps reduce the sense that this is a
    generic fairy tale. At one point, you encounter two peasants swapping
    jokes which, somehow, feel just bizarre enough to be real Russian
    jokes; at another, you encounter "three times nine" knights, which, as
    the author explains, really means, in Russian folk tale parlance,
    27. There is more than enough of this sort of thing to keep the story
    feeling fresh, though it's more the author's wit than the stories
    themselves that gives the game its appeal. (My favorite reference of
    all, actually, was the Firebird's tendency to "whistle the greatest
    hits of Stravinsky.") My one real objection is that women are more
    often than not reduced to helpless playthings or decorative objects,
    admittedly more the fault of the genre (and, maybe, the culture that
    inspired the story) than the author but still a mite irritating. (And
    ironic, since the author is one of very few women currently writing
    IF.)

    As noted, the puzzles are straightforward enough that they shouldn't
    slow the player down much, though there are some slightly unfair
    bits--notably, having to wait around for 15-20 turns before someone
    comes along and drops an item that turns out to be useful later
    on. There are some clues to the possibility of that event, but they're
    not particularly strong. There are some other bugs, but not many, and
    they don't impede the game all that much, and the end of the story is
    appropriately climactic and easy to figure out. Moreover, even the few
    moments where puzzle solutions are not entirely obvious are
    decipherable on fairy-tale terms; since the genre demands some
    suspension of logic anyway, thinking in fairy-story mode is usually
    the best way to move things along; though one solution might be better
    suggested by the context in that respect, it's certainly not
    unfair. The relative ease of the puzzles also makes this an appealing
    possibility for younger players, though some of the references--such
    as the baba yaga--might require explanation. The real fly in the
    ointment is a large maze; it doesn't seem like the game would lose
    much if it were cut down or eliminated.

    The writing is excellent, though there's rather a lot of it at certain
    key points, often several screens' worth, and several descriptions are
    a bit on the skimpy side--though most locales are standard enough that
    they don't need extensive writing to come across. Appropriately for
    the story and the age group, the writing gives more attention to plot
    than to drawn-out description: events and action get long chunks of
    text, not images. Still, it's worth noting that the author rarely
    slips into fairy-tale excess--not every woman is breathtakingly
    beautiful, not every obstacle is horribly dangerous, etc.--though one
    occasionally wishes for more details than the author
    provides. Moreover, as with most good fairy tales, the scale starts
    small and then builds--you start out doing menial tasks for your
    father--so that, when the author does lay on superlatives, they don't
    feel tired.

    Though the plot won't exactly throw anyone for a loop, Firebird is a
    quick, enjoyable game that might herald something new, namely IF
    grounded in a specific cultural tradition; Sound of One Hand Clapping
    and Pesach Adventure are the only other examples I can think of. If
    Firebird encouraged more research into backgrounds of games, and more
    innovative settings, it might lead to more creative games, never a bad
    thing. In its own right, it's a worthy effort.

    From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G colorado.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #15 -- October 11, 1998

    When Def Leppard's "Pyromania" album came out in 1983, it was a good
    album and a big hit, but it never made it to #1 on the American
    charts. Why?  Because Michael Jackson's "Thriller" was perched there;
    for months the Def Leppard album sat at #2, then sank, never reaching
    the top spot. What does this have to do with IF? Hold your horses, I'm
    getting to that. In the spring of 1998, Bonnie Montgomery suffered a
    similar fate -- she put out an excellent game which never got the
    recognition it deserved, because it was overshadowed by a concurrent
    release, Andrew Plotkin's masterful "Spider and Web." (Hmmm, perhaps
    this comparison isn't so good after all.  I'm not sure how much
    Plotkin wants to be the Michael Jackson of IF, let alone how thrilled
    Montgomery is to be called its Def Leppard. Plus, now I've outed
    myself as a fan of 80s heavy metal, not to mention an incurable
    parenthetical rambler. I should probably just delete this whole first
    paragraph, but knowing my Piers Anthony-like inability to erase
    anything I've written, I probably won't. Magnus, I leave it up to
    you.)

    This review is meant to partly make up for the unwarranted neglect
    "Firebird" has suffered. The game is cleverly written and well-coded,
    with a number of design and puzzle strengths as well. Not only that,
    it includes the command "WEAR THE CLAW"! How could I resist anything
    that makes reference (though probably not consciously) to my own
    one-game contribution to the world of IF? In fact, oddly enough,
    "Firebird" has several resemblances to "Wearing the Claw": both
    feature a circular wall with a plaque mounted upon it, each of which
    has "hints of honey" inside, and both games have a section where the
    parser prevents travel for three attempts. Now, of course I'm not
    suggesting that "Wearing the Claw" was somehow the inspiration for
    "Firebird" -- I doubt Ms. Montgomery has even played my game -- but I
    did find it interesting that our games had so many specifics in
    common. I'm inclined to think that these two games, taken together
    with some others such as Infocom's "Arthur" and Whizzard's "Lesson of
    the Tortoise", are taking steps towards creating a basic vocabulary of
    puzzles and devices for folk-tale-oriented IF.

    Whether or not this is the case, "Firebird" stands on its own as a
    remarkable piece of interactive fiction in its own right. Its clear,
    elegant prose is a pleasure to read, and in spots becomes quite clever
    indeed. For example, early on in the game our hero Ivan must pass by a
    gaggle of overeager female admirers wearing beeswax lipstick (to which
    Ivan is allergic). The women are described thus: "They're swarming
    everywhere, their constant chattering an irritating drone to your
    ears."  However, if Ivan fails to pass, the death message says "You
    are swarmed by these eager noble honeys. Much as you feared, their
    lipstick-tainted kisses cause hives to cover the entire surface of
    your skin. A severe allergic reaction ensues and you succumb." In a
    few quick sentences, Montgomery manages to work in "swarm" "drone"
    "hive", and "honey"; death by allergy has never been described with
    such wordplay and wit! The combination of humor and action is
    characteristic of "Firebird," and gives it a lighthearted tone which
    works quite well. Though the deeper structure of the game has a number
    of fairly serious elements, Montgomery finds a way to inject humor
    into most of the scenes, sometimes spilling over into outright
    hilarity. That this mix of humor and action creates balance rather
    than confusion is a testament to Montgomery's writing skills.

    As strong as the writing is, the design is just as good. The game
    provides multiple solutions to many of the puzzles, solutions which
    often are so well thought-out in themselves that it's rewarding to
    play through the puzzle each way, just to see how imaginatively the
    game approaches the problems. "Firebird" is flexible enough to handle
    lots of different kinds of thinking, and there were many times when I
    thought I'd made a game-killing mistake and later found out that
    although I had created a problem for myself, the game provided for a
    way out of it as well.  Moreover, when critical junctions do come up,
    the game gently suggests that you think about "praying to save your
    soul." If you acquiesce to this suggestion, the interpreter's "save"
    function is invoked, and you now have a bookmark just behind the
    critical point. There is only one place in which Montgomery's very
    player-friendly design approach breaks down, which is the inclusion of
    a fairly large, irritating maze. The maze, as far as I could
    determine, is of the bad old variety to which there is no alternative
    but slow, tedious mapping. Nonetheless, even if you hate mazes, it's
    worth it to slog through this one, just because the last part of the
    game is so rewarding. "Firebird" has several excellent climactic
    scenes (which one you see depends on what you've done up to that
    point) and it handles multiple endings in a number of highly creative
    ways.

    Finally, in addition to the big-picture factors, "Firebird" includes a
    number of nicely done, subtle touches. For instance, the author (who
    is married to Unkuulian implementor Chris Nebel) manages to sneak in a
    very sly reference to that series by naming a nearby tavern "The
    Cheese and Pig Inn." Neat coding effects abound as well; at one point
    Ivan is given a list of items he'll need in the next portion of the
    story. The initial contents of this list vary depending on what Ivan
    is holding when he receives it, and as he collects the items
    necessary, the corresponding list items are checked. Another example
    of clever coding is that the game not only frequently sends Ivan
    tumbling to the ground, but it counts the number of falls he's taken,
    and responds accordingly: "Just a reminder, this is the third time
    today that you and the ground have had an abrupt meeting." Puzzles are
    also soundly executed: not too difficult, well-clued, and
    strategically dispersed to keep the narrative at a steady pace. At
    this writing, the game still has several bugs, one or two of which can
    in fact render the game unwinnable. I have forwarded these bugs to the
    author, and she assures me that they will be fixed in the next
    release. If version 1.0 of "Firebird" was this good, it will be even
    better when all the niggling problems are repaired.

    "Firebird" proves beyond a doubt that the intersection between folk
    tale and IF is a fertile one. At the risk of making an overreaching
    generalization, I would contend that folk tales often tend to have a
    strong sense of structure, a distinct "best" ending, somewhat "flat"
    characters who mainly serve as ciphers for the plot, and frequent
    appearances by riddles or somewhat artificial puzzles, all of which
    are perfect for adaptation into conventional-form IF. The strengths of
    interactive fiction, on the other hand, include exploration of exotic
    landscapes, a strong sense of score/progress, and participation in
    structured narratives, factors which can combine to give us new ways
    to experience very ancient stories. What's more, the global audience
    of interactive fiction means that no matter in what tradition an IF
    folk tale is written, it will serve to teach at least some of its
    players about cultures outside their own. Here's hoping that others
    follow in the trail that "Firebird" has blazed.

    TADS file (.gam)

    Solution (Text)

    The Fire Tower
    From: Mike Penman <mike SP@G penman.org>
    Review appeared in SPAG #41 -- July 15, 2005

    TITLE: The Fire Tower
    AUTHOR: Jacqueline A. Lott
    EMAIL: jacq SP@G allthingsjacq.com
    DATE: 28 May 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive, Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/art/if-artshow/year2004/firetower.z8
         A map is located at:
         ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/art/if-artshow/year2004/firetower_map.jpg
    VERSION: 1

    Writing for the IF Art Show isn't easy, I know. Faced with the remit
    "explore interactivity", where do you begin?

    Jacqueline A. Lott chose to begin with an engaging character. The
    protagonist of The Fire Tower is consistently drawn, from the results of
    ">look at me", ("You glance down and the first thing you see are your
    hiking boots. They're serious hiking boots...") to knowledgeable asides
    made during the IF. She even has a purpose, having come to the fringes
    of Mount Cammerer in the Appalachians to walk solo and get away "from
    everything: work, responsibilities..."

    Though it was good to find such a well-presented character, it's Mount
    Cammerer that stars in this piece. This was an entry in the 2004 IF Art
    Show "landscape" section. It took best of show and "best setting" at the
    following XYZZYs.

    The first, powerful impact is of a beautiful landscape beautifully
    presented. It's tempting to describe sweeping scenes with flowery prose
    but the author resists that temptation. The text is sparse and
    transparent; it doesn't get in the way of the country depicted and
    everything is described with an infectious enthusiasm. I was left
    feeling relaxed, as though I'd been there, at least in part. I presume
    that was the main objective of the piece, so it's a success from the
    first play through.

    That sense of "being there" is enhanced by the sheer interactivity of
    the piece. Faced with something that says, in essence, "See how
    interactive I am!" I start to verb the nouns. This setting is deeply
    implemented. Almost everything can be examined, heard, smelled, felt and
    tasted. I know more about Appalachian flora now than I did before
    playing.

    Sometimes a lack of options left me feeling frustrated. I wanted to go
    back on myself or try routes that I wasn't allowed to. I was
    particularly miffed to find that I missed the work's titular tower
    because, having moved away from it without entering in order to re-check
    a previous description, I was barred from returning. But this isn't a
    game -- the author's trying to guide the player around a landscape --
    nor would route reversals or unplanned diversions be in character for
    the experienced lone-walker protagonist.

    Time -- always a difficult dimension in landscape -- is well handled.
    The protagonist's watch counts one minute for each turn and each travel
    description adds a number of minutes dependent on the terrain covered.
    There's a sense of time passing at a realistic rate, adding to the sense
    of "being there".

    I was disappointed with the centre of the game, the fire tower. It being
    the target and title of my walk, I was looking forward to finding
    something extra there. It's as beautifully described as everything else,
    but I'm not sure it deserves its pivotal placement.

    It's a good sign if the only major gripe I can raise about an IF is that
    I was left wanting more. In particular I wanted to explore the issues of
    stilting and entrapment -- barely but skillfully hinted at -- that led
    to this walk in the first place. I wanted to turn the protagonist to an
    equipment shop and then along the whole Appalachian trail, fulfilling
    her lifetime dream. For a player like me, without any real interest in
    puzzles, it wouldn't take much to turn this into a full length game in
    the Sunset Over Savannah mode.

    Perhaps the best praise I can offer the piece is this: I wish I'd
    written it. Its clean, artless-seeming approach fosters the illusion
    that I could have. In fact, I think I feel a landscape entry for next
    year's IF Art Show coming on. But first I'm going back to see if I can
    find the bear that Emily Short saw.

    Zcode .z8 file

    .jpg map file

    First Things First
    From: Adam Myrow <myrow SP@G eskimo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #29 -- June 20, 2002

    TITLE: First Things First
    AUTHOR: J. Robinson Wheeler
    EMAIL: rob.wheeler SP@G stanfordalumni.org
    DATE: February 2002
    PARSER: Tads 2.5.
    SUPPORTS: Standard Tads interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: If-archive, freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/ftf.gam
         Also available: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/ftf_manual.pdf
    VERSION: 2.0 (02/20/2002)

    Have you ever wished you could go back in time and prevent a mistake?
    Have you ever wished all those time travel games would let you change
    things for the better rather than preserve history the way it is? Well,
    wish no more! First Things First is a recent game that lets you do just
    that. You start out in the present, as an eccentric person who dreams of
    building a time machine. You just came back from the library, where as
    usual, you were reading on the subject. It is late, so you were thinking
    of just going to sleep. However, you've done what we've all done in the
    past. You've locked yourself out of your house! The spare key is nowhere
    around. As you begin to hunt for your spare key, something else begins
    to get your attention. Why is the roof in such lousy shape after only 10
    years? What's this squirrel doing on my roof? Why didn't I ever plant a
    tree on the south side of my house? In the midst of all your wondering,
    a time machine appears, and the real game begins.

    This game reminds me of Curses in a lot of ways. Like Curses, you are
    doing something ordinary, and gradually get yourself into something
    else. Like Curses, this is a puzzle fest. It got the XYZZY award for
    best puzzles for a good reason. Most of the puzzles are very logical,
    and some have multiple solutions. For example, there are at least 2,
    maybe 3 ways to get rid of the dog, and 2 ways to repair the wheel
    barrow. Be warned, the game can be made unwinnable, so save early, and
    keep multiple saves especially before doing something that will put an
    item out of play. Be extremely careful with money! Some items serve no
    purpose, while others have multiple uses. Still others are optional
    depending on how you go about solving puzzles. There is a contraption
    called a herring detector which will tell you if something is a red
    herring or not. It really breaks the mimisis of the game, so I would
    advise not using it unless you are truly desperate.

    This game has a maze, but it has a solution that doesn't involve
    dropping things. The best part is that once you get through it, you
    never need to go through it again.

    Overall, I liked this game. It has a few bugs here and there, but no
    real show stoppers. It is refreshing to actually be able to do something
    about the past instead of being told to accept it for what it is. My
    only real complaint is that the ending leaves a few loose ends, and I
    think the environmental tone is a bit too obvious. Also, some
    descriptions are a bit awkward. There is one place where the word
    "prettily" appears twice in the same sentence. Other than that, it's not
    a bad game, and there is even an Easter Egg room with a unique surprise.
    I found it to be difficult, but not insanely so. Anybody who wants a
    good old-fashioned puzzle-filled IF experience, and has some time on
    their hands should give this one a try.

    TADS .gam file

    Manual in .pdf format

    Maps in .gif and .pdf formats

    Step-by-step solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I absolutley loved this game.

    { Editor's Note concerning Availability:

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

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

    Stepwise solution (Text)

    Manual (.pdf)

    Flat Feet
    From: Neil Butters <NEIL.BUTTERS SP@G SYMPATICO.CA>
    Review appeared in SPAG #42 -- October 2, 2005

    TITLE: Flat Feet
    AUTHOR: Joel Ray Holveck
    E-MAIL: joelh SP@G piquan.org
    DATE: March 13, 2005
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/springthing/2005/flatfeet.zip

    VERSION: Release 1

    When I began playing Flat Feet I was a bit surprised that it only ranked
    fourth in the 2005 Spring Thing Competition. Despite not having played the
    other games I assumed they must have been very good to place better than
    this one. However, it quickly became apparent that the game's  auspicious
    beginning was a broken promise.

    In Flat Feet you are a cat and you have a detective agency with your ferret
    partner, Ralph. You haven't had a mystery to solve in a long time but this
    quickly changes. The mystery involves you and Ralph traveling around San
    Francisco trying to solve a series of robberies.

    The game opens with a clever prologue and enjoyable interplay between you
    and Ralph. After you receive your assignment and head off there is even an
    "in-joke" that anybody who has attempted to learn the INFORM language will
    likely appreciate. But after that the game becomes tedious as you try to
    solve a couple of contrived puzzles to achieve the simplest tasks.
    Depending on what you already have and the places YOU have visited, these
    puzzles could require a lot of traveling that only slows down the pace.
    Grannted the places you have to visit are interesting authentic San
    Francisco locations but the descriptions could have been more interesting
    and more detailed. None of these puzzles contributed directly to plot
    development and thus the mystery is thin and the perpetrator leaves behind
    some evidence that makes you question her intelligence.

    The game also doesn't take advantage of some interesting ideas. I thought
    that being a cat would provide some interesting twists, ie using your
    agility to solve a puzzle or two. In fact, the first puzzle would have been
    solved easily by a cat. Unfortunately being a cat is irrelevant. At one
    point you are offered a different point-of-view of the city but again the
    game doesn't really take advantage of it in its room descriptions (although
    this may have been an attempt by the author to comment on how dirty the
    city is, play the game and you'll see what I mean).

    There is a rather poor attempt at creating alternate endings. The final
    showdown could occur in any of six locations but the ending is ultimately
    always the same. You don't even have to get all the evidence to catch the
    robber, the one piece of evidence you do need is so generic that it allows
    for any of six possible suspects. Yet this flimsy evidence is still enough
    proof to confront the robber.

    There are some aspects of the game I did enjhoy.  The game was sometimes
    very witty and the comeraderie between yu and the ferret was fun. I liked
    the locations (maybe only because I visited there once) and there are some
    bizarre happenings that may hold some interest. I didn't encounter any bugs
    or any problems interfacing with the game although some room descriptions
    only make sense the first time you enter them or approach the room from a
    certain direction.

    I think Flat Feet is probably worth playing if you are interested in the
    San Francisco area and would like to read about some of the attractions
    there. Otherwise you may find the game a bit too tedious  and the weak plot
    won't maintain your interest.

    	Note: There is a walkthrough and source code files available with
    the game.  The walkthrough is a sample transcript complete with room
    descriptions so it may be tempting to simply read that and not play the
    game.

    Zcode game file (.z8), Inform source, and walkthrough

    Floatpoint
    From: DJ Hastings <dj.hastings SP@G wavecable.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #47 -- January 16, 2007

    TITLE: Floatpoint
    AUTHOR: Emily Short
    EMAIL: emshort SP@G mindspring.com
    DATE: October 1, 2006
    PARSER: Inform 7
    SUPPORTS: Glulx interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2006/glulx/floatpoint/Floatpoint.zblorb
    VERSION: Release 1

    Floatpoint is about a planet populated by genetically-engineered humans who want
    to come back to earth, or something like that. I don't remember exactly because,
    frankly, I didn't care. The author never made me feel like the things I was
    doing or the situation itself really mattered. This seems strange, because the
    whole point of the game is to figure out what's going on and decide what to do
    about it. But while I was certainly interested in the game as a puzzle, I ended
    up not caring about it as a story.

    The writing is good, although some of the descriptions were a bit long-winded
    for my tastes. I was probably playing just before bed, though, so that might
    have made me less patient with the descriptions than I otherwise would have
    been. The game could also have used a little more technical work. I ran into a
    few bugs and unimplemented things, and the whole game ran really slowly, with
    long pauses after each command. None of these things were a big deal- I even got
    used to the pauses after a while- but they made the game feel unpolished.

    Although I didn't like the game all that much, there was one aspect I really did
    like. Floatpoint used two devices to help communicate the story, and both of
    them worked well for me. They were a message system used to communicate with
    some distant NPCs, and a computer database containing information from your
    predecessor.

    The message system involves a console in the "communications room" and a beeper
    that you carry around with you. When someone sends you a message, your beeper
    alerts you to the fact. You can then go to the communications room and use the
    console to read and reply to any messages that you've received. The replies are
    written automatically; you only choose whether or not to send them. Often, you
    will get a response to your reply a while after you send it, so you end up
    engaging in some good sized conversations this way.

    These messages arrive every so often through most of the game, and that's what I
    really liked about the system. For one thing, the "message waiting" beeper
    pleasantly interrupted my other exploration, breaking up what might have become
    monotonous otherwise. And I found that I anticipated the answers to my messages
    in the same way that I anticipate an email from someone, which added to the fun
    of reading them when they finally arrived. The message system did a good job of
    keeping me engaged with the game.

    The other device that I enjoyed playing with was a computer database in which I
    could look up journal entries from one of the NPCs and information about the
    game's background. This is surprising, because normally I *hate* consultable
    objects in adventure games. It feels like I'm playing guess-the-noun, and I'm
    always afraid that I've missed a noun that was important. (And often I'm right.)

    But the database in Floatpoint avoids this problem in two related ways: most
    keywords will bring up multiple articles, and most articles have multiple
    keywords attached to them. The first is nice because you can look up a person's
    name (for example) and see everything in the database related to them. Then, if
    one of the articles that comes up mentions something else interesting that's
    related to the character, you can look that up and see what the database has to
    say about it. I had a lot of fun searching through the database this way. And I
    wasn't nearly as worried as I usually am about missing something, because with
    multiple keywords for each article, I figured I was pretty sure to run into any
    important ones eventually. (And in fact I did.) To me, playing with the database
    was the best part of the whole game.

    Even though I didn't care for the story, Floatpoint was worthwhile just to play
    with these toys. And hey, you might like the story better than I did. So if you
    have any taste for story-driven IF, I'd certainly recommend taking a look at
    this game.

    Blorbed Glulx game file

    Walkthrough (plain text)

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

    TITLE: Foggywood Hijinx
    AUTHOR: Ivan Cockrum
    E-MAIL: ivan SP@G cockrumville.com
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/mini-comps/mini-comp/foggy.gam
    VERSION: Release 2

    If the recently released Break-In is any indication, the effects of the
    1998 chicken comp may be with us for years to come, as games inspired by
    the chicken theme but not finished on time appear one by one, covering
    the landscape with feathers and...well, best not get into that. At any
    rate, Ivan Cockrum's Foggywood Hijinx was one of the first
    chicken-themed post-chicken-comp efforts (we also saw Downtown Tokyo,
    Present Day not long afterwards), and it's an amusing effort that's
    somewhere between a spoof of the inherit-your-uncle's-fortune genre and
    a Penn & Teller homage.

    Your uncle was fond of practical jokes, it seems, and his last and
    greatest joke, now that he's dead, is to turn the whole family into
    chickens when they show up to squabble over his estate. The challenge is
    to overcome your newfound limitations and find a way out of the problem,
    using your uncle's various wacky inventions that litter his study. The
    inventions themselves are at least as amusing as the premise, since they
    include things like the Hedge Helpers (a pair of hands to extend one's
    reach) or the Buffalo-on-a-Spring. There's really only one puzzle, but
    it's quite a puzzle--it involves all sorts of clever mechanical
    finagling, and the various peculiar devices are described well enough to
    make the puzzle solvable. (Well, mostly--there are a few slightly
    misleading responses.)

    The point of Foggywood Hijinx is the humor, obviously, and there's
    enough of it to keep the game going for a while. Notably, a TV features
    Julia Child raving dementedly about the joys of killing chickens, e.g.:
    "I once killed a chicken just to watch it die." Your various bickering
    relatives continue to bicker in chicken form, but in more amusing ways:
    "Uncle Orpington pulls a long strand of fiber from the carpet. Cousin
    Red jealously tries to snatch it away, and a tug-of-war ensues." This
    wouldn't be enough to sustain anything other than a very short game, of
    course--and it might not be enough, depending on how long it takes you
    to figure out the puzzle, to get through this one without the jokes
    getting stale. Still, there are a few chuckles here and there, which is
    all that can be asked of a chicken-comp game.

    In sum, it's funny enough to be worth the 10-15 minutes, and if you
    haven't already seen too much IF involving chickens, it's worth a shot.

    TADS .gam file

    TADS source code

    Windows version

    Macintosh version

    For A Change
    From: Duncan Stevens <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #19 -- January 14, 2000

    TITLE: For a Change
    AUTHOR: Dan Schmidt
    E-MAIL: dfan SP@G alum.mit.edu
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/inform/change/change.z5
    VERSION: Release 1.02

    For a Change is indeed a change, and in a way it's a good example of
    what text IF can be--it manages to leave most of the visual details
    entirely to the player's imagination by refusing to pin down exactly
    what the PC is seeing or experiencing, except in the most general terms.
    The result is either maddening or evocative, depending on the player; if
    the player isn't willing to do the work of visualizing the scene as it
    unfolds (and supplying the images where the author declines to), the
    game more than likely remains elusive, amorphous. Either way, it takes
    some mental adjustment to appreciate what For a Change is trying to do.

    The other innovative aspect of For a Change is the syntax, which is
    fractured, confusing, and fascinating; the author has chosen a mode of
    expression that makes sense on its own terms, but is quite definitely
    nonstandard English. Everything can be deciphered with a little thought,
    of course, and usually the key is realizing that a word, in the game's
    world, can act as a different part of speech than expected. The effect
    is very much like reading e.e. cummings (I was reminded in particular of
    the poem "anyone lived in a pretty how town"); once the reader
    recognizes how certain words are being used (in that particular poem,
    for instance, "anyone" should be parsed as a name), the whole thing
    falls into place. The syntactical shifts in For a Change usually arising
    from the way the author personifies and animates generally inanimate
    objects by giving them verbs suggesting conscious action. It's a credit
    to the author that his work recalls cummings, and that getting used to
    the unusual syntax is rewarding rather than irritating.

    Due to the above elements, For a Change is both a challenge and a
    pleasure to read. The following is typical of both aspects:

       Lantern Room
       This subsection of the inset brightens and flickers. The shadows
       belong to the air more than you do, it seems. They walk the cordstone
       walls; they move and excite. The shadows look to a wall, to bars in
       the wall, and the songlantern behind them. Further in is east,
       further out is west, and a slope obtains up to the south.

       >examine songlantern
       The songlantern hums and burbles, circled by brightening words,
       evading the bars and piercing the silence and darkness.

    "The shadows look to a wall..." suggests that the shadows converge on
    the bars, but the reader must first recognize that "look" is the game's
    way of personifying and giving life to the shadows, rather than binding
    them to the literal and inanimate reality. As for the songlantern, the
    reader has no way of visualizing what it is, and the description doesn't
    help; it merely gives the reader some elements to draw on in coming up
    with his or her own image. The word itself is evocative, rather than
    merely cryptic (at least, I found it so)--and the description conjures
    up a variety of images and sounds in a way that few straight-syntax
    descriptions could do. Similar is the following: "Then there is a moment
    of loudness and shock." An explosion? A clap of thunder? A scream? It
    could be any one, or all three, or none; the language is calculated to
    allow the player to choose.

    The fiction aspect of For a Change succeeds brilliantly, then (in my
    book, at least), but does it work as a game? The bag is a little more
    mixed on this count. Most of the puzzles require intuitive leaps of one
    kind or another, some greater than others; there is logic to all of them
    (logic on the game's terms, at least), but some of them make more sense
    after the fact. The problem in one particular puzzle is that the game
    requires a syntactical leap of faith, in a sense--not so much in what
    you type as in the way you parse a certain object's name, and the
    properties you ascribe to the object as a result of the parsing. The
    correct solution is quite consistent with the feel of the game, but
    getting used to the game's approach to grammar and actually predicting
    how the game will approach a given word (sufficiently so to make the
    prediction the basis for a puzzle solution) are two different things.

    The other problem with the game element of For a Change is that it's a
    little directionless; the initial directive is this: "The sun is gone.
    It must be brought. You have a rock," which doesn't exactly give the
    player much of a nudge in discerning the proper path. Adding to the
    aimlessness aspect is that the first puzzle isn't solvable until a
    certain event happens, and it's possible for the player to fail to
    trigger the event early on and wander around getting frustrated. True,
    the game is relatively small, and there aren't so many puzzles that the
    player is likely to remain clueless for long--and the hint system does
    help. Still, the initial playing experience can be a little
    daunting--the player's initial reaction might well be "not only don't I
    understand what anything is, I don't even know what I'm supposed to be
    doing or how to go about it."

    Even if it's less than perfect as a game, though, the interactive aspect
    of For a Change is one of its greatest strengths--because it is through
    the player's interactions with the environment that he or she generates
    images, forms an impression of what this elusive world is like. Giving
    the player a variety of ways to interact with the characters and objects
    ensures that different players will come away with different
    impressions, for example in the following:

       >examine toolman

       The toolman is bright and misty. Thoughts and uses hang from his
       shoulders like birds.

    Or:

       >give bar to toolman
       The toolman gently misunderstands.

       The toolman smiles softly.

    A player can easily generate an image of the toolman as animate or
    inanimate, depending on how he or she chooses to approach him (or it),
    and neither one is clearly wrong or right. This indeterminacy can be
    achieved in static fiction, to be sure, but interactive fiction can do
    it much better--an author can deliberately accommodate multiple ways of
    visualizing the same object or character--and For a Change takes
    advantage of its medium in some novel ways. Similarly intriguing about
    For a Change is the way it deals with scale; all measurements are
    relative ("To your north is a massive transparent cube, perhaps five of
    your heights on each side"), leaving the distinct possibility that the
    events are taking place on a microscopic level, or a cosmic level, or
    somewhere in between.

    Though, again, it's not for everyone, For a Change is the sort of
    experimental work that the competition was meant to foster; it's not the
    most successful entry as a game, but it's certainly well done fiction,
    and I gave it an 8 in the competition.

    From: Nick Patavalis <npat SP@G kmp.forthnet.gr>
    Review appeared in SPAG #22 -- September 15, 2000

    Imagine a certain use of the English language that, while ostensibly
    precise, and having perfect internal coherence, is such that the reader
    cannot immediately make sense out of it; he has to make (conscious or
    reflexive) assumptions as to what every phrase might mean. Combine this
    use of the language with an equally bizarre vocabulary that (though
    English) the reader has to pick up on the fly. Facing this prose, not
    all readers have to (and will not) construct the same mental imagery,
    but the internal coherence keeps the various interpretations more or
    less "aligned", in such a way that all (or most at least) readers can
    sensibly interact with the objects communicated.

    The outcome is something deeply bizarre, resulting in a rather dreamlike
    quality: everything has some sort of internal logic, even if you don't
    know what it is. And in fact, as the author has said in an interview
    (published in SPAG #19), some of the most peculiar articulations derive
    from fragments of his dreams, or from thoughts captured when his mind
    was otherwise empty.

    In a sense, this game itself presents a very interesting argument about
    the way understanding natural language works: Language is understood
    through context. (This is a known fact at least since W. v. O. Quine
    showed that "statements about the external world face the tribunal of
    experience not individually but only as a corporate body.") When context
    is missing, understanding is based on familiarity; we internally
    contextualize the language based on our previous experiences. The
    description of the Zork house's kitchen is more understandable than the
    description of Schmidt's "toolman", because we all have been in a
    kitchen. When the bonds to familiarity are weakened significantly (like
    in this game), the only remaining shelter for reason is the language's
    internal structure (coherence); this is what guides the reader's mind in
    its random attempt to establish plausible and familiar metaphors. Think
    about it for a while.

    This short piece of interactive fiction (together with a few others like
    Cadre's Shrapnel) supports in a very powerful way Adam Cadre's
    statement that:

       ...freed from commercial concerns, "text adventure games" have
       morphed into "interactive fiction" -- an increasingly experimental
       medium with every bit as much potential as straight prose...

    Schmidt has backed away a bit from the experimental approach outlined
    above by making sure that while the reader receives this "odd" language,
    he will not have to produce any. Thus any form of interaction will be
    done using "normal" verbs and normal phrasing (although sometimes
    involving objects which are not "perfectly normal"). I think it would be
    interesting to see a game that would require its readers to actively
    test their understanding of such a strange universe by verbally
    re-creating its inner logic, but I also share the doubts of the author
    as to whether the outcome would be playable.

    In the Author's Notes (included in the game, but available only after it
    is solved), Schmidt mentions the book "Wire and String" by Dan Marcus,
    and "The Book of the New Sun" by Gene Wolfe as works that influenced the
    writing of this game. I was not aware of these books but after I played
    the game I looked for them and read them. I deeply enjoyed reading them,
    especially Marcus's book. Apart from being interesting works by
    themselves they help clarify the underlying intentions of Schmidt's
    work.

    Closing with a negative remark: The game and the game-world are very
    short. I know it is supposed to be so, since it is a competition entry,
    but I would really like to see these ideas worked on a much larger
    scale.

    Conclusion: It is a must-play.

    Inform .z5 file

    Fort Aegea
    From: Adam Myrow <myrow SP@G eskimo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #31 -- January 3, 2003

    TITLE: Fort Aegea
    AUTHOR: Francesco Bova
    EMAIL: fbova SP@G mts.net
    DATE: September 2002
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: any Z-code interpreter
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, If-archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/zcode/ftaegea/
         Directory with game and various maps in PDF files plus walk-through
    VERSION: 2

    It has been said that when being interviewed, you are primarily judged
    by the first 10 seconds. For me, this is partly true of Interactive
    Fiction as well. I am more likely to stick to a game which has a good
    introduction than one whose introduction is poorly written. An
    introduction full of spelling errors and bad grammar makes me tend to
    question the game. In this regard, I was really unsure what to think
    when I loaded up Fort Aegea and got this introduction.

       "AAACHOOOO!!"

       Waking up with a start, you stare blankly into space, and rub your
       watery eyes. While fumbling around on your night table you find a
       piece of parchment in which to blow your nose and wipe your brow.
       It's spring and with it comes your annual bout of hay fever; a
       condition that is certainly not made any better by the fact that
       you're living on an outpost in the wilderness. No matter. You rise
       from bed with a yawn and a stretch, trying to focus mentally for the
       day ahead.

       Being the sole Priestess representing the Order of the Amylyan Druids
       in this distant Northern outpost has never been easy. However, as the
       settlers are incredibly humble and always helpful, your experience
       has been very rewarding.

       Oh well, another day filled with dispute resolution, work
       preparation, and general governance over your small settlement. The
       sun hasn't risen yet, so you still have a few minutes to yourself.

    I don't think there's ever been a PC in all of IF with hay fever, and
    the only case of hay fever I can recall offhand is the ogre in
    Spellbreaker. So, right off, I had a good sense of my character, but no
    clue what the story would be about. This is often a good thing, and the
    story in this particular game is complicated enough that a lengthy
    introduction would be a detriment, but still, this didn't do anything
    but make me wonder what I was getting into.

    This game is a sequel to The Jewel of Knowledge, and that made me feel a
    bit odd since I'd never gotten around to playing that particular game.
    However, this one stands on its own for the most part. The story is
    described in an interactive prolog which is a nifty idea. Basically,
    it's just another ordinary day until a farmer comes in through the gate
    of Fort Aegea badly wounded. He tells you of a demon who wants the blood
    of 4 virgins over 30 just before dying. Terrified, you consult some
    higher authorities and learn that this demon is actually a dragon. The
    dragon breathes toxic gas rather than fire and is rather nasty.
    Desperately hoping to save the fort from certain destruction, you let
    the dragon talk you into a dangerous game of cat and mouse. You have to
    survive the day while the dragon tries to kill you. If you survive, he
    will leave. Otherwise, he has the whole fort's population for lunch. So,
    the bulk of the game involves trying to keep your hide intact and
    protect others.

    There were two things I really disliked about this game. First of all,
    and by far the most important, there is a huge amount of violence in the
    story. While I can understand that dragons are mean and hurt people, I
    think the author went a bit too far. For example, a husband and wife
    with a baby are some of the people you try to help. First, the husband
    dies like so:

       The Dragon throws an agile paw at Pierre and knocks him heavily off
       the path and unfortunately, off a precipice that you're sure will end
       off a few hundred meters down the side of the mountain.

       "PIERRE!" screams Annie, the look of hysteria gaining momentum on her
       face. She hands you Etienne and sobs, "You must protect him
       Priestess, at all costs!"

       Annie turns to face the dragon and begins running.

    As is obvious, the next move, Annie meets her maker even more violently:

       Annie runs screaming head first into the Dragon's midriff. The dragon
       deflects her mild blow and clasps his arms around her waist with
       little effort. There is a short struggle followed by a bone-crunching
       snap, after which the Green Dragon throws Annie's lifeless body into
       the shrubs surrounding the clearing. His visage shows a hint of pity.

    It wouldn't be so bad if these were the only instances of such, but this
    sort of thing happens repeatedly throughout the story. There is some
    attempt to explain it at the end, but I found it to be a thin excuse.

    The second thing that hurt Fort Aegea for me is the spell casting. You
    have a few spells you can cast which have very unique effects. However,
    the problem is that almost every single puzzles solution involves
    casting one of about four spells. There is one spell that is completely
    useless in the game, though. The game specifically mentions that you are
    an experienced druid and therefore have many spells memorized. I would
    have preferred it if more of the puzzles involve non-magical solutions.
    I keep thinking of Graham Nelson's The Craft of Adventure in which he
    warns against overuse of magic. He said "the majority of puzzles should
    be soluble by hand -- or else the player will start to feel that it
    would save a good deal of time and effort just to find the 'win game'
    spell and be done with it." I completely agree with him on this point
    and note that in the entire Enchanter trilogy, there are at least some
    puzzles that can be solved without magic. One good thing about the magic
    system is that you never have to learn spells. You always have them
    memorized and can even look them up individually through a menu. The
    spell names also make sense for a change. For example "crewa" means
    create water. So, I didn't mind the magic system, and some of its uses
    were clever, but I would have preferred that more than one or two
    puzzles could be solved without it.

    I think the best thing this game has going for it is the completeness of
    the world. It is a fairly detailed world model and it feels very real
    with the exception of the description of the dragon that sounds like it
    came straight from Dungeons and Dragons or one of its imitators. Another
    plus is the interactive introduction. It lets the player get comfortable
    with the environment, start to understand what things are normally like,
    and to really appreciate the shock of the dragon's sudden appearance.
    Lastly, the game has two endings, and I always find multiple endings to
    be a nice touch when done well.

    So, overall, Fort Aegea is a real mixed bag with both good and bad
    points. I rated it a 6 in the competition.

    Directory with zcode .z8 file, walkthrough, and PDF feelies

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

    NAME: Four in One
    AUTHOR: J. Robinson Wheeler
    E-MAIL: wheeler SP@G jump.net
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition98/tads/fourin1/fourin1.gam
    VERSION: Release 1.0

    Playing Four In One, I was in an unusual, unprecedented (for me)
    situation: I was playing a game of which I had already read a
    complete, winning transcript. Not a walkthrough, but a transcript of
    commands and game responses. It seems that the author submitted this
    transcript to Stephen Granade's IF Fan Fest, an informal
    quasi-competition held at Granade's Mining Company web page. If I had
    known this transcript was also going to be a competition game, I
    wouldn't have read it, because I hate spoilers.  But I didn't know
    that, so I read it, and it made playing the game a very strange
    experience -- the whole thing gave me a very strong sense of deja
    vu. Now, granted, the transcript isn't an exact one. You can't follow
    that transcript and hope to win the game, because the commands are not
    all perfectly duplicated, and there are some other differences between
    the two as well. However, they have a *lot* in common. Now, the funny
    thing about this is that when I initially read the Four in One
    transcript, my thought was "It's a funny idea, but it would be far too
    difficult to actually turn into a game." Well, I have been proved
    wrong.

    The idea behind the game is that you're a film director in the heyday
    of the Marx brothers, and you're directing them in their first picture
    for MGM. Or at least, you're trying to direct them. Apparently,
    keeping all the Marxes in one room, getting along, and working
    productively is somewhat akin to herding cats. Consequently, you're
    forced into the position of chasing after them, collecting them one by
    one, and forcing them to follow you around to their (and your)
    considerable annoyance. Even once you've got them all on the set and
    rehearsed, there's no guarantee that one or more of them won't go
    bolting off to make a phone call, hang out at the catering table, or
    read a book. What's worse, you have only two hours to get a good take
    on a crucial scene, or you and the picture will both be canned. The
    transcript makes this into a hilarious situation, showing the Marx
    brothers at their zaniest even when the cameras aren't rolling. In
    fact, *all* the comedy takes place when the cameras aren't
    rolling. This is the kind of thing that I didn't think an IF game
    would be able to pull off, but Four in One is the living proof. It's
    not as funny as the transcript, but it works, especially in places
    like Chico's dressing room, where more and more people keep entering,
    pushing you inexorably to the back wall like the first entrant in a
    phone-booth-stuffing competition. Scenes like this can be irritating
    as well, and the game sometimes steps across the fine line between
    funny aggravation and just plain aggravating aggravation. However,
    with the exception of one internal TADS error that I found, the
    technical details of the writing and coding are executed superbly, and
    this goes a long way towards smoothing out any annoyances.

    The place where the game's technical proficiency shines the most is in
    its characters. Four In One is a the most character-intensive piece of
    IF I've ever played. Almost every location has one or more characters
    in it at all times, and these characters are as fully implemented as
    they need to be.  The gaffer, for example, is not terribly talkative
    -- ask him about the movie and he'll say "A job's a job," but ask him
    about the lights and he has an opinion, as he should. Every character
    has responses about the things they should know about, though if you
    spend much time in conversations with them you will run afoul of the
    game's time limit. The Marx brothers can tell you about each other,
    the movie, MGM (Groucho says, "MGM stands for 'more godless
    movies.'"), and anything else they ought to know about. Four in One
    does an outstanding job juggling all these characters, giving them
    just the appropriate depth of implementation so that the game really
    rewards replay. After I had solved the game, I went back and just
    chatted with the various characters, and was delighted with the extent
    to which they are implemented. The author's research is quite apparent
    in these moments, and it makes a big difference. Four In One taught me
    things about the Marx Brothers that I had never known before, and made
    me want to go out and rent A Night at the Opera again. That's
    entertainment.

    Rating: 8.7

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

    If competition entries got individual awards, Four in One would have
    to be recognized as the Greatest Sheer Effort. The game is simply
    littered with NPCs--24 by my count, and considering the way the
    characters wander in and out, I'm sure I missed at least a few. Some
    of them essentially stand still (though all have some dialogue
    potential), others have painfully complicated movement daemons, and
    just thinking about what it took to code all of them made me want to
    cry. (The source code is now available, but I haven't looked at it
    yet. Perhaps some day when I'm feeling especially brave.)
    Unfortunately, all that elaborate coding doesn't necessarily add up to
    a rewarding game--though given how much time the author obviously put
    into this, I certainly wish I could say it did.

    The premise: you're "Sam Wood," trying to put the finishing touches on
    the latest Marx Brothers movie, and you're charged with the task of
    assembling everyone on the set so that the last scene can be
    filmed. Your clout as director only goes so far, however, and trying
    to keep the brothers on the set long enough to film is, even for you,
    like building a house out of Jello. You have a trusty sidekick who,
    frankly, isn't much use, and the set is filled with extras and techies
    and other actors. Egos being what they are, however, you don't seem to
    be able to delegate the task of rounding up the brothers, and so you
    scurry around the studio as if you were a lowly assistant.

    Since the end of the competition, the cry regarding Four in One has
    been fairly uniform: cute but too frustrating. The cry isn't wrong, as
    such, but let's be clear about why it's frustrating: it's not because
    there are a lot of NPCs to understand and manipulate. It's that so
    much of the NPCs' behavior is random, as far as I can tell, that a
    given game can be impossible to win if certain random events go
    against you often enough. If two certain characters get in a fight,
    for instance, another would leave, slowing down the rounding-up
    process. Too many fights and you'd lose your power to gather people
    together, for various reasons. I don't know whether the fights
    happened at random or were related to some other factor, controllable
    or not; if there was another factor, it was obscure enough that I
    never caught on. Likewise, another character gets bored after a
    certain amount of moves and wanders away--and if you don't get him to
    do what he's supposed to do before that happens, you've wasted a
    chance, and you don't have a lot to spare. To be sure, part of what
    makes the game realistic is that the NPCs are not entirely malleable;
    to that end, Four in One gets lots of realism points. Getting the
    brothers to do what you want is, as someone said, like herding
    cats. But all the realism points seem to come out of the fun column.

    However, there's an upside to all this: there's lots of replayability
    in Four in One, partly to find Easter eggs and partly because there's
    lots of extraneous detail to sift through. Most of the characters
    respond to a variety of questions--about the movie, other characters,
    life, etc.  Because a winning game can vary so much--two different
    games can present different challenges: solving the game once doesn't
    guarantee that you'll be able to solve it on the next try. (Then
    again, the random events might just not be on your side the next time,
    as noted.) The game is consistently funny--Groucho has lots of good
    one-liners, and Harpo has plenty of amusing antics, even if they
    usually impede your progress. The thoroughness of the coding is not
    limited to the NPC daemons--different characters have distinct
    reactions when they enter certain rooms, for instance, and putting
    certain characters in rooms together has unexpected results. In short,
    so much of Four in One works so well that it seems rude to point out
    that the game itself isn't always a lot of fun, at least if the player
    is interested in achieving the goal the game presents. Most of the fun
    to be had is extraneous to that goal.

    In summary, Four in One reminded me of Tempest from the previous
    year's competition--a brilliant idea, thoroughly and intelligently
    done, that I wanted to like more than I did. And just as Four in One
    arguably worked better as the transcript submitted to the IF Fan Fest,
    so Tempest works better as, well, the play, and the literacy of the
    attempt to translate it can't hide that. Four in One is quite a
    testament to the author's skills; as a game, however, it's flawed, and
    I gave it a 7.

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

    This is quite an interesting concept, putting a new spin on
    IF. Instead of the game being object-centric, it is NPC-centric, with
    NO objects of any use what so ever, and more NPC's per square pixel
    than any other game I have played, although most of them are thinly
    implemented. But basically what happened is NPC's become gloryfied
    objects. You are on a film set and only have four remaining takes to
    complete a picture (hence the name), or you're out on your ear. The
    film includes the four Marx Brothers, I've vaguely heard of Groucho
    that's about it, and I thought there were only two. The problem is to
    get all the stars and extras in the same place at the same this. To do
    this you can TAKE people, to get them to follow you. The trouble is
    they keep wandering off while you're finding the others ones,
    sometimes after only one turn. There are, however, two NPC's who can
    help you locate missing people. Most of the time actors tend to go to
    the same places, but some won't follow without overs. Read the special
    commands to see how to control them. I'm afraid I couldn't finish this
    game, and suspect very very few people actually did.

    TADS .gam file (.zip) (updated version)

    TADS .gam file (.sit) (updated version)

    TADS file (.gam) (competition version)

    TADS Source code, essay from the author, and development logs (.zip)

    TADS Source code, essay from the author, and development logs (.sit)

    Solution (Text)

    The Frenetic Five vs. Mr. Redundancy Man
    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #21 -- June 15, 2000

    TITLE: The Frenetic Five vs. Mr. Redundancy Man
    AUTHOR: Neil deMause
    E-MAIL: neil SP@G demause.net
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/fren5-2.zip
    VERSION: Release 1.2

    The first edition of Neil deMause's Frenetic Five, a 1997 competition
    entry, had its problems--the game didn't really have a good sense of
    what to do with all your fellow superheroes--but it was also quite
    funny; this episode works out the kinks inherent in giving the PC
    multiple sidekicks, and it's even funnier than the original. The result,
    while not a wildly ambitious effort, is well worth playing.

    You are Improv, a MacGyveresque hero with a talent for making tools out
    of common objects, and your team consists of Newsboy, who can instantly
    provide a news update on any topic, Lexicon, who always knows the right
    word, Clapper, who can find any missing object, and Pastiche, who has
    assorted random powers (among them the power to sing lines from Top 40
    songs relevant to almost any occasion). You can ask your sidekicks for
    help at any time; you won't always get a hint from each of them, but
    you'll usually get help in some form somewhere. Truth to tell, not
    getting anywhere is at least as rewarding as making progress, since your
    fellow superheroes have a wide range of amusing sarcastic responses.
    Moreover, the ending encounter with the Mr. Redundancy Man of the title
    is absolutely hilarious, mainly for the villain's dialogue: "Welcome to
    my hideaway lair, my dear friends of mine! Your arrival has come
    fortuitously just in time for you to witness the sight of my greatest
    and most triumphal achievement!" The way you deal with him is clever,
    but it's the premise itself that makes this worth playing--he has such a
    wealth of amusingly repetitive dialogue that it's more entertaining to
    find all the ways to interact with him than to set to work at solving
    the puzzle.

    Both the first and second Frenetic Five games draw much of their humor
    from humdrum settings and tasks--i.e., you have superheroes riding the
    bus and trying to operate a copy machine--and while it's amusing here,
    as in the first one, the frustration aspect of wrestling with boring
    objectives comes perilously close to being simply irritating.
    Contributing to that problem is an unfortunate fellow named the
    Validator, who comments on everything you do, as follows:

       >examine validator
       Some superheroes are blessed with a magnificent physique, like
       Backhoe Woman and The Human Hydraulic Press. Some have powers that
       are only dreamt of by regular humans, such as The Defenestrator and
       Microwave-Popcorn Boy. Some have neither, but are at least fun to be
       around and get invited to lots of parties. Then there's the
       Validator.

       The Validator says, "Outstanding! It never would have occurred to me
       to inspect the Validator!"

       >kick validator
       It's not clear how to kick the Validator.

       The Validator says, "Oh, kick the Validator, huh?  Great idea!"

    You get the idea. It's not a bad joke, but it's not especially funny for
    more than a few turns, and the typical player will end up spending more
    than a few turns around this particular irritant. At any rate, the
    Validator brings out the basic mundanity of the setting--there's nothing
    that makes a setting seem quite so mundane as an irritating person
    commenting on everything you do--as well as the ho-hum nature of your
    powers, and those of your sidekicks. It's not every writer who could
    make mundanity funny, but this one does. E.g.: "The clerk looks
    thoughtful, in a manner that makes it clear that thought is not a usual
    requirement of the job."

    The puzzles, by and large, are nothing special, with the exception of
    the endgame puzzle, whose solution is a real "aha" moment. There's one
    earlier puzzle that takes either a major logical leap or better
    visualization skills than I have, but it's a relatively minor flaw,
    particularly in a game this small. The second episode of this series
    corrects the main flaw of the first one, namely that there was no
    particular rhyme or reason to when your fellow superheroes would be able
    to help you, and no standard way to ask them to intervene; here, "ask x
    for help" elicits either action (solving a problem you couldn't solve on
    your own) or some sort of response. It's not a perfect solution-- it's
    still rarely obvious when you should be addressing a problem with your
    own wits, in the manner of standard IF, and when you should be relying
    on your team--but at least Episode Two doesn't require you to guess what
    the other members of the team would do, which was the major flaw of the
    first Frenetic Five. Having a standardized way to kick a puzzle out to
    the rest of the gang makes things much easier.

    There's not a lot to the second edition of Frenetic Five; it's solvable
    in half an hour or so, and it doesn't do anything all that surprising.
    But it has several laugh-out-loud moments, and fans of superheroes will
    no doubt grin knowingly at the absurdity of it all.

    From: Francesco Bova <fbova SP@G pangea.ca>
    Review appeared in SPAG #22 -- September 15, 2000

    Hah!

    That was my repeated response as I played through Neil DeMause's second
    installment in a series I hope he continues. The Frenetic Five vs. Mr.
    Redundancy Man continues on in the humorous tradition that Mr. DeMause
    started with his initial episode (The Frenetic Five vs. Strum & Drang),
    and makes many improvements on that well-intentioned first episode to
    boot.

    The Frenetic Five's world is covered with superheroes. As long as you
    can do something mildly interesting (like, let's say, be forever
    encouraging of someone else's actions), you've passed the minimum
    requirements needed to play the part. In this respect, the Frenetic Five
    pay more homage to the cartoon show The Tick (and its colorful cast of
    superheroes like the cowardly Deflatomouse and the rain-man-like Urchin)
    than it does to any team coming from the Marvel or DC universe. In fact,
    you as the protagonist have no super power per se, just a love for the
    TV show MacGyver and an ability to create things out of household
    implements. Still, this makes you the perfect leader for your group of
    misfits.

    Although the writing and storyline are impressively well put together,
    the best part about FF II are the NPCs. Considering the game is
    approximately 4 rooms in size, the room-to-well-fleshed-out-NPC ratio is
    pretty high. You've got the superhero named the Validator, the clerks,
    and the villain from the title Mr. Redundancy Man. You've also got your
    teammates, who form your moral support network, and who are hilarious
    with their witty banter and comments when it comes time to use their
    "super powers". My personal favorite team member is Lexicon, who's
    essentially a walking, talking version of Microsoft Bookshelf. That is
    to say, he's got the right word for what's troubling you.

    [Reviewer's Note: Lexicon actually got me all teary-eyed and nostalgic
    for one of the oddest little superheroes to ever come out of the Marvel
    comic book universe. His name was Cypher, and he was a member of a group
    called the New Mutants (a sort of Junior X-Men squad). His superpower:
    the ability to translate any language! As you can well imagine he was
    used sparingly. I can just picture it now. The New Mutants are getting
    ready to attack Magneto's secret hideout and the call to action goes
    something like this...

    << OK Magik, you attack the flank with your magic bolts. Cannonball, you
    soar in from the clouds and weaken his defenses. Sunspot, we'll send you
    in through the front door because after all, you're super-strong. And
    Cypher, you stay behind and make sure no one unplugs the fridge. Those
    beers have GOT to be cold when we get back! >>]

    Like all the NPCs, Lexicon's "help" in solving puzzles was well
    implemented and his super weakness (the equivalent to Superman's
    kryptonite), left me laughing for a long time after it was revealed.

    The NPCs not only add to the comic flavor of the game, but also provide
    you with clues if you need them, thereby providing a built-in hint
    system that doesn't break mimesis. In fact, if you're feeling
    particularly unimaginative when it comes time for you to solve some
    puzzles, the team can act as your "walkthrough" provided you ask the
    right team member the right questions. (However, this is obviously not
    recommended as it decreases the overall enjoyment of the game).

    There are essentially two types of puzzles in the game. The first type
    includes puzzles where you have to employ your MacGyver-like abilities,
    and the second revolve around correctly using your team's "talents" to
    get out of situations. As I'd mentioned previously, every team member
    has a hand in solving one puzzle or another, but figuring out which one
    you need isn't always apparent without a little thought. (This was
    especially true of Pastiche, as I had forgotten her special abilities
    from the first game in the series). The fact that the puzzles tend to be
    a bit tougher (or maybe more correctly, not necessarily intuitive right
    off the bat), is actually a positive as it helps out with the pacing of
    the game.

    Pacing, you say? What does pacing have to do with anything? Well, let me
    explain. When smaller games have really simple puzzles, it's almost too
    easy to progress through them without paying much attention to the
    "buzz" in the background (i.e., funny non-default responses, snarky
    comebacks, etc.). I know a lot of authors who have gone to great lengths
    to "flesh out" their game environment only to realize that players end
    up missing most of the extra goodies because there was no motivation to
    experience them. One game in particular that comes to mind is Suzanne
    Britton's Worlds Apart.

    I can remember playing Worlds Apart and thoroughly enjoying it the first
    time. What I hadn't realized was how many subtleties there were in the
    game until Suzanne posted something on r.g.i-f regarding the richness of
    the world she had created. With her post in hand, I played Worlds Apart
    a second time and enjoyed it even more than I had the first. The point
    is, that if Worlds Apart had one tiny little flaw, it was that Suzanne
    didn't slow us down enough to smell the roses if we didn't really want
    to, and I know that I for one ended up missing some of the best parts of
    the game as a result.

    In FF II, the obstacles DeMause puts in front of you should slow you
    down enough to hear the "buzz" (specifically the witty banter from the
    game's NPCs, and some hilarious object descriptions), and get a real
    feel for the warped world your character lives in. This should add
    immensely to the game and the player's gaming experience as a whole.

    The ending is too funny for words, and will leave the player feeling
    satisfied even if he had to use the built-in walkthrough to achieve it.
    There is no way for the PC to die, and with the exception of one nasty
    little bug (which should be avoidable for most players) there's no way
    to get the game into an unwinnable situation. Even if you're not a big
    comic book fan, I would still highly recommend this one as a nice
    diversion on a day when you need a good laugh.

    TADS .gam file

    Macintosh version

    The Frenetic Five vs. Sturm Und Drang
    From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G colorado.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #13 -- February 5, 1998

    NAME: The Frenetic Five vs. Sturm Und Drang
    AUTHOR: Neil deMause
    E-MAIL: neild SP@G echonyc.com
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/tads/frenfive/frenfive.gam
    VERSION: Release 2 (1997 competition release)

    Here's my confession: I love superheroes. Ever since my first Marvel
    comic at age six, I've always been a fan. Even now, well into my
    twenties and possessing a Master's degree in English Lit, I still make
    sure I get my monthly superhero fix. Yes, I know that violent revenge
    power-fantasies do not great works of literature make. Yes, I love
    comics and I know that the comics market is overcrowded, to the
    exclusion of other quality works, with bulging musclemen in tight
    spandex. Yes, I know that the constant deaths and resurrections of the
    superhero set strain plausibility to the breaking point. (Though
    really, who cares about plausibility? We're talking superheroes,
    here!) And yes, I'm disturbed by the almost grotesquely idealized
    bodies (especially women's bodies) relentlessly depicted in superhero
    comics. But what can I say? No matter how guilty it gets, it's still a
    pleasure.

    Consequently, I was anxious to start playing The Frenetic Five, and
    gave a small cheer when Comp97's magic shuffler put it towards the
    front of the line. I've always thought that the whole superhero genre
    would make a great one for IF -- if it's a great power fantasy to
    watch some comicbook character shoot fire out of his hands, how much
    greater to actually play the character that does it! I quickly learned
    that FF is in fact a superhero spoof (seems that very few people who
    think of themselves as sophisticated can enter the superhero genre
    without wearing the bulletproof bracelets of satire and ridicule), and
    a very funny one too, in the tradition of Superguy. You play Improv,
    whose power is the ingenious use of household objects, and other
    members of your team include a boy who can see tomorrow's headlines,
    and a woman who can find lost objects by clapping her hands (named, of
    course, The Clapper). The prose maintains a consistently high quality,
    from the characters' dialogue with one another to the snappy responses
    provided for some unlikely actions (">GET HOUSE" brings "You can count
    the number of superheroes you know who can lift an entire house on one
    finger: Forklift Man. (Come to think of it, Forklift Man could lift an
    entire house with one finger.)") It's hilarious.

    Sadly, there are some problems as well. First of all, I was disappointed
    that my supposed super-power was not implemented, as it would have been
    one of the most natural (and coolest) hint systems ever devised. Anytime I
    needed help with a puzzle, I could have just drawn on my "super Improv
    power" to help me make the intuitive connections between those ordinary
    household objects. Instead, the game left me to hope that I (as a player)
    developed those MacGyver talents on my own. Not likely, I'm afraid. In
    addition, the game does not meet the challenge of allowing me to use even
    this setup, because it does not allow alternate solutions to puzzles by
    using objects in unconventional ways. Very few alternate solutions were
    implemented, and few are even anticipated with a snarky response. For
    example, when tied up, I tried many unconventional ways to escape my bonds
    (cut them with my shard of glass, put eyeglasses into sunlight to focus
    the light into enough heat to burn the ropes, blow on the eyeglasses to
    put them in the right place, bite the ropes, wrap duct tape on my fingers
    to get more than one object at a time, etc.) Each attempt was met with one
    of two (equally lame) responses: either very clumsy non-recognition of the
    verb ("You can't see any bite here.") or "That's not really possible in
    your current state." The game doesn't really account for all the clever
    things that could be done with the inventory objects provided, just the
    *one* clever thing that will solve each puzzle.

    Finally, there are a number of just plain bugs in the game, which
    always decreases the fun factor. The Frenetic Five has an excellent
    premise and, on the level of prose, an excellent execution. However,
    interface design and implementation are too important to be treated
    the way this game treats them, and it suffers for it. I'm still
    waiting for the game that does superheroes just right.

    Prose: As mentioned above, the prose is excellent throughout the
    game. The dialogue and characterization for each member of the team is
    sharp and funny, and room descriptions (which adapted somewhat to the
    character's mental state) are both concise and vivid. Even some of the
    most everyday IF responses are considerably enlivened by the superhero
    treatment -- for example, saying "Down" in a locale where that
    direction is not available evokes the response "Sadly, you're not
    equipped with the ability to tunnel through solid ground."

    Plot: The plot is basically pretty middle-of-the-road superhero
    cliche.  Since this is a spoof, of course, cliches are a good thing,
    and many of the touches (like having to take the bus to the
    supervillains' hideout) are quite funny. The landscape, the premise
    (SuperTemps, whose logo is a muscled forearm holding a timesheet), and
    the spoofing of venerable superhero tropes (a mission interrupts
    relaxation, the villains explain their nefarious scheme to the bound
    heroes, etc.) are all very cleverly done. There were some coincidences
    which strained even the generous boundaries of satire, but I'll
    discuss those below.

    Puzzles: In fact, I'll just discuss them right here. The puzzles are a
    weaker part of this game. I found basically two types of puzzles in
    the game. One group is the puzzle based on extremely contrived
    circumstances -- for example, the door to the villains' hideout uses a
    "guess-the-big-word" lock, and what do you know, I happen to have
    someone on my team whose superpower is guessing big words! Lucky me!
    The other type of puzzle is supposed to have drawn on my character's
    superpower, the ingenious use of household objects. However, since
    this power wasn't implemented (as a hint system) within the game, I
    was left to think of these ingenious uses by myself, the problems of
    which have already been discussed above.

    Technical:
    writing -- I found no errors in grammar or spelling in this game.

    coding -- I think the main failure of the coding was the one I've
    already discussed: the lack of depth in coding alternative uses for
    inventory items. When a game's main character is someone whose primary
    trait is the ingenious use of objects, it is incumbent on that game to
    provide specific code for as many of those ingenious uses as possible.
    Frenetic Five falls well short in this regard. The game also had a few
    regular bugs, which I assume will be fixed in the post-competition
    version.

    TADS file (.gam) (Updated version)

    BinHexed Macintosh file (.sit.hqx) (Updated version)

    PC executable (.zip) (Updated version)

    TADS file (.gam) (competition version)

    Friday Afternoon
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #13 -- February 5, 1998

    NAME: Friday Afternoon
    AUTHOR: Mischa Schweitzer
    E-MAIL: M.A.M.Schweitzer SP@G inter.nl.net
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILIITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/competition97/inform/friday/friday.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    PLOT: Simple (1.2)               ATMOSPHERE: Office, but well-done (1.3)
    WRITING: Quite good (1.4)         GAMEPLAY: Mostly good (1.2)
    CHARACTERS: Quite funny (1.4)  PUZZLES: Nothing special (1.2)
    MISC: Solid, but some unfortunate elements (1.2)
    OVERALL: 6.3

    Among all the wander-around-an-ordinary-place-doing-ordinary-things
    entries in the 1997 competition, perhaps the most enjoyable is Friday
    Afternoon, a short tour of the author's office. Though the puzzles
    aren't really anything special, they have few obvious flaws, and most
    impart an air of whimsy that makes this feel reasonably fresh.

    Perhaps the most notable thing in Friday Afternoon is a development
    right at the beginning of the game -- your glasses break, and you have
    to find a means of fixing them despite your limited vision. The
    solution itself is not particularly hard or innovative, true, but
    Mr. Schweitzer shows admirable thoroughness in concealing the office
    behind a blur until the problem is solved. The problem is vaguely
    reminiscent of one from Wishbringer, though that was an absolute bar
    on vision rather than a reduction -- but it did draw me into the game
    effectively enough, much more than the average conventional-task game
    tends to. My only problem with that part of the game, really, was that
    the solution came too easily; I wanted to have to rely on other
    senses, follow a complicated pattern, something, but the payoff was a
    bit mundane.

    After that, Friday Afternoon becomes fairly conventional, though
    enlivened by a good deal of wit; one of your co-workers has responses
    that echo those of the hacker in Lurking Horror, for one thing, and
    the solution to the problem of looking up a phone number is
    entertainingly zany. (At least, zany in a bored-and-
    trapped-in-an-office way.) The only puzzle that really breaks IF rules
    is one involving repeated actions without the first few failures being
    clued -- i.e., the player might give up after a try or two, since the
    responses don't indicate that you're getting any closer.  With some
    tinkering on that -- feedback that changes, some reason to believe
    that pursuing that course will lead you to the goal -- the puzzles
    would be fine.

    A secondary but just as significant problem in Friday Afternoon
    involves a certain calendar and what it assumes about you, the player
    -- namely, that you're a straight male who enjoys having pictures of
    women in tight clothes in your office. While this certainly doesn't do
    anything for the game, in my eyes, the sexism involved isn't so
    painfully blatant that it's offensive; I found it a bit annoying, I
    suppose. (When I played this one, I had already encountered "Leaves"
    and its much more juvenile example of the same problem.) I don't think
    that the existence of the calendar in the game is itself wrong, but
    there are a few lines that could be better put -- namely, in a
    description, you're told that it's from August 1997, "but that isn't
    what you're looking at, is it?" And elsewhere, when you find a note
    indicating that the company's female employees are offended, you smile
    and note that the management won't see the calendar in its current
    location. No, not outrageous, but still a little obnoxious on both
    counts. Imputing thoughts or feelings to a player can be very
    effective when well done, but these aren't thoughts or feelings that
    are really worth imputing, given the assumptions involved. My feeling
    is that the calendar should still serve its purpose in the game -- but
    that the suggestion that it, er, does whatever it does for you should
    be removed.  (And, I must say, the answer to "read calendar" is quite
    amusing.)

    Some have objected on similar grounds to the central premise of the
    game -- you need to get out of your office by 6:00 lest you miss your
    date with Tanya, and your date with Tanya is particularly important
    because you want to prove to yourself and to the world that you're not
    a nerd. Not a particularly noble reason for going on a date with her,
    true, but the game doesn't say that it's the sole reason or that you
    have no actual feelings for Tanya, merely that you feel like a nerd
    and are tired of that feeling.  My feeling was that this is simple
    tell-it-like-it-is; for many people, going on a date -- either the
    first one ever or the first one in a long time -- serves as ego
    reinforcement, a sign that you're attractive, interesting, etc. It
    isn't particularly fair to the other party involved if that's the only
    reason, but the interests of comedy here; it's not as funny, somehow,
    if you're anxious about missing your date because you're desperately
    in love, and this is supposed to be comic, not tragic.

    All that said, there are plenty of things to enjoy here, notably an
    "Easter Egg Hunt" in the hint menu that gives the player interesting
    things to try -- with a prize in the form of the original release of
    the game. I didn't find many of the Easter Eggs involved -- though I
    wouldn't mind getting a push, particularly for "re-creating a scene
    from The Graduate". There is plenty of deadpan humor in the writing,
    for example when you try to move a stack of boxes and get this: "You'd
    rather not do anything with it: you might hurt yourself if it all fell
    on top of you, and you don't want to go on a date with Tanya with
    band-aids all over your face." Or a reference to a desk as "taking up
    space," to which the author adds "(Much like Marc's job description,
    from all you've seen him do.)" The view of your co-workers is
    consistently amusing, even if they're a bit stereotyped; the sugarcube
    is a very funny take on office boredom.

    Though there isn't a lot about Friday Afternoon that will stay with
    the player, the author should get credit for not doing much
    wrong. Using the phone, admittedly, requires fairly specific syntax,
    and the scoring system -- where you get ten points for significant
    tasks, but one routine action gets one point -- is a bit odd. But the
    game is entirely free of grammar problems (the author is Dutch, though
    it's not clear what his familiarity with English is). There's a time
    limit, though it's sufficiently loose that you really have to be lost
    to run afoul of it -- but it does provide some measure of tension, the
    puzzles work the way they're supposed to, and the whole thing's done
    with a measure of humor. I gave this one an 8 on the competition
    scale.

    Inform file (.z5)

    Frobozz Magic Support
    From: Adam Myrow <myrow SP@G eskimo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #32 -- March 20, 2003

    TITLE: Frobozz Magic Support
    AUTHOR: Nate Cull
    EMAIL: culln SP@G xtra.co.nz
    DATE: February, 1997
    PARSER: TADS 2
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF archive.
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/fmsr4.gam
    VERSION: 4

    Back in 1996, the Internet IF community was just beginning to take off.
    The second IF competition had been even more successful than the first,
    and experimental works were just starting to appear. Still, the majority
    of the IF produced at this time was either an Infocom tribute or
    followed the style of an Infocom game. Frobozz Magic Support is a case
    in point. If the title doesn't make this obvious, this is one of the
    many games to pay tribute to the Zork/Enchanter games. In fact, it is as
    if the author was thinking "let's see. References to the Flatheads?
    Check. Appearance of the Implementors? Check. Game can be made
    unwinnable by doing actions in the wrong order? Check. Really annoying
    maze? Check." The only things missing were a sleep timer and starvation
    puzzle. Well, perhaps the maze would be regarded as creative by some.
    Let me put it this way, if you enjoyed the maze in the 2002 competition
    entry called Evacuate, you will be thrilled with this one. I didn't care
    for either maze. However, as old-school IF, this really isn't as bad as
    I made it sound. For one thing, the story is original. You are a novice
    support clerk who goes on calls to help people out of the jams they get
    themselves into when magic doesn't quite work like it should. This, plus
    the numerous references to blorple and all the cubes gives me the
    impression that this is supposed to be taking place at the same time as
    Spellbreaker. One of the problems you fix, for example, is an Enchanter
    who has turned himself into a shark with the Snavig spell. The spell
    won't wear off. Similarly, your companion is a burin that got animated
    with a malyon spell. Once again, the spell doesn't want to wear off.
    Perhaps this was the beginnings of the failure of magic which resulted
    in the great conclave in Borphee.

    Unfortunately, Frobozz Magic Support doesn't do as much with this plot
    as I thought it should. Like much older IF, the plot is mostly an excuse
    for puzzles. The puzzles vary from creative to annoying. As I mentioned,
    it is easy to silently make the game unwinnable if you don't do things
    in the correct order. On top of this, the hint system in the game is the
    worst I've ever seen. I've never programmed in TADS, but apparently,
    hint systems of any kind are quite difficult to design in that language.
    I say this because I rarely see a good hint system in TADS. This one is
    nothing more than a dump of all the hints, which are rather vague. You
    have no control over what gets shown. You type "hint" and get about two
    screens worth of little clues. I would have preferred that it be
    context-sensitive or at least present a simple menu. The other option is
    to type "walkthrough" which spits out a list of commands which will win
    the game. Neither was very satisfying. I suggest that if you must resort
    to hints, download the solution from the if-archive at
    ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/solutions/frobozz.sol. It explains
    the logic of the puzzles and is divided into sections. I ended up having
    to look at this solution more than I care to admit because after I
    discovered how easy it was to make the game unwinnable, I wanted to make
    sure I wasn't doing anything to ruin the game. These elements really
    surprised me because in Mr. Cull's later Glowgrass, they are largely
    absent. Also, in his interview after the 1997 competition, he talked
    about how much he disliked puzzles of the very type he programmed in
    Frobozz Magic Support. As I said, he seemed to be making a conscious
    effort to emulate Infocom to the point that he ended up exaggerating it
    a bit.

    The bottom line is this: if you are a big Enchanter fan, and don't mind
    the type of game which will require a few restarts, give this one a
    shot. If you were introduced to IF with Photopia and don't know Belboz
    from Krill, forget it.

    TADS .gam file

    Step-by-step solution

    Frozen
    From: Christopher Forman <ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #11 -- September 16, 1997

    NAME: Frozen
    AUTHOR: Jeremy Farnham
    EMAIL: None given
    DATE: June 1996
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: ZIP Interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp.ifarchive.org://if-archive/games/zcode/frozen.z5

    You're working late one night in the university computer lab when you
    notice that everyone around you has suddenly stopped what they were
    doing.  Closer investigation reveals that your fellow students and
    professors have all been immobilized by some mysterious force.
    Perhaps that odd machine in the gradate students' lab could offer an
    explanation...?

    My first impression of this game was that it was strongly influenced
    by "The Lurking Horror" -- the setting and early descriptions were
    very reminiscent of Infocom's tribute to Lovecraft.  "Frozen" is
    obviously a first attempt with Inform, containing numerous, albeit
    rather insignificant, bugs (such as being able to find objects by
    searching for them a second time), missing line-feeds in obvious
    places, a score that's always 0 out of 0 (is that good or bad?) and
    other nuances that give the impression of an unpracticed I-F
    programmer.

    These will hopefully be fixed as the author makes progress with the
    development system, because I see a lot of promise from his first
    work.  "Frozen" sports three, count 'em, THREE different conclusions
    to the story, a prominent plus in my book ("The Path to Fortune" also
    features a trinity of endings).  Occasional bits of writing are easily
    on par with "Lurking Horror" and the game has a genuinely mysterious
    feel throughout.

    Perhaps a bit too mysterious, in fact.  My primary gripe about
    "Frozen" is the complete lack of resolution to the game's bizarre
    circumstances.  Aside from the curious last-minute addition to the
    machine in the lab, no attempt at an explanation is even made.  Why
    exactly did the students freeze up?  Why wasn't I affected?  How did
    my experiences act to reverse it?  What exactly was that sphere on the
    machine, and why was it added?  Whose body was that, burned at the
    stake?  Two of the endings seem to suggest that everything was a
    dream, but all three of them are quite vague.

    Don't read this the wrong way -- unanswered questions fit in well with
    this type of story, and I like having to make educated guesses to put
    things together (and I'm a huge fan of "The X-Files", where the
    writers frequently and intentionally leave the loose ends for viewers
    to tie up), but I was hoping the author would give me a little more
    background to work with in this particular case.  Perhaps the dust
    spirit could have offered a few clues, or perhaps there could have
    been more information about the graduate project.

    At any rate, I enjoyed "Frozen".  Its size (the object code is only
    about 64K) would have made it a perfect short work for the
    Competition, but perhaps Jeremy Farnham is working on something else
    even as we speak...

    Inform file (.z5)

    Future Boy!
    From: Soenke Klettner <soenke_k SP@G yahoo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #42 -- October 2, 2005

    NAME: Future Boy!
    AUTHOR: Kent Tessman
    EMAIL: kent SP@G generalcoffee.com
    DATE: 2004
    PARSER: HUGO
    SUPPORTS: HUGO Interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: commercial; General Coffee Productions
    URL: http://www.generalcoffee.com

    Future Boy! Is the first commercial project developed with the HUGO-engine,
    written by HUGO’s creator Kent Tessman. As expected, it is flawless with
    regard to programming and parsing and it is a convincing proof of HUGO’s
    power. But what is more important, it is one of the best games I have
    played in years.

    The story: Even though the title suggests otherwise, you are not Future
    Boy, but his roommate. Nevertheless, it is up to you to save the city from
    the evil supervillain Clayton Eno. To minimize spoilers, let me just say
    that the plot takes many interesting and surprising turns and is
    beautifully designed. Plus, you meet very interesting characters, some
    friends, some foes, some something else. As in any good action comic (or
    movie, by the way) the pace quickens towards the end. At the same time, the
    difficulty of the puzzles rises, thus stretching the suspense to a maximum
    (unless you use the in-built hint system prematurely). The game features
    congenial graphics, animation sequences and music bits. Cartoonish in
    style, they add to the superhero flair effectively, but they are neither
    necessary nor helpful for advancing in the game. So the enjoyment doesn’t
    suffer too much on a system without graphic support (e.g. Palm). The voice
    acting deserves special praise: it is amazingly well done and very
    professional. I didn’t discover any major flaws worth mentioning.

    The game itself has a linear structure, which means there are no
    alternative endings and the plot doesn’t develop in different directions
    depending on the player‘s actions. In the beginning,  there is always only
    one puzzle at hand to be solved to advance the story. In the middle game,
    the structure becomes much more open and the player can decide which puzzle
    to try next, so he doesn’t get stuck that easy. The level of difficulty
    starts very moderate, so even the unpracticed (or untalented) puzzle solver
    will advance easily and get motivated to try to solve the later, more
    difficult puzzles by himself as well. This later puzzles get pretty hard
    and multi-layered, but are always fair, solvable and well provided with
    clues.

    There are two features of the game I would like to see in every future text
    adventure: a "goal" command which tells you what (basically) to do next and
    a short summary of what happened so far after each restore.

    So, I really recommand the game to anyone who likes superhero stories, good
    puzzles and/or good text adventures in general. It is not cheap, but worth
    the price (although I wouldn’t order the deluxe package again, which is 5 $
    more for a common CD case and a four page booklet).

    Web site with information on how to purchase the game

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