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Game Reviews A

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The email addresses used are those submitted with the review, so naturally some of them may be out of date.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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    Table of Contents
    Aayela
    The Abbey
    Above and Beyond!
    Acid Whiplash
    Acorn Court
    Ad Verbum
    Adventure (aka Colossal Cave)
    The Adventures of Elizabeth (El) Highe
    The Adventures of The President Of The United States
    Aisle
    Akari's Story
    Akron
    Alien Abduction?
    All Alone
    All Hope Abandon
    All Quiet on the Library Front
    All Roads
    All Things Devours
    The Amazing Interactive Turing Machine
    Amnesia (Thomas Disch)
    Amnesia (Dustin Rhodes)
    Amnesia (Toby White)
    Anchorhead
    And The Waves Choke The Wind
    Another Earth, Another Sky
    Another Lifeless Planet and Me With No Beer
    The Apocalypse Clock
    Arrival, or Attack of the B-Movie Cliches
    Arthur: Quest for Excalibur
    ASCII and the Argonauts
    At The Bottom Of The Garden
    At Wit's End
    The Atomic Heart
    Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies
    Attempted Assassination
    Augmented Fourth
    Augustine
    Aunts and Butlers
    The Awakening
    The Awe-Chasm

    Aayela
    From: John Wood <john SP@G elvw.demon.co.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #10 -- February 4, 1997

    NAME: Aayela
    AUTHOR: Magnus Olsson
    EMAIL: zebulon SP@G pobox.com
    DATE: October 1996
    PARSER: Below Average
    SUPPORTS: TADS ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/aayela
    VERSION: Version 1.0

    After playing Magnus Olsson's acclaimed entry in last year's
    competition, Uncle Zebulon's Will, I was expecting a lot from this -
    particularly when I saw that it was set in the same universe.
    Unfortunately, this is an experiment in utilising senses other than
    sight rather than a full game, and it shows - the plot is a standard
    "quest for the magic mcguffin," and feels tacked on.

    The atmosphere created by spending most of the adventure in the dark
    is moderately effective, but the use of other senses is too limited to
    do the situation justice.

    As a game, there is not a lot for the player to do.  I completed it in
    under an hour, most of the time spent wandering around because I
    hadn't spotted what I was supposed to be doing.  There is a good
    selection of alternate endings, but all in all it felt too small and
    shallow to satisfy.

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

    Ah, Magnus Olsson is sneaky, using an attention-getting device similar
    yet opposite to the one used by the (dull) AGT game "Zanfar."
    "Zanfar" has a name that places it last in an alphabetic directory
    listing, so that it's the last title a player sees, thus making it
    remain fresh in his/her mind.  Magnus' tactic is the opposite.  He
    gives his game a name that places it FIRST, in the hopes of grabbing
    the advantage from players who go through all the entries in
    alphabetical order, thus leaving no prior work for players to compare
    his entry to.  Well, it didn't work on me!  I saw through your little
    plot, Magnus, and I made it a point to play "Aayela" DEAD LAST, so
    that I could effectively compare it to EVERYTHING!!  AH HA HA HA HA HA
    HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

    *Ahem.*  Well.

    "Aayela" is set in the land of Vyhl, visited by your character at the
    end of Magnus' 1995 entry Uncle Zebulon's Will. That said, I guess
    I expected a more obvious continuation of "Zebulon," in the shoes of
    the same character, uncovering more of the same mystical land while
    perhaps getting a chance to meet my eccentric uncle Zeb.  Instead I
    found myself assuming the role of another young (expendable) unknown
    set off to seek out the standard adventure-game McGuffin, in this case
    the Stone of Aayela.

    As in "Zebulon," Magnus' writing shines.  (Does so, Gareth!)  Like the
    vanished Zebulon with whom a rapport was forged in "Aayela"'s prequel,
    the imprisoned spirit of Aayela guides the player forward and develops
    into a part of him.  This is paced nicely, with the unique setting of
    total darkness for much of the quest.

    Unfortunately, this mars the realism created by the rest of the
    writing.  The room text is sometimes no more than standard cave
    descriptions preceded by the words "It's completely dark."  The
    protagonist's sense of direction must be uncanny to allow him to
    navigate with no light by which to see his compass.  There's no threat
    of danger, either, until the very end, after which I was left with a
    feeling of, "You mean that's IT?!"

    I liked "Aayela," don't get me wrong.  I simply didn't find it as
    clever as Magnus' previous work, particularly when compared with so
    many other outstanding entries this year.

    Directory With TADS .gam File

    The Abbey
    From: Cedric Knight <ADDRESS REMOVED>
    Review appeared in SPAG #24 -- March 24, 2001

    TITLE: The Abbey
    AUTHOR: Art LaFrana
    EMAIL: lafrana SP@G genesis.mcs.com (?)
    DATE: 1993
    PARSER: Not bad
    SUPPORTS/PLATFORM: MS-DOS
    AVAILABILITY: Shareware, $10
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/abbey.zip
    VERSION: 1.0

    You are a 14th century scholar sent, by no less a personage than the
    Pope himself, to recover ten treasures after a fire at the Abbey of
    Montglane. This old-time DOS adventures deserves a SPAG review for its
    attempts to bring the medieval thriller genre to IF, and for its good
    puzzles, plot, and imagery. This imagery is achieved despite
    descriptions which are not surprisingly economic considering that parser
    and world are condensed into a 51K executable. There’s a sense of
    incredulity at certain points as the plot develops, but the denouement
    is satisfying, providing revelation and resolution of what has gone
    before. Some pieces recur from LaFrana’s earlier and rougher "Hampton
    Manor", but these are merely in-jokes, and not distracting.

    Your score proceeds through a series of ranks, which also neatly split
    the game into seven sections, which although set in the same environment
    involve different puzzles of increasing complexity. One logical but
    complex puzzle (perhaps the most complex) eventually results in apparent
    bloodshed when you dispatch the only NPC of any significance, but since
    the first time you encounter him he’s likely to kill you, it might
    reasonably be considered self-defence.

    The parser is claimed to be better than that in "Hampton Manor", and is
    certainly adequate, but there are still verb problems. As in the
    previous game, "move" is more effective than "search", contrary to
    widespread IF convention, and one puzzle early in the game is
    effectively impossible for non-US English speakers. I do not consider
    revealing unintentional difficulties to be spoilers, and as this is not
    the only game with this problem it is worth mentioning. The verb in
    question is "pry" which as far as I know isn’t used in the intended
    sense outside North America. So here is an appeal to library designers
    to include "pry" as a standard verb synonymous with "prise", "jemmy",
    "prize", "jimmy", "jimmi", "lever" and "force".

    The game’s later stages are genuinely demanding, including one puzzle
    involving not just a bit of arithmetic but also close observation of
    scenery. One problem with this is that by the time you get to this stage
    you may well have forgotten a clue. Worth trying, and, if the author is
    still collecting it, also worth the registration fee.

    PLOT: Fantastical (1.4) ATMOSPHERE: Suitably creepy (1.4)
    WRITING: Evocative (1.3) GAMEPLAY: Guess the verb (1)
    VARIETY: Unique structure (1.7)
    OVERALL: 6.8
    CHARACTERS: Sparse (0.6) PUZZLES: Tricky (1.4)
    DIFFICULTY: Hard

    Game file (.zip)

    Hints and stepwise walkthrough

    Above and Beyond!
    From: Robin Adams <robinadams SP@G ukonline.co.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #24 -- March 24, 2001

    NAME: Above and Beyond!
    AUTHOR: Michael J. Sousa
    EMAIL: msousa SP@G efortress.com
    DATE: January 2000
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/above.gam
    VERSION: 1.2

    Michael says that this game is the first he has written with TADS, but
    he doesn't make it clear whether it is his first IF game ever, or not.
    If it is, it is extremely good for a first game; and even if it is not,
    it's not a bad little game by any means.

    You play Alex, a programmer newly hired for a software company whose
    name is never revealed. As you pull into the parking lot for your first
    day, you realise you've left your ID card at home. Just in case you
    think the company will be understanding, as you approach the main doors,
    you witness a man named Bill being fired for losing his ID. And so your
    first problem is neatly set: how to get inside.

    As you snoop around outside the building trying to work this out, you
    overhear a conversation between two FBI agents who are investigating a
    series of abductions among the employees of the company. Once inside the
    building, investigating these disappearances forms the main plot of the
    game.

    This is not a Deadline-style detective game, though; while there are one
    or two clues to find or conversations to overhear, most of the problems
    are of the traditional kind: obtaining objects, getting through locked
    doors, and all the other activities we IF-ers love so much.

    These puzzles aren't very many - it's a relatively short game - but most
    of them are very well polished. As it should be, it is often easy to see
    what you are supposed to do, but difficult to see how you should do it.
    They are all perfectly logical and very satisfying to solve, with one
    exception. (The exception is how to open the prison cell door. I had to
    resort to the walkthrough for that, and even now, I'm not sure how it
    was supposed to work.)

    One problem - how to get past Greg and Ed the guards - reminded me very
    much of the Babel fish problem in Hitchhiker's (and, despite some
    people's opinions, that is a good thing). You find the first part of the
    solution, and a second obstacle is revealed. Beat that, and a third is
    found; and so on, until you get all parts in place and watch it unfold
    like clockwork. Great fun.

    Throughout the game, Michael shows a good instinct for how much of a
    clue to give the player when you get the answer to a problem `almost
    right'. If you are wearing an incomplete disguise, for example, you will
    be told which part you are missing - but not where or how to get it, of
    course.

    There is also a very sparse HINT function. It hardly ever gives the
    complete solution to a problem; most of the time it simply tells you
    which problem you should be tackling next, sometimes it gives the broad
    outline of the solution.

    This is also the first game I have played with a WINNABLE command, which
    shows whether or not the game has been put into an unwinnable state.
    This is, in my opinion, a great thing, and I'm glad to hear it's
    becoming quite common.

    I should mention that the game is extremely linear. There is never a
    choice as to which problem to solve next - even on occasions when it
    would have been easy to do so. There is always something that means you
    can't get into a necessary area until you've solved the previous
    problem. This didn't bother me too much, as it fit into the general
    spirit of the game. You'll know whether it will bother you or not.

    My main complaint is that the descriptions are so dull. Except for a few
    pieces of humour (which stick out like sore thumbs), we are told the
    absolute bare minimum about each room or object. Here are a few samples:

       Front of Building
          You're standing in front of the building of your new company. It's
       a two story building that is shaped like an inverted V. The entrance
       is marked by two large glass doors. To the east is the parking lot.
       Paths also lead north and south.

       Parking Lot
          You're in the middle of a fairly large parking lot, standing
       beside your car.  To the west is the front of the building.

       Copy Room
          You've made your way into a small room used to store day-to-day
       office equipment.  Various pieces of equipment line the wall.

       >X SHREDDER
       The shredder is sitting on a small table at the far end of the room.
       It is currently turned on.

       >X PEN
       It's an ordinary pen.

    And so forth. There's nothing wrong with a few descriptions like this -
    after all, Zork's "South of House" was hardly the most interesting
    location ever. But I could have chosen any room or object in this game
    at all; I honestly can't think of a single exception. Each one is a
    basic description, then a list of the things you need to know to solve
    the game. Taken all together, it makes the world seem very, well, grey.

    This is particularly true once you get inside your office. According to
    the comments in the credits, the game had a maze at some point in its
    history which was later taken out. I'm willing to bet that the maze was
    the office, which consists of about 30 cubicles and offices, and the
    hallways between. Michael has straightened it out, making it much easier
    to navigate, but has kept the hallways' and cubicles' descriptions
    identical except for the name of the occupant.

    Michael claims the game is based very closely around the office where he
    actually works. If this is true, he must be one of the most bored people
    on Earth. Not only are the rooms so monotone, but his colleagues are all
    clones. Meet one of them for the first time, and he or she will rise,
    read your name tag, shake hands, and introduce themselves. Examine them,
    and you will either see:
    He's your average looking male.
    or:
    She's your average looking female.
    They spend their day alternating between `trying to get some work done',
    and talking on the phone. They refuse to talk about each other. It would
    have been wonderful if the kidnappings turned out to be some sinister
    force replacing people with these soulless androids, but sadly this
    turns out not to be the case.

    This especially hits you because you are set tasks where the only point
    seems to be `See if you can find your way from here to this cubicle' -
    another remnant of the maze, I imagine. Mazes are dull, but at least
    there would have been a bit of challenge. As it is, these treks are
    simply tedious.

    I think I've concentrated too much on the bad points of this game -
    mainly because the good points are the puzzles, and I can't describe
    them too much without giving things away. Don't come to this game for
    good writing, characterisation, or a good story - the plot is quite
    simplistic. Do come for some very well designed puzzles, and a
    satisfying little game that will keep you occupied for two or three
    days.

    From: Cedric Knight <ADDRESS REMOVED>
    Review appeared in SPAG #24 -- March 24, 2001

    Intrigued by the sole 8.7 score given to this game and a request for
    reviews, I downloaded the TADS file and started playing. This was
    immediately after finishing "Little Blue Men", to which this new game
    has some similarities, such as being set in a dull and frustrating
    office. However, whereas "Little Blue Men" was tightly constructed, this
    new game seems to sprawl a little, and consequently you find yourself
    wandering through many locations that are essentially the same; it’s
    good to keep a map because many have the same brief description.

    The premise seems straightforward. You are Alex (a nicely genderless
    name, but why are all the managers men?), a programmer starting the
    first day of work at a new company. The first problem of the game is
    that you have no ID card to gain entry to the building. The first
    problem *with* the game is that that shouldn’t be a problem: for
    example, why can’t you simply talk to the receptionist? This kind of
    contrivance sticks out a little, and the game continues in this manner
    for a while, with linear but frequently unlikely puzzle solutions. Of
    course, all adventures have necessary objects just lying around to some
    degree, but in Above and Beyond! this arbitrariness is quite
    conspicuous. I also had to resort to using HINT occasionally to
    double-check I was doing the right thing. (Despite what the author says
    about being sparse, these HINTS are about right, subject to the two
    criticisms here. The game also provides a useful WINNABLE command to
    check the current position is worthy of saving and that you haven’t left
    any important items behind.)

    The story develops mostly by eavesdropping, which lends the game an
    atmosphere reminiscent of a David Mamet thriller, as well as giving a
    good opportunity for humour. You can also tell some of the author’s
    interests by references to Page and Plant plus a few IT-based jokes. The
    plot can be neatly divided into three. The introductory section concerns
    getting access to the building, and is fairly obvious; I was lucky to
    find a slightly concealed object first time off, and only had slight
    problems with wanting to use "drop" instead of "put". The second section
    involved a light satire of office work, and seemed reasonably intuitive
    until some shenanigans with "Bob", where the player has to do a lot of
    waiting and it doesn’t seem the puzzle solution is going to get you
    anywhere. Ideally in IF, I would say that the complexity of the problem
    should be proportionate to the importance the player is likely to give
    it. At this one point, I admit to looking up someone’s else solution,
    but after that it was plain sailing. The final section begins with a
    nice puzzle which involves dying several times to deduce the complete
    solution, and then again seemed to me to go off at a tangent, with the
    solution just out of reach because one useful object has a second, more
    obscure role. From then on, the game decides you don’t need any more
    hints, and a rapid climax was for me let down by a final confrontation
    with the villain of the piece which lacked credibility.

    The game makes up for the formulaic and functional plot in the
    non-player characters, of whom there are around 30. The office workers
    are, the author claims, based on real people, but seem to be cut from
    the same cloth (or class), with superficial details differing in the way
    the author satirise their frequently bovine mannerisms. My favourite
    among these is Brian the Guardian of the Library: "Brian is having an
    in-depth conversation on the pro's and con's of formulating a policy of
    systematically assigning street names to all city streets using the GPS
    as a guide. This could, and probably will, take a while." The NPCs’
    activities may noticeably depend on quite unrelated actions by you, but
    this does not seriously detract from the game.

    The writing is literate, but Varicella it is not, unfortunately.
    "Walking the plank" makes you "giggle to yourself thinking you're on a
    pirate ship" which I only criticise of because it’s the kind of thing I
    might write. I only found one or two typos ("compliment" where it should
    be "complement") or minor programming errors.

    In conclusion, the good puzzles and characters are let down slightly by
    the plot, and while not worthy of the high score previously given, is a
    commendable first effort.

    PLOT: Disappointing (0.9) ATMOSPHERE: Good, filmic (1.3)
    WRITING: Serviceable (1.1) GAMEPLAY: Repetitious (1.1)
    VARIETY: Nice set pieces (1.3)
    OVERALL: 5.7
    CHARACTERS: Entertaining (1.3) PUZZLES: Mostly good (1.2)
    DIFFICULTY: Mostly middling-to-easy

    TADS game file (.gam)

    Walkthrough

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

    NAME: Acid Whiplash
    AUTHOR: Rybread Celsius & Cody Sandifer
    EMAIL: rybread SP@G anok4u2.org (Celsius), sandifer SP@G crmse.sdsu.edu (Sandifer)
    DATE: September 1998
    PARSER: Inform whacked
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/acid
    VERSION: Release 1

    ACID WHIPLASH by Anonymous (a.k.a. RYBREAD CELSIUS CAN'T FIND A DICTIONARY
    by Rybread Celsius and Cody Sandifer)

       "This is terribly, terribly unfair. I'm really sorry. But I just
       started laughing hysterically, and it's not what the author intended.
       In the middle of an intense ending sequence, I read the line:

       'My blood pumper is wronged!'

       I just lost it. It's a very 'Eye of Argon' sort of line."
                            -- Andrew Plotkin, reviewing "Symetry", 1/1/98

       "It takes guts to do *anything* wearing a silver jumpsuit.
            My point:
       I bet Rybread wears *two* silver jumpsuits while he writes IF."
                                    -- Brad O'Donnell, 1/6/98

    I hope my title line isn't too big a spoiler. I guess I can't feel too
    guilty about giving away something that's revealed in the first 3
    seconds of the game. Anyway, it would be impossible to talk about this
    game without talking about Rybread Celsius. Yes, Rybread Celsius. The
    man, the myth, the legend. There are those who have called him "A BONA
    FIDE CERTIFIED GENIUS" [1]. There are those who have called him "the
    worst writer in interactive fiction today" [2]. There are even those
    who have called him "an adaptive-learning AI" [3]. Whatever the truth
    behind the smokescreen, opinion is clearly divided on the Celsius
    oeuvre. He appears to have an enthusiastic cult following who look at
    his works and see the stamp of genius, paralleled by another group who
    look at those selfsame works and see only barely coherent English and
    buggy code. I have always counted myself among the latter. Works like
    Symetry and Punkirita Quest set my English-major teeth on edge. I have
    never met a Rybread game that I've liked, or even halfway
    understood. But Acid Whiplash is different.

    First of all, I need to say that I'm going to call it Acid Whiplash, for
    several reasons:

      1. I'm not sure what the game's real name is supposed to be.
      2. The other name, while it may be (is!) perfectly true, is just too long
         to write out.
      3. Acid Whiplash is just such a *perfect* name for this game.

    I've never dropped acid myself, but I'm guessing that this game is
    about the closest text game equivalent I will ever play, at least
    until my next Rybread game. The world spins crazily about, featuring
    (among other settings) a room shaped like a burning credit card (???),
    nightmarish recastings of Curses and Jigsaw, and your own
    transformation into a car dashboard. Scene changes happen with
    absolutely no warning, and any sense of emerging narrative is dashed
    and jolted about, hard enough and abruptly enough to, well, to give
    you a severe case of mental whiplash. Sounds like a typical Celsius
    game so far, right? But here's the best part: stumbling through these
    hallucinogenic sequences leads you through a multi-part interview
    between Cody Sandifer and Celsius himself, an interview which had me
    laughing out loud over and over. Sandifer is hilarious, striking the
    pose of the intensely sincere reviewer, taking each deranged Celsius
    word as gospel, and in the process manages actually to illuminate some
    of the interesting corners of his subject, and subject matter. And
    Rybread is...  Rybread, no more or less than ever. Perhaps being
    changed into a dashboard while listening makes the whole thing funnier
    -- I'm not sure.

    As usual, my regular categories don't apply. Plot, puzzles, writing --
    forget about it. Acid Whiplash has no real interaction or story in any
    meaningful sense. (There is, however, one very funny scene where we
    learn that Rybread is in fact the evil twin of a well-known IF
    author). If you're looking for a plot, or even something vaguely
    coherent, you ought to know that you're looking in the wrong
    place. But if you aren't familiar with the Way of the Rybread, or even
    if you are, I recommend giving Acid Whiplash a look. It might shed
    some light on what all these crazy people are talking about... but
    don't expect to understand the *next* Celsius game.

    [1] Brock Kevin Nambo

    [2] Me. (Nothing personal.)

    [3] Adam Thornton

    Rating: 5.2 (This is by *far* the highest rating I've ever given to
    Rybread. In fact, I think it beats his past 3 ratings from me put
    together!)

    Inform file (.z5)

    Walkthrough (Text)

    Acorn Court
    From: Alistair G. Thomas <agt20 SP@G phy.cam.ac.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #12 -- December 13, 1997

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

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

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

    Inform file (.z5)

    Ad Verbum
    From: Mark J Musante <olorin SP@G world.std.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #23 -- December 29, 2000

    NAME: Ad Verbum
    AUTHOR: Nick Montfort
    EMAIL: nickm SP@G nickm.com
    DATE: October 2000
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/adverbum.z5
    VERSION: Release 1 / Serial number 000925

    One line summary: Nord and Bert with attitude.

    This isn't Nick's second game, but it is the second game of his that is
    fairly widely known. The first one was "Winchester's Nightmare" which
    took an interesting tack in trying to get the player to be really part
    of the story. Instead of the usual ">" prompt, the player is presented
    with "Sarah decides to", and you get to fill in what you would like her
    to decide to do.

    This really made you feel part of the action, but it had the drawback of
    eliminating the standard commands we came to know and love over the past
    20+ years of IF. Notably, 'i' for inventory, 'n' for north, and so on.
    "Sarah decides to sw" doesn't make much sense as a sentence.

    "Ad Verbum" takes this into account in a thoroughly amusing and clever
    way. If you use commands like 'up' and 'north', the room descriptions
    will also use them. If you instead use 'u' and 'n', so do the room
    descriptions. Some people might find this off-putting. I found it
    grin-worthy.

    But enough of that. The game itself presents the player with a seemingly
    simple stint: acquire all objects from a house and dump them in the
    Dumpster. The catch is that the house once belonged to the "cantankerous
    Wizard of Wordplay", so it's not as simple as going through each room
    and picking up the objects. You have to obey the rules.

    For example, in one room, you can only use words that begin with the
    letter 's', however the only way to leave it is to the north, which is a
    word you can't use. You also have to be able to pick up objects in those
    rooms, again only using 's'-words.

    Naturally, when you're in an 'n'-, 'e'- or 'w'-only room, it's hard to
    save the game, so Nick has you read a warning message before entering
    those rooms explaining the situation. It's a bit on the defensive side
    and it definitely breaks the flow of the game, but I'm sure that
    beginning players would find it useful. I, on the other hand, would have
    preferred to see that as a puzzle one discovered during the course of
    play.

    After all, the game is short enough. Too short, really, because these
    are the kinds of puzzles I love to see. Reading the text, thinking up
    possible solutions, a bright flash of discovery, the eagerness to see
    what's next... that's what IF is all about.

    The only downside to the game is that it didn't recognize quite as many
    words as I thought it ought to. It's frustrating to think of a perfectly
    good word ('scarper' to leave the 's' room, for instance) and then have
    it not work. I'm sure Nick will be getting plenty of suggestions from
    others, if he hasn't already.

    That being said, this was the game that made the whole competition for
    me. I enjoyed it from intro to quit. Nick, if you're reading this, keep
    writing more! I'd love to play a full-size game with this sort of wacky
    wordplay and perplexing puzzles.

    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #23 -- December 29, 2000

    Infocom, in its heyday, produced some games the likes of which has never
    been seen since, either because there's no perceived interest in such
    games (the mysteries in particular) or because amateur IF writers don't
    have access to the proper technology (the more graphical games). Neither
    of those objections necessarily applies to Nord and Bert Couldn't Make
    Head or Tail of It, a wordplay game, but Nick Montfort's Ad Verbum is
    arguably the first free- or shareware IF game to follow in Nord and
    Bert's footsteps. (Dennis Cunningham's T-Zero had some points in common,
    but there was more going on than wordplay--pop culture references and
    such.) Ad Verbum is a worthy successor: like Nord and Bert, not all of
    it is particularly inspired, but the moments that work really, really
    work.

    The plot, again like Nord and Bert, is simply an excuse for wordplay
    puzzles--you're looking through the Wizard of Wordplay's mansion and
    moving through various rooms that are devoted to specific types of
    wordplay, thereby to collect objects. Many of the puzzles are a bit
    obscure, and some are only tangentially related to wordplay--or, rather,
    involve forms of wordplay that aren't necessarily familiar to anyone but
    the most hardened of GAMES magazine addicts. (One puzzle that involves
    moving a sofa down a flight of stairs is particularly baffling to those
    not on the author's wavelength.) Another, involving a little boy who's a
    dinosaur fan, I found simply misleading--at least, the solution
    suggested in the hints was something of a surprise to me.

    The heart of the game, however, lies on the "initial" floor of the
    house: there are passages lying to the north, east, west, and south, and
    going north yields this:

       "LISTEN WELL!" a sonorous voice booms out, in attempted hollowness.
       "Know ye that passage back through here is difficult for some,
       impossible for others! Should you wish to transport yourself -
       without your cherished possessions - out of these constrained
       confines, utter the magic command: NEW!"

       Neat Nursery
       Nice, nondescript nursery, noticeably neat. Normally, nurslings
       nestle noisily. Now, none. No needful, naive newborns.

       Nearby: ... nifty nappy.

    The parser, as you might have guessed, has been rewritten to require
    that every word of every command begin with N. Violating the rules
    elicits "No! No! Negative, novice. Nasty notation." or "No! No!
    Nefarious nomenclature. Narrate nicely, now." The NEW command mentioned
    above is your only way of getting out of the room: RESTORE, QUIT and
    everything else has been disabled. Needless to say, in the rooms to the
    east, west and south, the parser has been similarly reworked for the
    appropriate letter. You have a goal for each room--extracting some
    objects and getting out of the room, using only the appropriate
    letters--but even after the goal is accomplished, it's worth hanging
    around to experiment with the alliterative parser. The results are more
    often than not hilarious, as with the following:

       >nip nappy
       Naughty, naughty! Nibbling nappies not normal.

    Or:

       >examine effigy
       Enemy effigy. Extreme enormity evident. Execrable evildoer!

    There's plenty more amusing stuff in each room: the parser-rewriting was
    done with plenty of intelligence and wit. (WAIL in the appropriate room
    elicits "Waaaah!", which amuses me no end for some reason.) In short:
    nicely notated, Nick! Erudite, esoteric effusions entertain endlessly.
    Winsome, witty wizardry will woo wordsmiths, who will whisper "Wow!"
    without wearying. Surely, such semantic skill should solicit
    stratospheric scores.

    There are some variants on the alliterative parser--another S room with
    another restriction, and a room with objects whose content suggests that
    the proper TAKE replacement for each object will involve
    letter-avoidance of one sort or another. (There was a nasty bug in the
    competition version of this room that has been squashed--naturally, the
    game in the updated version reports a literal squashed bug.) The parser
    is not, however, rewritten for each object, so most of the fun of the
    alliterative rooms is lost, and only the wordplay puzzle remains. It's a
    fine puzzle, of course, but it doesn't have the same effect. The other
    puzzles are likewise not nearly as inspired--there's a "twin bedroom"
    that requires that all commands be in the form >HAMMER HAMMER, but there
    isn't nearly as much room for experimenting there.

    To the extent that Ad Verbum works--and it depends mostly, I think, on
    the extent to which the player is amused by the alliterative rooms--it
    works for different reasons than Nord and Bert worked. The latter called
    for all sorts of cleverness from the player, and getting through it
    produced a real feeling of accomplishment; some of the puzzles were
    quite difficult. In particular, certain scenarios required that the
    player deploy various clichés or idioms, often in amusingly twisted
    ways, to get through the scene--and not a small amount of creativity was
    required. Ad Verbum doesn't ask nearly as much of the player--the most
    difficult feat of wordplay is clearly coming up with the appropriate
    alliterative words, and in most rooms that's not especially difficult.
    (Getting out of the N room is a challenge--sufficiently obscure that if
    you go in there without first encountering the fellow who wanders around
    dropping hints, you're unlikely to get it--but the others are pretty
    straightforward.) But the author here has put his own skills on display,
    much more so than the Nord and Bert authors did, and the result is just
    as amusing. In other words, the fun is more passive here than it was in
    Nord and Bert--the interactivity isn't as important--but there's still
    fun to be had.

    Ad Verbum is not an unqualified success; without the alliterative
    parser, I don't think there'd be much interesting about it. But I got
    enough laughs out of those rooms that I can't give it anything less than
    a 9.

    Inform .z5 file (updated version)

    Inform .z5 file (competition version)

    Adventure (aka Colossal Cave)
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #8 -- February 5, 1996

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

         Adventure, aka Colossal Cave, is the oldest, most famous, most
    modified, most ported, and most pirated game in the history of
    Interactive Fiction.  Written in the antiquity of the mid 70's, it was
    bootlegged to practically every university in the country on magnetic
    tape.  It was commercially released by several companies (such as The
    Software Toolworks), and has been ported to AGT, TADS, Inform, and
    several others.
         It has also been expanded several times.  Many authors have taken
    the layout of the original game and simply added new rooms, items, and
    puzzles.  For this reason, the game is usually referred to by the
    maximum number of points that can be scored.  For instance Adventure
    350 (the original version), Adventure 370, Adventure 550, Adventure
    1000, and so on.
         Adventure could also be said to be indirectly responsible for the
    entire Infocom product line.  The original mainframe Zork was begun
    when the authors played Adventure and believed that they could improve
    on it, especially vis a vis the parser.  Zork, the product of their
    efforts, was the foundation of Infocom, and owes heavily to Adventure.
    The words "xyzzy" and "plugh" will draw a response, and the thief's
    maze is lifted directly from the game.
         All in all, one might conclude from this that Adventure is the
    greatest Adventure game ever written, but this is not quite the case.
    It's continued popularity stems from a) its hauntingly compelling
    atmosphere, b) its colourful imagery, c) the fact that for many it was
    their first adventure game, and d) the fact that many people first
    played it 70's style.
         Playing a game 70's style was very different from playing today.
    Since there were few personal computers, playing a game usually
    involved a trip to the local university computer room, generally after
    hours, with a bag lunch in tow (since the session would usually last
    quite a while).  My own first experience with Adventure involved
    late-night trips to IBM with my programmer father.  The long trek
    through dimly-lit windowless corridors to the terminal room was
    practically an adventure in itself, and since you couldn't
    just go and play whenever you wanted to, the game had plenty of
    opportunity to grow larger in the imagination in between sessions.
         Also, a player is more likely to be forgiving of a first game than
    later ones.  When you have never seen such a game before and are not
    quite sure what it can understand or do, you won't mind a simple
    two-word parser, such as Adventure has, unless it is positively
    user-unfriendly.  Adventure's parser while simple, is adequate for the
    game, and produces a good effect by frequently addressing the user
    directly ("You don't expect me to do a decent reincarnation without any
    orange smoke, do you?").

         Adventure is loaded with memorable imagery (Witt's End, the maze
    of twisty little passages, the Pirate, the breath-taking view, "xyzzy,"
    et cetera) that generally stays with a player long after the game is
    completed.
         The atmosphere is wonderfully authentic.  The game map was based
    on Bedquilt Cave in Kentucky, part of the Mammoth Cave labyrinth.
    While there are no dragons in Bedquilt, it is said that first-time
    visitors have been able to find their way around by virtue of having
    played the game.  While Zork is simply a collection of interesting
    locales that just happen to be underground, Adventure resembles a real
    cavern much more, featuring dead ends, fissures, blocked passages, and
    passages in the floor.  As in Tolkien, magic in Adventure is present,
    but tantalizingly remote; not coming out the wazoo, as it is in Zork
    and most other fantasy games.
         Nevertheless Adventure is not without its problems.  As mentioned
    previously, the parser is rather primitive, at least in the original
    version (the TADS and Inform ports have state-of-the-art parsers).
         Also the puzzles are frequently meant to be solved by trial and
    error rather than deduction.  How are you supposed to figure out what
    to do with the rod, or how to kill the dragon, or how to bring light to
    the Dark Room, or how to recover the Golden Eggs, or how to get that
    final point, anyway?  By experimenting, that's how.  Of course, in a
    first game players are often much more inclined to experiment with it
    to discover its capabilities.
         That's not to say that there aren't some good puzzles as well.
    The object that you need to win at the end is very cleverly concealed,
    and only the keen-eyed will detect the subtle difference between the
    vending machine maze and the Pirate's maze that allows you to map the
    former without dropping objects (unfortunately, this feature is not
    present in the Inform version).
         There are no save/restore puzzles as such.  It is possible to win
    on the first playthrough, but not to achieve the maximum score.  If you
    take too long (and you will), you will be forced to expend one of your
    treasures to recharge your lamp (thus lowering your score), but after
    you have solved the game, it will be a simple matter to optimize your
    time and win before this becomes necessary.
         Adventure is an adventure game that every text gamer should play
    some  time in their lives; the only game that has a genre named after
    it.  But it would be best to stick with Adventure 350 in either its
    original form, or the TADS or Inform ports.  The add-ons of the larger
    versions simply make the game bulkier and clunkier without improving
    the gaming experience.

    From: Alex Freeman <freemanry SP@G aol.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #22 -- September 15, 2000

    Adventure is the first adventure game ever. This was played on
    mainframes actually. I remember how my uncle would tell how he used to
    work on a mainframe with other people, and the only game available to
    them was Adventure. Its output was printed on paper rather than on a
    screen. They were never able to beat it, though.

    I got this game from a friend, and I was really excited about it because
    of what my uncle had told me. I got hooked quickly. I would keep on
    playing this game and making rapid progress. The only two reasons why I
    didn't get to the last puzzle in one sitting are probably because I was
    forced off the game by mother a few times and because of the two mazes
    in the game. Back then, I wasn't as good at finding my way around mazes
    with twisty passages as I am now.

    Not surprisingly, the game is pretty simple in some ways. For instance,
    the two-word parser. Another is that the characters are really simple
    and have basically no personality. Howver, this is not really a
    complaint. These two things don't need to be any more complicated than
    they are for the game.

    As you can probably tell, I really enjoyed this game. The nice thing
    about it is that most of the puzzles are logical and not too easy or too
    difficult. One of my favorite ones is the one where you have to figure
    out how to bring into this dark room. I thought was a really clever
    puzzle because you have to use cleverness to do it.

    However, there were about two exceptions to this rule. Figuring out how
    to get in the cave was pretty easy, and the very last puzzle was
    definitely too difficult. [Further comments removed due to spoilers.
    --Paul]

    Another complaint I have about this game is the random fighting that you
    do with the dwarfs. After one of them throws an axe at you and misses,
    you're supposed to pick it up and throw at dwarfs when they appear and
    start throwing knives at you. Whether you hit them and whether they hit
    you is just chance. This simply gets in the way of the game. I think it
    would have been better if you had to get rid of those particular dwarfs
    by solving puzzles. Of course, the very last puzzle gets rid of all of
    them but still.

    Another one is that when you die, you don't just die; you can get
    reincarnated into a different body and get another. I think it would
    have been better to have taken this feature out so as to make the game a
    little more realistic and to make players more cautious by saving their
    games.

    Overall, this is a great game. I recommend it to everyone who is
    interested in adventure games. It is interesting to compare this game to
    more recent adventure games to see how much things have changed since
    then. For instance, in Adventure, you can only look at rooms; you can't
    look at objects. In most adventure games written since then, you can do
    both.

    My points for the game are this:
    Atmosphere: 1.7
    Gameplay:   1
    Writing:    1.2
    Plot:       1.1
    Fantasy:    1.5
    Total:      6.5

    Characters: 0
    Puzzles:    1.8

    PC executable w/ Source (.zip)

    Inform port (.z5)

    The Adventures of Elizabeth (El) Highe
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #5 -- April 19, 1995

      NAME:  The Adventures of Elizabeth (El) Highe
                                         GAMEPLAY:  Poor, but adequate
      AUTHOR:  Bill Larkins              PLOT:  Slightly below average
      EMAIL:  ?                          ATMOSPHERE:  Below Average
      AVAILABILITY:  CIS Gamer's Forum   WRITING:  Average
      PUZZLES:  Not so hot               SUPPORTS:  AGT
      CHARACTERS: Slightly below average DIFFICULTY:  Trivial

         In THE ADVENTURES OF ELIZABETH (EL) HIGHE, you play Elizabeth
    Highe, a game designer for Sierra who must write a sequel to the
    hit, G-String Gertrude so that Ken and Roberta Williams will allow her
    to leave the building (all the names have been slightly changed, of
    course; i.e. Sierra to Appalachia, Roberta Williams to Robert Bills,
    etc.).  You write your game by entering the computer (in a manner
    similar to the movie TRON) and physically retrieving it.
         The AGT manual, in describing various uses for adventure games,
    suggests that you could write a game about your co-workers and
    play it on a Friday afternoon.  This seems to be exactly what Bill
    Larkins has done here (though I don't know if he ever worked for
    Sierra).  The game is short (I was able to complete it in 42 moves),
    simple and lighthearted.
         The AGT parser is much maligned, but is really as good as the
    author makes it.  It doesn't do much in this game, but it doesn't need
    to.  The only problem I encountered was when I performed one important
    action and got no response at all, even though the action was registered.
    Some might mistakenly take this to mean that the action was not important
    and get sidetracked.  The game is meant to be simple, cute, and quickly
    over, and it is.

    AGT files with PC Executable runtime (.zip)

    The Adventures Of The President Of The United States
    From: T. Henrik Anttonen <thealtren SP@G hotmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #35 -- December 31, 2003

    TITLE: The Adventures of the President of the United States
    AUTHOR: Mikko Vuorinen
    EMAIL: mvuorine SP@G cc.helsinki.fi
    DATE: October 2003
    PARSER: Alan Standard
    SUPPORTS: Alan interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/alan/apus

    This game only placed 21st in this year's IF Comp, but the name and the
    Finnish author attracted my attention enough to make me decide that I’m
    going to try to save my reputation after the horrid review of Pulsar 7
    by reviewing this.

    This is a short game that I think is supposed to be funny, but it
    doesn’t quite achieve its purpose. First of all, I don’t find it
    particularly funny, and second, it isn’t very easy to complete because
    of its technical imperfections.

    The basic idea is great. You are the (unnamed) president of the United
    States. But since the White House is such a boring place, allowing
    nothing beyond the destroying the world as entertainment, you decide to
    go on an adventure. Unfortunately, an over-protective secret service
    agent doesn’t allow you to go and there you have your first puzzle.

    The biggest problem of the game is that it seems to be written too
    hastily. The room descriptions are insufficient and the parser doesn’t
    allow you to look for details except in a few places. That makes the
    simple puzzles quite hard to solve; I have to admit that I had to
    consult the walkthrough several times only to find that the solution was
    right there in front of my face, but I couldn't have known it since it
    didn’t appear in the room description.

    I liked the idea that after you get out of the White House, rooms are
    countries. I don’t know if it has been done before, but that really gave
    a refreshing difference to the game. In your journeys as the president
    you get to visit Mexico, Canada, Russia, Finland and Sweden. In Finland
    you actually get to learn some Finnish.

    I didn’t like the fact that the player isn’t given any purpose other
    than the need to go out on an adventure. I know that this is one way of
    designing a game, but I’ve always liked when the player is given a
    purpose and a goal he needs to accomplish to get on with the game. When
    a game combines this sort of purposelessness with bad room descriptions,
    you’re in for a lot of headaches if you don’t resort to the solution
    file.

    The parser is also quite limited. The author says he tried to avoid
    guess-the-verb puzzles this time, but unfortunately the parser
    understands only one way of expressing yourself most of the time and you
    have to guess a lot while playing. I didn’t find any actual bugs though.

    So, to summarise: The game's basic idea has potential and the
    room-country design is refreshing, but the game falls to its technical
    problems. If the author would’ve given some more time to actual
    programming and to the room descriptions, this would’ve been a quite
    entertaining game.

    Directory with Alan .acd and .dat files, and solution

    Aisle
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #18 -- September 15, 1999

    TITLE: Aisle
    AUTHOR: Sam Barlow
    E-MAIL: sam.barlow SP@G talk21.com
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Inform standard, with some additions
    SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
    AVAILABIILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/games/zcode/aisle.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Sam Barlow's Aisle is without a doubt one of the most unusual works to hit
    the IF community in quite some time. In no sense is it a game; trying to
    "win" it is futile, and the suboptimal outcomes aren't bad choices to be
    avoided as such. Rather, the point is to explore the central character and
    take a look at the various possibilities available to him from one point
    in time. That said, however, it's not clear that Aisle is an entirely
    successful experiment.

    The premise is simple: the game has one move, and it "ends" after that
    move and automatically sends you back to your original position. By
    interacting with what's around you -- and by incorporating knowledge
    gained thereby into future moves -- you learn about your own character and
    make sense of his various neuroses, fears, and hangups (to some degree,
    anyway). In the process, you get a sense -- at least, I did -- that your
    character, in this one move, is at a crossroads of sorts (or, at least,
    that the moment can mark a turning point, a change, if treated that way),
    and you take a look at where various paths might lead. In a sense, it's IF
    compressed -- while most good IF lets the player decide how a story will
    come out, to some extent, but draws that input out over several dozen or
    hundred moves, Aisle limits the input to one turn and tells the rest of
    the story for you. This structure allows the author to greatly multiply
    the range of options available, of course.

    In practice, however, Aisle can be thoroughly confusing--in part because
    the author both lets the player discover the PC's past and gives the PC
    multiple pasts to discover. The player might therefore initially assume
    that the key to understanding the player is piecing together his
    memories -- but there are too many memories that are inconsistent,
    incapable of fitting together, to do that successfully. As a result, it's
    difficult to make sense of what the PC does in the present, given that he
    has multiple pasts which might or might not explain his actions, and the
    character splinters into several parts, Sybil-like. The command "think
    about" or "remember" gives the player access to the PC's past, which is
    handy -- but the significance of the events recalled is largely a matter
    of interpretation.

    Though this may be a product of the assumptions built into most IF (i.e.,
    polite conversations are rare), it also seemed that most of the PC's
    options at this moment in time are profoundly antisocial; many involve
    violence, many of the other options are simply bizarre, and your character
    often treats apparently normal conversational gambits as an excuse to act
    psychotic. All this has its place, of course -- the PC is supposed to be
    unhappy and under stress -- but it does make Aisle a bit tedious after a
    while, when the options for civilized behavior run out.

    On the other hand, many of Aisle's outcomes are quite effective on an
    emotional level, product of antisocial behavior or not; there is a strong
    sense in many of the scenarios that the PC doesn't really know why he does
    what he does. (Which, of course, puts him in the same boat as the player.)
    Whether intended this way or not, it's an intriguing take on the player-PC
    relationship in works of IF, since the player is free to tell the PC to do
    irrational, bizarre, or suicidal things -- but here the consequences of
    those irrational actions, and their effect on the PC, are played out again
    and again. Thus, as unattractive as the PC occasionally seems, it's hard
    to entirely lose one's sympathies for him. Since most of the story
    revolves around the PC's emotions, the player's reaction to the PC
    determines her reaction to the story as a whole, however -- and it should
    also be noted that the repetitive nature of the game, and the sameness of
    most of the outcomes, may tax the patience of the player and erode her
    sympathy for the hapless antisocial PC.

    The writing, on the whole, is strong -- memories come back to the PC in
    jumbled, scattered fragments that force the player to cobble together the
    story (or one of the stories), and the fragments -- a pasta meal, a
    waiter, an accident -- are vividly rendered, with striking images to carry
    them along. (It would spoil the game, however, to reveal what the images
    are.) The technical aspect, though obviously very simplified, is likewise
    well done; most actions, logical and illogical, are provided for, and
    those that aren't generally are omitted for a good reason.

    It's difficult to say, in the final analysis, what Aisle is setting out to
    do. If the point was simply to experiment with the classical IF form, this
    was clearly a successful effort. But the introspective nature of the game
    leads one to believe that the point is to portray a character and paint
    his emotional portrait, and the effectiveness of that aim turns on the
    player's reaction. For those who don't care for the PC or for his
    behavior, Aisle gets old fast, and there isn't much flexibility for the
    player to try to send the PC in different directions or otherwise change
    his ways. The lack of any sort of cathartic finale also means that the
    story always feels incomplete: the player is likely to try a series of
    options, eventually conclude there is nothing more to see, and quit, with
    no particularly resonant ending to make the whole thing more emotionally
    satisfying.

    Aisle is an interesting idea that has its moments, and it's worth a look
    for anyone interested in the theory of IF. Its effectiveness depends on
    whether it makes an emotional impact, however, and without such an impact,
    it's a dreary experience at best.

    Inform file (.z5)

    Walkthrough (Text)

    Akari's Story
    From: Sara Brookside (jsh11a SP@G aol.com)
    Review appeared in SPAG #44 -- April 30, 2006

    TITLE: Akari's Story
    AUTHOR: "Taleweaver"
    EMAIL: tralu SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: 2005
    PARSER: ADRIFT
    SUPPORTS: ADRIFT interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; Shadowvault archive
    URL: http://www.shadowvault.net/games/akari.zip
    VERSION: Release 1

    In this game, you play a Japanese teenager on a typical weekend day (in other
    words, no school!)  I would place this piece of IF in the "slice-of-life" genre
    and the game does do a relatively good job of faithfully simulating Akari's
    daily life.  Unfortunately, that simulation can sometimes be a little bit
    pedantic in the sense that it provides little in the way of "escape value."  I
    wasn't particularly caught up in the story or involved in the action, despite
    the fact that the world-modeling implementation was adequate.  Along those same
    lines, Akari's day lacked a sense of urgency or any clear goals.  Accordingly,
    there wasn't very much to command action or to require much of the PC.

    The walkthrough reveals that the game ends after a certain number of turns. at
    the end of the day, so to speak.  So, there is no real way to "win" the game,
    although there is a scoring system that awards points for certain actions.  The
    walkthrough also revealed that I tried many of the actions that the author had
    in mind, while there were others that I missed completely and would have never
    thought of had I not read the walkthrough.

    One of the most interesting aspects of this piece is that it DOES provide
    insight into another culture (unless, of course, you happen to be a Japanese
    teenager yourself!)  Japanese customs and terminology and even dietary
    preferences are woven into the game, which is quite intriguing!  The game also
    reveals a bit about what is important to modern Japanese youngsters. also neat
    to know.  On the downside, this may have the effect of making the player feel
    more like a spectator than a participant.  It is as if one is observing Akari's
    life, rather than participating in it or living it, which makes the pace of the
    work feel rather slow at times.

    The writing is rather sparse, in the sense that room descriptions are relatively
    brief and many nouns are non-examinable.  Still, I didn't note any particularly
    jarring errors in grammar or spelling, which certainly helped make for a
    pleasant reading experience in that regard.  In short, however, I felt much as
    if I was reading an essay by a Japanese teenager about her life, rather than
    playing a game.

    There are puzzles in the game and they are reasonably well-crafted, although
    certainly not complicated.  I wish there had been more of a sense of payoff to
    successfully solving the puzzles, however.  Because the problems posed were
    essentially of the routine, day-to-day variety, and there was very little
    urgency, it didn't seem to matter much whether I solved the puzzles or not.  The
    only real impact for doing so was the point value added to my score for
    performing certain actions.

    The characters in the game were largely undeveloped, except for the PC.  All of
    the NPCs felt rather static and cardboard to me, almost as if they were objects
    rather than characters.   Conversation is minimal, except if you happen to guess
    the few things that the author has allowed you to "ask [character] about," but
    this is not an uncommon problem by any means.

    As for plot and story, both were a little thin.  Without a compelling goal to
    spur action, the experience was much more like an exploration than an
    interactive narrative.  Game play progressed smoothly, though, with little
    evidence of "bugginess."  There was an occurrence or two of "guess the verb,"
    but I found those issues to be relatively easily solved and certainly not game-
    stoppers.  A reading of the walkthrough definitely revealed several cases of
    "read the author's mind" and in each case, I had failed to do so.

    In conclusion, this game could be much improved by augmenting descriptions to
    add atmosphere and capture the attention of the player, as well as implementing
    more variety and innovation in the tasks of the PC to make for a more compelling
    story line.

    Overall rating:  ** out of ***** for faithful simulation, fair puzzles, and
    cross-cultural value.

    Zip file containing ADRIFT game file and walkthrough

    Akron
    From: J. Michael Bottorff <pika_163 SP@G yahoo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #28 -- March 20, 2002

    TITLE: Akron
    AUTHOR: Markus Kolic
    EMAIL: markusrtk SP@G golden.net
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Below Average
    SUPPORTS/PLATFORM: ADRIFT
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/adrift/akron.taf
    VERSION: 0.1

    We've all seen it in many games, especially RPGs. Your character wakes
    up and has no idea who he or she is. Amnesia sets in. In "Akron", this
    is also true. However, when your character wakes up, he's in --
    surprise! -- Akron, Ohio. It's where you live, you remember that much. And
    so you tromp all over Akron (or a certain part of it at least, because I
    don't think it's really that small) trying to search for who you are.

    So far so serious. However, when you stumble onto a cornfield, you get
    this description:

       You have blundered into a cornfield. Oh my. It looks like this is
       another one of those annoying mazes that the programmer loves so
       much. Well, let me give you a little hint - just go NORTH and you'll
       be out of the maze! You see, I, the computer, have changed this game
       JUST FOR YOU! Or, I can - oh no. The programmer's coming.
       AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE...

    The rest of the game follows suit, of course. In fact, the rest of the
    game is even *wackier*. (I would give you an example, but that would be
    spoiling.)

    The NPC's in this game are almost lifeless. The only one I could strike
    up a conversation with, was the cop, and that was because he was a clue
    to the game. Also, the game bugs are few, but drastic (for example, you
    can't pick up the library card).

    Some parts of "Akron" were endearing, others just irritating and
    mind-boggling. I didn't think this game was very good, but nor very bad.
    My advice: Pick it up if you are interested. If you like it, good. If
    not, just get rid of it. It's not going to be everyone's cup of meat.

    PLOT: A non-structured plot (0.5)
    ATMOSPHERE: Good, Ohio-ish (1.2)
    WRITING: Insanity shines through (0.8)
    GAMEPLAY: A lot of walking (0.9)
    VARIETY: Lots of variety (1.3)
    OVERALL: 4.7

    CHARACTERS: Few, but lifeless (0.7)
    PUZZLES: Completed with the right words (0.8)
    DIFFICULTY: Easy

    ADRIFT .taf file

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

    NAME: Alien Abduction?
    AUTHOR: Charles Gerlach
    EMAIL: gerlach7 SP@G tam6.mech.nwu.edu
    DATE: October 1996
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS Ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/abduct
    VERSION: Version 1.0

    It's hard to believe that this is the very first serious game about
    aliens.  Oh, there have been the pulp sci-fi offerings ("LGOP," for
    instance), and the typical plot-forming UFO abduction (as seen in
    "Waystation," "Plague Planet," and "Lost"), but I can't recall ever
    seeing a work of I-F that deals with the anomaly from a standpoint
    that does justice to the phenomenon.

    Overall, the story is quite linear, with a number of plot points
    slightly less than intuitive.  The quality of prose fluctuates.  Most
    disappointing is the interior of the ship, which offers simply a bland
    description of how you're in a place you never expected to be, leaving
    few details for the imagination to work with.  Other bits, such as the
    click of an automaton's eyes and the ripping of a wire from your neck,
    never failed to make my skin crawl.  Puzzles range from subtle (the
    conversations with NPCs, which allow the aliens to adjust their illusion
    of your world) to blatantly gratuitous (the colored shapes aboard the
    ship, and the crystal duck in the woods) and a number of tasks which
    never quite escape the "give <x> to <y>" feel.  Most are enjoyable
    regardless.

    Particularly enjoyable is the fact that the ending leaves you uncertain
    as to what really happened, hence the question mark in the game's title.
    Was it really an alien encounter?  Or might you have really lost your
    mind?  Which seems more probable?  Also, it's truly creepy how the
    aliens use your thoughts to build and expand the artificial reality
    they've trapped you in.  I congratulate the author for this inventive
    work of I-F.

    And I'll congratulate myself as well.  I got through this whole review
    without even once mentioning "The X-Files."  Oop- DAMN!!

    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #26 -- September 26, 2001

    One of the many trends in IF of recent years has been to emphasize
    characterization, and in particular the character of the player
    character, over puzzles. An early portent of that trend was Charles
    Gerlach's Alien Abduction?, a 1996 competition entry that endeavors to
    make the PC something other than a cipher. The result isn't a total
    triumph, mostly because the game didn't fully emancipate itself from
    puzzlefest expectations, but it's an interesting attempt.

    It seems you're convinced that aliens are out to abduct you; a similar
    conviction landed your father in an asylum, but you know what you know.
    Sure enough, aliens do come by and -- after making you play a variant on
    Mastermind -- release you again, but the reality you go back to has some
    incongruities, notably that your father is back, showing no signs of
    having been carted away. Your goal, at that point, is to make sense of
    the incongruities.

    At least, I think so, and therein lies the difficulty. It's far from
    clear to the player at that point what he or she should be doing; that
    things seem to be a little off-kilter doesn't point the player in any
    particular direction for purposes of addressing the problem, and nothing
    that you find as you explore the off-kilter world (which is quite small
    as it is) is particularly illuminating. You can talk to your father, and
    while he has quite a lot to say, nothing really gives you much of a clue
    about what you're supposed to be doing. The solution isn't wholly
    illogical, it turns out, but it requires some fairly tortured inferences
    about various characters and how they react to certain stimuli.
    Considering that this puzzle is the heart of the game -- there are
    several subpuzzles, but most of the game is given over to one central
    problem -- not having a sense of what you're doing is a major flaw. This
    isn't a characterization problem, as such -- there are good reasons for
    the PC to do what he does. It's just that the player doesn't know enough
    about the PC (and his past) to understand those reasons.

    The problem springs in part from the game's attempts at giving the PC a
    specific identity and background, since the solution to the central problem
    hinges on the player's having a much deeper understanding of that background
    than seems likely, given the available evidence. Specifically, the problem
    turns on a certain NPC's psychology, for the most part, and the game didn't
    provide enough exposition to permit the player to draw the right inferences.
    This is good, in a certain respect; NPCs with psychological makeup more
    complex than some variant on "feed me" are relatively uncommon. That also
    means, however, that the player cannot necessarily be counted on to see what
    the author wants him/her to see, unless the author spells everything out in
    nice big letters (which defeats the point, to some extent). Here, there are
    clues scattered around, but it's a fairly long leap from the clues to the
    solution. (A related problem is that the solution requires inferring that a
    certain bit of technology has what seems a grave flaw; I certainly didn't
    find any suggestions that there was such a flaw.)

    Mostly because of those psychological intricacies, Alien Abduction? is a
    pretty difficult game -- it's entirely possible that you, the player,
    will stumble on the solution by accident, but that's not exactly
    satisfying. There are, let me emphasize, internal hints, and those are
    handy indeed -- and the game as a whole has a certain twisted logic once
    you understand what's going on. It seemed to me, however, that there
    wasn't much chance of the player attaining such an understanding without
    the hints. There's also one rather artificial puzzle (a.k.a. a "soup
    can" puzzle) -- the presence of the aliens supplies an excuse (they're
    testing you, you see), but not a great excuse, and the game would have
    been better, I think, had that puzzle been omitted.

    While Alien Abduction? doesn't quite work as a fusion of puzzle-solving
    challenge and character study, it does work as a mood piece and as a
    mess-with-your-head game in the tradition of Delusions and Spider and
    Web. (Yes, I'm aware that this preceded Spider and Web, but that's the
    paradigmatic example.) The discover-what's-going-on process is
    thoroughly creepy -- there's no big payoff, but there's a series of
    smaller surprises that effectively kept me guessing. The
    almost-normality of the setting works nicely (though it might have
    worked even better if the game gave the player more of a chance to
    explore the layout at the beginning, the better to appreciate the
    changes, Wishbringer-style; as it is, the game mostly tells the player
    "hey, this and that are different"), and lots of relatively nonessential
    objects and conversation topics are implemented, so the player isn't
    likely to keep running up against the game's boundaries (never a good
    thing in a mood piece). As for the mess-with-your-head factor, the game
    does a nice job of raising doubts about the PC's sanity and reliability,
    though those doubts are largely tangential to what actually goes on in
    the game; you may question whether the PC's perceptions are true, but
    you can largely assume that they are for purposes of getting through the
    game. That aside, unreliable narrators are a fun device, central to the
    progress of the story or not.

    How well Alien Abduction? works is a function of the player's
    expectations, I suppose -- it's certainly a well-written game with some
    suspenseful moments and good deal of atmosphere, and if you're someone
    who enjoys IF that emphasizes setting and mood, and who doesn't care
    overmuch about being able to solve the puzzles without reliance on
    hints, this is definitely for you. (I'm sure I'll hear from people
    claiming to have finished the game with no hints in seconds flat, but I
    call 'em like I see 'em, and I just don't see enough in the game to
    enable the player to understand the logic of the puzzles ex ante.) In
    that respect, the intervening years have made the IF audience somewhat
    more receptive to this game -- a well-crafted story with
    not-entirely-well-crafted puzzles is perhaps more welcome now than it
    was in 1996, though the tendency these days, I think, is to omit or
    downplay the puzzles. (In other words, the tendency for an author
    writing this game now might be to let the PC make some of the trickier
    inferences himself, rather than making the player do it; the
    interactivity would be thereby reduced, of course, but life is full of
    tradeoffs.) To the extent that Alien Abduction? tries to squeeze both
    challenging puzzles and some complex personalities and character
    interactions into the same game, it's a laudable effort; to the extent
    that it doesn't quite succeed, well, not many games can be called a
    total success on both those levels, and this was an early shot at it.
    It's not a roaring success, but it certainly has its moments.

    TADS .gam File (updated version)

    Directory With TADS .gam File (competition version)

    All Alone
    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #22 -- September 15, 2000

    TITLE: All Alone
    AUTHOR: Ian Finley
    E-MAIL: domokov SP@G aol.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/alone1.gam
    VERSION: First release

    Ian Finley's IF output has been varied thus far: Babel, his 1997
    competition entry, was science fiction of a distinctly dark shade, and
    Exhibition, from the 1999 competition, was a puzzleless exploration of
    an artist's works through the eyes of four different viewers. All Alone,
    his latest effort, has echoes of both: like Babel, it's highly
    atmospheric (and dark), and like Exhibition, there are no real puzzles
    as such. But this one is from the realm of horror/suspense--the author
    calls it "play-in-the-dark-ware" and says that "it MUST be played at
    night, in a quiet room, with the lights off"--and to the extent it works
    (which, for the most part, it does), it works on a different level.

    The plot, by initial appearances, is conventional stalker horror: you're
    waiting for your husband to come home, listening to the TV announcer
    talk about the serial killer who's on the loose, but then, of course,
    the power goes out, and you start hearing noises. The tension builds
    nicely, with all the requisite horror touches--a storm raging outside, a
    strange phone call, etc.; in fact, the only problem with the plot is
    that it doesn't do much that could be considered surprising (with the
    possible exception of a cockroach crawling over your foot at a key
    moment). The point, it seems safe to say, is to create an atmospheric
    game, not to experiment with the genre, but it's also true that the
    trajectory is familiar.

    On the other hand, All Alone does do one thing that's interesting: it
    leaves several details of the plot so murky that you probably won't
    catch on the first time through, and you may not even pick up on them
    after that. Of course, horror/suspense plots require some degree of
    murkiness about what precisely is going on, but usually there's a moment
    where Everything Becomes Clear; here, there's no such moment. As such,
    the ending of the game may leave you a bit flatfooted, especially since
    the game sort of skips directly from the climax to the ending: the
    tension builds, the moment arrives, and suddenly it's over, with the
    details almost as obscure as they were during the buildup. It's an odd
    strategic choice, really--perhaps the author means to encourage replay
    to figure out the fuzzier bits, but horror loses a lot on the replay.
    Whatever the rationale, it moves the game out of the realm of familiar
    stalker horror into something more unusual.

    There are no puzzles in All Alone, as noted. You experience the story
    differently if you react to the various stimuli in different ways, but
    only marginally so, and you can't actually change the course of the
    story (at least, as far as I can tell). The author calls it a "mood
    piece," and that's how it works: your inability to affect what goes on
    actually enhances the mood, since it enhances the feeling of being the
    prey. In that respect, it's a good illustration of how interactivity and
    player involvement can be achieved without the aid of puzzles: true,
    this sort of story doesn't have to be very interactive to keep the
    player's interest, but the author does tell it well.

    All Alone is a short but well put together effort that adapts the horror
    genre to IF nicely, with some unusual elements. Give it a try if you
    have a spare 10 minutes late at night.

    TADS .gam file

    All Hope Abandon
    From: Paul Lee (bainespal SP@G yahoo.com)
    Review appeared in SPAG #44 -- April 30, 2006

    NAME: All Hope Abandon
    AUTHOR: Eric Eve
    EMAIL: eric.eve@hmc.ox.ac.uk
    DATE: May 2005
    PARSER: TADS 3
    SUPPORTS: TADS 3 interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/AllHope.zip
    VERSION: 1

    Only a well-done game can successfully combine such elements as a rather
    detailed plot, puzzles of all sorts, a theologically dense theme, and Greek
    alphabet characters. "All Hope Abandon," though the prospect seems dizzying in
    retrospect, does all of the above and somehow manages to seem somewhat natural.
    This feeling of being natural is not inherent; this is especially apparent early
    on when the player is quickly thrown into the deep end at which point the game
    world seems like a disgruntled fairy tale. Thankfully, this "fairy tale" feeling
    soon dissipates into the more interesting scheme of the game.

    The player is cast as Dr William Fisher, a New Testament scholar, who at the
    opening of the game is found listening to the lecture of the deranged Professor
    Wortschlachter. Earlier at breakfast, William had met a pretty blond woman who
    somehow also ends up trapped in Limbo land (though the reason this happens is
    never adequately explained -- I think on purpose). Apart from adding a little
    romance to the story, she serves to symbolize the theme of hope throughout the
    game.

    The text is not overly complex or "purple," but is sufficient and usually easy
    to read. Sometimes the writing even has a slight pinch of wit, such as in the
    introductory text. The game is very detailed -- even unnecessary objects are
    carefully described. A "THINK" verb is implement which allows the player to
    THINK ABOUT certain topics, and I found the responses to cover mostly everything
    that could be thought about.

    The detail in prose and design is complimented by many puzzles. These puzzles
    come in a range of difficulty, generally becoming more difficult as the game
    progresses. The solutions to quite a few of these at least partially require the
    player to scrutinize every single detail of an important object. This sounds
    tedious, but it works alright because one gets used to the high level of
    implementation and also because the puzzles all at least require some level of
    critical thinking besides just examining. The game is structured so that it is
    quite easy to finish the game without having solved all the puzzles, and thus
    without having tied up all the loose plot ends. This is a result of the
    integration of the narrative and the puzzles, and gives the game more
    replayability than most interactive fiction games out there.

    Even with its great puzzles and well-done story, "All Hope Abandon" would be a
    mediocre game if it was riddled with bugs and grammatical errors. This is not
    the case; it is clear that the game was carefully tested. Everything works as
    expected, and it does not appear possible to get the game into a state that was
    not anticipated by the author. I must report that I did find one accidental
    typo; however, but if you can get over such things it will not lessen the
    quality of the game for you.

    In conclusion, "All Hope Abandon" by Eric Eve is an extremely well-done work. I
    would definitely commend it to your "to play" list if you have not played it
    yet. If you never play it, you should know that you are missing out on one of
    the best games to be released last year.

    From: Valentine Kopteltsev (uux SP@G mail.ru)
    Review appeared in SPAG #44 -- April 30, 2006

    I know, I know -- a decent review has to start with some smart preamble on a
    more or less abstract topic; unfortunately, I couldn't think of any for All
    Hope Abandon. So please excuse me just for this once, and let's move on to
    business.

    The theme of this game is probably best defined as "subconscious jorney".
    However, if the author was trying (please note the conditional mood) to
    create a dreamlike atmosphere that suggests itself for a work of that kind,
    he didn't succeed too well. Anyway, no matter what the author's intentions
    were -- the game more than makes up for it by providing a stunning cocktail
    of adventure, theology, and romance, all that spiced with a good shot of
    irony. Several ways to victory are laid through it; and although the
    denouement is rather predictable at the end of the day -- the rich,
    intentionally anachronistic setting full of gadgets to fiddle with, and the
    considerable variety of the paths provided make it worth replaying the game
    several times to try out each of them.

    Another aspect of All Hope Abandon, which was especially pleasant personally
    for me: it doesn't act overly symbolic, although, again, it'd be very much in
    the tradition of the genre. You know, symbolism is just not my mug of beer,
    and games relying on it too much often leave me puzzled. On the other hand,
    the fact AHA sets forth its main ideas clearly enough doesn't mean it's as
    uncomplicated as a game as I am as a person;) -- I'm sure that players more
    skilled at interpreting symbolic links than myself will be able to enjoy the
    game on additional levels that remained inaccessible to me.

    From the technical point of view, the game is faultless. In comparison with
    the previous version, TADS 3 added several interface enhancements (for
    instance, let's mention the menu-based built-in hints, and the topic
    suggestions mechanism of the conversation system) on its own. All Hope
    Abandon not only makes extensive use of these facilities, but introduces, in
    its turn, a few more. The most interesting ones are the THINK ABOUT command,
    and the ability of the player to look in a specific direction. The first
    feature is one I've been looking forward to for a long time. Particularly in
    this game, it seems all the more appropriate since the protagonist has some
    "specialist knowledge that most players will probably not share"; besides,
    it's smartly used in one of the puzzles. The second one probably wasn't as
    challenging to implement from the technical point of view, but means A LOT
    additional work for the game author (ten extra descriptions -- eight for
    compass directions, and two for LOOK UP/DOWN -- in each room); even taking
    into account they're more terse than the "main" room description, and that a
    few of them are similar -- it's still a feat worthy of esteem.

    At this point, I've taken a pause and looked at what I had written so far.
    You can bet on it -- I'm utterly disappointed with the results: All Hope
    Abandon is a great game that deserves an outstanding, or at least a memorable
    review, not the generic stuff I sullied the (virtual) paper with. Of course,
    any reviewer will tell you it's much easier to write a memorable review for
    a flawed game; sure enough, All Hope Abandon doesn't offer much in this
    respect. At best, one could complain about the puzzles being too easy, which
    isn't much of a drawback as times go, and the most sceptical among the
    players would probably point out that the whole romantic plotline is a bit
    unrealistic, considering the protagonist and his beloved barely knew each
    other; well, I consider myself a cynical person, but not cynical enough for
    not believing in love at first sight, so this was OK for me. Still, the
    unsufficient flaws of the game are a pretty lame excuse for my review being
    so insipid.

    I think the problem is, All Hope Abandon just arrived at a wrong point in my
    life. The effect is like paying a visit to the British Museum at the very end
    of an exhaustive sightseeing day trip through London: the overstrained
    tourist feels there's a lot of things to admire, but the emotions just aren't
    there. Thus, in spite of my review probably not sounding too enthusiastic,
    let me assure you -- this game is a great work suitable practically for any
    players, ranging from novices to the versed ones, and represents a glorious
    showcase for the opportunities the new version of TADS offers.

    SNATS (Score Not Affecting The Scoreboard):

    PLOT: Predictable, but still gripping (1.3)
    ATMOSPHERE: Motley mix (1.5)
    WRITING: Manifold, and splendid in its every manifestation (1.5)
    GAMEPLAY: Relaxed trip for the most part (1.4)
    BONUSES: Rich setting, fine irony, the THINK ABOUT command (1.4)
    TOTAL: 7.1
    CHARACTERS: Memorable enough (1.3)
    PUZZLES: Well-clued and logical (1.2)
    DIFFICULTY: On the easy side (4 out of 10)

    Zip file containing TADS 3 game file and walkthrough

    All Quiet on the Library Front
    From: Palmer Davis <palmer SP@G ansoft.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #7 -- October 14, 1995

      NAME: All Quiet on the Library Front   PARSER: Inform v1502
      AUTHOR: Michael Phillips               SUPPORTS: Infocom Ports
      EMAIL: ???                             AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
      ATMOSPHERE: Just a little thin         WRITING: Expository
      CHARACTERS: Cardboard                  PLOT: Linear
      PUZZLES: Quite simple                  DIFFICULTY: Easy

    The premise is quite straightforward: you need to borrow a normally
    unobtainable book from your college library in order to write a
    research paper.  After a bit of wandering around, finding objects
    lying about, and giving them to the appropriate people, you do.

    I must confess that I was somewhat put off by the fact that the
    game is set on a college campus; the college game is second only
    to the Colossal Cave-style undirected dungeon crawl/scavenger hunt
    for being drastically overdone.  It worked in _Lurking_Horror_,
    and it's working now in _Christminster_, whose setting is different
    enough not to be stale, but every other such game since (not to
    mention the innumerable campuses that have been set up on MUDs
    worldwide) has felt like walking into someone else's inside joke.
    That includes a number of rather popular games that have fallen
    flat for me, and I'm probably stepping on a number of toes here;
    I tried not to let my feelings for the genre color my judgement.

    This entry doesn't just happen to take place on campus, however;
    the entire plot is centered around writing a research paper, and
    therein lies the problem.  Most IF transports the player to a
    fantastic place or situation that's genuinely interesting, sometimes
    more so than what's going on outside the screen.  That's not the
    case here -- being stuck in the library working on an undergraduate
    research paper is something that one plays IF to *escape*, not
    encounter, and the game never really transcends the ultimately
    pedestrian nature of its central task.

    It is possible to create good interactive fiction based entirely
    on everyday experiences if the writing stands out enough to carry
    the game on atmosphere (see _A_Change_in_the_Weather_, below).
    It is also possible to make a good game out of a fundamentally
    unpleasant situation (_Theatre_, for example, or _Bureaucracy_)
    if the game provides gripping drama or offers a fresh perspective
    on the events in question. _Library_ does neither, offering a
    fairly routine scenario executed in expository but uninspiring
    prose.

    Oddly, the stairwell leading to the upper floor, an area in which
    none of the plot takes place, is one of the game's bright spots as
    far as writing goes -- the descriptions there are nearly as long
    as in busier areas, which gives the author enough space to breathe
    life into details like the paintings.  Had the rest of the map been
    executed with that much care, the game would have worked much better.
    It's not necessarily that more words are needed elsewhere (see
    _Enchanter_, for example), it's that more thought is needed to make
    the descriptions come to life.

    Overall, the game is solidly crafted, but feels like it's just
    going through the motions.  This isn't a *bad* game by any means,
    but somehow lacks that certain spark that makes well-written IF
    such a joy.  Cleaned up and commented, the source to this would
    probably make pretty good example code for new authors; it's solidly
    crafted, including a basic help system that gives a hint for the next
    puzzle.

    (After writing most of this review, I learned that the entry was the
    author's first attempt at writing IF.  It's obvious that the author
    *has* in fact mastered the motions that need to be gone through to
    create IF, and is just starting to catch on to a writing style; I
    look forward to seeing full-length works from him in the future.)

    BOTTOM LINE: An accurate simulation of a tedious chore.

    Inform File (.z5) (Updated version)

    Inform File (.z5) (Competition version)

    All Roads
    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #27 -- January 4, 2002

    TITLE: All Roads
    AUTHOR: Jon Ingold
    E-MAIL: ji207 SP@G cam.co.uk
    DATE: 2001
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/AllRoads.z5
    VERSION: Release 1 (post-comp release -- version apparently not updated)

    It's occasionally been said that the diversity of latter-day IF makes it
    difficult to compare games -- when puzzles are downplayed and setting,
    story, characterization, etc. are stressed, different games often have
    very few common measures (other than technical smoothness and writing
    skill) by which to rate them. Instead, games are judged more and more by
    how well they were trying to do whatever they were trying to do, and as
    measuring the success of, say, a horror-oriented game is very different
    from measuring the success of a sci-fi game, it becomes harder to say in
    a useful way that any given game is better than another. (Was it always
    thus? Maybe, but I seem to recall some fairly lively debates, a few
    years back in r*if, over which Infocom games were the best and worst --
    despite Infocom's attempts to explore a broad range of genres.) I bring
    this up not because I have any idea where Jon Ingold's All Roads stands
    in the IF pantheon; to the contrary, I have no idea, because while it's
    certainly an enjoyable game in many respects, I cannot divine what the
    author was setting out to do.

    The premise is that -- well, that's the problem. The initial text
    suggests that you're lying in your bed, then abruptly you're standing on
    a scaffold, about to be hanged, and a few turns later, just as abruptly,
    you're tied up in a cellar. From there, things slow down a little, but
    the general "huh?" aura persists throughout -- you jump around in time
    and space enough that you're unlikely to follow what's going on until
    the very end. It doesn't, however, matter much that you don't know
    what's going on, as the game shepherds you along quite firmly -- you
    can't get very far off the track at any point, nor is there a way, as
    far as I can tell, to derail the express by dying or making the game
    unwinnable. (Well, okay, there's one puzzle, and it's a fairly subtle
    puzzle, sufficiently so that it's not impossible to bog down -- but
    other than that things more or less roll along.) The plot itself
    involves political machinations in a sort of alternate-universe medieval
    Venice, certainly a good setting for not knowing what's going on, and
    the game plays that aspect to the hilt -- most of the salient facts,
    such as who's on what side, remain mysterious throughout, adding to the
    general bewilderment. At a few points, if you don't supply the needed
    action, the game gives you progressively less subtle hints, so the
    course of the story is unlikely to stop very often. The result, at the
    end of the game, is essentially a very odd short story where you supply
    much of the protagonist s action but very little of the brainpower.

    Give All Roads some credit, though -- the player does *do* almost
    everything in the story, as opposed to watching his friend the player
    character do things in long chunks of text between prompts (a common
    failing in story-oriented games). Some of the actions are attributable
    to unsubtle hints, and there's a little bit of unreliable-narrator
    trickery, but most of the time the game gets the player sufficiently on
    the story's wavelength that outright prodding is unnecessary, which is
    nothing to sneeze at. Simple weirdness or absurdity is fairly trodden IF
    ground, but this isn't that, exactly -- the point is not, as far as I
    can tell, simply to be strange and confusing. The underlying logic of it
    all is obscure, but the actions themselves are reasonably apparent.

    In a sense, though, that's the problem; there are (at least) two
    narratives in All Roads, one the ostensible course through the game and
    another the player's progress toward deciphering the game's central
    puzzle, namely Why The Whole World's Acting So Weird. The game appears
    to have decided quite firmly that you will begin to get hints on the
    latter only toward the end of the game; detective work during most of
    the story is not only not encouraged, it's pretty much impossible. Some
    common commands are disabled or even given misleading responses. Yes,
    there are stray clues here and there, but they don't seem to be in
    places where the inquiring player would tend to look -- they're more
    like Easter eggs. The most blatant aspect of this is the conversation
    system, namely TALK TO, which certainly avoids complications but doesn't
    leave much freedom. It's not, exactly, that the game will break if your
    strange time-space-jumping tendencies are aired, because you do air them
    (after a fashion) in your TALK TO conversations, but the game appears to
    have made a choice -- rather than letting you, the player, screw things
    up and get some *** You have died *** equivalent, the game simply
    prevents you from screwing things up.

    Does this all matter? Yes and no, in my book. It doesn't make the
    underlying puzzle any less interesting -- and it is a good puzzle, well
    worth some thought and some poring over the transcript. For my part,
    though, the railroaded nature of the game took away some of the
    satisfaction of figuring out the puzzle, since there was no possibility
    that I'd make a clever guess and be rewarded, and the giveaways at the
    end really were outright giveaways. (I might have found the process a
    bit more rewarding if the solution lay more in going back through the
    game and trying new stuff, thereby to learn more, and less in the
    exposition at the end.) Accordingly, it's difficult to judge the game --
    as pure story, once understood, it's impressive, and the various pieces
    come together well. The meta-puzzle of the story isn't quite as
    successful, though, due to the feeling that the player doesn't really
    have much of a shot at solving the puzzle, and accordingly the extent to
    which the game succeeds depends on one's assumptions about what the game
    sets out to do.

    Those reservations noted, I should add that I did enjoy All Roads; the
    complexity and depth of the story it wove landed it the top spot in the
    comp, and deservedly so. For my part, I gave it a 9.

    .z5 Zcode file (updated version)

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

    All Things Devours
    From: Valentine Kopteltsev <uux SP@G mail333.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #39 -- January 7, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The SNATS (Score Not Affecting The Scoreboard):

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

    From: Joao Mendes <joao-mendes SP@G netcabo.pt>
    Review appeared in SPAG #39 -- January 7, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Final rating: 9

    .z5 Zcode file (competition version)

    The Amazing Interactive Turing Machine
    From: Valentine Kopteltsev <uux SP@G mail.ru>
    Review appeared in SPAG #45 -- July 17, 2006

    NAME: The Amazing Interactive Turing Machine
    AUTHOR: D. Clemens
    EMAIL: jdc20 SP@G psu.edu
    DATE: May 2006
    PARSER: Inform
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://www.math.psu.edu/clemens/IF/Turing/

    A Turing machine is an abstract device invented by the British mathematician
    Alan Turing. It consists of a reading/writing head that moves over an infinite
    tape in discrete steps (one step at a time), writing zeroes or ones on it as it
    does so. This movement occurs in accordance with a so-called state table (which
    effectively represents a program of sorts) containing entries that define,
    depending on the state of the machine and on the symbol that has just been read
    by the head, whether a zero or a one has to be written to the tape, which way
    (left or right) the head has to move next, and to which state the machine should
    change.

    I'm not sure the previous paragraph doesn't automatically put my review in the
    SPAG Specifics section, because, if we assess The Amazing Interactive Turing
    Machine basing on canons traditionally applied to IF-games, the "find out how
    this weird contraption works" type of puzzle is the only thing it can offer the
    player. Seriously, most players probably wouldn't know what a Turing machine
    actually is, because it's not a concept taught in every school (well, not even
    in every college, at least in Russia). On the other hand, I think 90 percent of
    such "uninitiates" would just resort to the Internet. The only reason why I
    didn't do so myself is, a couple of months ago I accidentally stumbled upon a
    popular scientific magazine that contained an article dealing with the subject.

    Thus, as you might have already guessed, the reviewed work is nothing more and
    nothing less than a fully functional emulation of a Turing machine. As such, it
    probably represents a useful tool for people active in adjacent areas of
    science, which can spare them lots of routine paperwork. However, a few
    enhancements could help making this tool even more powerful: first of all, a
    point-and-click interface for setting up the state table (although it probably
    would be a pain to implement in Inform) -- the current editing procedure is
    pretty tedious. The second improvement would be a command allowing to skip the
    entire computing session of the machine, hiding all intermediate messages, and
    only displaying the results of the computation. Currently, the game allows you
    to skip up to 59 turns; while this really is a blessing, it's not enough for
    more complicated tasks (that can take quite an extended number of steps on a
    Turing machine), and the monotonous "The machine churns along" messages become
    more and more annoying with the time.

    As almost any computer, the Turing machine has something fascinating about it,
    so that many people probably will be tempted to fiddle with it. While I'm a
    dilettante in this field, I couldn't help programming a few semi-trivial
    problems on it. Thus, this work clearly has a certain entertainment value, at
    least for a specific category of people; still, it hardly can be considered
    interactive fiction by any means.

    Blorbed Zcode story file

    Inform 7 source code (HTML format)

    Amnesia
    From: Christopher E. Forman <ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #9 -- June 11, 1996

    NAME: Amnesia                          GAMEPLAY: Infocom-quality parser
    AUTHOR: Thomas M. Disch                PLOT: Good, though done before
    EMAIL: ???                             ATMOSPHERE: Very good
    AVAILABILITY: Commercial (Elec. Arts)  WRITING: Excellent
    PUZZLES: A variety                     SUPPORTS: C64, Apple II, IBM
    CHARACTERS: Satisfyingly responsive    DIFFICULTY: Challenging

         During the reign of Infocom, there were many attempts by other
    software companies to follow their recipe for quality I-F, some of them
    succeeding and some of them not, the latter occurring largely because of
    Infocom's dedication to I-F. Firms such as Sierra, Mindscape, and Electronic
    Arts preferred to branch out and diversify their software products, rather
    than placing all their eggs in one basket (which could be another factor
    contributing to Infocom's downfall, but that's another article entirely). In
    fact, Infocom and Level 9 were the only two companies focused solely on I-F,
    which may acount for their stories outshining those of the competition --
    very few 80's text adventures that I've seen can even come close to the
    gameplay of the average Infocom game. Thomas M. Disch's "Amnesia," however,
    succeeded where many others failed.
         As the player begins "Amnesia," he (and the main character is most
    certainly male) awakens in a New York City hotel room, naked and with no clue
    as to his identity. This by itself is by no means unique -- ICOM's "Deja Vu"
    begins under the same pretenses. But the story behind "Amnesia" is so much
    more involved.
         Once the most pressing problem of finding clothes is overcome, the
    player hits the streets of Manhattan in an effort to recover his lost memory
    and find out who framed him for murder. This, in essence, is the primary
    puzzle of the game, although its solution is hampered by a need to find food
    and a place to sleep at night. These things cost money, so earning money
    through such means as washing windows and panhandling are necessary.
         "Amnesia's" parser is perhaps the only one to equal Infocom's at the
    time. In many places it surpasses Infocom. With a vocabulary of about 1700
    words and a multiple-sentence parser with plenty of synonyms, you'll very
    rarely need to hunt for a word. The one minor annoyance stems from the fact
    that objects' words aren't recognized if you try to use them when an object
    isn't in the current location -- for instance, you can't refer to a telephone
    of one isn't around, even though there may be one elsewhere in the game. But
    this is minor. Character interactions are detailed, and range from face-to-
    face meetings to conversations over the telephone.
         The game itself is huge, with as many as 4000 locations. Most of
    them are street corners or parts of the Manhattan subway system (both of
    these are completely programmed into the game), although there are a number
    of buildings and New York landmarks for the player to visit. A map (among
    other things) is included in the game package, so there's no need to draw
    your own, but you'll probably need to at least jot down some notes.
         "Amnesia" offers a variety of puzzles, from object and character
    interactions to some creative methods of obtaining money, food, and rest.
    The game's scoring system reflects this, awarding points for the categories
    of detective (how well you uncover clues), character (how well you interact
    with the denizens of New York), and survivor (how well-fed and rested -- and
    also alive -- you keep yourself). A good balance of the three is necessary
    for victory.
         If there's one major complaint about the game, it's the copy
    protection. The subway and city maps, address book, and street-indexing
    code-wheel would have been more than adequate to deter piracy, but "Amnesia"
    insists on forcing players to insert the original game disk for verification
    each time it loads. It seems EA didn't think of the consequences of what
    would happen when 5.25" disk drives phased out. you must insert the original
    disk -- a backup copy won't work -- or plan to spend several hours doing some
    heavy hex-editing, as the copy protection is malevolently self-modifying (on
    par with some of the more evil computer viruses). Someone out there either
    REALLY didn't want this game to be copied (even legally), or REALLY liked
    copy protection.
         Once you get past this, though, "Amnesia" is a joy to play. It was
    written by Thomas M. Disch, who won the Campbell Award back in 1980, but this
    was done specifically for the I-F medium; it's not an adaption of any sort.
    (I've heard of a sequel -- "Amnesia II," astoundingly enough -- but have
    never seen it, and would appreciate any info anyone might have on it.)
    Disch's prose is vivid and flows nicely, spanning several screens on a few
    occasions. It makes for good reading as well as good adventuring, combining
    the best of the two art forms.

    Amnesia
    From: Neil Butters <neil.butters SP@G sympatico.ca>
    Review appeared in SPAG #36 -- March 16, 2004

    TITLE: Amnesia
    AUTHOR: Dustin Rhodes
    EMAIL: crazydwarf12 SP@G yahoo.com
    DATE: October 2003
    PARSER: TADS2
    SUPPORTS: TADS2 interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/tads2/amnesia
    VERSION: Version 1.0 (competition release)

    The first line of Amnesia demonstrates what to expect from the game:

       A cool beach where you should have washed ashore and not have been
       able to remember anything because you where supposed to have amnesia,
       which you didn't, which completly ruins the whole storyline this game
       was going to have, so now the auther will have to make a game up on
       the spot, enjoy.

    Amnesia is a crude, nonsensical, and often hilarious effort, with an
    obvious affection for the genre. It certainly seems as though Amnesia
    was made up on the spot. For example, there is no story and the goal of
    the game does not become apparent until near the conclusion. The parser
    is very limited and there are spelling and grammatical errors aplenty.
    Often the exits from rooms are not mentioned. This only became a major
    problem in one situation. Consulting the walkthrough file did not help
    much -- it is in error. The puzzles make very little sense, but are easy
    to figure out anyway. And don't expect to finish the game; there's a bug
    near the end. A total waste of time? Not really, because I also laughed
    quite a bit. The sloppy and crude design often invoked laughter. The
    major NPC's sole purpose seems to be to act strange. Don't bother trying
    to interact with him (I don't think you can, despite the author's claim
    to the contrary) -- just enjoy his antics. Also contributing to the
    game's enjoyability is the author's self-mockery and love of the
    adventure game. Often the author (or narrator) will acknowledge the
    game's absurdities and invite you to play along. Credit has to be given
    for its self-consciousness.

    It is obvious why Amnesia finished in 27th place in the 9th Annual IF
    Competition. I can't say that Amnesia is "so bad it's good." It is not a
    good game. However, if you have 15 minutes, a sense of humour, and do
    not take it too seriously you may have as much fun playing Amnesia as
    the author had creating it.

    Directory with TADS2 .gam file and walkthrough

    Amnesia
    From: Jessica Gorzo <galaxycoff SP@G yahoo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #49 -- August 18, 2007

    TITLE: Amnesia
    AUTHOR: Toby White
    EMAIL: T.Q.A.White SP@G ncl.ac.uk
    DATE: 1995
    PARSER: Custom
    SUPPORTS: Windows
    AVAILABILITY: was shareware, now presumably abandoned
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/amnesia.zip

    This is a classic surreal text adventure, though it never achieved great fame.
    Even after its release, it continued to be overshadowed by the text adventure of
    1986 with the same name. The mysterious settings could intrigue even the most
    experienced IF fan as the gamer wonders what on earth is going on in the place
    this character woke up in. The character himself can't help you; he wakes up
    from an odd outer space dream into an unfamiliar house with no recollection as
    to how he got there. He can't remember anything about what one can only presume
    is his house, which has many oddities of its own. Custard in the tub, a crash
    helmet on the kitchen stove, and rather odd voices on the other end of the
    telephone would confuse even those who could remember something about their
    past! The dazed character tries desperately to make sense of everything he
    encounters, and slowly but surely a few clues unfold. However, on the end of
    every clue hangs another mystery. Every new site yields another piece of the
    puzzle, and has intriguing characters to interact with along the way. The rich
    imagery allows for clear and captivating mental pictures. You can truly immerse
    yourself in the beautiful-yet-strange world of the character. This game truly
    keeps you intrigued the whole way through!

    As for the commands, the author is not rich on synonyms, though the help file
    claims otherwise. The most frustrating aspect is trying to figure out the exact
    word the author was thinking of. Expected phrase structure is also inflexible.
    When it comes to user interaction, the author is clearly concerned with the
    "action" instead of the examination. Sometimes the responses don't match up with
    the known, game-described scenery. Perhaps he thinks this is just steering the
    user in the right direction, but his vehement "I don't know when you're talking
    about!" response when you know full well what you typed made perfect sense can
    be discouraging. This game could use a better range of user response. Be sure to
    be very specific in command wording when playing.

    Overall, though, this game is worth playing because of its intriguing plot.
    Sci-fiction meets mystery with a hint of comedy makes it more than worthwhile.
    Though the interaction can be a bit frustrating, its all the more rewarding when
    you finally get the problem right. This game is worth your while!

    Zip containing Windows executable with online help

    Anchorhead
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #18 -- September 15, 1999

    TITLE: Anchorhead
    AUTHOR: Michael Gentry
    E-MAIL: edromia SP@G concentric.net
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/anchor.z8
    VERSION: Release 5

    There's a certain skill to writing horror fiction: the author has to know
    how to build suspense in such a way that the story is interesting
    throughout. The challenge is doubled for IF, since the author cannot
    control the pacing in the same way as a static fiction writer can -- and
    the puzzles need to be forgiving enough that the player doesn't bog down
    in a particularly difficult one and lose the rhythm of the story. Michael
    Gentry's Anchorhead is very good horror IF; the author has a nice feel for
    the challenges posed by the genre, and the game is consistently both scary
    and playable, no small feat.

    Among the challenges is, of course, making the game feel fresh.
    Lovecraftian horror is a fairly well-explored IF genre -- between
    Infocom's Lurking Horror, Brendan Wyber's Theatre, Dennis Matheson's
    Awakening, and Anchorhead, Lovecraft seems to have quite a few imitators.
    (Most or all of whom, incidentally, write better than he did.) The trodden
    nature of this particular ground means that the seasoned IF veteran needs
    more than unnameable horrors and unspeakable rituals to stay interested in
    a game that borrows from Lovecraft. But Anchorhead is up to the job: the
    story is more than good enough to overcome the familiarity of the horror
    devices. Part of the reason is that the story revolves around the
    relationship between the PC and her husband, which comes alive as much as
    any relationship between two IF characters in memory -- and much of the
    progress of the story is marked by changes in that relationship.

    But I'm getting ahead of myself. The story is that your husband has
    inherited a family home in the New England town of Anchorhead, and picked
    up a full professorship at the local university, so you and he are moving
    in. You don't know much about his family -- in fact, when the story
    begins, you don't even know the family name (of this branch, at least) --
    and much of the first half of the game is spent wandering around gleaning
    details. It's to the game's credit that you do have to glean the
    details -- as in, progress is cut off until you've actually found certain
    bits of information and made use of them in certain obvious ways.
    Knowledge from prior games, in other words, isn't enough. This makes
    particular sense given the genre: a Lovecraft fan might well skip straight
    to the conclusion and cut out the information-gathering, which would throw
    off the pacing of the story's buildup (and make later events rather
    confusing for someone who hadn't bothered to collect the evidence). And
    for those of us who don't know intuitively where the story is heading, the
    various details heighten the creepiness factor considerably. To be sure,
    there are improbabilities and coincidences, but such things are inherent
    in the Lovecraftian universe -- and given the assumptions of the genre,
    nothing in Anchorhead strains disbelief unnecessarily.

    The game is divided into three days, but time passes only when certain
    puzzles are solved; you are only on the clock at a few select times (and,
    even then, the timing isn't all that tight). The pacing is therefore
    fairly leisurely for the bulk of the game, which takes away the scare
    factor inherent in time limits. In light of that, the author has to ensure
    that the story does, in fact, move along when the threat of imminent death
    isn't forcing it to move along -- and he succeeds, mostly; few of the
    puzzles should detain the player long enough that she forgets what had
    been going on in the story before she started on the puzzle. From the
    author's notes, this appears to be a conscious choice, and it's a wise
    one; repeating the same scene dozens of times doesn't serve any sort of
    story well, but it's particularly damaging for horror, since there's
    little shock value in a gruesome death when you're reading it for the
    twentieth time. As it is, there are only a few scenes where the player is
    likely to have to replay several times, and the more recent releases have
    streamlined those as well -- particularly one involving a certain asylum.
    (Anchorhead is much better in this respect than Lurking Horror, which had
    some very difficult puzzles and several ostensibly scary sequences that
    most players probably end up playing through multiple times.)

    Anchorhead is a _very_ large game -- not so much in the amount of area
    covered, but in the length and complexity of the story, the amount of
    items you encounter and use in one way or another, and the potential
    different paths through the game. Very few of the game's items are
    artificially cut off from each other to save the bother of coding their
    interaction, moreover, meaning that the combinatorial explosion factor
    must have been considerable. In light of that, the technical aspect of
    Anchorhead is impressive indeed (there's a reason why this was the first
    Inform data file to exceed half a meg in its compiled form). There were
    some bugs from the first few releases, but they've largely been cleaned
    up. One of the nicest things about Anchorhead, moreover, is its
    player-friendly nature: you have a rucksack-like trenchcoat that can carry
    just about everything in the game, but the game does all the item-juggling
    for you when you try to pick up something you don't have room for in your
    hands. Better still, the umpteen locked doors and keys to those doors that
    you encounter along the way are handled automatically, through a keyring:
    type UNLOCK DOOR before one of the locked doors, and the game will
    automatically flip through the keyring and try all the keys. Without this
    innovation, trying to keep track of which key opens which door would be a
    puzzle in itself; with it, the player is free to pass through the doors
    without giving them a second thought. A game as complex as Anchorhead is
    clearly the product of considerable attention to detail.

    The best thing about Anchorhead, however, is the writing, which is itself
    the product of some very careful choices. Horror writing can easily lose
    its force over the course of a story; the author has to strain to come up
    with fresh grotesqueries that shock or terrify in new and different ways.
    There's no formula for avoiding repetition in such writing, but somehow
    Anchorhead manages -- to the end, I never had a sense of deja vu when
    reading about my latest gory death. The author also exercises enough
    restraint to avoid slipping into self-parody, another pitfall of horror
    writing -- every sight and smell is not, in fact, pronounced the most
    horrible sight you've ever witnessed or the foulest stench you've ever
    smelled. Vital on this point is that the author avoids injecting the PC's
    emotions into the story almost completely; when you're not told that
    you're terrified out of your wits at every moment (and can infer such
    things when you care to), the story avoids excessive repetition. Nor, in
    fact, are you told, with a few exceptions, how you react to your various
    experiences -- no "you scream in terror" or "you gasp in horror" or
    equivalents. The emotional reactions are left to the player.

    Those are some of the things Anchorhead doesn't do that win it points in
    my book, but the things it does do are just as good. This game won the
    1998 XYZZY for Best Setting, and the award is well-deserved: the
    atmosphere is skillful, particularly in the early scenes: the author
    conveys a feeling of general gloom and decay without crossing the line
    into horror prematurely, and without laying on the foreboding and unease
    stuff too thickly. This is one of the better passages:

         Pallid gray light trickles in through the drawn blinds. The office is
         deserted, papers still scattered across the top of the desk. The front
         door lies west, and the file room lies east.

         Sitting on the corner of the paper-strewn desk are a telephone and an
         answering machine.

         Someone seems to have left a cup of coffee sitting out, half-finished
         and cold.

    With just a few details -- the "pallid gray light", the unfinished cup of
    coffee -- the author sets a subtly disturbing scene; not everything gets a
    description filled with ominous portents (there is nothing to suggest that
    the desk was abandoned in haste or any such thing, which might tempt a
    lesser writer). It is inevitable, given the nature of the materials, that
    things get a bit over the top now and again, but that's the exception
    rather than the rule here.

    Are there flaws in Anchorhead? Yes, but they don't detract much from the
    story -- and recent releases have cleaned them up. There's a sequence
    toward the end of the third day with no time limit (after a chase of sorts
    had already happened) in which the player doesn't really have much
    direction in figuring out what to do next, and it's possible to wander
    around aimlessly for quite a while, trying to figure how where to go, and
    lose the feel of the story. Some points are awarded for nonessential
    things, which might leave the player wondering what she's missed when she
    completes the game with less than a perfect score. The one puzzle that
    struck me as potentially frustrating involved an NPC who would give the PC
    an object, given the proper prompting -- but it's not necessarily obvious
    how to prompt him, and it's easy to get on the wrong track.

    Still, these problems are insignificant given the scope of the game, and
    most things about Anchorhead work more than well enough to keep the player
    involved throughout. It's an impressively coded, impeccably written work,
    one of the best in recent memory.

    Inform file (.z8)

    Map in GUEMap format (.zip)

    Solution (Text)

    And The Waves Choke The Wind
    From: Alfredo Garcia <Five-0 SP@G oceanfree.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #23 -- December 29, 2000

    TITLE: And The Waves Choke The Wind
    AUTHOR: Gunther Schmidl
    E-MAIL: gschmidl SP@G gmx.at
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/atwctw/atwctw.z8
    VERSION: Release 1

    Here's a story that starts with the meat. It's a classic 'What the...?'
    moment for our PC, who awakens to find himself on a lifeboat, floating
    in an empty sea, bound and (it would seem, rather unnecessarily) gagged.
    The introductory puzzle is good, as it encourages us to examine the PC
    down to the smallest details, all of which are implemented well. Here's
    an ambiguity you don't have to clarify too often:

       >CUT HAIR USING THE KNIFE
       Which do you mean, your dreadlocks or your pubic hair?

    And if you think that's going a shade too far, you'll find that even
    your anus is implemented - a smuggling puzzle later on, perhaps? At
    first I thought this all a little excessive; in fact it was totally in
    keeping with the theme of (at least) this preview - self-scrutiny. The
    generic theme is more immediately obvious - Lovecraftian Horror. The
    author does well to create a sense of foreboding throughout the piece,
    and generally it succeeds in maintaining an atmosphere of dread. This
    was only occasionally deflated by a poorly chosen phrase ('butt naked'
    and a reference to 'the enemies you've wasted' seem anachronistic) or an
    unsuitable quotation (Lovecraft and the Necronomicron are fine -- but
    Nine Inch Nails?)

    As we progress, the PC is revealed to us through a series of flashbacks.
    It sounds like this shouldn't work, but it does. Too much pathos is
    injected, yet it's nice to feel something for your character by the end
    of the game, and I did.

    It's a shame the author didn't enter a more interactive section of his
    work. All there is to do here is explore. The descriptions are well
    handled, but I found very little for me to *act* on. I really didn't
    like the proliferation of talk menus towards the end - but then again, I
    really don't like talk menus generally. (More on this later)

    So then, as a game this seems a little uneven, but as a preview it
    really whets the appetite.

    Rating: 6

    Inform .z8 file (competition version)

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

    TITLE: Another Earth, Another Sky
    AUTHOR: Paul O'Brian
    EMAIL: obrian SP@G colorado.edu
    DATE: September 2002
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Glulxe interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: freeware IF-archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/glulx/eas2/
         Directory with hints, release notes, and game
    VERSION: 1

    Last year, Paul O'Brian entered a very short game called Earth and Sky
    into the competition under a pseudonym. This game introduced us to the
    fact that he intended to make a series of games based on two newly-made
    superheroes. The number one complaint about his first entry in this
    series was that it was just too short. So, this year, Mr. O'Brian makes
    up for it and produces his most puzzle-filled and detailed piece of IF
    to date. In Another Earth, Another Sky, you play Austin Colborn. This is
    the superhero who wears the "earthsuit." This suit gives him the
    strength of a giant and the capability of jumping over buildings. In
    part one, you played his sister, with the power to create fog, fly, and
    shoot electricity. I thought that Emily's powers would be more fun, but
    I was soon proven wrong. That super strength of Austin's is much more
    fun than I imagined. How many times have you wanted to break down a
    locked door only to be told something like "violence isn't the answer to
    this one?" Well, this time, you get to break those doors down. As for
    the story itself, there is a lot to learn. You are continuing your quest
    to find your parents. This search will eventually take you to an alien
    world that is quite unique. I really thought the descriptions made it
    easy to imagine.

    The thing that impressed me about this game is the detail. For example,
    there is a bedroom with curtains which can be opened and closed despite
    the fact that the curtains play no part in the story. Nearly every
    object mentioned in room descriptions can be examined. This is always a
    good thing to me. Of course, what would a Paul O'Brian game be without
    doors that can be unlocked from the inside and room descriptions that
    change as the PC learns about his surroundings? These elements are
    present and only add to the feeling of being there.

    So, is there any problem with the game? A few, but they are very minor.
    Mostly, they are a matter of personal taste. For example, I wanted to
    see more teamwork between the superheroes. Others have mentioned this, so
    I suspect we will see it in part 3. Another thing is that I preferred
    the titles to the sections in Part I over the Emily Dickinson quotes.
    They seemed more like what should be in a comic book and that is what
    this story is trying to emulate. As I said, this is personal
    preferences, and it wasn't enough to make me really downrate this game.
    It was a pleasure to play after some of the other competition games this
    year. Mr. O'Brian, a fine piece of work and a well-deserved first place
    finish!

    Directory with Glulx .blb file, hints, and readme (competition version)

    Another Lifeless Planet and Me With No Beer
    From: Magnus Olsson  <mol SP@G df.lth.se>
    Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995

      NAME: Another Lifeless Planet And Me With No Beer
                                            PARSER: Pathetic
      AUTHOR: Dennis Drew                   PLOT: Not very original
      EMAIL: ?                              ATMOSPHERE: Absent
      AVAILABILITY: IF Archive, S10         WRITING: Acceptable
      PUZZLES: Standard, uninteresting      SUPPORTS: IBM
      CHARACTERS: Props                     DIFFICULTY: Average

    One of the most important skills shareware authors have to learn, at least if
    they expect to earn any money, is that of promoting their products - it's a
    tough world out there, tons of shareware gets published every year, and if
    you don't promote your program it's not very likely to get noticed.

    Dennis Drew, the author of this particular game, seems to have learned
    his lesson well in this regard.  Not only the accompanying documentation, but
    also the starting - and ending - screens of the game itself are full of
    superlatives describing how interesting, fun, high-quality, professional, and
    generally amazing it is - as are all of Mr. Drew's programs; one of the
    documentation files is a catalog listing his entire "astounding software
    line" "from heavy-duty business programs to incredibly enjoyable games," all
    described in terms such as "incredible," "astounding" and "terrific".

    According to the docs, one of his programs was rated by COMPUTE Magazine as
    "One of the World's Best 101 Programs." I haven't tried that program, but
    from my experience of this game, as well as of my other sample of his
    products (included in the distribution was Compu-Nerd, "a highly professional
    and technical program designed to discover the age-old question, 'Am I a
    nerd?'," which after asking me some rather leading questions proceeded to
    feed me a few screenfuls of platitudes like "You are one of the millions
    of people who have found word processing to be an incredibly valuable
    computer function," and then rated me as a "Minor Nerd"  - thanks
    a lot!), I can only conclude that Drew is right: it _is_ incredible.

    But back to the subject of this review: the game, which starts with the
    friendly greeting "WELCOME to another one of my incredibly interesting and
    logical adventure games."  Does it live up to the great expectations the
    author goes to such lengths to build up?  Unfortunately, any user naive
    enough to take Drew's documentation at face value is bound to be
    disappointed.  The situation was aptly described 2000 years ago by Horace:

      "The mountains are in labour; an absurd little mouse is born".

    This doesn't mean that the game is a failure.  Indeed, had it been written in
    1979 or so, for the PET or TRS-80 or some other early home computer, it would
    probably have been a great game. After all, there are quite long room
    descriptions, a graphic picture for every room (character graphics with the
    incredible resolution of 15*15 or so), and colour (a particularly tasteful
    colour scheme in light blue, dark blue, yellow, green, and bright magenta!)

    However, the game was actually written in 1989 for MS-DOS, so we'll have to
    apply slightly different standards of greatness.

    Even by those, more modern standards, the game has a few points to recommend
    it.  The plot may not be very original - you're stranded on an alien planet
    and have to find a way home - but at least the concept has been proven in
    hundreds of other games.  Just as the author claims, the game really _is_
    logical, in the sense that (in Drew's own words) "everything (...) has a
    logical and understandable purpose behind it."  The author clearly knows how
    to write (i.e. his spelling as well as his grammar are quite flawless).
    There are even some jokes thrown in - rather a lot of them, actually.

    Of course, every silver lining has a cloud within it, and the above doesn't
    quite suffice to make this game as great as the author claims.  In fact, it
    doesn't suffice to make it good, or even worth the time it takes to download
    it.

    To start with, the parser is absolutely pathetic - clearly the worst parser
    I've ever seen in a non-freeware game.  It's not only strictly limited to
    two-word sentences, but its vocabulary is extremely limited as well. There
    are no adjectives, which explains the fact that the first object you
    encounter is a "small-stone"  that can't be referred to as just "stone."

    What's even worse is that the parser doesn't understand _anything_ that you
    can't do in the current game state, so, for example, if you try to go north
    in a room where the only exit is south, you get the message "I do not
    understand that. Is that logical?" (of course, the latter question must be
    rhetorical, since it can only be answered with a resounding "no").

    Also, the prose being grammatically correct doesn't make it good, or even
    interesting.  Even though the genre is the cheapest kind of space opera
    (complete with icky monsters and blaster-wielding aliens) which usually gives
    lots of opportunities for atmosphere and excitement, both these elements are
    conspicuous only by their absence.  The attempts at humour don't improve
    things; at their best, the jokes aren't very funny (and, no, Virginia,
    telling four variations on the same bad joke in the first thirty rooms isn't
    four times as funny as telling it once). At their worst -- well, let me just
    quote the response you get when you try to walk north from the initial
    location, to see what is blocking your way:

    "Trivia question:  Do you know what this is?      8P

    That's the head of a dead astronaut laying on its side with its tongue
    hanging out.  That's what you look like after a really giant, huge,
    icky, nasty-looking monster standing there munched the rest of you!!

    Have a nice day.      ;)     <---that's a wink and a grin!

                          (munch munch munch munch....)  <---- sound effects"

    So for "Another Lifeless Planet And Me With No Beer"  - do I have to continue?
    I'll just conclude by saying that somehow, I wish that this game had _not_
    been logical; then it might at least have been interesting (see my review of
    Space Aliens Laughed at my Cardigan), and perhaps good for a laugh, too.
    Unfortunately, it is neither.  Of course, if you happen to like humour like
    the example above, and if you think that good writing, atmosphere and logical
    coherence only distracts you from the puzzles, then this game may be worth
    trying. If not, it is best avoided.

    The prospective IF author would probably also do wisely to avoid Gamescape,
    "the ultimate stand-alone adventure writing system," "the incredible system
    that allows you to design and then play adventure games," that was used to
    create "No Beer"  (a fact which is almost impossible to avoid noticing, since
    every time one exits the game one is treated to two promotional screen pages
    about Gamescape).  The registration fee for Gamescape is $95 + $5 S&H.

    Considering that TADS is about half that amount, and Inform is free, and even
    more considering the parser and user interface of "No Beer," the decision
    about which system to use should be a simple one indeed.

    PC Executable (.zip)

    The Apocalypse Clock
    From: David Jones <drj SP@G pobox.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #47 -- January 16, 2007

    TITLE: The Apocalypse Clock
    AUTHOR: GlorbWare
    E-MAIL: Jfs928 SP@G aol.com
    DATE: October 1, 2006
    PARSER: Inform 6 standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code
    AVAILABLITY: freeware; IF-Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2006/zcode/apocalypse/apocalypse.z5
    VERSION: Release 1 / Serial number 060801 / Inform v6.31 Library 6/11 S

    The blurb that came with the competition release of this game goes "You must
    stop the end of the world. Your tools in this task: A crayon and a cat."  You
    can tell that we're not dealing with a serious work.  It starts with 3 boxed
    quotes.  A little over the top, but given the humor in the rest of the game,
    it's probably intentional.

    The PC is a lazy wastrel, labeled by others as being paranoid for building an
    Apocalypse Clock.  One day the clock goes off, indicating impending apocalypse
    and thus the adventure begins.  As the narrator puts it: "It looks like you'll
    have to pull a Duke Nukem and stop the end of the world."

    "Your Bedroom".  I rarely find this a good location from which to start a text
    adventure.  There are spelling mistakes in the opening text which are probably
    not deliberate.  There are a few more punctuation mistakes, includes the classic
    its/it's confusion, but I found it easy to avert my gaze around them.  For some
    reason the entire game is in a fixed pitch font.  I had to read other people's
    reviews to spot this; it looks just fine in my Spatterlight set up (Monaco 11)
    and I'm used to staring at fixed pitch fonts all day.

    Once the surface issues had worn off I found the writing funny, self-
    referential,  and irreverent.  X ME gives the knowing response: 'You're just
    your normal self, "as good-looking as ever", as they say.'  Its sarcasm could
    perhaps put a lot of people off, but I found it genuinely amusing.  It's pretty
    much the only reason I'm reviewing the game.  Without its witty writing we would
    have nothing but a carcass of game, for the mechanics of the game are very poor.
     Only the very bare minimum of objects are implemented: scenery implied or
    mentioned in room descriptions will rarely be present.

    A typical example (from the opening):

    Your Bedroom (on your bed)
    You survey your small bedroom. To be frank, it's messy. Your clothes hang in
    strange places. The carpet is stained with unidentifiable substances. The
    wallpaper is faded and tacky, the bed is falling apart, and the drywall is
    crumbly and, inexplicably, rusty, but it's home.

    >> x bed

    You look at your awful bed. It's falling apart and kinda smelly, and seems to be
    upholstered with a towel.

    The Apocalypse Clock reads 00:00:00:59.

    >> smell bed

    You smell nothing unexpected.

    The Apocalypse Clock reads 00:00:00:58.

    >> x drywall

    You can't see any such thing.

    As well as the bed's smell and the drywall not being implemented, you can see
    from that transcript that the Apocalypse Clock counts down.  Yes, a timed
    puzzle; you have about 60 turns to play the entire game.  That immediately tells
    you that The Apocalypse Clock is not a long game, and it isn't.  It's also quite
    a big hint that you'd better not hang around doing things like scraping the
    inexplicable rust off the non-existent drywall just in case you need a source of
    iron oxide later.  You don't.  Timed puzzles aren't popular, but in this case it
    seems pretty fair.  It's the game's key device to add tension, you know about it
    right from the beginning, and it's an overarching time constraint, not one that
    is used to make a particularly annoying timed puzzle.

    Note that this is not a one-room game; this might not be obvious from the
    description of the first room.  The exit out of Your Bedroom isn't described;
    that's a bug, and is frankly typical of the attention paid to describing and
    implementing the geography.  You simply have to use trial and error to guess
    your way out of the first location.   You probably ought to look around for some
    completely unclued and crucial objects as well, because you won't be able to
    return to get them due to what is probably an accidental one-way link between
    the living room and a secret location that you discover.   Later on you'll
    probably discover that the front door is mentioned but doesn't exist; ENTER
    PICTURE inexplicably garners the response "You bump into your front door."
    Personally, I didn't find any of these defects a real problem in my playthrough
    for the competition though I can see that it would cause others to more or less
    immediately throw the game in the bin.  Persevere and you'll discover how to use
    an aging computer to activate a door that is simply totally undescribed, no
    description of the door appears whatsoever.

    The game hasn't been beta-tested and it shows.  Deviate from the author's
    clearly intended (narrow) path and you'll discover bugs, unimplemented things,
    and more bugs.  Almost any puzzle in the game can be solved "in the wrong
    order", usually with disastrous results.  A typical example involves Sara (your
    cat, more on her later) who starts the game in your inventory.  Now, you're
    clearly not supposed to be able to relinquish Sara, but you can, and if you do,
    then she still speaks to you later on.

    Sara is the game's principal NPC.  She's your cat; you're compelled to carry her
    round to save her from the apocalypse.  She talks, with a very bad cockney
    accent.  She's the highlight of the show.  The opposition between the player and
    Sara provides much of the humor.  Much of the time Sara, like most cats, is
    content to sleep, but she'll occasionally inject some sarcasm such as "Oh, I see
    you've discovered the secre' tunnel I built some years ago."  It's a bit of a
    toss up to decide whether Sara or the narrator is the most sarcastic.  The rest
    of the humor is a mixture of the slightly surreal (the "inexplicably rusty
    drywall"; later in a different location: "its walls gleam with some sort of
    creepy moisture, with frayed wiring hanging from the ceiling like spooky, nasty-
    smelling vines."), fourth wall breakers (examples of which would probably
    spoil), and what I suppose a literary critic would call the narrator's interior
    monologue (just after a PC is becomes inoperable: "Goodbye, noble computer. Your
    memory will keep going, and going, and going.").

    I feel that if you can somehow see past the unpolished writing, the under-
    implemented features, the badly implemented features, the almost tediously
    simple and cliched puzzles - if you can somehow see past all that then there's
    the kernel of amusing, witty, creative, small, game here.  Humor is always
    tricky, but I find the author's style pretty funny.  The writing is raw, and it
    could definitely do with a steadying influence from time to time.  Beta-testing,
    really any sort of testing, would definitely be an improvement.  Almost anywhere
    that code comes into play (puzzles; rules for not being to drop Sara; doors with
    special opening requirements) the player can poke around and cause things to
    fall over.  You'll probably do it accidentally.  It doesn't indicate lack of
    testing so much as a complete inability to imagine that player might do anything
    other than type in the walkthrough.  The crayon mentioned in the blurb never
    appears; a pencil is used instead.

    It placed 31st (out of 43).  I scored it 7.

    I would be very intrigued to see the author produce a work with more craft
    applied to it, I feel there's a raw wit and imagination that could be
    successfully harnessed.  Please let's have Sara the cat in the next game too.

    Z-code game file

    Plain text walkthrough

    Arrival, or Attack of the B-Movie Cliches
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999

    NAME: Arrival, or Attack of the B-Movie Cliches
    AUTHOR: Stephen Granade
    E-MAI: sgranade SP@G phy.duke.edu
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: TADS
    SUPPORTS: TADS 2.2.6 and later
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/arrival.zip
    VERSION: Release 2

    I may not be in the best position to review Arrival, the first game of
    consequence written in HTML-TADS, since I'm working with a Stone Age
    system that can't deal with HTML-TADS games, and hence all I saw was
    the text. But I can say this: even if your system has not been graced
    with a port of an HTML-TADS runtime, check out Arrival anyway. It's
    easily one of the best games of this year's competition, graphics or
    not.

    The story: your life as an eight-year-old is enlivened by, why not,
    aliens landing in your backyard, except that these aliens clearly have
    been reading Calvin and Hobbes, since they're invisible to your
    parents. They commission you to run some errands for them so that they
    can get on with enslaving the planet, so you carry out some tasks, of
    varying degrees of silliness, to Thwart the Evil Plan.

    The author titles Arrival an "attack of the B-movie cliches," but that
    isn't really fair: Arrival is far wittier than any B-movie, and it's
    far too self-aware to be cliched. (Your character's reaction upon
    seeing the spaceship: "Oh man oh man, it must be a spaceship!  From
    outer space!  Maybe from Gamma Proxima Epsilon Centauri Five B!") The
    aliens owe much more to parody than to cliche: they demand Ho-Hos and
    grumble about the obnoxious way Earth constantly sends banal radio
    broadcasts into space. On hand is a translator that mutates the
    aliens' speech into Bill and Ted-speak, with consistently amusing
    results (the answer to one question changes from "You are quite a nosy
    child" to "Why don't you, like, go play in traffic"). The fact of the
    alien-invasion plot should not obscure the amount of wit that went
    into the writing of Arrival: for instance, when the alien's translator
    fails, he scowls and yells "Universal translator, my anterior
    appendage!" Few games can claim the amount of originality that Arrival
    offers.

    The fun of the game is largely in the writing and the amusing asides,
    however, rather than the puzzles: some are clever, but a few are
    simply obscure or insufficiently clued. There's a hint file to help
    things along, and Arrival is the rare game where it's better to turn
    to hints than to insist on unraveling puzzles yourself. The fun of the
    game diminishes when the player is stuck, and the payoff associated
    with solving the puzzles isn't so great that resorting to hints takes
    away a sense of accomplishment. The charm of Arrival lies, in short,
    more in seeing the aliens' funny responses to different actions than
    in solving problems, and it is hence more rewarding to move the story
    along, in order to discover more parts of the game that produce funny
    responses, than to stand still until you solve a puzzle by your own
    wits. The puzzles aren't especially bad or unfair, to be sure, but by
    and large (with one exception, a puzzle that turns on a sly joke about
    child-proof lids), but they don't match the level of the writing
    either.

    If there is a flaw in Arrival, apart from the puzzles, it is that your
    identity, an eight-year-old, only surfaces intermittently. There's
    plenty of humor to be mined from the world as viewed by a
    child--Calvin and Hobbes, for one, produced about ten years'
    worth. Aside from the occasional response, though (TAKE STICK when no
    stick is present: "I don't see no--I mean any--stick here"), you can
    largely forget that you're eight years old--and there are several
    moments, such as the discovery of a velvet Elvis and a rain stick,
    that might be enlivened by commentary from an eight-year-old's
    viewpoint. (On the other hand, your eight-year-old self comes out more
    clearly in some of the AMUSING responses, suggesting that the author
    wanted to mine that vein of humor but didn't get around to
    incorporating it into the story much. Moreover, as I understand it,
    the graphics appear to have been drawn by an eight-year-old, so
    perhaps that changes the game experience for those who can actually
    see the graphics.)  It's a minor flaw, though, and testifies to the
    general solidity of the game and its coding.

    Arrival is a well-crafted game--at least, the text portions are, and I
    trust the graphics and sound add to the experience. It's also littered
    with in-jokes and funny asides that more than make up for the
    derivative nature of the plot, and it plays up the alien invasion for
    satiric value, which excuses the cliches (for me at
    least). Reminiscent in some ways of Carl Klutzke's Poor Zefron's
    Almanac, but much more consistently funny and playable, Arrival is a
    worthy effort.

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

    The Arrival is the first HTML-TADS game I've ever played, certainly
    the first competition game ever to include pictures and sound. I was
    quite curious as to how these elements would be handled, and maybe
    even a little apprehensive. I wasn't sure that a lone hobbyist could
    create visual and musical elements that wouldn't detract from a game
    more than they added to it. But Arrival dispelled those fears,
    handling both pictures and sound brilliantly. The game's ingenious
    strategy is to cast an 8-year-old as its main character, which makes
    the fact that most of the graphics are really just crayon drawings not
    only acceptable, but completely appropriate. Just for good measure,
    the game chooses "Attack of the B-Movie Cliches" as its theme and
    subtitle, thereby making the cheese factor of the special effects
    (which is pretty high) actually enhance the game rather than embarrass
    it.  The pictures are delightful -- the crayon drawings evoke a great
    sense of childhood and wonder while continuing the humorous feel of
    the whole game.  The spaceship (two pie plates taped together) and the
    aliens (in the author's words "the finest crayons and modelling clay
    $2.83 could buy") are a scream -- I laughed out loud every time I saw
    them. The game also includes a couple of very well-done non-crayon
    graphics, one an excellent faux movie poster and the other a dead-on
    parody of a web page, both of which I found very funny. The sounds,
    though sparse, are equally good -- the sound of the alien spaceship
    crash-landing startled the heck out of me.  I'm not used to my text
    adventures making noise! But a moment later I was laughing, because
    the noise was just so fittingly silly.

    However, all the funny pictures and sounds in the world couldn't make
    Arrival a good game if it wasn't, at its core, a well-written text
    adventure. Luckily for us, it is. The game is full of cleverly
    written, funny moments, and has layers of detail I didn't even
    recognize until I read the postscript of amusing things to do. The
    aliens, who bicker like a couple of married retirees touring the
    U.S. in their motor home, are great characters. Each is given a
    distinct personality, and in fact a distinct typeface, the green alien
    speaking in green text while the purple alien has text to match as
    well. If you hang around the aliens you will hear quite a bit of funny
    dialogue, and if you manage to switch their universal translator from
    archaic into modern mode, you can hear all the same dialogue, just as
    funny, rewritten into valley-speak. The game has lots of detail which
    doesn't figure in the main plot but creates a wonderfully silly
    atmosphere and provides lots of jokes. For example, on board the ship
    is an examination room, where by flipping switches, pulling levers, or
    turning knobs you can cause all sorts of machinery to pop from the
    walls and perform its function on the gleaming metal table, everything
    from laser beams to buzz saws to Saran Wrap. In addition, Arrival is
    one of the better games I've seen this year at unexpectedly
    understanding input and giving snarky responses to strange commands,
    which has been one of my favorite things about text adventures ever
    since I first played Zork. Even if you can't (or don't want to) run
    the HTML part of HTML TADS, it would still be well worth your time to
    seek out The Arrival.

    However, don't be afraid to rely on hints. I had played for an hour
    and hadn't scored a single point when I took my first look at
    them. Now, once I got some hints I determined that the puzzles did in
    fact make perfect sense -- they weren't of the "read the author's
    mind" variety and I would probably have come to solve them on my
    own. Perhaps the presence of pictures, sound, and hyperlinks threw me
    out of my IF mindset enough that I was struggling more than I should
    have with the puzzles. That's probably a part of it, but I think
    another factor was that all the details in the game ended up becoming
    a big pile of red herrings for me. There are quite a few items and
    places which have no real use beyond being jokes, and I found it quite
    easy to get sidetracked into trying to solve puzzles that didn't
    exist. It's not that I don't think those pieces should be in the game;
    I actually find it refreshing to play a game where not every item is
    part of a key or a lock, and even as it caused me to spin my wheels in
    terms of game progress, it helped me ferret out a lot of the little
    jokes hidden under the surface of various game items. However, if
    you're the kind of player who gets easily frustrated when your score
    doesn't steadily increase, don't be afraid to rely on a hint here and
    there. Just remember to replay the game after you're done so that you
    can see what you missed.  Besides, that pie-plate spaceship is worth a
    second look.

    Rating: 9.6

    TADS .gam and resource files (.zip) (updated version)

    TADS Source code (.zip) (updated version)

    Directory with TADS .gam file, resource files, and walkthrough

    Arthur: Quest for Excalibur
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com&rt;
    Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995

      NAME:  Arthur: Quest for Excalibur  PARSER:  Infocom Advanced
      AUTHOR:  Bob Bates                  PLOT:  Very Good
      EMAIL:  ?                           ATMOSPHERE:  Very Good
      AVAILABILITY:  LTOI2-CD             WRITING:  Very Good
      PUZZLES:  Very Good                 SUPPORTS:  Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS:  Very Good              DIFFICULTY:  Average

            In Arthur:  The Quest for Excalibur, Infocom's final text game, you
    play the part of the boy Arthur.  In the space of a few days, you must
    develop the traits necessary to lead England and challenge Lot, a local
    chieftain, before he is crowned King.
            The parser is Infocom's best ever, though unfortunately this is the
    only game it was used in.  You can change your viewing mode with the touch of
    a function key.  The bottom half of the screen is like a standard text game,
    but the top changes, depending on your mode.  One mode shows you a graphic of
    your area.  Another gives you an onscreen map, a third shows you your
    character's development, another constantly shows you a description of your
    area, and another gives you a constant report on your inventory.  You can
    change modes without expending a turn.
            The graphics (in graphics mode) are helpful, but in true text game
    fashion they are not necessary.  No puzzles require recognizing a clue in the
    graphics, and indeed one of the modes is text-only mode, in which the game
    resembles one of the Infocom classics.
            While the overall purpose of the game is to do things that will
    develop your personal abilities to the point that you are worthy to rule
    England, the main quest of the game is to acquire certain magical quest items
    that will allow you to get past the Red Knight to where the Lady of the Lake
    lies enchanted (Everything you always wanted on a bier...).  Only with her
    help can you recover Excalibur from where Lot has disposed of it.
            Early in the game, Merlin will give you the ability to transform
    yourself into a variety of different animals.  Many of the puzzles cannot be
    solved while you are in human form.
            There are few save/restore puzzles.  Puzzles that you would be
    unlikely to get the first time around generally give you multiple
    opportunities to solve.  There are not many "guess what the author is
    thinking"  puzzles, but there are a few.  When you try to read the writing on
    the wall in the ivory tower (for instance), only a burst of inspiration will
    help you along.
            Like several other Infocom games, Arthur has onscreen hints.
    However, Arthur's have a new twist, in that you are not given the entire clue
    menu at the beginning.  To prevent you from reading them too far ahead, clue
    questions are added to the menu as they become relevant to your current
    situation.  Sometimes, the clue will tell that you cannot solve a specific
    puzzle with the information and resources that you have at hand.
            Arthur was the ideal Graphic Interactive Fiction game, with graphics
    that helped set the mood and aided gameplay without taking over the game from
    the text part.

    From: Joe Mason <jcmason SP@G uwaterloo.ca>
    Review appeared in SPAG #14 -- May 17, 1998

    PLOT: Standard
    ATMOSPHERE: Evocative but inconsistent
    WRITING: Fair                                   GAMEPLAY: Good
    CHARACTERS: Some memorable, some stereotyped    PUZZLES: Fair
    MISC: Graphics - atmospheric
    OVERALL: A fun diversion

    Arthur is one of Infocom's last games, and like Zork Zero it combines
    text and graphics.  The graphics are completely unnecessary to the
    story - in fact it is possible to turn them off completely - but they
    are pleasant to look at and add to the game's atmosphere.  The
    medieval banner styling of the background window is especially well
    done.

    The interface does have a few flaws, however.  There are several
    possible screen modes, with the lower half of the screen devoted to
    command entry and the upper half to graphics or description.  One mode
    shows a picture of the area, one shows the textual description (which
    duplicates details of the pictures), one shows the player's inventory,
    one the current score, and one a Beyond Zork style on-screen map.  A
    sixth mode is the traditional full-screen text mode.  The modes
    themselves are nice (the map is especially handy) but switching between
    them is done using function keys, making it hard to remember what key to
    hit for which mode.  Also, the function key support is broken for some
    interpreters - it works under Frotz 2.32, but not WinFrotz, for example.

    The game itself is of typical Infocom stature.  Despite being produced
    in their twilight years, it shows no decrease in quality - quite the
    opposite, in fact.  The plot begins promisingly, with Merlin giving
    young Arthur a mission to demonstrate that he has all the qualities
    required for a good King.  However, it soon becomes a typical treasure
    hunt, with the player (as Arthur) required to defeat several evil
    enemies in order to gather trophies to present to the Red Knight.  Once
    he has done this, the Red Knight will let him past in order to get the
    item he needs to defeat the usurper King Lot and claim Excalibur.
    Slightly more depth is given by the fact that the treasures, while
    arbitrary, do have a common thread: they all show proof that Arthur has
    defeated a threat to the land.  As Merlin explains, "His [the Red
    Knight's] life's mission is to rid the land of evil," so there is a
    reason for the treasure-hunt quest to be occuring.  Still, it feels out
    of place in a game which, at the beginning, seems to place emphasis on
    story and character.

    In fact, the entire game has a disjointed quality to it.  The built-in
    hint file includes a section of notes giving historical background to
    King Arthur's time, and explaining several of the references used.  The
    section titled "Reality vs. Romance" begins, "There is inherent conflict
    built into writing a game about King Arthur. It is the conflict between
    history and legend - the way things were, versus the way we wish they
    were."  This game unfortunately does not deal with this conflict as well
    as it could.  Some locations and characters - such as King Lot's castle,
    the poor peasant's hut, or the village idiot - are quite well-drawn and
    lifelike.  These characters tend to evoke the atmosphere of the "real"
    Arthur, the medieval warlord whose court was a fortress providing his
    serfs with protection from barbarian invaders.  However, mixed in with
    this atmospheric setting is the "romance" Arthur, with its archetypal
    coloured Knights who quest against generic "evil".  The characters
    involved in this aspect of the game are much less responsive and seem
    stereotypical or comical.  The two halves of the plot sit uneasily
    together, resulting in a game that almost succeeds at telling a good
    story but ends up feeling more like a string of puzzles linked by
    narrative.

    The puzzles are mostly good, but some display the same split.  Some are
    character- and plot-driven, but others involve word problems and other
    artificial constructs and seem quite out of place.  There is one maze,
    which is easy to map once the trick is discovered but still annoying.
    One nice touch is Merlin's gift to Arthur: the ability to turn into
    various animals.  Some puzzles require using the special abilities of
    these animals, which is a nice touch.  The puzzles are not especially
    hard, and the presence of well-written Invisiclues style online hints
    makes the game easy to solve.

    Arthur, while not an exceptional game, is still fun to play and well
    worth a look.  By the time of its writing, Infocom had become adept at
    integrating puzzles and story, with the result that it mostly flows very
    well.  Its deficiencies are mostly due to confusion over how to present
    the Arthurian legend, rather than a failure as interactive fiction.

    From: Walter Sandsquish <Sandsquish SP@G aol.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #22 -- September 15, 2000

    Remember Floyd from Planetfall? Remember his wonderfully naive
    personality? Remember his charmingly childish antics? Wasn't he sooo
    cute?

    Yeah.

    Remember ... uh, remember ...

    Okay, so text-adventure games aren't usually populated with memorable
    characters. Actually, they usually aren't populated with characters at
    all. Sure, a typical Infocom mystery would have a half-dozen people
    sitting around, staring at the walls, waiting for you, the hero, to come
    show them something or other. But generally, interactive fiction doesn't
    have much in the way of interactive characters.

    That's what makes "Arthur" so special. Despite the fact that it's set in
    the wilderness, it is teeming with characters. No. It's teeming with
    people. Yes, the people are stereotypes, but this is "Arthur," and
    what's a legend without stereo-- I mean, archetypes? Bob Bates quickly
    and cleverly etches the kind, but stern, Merlin with just a shade of
    menace; each of the variously-colored knights that stand in Arthur's way
    has a distinctive personality (my favorite is the Blue Knight, who must
    have just wandered over the hill from the filming of Monty Python's
    "Holy Grail"); and the evil King Lot is, well... evil. The protagonist
    is, as usual, missing, but "Arthur" sports another dozen delightful
    personalities that I won't spoil for you. I will, however, tell you that
    Mr. Bates found room to pay homage to that first memorable IF character,
    Floyd!

    "Arthur" is a clever synthesis of a few of the earlier, usually
    neglected, legends surrounding Arthur's youth. Arthur must prove to
    Merlin that he is ready to accept the responsibilities of a monarch.
    Empowered by Merlin's ability to transform himself into different
    animals, he slithers, burrows and flies through the wilderness
    surrounding Glastonbury. The amount of research that went into this game
    is remarkable. You probably won't find a more thorough, yet concise,
    Arthurian bibliography than the one found in the "notes" section of the
    hints.

    If the characters and setting are distinctively Arthurian, the puzzles
    definitely belong to Infocom. There is nothing mind-breaking here, but
    the whole range of Infocom's stumpers was shoveled into this game.
    There's a maze (it's mappable), a cryptogram, a riddle, some pattern
    recognition, cartoon-logic (read those descriptions carefully) and a lot
    of commonsense puzzles. Bob Bates gives us a refreshing change of pace
    by forcing the player to think in terms of several animals to resolve
    more than a few conflicts. Of course, you'll have to read the
    documentation to figure out a couple of the puzzles, but, as usual,
    Infocom makes that a pleasure.

    "Arthur's" biggest weakness lies in its structure. After following
    Merlin's lead, the player could find himself wandering aimlessly through
    more than half of this sizable game. It's a problem that could have been
    easily fixed, and, as a matter of fact, I'll take care of it right now.
    After you deal with the injustice Merlin mentions, walk as far southeast
    as you can. Listen to what the nice man in red says, and try to be
    agreeable.

    If structure was "Arthur's" weakest point, then one of its stronger
    points was parsing. I kept having to remind myself that I could, and
    sometimes had to, use phrasing that most text games would choke on.

    No one, however, should choke on Bob Bates' prose. At times, it reflects
    Infocom's tendency to pepper language with a distracting number of
    adjectives, but, for the most part, "Arthur" is clear, direct, and
    charming. It's a shame that Bates couldn't finish his last couple of
    projects for Infocom before he had to move on.

    "Arthur," written in 1989, strongly refutes the argument that Infocom
    had lost its way the last couple of years before it was reorganized.
    This game definitely belongs in the top quarter of Infocom's graduating
    class. It is a "graphic" adventure, but here, graphic means illustrated,
    and text-only diehards will be happy to know that they won't need the
    illustrations to finish the game and can turn them off if they want.

    But everyone should take a look at the dragon.

    Solution (Text)

    ASCII and the Argonauts
    From: Francesco Bova <fbova SP@G mts.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #33 -- June 25, 2003

    TITLE: ASCII and the Argonauts
    AUTHOR: J. Robinson Wheeler
    EMAIL: jrw SP@G jrwdigitalmedia.com
    DATE: 2003
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: http://raddial.com/if/games/asciargo.zip
    VERSION: Release 2

    An issue ago, I reviewed the IF-Classic game Savoir-Faire. Savoir-Faire
    is a game that illustrated some of the beautifully nostalgic flair of
    the old Infocom games while also improving greatly on Infocom's parser
    system and playability. ASCII and the Argonauts is another IF-Classic of
    sorts, but instead of having an Infocom-based backdrop as its focus,
    ASCII takes a light-hearted poke at some of the surreally awful Scott
    Adams games that featured poor punctuation, anemic descriptions, and
    less than robust NPCs. While obviously not as polished as Savoir-Faire,
    I found the tribute aspect of ASCII to be more endearing, and the
    dichotomy of a strong parser in a minimalist-type setting very
    entertaining.

    What also makes ASCII remarkable is that it was conceived of and created
    for a Speed IF competition in about 12-15 hours. Here was the premise
    for the competition (which was taken from an ifMUD conversation):

       Trivia question: Which is a famous text adventure? a) Zork, b) Dark
       Tower, c) ASCII and the Argonauts).

       Jacqueline says, "Did they make that ASCII and the Argonauts thing
       up? I've never heard of that, and it sounds scary, but I wouldn't be
       surprised if it existed."

       Gunther | Your search - "ASCII and the Argonauts" - did not match any
               | documents.

       Gunther says, "of course, now it has to be written in a speedIF. You
       have two hours. GO!"

    And with those very broad parameters, Wheeler created a bare-bones
    tribute to not only the myth of the same name but to many of the Scott
    Adams games created years ago.

    So what do I mean by bare-bones? Well, as I've already mentioned, this
    game follows a very minimalist sort of pattern. The only area where it
    doesn't diverge too greatly from a typical Inform game is with its
    parser. Unlike the typical Scott Adams game, the parser was able to
    handle any of the standard vocabulary you would expect in a typical
    Inform game. This set up an interesting dichotomy for me because even
    though the parser was sophisticated, the default responses were not.
    Wheeler essentially hacked the default response code for most verbs and
    dumbed them down (i.e. two-word responses, poor punctuation) from their
    original Inform standards, with the game's default message for just
    about any action being, "I CAN'T". That's right, "I CAN'T", replete with
    capital letters and no period. Oh the joy of writing sophisticated
    sentences such as: PUT THE ROCK IN THE URN only to have I CAN'T spitted
    back as the response.

    The minimalist style continued with the game's setting. The room
    descriptions were non-existent, and were instead summarized at the top
    of the game's split-screen simply with the room's title and a list of
    NPCs and objects that the player could interact with. Following the same
    motif, that list of players and objects was not expanded upon either.
    They were listed solely by their names regardless of what context you
    found them in. Examining objects typically provided descriptions as
    verbose as, "VERY SHINY!" to ones as barren as "NOTHING SPECIAL".
    Examining NPCs would typically have the NPC give a one-line description
    about how they'd interact with you, and talking to them had no outright
    benefit whatsoever as they repeated the same default responses whether
    you asked, told, or ordered them to do something. Still there was
    something that felt so right about the simplicity of it all.

    The game map was fairly small and, with a few notable exceptions, most
    areas could be traversed without too much death without warning. What
    impressed me about the map though, was that there were some fairly
    crafty puzzles buried in its structure. These puzzles typically revolved
    around strategic inventory management; the net effect of which was that
    if you solved certain puzzles too early, you could put the game into an
    unwinnable position. Unwinnable positions aren't new to IF and certainly
    not new to Scott Adams games, but unlike many of those games, the
    unwinnable states here were not caused as a result of poor game design
    choices. Rather, they were caused by what I feel was the author forcing
    the player to conserve his limited resources in an attempt to come up
    with a strategy that took into account the entire game as opposed to one
    individual puzzle. To win, the player has to have a comfortable feel of
    his surroundings and what the hurdles are before he proceeds. Only then
    will he be able to envision the best way to use what he has. I found
    that this process also made the game feel more like a whole gaming
    experience rather than a string of unrelated puzzles that were loosely
    tied together, and I obviously enjoyed that. A mite bit deeper than the
    games ASCII appears to be spoofing, methinks.

    So anyways, to sum up: I guess for me the bottom line is that a lot of
    game designers today try to write more impressively than their skill
    level provides and either overplay their theme, or overwrite their
    dialogue, or whatever, and it was interesting that I felt just the
    opposite way about ASCII. As I finished playing, it occurred to me that
    despite the clunky grammar, skeletal room descriptions, and poor
    writing, there was an extremely solid structure and a very talented
    programmer behind its creation and all the wonky game design choices in
    the world weren't going to hide that fact. If you have an hour to kill
    or your brain needs a break from its daily grind, I would definitely
    give this one a shot.

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

    NAME: At The Bottom of The Garden
    AUTHOR: Adam Biltcliffe
    EMAIL: abiltcliffe SP@G bigfoot.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: included in the zipped archive at
         ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/mini-comps/dragon/DragonComp.zip
    VERSION: Release 1

    With a fairly solid structure, a simple premise, and some nice
    atmosphere, At The Bottom Of The Garden was probably the 2000 Dragoncomp
    game with the most substance.

    You retire to your garden to find 8 pint-sized dragons descending on
    your wife's prized rosebush, with a group of people called "the
    ancients" (an inside, dragon-related reference I'm not aware of,
    perhaps?) set to arrive in 15 minutes to look at your wife's
    horticultural marvels. You have to get rid of the dragons before "the
    ancients" arrive, as the drakes seem to have a passion for sitting on
    your wife's lovely rosebush and their combined weight will eventually
    destroy it.

    The time limit is pretty tight (maybe 30 moves or so), so winning the
    first time around is quite difficult. In fact, after playing through it
    once I was concerned that the game wouldn't give me enough time to
    eliminate all 8 dragons. Only after winning did I realize that you had
    to kill a number less than 8 to effectively win the game. This ended up
    being a little frustrating as I technically would have won a few times
    but ended up restoring previous saved games just before my time limit
    expired, thinking that I hadn't done enough to accomplish my goals.

    The game's few puzzles are nothing special although solid and logical.
    Experimenting with scenery and objects is a must and the only real
    drawback is finding that there are no alternate solutions to the few
    puzzles that there are. I think a few alternates could have been
    implemented with little difficulty as there are some parts of the garden
    that are richly described but have no apparent effect on the outcome of
    the game. That's not to say that every item that's described has to be
    relevant to the game somehow, but I found myself pursuing a more
    abstract logic when it came to puzzling out the answers because of that
    richness. You can't dispose of a dragon the same way twice (something
    about the dragons not falling for it again), even though the dragons
    appear progressively throughout the game, and therefore technically,
    some of them never fell for it in the first place (I know, I know, I'm
    being anal).

    The writing is good with little historical descriptions about the
    garden's contents, such as this one:

       >examine tree
       Goodness only knows how old this tree is. Suffice it to say that the
       passing of time has transformed it into a broad dark knot of twisted
       wood, topped by a huge crown of leaves high above. One particularly
       noticeable twisted branch sticks out from it about five feet from the
       ground.

    and although all the dragons' descriptions are the same with the
    exception of their color, their respective colors (i.e., blue, red,
    white) are given adjectives that describe the breath weapon their
    Dungeons & Dragons equivalents would employ (i.e., electric blue, fiery
    red, cold white), and I thought that was kind of neat.

    The only other quibble I guess is that you have to kill the dragons to
    get rid of them, and considering they're all described as "wearing an
    expression of endearing stupidity", and considering they have the damage
    potential of an 8-inch Zippo lighter, obliterating the little guys seems
    like... well... overkill. This is especially true, as the ending
    suggests some sort of harmony between human- and dragonkind.

    I've always got low expectations when it comes time to play these
    mini-comps and this game at least exceeded those moderate expectations.
    If you have 10 minutes to kill you may want to give this one a try

    Zipped file of all Dragon-comp games

    At Wit's End/Dinner With Andre
    From: Sean T Barrett <buzzard SP@G world.std.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #23 -- December 29, 2000

    TITLE: At Wit's End
    AUTHOR: Mike J. Sousa
    E-MAIL: msousa SP@G efortress.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2000/tads/awe/awe.gam
    VERSION: 1.00

    TITLE: Dinner With Andre
    AUTHOR: Liza Daly
    E-MAIL: liza SP@G retina.net
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/dinner/dinner.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    >GET OUT OF THE FRYING PAN

    Take the PC and put him or her in a situation where everything has gone
    JUST RIGHT. The PC is on top of the world.

    And then something goes a little wrong. Just a little wrong, not
    ludicrous or unrealistic. But, hmm, a tad unfortunate.

    And then the player gets the PC out of the situation and things just go
    from bad to worse.

    AWE starts better: the PC is in a tough situation where things could go
    bad or things could go good. (Heck, it may actually be possible to fail
    the first puzzle, or it may not, I don't know.) Then by solving a really
    easy puzzle, *then* the PC is on top of the world. It's a really nice,
    cheesily happy moment--and then trouble starts. But the player got to
    participate in hitting that top of the world. You were pretty sure it
    was going to happen (although it was possible you'd fail and it would
    instead be a redemption story), but even so, it was a good moment. Oh,
    and then the accident. It doesn't rob the PC of being at the top of the
    world--the PC's achievement isn't called into question or offset in any
    way--the PC just starts having a (largely unrelated) misadventure.

    DwA does not start quite as strongly--your character is already (almost)
    at the top of the mountain, and you don't share in the experience of
    having gotten to the top. As well, DwA turns out to be a farce, but
    holds off on revealing this until things start going wrong--which makes
    it all the more crazy, but can get a player invested in the game the
    wrong way. Still, the waiter comes over, and if the player makes the
    obvious choice of answer, there's a nice moment of feeling "yes,
    everything is perfect" that is triggered by player action. Oh, but then
    things start going wrong. And where none of the problems of AWE relate
    to the achievement directly (the PC has already climbed back down the
    mountain he'd climbed), in DwA its the mountain itself being put at
    risk. A tremor, a threat of a landslide, and then wooosh...

    I think of these sorts of games as "out of the frying pan and into the
    fire" games because at every moment, once you resolve the situation, a
    new peril threatens. (The movie "After Hours" pops into mind as well.)
    The last half of Kaged was more explicit that way; in some ways it was
    more effective, since the peril threatened in Kaged was your life; the
    peril threatened in AWE is, well, your ability to return home; and the
    peril threatened in DwA is public humiliation.

    One of the reasons "out of the frying pan and into the fire games"
    tickle my fancy is because they make the character's motivation
    explicit. At any moment, I know what I'm supposedly to be accomplishing
    in the short term (crucial to being able to play the game) and I also
    know why that action fits in with my end goal (not getting humiliated,
    or returning home). Far too many games put you in a situation where all
    you can do is poke around at suspicious-seeming objects and solve the
    puzzles related to them.

    To me, this is what storytelling in IF should be about; giving the
    player a high-level goal (a story to achieve) and then giving the player
    enough information (e.g. a low-level goal) to be able to carry out tasks
    *for the purpose of achieving that goal*. Why is this storytelling? When
    the player of DwA confronts the challenge of the four waiters at once, I
    can imagine the zany British TV sitcom where this exact sequence of
    events plays out. Whereas many games, say, The Pickpocket or The Planet
    of the Infinite Minds or even Transfer, I can't imagine comprehending
    this go by on a screen; the motivations of the protagonist would be
    incomprehensible. Or maybe you could imagine it as a mystery where the
    audience is left in the dark; but when, in IF, the audience is
    controlling the protagonist, that way of looking at it makes little
    sense.

    "Out of the frying pan and into the fire" isn't the only way to achieve
    such "storytelling"; when I change the color of an object in Kaged it's
    for a pretty obvious reason, to achieve a pretty obvious goal that has
    to do with the overall situation; but when I create a library in Planet
    of the Infinite Minds I'm just doing it 'cause it's there. In fact, "out
    of the frying pan and into the fire" may not be the most effective way
    of giving the player lower-level goals; letting the user set her own
    pace is probably a better experience most of the time.

    In fact, an "out of the frying pan and into the fire" sequence can end
    up just feeling like a series of set pieces--the mouse sequence in
    Transfer is a fairly good example of a set piece, although it does rely
    on one piece of game-specific knowledge--so a game that integrates its
    puzzles, rather than leaving them a series of disconnected events, may
    turn out to be a stronger work. In the case of DwA, though, I thought
    the pieces meshed together really well; they all tie into the initial
    scenario, and the pacing is superb: a series of linear puzzles, then the
    game "goes wide" with a tough multi-element puzzle, then tightens down
    and is at peace briefly, easy, relaxed, everything is going right... and
    then BAM, ouch, followed by an easy end game. Perfect. As an added plus,
    the elements of DwA end up serving as a bit of a parody of some romantic
    genre cliches, indeed with the ending almost coming off as
    (unintentionally) mocking Masquerade, which uses those cliches to create
    its archetypal romance genre story.

    AWE gets off to a rollicking start with simple, tight, timed puzzles,
    but then goes much too broad and much too hard, at least for my tastes.
    While all the puzzles seemed reasonably logical, but the breadth meant a
    lot of time pursuing irrelevant alternatives, and the difficulty would
    have required an awful lot of player time to solve without excessively
    relying on hints/walkthroughs, which I was unwilling to do. Therefore I
    can't comment on how successful the pacing is beyond that point. But up
    until it goes broad, it is an amusing alternation of "oh shit" and "ho
    hum, what now?" which I quite enjoyed, since at each moment (say,
    walking up to the house), I was tensing up waiting for what would go
    wrong next. (And the title helped--it was GOOD that I knew I was doomed
    to be going into the fire.)

    I'll go out on a limb and make a specific design suggestion of the sort
    I think is pretty pretentious of me to make, but what the hell: the
    spine of the story was trying to return (which generally meant escaping
    each situation); as far as I played, *everything* that happened was on
    the spine of the story, except having to eat. Having to eat jarred me
    horrendously because of that. Realistic? Sure. Related to the story? Not
    at all. I'd cut it. (You can argue that it's on the spine if the central
    peril of the story is dying, but that was how it felt to me
    anyway--tangential.)

    At Wit's End: Directory with TADS .gam file and walkthrough (competition version)

    Dinner With Andre: Inform .z5 file (competition version)

    The Atomic Heart
    From: Mike Russo <russo SP@G caffeinedreams.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #35 -- December 31, 2003

    TITLE: The Atomic Heart
    AUTHOR: Stefan Blixt
    EMAIL: flash SP@G df.lth.se
    DATE: October 2003
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/zcode/atomicheart
    VERSION: Release 1 (competition version)

    This could have been a really good game. The set-up is involving -- you
    spend most of the game wondering where exactly your loyalty lies, and
    under nearly constant threat of death -- there are a number of computer
    interface-based puzzles which could have been entertaining, and while
    the story deals with some fairly standard sci-fi tropes, there's a
    welcome sense of horror and desperation beneath it all. Unfortunately,
    all this promise is severely weakened by inadequate motivation, some
    questionable design choices, and an incredibly mulish parser.

    To start with the good parts: the robot revolution is a morally
    complicated thing for most of the game. While the "correct" side becomes
    clear towards the end, up until that point I found my sympathies
    conflicted; while the scenes of carnage wrought by the insurgent
    machines were terrible enough, the fact that I was playing a glorified
    appliance who recently became self-aware reinforced the idea that maybe
    they had a point. The other robots seemed dangerous, of course, but the
    humans were also shooting everything in sight, rendering them less than
    sympathetic. This sort of ethical quandary is a pleasant change of pace
    from the traditional IF conception of the protagonist as a force for all
    that is righteous. The puzzles also have quite a bit of potential; the
    use of different interfaces recalls A Mind Forever Voyaging, allowing
    the player character to control a variety of machinery.

    In practice, though, things fall down. To start with perhaps the
    smallest of the game's problems, motivation is inadequate throughout.
    While the initial section of the game is on rails, once things open up,
    I was at a loss to figure out why I was still sticking around. Upon
    moving outside and finding the intertwined carcasses of man and machine,
    I wanted to run away as quickly as I could. When that proved impossible,
    I poked around and found the kid I'd been assigned to watch over -- so,
    time to skedaddle with the tot in tow, right? No; in fact, I needed to
    make my way into the airbase, where people were hell-bent on shooting
    me! While the logic becomes clear once the endgame is reached, it all
    comes off as rather contrived; the only reason I was in the base was
    because the game wouldn't let me go anyplace else.

    The game also unfortunately doesn't start out with its best foot
    forward. The initial section is frustrating and punishingly timed. When
    confronted with a myriad of new commands and a nonhuman player
    character, my first impulse is to tinker and experiment; unfortunately,
    this led to a quick depletion of my charge. It took me several restarts
    before I figured out everything I needed to do, and I still hadn't
    really figured out what all the cables drooping out of my body were for.
    Matters aren't helped by the inexplicable decision to cut to the framing
    story upon losing the game and not tell the player that he's now in an
    unwinnable state -- I spent a good long time trying to get my new Air
    Force persona to do something useful before I realized that I needed to
    reload.

    Finally, the custom commands had me tearing my hair out in frustration.
    Much of this was due to the fact that "ATTACH" and "CONNECT" aren't
    quite implemented the same way; my first impulse was to use the former,
    but the game wound up preferring the latter. Descriptions would say that
    cables were connected to each other when the game wasn't actually
    recognizing that they were, which led to much anguish. Then there's the
    Walkdozer, which you spend a good chunk of the game piloting.
    Unfortunately, getting in and out of the thing is an exercise in
    frustration, since the door isn't actually implemented. In theory OPEN
    WALKDOZER, CLOSE WALKDOZER, EXIT WALKDOZER and ENTER WALKDOZER should be
    all you need, but some synonyms would have been nice, especially since I
    ran into a nasty bug where OPEN WALKDOZER would return "which do you
    mean, the Valvo Walkdozer or the Valvo Walkdozer Operating System?" All
    attempts at disambiguation failed, necessitating yet another restart.
    It's impossible to leave the Walkdozer without unplugging from the
    thing, of course, but instead of this task being elegantly handled
    behind the scenes, the player is forced to go through the process
    manually, and again, I hit many snags. A sample transcript:

    >DROP CABLE
    The GSTS interface cable is already here.

    >REMOVE CABLE
    (first taking the GSTS interface cable)
    You're not wearing that.

    >EXIT
    You need to let go of the interface cable before you move.

    >DROP INTERFACE CABLE
    Dropped.

    Oi. I also stumbled across what in retrospect was probably a bug, but
    which confused me mightily at the time; going west from one of the
    airfield locations dumps the player in Darkness. At first I thought I
    had taken too many gunshots and had lost power, which led to much
    frustrated fiddling and still another restart. In fairness, I don't
    think the room's description mentioned an exit to the west, but I was
    trying to get from one side of the compound to the other quickly so I
    was just typing "W" "[ENTER]" over and over until I stopped.

    For all my griping, I still wound up liking Atomic Heart; as I said,
    it's got promise, and the final puzzle has a solution that's at once
    clever, obvious, and poetic. Any game that leaves me saying "wow, so
    this is how Jim Jones must have felt!" can't be all bad. Still, it could
    have been so much more. I'd encourage the author to work on a post-comp
    release; with a little tweaking, he could have an excellent game on his
    hands.

    Directory with zcode .z5 file, readme, and walkthroughs

    Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies
    From: Emily Short <emshort SP@G mindspring.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #46 -- October 17, 2006

    NAME: Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies
    AUTHOR: Oyvind Thorsby
    EMAIL: jthorsby SP@G broadpark.no
    DATE: August 27, 2006
    PARSER: Inform 6
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/AOTYRZ.z5

    It would be hard to write a very long review of Attack of the Yeti  Robot
    Zombies. This is a short game, and one that deliberately avoids  depth of
    implementation: there aren't many objects in any given room;  moreover, EXAMINE
    is disabled. What you see in the initial room  description is all the
    information you get.

    This spareness is in service of an unusual goal: getting the player  to play a
    timed game without restoring any saved files or undoing any  moves. The
    announcement for AotYRZ explained that this was an  "attempt to win on the
    first play" game, an unusual effect for IF.  Since there's nothing to force the
    player to obey these restrictions,  AotYRZ has to rely on player goodwill.

    Fortunately, the design of AotYRZ does support that kind of play.  There are no
    puzzles you need to solve by repeated tinkering. The  absence of EXAMINE
    actually helps here, since in any given situation  you know you've seen
    everything you need to see; there's no chance  that you've failed to look at an
    object that carries a critical clue.  Even the puzzles I missed were, in
    retrospect, completely fair.

    AotYRZ is also a bit more forgiving than the description might imply.  The
    puzzles all revolve around killing or avoiding bad guys (mostly  the monsters
    of the title); the player character has a limited supply  of ammunition, which
    he can use to circumvent puzzles when it looks  like he's not going to be able
    to solve them in time. So it's not  necessary to get everything right to
    survive the game. Solving a  majority of the puzzles is enough.

    When played as intended, AotYRZ achieves a level of tension missing  from most
    IF games. The structure works particularly well in action  scenes: because my
    player character wasn't given the time to dawdle  or the opportunity to examine
    things thoughtfully, the moments when I  had to do something dangerous and
    flashy felt more cinematic than in  other works.

    In other respects, this is pretty light-weight stuff. Right from the  title we
    know the game doesn't take itself very seriously. The  premise never gets any
    deeper than that; the setting is cartoonish;  there's not much to the story,
    either. So while I was engaged with  the technical challenge of getting through
    in a single play, I never  felt that the stakes were very high if I failed.

    Zcode game file

    Attempted Assassination
    From: Greg Boettcher <greg SP@G gregboettcher.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    TITLE: Attempted Assassination
    AUTHOR: Matt Slotnick
    EMAIL: mslot722 SP@G yahoo.com
    DATE: April 16, 2005
    PARSER: Quest
    SUPPORTS: Quest 3.53
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL:
    http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/quest/AttemptedAssassination.zip
    VERSION: 3.0

    This was the first Quest game I've ever played, and my goodness. I have to
    start by telling what I've observed about the Quest system before I go on to
    review the actual game.

    *The Quest System*

    Some people might only barely consider Quest games to be interactive fiction.
    Although you can type in commands, the range of commands is extremely limited.
    From what I could tell, Quest is used mostly to make adventures that can be
    solved by using no verbs other than "look at," "examine," "take," "drop,"
    "speak to," "give," the ever-popular "use," and the directional verbs such as
    "north" and "south." To input these verbs, you can type them in, but you can
    also input them via a graphical user interface on the right side of the game
    window. Also in that part of the screen there is also a list of nearly all the
    objects you can interact with. By clicking buttons and dragging various words,
    you can do 90% to 100% of everything you need to do to win a Quest game,
    without the need to type anything, and without the need to use any verbs not
    listed above.

    In the game I played, I only found one case where a non-standard verb was
    implemented. In the case of one noun, it actually does work to type "open noun."
    But this verb was implemented badly. If you try to "open X", where X is almost
    any other noun, you get the same response as if you type "asdf X".

    Thus, it is not very rewarding to spend much time using non-standard verbs in
    Quest games. There is no illusion of being able to try to do anything you can
    think of to type. As such, I would expect most people to almost always use the
    click-and-drag interface on the right-hand side of the screen. This is IF at
    its most rudimentary; in fact, it is barely IF at all.

    Aside from verb problems, there was also a tendency for noun problems, at least
    in the game I played. If you want to take a beach ball, for instance, "get ball"
    might not work; you might have to type "get beach ball." Not very impressive.

    As a result, the level of interaction in a Quest game is not adequate. At best,
    it feels like a graphical game with a clunky interface. But to me, having a
    trimmed-down interface without graphics is like having the thorn without the
    rose. And when it comes to interpreting textual input, Quest does a bad job.

    *Attempted Assassination*

    I keep thinking to myself that, to be fair, I should not ask whether Attempted
    Assassination is good, but whether it's good as a Quest game. On this basis, I
    have to ignore the game's shallow interactivity, bad parsing of verbs, bad
    parsing of nouns, clunky interface where almost all interactive objects are
    listed, etc. By Quest standards, is Attempted Assassination good?

    Well, the game begins when you wake up at 8:05, already late for work. You run
    to the car, arriving there at 8:08. There you find a note that says, "Your car
    will detonate at 8:08 this morning. Have a nice day!" So you hightail it out of
    there, seconds before the explosion. Then, later, you find out that the bomb
    was planted between 8:00 and about 8:02. My, but your guardian angel was quick
    at writing that note! Ah, the realism.

    In another part of the game, you chase a suspicious man, who jumps through a
    window. You follow him until you have him cornered. Finally he says, "I don't
    know of any bombing on your car. I jumped out of that window because I dropped
    my watch." How do you respond? You say, "Oh, sorry to have bothered you then."

    These cornball events might make you roll your eyes, or they might make you
    laugh. But even if there's some humor here, how are you supposed to enjoy it
    when the game is so sloppy and badly designed? The game contains rooms named
    "room03" and other such things; there are gruesome spelling and grammar
    mistakes ("no where in side" should be "nowhere in sight"); there is a car that
    you can' t drive, but behaves for all the world like a door; and so on.

    No, I can't call this game successful even by the standards of what Quest could
    achieve. And even if it was good as a Quest game, that would still make it
    pretty far from being a good game.

    On the other hand, this was the author's first game. The good news is, there's
    plenty of room for improvement.

    Quest game file

    Augmented Fourth
    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #22 -- September 15, 2000

    TITLE: Augmented Fourth
    AUTHOR: Brian Uri
    E-MAIL: llamaboy SP@G vt.edu
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Aug4.z8
    VERSION: Release 1

    The IF archive is full of first-time efforts at authorship, many of them
    rather inglorious, so prospective players might not necessarily seize on
    Augmented Fourth, written by newcomer Brian Uri. Those who pass it by
    are missing out, though: this is one of the most imaginative and most
    polished games produced in quite some time, and it's a first effort in
    name only: the technical aspect is nearly flawless, and the story is
    remarkably well put together.

    It seems you're a below-average trumpeter who has been unfortunate
    enough to incur the wrath of your obnoxious (and astonishingly stupid)
    king, and the game opens with you being tossed into a pit. As with
    everything else in Augmented Fourth, however, even this unusual premise
    is crafted in ways you might not expect: you spend five moves simply
    falling into the pit, trying to grab onto things as you fall (and
    failing), and listening to the banter of a couple of nasty guards whose
    stupidity rivals the king's. Lest you think that all this heralds a
    conventional hero-struggles-against-injustice story, the author plays
    virtually everything in this scene for laughs, such as the guard's
    reading of your sentence: "This I hereby put to paper as my word is the
    law when the law is my word, when it is heard. Indeed. Thus I spake. Er,
    spoke. Alright, scribe, stop your dictating now." You eventually find an
    abandoned underground settlement of sorts, and meet one of its denizens,
    and the story that follows is consistently and entertainingly whimsical.

    Humor in IF is difficult to do well, since the author has so little
    control over how the player approaches the story, and the lack of
    control over the course of the story often means that the timing of your
    otherwise hilarious jokes may be ruined by no fault of your own. (And
    things like funny room descriptions aren't enough, since few
    descriptions are funny on the hundredth reading.) Accordingly, the best
    humorous IF relies on absurdity and fourth-wall humor rather than jokes
    as such, and Augmented Fourth fits that category: the funniest bits rely
    on the reliable trope of the Ridiculously Stupid Adversary, and the
    world you end up discovering is replete with cartoonish humor. The
    humor, in other words, has technically been done before, and yet it
    works: this author has an unerring ear for comic style, whether in the
    form of simple absurdity or barbed IF reference. (From the opening
    scene, when you're in the pit: one of the guards shouts, "It must get
    pretty tedious explorin' a room with no exits in any of the four
    cardinal directions but it wouldn't be much of a prison otherwise, eh?")

    The development of the plot, while competent, isn't quite as good as the
    writing; once you get past the intro and reach the main body of the
    game, you're essentially given a lot of puzzles to solve and an eventual
    goal to attain, and while it's a safe bet for experienced IF players
    that solving the puzzles will lead to reaching the goal, there's nothing
    to make the connection as such. To be sure, Augmented Fourth has a lot
    of company in that respect--not many games really integrate plot and
    puzzles more thoroughly than giving you an overall objective and perhaps
    an initial nudge--but it's still worth noting for those who crave a real
    melding of the narrative and the crossword. On the other hand, there's
    plenty of story that underlies the puzzles--i.e., the solutions to most
    of the puzzles rely at least in part on information specific to the
    game, so you won't get far without taking the time to read and
    understand the backstory. That reduces the sense that the game was an
    excuse for the puzzles, since the puzzles are specific to that game and
    wouldn't make sense in any other context. In short, while the progress
    of the plot isn't really related to the puzzles, the details of the
    story are, which certainly beats total independence of the two elements.

    Augmented Fourth does incorporate a device to reduce the sense that
    you've left the domain of plot and entered the realm of puzzles:
    periodically (in fact, at key points after you solve certain puzzles),
    you're shown cut scenes featuring the obnoxious king. The scenes are
    significant in several respects: they explain the premise of the game
    and give a basis for several important aspects of the setting, they
    develop the king's character (always worth a laugh), and they give your
    quest some context. To explain in detail would spoil the game, but
    suffice it to say that the cut-scenes turn your overall objective from
    saving your own skin to something more generally beneficial. It doesn't
    affect the puzzle-solving, but it does make the game feel more fleshed
    out. It's worth noting because, as most IFers know, giving a PC a set of
    motivations that explain every puzzle isn't easy; the cut-scene
    approach, which gives the PC's actions a temporal context (i.e.,
    "meanwhile.") and, to some extent, an apparent link to other things that
    are going on. Technically, I suppose, it's not a perfect substitute, but
    it does create the illusion of involvement in the plot (as opposed to
    solving unrelated puzzles). At any rate, even if you don't buy the
    illusion, the cut-scenes are hilarious, which is a more than adequate
    justification for their presence.

    The puzzles themselves are creative, on the whole, and they revive
    something akin to Infocom's spellcasting system, with a few inventive
    (and amusing) twists. Chief among the benefits of this is the
    possibility of trying out your spells on various objects in various
    contexts, with accompanying potential for humor, and I'm pleased to
    report that the author left very few stones unturned in that respect.
    Moreover, not all the puzzles depend on the spells (nor do they apply
    the spells in straightforward ways), so solving puzzles isn't simply a
    matter of leafing through the spells to figure out which one applies,
    which sometimes happened in the Enchanter series. Some of the puzzles
    involve rather obscure intuitive leaps, and one relies on information
    that an NPC provides only randomly (meaning that you may not hear the
    relevant bit unless you wait around for a while), but on the whole
    they're both challenging and reasonably fair (and the author has
    uploaded a walkthrough to the archive). It's also nearly impossible to make the
    game unwinnable (though there are plenty of deaths)--the game goes out
    of its way to replenish finite resources and provide multiple
    opportunities to solve puzzles.

    Augmented Fourth doesn't transcend the limitations of the form or
    subvert the player's expectations in any fundamental way. Still, it's
    one of the best-written and best-programmed efforts to be released this
    year, and it's a good example of what you get when an author really goes
    overboard in providing funny responses for obscure actions and filling
    out the backstory. It's a polished, intelligent work that deserves your
    attention.

    Inform .z8 file

    Solution file (written by the author)

    Inform source code

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

    TITLE: Augustine
    AUTHOR: Terrence V. Koch
    EMAIL: teviko SP@G softhome.net
    DATE: September 2002
    PARSER: TADS 2
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware IF-archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/tads2/augustin/
         Directory containing game, hints, walk-through, and release notes
    VERSION: 1.0

    Terrence Koch is a new author to watch out for. While his first piece of
    IF, Augustine, isn't perfect, it has the right idea. In this story, you
    play a man who has lived over 600 years. Back in the early 1400's, your
    family and friends were wiped out in a brutal raid of your village.
    Though you were still a child, you sought the man who had done this and
    tried to kill him. You never got to kill him, but vowed that you would
    never rest until you did. He also made the same oath about you and you
    are now both cursed to live until one of you kills the other. The story
    tracks the history between the two of you all the way to 2002, where you
    meet on a ghost tour set aboard a ship. For some reason, you always meet
    in St. Augustine, Florida, so that city holds a special place for you.
    This is where the game gets its title.

    The author concedes that this game is similar to the TV series and movie
    called Highlander, but insists he came up with the idea independently. I
    thought this was a bit defensive, but I can understand where he's coming
    from. Anyway, I really liked the concept. The game alternates between
    the present and flashbacks with a few lengthy cut scenes. By the end, I
    felt like I had participated in a story, which is, to me, the whole
    purpose of interactive fiction. Granted, the story isn't perfect,
    especially in terms of spelling and bugs. There are several spelling and
    grammar problems as well as some parser quirks. Yet, when I played, I
    found myself overlooking a lot of this. It may have been because I had
    played a particularly buggy entry just before it and was willing to
    overlook problems if the game at least made sense and didn't spit out
    nonsense every few moves. Also, I give a lot of leeway to an author who
    attempts to tell a story as complex as this in such a short game.

    Interactive flashbacks, in particular, are extremely difficult to do
    well -- too much interaction and the whole story has been changed. Too
    little, and it may as well be a long cut scene. The author strays back
    and forth across this line. The opening flashback, which details the
    village raid, is more like an instant death puzzle. How can you die in a
    flashback? Later flashbacks still have some possibility for ending the
    game abruptly, and even later, it is practically impossible to change
    the predetermined course of events. As I said, this is tricky ground,
    especially for a first-time author. The biggest problem with the way the
    story is presented is that the flashbacks are too close together. Near
    the beginning, you take a walking ghost tour which is almost completely
    non-interactive. You basically follow your tour guide and read long
    descriptions of the thoughts going through your mind. This would have
    been a perfect time to place the flashbacks, but instead, they are all
    bunched together on the ship.

    So, overall, I liked the story, but the implementation was problematic.
    I would really like to see a post-competition release of this game. With
    a bit of cleanup, it stands to be an outstanding first work.

    From: Mike Roberts <mjr_ SP@G hotmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #31 -- January 3, 2003

    When I came to the part of "Augustine" where the player character takes
    a guided tour of the city of the game's title, I immediately recognized
    what had been vaguely bothering me about the game up to that point. The
    guided tour is not just a major chunk of the game's plot; it's at the
    heart of the game's design. The entire game is, in a way, a guided tour,
    and has some of the good and bad features of any guided tour.

    The story opens in the year 1400, somewhere "just outside of Wales,"
    where the player character is a young villager. A cruel warlord rides
    into the village with his army, and proceeds to kill everyone in the
    village except the player character. The PC manages to evade the
    soldiers by hiding; after the raid, the PC vows vengeance on the
    warlord, and sets out to track him down. From here, the story gives us a
    capsule summary of the PC joining an army that opposes the evil warlord,
    training for combat, and entering his first battle against the warlord.
    In the course of the battle, we encounter the warlord himself; we chase
    him into a hidden part of his castle, where a magical transformation
    causes both the PC and the warlord to become effectively immortal,
    immune to death or serious injury except at one another's hands.

    That might sound like a lot of story, and it is; but the interactivity
    through this part is so limited that it takes all of about twenty turns
    to get this far. I think the author intended this portion as an extended
    introduction, and couldn't resist the temptation to cram the entire
    back-story here; but the trade-off is that all of these big events are
    just sketched out, and you feel like you're being rushed along. The
    opening scene where the PC's entire family is killed, for example, ought
    to have a visceral emotional impact; but it doesn't, because we haven't
    really had a chance to meet any of the other characters or see their
    relationship to the PC. It also doesn't help that the PC has to just sit
    there and hide during the whole enemy raid scene; it would have been
    more satisfying if the PC had tried his best to defend the village but
    had been unable to overcome the superior force of the raiders.
    (Explaining how the PC survived in this scenario might have been
    trickier, but not impossible; he could have been badly wounded and left
    for dead, for example.) But the PC so willfully keeps his distance from
    the action that it distances us as well.

    The story next moves from 1400 to the modern day, where the main action
    is set. The PC is still alive, thanks to the magical transformation, and
    is now in the town of Augustine, Florida. Here the plot development
    becomes less frantic, and we're able to do some more leisurely
    exploration. Even here, though, our exploration options are limited,
    more so than they first appear; we can walk through the town's streets,
    but we can't enter any of the buildings. This is where I first got the
    feeling that I was in a museum, with velvet ropes keeping me on the
    approved path and safely out of reach of the exhibits. In fact, this is
    exactly where we eventually take the actual guided tour; the tour guide
    leads us around these same streets, pointing out historical events that
    took place in all of those buildings we can look at but not enter.

    The guided tour is an interesting device for filling in the back-story,
    but in this particular game it seems an odd choice. During the tour, as
    the guide points out bits of history, the PC reminisces about his
    personal involvement in those events. Why, then, doesn't the PC have
    anything to say about all of those significant places when visiting them
    on his own, outside the tour? The PC doesn't even seem to recognize the
    places before the tour. I can understand why the author wanted to dole
    out the back-story using the tour, but there's no good reason within the
    context of the story that the PC shouldn't be able to reminisce all by
    himself; the tour as a narrative device seems better suited to a
    static-fiction rendition of the story.

    As for the writing, it's mostly decent, but I have a few quibbles. The
    technical polish is a bit spotty in places: there's at least one
    it's/its confusion, some weird comma placement, and a few spelling
    errors. The story in one place uses "ironic" to mean "coincidental"
    (which I hear is the latest direction in the drift of the popular
    meaning of "ironic", "sarcastic" being the previous one, but this is the
    first time I've personally spotted this new meaning in actual use). The
    writing affects a style that I think is meant to evoke the sweeping
    historical epic; this gives the writing a certain stiltedness in places,
    but you get used to it pretty quickly.

    It probably sounds as though I didn't like this game much, given the
    number of weaknesses I've focused on; but I wouldn't have gone into so
    much detail if I didn't at least want to like it. I actually didn't warm
    to the game immediately, partially because I was put off by some of
    these design problems and partially because the story seemed awfully
    similar to the film "Highlander" (a resemblance the author acknowledges
    in the README file, with an explanation that it's a coincidence).
    However, as I got further into it, I found I was enjoying the game quite
    a bit. The feeling of running on rails remained, but it was less obvious
    after the early parts of the game; and more importantly, the story
    became increasingly engaging as it progressed. There's simply a lot of
    story here, especially considering the constraints of the competition's
    two-hour play limit (which the game does a pretty good job of obeying) -
    and as the plot develops, the resemblance to "Highlander" fades.
    "Augustine" has plenty of flaws, but its story is interesting enough
    that it's worth a look.

    Directory with TADS 2 .gam file and hints

    Aunts and Butlers
    From: Valentine Kopteltsev <uux SP@G mail.ru>
    Review appeared in SPAG #47 -- January 16, 2007

    TITLE: Aunts and Butlers
    AUTHOR: Robin Johnson
    E-MAIL: rj SP@G robinjohnson.f9.co.uk
    DATE: October 1, 2006
    PARSER: Non-standard
    SUPPORTS: Web-Browsers
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/games/competition2006/web/auntsandbutlers.html
    VERSION: -

    (The reader should be informed beforehand that all my oh-so-clever insinuations
    following came to me as an afterthought. While actually playing A&B, I was just
    enjoying the ride for the most part, never being distracted by secondary
    ponderings.)

    The game has (and the author's blurb for it seems to endorse it) an unmistakable
    P. G. Woodhouse-feel (reminding of the Jeeves and Wooster series in particular),
    but as I thought about it more closely, I realized it wasn't *that* Woodhouse-
    like at all.

    Why do I think so? Well, remember the original novels: Wooster appears before us
    not just as a mere blunderer (although this part of his nature usually plays a
    major role in the story) but also as the nobility in the flesh, a person who
    very rarely, if at all, pursues one's own ends, and who's ready to risk his own
    reputation to help out his friend (well, actually, the choice is made for him in
    most cases, but that's another thing).

    In Aunts and Butlers, however, we find an entirely different kind of person as a
    protagonist: a very purposeful man who not only knows what he wants, but is also
    capable of acting pretty mean at times to reach his goals. If anything, A&B
    represents a post-Woodhouse setting, where most of Wooster's fortune has
    trickled away through his fingers (which seems pretty realistic, since he's
    never been a man too concerned about his revenues, to put it mildly), carrying
    away most of his aristocratic scruples and complications, and replacing them
    with healthy cynicism in the process. This personality change did him good in
    the long run -- by the end of the story, our hero not only gains his wealth
    back, but also acquires something the original Wooster never could even dream
    of; I mean the esteem of his valet, who stops treating his master as a mix of a
    child to be nursed and a marionette to be manipulated, and begins to see him as
    an equal partner (granted, the last one is my assumption, but it's more or less
    implied by the game).

    If I were the game author, I'd provide A&B with the subtitle "Revenge of Bertie
    Wooster", because the protagonist really pays back the people who's been
    torturing him in the original Woodhouse novels. The only thing I missed in this
    respect in the game was a nasty prank on Bingo Little (you know, something like
    sending him down a smelly trash chute to the feet of his oblivious wife and
    uncle.)

    If you aren't as much a fan of P. G. Woodhouse as I am, you'll probably see
    Aunts and Butlers just as a light-hearted, not too deep work with an
    unproblematic gameplay, good enough to while away an hour or so. It has a slight
    general adventuring  frosting, which isn't necessarily needed and could be
    removed without anybody missing it, yet, on the other hand, it doesn't hamper
    the game, either. Isn't this worth a rating of at least 6 points? Sure it is.

    There's one more thing, though: A&B hasn't been created with one of the major
    IF-development systems -- instead, the author employed JavaScript. In itself,
    this isn't such a rare thing; it's the surprisingly good parser that makes it
    practically unique. You couldn't find any complaints about it in my review,
    could you? That's because it's really on a par with the needs and expectations
    of the modern text adventurer, or at least very close to that. I imagine what an
    awfully huge lot of work it must have taken to bring it to that quality level
    from scratch! Well, doesn't this extra amount of work deserve an increase of the
    game rating by at least one point? Sure it does -- at least as far as I'm
    concerned;).

    Competition score: 7

    Full game in HTML format, playable in most web browsers

    Walkthrough, HTML format

    The Awakening
    From: Chantikell <Chantikell SP@G aol.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #15 -- October 11, 1998

    NAME: The Awakening
    AUTHOR: Dennis Matheson
    E-MAIL: Dennis_Matheson SP@G compuserve.com
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: all Inform ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/infocom/awaken.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Considering that "The Awakening" by Dennis Matheson is a rather small
    game, I was pleasently surprised by both plot and atmosphere of the
    game.

    The game starts out with the player finding himself in an old,
    decaying churchyard during a thunderstorm, not knowing how he came
    there nor who he is. But both the fact that he's originally located in
    an earth pit and the name of the adventure lead up to some
    suspicions...

    Besides, the author mentions to have been inspired by the works of
    Lovecraft, so for me the setting of the game was, if not outright
    obviously, so at least in all probability, part of the Lovecraftian
    Universe, with strange and malovelent forces at work.

    During the course of the game I found this to be true, and by and by
    learnt more about my surroundings, and the goal I had to achieve,
    until I was able to defy these forces and win "freedom".

    The atmosphere, especially during the first part of the game, is quite
    dense.  Especially, once I was inside the church, I felt like an
    intruder, at a place where some tradegy had already occured, trying to
    make sense of the remnants.

    But the end of the game came as something of an anti-climax to me: I
    had no problems to win against my antagonist, and no final explanation
    was offered to fill a few gaps I had noticed, just a plain
    ***You have won*** message.

    But, as I said before, "The Awakening" is a short piece of interactive
    fiction, and therefore due to lack some fleshing out that a bigger
    game perhaps would have had. For its length it's really a fine example
    of the art, capturing in its story, and convincing in its atmosphere.

    I've totally forgotten to mention the technical side, and that's
    probably because I found no flaws there, no bugs or parser problems,
    which of course heightened the pleasure of playing "The Awakening".

    From: okblacke <okblacke SP@G usa.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #18 -- September 15, 1999

    "The Awakening" is a short-short horror with a clear and admitted
    homage to H. P. Lovecraft (HPL), complete with elements lifted directly
    from "The Outsider" and other of that seminal author's works. It's a
    "first game", too, and taken as such, it's certainly not bad.

    But the game can be seen to illustrate some of the larger issues that
    arise when trying to bring the feel of HPL to IF. On the good side, a
    lack of dialogue and human interaction (which HPL felt to be
    antithetical to the atmosphere he was trying to create) makes
    sidestepping classic IF NPC issues easier. On the bad side, the
    kleptomaniacal, Wile-E.-Coyote-esque aspect of the adventurer doesn't
    mix well with lurking horrors.

    In other words, running around with ladders and being chased by dogs
    present me with comic images--made even more comic by the fact that I
    knew from the start (as any reader of HPL would) the secret behind the
    "purple tablecloth".

    I know the writing worked for a lot of people, but I'm still scratching
    my head over "storm tossed sky" (not to mention the Zork-esque "storm
    tossed branches"), concaphony, and the "iron-barred fence" in the
    initial descriptions. (A fence barred by iron? A fence made of iron
    bars?) Not to mention prose peppered with "seems".  (I'll assume that
    the adjective-heavy segments in the beginning of the game are an homage
    to HPL.)

    Some of the weather effects didn't quite make it for me, either. The
    frequency of the intermittent hailstorms drew my attention to the fact
    that I was being fed random weather effects.

    There was some satisfaction in solving the puzzles, although there is
    an instant death puzzle at the end (which you can avoid by talking to
    an NPC).  They mostly made sense and some effort was made to avoid
    having the player get into unwinnable state. (Though the hint system
    actually encourages the hapless user to get into an unwinnable state,
    if he's trying to minimize his use of it.)

    The arrangement of hints is poor: I'd say half the hints are worthless,
    and they detract from any sense of atmosphere, even ending with "That's
    All Folks" when they have been exhausted.

    There are a number of out-of-place messages, some from the Inform
    standard library (like "Violence isn't the answer to this one.") and
    one gets the idea that the author hasn't quite patched up all the
    holes.  You can, for example, tie a rope to the limb of the tree, only
    to receive the message "The broken limb isn't attached to anything"
    when you try to "untie limb".

    This is a somewhat harsh review but, as I point out, the game isn't bad.
    There are some nice atmospheric touches and the author shows more care
    with the story than one might expect from such a small game. Nonetheless,
    a game (however short) that is dependent so heavily on atmosphere needs
    to take impeccable care with the details or risk losing his audience
    before they get to the "frisson".

    Plot: 1.2
    Atmosphere: 0.8
    Writing: 1.2
    Gameplay: 0.9
    Characters: 1.0
    Puzzles: 1.0
    Overall: 1.3

    Inform file (.z5)

    Inform source code (.inf)

    The Awe-Chasm
    From: Christopher E. Forman <ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #8 -- February 5, 1996

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

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

    PC Executable (.zip)

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