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Game Reviews J

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The email addresses used are those submitted with the review, so naturally some of them may be out of date.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
    Jacaranda Jim
    Jacks or Better to Murder, Aces to Win
    Jane
    Janitor
    Jewel of Knowledge
    Jigsaw
    The Jim MacBrayne games (The Mission, Holy Grail, Frustration, Golden Fleece)
    John's Fire Witch
    Journey
    Journey Into Xanth
    The Journey of the King

    Jacaranda Jim
    From: Alex Freeman <Freemanry SP@G aol.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #24 -- March 24, 2001

    NAME: Jacaranda Jim
    AUTHOR: Graham Cluley
    EMAIL: hamrag SP@G cix.co.uk
    DATE: 1987
    PARSER: Quite good
    SUPPORTS: DOS
    AVAILABILITY: Public Domain
    URL: http://www.grahamcluley.com

    Jacaranda Jim is another game by Graham Cluley. It was actually written
    before Humbug, but there are many similarities between the two games.

    In Jacaranda Jim, you are... Jacaranda Jim. You have crash landed on the
    planet Ibberspleen IV. The game starts with you waking up from a dream.
    When you do wake up, you find that you are in a dark cave with Alan the
    Gribbley. In case you're wondering what a gribbley is, it is some
    strange creature that is a cross between a neanderthal and the aftermath
    from a night with Malcolm Muggeridge. Alan has a rather disgusting beard
    also.

    Anyhow, you don't really know what to do, but you figure (no doubt
    correctly) that it would be at least a good idea to find some way of
    getting back to Earth. As you explore Ibberspleen IV, you find that it
    is a lot like Earth: There are a post office, a zoo, a grocery store, a
    church, and other Earth-like buildings. While you're doing all this,
    Alan is constantly at your side even when you're out in the rain, but he
    leaves when it becomes night (the game goes through the cycle of day and
    night).

    The NPCs are generally not as well developed as they are in Humbug, but
    you get to know them better (or at least the well developed ones) by
    asking them questions. My favorite NPC is the thief. When you're on the
    beach, you better beware because he may try to rob you. When he does, he
    says, "Har, har! Give us yer valuables!" If you ask him about the police
    he says, "They aren't after me; are they?" Also, don't think that
    running away from him will help you any because he'll chase after you
    and smash your head with his mallet.

    My favorite place in the game is the cave. It contains interesting areas
    and plenty of puzzles. It also contains one of my favorite puzzles: the
    wall of fruit. As you explore the cave, it becomes less and less like a
    cave (it contains stuff like a telephone booth and a safe).

    Its parser is quite good. It is easy to use and understands fairly
    sophisticated commands. However, it can't do really fancy stuff like
    recognizing multiple commands.

    Like Humbug, it is humorous but not as much. It is still rather witty,
    and it sure adds to the game, though. My wildcard points are once again
    for the humour.

    Its main flaw is its puzzles. Many of the puzzles were too hard, such as
    the colored buttons one. The hint system solves this problem partially,
    but it is no substitute for good puzzles. Don't get me wrong, though. It
    has many good puzzles such as the wall of fruit that I mentioned
    earlier, but there should have been many more.

    Overall, Jacaranda Jim is a good game and worth playing, but it could
    have been an excellent game if the puzzles had been better.

    Atmosphere:     1.3
    Gameplay:       1.5
    Writing:        1.5
    Plot:           1.2
    Humour:         1.3
    Total:          6.8
    Characters:     1.3
    Puzzles:         .8

    PC game files (.zip)

    Solution (including registration key)

    Jacks or Better to Murder, Aces to Win
    From: Joe Mason <jcmason SP@G uwaterloo.ca>
    Review appeared in SPAG #19 -- January 14, 2000

    TITLE: Jacks or Better to Murder, Aces To Win
    AUTHOR: J.D. Berry
    E-MAIL: berryx SP@G earthlink.net
    DATE: November 1999
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/inform/jacks
    VERSION: Release 1

    One of the things I've always liked most about adventure games is
    plunging into another world - learning its rules and background. That's
    why Jacks was a delight. You play the head of a church with a large
    bureaucracy whose officers are named A's, B's, and C's. (The lowest rank
    we see is an E.) Districts are also given letters, leading to characters
    with names like the B of H. Each B heads a district: you are apparently
    the one and only A. "Jack" is slang for a hired killer. The goal of the
    game is to survive and assassination attempt.

    I've heard the rule "show, don't tell", and frankly I have no truck with
    it. Neither does the author of Jacks. During the opening text, you are
    introduced briefly to your character, the world, and the fact that you
    suspect a plot. Throughout the game, you are handed every deduction
    which your character makes. I don't see this as a flaw: it kept the
    story moving, and was a good way to mix the presentation of world
    background with the narrative. The player is supposed to be someone very
    experienced in the local politics, and having the game present you with
    appropriate memories and conclusions as they come into play was a good
    way to keep this believable.

    The technique does break down, though. First, the writing is pretty
    ham-handed at times. Although there are a few great descriptions and
    some good moments, most of the writing is only serviceable. When
    descriptions were presented badly, it wasn't too bad, but it was really
    jarring when the player's thoughts were handled clumsily. This happened
    more towards the end. There was also a tendency to infodumps. In the
    opening text, this was excusable (although, "You, the venerable A,
    are..." is not a very catchy opening), but when a character was
    introduced later with a long political discussion, it really broke the
    pace.

    A second problem is that the ending really isn't up to the rest of the
    game. It seems to be cut off quite abruptly, and the writing is very
    clumsy. Right before the finale, a subplot is introduced and resolved in
    exactly one move (three or four if you stop to examine things). The
    subplot is bracketed by more infodumps explaining the political
    importance of what just happened: they gave a good feel for the
    background, but really shouldn't have intruded in the middle of the
    game. Cutting the subplot and devoting the extra space to the main plot
    would have made the ending much better: the subplot could have been
    expanded on in a sequel.

    In fact, the game cries out for a sequel. Using this short scenario as a
    way of imparting background information is a great way to introduce a
    world and a character which could be developed further. I'd like to see
    a game with a similar tone which isn't so linear, and with a greater
    scope for politicking. The church isn't actually fleshed out that well -
    it feels more like a surface sketch - but its hard to tell whether thats
    because of the game's length (or lack thereof) or because the author was
    actually writing it off the top of his head. The pseudo-science aspects
    of the randomly generated church dogma lead me to feel its the latter,
    but the world, sketchy though it is, is engaging enough that I'm sure
    the author could do a game with much more depth there if he wished.

    The randomly generated church dogma is hilarious, by the way. "Which
    gets back to what I was saying earlier, if you are serious about our
    religion, you will account for a positive outlook." "You don't need to
    be the A to know frequent efforts can put our words into practice
    regarding life in general." "Clearly, among all things, it's not
    throwing the baby out with the bathwater to go beyond inertia."

    Rating:

    Base:   8  (Really good game, but a few flaws)

           +1  (A complex setting to dive into)
           -1  (Prone to infodumps)
           -1  (The ending loses it)

    Final:  7  (Should be great, but has many flaws)

    Directory with Inform .z5 file and walkthrough

    Jane
    From: Jessica Knoch <jessicaknoch SP@G mindspring.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #31 -- January 3, 2003

    TITLE: Jane
    AUTHOR: Joseph Grzesiak
    EMAIL: jane SP@G ifcomp.org
    DATE: September 2002
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/zcode/jane/jane.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    This was an interesting one. It starts right out telling you that it
    "deals with the potentially uncomfortable topic of domestic abuse."
    Telling the player up front about the topic is a very wise move, in this
    case: Jane is really nothing like a traditional work of interactive
    fiction. The idea is simple. You play the role of various characters
    over the course of a few weeks/months in the story of a woman with a
    violent husband. There isn't a lot of room for changing the course of
    what happens; in fact, I think it's pretty much impossible. You may not
    notice it much the first time, but play it through again. This isn't
    just the linearity of a story-game, though: the inability to affect the
    ultimate outcome of the story actually lends to the sense of
    helplessness in the title character, and the helplessness too of those
    around her, who watch and want to help but can't seem to find the right
    thing to do or say.

    The conversation is done with menus, which is a fine way of doing it
    when you're trying to tell a specific story. The problem is this: a menu
    with only one option isn't really much of a menu. The author explains in
    the afterword that he would have preferred to implement more
    conversation options. I can imagine it's a pain in the butt, keeping
    track of conversations and characters and stuff -- heck, Emily Short has
    written more than one game entirely consisting of complex conversation.
    So I don't mind too much.

    I also agree with what the author says in the afterword about alternate
    endings: if he had implemented an ending where Jane gets away from her
    abusive husband, then he would risk making any ending where she doesn't
    seem like a "losing" ending, and that can't help but trivialize the
    subject. It's a difficult thing to handle in a work of interactive
    fiction, but I think this is an excellent attempt.

    It is a little disorienting to switch from one character to another --
    yes, I know everyone always says that. It doesn't make it any less true,
    and it's also true that it detracts from the overall feel of character
    and cohesiveness of the story. At the same time, though, the two scenes
    near the beginning that we get from the husband's point of view are
    invaluable for a deeper understanding of the complexities of the topic,
    which is something the author was clearly trying to portray.

    There's no question that the piece is being used to raise awareness of
    domestic abuse, and I'm not really sure that the Comp is the place for
    such things. On the other hand, it certainly is honest about what it's
    doing, and uncomfortable though it is to play through, there is no doubt
    of it's sincerity. And I do approve of raising awareness of such things
    in general. This is by no means a fun game, but it is well coded and a
    competent job of story-telling.

    There are a couple of oddities that only an "IFer" would notice, mostly
    scenery objects that can't be interacted with as you might expect in
    reality: shoes that can't be picked up, a bench you cannot sit down on,
    and a wife you can't kiss ("Keep your mind on the game" is quite a
    jarring response when I've forgotten that this is anything related to a
    "game" at all). Plus I couldn't save or transcript and I don't know why.
    In summary, a thoughtful piece that addresses a serious issue in a
    skilled and competent way.

    (There, I went the whole review without mentioning Photopia. D'oh, I
    just did!)

    Directory with zcode .z5 file and walkthrough

    Janitor
    From: David Welbourn <dswxyz SP@G look.ca>
    Review appeared in SPAG #31 -- January 3, 2003

    TITLE: Janitor
    AUTHOR: Peter Seebach and Kevin Lynn
    EMAIL: ifcomp SP@G seebs.plethora.net
    DATE: September 2002
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/zcode/janitor/janitor.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Do you like puzzles? Do you like a challenge? Are you nostalgic for
    games like Colossal Cave and Zork I? And do you like breaking mimesis?
    Yes? Then this is the game for you.

    Remember Zero Sum Game from 1997? In that game, you had just finished an
    adventure with the high score, but then your mom ordered you to put all
    your treasures back where you found them. Janitor starts out much the
    same way, except this time you’re a janitor at the Flavorplex Text
    Adventure Company, a player has finished the game, and it’s your job to
    put everything back. And just like in Zero Sum Game, the score goes down
    when you solve a puzzle, not up. Fortunately, Janitor is far less
    bloodthirsty.

    An added conceit to the proceedings is the addition of mimesis and space
    warping technologies. The internal game, a cave-crawl called Flavorplex
    Qualifying Adventure, is built like a series of movie sets adjoining the
    company’s hallways, and populated with actual treasures. But internally,
    a mimesis field makes the sets seem real and hides the access corridor
    exits, while some other pseudoscience connects the rooms so that they
    follow the adventure’s desired layout. And you’re equipped with a
    mimesis disruptor in your mop so you can see how the rooms really are
    and get your job done.

    So once you’ve understood all that (and probably made two contradictory
    maps of the place), and stopped chuckling at all the in-jokey game
    references, you can start figuring out what goes where. As you might
    imagine, it’s somewhat tricky, and in places somewhat unfairly so. I
    wasn’t done when my two hours ran out, and I had to rate it partway
    through. (There are hints, both in-game, and in an external html file
    should you need them. And, in time, I did need them.)

    Still, the game wouldn’t let me go. Quite apart from the desire to
    successfully reset the game, there were clues that something wasn’t
    quite right about Flavorplex; there’s a mystery to solve as well. You
    might want to talk to your boss’s secretary, Eva, guest starring from
    Grim Fandango, about a few things.

    And when you’ve won Janitor, you can still continue to play by playing
    the Flavorplex game forwards! What fun.

    Rating: 8

    Directory with zcode .z5 file and hints

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

    TITLE: Jewel of Knowledge
    AUTHOR: Francesco Bova
    E-MAIL: fbova SP@G pangea.ca
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/jewel.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Is the truest/highest purpose of IF entertainment, or art, or a fusion of
    the two? Is a game that provides an enjoyable playing experience as worthy
    as one that questions the nature of the form, or slyly sends up cliches or
    assumptions about its genre? Should the IF community turn up its nose at
    games that aspire to be nothing more than a collection of puzzles, bound
    by a tried-and-true plot?

    Francesco Bova's recently released Jewel of Knowledge does not pose these
    questions, technically, but playing through it does bring to mind some
    issues at the very core of IF--because, in its essense, Jewel of Knowledge
    is a puzzle-fest dungeon crawl in the tradition of Colossal Cave, Zork,
    and other foundational works of IF. To be sure, it gives the player
    considerably more backstory than most of the seminal dungeon-crawl works,
    and your motivations are considerably more developed. But what really
    works here is what made the canonical dungeon crawls work, namely good
    puzzles and a well-described setting; the moments where the author tries
    to question the assumptions of those traditional dungeon crawls are far
    less effective.

    Let me be clear, though: there are many intriguing innovations in Jewel of
    Knowledge that may well catch a Zork veteran off guard. Particularly
    notable is the opening sequence, which makes the backstory/prologue of the
    game interactive and forces the player to pay attention to the story
    rather than ignoring it and blithely jumping into the puzzles. While the
    plot does not at first glance appear novel--defeat three dragons, obtain
    the McGuffin of the title--the story follows a rather different path than
    the fantasy-game aficionado might expect. Other mild surprises include a
    maze that isn't what it appears to be and a false puzzle of sorts, an
    obstacle that cannot be passed in the expected way. These are effective in
    the context of the game because they keep the player guessing.

    Moreover, many of the puzzles are genuinely creative. Particularly notable
    is a cloak into which the player can insert other objects (the exact
    physical process here is left vague); the cloak then assumes the
    properties of those objects. The game doesn't do as much as it might with
    the implications of this power--some of the stranger and more interesting
    results are left sadly underdescribed. Still, it's an interesting idea
    that gives rise to some unusual puzzles. The maze mentioned above is
    clever as well and accommodates different solutions, in a sense, and other
    puzzles turn on recognizing relationships between objects in ways that
    reward careful reading.

    It is obvious to anyone who has finished Jewel of Knowledge, however, that
    the author had more on his mind when writing the game than coding original
    puzzles and arranging them in a satisfying sequence. There are Weighty
    Issues Afoot; progressively stronger hints develop them throughout the
    game, such that the finale is a surprise only for the player who hasn't
    been paying much attention at all. But while the game does a nice job of
    developing the PC's character and fitting him into the story, the author
    overdoes his theme--and what was presumably supposed to be a surprise
    ending becomes painfully obvious. The loudly moralistic ending is
    exacerbated by a guess-what-the-author's-thinking game for the optimal
    ending; even if the player recognizes the action that would lead to the
    suboptimal ending, she's likely to try it just to get a clue toward what
    the author _really_ wants her to do. The trouble is partly that the point
    isn't all that novel--Zork III made it much more subtly--and the
    alternatives presented at the end are painted in such stark colors that it
    doesn't actually say much to us. (Admittedly, it may be asking a lot to
    expect a fantasy game to say anything of note, but a more nuanced set of
    options might have helped.)

    There are similar problems with the writing. Parts of Jewel of Knowledge
    are impressively well-written: the scenes, by and large, are set vividly
    and economically, and the cave setting comes alive even for players who
    have already seen thousands of cave settings. There is plenty of
    geological detail (shades of Colossal Cave) that reduces the feeling that
    the cave is just a generic setting for the author's House o' Puzzles. (The
    geology even plays a part in some of the puzzles.) Other descriptions give
    the setting some atmosphere, though on the whole there isn't much of that.
    But there are also many awkwardly phrased moments, and, unsurprisingly,
    many of them come along when the author is reminding us of his Themes.
    This passage, from a conversation with your companion, is not entirely
    atypical:

         "Of course, returning the Jewel to Amylya will provide us with a
         lifestyle we could have only dreamed of," continues Jacob, "and the
         omniscience that the Jewel brings would tempt any person."

    Any person? Conversation isn't easy to write, but jarring moments like
    these don't help. Likewise, in what is presumably supposed to be a
    chilling moment, you discover the body of your companion:

         Oh, the horror! Lying face down on the cold granite ledge is your former
         colleague Ariana! Looking up through the shaft, you deduce that this
         must have been the air pocket she fell through a few layers up.

    The tone wobbles badly--any "horror" the player feels is minimized by the
    ill-placed observation about the air pocket. On the other hand, in the
    same scene, there is one particularly well-done line:

         You feel a lump in your throat as you realise that your nimble friend
         won't be around to experience the joy of your triumph as you bring home
         the Jewel.

    The author makes a rather surprising point here about the essential
    selfishness of the PC--and while it's jarring to interrupt the player's
    sympathy for Ariana, it does serve the purposes of the story. The writing
    isn't world-class, in other words, but it's good enough to be worth paying
    attention to--particularly in in the way it develops the protagonist's
    character.

    Likewise, from a technical standpoint, Jewel of Knowledge is mostly
    successful despite some rough spots. Some puzzles take more experimenting
    with verbs and syntax than seems strictly necessary, and others take more
    manipulation and searching of apparently insignificant scenery than one
    would expect from the average player. (At one point, moreover, the author
    seems to have unintentionally created a puzzle involving your escape from
    a dream or reverie, since the required action is rather obscure.) But
    there are very few bugs, and the design flaws don't significantly impede
    the player's progress. There are well-done little bits here and there,
    such as a warning system when the player is about to render the game
    unwinnable, and a "practice" puzzle reminiscent of Edifice.

    Jewel of Knowledge is, in fact, well-crafted enough that the forced ending
    is all the more disappointing--and yet it does manage to say something,
    even if unwittingly, about the state of IF. It is not exactly a secret
    that generic cave crawls focused entirely on gathering treasure are no
    longer in fashion, but Jewel of Knowledge, it may fairly be said, goes out
    of its way to avoid that label just a bit too much. No doubt this is the
    product of envelope-pushing IF that have left the traditional fantasy
    quests looking unimaginative, but it should still be possible to combine
    the traditional fantasy game with a modicum of irony; that was, after all,
    Zork III's approach. Perhaps more importantly, the split in personality
    between the "game" side of Jewel of Knowledge, which is by and large well
    done, and the "fiction" side, which is a worthy effort but needs some
    help, leaves the whole thing feeling a bit schizophrenic.

    My point, if I have one, is that not all IF needs to be dedicated to
    pushing envelopes, erasing boundaries, overturning tropes. Certainly, it's
    fun and a good idea to send up familiar settings or introduce fourth-wall
    humor to show the player that you're hip to the latest trends. (Jewel of
    Knowledge does do this in a few spots, and quite well at that.) But IF can
    be perfectly serviceable as _entertainment_, hardly an illegitimate goal,
    without beating the player over the head with a message about the
    limitations or assumptions of the genre. Jewel of Knowledge feels like it
    wants, in its heart of hearts, to be a Spider and Web, a Losing Your Grip,
    a Photopia, and it just isn't up to the job.

    There is plenty to like about Jewel of Knowledge; in most respects, it's a
    worthy heir to the tradition of fantasy quests, and while it has some
    problems, they don't detract from the game aspect much. Unfortunately, as
    interactive fiction, the overall effect is best described as uneven.

    From: Karen Tyers <karvic SP@G btinternet.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #18 -- September 15, 1999

    Jewel of Knowledge is the first offering by a promising new author,
    Francesco Bova, and hopefully it won't be the last.  It is a
    traditional dungeon crawl, so for you purists out there, it's ideal.
    In my opinion (not worth much, but there you are), there are far too
    few traditional text adventures being written nowadays, and I have to
    confess I am not too sure that I like the way that interactive fiction
    is heading.  I like to have puzzles to scratch my head over, and the
    trend towards puzzleless games doesn't appeal to me at all.  You might
    just as well write a book and be done with it.

    There, now I'll get off my soapbox, and on with the game.  When you
    start, you find yourself deep underground, obviously in the middle of
    some quest or other, but with very little information on what you are
    supposed to be doing.  This had me stumped at first, but you do have a
    travelling companion (Jacob), and if you start talking to him about
    various things, you will find the game soon opens up, and since poor
    Jacob doesn't live very long, as usual in this type of game, you find
    yourself alone and very much up the creek without a paddle!  I am not
    giving away anything here by telling you this, since in order for the
    game to start properly, unfortunately poor Jacob has to go and meet his
    Maker.

    OK, so you're now even deeper underground, and you must start to wander
    round the various tunnels and passageways in order to achieve your
    object of finding this wondrous jewel which is reputed to give it's
    owner unlimited knowledge and power.  I really don't want to say much
    about the puzzles since it would give too much away, but there are lots
    of things to do in a very small playing area.  What about that porous
    wall that you can look through - can you get to the other side of it?
    What about that shaft above the geyser - are you able to get up there?
    What about the crack in the roof of one of the tunnels?  What about
    that skeleton that seems to be hiding something?  The list goes on, and
    you haven't even met the three dragons yet!  Is there any way of
    getting in contact with the people who sent you on this foolhardy
    mission in the first place?

    These are just a few of the questions you will have to find the answers
    to while playing this game.  There are many more of course, and I have
    to say that although I got stuck in several places, none of the
    problems were insoluble with a little thought, and a lot of lateral
    thinking.  Just a word of warning, don't be too quick to be destructive
    and violent - think about things.

    When I finally got to the endgame and found the jewel, I was quite
    relieved. I know from messages on the newsgroups that I subscribe to,
    that several people didn't like the ending, but I have to say that I
    found it to be a very refreshing change.  I won't say more than that,
    as I don't want to spoil things, but I would be very interested to know
    what other people think.

    There are still one or two minor bugs in the game, but nothing that
    will stop you completing it.  The author is aware of them, and they
    should be cleaned up shortly.

    I may be a little biased here, since I was involved in the
    beta-testing, but I would thoroughly recommend this as a smashing
    little game to while away a few hours.  I do hope the author continues
    to write games like this, for those of us who still prefer a good old
    'zorky' type of game.

    Inform file (.z5)

    Map (.gif)

    Solution (Text)

    Alternate Walkthrough (Text)

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

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

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

    From: Adam J. Thornton  <adam SP@G flagstaff.princeton.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #8 -- February 5, 1996

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From: Gareth Rees <gdr11 SP@G cl.cam.ac.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #9 -- June 11, 1996

    "Jigsaw" opens on the night of December 31st, 1999, at a party to
    celebrate the new millennium. Feeling out of sympathy with the
    thronging party-goers, and unable to find again the attractive stranger
    in black who has just slipped away, you wander off to explore a
    mysterious monument built by the late eccentric millionaire Grad
    Kaldecki. You discover that Kaldecki has constructed -- or somehow
    obtained access to -- a time machine. In the centre of the monument, the
    time machine takes the baroque form of a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces
    (once found) give access to turning points in twentieth century history.
    Kaldecki planned to alter history, but died with his work barely
    started, leaving his acolyte (the attractive stranger, soon capitalised
    as Black) to complete his megalomaniacal scheme. Much against your
    will, you find yourself trailing around the century in Black's wake,
    trying to restore history to its rightful course, and searching for
    hidden jigsaw pieces. You visit some of the most important moments in
    twentieth century history: World War I, the Wright brothers, women's
    suffrage, the Moon landings, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall. (Though not
    every historian would place the writing of Proust's novel "A la
    Recherche de Temps Perdu" in this list!) The quest is complicated by a
    romance between you and Black, and by hints of metaphysical significance
    when you enter a realm called "The Land," whose mist-shrouded
    locations are emblematic of the great themes: Art, Science, War, and Nature.

    It is often an axiom in time-cop novels that we live in the best of all
    possible worlds, and that any kind of interference with history must be
    disastrous. "Jigsaw" rigidly enforces this convention by ending the
    game whenever the past is changed. This extreme historical conservatism
    sits uneasily with some of the chapters: it is not clear why eight
    million men had to die for the sake of the world as we know it, nor what
    is so bad about the world described in the following paragraph that
    World War I was preferable:

       You shake your head, confused. Why did the mad London-born
       architect Kettering build this monument? Why did the government of
       the Franco-British Republic ever allow Century Park to be built here
       at Versailles? Never Mind: time to go and get a drink of potato
       brandy from the commissars and toast the new millennium.

    Sometimes it is completely implausible that the disturbance in the past
    could have led to the result you see. For example, in the Suez Canal
    chapter, the wider outcome does not depend on your actions: even though
    Black brokered a deal to prevent the Suez Crisis, the powers that be
    always intended to renege on the deal.

    "Jigsaw" is a huge game, one of the largest text adventures ever
    written. It is made manageable only by its episodic structure: each
    time zone can be treated more or less as a separate game, requiring only
    those objects that are nearby to solve its puzzles. (Though there are a
    few interconnections between the eras to make life interesting, and
    attempts to use anachronistic objects inappropriately are often
    amusing.) "Jigsaw"'s puzzles are hard; often all you can do is collect
    the available objects and fiddle with them, without any real
    understanding of what your objective is until you've achieved it.
    Particularly unfortunate in this respect are the Alexander Fleming,
    women's suffrage and East Berlin chapters. A few other puzzles refer to
    classic works of interactive fiction including "Adventure," "Zork" and
    "Enchanter," and the novice without this background will struggle.

    Some of the puzzles, on the other hand, are inspired. In one chapter, you
    find yourself at Bletchley Park in World War II and have to decrypt
    a message encoded by the Enigma machine. Sweating away at this problem,
    I suddenly realised that, whereas the usual derring-do of and adventure
    game is only so much make-believe, in this case my task was made no
    easier by its fictional nature. Of course, my 1940s counterparts faced
    a more difficult Enigma machine -- Nelson's being slightly simplified --
    and had to succeed without the benefit of information gained by supernatural
    means, had no access to high-speed computers, and faced rather greater
    consequences of failure than merely an unfinished game. I found myself
    thinking, "If Turing and Newman could do it, then surely I, with all
    these advantages, can do it too!"

    The most interesting feature of "Jigsaw" is the war it deals with
    Black's sex. By cunning paraphrase, Nelson manages to avoid ever
    stating whether Black is male or female: knowing only that Black is
    attractive to you, you are free to project your own preference onto the
    situation. This is a more elegant device than the outright question
    "Are you male or female?" or the various other contrivances by which Infocom
    games force a decision on you. Not every reader appreciates this
    elegance: at least one person posting to rec.games.int-fiction, having
    noticed that both you and Black are able to pass yourselves off
    successfully in masculine roles, argued that you and Black must
    therefore be gay men. But given the fantastic nature of the piece, and
    the famous cases of women who have gone disguised as men for long
    periods of time without detection, it is foolish to rigidly insist on
    such an interpretation.

    "Jigsaw" is Nelson's second game. His first, "Curses," grew by stages
    into a mish-mash of Celtic Druids and King Arthur rubbing shoulders with
    classical Greek Gods and the poems of T.S. Eliot. The effect is
    certainly startling, but I imagine that a writer as attracted to
    elaborate formal structures as Nelson could not be satisfied with the
    outcome. A new game gave him the opportunity to make amends. The
    result is dominated by structures based on the numbers 16 and 100.
    There are 16 time zones, 16 chapters, 16 jigsaw pieces, 16 animals to
    sketch, 16 locations in the Land and the game starts with 16 minutes to
    go before the start of the new century. There are 100 years in the
    Twentieth Century and 100 points to be scored. There are also pairings
    of opposites: Prologue and Epilogue, Black and White, nature and
    technology, the dead Land and the living Land, the party at the end of
    the century and the party at the beginning, the chapel unbuilt and the
    chapel disused.

    At times I felt the correspondences and allegory were too obvious and
    too much; Black's schematic role rather overshadows the tentative story
    of Black's relationship with the player (and this is now helped by the
    flexible order of the chapters). "Jigsaw" also lacks the excitement and
    unpredictability which "Curses" achieved by being so chaotic.

    Still, "Jigsaw" is extremely good by the standards of existing text
    adventure games, and certainly good enough to be worth paying the
    compliment of taking it seriously. Although it adopts a traditional
    puzzle-based style of  game-play, and doesn't make any technical advances
    beyond the state of the art, it does wonders with the limited techniques
    at its disposal. Everyone who enjoys text adventures should play it.

    Inform Game File w/ Help (.z8)

    Inform File, Help Only (.z5)

    Inform File, Game Only (.z5)

    Solution (Text)

    The Jim MacBrayne games (The Mission, Holy Grail, Frustration, Golden Fleece)
    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #21 -- June 15, 2000

    TITLES: The Mission; Holy Grail; Frustration; Golden Fleece
    AUTHOR: Jim MacBrayne
    E-MAIL: jmacb SP@G medusa.u-net.com
    DATES: 1996
    PARSER: TADS 1.0
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URLS: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/mission.zip
          ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/hgrail.zip
          ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/frust.zip
          ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/gfleece.zip
    VERSIONS: The Mission: Release 1.02
              Holy Grail: Release 1.01
              Frustration: Release 1.02
              Golden Fleece: Release 1.00

    Among the most obscure denizens of the IF Archive are four games by one
    Jim MacBrayne--all written in 1989 and 1990 (possibly in AGT--I'm not
    sure), and ported to TADS and uploaded sometime in 1996. And while there
    are technically four games--Holy Grail, The Mission, Golden Fleece, and
    Frustration--they're so similar that they're practically
    indistinguishable. For that matter, their merits and faults are all
    pretty much the same as well: they're quite well put together but not
    especially engaging.

    The genre is vaguely fantasy, though the settings go back and forth
    between modern-day and otherwise (within the same game-- medieval
    castles and mysterious machinery sit virtually side by side). The
    premise of Holy Grail involves medieval stuff, as you might imagine, but
    it hardly matters, since the plot is all but irrelevant to these games;
    the objective amounts to object- collecting. (True, in Frustration, the
    idea is to pull together items on your shopping list--but it doesn't
    really change the game significantly, since you don't find the relevant
    items in places you're looking for them, unless you look for honey by
    climbing trees in deserts.) All four games are out-and-out puzzlefests
    in the tradition of classic IF--the objective provides a vague excuse
    for your being there, and a nice ending message, but doesn't really
    affect what comes in between.

    The puzzles themselves are at once varied and oddly monotonous. Keys for
    doors play a very big part--all four games are simply littered with
    keys--and magic potions with various unforeseeable effects are also a
    recurring theme. All four of the games feature at least one math problem
    and at least one maze, and all of them revolve around singularly bizarre
    magical transportation systems which make it annoyingly easy to strand
    yourself somewhere and make the game unfinishable. Not many of the
    puzzles break out of the apply-object-X-to-obstacle-Y feel, and many of
    those that do rely on trial and error and weird intuitive leaps. One
    puzzle in Golden Fleece, for example, involves what amounts to a giant
    see- saw, and requires lots of tedious object-moving to balance the
    seesaw properly; another at the beginning of Holy Grail involves, in
    essence, a timing device to open and close a door. Creative puzzles
    both, but highly obscure--and the relevant descriptions don't help much.

    There are other, stranger similarities. All four games have at least a
    few "Broom Cupboard" locations--Jim has a fondness for the things,
    whether or not there are brooms around--and three of the four have at
    least one long hall that you traipse along, opening doors. All of them
    are inordinately fond of buttons or switches that trigger something else
    somewhere in the game, no longer a favored approach to IF design;
    likewise, all of them have lots and lots of useless rooms. In fact, the
    author sometimes gives the impression that someone's requiring him to
    have a certain minimum number of locations (perhaps he worked for
    Sycamora Tree), because he often seems to make fun of himself for
    throwing in useless rooms:

       Small Chamber
          The small chamber you have entered has but two features. One of
       these is the small doorway inset into the wall to your north, whilst
       the other is its total lack of interest.

    Or, even stranger:

       Almost-featureless Chamber
          An involuntary gasp of recognition issues from your throat as you
       pass into this dead-end chamber. Wonderingly your gaze travels over
       the walls, floor and ceiling, remarking on the total absence of mossy
       growths, damp patches, stalactites or any other remarkable features.
       You are about to come to the the apparently-inescapable conclusion
       that this is a featureless chamber, when your eye comes to rest on a
       knobbly little bit of rock with a texture and colour marginally but
       sufficiently different from that of the surrounding rocks as to make
       the chamber almost-featureless.

    Calm down, Jim. There's a balance to be struck, of course, in crafting a
    setting--not every location needs to be absolutely crucial--but when a
    room has so little purpose that the description consists of a comment
    about how useless the room is, it's time to rethink. It's especially odd
    because many of the settings are effectively described--granted, some of
    them throw too many diverse milieus into too little space, but most of
    the subsections and smaller areas within the game are well done. Those
    areas include numerous locations that are just there for the atmosphere,
    and they work very well. Unfortunately, as shown above, there are other
    locations that don't even play a role in providing atmosphere, unless
    the desired effect is dullness. Moreover, the volume of useless
    locations leads to a lot more traipsing around than seems strictly
    necessary.

    As games, all of MacBrayne's works are only somewhat successful.
    Certainly, if you're looking for an involving story, these don't have
    much to offer--but even on their terms, as collections of puzzles, these
    games have some problems. Too many of the puzzles rely on guesswork and
    on experimentation rather than on logic as such; it's hard to imagine
    that most players actually like pushing a button and then poking around
    the landscape to see what, if anything, happened. Much of the
    transportation involves going through one-way doors of sorts--and if you
    failed to bring something with you, or press a certain button that will
    end up opening a certain door, you're stuck. In other words, there's a
    lot of unfairness and player-unfriendliness going on. There's one puzzle
    in Frustration that turns on a rather silly pun, and another in the same
    game that amounts to a stubborn-parser trick, and another in Holy Grail
    that's the ultimate in knowledge- obtained-by-screwing-up. There are
    moments of creativity, but they're outnumbered by rather mindless
    give-object-to-obstacle puzzles.

    The shame of it is that Jim MacBrayne's games clearly reflect some real
    effort--there are lots and lots of objects in each one, for instance,
    and the objects all interact in more or less sensible ways. The writing
    is thorough, and though it's a bit overdone in places, it's usually good
    enough to convey the scene efficiently. There's some entertaining whimsy
    scattered here and there as well--there's a cut scene in Frustration
    involving a giant teddy bear (really), and there are numerous jokes of
    varying degrees of cleverness scattered through all four games. There's
    even a sense of dramatic progression at times-- particularly in The
    Mission, where your quest for the toothpick of Quetzlcoatl (really) is
    periodically interrupted by scenes out of some old boys' club, where the
    potentates who commissioned you with the quest speculate on the chances
    of your completing it. It's a cinematic device that I'd never seen in
    IF, and it's used to great effect here. The problem is that standards
    have changed since MacBrayne wrote these games, and even well-written
    puzzle- fests don't elicit much more than a yawn anymore--even when they
    don't have the game design flaws that these have. The year when these
    were released--1996--saw thoughtful efforts like So Far, Delusions and
    Tapestry that integrated story with puzzles in a way that little, if
    any, IF had done before; obsolescence, for old-style fantasy/puzzle IF
    like MacBrayne's games and Path to Fortune came suddenly. Works on the
    wrong side of that divide are treated more like museum pieces than works
    of actual interest now--and while the development is a healthy one is
    many respects, it left some games that were clearly the product of
    considerable labor out in the cold.

    It can't fairly be said that these are terrific examples of their kind;
    they're flawed in several respects on the design front. But they're
    solidly put together, and nostalgic old-style IF buffs just might enjoy
    one of them; Holy Grail is probably the best of the lot, but there's not
    much to distinguish them. For most of us, though, the main function of
    Jim MacBrayne's games is to offer some perspective on where IF has come.

    Frustration:

    Amiga file

    TADS .gam file and DOS TADS runtime

    Solution

    Golden Fleece:

    Amiga file

    1989 DOS version

    TADS .gam file and DOS TADS runtime

    Solution

    Holy Grail:

    Amiga file

    TADS .gam file and DOS TADS runtime

    Solution

    The Mission:

    TADS .gam file and DOS TADS runtime

    Solution

    John's Fire Witch
    From: Magnus Olsson <mol SP@G df.lth.se>
    Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995

      NAME: John's Fire Witch               PARSER: Excellent
      AUTHOR: John Baker                    PLOT: Linear
      EMAIL: baker-j SP@G ix.netcom.com               ATMOSPHERE: Very good, Enchanter-ish
      AVAILABILITY: IF Archive, S6                 WRITING: Very good
      PUZZLES: Standard, with a few nice touches
                                            SUPPORTS: TADS
      CHARACTERS: Few, rather simple        DIFFICULTY: Easy

    It's a cold December's day, and you're visiting your old friend John -
    or, rather, you would be visiting him if he were there; but he never
    showed up at the pizza place where you'd agreed to meet, his apartment
    is empty and unlocked, and you've got nothing better to do than spend
    the night on John's living-room floor. The next morning, you wake up to
    find that a terrible blizzard has cut off the house from the rest of the
    world.  When searching the apartment, there's still no sign of John.
    There is, however, a deep, mysterious hole in his basement, a hole which
    turns out to take you straight into the middle of a conflict between
    magical powers...

    This is the starting point of "John's Firewitch," a short (in the
    author's words, "snack-sized" ) but extremely well-written piece of IF.
    On the surface, this game isn't very remarkable: it's quite simple (it
    took me about three hours to solve), neither the puzzles nor the story
    are very original, the author doesn't seem to have any high-flying
    literary ambitions, and there are no startling new innovations in game
    design.

    Still, this is one of the best - perhaps _the_ best - shareware games
    I've ever played; better, even, than most commercial games.  I'm not
    quite sure I can put my finger on what makes it so good - it's always
    easier to pinpoint what you don't like about something than what you
    like - but "John's Firewitch" is simply very good workmanship; those
    little irritating glitches and mannerisms that seem to be unavoidable in
    non-commercial works are absent; the game is eminently playable (much
    thanks to the excellent parser); the puzzles logical with satisfying
    solutions; the ending forms a satisfying climax; the writing excellent
    and free from mannerisms and bad jokes; everything just feels right.

    The atmosphere and style of the game are very similar to Infocom's
    games, especially the Enchanter trilogy, with the possible exception
    of the beginning which shows a refreshing sense of self-irony (John in
    the game being the author's _alter ego_). It is much smaller than a
    typical Infocom game, though. If Enchanter is a novel, then this is a
    short story. This very shortness may be a reason for the game giving
    such a good impression. On the technical side, (as one reviewer noted on
    rec.games.int-fiction), the small size of the game saves the author from
    the complexity of large games (which tends to increase very rapidly with
    game size). On the literary side, it's much easier to maintain dramatic
    tension in a short work than in a long one; and this advantage is
    enhanced by the puzzles being easy (but certainly not obvious!), which
    keeps down the playing time.

    This reviewer, being a busy man with too little time to spend on IF, and
    in addition being slightly disturbed by the recent trend towards
    "simulationist"  IF (where the authors try to provide a good simulation
    of their literary world, complete with all objects, an attempt which
    will only serve to overwhelm the poor player with useless information)
    would certainly like to see an increase in the number of small but
    well-written games like this. "John's Firewitch" is an excellent example
    to emulate for prospective authors.

    And with authors like John Baker around, why should we mourn the passing
    of Infocom?

    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #12 -- December 13, 1997

    There isn't a lot to John's Fire Witch; it's relatively short (250
    moves or thereabouts required, and much of that is traveling hither
    and yon) and the puzzles and characters are simple. What's there,
    though, is refreshingly well put together, with very few obvious bugs
    or gameplay problems; as first efforts go, this is one of the better
    ones you'll find.

    You, the player, have come to visit your friend John Baker -- who, for
    an author included in his own game, takes quite a verbal beating; we
    certainly don't get a very good impression of John's habits and
    tastes.  There is no sign of John in the apartment, though, other than
    junk scattered here and there and a diary left in the bedroom
    suggesting that John has stumbled into a confrontation between a Fire
    Witch and Ice Wizard residing in his basement. (This suggests to you
    about John that "years of heavy drinking have finally destroyed his
    mind.") Nevertheless, you investigate the hole in the basement and,
    sure enough, find all manner of strange things, none of them obviously
    supporting the claim that an Ice Wizard and Fire Witch are in the area
    (until the very end) but intriguing in their own right. The best of
    the puzzles is one involving a devil and the task he assigns you: the
    solution requires an intuitive leap of sorts, but a sensible one, if
    that makes sense; though most are fairly clever and rewarding to
    solve.

    There are few moments in John's Fire Witch that break the spell, so to
    speak, by drawing the player's attention to the mechanics of the
    game. One is a painful guess-the-verb moment, coupled with some
    illogicalities on the solution to the relevant puzzle (why one
    particular solution to the ring problem is deemed correct, and another
    incorrect, is less than obvious to me). There is a puzzle that cannot
    be solved until a certain number of turns have passed -- and if you
    move through the earlier part of the game efficiently, you may find
    yourself a bit puzzled about why there's no apparent way to move the
    game forward. (Or simply irritated about having to wait 50 or so turns
    for something to happen.)

    The inventory limit is fairly small and requires some step-retracing
    (arguably, this is more rather than less realistic, since the classic
    adventurer seems to have eleven hands, but it does complicate things),
    and there are a few situations that require somewhat exact syntax. But
    most nouns and verbs have several substitutes, though the game
    occasionally fails to fill in logical gaps (for instance, "sleep" with
    a bed in front of you puts you to sleep on the floor). Moreover, the
    game is free from scenery-object confusion, free from disambiguation
    problems, as far as I could tell ("which do you mean..."), and takes
    the trouble to code many specific responses to non-useful actions,
    lending to the polished feel. In short, even if there isn't much
    there, problems that distract from what is there are relatively few.

    The writing is mostly good, though it has its rough moments -- the
    death of an adversary is somewhat unnecessarily gruesome, something as
    unusual as a bridge made of ice gets virtually no description, and the
    game takes it upon itself to tell you when you stumble into a crystal
    grotto that "the overall effect is quite beautiful." Let me conclude
    that, John. You just tell me what's there. Still, most of the writing
    is solid, though some of the better descriptions are in the apartment
    rather than in the tunnels, which often feel, well, just a bit
    generic, and occasionally a tad clumsy.  For example:

             Long Tunnel (1)

             This is a long tunnel leading north and south.  It has
             definitely been purposefully made, being tiled with crafted
             stone.  It looks like something that would have been created
             centuries ago.  You can see the Red Crystal Grotto to the
             north, and a side corridor leads off to the east.

    Not awful, certainly, but there are more adept ways to suggest that
    the tunnel didn't just come about than "it looks like something that
    would have been created centuries ago." Like the rest of John's Fire
    Witch, though, the writing is good enough to keep the game enjoyable
    (and focus the player's attention on the puzzles, for that matter;
    more striking prose would give the game an exploratory feel, which
    might mesh oddly with its role as a diversion with some clever
    puzzles. And many moments have a certain deadpan charm, e.g. when
    you're about to be frozen:

           There is a loud and horrible rushing noise in your ears, and
           the room appears to be filling up with what you would describe
           as steam if it were not so very very cold.

    John's Fire Witch was designed as a short diversion, and it fills that
    purpose -- and more elaborate descriptions or development of the plot
    might distract from that purpose. As it is, the player need only grasp
    the essentials of what's going on (actually, not really even that)
    before plunging in and starting to solve puzzles -- and the
    unobtrusive writing is consistent with the overall feel. The ending
    points to a sequel, which may or may not be more elaborate -- but as s
    short "snack-sized" game, this one works quite well. Its general
    solidity (in comparison to much of what is produced nowadays)
    testifies to the undeniable truth that putting together workable,
    polished IF is not easy. On the whole, John's Fire Witch is not
    especially remarkable for anything in particular it does right, a few
    clever puzzles aside, but especially for a first effort, it deserves
    recognition for the many things it avoided doing wrong.

    PC Executable and TADS .gam version (.zip)

    Stepwise Solution (Text)

    Walkthrough (Text)

    Journey
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #5 -- April 19, 1995

      NAME:  Journey                        GAMEPLAY:  Multiple Choice
      AUTHOR:  Marc Blank                   PLOT:  Extremely Linear
      EMAIL:  ?                             ATMOSPHERE:  Good
      AVAILABILITY:  LTOI 2 - CD ROM        WRITING:  Well Done
      PUZZLES:  Slightly less than average  SUPPORTS:  Some Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS:  Good                     DIFFICULTY:  Relatively Easy

         Journey is an extremely difficult game to classify; not quite a
    text adventure, even less of a graphic adventure, and certainly not a
    role-playing game.  Billed as a "role-playing chronicle," this helps us
    little, as it is the only one of its kind.  It is generally classified
    as one of Infocom's text games, because it uses the same interpreter as
    Zork 0, Arthur, and Shogun.
         While every other text adventure is written in Second Person,
    Journey is written in First Person, from the point of view of your own
    character, who keeps a journal of your progress through the story.
    While most text games have a parser that requires complete sentences,
    Journey's parser resembles a graphic adventure.  It lets you choose
    from a set of actions in a separate window, and even allows mouse
    support.  While the AGT Master's Edition allows one to use a similar
    parser, it is probably unique in commercially published text games.
    And ultimately, Journey must be considered a text game, as it is
    through the text rather than the graphics that the interaction takes
    place.
         Though the parser is extremely easy to use, it makes for very
    linear game play.  In most cases it is impossible to return to a room
    that you have just left.  At times the game seems more like one of
    those Adventure Game Decision Books than it does a computer game,
    though it still presents you with many more choices to be made than the
    average book does.  Still, the game allows less interaction than most
    text games do, and the graphics only partially compensate for it.  Some
    sort of sound and music capability should have been included.
         Journey's plot is a variation on that made famous by Tolkien and
    imitated many times since then.  A Dark Lord (here called "Dread Lord" )
    is wreaking havoc on the countryside and its populace, so a questing
    party is formed and sent to seek the wizard Astrix for his advice.
    After many perils, they reach Astrix who sends them on a quest to break
    the Dread Lord's power.  Since Journey is only part 1 of the Golden Age
    Trilogy, and parts 2 and 3 were never written, we don't get to see the
    Dread Lord's final defeat.
         Due to the menu system, Journey's puzzles are generally not too
    difficult, but there are some that will challenge the experienced
    gamer, and one at the end that can only be solved if you were paying
    attention earlier.
         Journey is one of several "experiments" in formatting that Infocom
    undertook around this time (some others being Nord & Bert, Beyond Zork,
    Border Zone, and of course the infamous Infocomics).  This is one of
    their less successful attempts.  The game is fairly enjoyable to play
    by itself, makes a nice change of pace, and presents the gamer with a
    new way of doing things to try to assimilate, but ultimately the
    reduced interaction, and the difficulty of doing challenging,
    interesting puzzles with this parser would have made a whole line of
    such games rather less interesting.  The moral:  play Journey and have
    a good time with it, but don't feel too bad that the series was never
    continued.

    Solution (Text)

    A Journey Into Xanth
    From: Christopher E. Forman <ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #8 -- February 5, 1996

     NAME:  A Journey Into Xanth                  PARSER:  AGT Standard
     AUTHOR:  Neil Sorenson                       PLOT:  Quite linear
     EMAIL:  None Given                           ATMOSPHERE:  Well-adapted
     AVAILABILITY:  IF Archive                           WRITING:  Prosaic, with good
                                                    spelling but poor grammar
     PUZZLES:  Easy, typical, but plot-related    SUPPORTS:  AGT Ports
     CHARACTERS:  Nicely developed                DIFFICULTY:  Easy - Medium

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

    AGT files with PC Executable runtime (.zip)

    The Journey of the King
    From: Mike Harris <M.Harris SP@G spi-bpo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #47 -- January 16, 2007

    TITLE:  The Journey of the King
    AUTHOR: Peter Nepstad
    EMAIL: petern SP@G illuminatedlantern.com
    DATE: November 26, 2006
    PARSER: TADS 2
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://www.illuminatedlantern.com/if/games/the_journey_of_the_king.html

    Peter Nepstad has based The Journey of the King on the Lord Dunsany story of the
    same name, originally published in 1906.  In the "About" file included with the
    zipped download he notes that the story is now in the public domain in the
    United States and helpfully includes a link to the story in the Project
    Gutenberg archives, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8183

    One does not need to be familiar with the story to successfully play the game.
    In fact, the author's primary purpose would seem to be to familiarize those who
    might not know the tale nor Lord Dunsany's work in general.  The titular PC
    talks to the NPCs in a menu-driven format, gradually and interactively telling
    the tale.

    One chooses to hear prophesies of various sages within the kingdom and finally
    choose among them.  During the course of this one encounters some puzzles, none
    too difficult.  It's possible to put the game in an unwinnable state by hearing
    the prophecies in incorrect order - or perhaps more accurately, I managed to get
    myself impossibly stuck a couple of times.  In any case, it's not much of a
    hardship to restart the game and replay should this happen, if one doesn't mind
    verbosity.  The story in this case served me well as a semi-walkthrough and
    hints file.

    The play itself is bug free, with no guess the verb problems.  Indeed, beyond
    "TALK TO" and "EXAMINE" there's very little else to do, with only a scant
    handful of objects available for manipulation.

    If you happen to be open to appreciating Lord Dunsany's very florid 19th Century
    writing style you'll find the game very enjoyable and actually a rather clever
    way of getting painlessly through some fairly dense prose.  The mood is well set
    and conversational menu commands, such as that to your faithful Cupbearer, e.g.
    "I would drink the wine of my Ancestors, so that I may feel more at ease" suit
    the tone of the tale.  If on the other hand you prefer your PCs to be less
    compelled by a narrative, or prefer crisper, more modern prose you'll likely not
    find the game to your taste.

    Out of 10 I give the game a 3 for simplicity and a 6 overall.

    TADS game file, cover art, and author's notes

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