#
ISSUE #38 - September 28, 2004

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

                             ISSUE #38

            Edited by Paul O'Brian (obrian SP@G colorado.edu)
                         September 28, 2004

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

    SPAG #38 is copyright (c) 2004 by Paul O'Brian.
    Authors of reviews and articles retain the rights to their contributions.

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

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

    David Cornelson: Build A Business For Interactive Fiction

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

    City Of Secrets
    Dead Reckoning (David Whyld)
    Generic New York Apartment Building
    The Hobbit
    Max Blaster and Doris de Lightning Against the Parrot Creatures of Venus
    Necrotic Drift

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

    Occasionally, I like to scan the "recently uploaded" pages of the IF
    Archive and play whatever game I find there. I did that recently, and
    the game I found was mysteriously titled "w.z5." Inhabiting the current
    American political climate as I do, I fully expected it to be either a
    scathing indictment or an indignant defense of George W. Bush. Instead,
    it turned out to be a little curiosity by Simon Scott called "Get
    Magazine. Open Magazine. Read Article." The game bills itself as an
    "interactive article," and was created as a companion piece to an actual
    prose article of the same title in the British zine God's Rude Wireless,
    which according to its website (http://www.godsrudewireless.co.uk/) is
    "distributed at no cost on the first Thursday of every month at The
    Fitzroy Tavern, Windmill Street, London."

    I've just finished reading the prose article, and I found it to be
    witty, well-informed, and generally enjoyable, which was a relief,
    because the game itself falls rather flat. Various misspellings,
    punctuation problems, and capricious newline behavior make it feel
    rushed and sloppy. Also, despite being very small, it's still a bit
    underimplemented -- for instance, it features the sudden appearance of a
    "man in a dark red suit" but can't manage to parse "man", "dark", "red",
    or "suit." Most damningly, it fails in what seems to me to be its main
    task: providing a pleasurable introduction to the medium of IF for people
    unfamiliar with it. The game hinges around conversation with a
    particular NPC, who can be prompted via keyword to disgorge reams of
    information about the history of the text adventure, but it surrounds
    this interaction with so little implementation and help text that people
    new to IF are very likely to be put off. In my opinion, effective
    newbie-friendliness requires a level of commitment and coding
    sophistication that this game doesn't demonstrate, and I'm a little
    frustrated that it's out there as an advertisement for IF, though the
    quality of the prose article does help to mitigate that feeling.

    I'm well acquainted with this frustration, and the ambivalence that
    accompanies it. It's true that IF has received some wonderful,
    high-quality publicity lately, through such venues as Games magazine and
    various reviews of Nick Montfort's book TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES. Then
    again, there are other publicity vectors that don't do such a great job,
    and in those, the most well-publicized games may not be the best ones.
    It pains me to think of people encountering substandard IF and taking it
    as the norm. I even feel ambivalent about that, though -- on the one
    hand, I love it that there are people with enough passion for IF that
    they're spreading the word to the world; on the other hand, if what
    they're spreading is poorly written, badly implemented, or generally
    unprofessional, they're not helping the cause as much as they think they
    are.

    I don't have a solution for this, except to fall back on the old First
    Amendment formulation that the answer to bad speech is not suppression,
    but rather more speech. You too can be a representative of interactive
    fiction to the world at large, and every time you show somebody the best
    of what modern IF has to offer, you help our culture understand that
    this medium is still alive and thriving. There are some amazingly
    professional games out there, and I continue to hope that those are the
    games that will receive the lion's share of whatever spotlights there
    are.

    Meanwhile, luckily for the patrons of the Fitzroy Tavern, no doubt more
    of them read the article than actually played the game. And luckily for
    me, I'm well inured to being less than comfortable about what's
    representing me -- like I said, I'm an American.

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

    From:	Ethan Dicks

    I was just reading the SPAG newsletter and I thought I'd let you know that I
    am putting the finishing touches on the long-awaited Release 13 of ZDungeon.

    There are a number of bug fixes including a show-stopper in the endgame.  If
    all goes well, I should be able to throw a copy up on the IF archive in the
    next week or two, just before the *seventh* anniversary of commencing this
    work.

    If this release tests well, I plan to release the Inform source soon
    after.

    [Wow, seven years. And I see from the newsgroups that ZDungeon version
    13 was just released a week or two ago. Congratulations! --Paul]

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

    NEW GAMES
    As usual, the pre-comp quarter hasn't yielded many new games. Of those
    I've seen announced, one is a French opus by the author of Filaments,
    and the other is a game about and for middle-school students, written by
    one of the most prominent authorities on using IF for educational
    purposes. In addition, Kent Tessman has released an exciting trailer and
    demo for his upcoming sorta-superhero opus, Future Boy!
       * La Mort Pour Seul Destin (in French) by JB
       * The Enterprise Incidents by Brendan Desilets
       * Future Boy! demo by Kent Tessman.

    AND THAT'S JUST FOR STARTERS!
    IntroComp is one of IF's best teases. The idea behind it is that you
    submit the beginning of a working, playable game. Your beginning gets
    judged with a bunch of others, and like in other comps, you can win
    fabulous prizes if you place well. The one catch is that you don't
    actually get to *claim* your prize until you finish your game, and you
    must do so within a year's time of the end of the comp. The winners of
    this year's IntroComp are:
       * 1st place: Intro to Jabberwocky, by Gregory Weir
       * 2nd place: Auden's Eden, by Tommy Herbert
       * 3rd place: Passenger, by Niall Richard Murphy
    A complete list of entrants (and all the latest IntroComp news as it
    arrives) is available at http://www.xyzzynews.com/introcomp. With any
    luck, prizes and prestige will motivate the successful completion of
    these games by next July. And if I'm really lucky, once they're
    finished someone will review them for SPAG!

    YOU STILL HAVE: NO TEA
    Astonishingly (at least to me), it's been twenty years since Infocom
    released The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. In celebration of that
    anniversary, the BBC has released a flashy new version of the game,
    where the text window is encased in a Legend-like interface with
    clickable directions and shortcuts to oft-used commands like CONSULT
    GUIDE ABOUT. It also contains graphics depicting many locations and
    inventory items, and they're even sponsoring a contest to supply the
    remaining illustrations, with the grand prize being a speaking role in
    the new Hitchhiker's radio series. The game, as well as lots of other
    nifty stuff, is at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml.

    NOW THAT'S ITALIAN!
    Roberto Grassi is the editor of Terra D'IF, Italy's answer to SPAG and
    XYZZYnews. Now, with Alessandro Schillaci, he's created the Italian
    answer to Baf's Guide -- it's straightforwardly titled "The Guide To
    Italian Adventures", and can be found at
    http://www.robertograssi.net/at/terradif/guidaifitalia/index.asp.

    MO' BETA IS MO' BETTA
    For the second year in a row, Jess Knoch has run BetaComp, the
    competition for beta-testers. The idea behind this comp is that all
    entrants receive a copy of the same game, and the ones who provide the
    most articulate, organized, and thorough beta-testing reports end up
    taking home the top prizes. Plus, the game author gets an awesome crop
    of testing reports! This year, first place went to Graham Holden --
    congrats Graham! Full details on this year's BetaComp, as well as copies
    of the game and all the bug reports, are at Jess's website:
    http://www.strangebreezes.com/if/comps/beta2004/default.htm

    THE GLORY CAN BE YOURS
    It's true that writing for SPAG won't fill up your bank account -- it's
    purely a glory position. You know, the glory of... writing reviews! For
    SPAG! Wouldn't you like to grab a little of that glory for yourself?
    To get you started down that bright road, here are ten games that I'd
    really love to see you review:

    SPAG 10 MOST WANTED LIST
    ========================
    1.  The Act Of Misdirection
    2.  Curse of the Dragon Shrine
    3.  Dead Reckoning (Nick Montfort's translation of Olvido Mortal)
    4.  1893: A World's Fair Mystery
    5.  The Enterprise Incidents
    6.  Heist
    7.  Large Machine
    8.  Narcolepsy
    9.  Redemption
    10. Return To Ditch Day

    ARTICLES-------------------------------------------------------------------

    David Cornelson has done a lot of things in the IF community: written
    some games, managed a minicomp, organized an IF website, run a server
    that hosted all kinds of IF-related stuff, and probably more that I'm
    forgetting. Perhaps his most impressive accomplishment was the way he
    shepherded both the Inform Designer's Manual and the Inform Beginner's
    Guide into paper publication, so that hundreds of us could order these
    great books directly from David or through such intermediaries as
    Amazon.com. When he approached me about writing an article on how IF can
    intersect with business, I was expecting him to draw on this experience
    to explain how a little business acumen could produce some great stuff
    for the IF community. What I got instead was something else entirely --
    an audacious and detailed proposal for creating a profitable interactive
    fiction business in today's world. Any of you readers who happen to be
    venture capitalists: take note!

    From:	David Cornelson

    BUILD A BUSINESS FOR INTERACTIVE FICTION

    Some may argue that the words "successful", "business" and "interactive
    fiction" were forever forsaken from appearing in the same sentence after
    Infocom announced Cornerstone. Some may look at Cascade Mountain
    Publishing and exclaim, "Look, even a successful IF author can't do it!"
    Some people suggest that interactive fiction is an art form that doesn't
    translate to commercial appeal. Some people suggest that failure is
    imminent if you use rec.arts.int-fiction for your business advice.

    All of those people would have good reason to say those things.

    It still doesn't prove that a successful interactive fiction business
    isn't possible. In fact, it's my belief that it is quite possible to
    build a successful interactive fiction business and that the problems or
    excuses listed above, if entirely ignored, would have no bearing on an
    interactive fiction business.

    The Infocom franchise failed for reasons that have been discussed and
    debated over the years. Comparing it to what a potential business in
    today's market would be like is pointless. Today's market is so vastly
    different from the mid-eighties that there simply is no comparison. My
    first rule for developing an interactive fiction business is that you
    must let the past die and create the environment required to make your
    business successful.

    For history's sake I'd like to mention Cascade Mountain Publishing. I
    had a very long discussion with Mike Berlyn a few years ago and without
    getting into details, CMP failed for reasons that had absolutely nothing
    to do with interactive fiction or its commercial viability. Enough said.

    Anyway, I was speaking of reinvention. In my mind, the next question is,
    "How do I define a market that will allow interactive fiction to
    succeed?" I'm not a marketing or sales expert, but it's my belief that
    markets are both discovered and created. Look at something like
    Starbuck's Coffee -- they created a market. Coffee had been around
    forever and coffee houses with it. But the inventors of Starbuck's
    Coffee created a market for their products. The development was done for
    them by the simple fact that coffee already existed and people were
    already addicted to it. If you had asked a group of coffee-house owners
    before the "Starbuck's era" what they thought made a successful
    business, I'm guessing none of their advice would fit into the business
    created by Starbuck's. Starbuck's reinvented a well-defined market and
    took it to another level.

    So the next question is, "What's next? I want to define a new market
    that will allow IF authors to publish and sell their works and make a
    buck. What crazy reinvention could possibly appeal to a wide enough
    audience to would make this even remotely possible?"

    Damn good question. I can offer one vision; there are probably many
    others. The first thing about my vision follows the reinvention theme. I
    don't believe I can release a piece of software packaged as a computer
    game marketed next to The Sims or Doom III. That isn't my market. It's
    not even close to my market. It's not even in the same universe as my
    market. Video games are to IF as SlimFast is to a balanced diet. Not to
    say that there aren't video games with IF-like qualities, because there
    are and some of them are well done. I've played Baldur's Gate II and
    thought it was well done. The problem I have with these games is that at
    some point, I have to hold a key or joystick button down in repeat mode
    in order to accomplish some task. It isn't the same as solving an
    interactive fiction puzzle. Interactive fiction simply is not gaming as
    it is understood in the current gaming market. Since that seems to be an
    undisputed truth, there is no point in trying to change that truth. It
    would be far more productive to find a square hole for this square peg.

    So the first action in your interactive fiction business plan is to
    define a new market. Where would you find people with the patience and
    skills required for an interactive fiction piece? I can think of several
    places: a bookstore, library, and/or a school. These are the places
    where I would define my market. All three of these places purchase
    software and they usually do it on a large scale. So instead of selling
    a single copy of your game to a single random buyer in a typical store,
    you sell an unlimited copy license for your software to a chain of
    libraries or schools. Bookstores are probably closer to the video game
    market, but I have thoughts on how to define a new market within the
    typical Borders or Barnes and Noble chain. I imagine a shelf-top kiosk
    of CD's. The CD sells for less than $10 USD, possibly as low as $.99
    USD.

    Another portion of my reinvention scheme is in the method of software
    development. It's my belief that good story tellers are good story
    tellers and the medium doesn't matter. What makes IF difficult to create
    and burdens the potential time-to-market variable is the medium, not the
    stories themselves. If we take good story tellers and train them to
    write their idea down in a script format, we could probably use low-cost
    labor to implement the stories more rapidly and more cost-effectively.
    Granted, there are some authors that would refuse this methodology and
    that's okay. I would develop the market and introduce the more talented
    authors later anyway. Once I got a foothold and sold a few CD's, I would
    begin to have a customer base. I could build that customer base by
    offering heavier content at a higher price.

    Another form of reinvention is an idea similar to Neil deMause's
    Frenetic Five series. If I'm developing games to be sold from a small
    kiosk next to a cash register, then offering a series of smallish,
    humor-filled games may very well be a home run. If this formula were to
    work, I could then expand into other genres such as suspense, sci-fi,
    and mystery, satisfying bookstore customers who have already established
    their interest in those genres.

    So I've defined a potential path for newly marketing interactive
    fiction. I've done a rough sketch of simplifying and speeding up the
    time-to-market efforts. The next few problems are difficult to
    articulate, but I'll try.

    I believe that none of the current IF development systems have the
    growth potential to successfully launch an IF business. They are all
    excellent systems for artistic purposes, but they all have a high
    technical competence requirement for both the author and player. This
    has to change in order to move interactive fiction into the reinvention
    phase. The game engine required for commercial development has to be
    based on a commonly available language (C, Java, or C#) and the
    resulting games must encapsulate all functionality. The latter is
    actually possible with the current development systems, but the former
    is a requirement for business reasons. If I'm to lure investors to my
    business plan, I'm going to need to sell them on the technical
    specifications as well as on the marketing model. I just don't think I
    can sell any of the current systems to a venture-capital firm. It has to
    be something they're familiar with and can verify through established
    channels.

    Some of the other requirements are simply add-ons, such as
    copy-protection schemes (debatable in today's environment) and a flashy
    and consistent front end. There are some technical ideas I would like to
    consider, but I would only do it if I were successful with the current
    form of interactive fiction. Everyone knows I have a certain zeal for
    discussing explicitly authored multi-player interactive fiction.

    Now I have the market, the new platform, and some venture capital. I
    still need some authors. What do they get out of all of this?

    I have to admit that this is where my business acumen fades and I'm
    flying by the seat of my pants. I would have to say that the first year
    or two of developing my business I would pay a flat rate for a game or a
    series of small games, garnering complete ownership forever and ever.
    The business plan has to have a steady flow of writing coming in and
    this has to be a commodity. The emotion and art has to be removed from
    this part of the business. I still think I can find talented writers to
    story-board games and have talented programmers code them and come up
    with something that will sell. I think a successful IF business would
    require access to these resources.

    Will these works be as good as an Emily Short or Adam Cadre authored
    feature? No. That's not the point. Would I try to work with an Emily
    Short or Adam Cadre on developing a workable relationship? Of course I
    would. These relationships would have to be outside of the business plan
    and based on a contractual agreement. In fact it's my belief that once I
    established the basic business model and had a customer base, I could
    then introduce quality works at a higher price, which would support
    offering advances and paying royalties. I would only do this if I first
    succeeded in building the market with a resource-based development
    business. Trying to work with the demands of authors, time-to-market
    issues, and contractual obligations would seem to me to be too heavy a
    load for my business; taking that path from the beginning is too risky.

    So I have defined a market, a development plan, writer resources,
    developer resources, and a plan to grow my customer base. This plan is
    flawed, though. It has requirements that don't exist or may are arguably
    unnecessary. Do I really need a new system? I think I do. Many people
    will argue this point. I'm okay with that. Even if one of the current
    systems were used it would have to be retooled for commercial
    development. It would have to be changed so that the freeware version
    was incompatible with the commercial products. I think in the short term
    it might be possible to leverage a current system, but in the long run,
    a new engine would be required.

    Where is this venture capital coming from? Heck if I know. If someone
    can get Mark Cuban to play a few games or Tiger Woods to play Textfire
    Golf, we might have a shot. Outside of a wealthy individual taking an
    abnormal interest in interactive fiction, I don't see any legitimate
    access to venture capital appearing.

    In any case, these are my thoughts about building an interactive fiction
    business. If you have thoughts, please feel free to share them on
    rec.arts.int-fiction so everyone can take part.

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

    Consider the following review header:

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

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

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

    From:	David Jones

    TITLE: City of Secrets
    AUTHOR: Emily Short, Secret-Secret
    EMAIL: emshort SP@G mindspring.com
    DATE: 2003
    PARSER: Inform enhanced
    SUPPORTS: Glulx interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/glulx/CoS.zip
    VERSION: Release 3

    First off, an issue that arises, I suspect, because I am using a
    curses-based text-only Glulx interpreter: the about system is horrible,
    and so are all the menus in the game. It's probably not the author's
    fault, but it's her decision to use it. I couldn't work out how to
    escape the menus and restarted (hurray for Control-C!) resolving never
    to use the menu. Maybe you'll have better luck if you're not so much of
    a stick-in-the-mud text-only sort of person. Aside from a permanent
    display of "Glk library error: set_hyperlink: hyperlinks not supported."
    it didn't affect the game play (except that I had to resist using the
    help menu).

    Be a tourist in a city you never intended visiting. Miss your best
    friend's wedding. Get a guided tour from one of the native lunatics. Get
    robbed. Become a secret agent. Flirt with a mysteriously attractive and
    secretive woman. Learn about magic. Talk to a lot of people.

    The action takes place in a city. You arrive there on you way to your
    friend's wedding after the train you are on breaks down. It is a city
    where technology is fused with magic (or should that be opposed to?).
    The city is a melting pot of oppositions (or at least, opposites): magic
    and technology; old and new; autocracy and democracy; austere and
    opulent. The implementation of the (small) city is incredibly well done.
    For immersion, I would say that City of Secrets is state of the art.

    The city bustles. People pass you by in their own conversations, they
    jostle you, they look in shop windows, they get on and off the city's
    trolley system (I haven't discovered a way to use the trolley system,
    you don't have a pass). This is all done with randomly generated
    descriptions of people and actions. The programming of this is really
    well done (and must have been a bit tedious at times); various events in
    the story will change the mood of the city and the way people act and
    react changes accordingly. A typical example is: "A cheerful lady
    wanders along, arm in arm with a well-built older fellow." I was
    initially impressed, and then, after discovering that you can't really
    interact with any of these people, disappointed. I was impressed again
    when I discovered how things changed as the story progressed. Obviously
    one can't hope to provide any accurate emulation of a city, but in City
    of Secrets we see a pretty good approximation using the technology of
    today.

    One or two things (near the beginning of the game) stood out as a little
    odd, as if programmed on the cheap. In any other game I wouldn't have
    bothered mentioning them, but because of the depth of interaction that
    City of Secrets generally gives us, my expectations were raised. There's
    no opportunity to tip the bell-hop, and "run bath" executes an entire
    bath sequence (running the water, getting undressed, waiting for the
    bath to fill, washing, getting out, etc) in one move. I was rather
    looking forward to a bit of a splash around in the bath (but evidently
    the PC wasn't).

    Your mental state is displayed in the lower window alongside the room
    description, like this: "Outside Train Station, Wandering around,
    Tired". This initially annoyed me. I found the author's attempts to make
    me feel the PC's tiredness clumsy. Or at least, displaying it in the
    status window is clumsy. Thankfully it's not the author's only device.
    Having arrived at a hotel I examine a travel brochure: "A rather pretty
    brochure with a map and color pictures. There is writing, too, but it
    just seems to swim around, thanks to your current state of fatigue."
    That kind of thing seems spot on and just what it's like to arrive in a
    place that you never intended to visit. After a while I got used to the
    display and it didn't bother me at all.

    After half-an-hour or so, I was asking myself, "What's the point?". I
    kept on playing for three reasons: 1) it's called City of Secrets, 2)
    it's by Emily Short, and 3) I had already decided to write a review of
    it. In the end, I'm glad I did. It took me 3.5 hours on my first play
    through and I played it through again only to discover that my first
    play through wasn't an entirely successful one (but it nearly was).

    It soon becomes clear that there is a conflict in the city, a conflict
    between the Illuminated Ones and the Gnostics, the city's opposing
    political/religious sects. You get to play a significant part in this
    conflict. Initially, your part starts out as a sort of investigation,
    but as you learn more about the city, its characters, and its magic it
    becomes clear that you can (and must?) step outside your initial brief.
    Most of the time, you'll be talking to people and reading things to gain
    various clues. There's a vast amount of text in this game. I have given
    up all hope of experiencing the "whole" game. I'm still discovering
    significant new things on my third play-through.

    Talking to NPCs is done with a combination of a menu system and a topic.
    You initiate a conversation with a greeting like "GREET CONCIERGE," and
    can then either choose one of the conversational options presented on
    the menu or try a new topic of conversation such as "TOPIC FOOD". It
    works fairly well. I think it provides a good balance between the
    author's obvious desire to constrain the topics of conversation and the
    player's ability to pick any topic for discussion. Sometimes you can
    lose a conversational option for apparently no good reason. EG I had
    only one option left on my conversation option card (about shopping). I
    typed "how", a non sequitur, just to see how the game would respond,
    "(You can think of nothing to say.)", and the option was removed from my
    card (now empty). Most of the people you meet are prepared to talk about
    a lot of things though their opinions on some topics, the fortress and
    food most notably, seem to be drawn from a common pool giving me the
    impression that some of the lesser characters are punched-out from the
    same die. The way the conversation progresses influences your standing
    with the NPCs; you can turn them against you or earn their favour (to
    some extent). The "AMUSING" section points to some very strange
    consequences that can happen, only one of which I found before
    completing the game and none of them I have managed since (not that I've
    tried that hard). Occasionally this conversation system stumbles;
    selecting a topic can initiate a conversation about something
    surprisingly different, but it's a forgivable minor flaw in such an
    ambitious system. You can recall your impressions of people with
    "REMEMBER CONCIERGE" which gives you a summary of what you have learned
    (mostly from other people) about the person in question. I like it.

    The writing is excellent. I had previously played, and enjoyed,
    Metamorphoses (also by Emily Short) and was somewhat put off by the
    excessively flowery language (no, I mean I was overwhelmed by a
    sumptuous filigree of syntax which sparkled with every twist and turn of
    the light that shone upon it). City of Secrets has plainer language
    wielded with the same skill. I found it a change for the better.
    Occasionally the descriptions are overwhelming -- one simply has too
    much text to read, and it sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish
    the set from the game, though I suspect that's rather the point. To my
    surprise I did find a couple of genuine mistakes: "pier" instead of
    "buttress" (correct, but obscure. Or is this a feature of North American
    English?); confusing "glassine" with "glassy" (poetic license? I hope
    not). The occasional misused punctuation mark. The very few mistakes
    don't seem to be due to lack of attention more perhaps that the writer
    is stretching herself beyond her ability. On the other hand, City of
    Secrets is a much bigger work than Metamorphoses so perhaps it is just
    down to the problem of proofreading this vast text.

    There are a couple of dream sequences. I was initially quite excited at
    the prospect of an interactive dream sequence, but they proved to be
    less interactive than I had hoped (on a level with Lurking Horror).
    They're more like slightly surreal infodumps. Still they do add
    character and they're not just dream sequences foisted upon you because
    the author wanted you to know something and couldn't think of anything
    less clumsy. They have a proper part to play in the story and are
    integrated well.

    Wandering around the city and chatting to people is quite fun and
    sometimes almost feels adventurous as you wander into increasingly
    dilapidated parts of town. There's plenty of people to talk to, and
    quite a lot of things to read (more and more text!), but not all that
    much to do (though the "AMUSING" section clearly indicates that I didn't
    even scratch the surface). Overall the game is fairly easy (which is
    intended), the puzzles being reasonably straightforward.

    I discover that there are some nice attempts to help the absolute
    beginner along. For example, if the first thing you do is press enter at
    the prompt you receive a little spiel about the prompt and simple
    instructions.

    The story branches. I haven't fully explored to what extent, but I'm
    already impressed at the different branches that I have seen. I strongly
    suspect that there are different endings (probably according to which
    faction in the city you ally yourself to), but I haven't had the
    tenacity or patience to find them.

    Jumping zorkmids! I just noticed that the download is over 6 Megabytes!
    I suppose that includes pictures (which I haven't seen as I played it on
    a text-only interpreter).

    Overall it's an excellent game. It's not a puzzle-fest; it's not
    supposed to be. It's a conversation-fest. You can chat to (and "up" to
    some extent) a large number of NPCs who are all intelligently
    programmed. The way that the story unfolds is very well done, with
    different NPCs (and some books) filling in different parts of the canvas
    with their own style. To be honest it's not my cup of tea -- I prefer
    puzzles (like Metamorphoses), but I have no problems recommending this
    game to anyone.

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

    From:	Michael Bechard

    TITLE: Dead Reckoning
    AUTHOR: David Whyld
    EMAIL: me SP@G dwhyld.plus.com
    DATE: Dec. 2003
    PARSER: ADRIFT standard
    SUPPORTS: ADRIFT interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/adrift/DeadReckoning.taf

    It's pretty tough to write a horror game effectively. More than any
    other emotion, it is hard to strike true fear into a person sitting at a
    computer comfortably playing a game. One has to really put the player IN
    the game, make them develop an affinity for the characters involved, and
    get them out of the mindset of a typical gamer (piddling around with
    every little option, restoring saved games at their leisure, etc.) Dead
    Reckoning comes close to doing just this, but not close enough.

    The game is set in the town of Morrow and leaves you, Duffy, to unravel
    the horrors that have come to roost there. You slowly uncover the reason
    why all the town's inhabitants are missing or dead while trying to
    rescue your friend Edwin from some unknown danger. The author describes
    this game as "more of a story-driven game than a puzzlefest," but I
    would categorize it somewhere in-between.

    As far as putting the player in the game, I believe Dead Reckoning
    succeeds, albeit marginally. A thorough implementation of all the
    objects mentioned in the game's text contributes heavily to the
    immersion factor. I found I could listen to and smell various things,
    even examine things that were mentioned as not being there (described,
    of course, as absent). Very nice. The evocative descriptions were well
    done too, for the most part. A nice example is:

       "Well, well, one of the living," says the corpse, its voice a choking
       rasp. As it speaks, bits of rotten skin flake off from the side of
       its face and drift in lazy spirals down to the dusty floor. "We don't
       get many living ones here anymore, do we, my brethren?"

    Sometimes, however, I got the feeling that the author was trying a
    little too hard, as in the following exchange between the player and an
    NPC:

       "I was the priest here in Morrow until... the bad things happened."
       "The bad things?"
       "Lots of bad things. An ancient evil returned to haunt us, to exact
          revenge for what we did." He shakes his head sadly.

    Quite a few things are described as "eerie" or "unsettling," when these
    kinds of feelings should be evoked from the player, not spelled out for
    them. I never really felt unsettled or afraid while playing because of
    my lack of affinity for the characters. I never cared about Duffy or
    Edwin at all during the game. Why? Because I didn't know them as
    characters, as "real live" people. Dead Reckoning tries a bit in this
    regard, unfolding bits and pieces of Duffy and Edwin's past as children
    in the course of play, but it left me wanting more. If I'm running for
    my life from some zombies, I want a reason why I should even care. On
    the other hand, some of the characterizations were done very well; I
    just wanted a little more meat to them, I suppose.

    As for getting the player out of the mindset of a gamer, the game
    succeeds. While the plot is a little linear and progress is sometimes
    blocked by puzzles, the puzzles aren't too hard (or numerous), and
    multiple endings/deaths are available. When a potential death is near,
    the game gives you fair warning about it. While some players may be put
    off by messages like, "You have a bad feeling about doing that," I
    appreciated the effort from the author to steer me towards the right
    path. Once a player dies and has to restart or restore, there's a huge
    break in mimesis. The previous message, while still breaking mimesis,
    only does so a little, and not nearly as much as restoring your game. In
    a horror game where the player's situation is deadly, this is even more
    important. I suppose one could argue that the player should never be in
    danger of dying in the first place, but that's another topic of
    discussion...

    Some other nitpicks I had with the game were a fair amount of typos and
    some small incongruencies/bugs, but they weren't that noticeable. The
    typos were, though.

    Overall, I would compare Dead Reckoning to one of the old EC horror
    comics; there are some real detailed, spooky descriptions and a nice
    zombified plot, but it leaves you painfully aware that you're "just
    reading a comic." However, this isn't really bad at all; I love EC
    horror comics, and I love horrific art in general, even if it doesn't
    scare me. Ergo, I liked this game. If it's not a truly chilling,
    engrossing piece of IF, it is a very solid, entertaining romp through a
    wonderfully realized, classic horror setting.

    Final score - 6 of 10

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

    [NOTE: The following is a review of an AIF ("Adult Interactive Fiction")
    game, and therefore contains a bit of profanity and what the TV Guide
    calls "adult situations." --Paul]

    From:	Anonymous

    TITLE:  Generic New York Apartment Building
    AUTHOR: New Kid
    EMAIL: newkid SP@G killingtime.com
    DATE: March 1999
    PARSER: TADS
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY:  Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/gna.zip

    Generic New York Apartment Building, which was written by New Kid, is a
    prime example of the limitations of the genre, and especially the
    limitations of the sub-genre AIF.

    In the story, the player assumes the role of a recently hired super in a
    generic New York City apartment building where the residents are
    parodies of television characters. The twist to this game is of course
    the fact that the super is not your average super; he's the type of
    super that you would find in a cheesy adult film. The only thing that
    this game did not have was terrible music and the line, "I'm here to
    clean your pipes."

    Your goal in the game is to make sure that all of your residents renew
    their leases, and in order to do that the player must solve problems
    that the tenants have, and also perform sexual acts with the tenants.
    The luster of the adult aspect of the game wears off quite fast due
    largely to the fact that every situation is solved with the same
    commands. These commands are (kiss, rub, lick, fuck, and then the name
    of the female organ.) Sex may be fundamentally similar from case to
    case, but surely there were different situations that New Kid could have
    come up with.

    The thing that most drew me to this piece was that it had picture and
    sound files included with it as well; it was something that I noticed
    before I noticed that it was listed as AIF. The pictures and sounds that
    were included in this piece led me to the conclusion that neither images
    nor sound belong in interactive fiction. The pictures were faked nudes
    of television characters such as Monica and Rachel from Friends (in the
    game they were referred to as Rochelle and Monique). By including
    pictures in interactive fiction, the author steals away the ability to
    come up with one's own image of the characters. The sound bites are few
    and far between, and they become so annoying that the reader almost
    wants to turn off the program. The sound bites included were: a bell for
    the elevator, a dog bark, and a large explosion sound. The annoyance
    factor from the sounds and images greatly outweighed anything positive
    they were meant to bring.

    As far as puzzle difficulty goes, the game was fairly hard for me. I am
    a rookie to the realm of interactive fiction and I played for about six
    hours before I had to resort to a walkthrough for solutions. At one
    point you're supposed to plug a fax machine in to the wall of one of the
    NPC's apartments, and I never in my wildest dreams would have thought to
    do that. Other than that the game was very straightforward. The NPCs
    would call you and tell you their toilet was broken, you go and fix it
    with a tool, and that was what went on in the game for the most part.

    Generic New York Apartment Building was an okay game to play despite its
    shallow and juvenile story; I suppose though that if you are seriously
    playing a piece of AIF that you would not really care about the story
    being too deep. New Kid could have made the game better if he would have
    left out the faked photos and annoying sounds. The repetitiveness of the
    commands, especially the sexual ones, is one of the reasons that
    interactive fiction is not advancing as fast as it could be. It is very
    tedious to come up with different ways for problems to be solved and
    challenges to be overcome, but it is what the genre needs to achieve
    greater depth. I do not think that the problem lies solely with the
    writer though, machines for IF itself need to be looked at in greater
    depth, but anyone involved with IF knows that.

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

    From:	David Jones

    TITLE: The Hobbit
    AUTHOR: Veronika Megler, Philip Mitchell
    EMAIL: ?
    DATE: 1983
    PARSER: Inglish
    SUPPORTS: Spectrum Emulator
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/spectrum/melbourn.zip
    VERSION: 1.2

    What am I doing reviewing The Hobbit? No idea. I first played it fairly
    close to when it came out in 1983 on my old faithful ZX Spectrum. At the
    time it was a major release and was probably state of the art, boasting
    a parser, NPCs that did their own things and which you could command,
    and graphics. It has significant nostalgia value for me. Make sure you
    play the 1.2 version (it has a little 1.2 on the loading screen at the
    top left). The earlier version is buggy (sometimes hilariously,
    sometimes just frustratingly) and not possible to complete. I'm playing
    it on an emulator (which makes typing a whole lot easier).

    The Hobbit is graphical and I am playing with graphics on (mostly
    because I don't remember how to switch them off). For its time, the
    graphics weren't bad. Now they're just extremely simple. In a nice
    touch, one of the graphics changes as night turns to day. Not all the
    locations are blessed with pictures, and disappointingly Rivendell,
    surely one of the most alluring places in Middle Earth, has no picture.

    The game carries on in real time if you sit around and do nothing.
    Sometimes with terminal results, which frustrates my efforts to draw a
    map as I go. The NPCs also wander about on their own, with Gandalf
    popping in and out and Thorin sitting down and singing about gold.

    The parser is surprisingly competent, understanding GET SWORD AND ROPE
    and KILL THORIN WITH SWORD. But then, it also "understands" SWORD DROP
    AND ROPE so perhaps "parser" is a term too generous. Still, it's an
    accomplished effort for its time and even in modern times is bearable.
    Although X and Z are not implemented, words can be abbreviated (I assume
    to the shortest unique prefix). So EXAMINE WARG can be abbreviated to EX
    WAR. It tries to be a little helpful, if you have the key then "UNLOCK
    DOOR" works but "OPEN DOOR" does not. There are some annoying verb
    problems: in one place SMASH works but HIT does not. The parser
    sometimes has problems with disambiguation, THROW SWORD AT GOBLIN
    eliciting the response "WHICH TING?".

    Talking to NPCs can be achieved with commands like SAY TO GANDALF "GIVE
    ME MAP" (and a lot of the time, he will.) There's neither ASK nor TELL.
    As mentioned, the NPCs wander about of their own "will" and will
    sometimes do helpful things for you, like open a door which you could
    have opened yourself. They also sometimes do not so helpful things, like
    take objects from your possession. The NPCs can carry objects and seem
    to be able to do most of the things that you can, so there's clearly a
    high level of symmetry in the world model. For example, SAY TO THORIN
    "READ MAP" elicits the response: "Thorin examines the curious map. There
    seem to be some symbols on it but Thorin cannot read them." It can be
    quite amusing to play around with this stuff (you can get Thorin to
    carry you for example) but there's rarely any point. Frustratingly, when
    do you need to interact with an NPC, and you do need to in order to
    complete the game, they can be a little bit stubborn.

    Many NPCs from the book are here: Gandalf and Thorin (but not the other
    companions), the trolls, lots of goblins, Elrond, Gollum, Dale, the
    dragon.

    Room descriptions are brief, and object descriptions are even briefer.
    The first time you enter a location its picture will be drawn if it has
    one. It will also be drawn every time you subsequently LOOK which, since
    it takes more than a few seconds to draw the picture, can be a bit
    annoying. It will also be drawn every time you get captured (which will
    probably happen a lot) -- this is outstandingly annoying. Don't expect
    to be able to examine everything because you won't be able to. Most of
    the time you can only interact with the objects essential to the game.
    For the convenience of the game designer, the distances between adjacent
    locations on the map are often wildly different. You step straight out
    of your house into the lonelands -- there is no Hobbiton or Shire -- and
    from there another step to a clearing with trolls in. It's a bit
    bizarre. Sometimes "objects" in locations are not mentioned on
    subsequent visits unless you LOOK (for example a web.) Also, the
    description of a location when you first visit it and the (briefer)
    description on subsequent visits is different, and sometimes
    sufficiently different to be confusing.

    The writing is brief, basic, and flawless in spelling and grammar. The
    opening lines, "You are in a comfortable tunnel like hall / To the east
    there is the round green door", are fairly typical of the writing
    throughout the whole game, not even attempting to emulate Tolkien's
    style (thankfully). The brief style was almost certainly forced on the
    authors by the constraints of the machines at the time (The ZX Spectrum
    has only 48 Kilobytes of RAM). The story follows the book roughly, and
    takes in the major locations and encounters described in the book, but
    none of the drama and wonder of the book is captured in the game. The
    encounter with Gollum, the spiders, the dragon are all reduced to rather
    boring events.

    The puzzles are, I think, hard. It's a little hard for me to judge the
    difficulty now, because I solved the game (with one reference to a
    walkthrough) about 20 years ago now (eek!), so when I was replaying it
    for the review I was able to draw on those memories. Several of the
    puzzles are non-obvious, and several of them are time based. Some of the
    puzzles require an element of chance (or at least perseverance). The
    game gives no feedback for attempts that are "almost right". One or two
    of the puzzles would be more difficult without having read the book.
    Some of the puzzles can be avoided or substituted, so the game exhibits
    multiple solutions (although no particular puzzle does). It's quite easy
    to die, often without warning. It's possible to enter unwinnable states,
    sometimes through your own actions, but sometimes simply because the
    random behaviour of the NPCs conspires to kill off some crucial
    character or leave you stranded in a dungeon with no-one to help you
    escape. The game is mean, unfair, and unpredictable. There is no UNDO,
    but if you're playing on an emulator then emulator snapshots are a fine
    substitute.

    There are _two_ mazes: the mountains, and the goblin caves. Thankfully,
    in each of them each location has a unique description (its exits). This
    makes the mountains not so bad to map, but the goblin caves are not only
    vast (22 locations), but the wandering goblins will capture you
    returning you to their dungeon. That, coupled with the fact that whilst
    you're drawing your map the game will insert WAITs (giving the goblins
    more opportunity to wander round and capture you), makes this segment
    really really annoying. A bug (or a useful misfeature at any rate) means
    you can kill the goblins, which is the only thing that makes the whole
    experience (painfully) bearable. Still, no one would stand for it today.
    The rest of the, quite large, map is laid out a bit confusingly, which
    makes navigation stumbling and awkward.

    Overall I can't really recommend The Hobbit except for historical
    interest. It requires a lot of patience and random inspiration to solve
    (even with a walkthrough!) and doesn't offer much in reward. None of the
    puzzles have any outstanding "Aha!" moments; one of the puzzles might
    have were it not for the fact that it's in the book. None of the
    situations are interesting or inspiring.

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

    From:	David Jones

    TITLE: Max Blaster and Doris de Lightning Against the Parrot Creatures
           of Venus
    AUTHOR: Dan Shiovitz, Emily Short
    EMAIL: Dan Shiovitz , Emily Short

    DATE: 2003
    PARSER: TADS3, I guess
    SUPPORTS: TADS3
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/mini-comps/SpringThing2003/parrots/parrots.t3
    VERSION: version 1.0 (SpringComp release)

    Max Blaster and Doris de Lightning Against the Parrot Creatures of Venus
    is a great title. This is space opera, in sexy pants. But first I should
    get a few boring things out of the way.

    This is a TADS3 game, the first one I've played, so I just had to
    compile a new interpreter, using a build system that was complicated
    enough to require configure but didn't use it (and I doubt it really
    needs to be that complicated). This does not put me in a good mood. But
    never mind, it does compile, and it does play the file. As ever, I'm
    playing without graphics. Oh yeah, another interpreter issue: on the
    interpreter I was using every time a conversation menu popped up it was
    like going into hyperspace. This is no doubt because tads3 is doing a
    graceless job of the curses screen management (it looks like it's doing
    a screen clear and full redraw. Fairly slowly). I discover BANNER OFF
    which pleases me greatly. That's the icky interpreter issues out of the
    way; I feel a bit dirty mentioning them in a review.

    As soon as I start playing my poor mood is dispelled. The humour is
    already winning me over and I've only typed 3 commands. And two of those
    were "i" and "footnote 1".

    In many ways I was reminded of Zucker, Zucker, and Abrahams. And the
    thing about them is that they never let up -- their humour is fired from
    a machine-gun. Shiovitz and Short try a similar trick, and they almost
    get away with it. The corny wisecracks, the cheesy lines, as long as it
    keeps flowing it works and it's funny. And it does flow. This
    description of your apparel is typical: "Rocket pants are, without a
    doubt, the best article of clothing ever invented. It's good to live in
    the future."

    Generally the game manages a witty banter whether you're chatting to
    your partner, solving puzzles, or just being mystified and examining
    stuff. The writing is spot on (bar a couple of minor exceptions).
    Speaking of your partner, you can play the game either as Doris or Max,
    and when they are together you can switch between them (with SWITCH TO
    MAX). Max is your typical space hero. He's sharp with a blaster, and has
    unflusterable hair. Doris is a sassy upstart agent trying to out-do Max
    (and trying not to fall for Max in a cheesy Cubby Broccoli sort of way).
    The characterisation is funny and comes across well. They're on a
    mission, something to do with Venusian birds taking over earth, blah
    blah blah.

    There are quite a few nice small touches. It has footnotes that are
    automatically numbered, so you can't tell when you missed one. It tells
    me about "oops" the first time I misspell something (maybe this is a
    standard TADS3 feature?).

    Max and Doris take different tracks through the adventure. Their paths
    are like a figure 8. They're together and the start, then they separate,
    they rejoin in the middle, only to separate again, and then rejoin for
    the finale. So, there is branching. But it's quite a shallow sort of
    branching. There are two points where being Max or being Doris is
    significant. For the first one the player has no idea that it will
    happen. You just get to follow the branch of whichever character you
    happened to be. At least for the second one you know the branch is going
    to happen, you just don't know what it might entail. The most annoying
    thing for me was that I couldn't switch after the branch point. It's not
    like a game where you have to solve puzzle A or puzzle B, because
    usually in those situations you can fiddle with puzzle A _and_ fiddle
    with puzzle B before you solve either one of them. Probably you don't
    really decide to pick one of them and solve it, it's just a matter of
    which one you solve first. In Max Blaster and Doris de Lightning Against
    the Parrot Creatures of Venus you have to pick a path before you know
    what lies on it. (Damn, that long name really puts me off my urge to
    write the title out rather than say "this game").

    The reality is very linear. Initially as I raced through the
    introduction on rails I didn't mind, it's okay for introductions to be
    linear. But the rest of the game is linear too: most of the time there
    is exactly one puzzle to solve and nothing else to do but solve the
    puzzle. The linearity is enhanced by the occasional "you can't go that
    way because it will break the design and the narrative. Really, stick to
    the path that I've laid down for you" kind of message. This linearity
    didn't really worry me until I was stuck. Now, being stuck is ordinary,
    it's the normal mode for adventure games, and in a good game I don't
    mind being stuck. But in a good game even though I'm "stuck" I will
    usually have a laundry list of (increasingly improbable) things to try.
    And there is usually the variety of being stuck at more than puzzle
    simultaneously which means I can try and solve a different puzzle.

    Coincidentally the first time I got stuck was also around the time that
    I started losing faith with the game. There was a potentially dramatic
    situation broken by a crack in the fourth wall. I found a nasty
    "[Runtime error: invalid datatypes for addition operator]". I put the
    game into an unwinnable state but I couldn't tell if it was a straight
    bug or mis-design. But it was also at this point that I noticed
    something cute: Max and Doris notice different things and, when they are
    together, have to co-operate to solve puzzles. As Max:

       >x yellow
       Well, it's a small electronic thingy. With colored stripes. Not to
       get all technical or anything.

    As Doris:

       >x yellow
       There's a large yellow stripe on the left, and then smaller red,
       black, and gold stripes next to it. That suggests it's probably a
       standard-issue networking module; this is probably in there to let
       the computer make transmissions out into the main network. It
       wouldn't be hard to pop open and disable, if one were so inclined.

    The puzzles range from the trivial to multi-hour marathons with a mondo
    sandwich machine controlled by levers and switches. In fact, some of the
    puzzles "solve themselves" by virtue of your partner solving them for
    you. In an easy game this would be no bad thing, but this is not an easy
    game. The hard puzzles are very hard (and made a little bit harder by
    buggy clueing) and they don't solve themselves. So having the easier
    puzzles solve themselves doesn't really help anyone, because if you
    can't solve those you aren't going to solve the hard ones.

    There are hints online but in at least one case they fell crucially
    short of the whole answer. Ordinarily I wouldn't have read the hints,
    but I had already won the game and was playing through on the alternate
    track to write this review (see how thorough I am?) and had whacked
    myself out with the world's most insane lever problem that rated at
    least two cups of tea. As it happened I needed to do just a little bit
    more to sneak past the guard but I wasn't up to it and looked at the
    hints, which didn't help at all. Fortunately that last bit of the puzzle
    wasn't too hard. The hints, by the way, are as witty as the game and
    well worth reading and I would say that if you want to avoid banging
    your head against a problem for 3 hours then you should read them early!

    Some of the puzzles are good, some are funny, some are lame. It's a
    pretty mixed bag. The final section includes a timed puzzle, but at
    least it's totally obvious that it's timed (so you can save) and it's
    kind of optional and not too hard.

    At a couple of points I was impressed by a Nethack-like tendency in the
    game. There is an inexhaustible supply of pills, you can take as many as
    you like (one at a time; cut-and-paste is the obsessive pill-picker's
    friend). You can leave piles of pills around in various locations. There
    doesn't seem to be an inventory limit (not that I would want a limit),
    so you can carry mind-boggling amounts of stuff. You can find all sorts
    of problems with the parser. It's amusing (if you're me) and pointless.
    And it slows the game down, but really that's my own fault for having 40
    odd pills and 30 odd novelty beak polishers.

    Another thing that struck me as being borrowed from Nethack (to be
    honest I would be surprised if the authors have had any experience of
    Nethack, but I have had lots so I often think "Oh yeah, it's just like
    how it works in Nethack") is the epistemic object descriptions. A pill
    is a "pill" when first discovered, but, when you discover that you can
    eat it, it becomes a "food pill". Similarly, a different object changes
    its initial name to become a "screen disruptor". (It's also reminiscent
    of the mongoose in Pirate Adventure.) All this nonsense with objects
    changing their descriptions is quite nice, but it is also the source of
    some unfortunate bugs. At one point I discovered that I could "show max
    the disruptor," but I couldn't show him the object that changes into the
    disruptor (it gives a runtime error, oops!)

    For the first few hours the humour was winning me over, the linearity
    wasn't bothering me, and I hadn't found that many bugs. I suspect the
    earlier parts of the game are more polished than the later parts, and as
    I played more I found more and more bugs. These were things like
    unimportant objects not being examinable, or it not being possible to
    disambiguate some object (this is a TADS thing isn't it?), or
    inconsistent choices of disambiguation. Some of them were more serious,
    like a TADS runtime error, or a crucial component in a puzzle being
    incorrectly described, or a plausible phrasing for an action in a long
    and crucial sequence not working and giving a misleading response.

    In the end the bugs wore me down and I come away from the game somewhat
    dissatisfied, despite some great writing which I found quite witty, a
    pair of appealing characters, and some interesting puzzles. I suspect
    that the game's length (7 hours of play for me on my first time through
    as Doris) meant that the quality suffered. The bug-finding and
    bug-fixing will have been spread more thinly. If I had taken a less
    thorough look then I suspect that I would have come away happier. So
    that's what I recommend to you. Play it, have a laugh, read the
    walkthrough early, and don't poke around too much. You'll have fun.

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

    From:	Sam Kabo Ashwell

    TITLE: Necrotic Drift
    AUTHOR: Robb Sherwin
    EMAIL: beaver SP@G zombieworld.com
    DATE: 2004
    PARSER: Hugo
    SUPPORTS: Hugo interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/hugo/ndrift.zip
    VERSION: Release 1

    Necrotic Drift contains all the elements you'd expect of Robb --
    bittersweet schmaltz, randomised combat, human, sympathetic characters,
    tangential epigrammatic title, brilliant squick-out humour, big
    textdumps and a streak of geek a mile wide. There are plenty of
    references to previous Sherwin games, particularly Fallacy of Dawn and
    Chicks Dig Jerks. It's his biggest and most skilful game to date.

    Big, but linear. You have an intro section (near-isomorphic to the
    Fallacy of Dawn intro), then another intro, then a run-up, and *then*
    the game proper starts. After that, you have an endgame and an epilogue.
    At most significant steps, there will be a great big textdump; I don't
    object to these too much, but they certainly add to the game's apparent
    size. Nonetheless, it plays relatively quickly; most of the puzzles are
    pretty straightforward, and the game gives you a pretty good idea about
    what you should be aiming at next. (Sometimes this is a little
    heavy-handed, as in the bit where an ally starts clearing a barrier and
    suggests you look around for items that might be useful beyond said
    barrier; generally they're pretty good, though).

    Compared to previous games of Robb's, it's much more technically sturdy;
    not too many awfully obscure puzzles, no jagged edges a betatester
    should have caught, better implementation all-round. The old problems
    are still there, though; the one item you need to use in a room is
    generally strikingly prominent, scenery objects are often very flat and
    unresponsive. Of course, the scenery is brought alive very well in room
    descriptions and so on -- it just doesn't handle interactive poking
    around too well. One or two puzzles seemed very illogical or badly
    flagged up, and I underwent a lot of frustrating death at one point
    before seeking out hints; most were along the lines of 'you just found
    this item so it must be the one for the next puzzle'. I also note that
    Sherwin has at last developed his combat system above the 'I attack, but
    miss, the skeleton! The skeleton attacks and hits me!' level that so
    thoroughly killed A Crimson Spring, albeit only to add amusingly awkward
    battle-cries. Of course, since the thing is a D&D parody, formulaic
    combat descriptions are par for the course. I doubt it'd lose much to
    audiences unfamiliar with D&D, however; everything that needs to be
    explained is explained, and there are contextual jokes but not really
    any in-jokes.

    The game managed to convey a pretty damn good feeling of the urgency of
    the situation and the trepidation about moving into unknown areas. On
    the other hand, when the annoyingly low inventory limit forced you to
    scuttle back and forth looking for abandoned items at far corners of the
    mall, this effect was lost somewhat. (This also tended to happen during
    Dramatic Confrontations, which were kind of undermined by having the
    ability to run off and come back multiple times). There's a principle in
    IF theory that, in character-driven games, descriptive writing should
    convey as much about the character and his world as about the object
    described; this game goes joyously and superbly over the top with this
    principle. This compensates for the lack of physical detail to a great
    extent. The confinement and triviality of the Mall (and the intimate
    knowledge Duffy has of it) give us a very good idea of how narrow
    Duffy's horizons are. While in FoD New Haz felt like a sprawling
    metropolis or at least a very big town, here it feels like a
    claustrophobic little dead-end.

    The multimedia works and it doesn't work. The use of images has improved
    significantly; in FoD, the images were used kind of inconsistently, with
    some inventory items having objects and others not. In ND they're
    sharper and better used. There are a great many images, they contribute
    greatly towards setting the mood and establishing characters, and it's
    obvious that a monumental amount of care and effort has gone into them.
    Some images of characters still seems a little awkward and
    obviously-posed, however. Subject-matter makes things tougher, too --
    even if you've got a multi-million CGI and modelling team behind you, if
    you're depicting the undead you've only got a one in three chance that
    it won't look ludicrous. Given that, much of this was pretty impressive,
    and where it was cheesy it was forgivable.

    The use of music wasn't as good. I found it kept fading out into
    nothing, and then when a new piece of music was triggered it'd cut in
    jarringly. I get the distinct impression that Robb, like quite a few
    other authors, is trying to use IF as a poor man's cinema; perhaps
    consciously so. The thing is, music is hard to get right with IF. Both
    are non-static media, but IF's non-static nature is interspersed with
    static blocks of reading time, particularly in this game. You'll get a
    dramatic chord and -- whoa, a zombie image! -- but you'll have read down
    three lines of text before the zombie *actually* jumps you. It's like
    watching a movie where the dialogue is properly in sync but the music is
    a few beats off. I think music has applications to IF, potentially, and
    I can see that this is more or less going in the right direction -- it's
    aimed at atmospheric background mood-setting stuff, and as such it's
    well-chosen. Those cut-ins need work, though I don't know how you'd
    manage that ideally.

    The Love Interest is, zombies aside, the real focus of the story, and
    it's handled well. It becomes pretty obvious that undead-fighting --
    much like D&D -- is a great excuse for Duffy to ignore his relationship
    crisis. The relationship stuff isn't deeply original or earthshakingly
    moving, but it's very human. It works least well, perhaps, at the more
    tender moments -- much like the protagonist's life-affirming speech to
    the demon wherein he explains why he plays D&D. Sherwin is eminently
    comfortable with crafting humour, but it feels that there's less craft
    in the heartfelt stuff. No shame in that; writing heartfelt stuff is
    hard. The typical authorial error (thinking heartfelt stuff needs *less*
    craft because it's heartfelt) doesn't look as if it's been committed
    here, but I think this is an area that could do with being addressed.
    Modern audiences have been saturated with tacky pop-culture
    representations of the subject; it's a cliche minefield. Re-used phrases
    and sentiments seethe around it. They need to be avoided like the
    plague.

    I played in tandem with Jacqueline Lott; she objected vehemently to the
    unavoidable ending. The problem I have with it is that the emotional
    guts of the piece are kept at arm's length from the player, either
    entrenched in the middle of big passages of text or as involuntary
    actions. For Jacqueline, this was annoying because you couldn't
    influence the outcome; for me, it was annoying because it made me less
    involved with the outcome and hence cared less about it. Inevitable
    outcomes are fine in my book, but the bulk of an IF story (and hence its
    major developments) should really be interactive.

    Now, I loved Fallacy of Dawn to bits, and this is clearly a better game,
    on many many levels, than Fallacy of Dawn. (Sorry for going on and on
    with the comparisons, but this game invites comparisons, plies them with
    hors d'oeuvres and wine, and then suggests an S&M orgy to them once
    they're good and drunk). So why do I feel more indifferent towards
    Necrotic? Mostly, I think, because it's not enough of a departure. We
    have crudely wisecracking geeks in a grimy, dystopic future,
    well-employed graphics, a sassy girlfriend and a crass best buddy who
    follow us about... to be honest, it feels more like a liberal remake
    than a sequel. And y'know how remakes are never looked on as fondly even
    if they're technically superior? Right.

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

    From:	Jeff Howell

    The first thing a potential player is likely to notice about Necrotic
    Drift is its size. 38MB is a huge filesize for what we've become used to
    thinking of as 'text adventures'. It's worth the download if you've got
    even reasonably fast dial-up, and anyone with broadband shouldn't even
    be thinking twice about it. Included in this package is a .pdf manual,
    presented as a copy of 'Which Witch?' magazine. It's a nice feelie, and
    although the language is needlessly colorful in parts, is good for a
    chuckle. Instructions for playing the game are included in the .pdf, and
    integrated nicely as part of the magazine.

    The game starts off fairly slowly. The opening scenes really don't mesh
    well with the rest of the game, and some of the dialogue and two of the
    main character's friends are truly unpleasant. I can see the point to
    some of what goes on here: it does establish some of Jarret's (the main
    character) personality and his situation in life. All of this is in
    retrospect, though. At the time, it just felt sort of forced,
    occasionally amusing, and largely pointless. The beginning of a game
    should grab a player's interest, not make them think "I'll give it a few
    more turns to see if anything more interesting happens." The game does
    pick up nicely, thankfully. The writing is superior after the slow
    start, and both the audio and graphical aspects, not normally seen in
    IF, add a great deal to the experience.

    At its most basic, Necrotic Drift is Survival Horror in IF style. Jarret
    can only take so much damage before the game ends, and there are a
    number of 'surprise' attacks in darkened corridors. But there's a lot
    more here than blasting everything in sight, primarily because standard
    weapons aren't in great supply. This is IF, and in IF, puzzles rule.
    There are specific ways to get past every obstacle, all very logical,
    but all requiring that the player pay very close attention. There's a
    lot to notice, many small details that the author has added that really
    add to the atmosphere of the game, and many of those are important. More
    than likely, you won't manage to get through on the first attempt, but
    that makes success that much more satisfying when it comes.

    None of the puzzles are all that difficult on a second attempt, if the
    player is paying attention, but that's not really the point of the game.
    The conversations and encounters drive what is, at it's heart, a story
    about relationships. There's as much being said here about loss, love,
    and friendship as there is about beasts that go bump in the night, and
    that's what really marks Necrotic Drift as a superior game. The plot is
    linear, and there seem to be some unavoidably tragic parts, but that's
    okay. The story is a quality one and if there's some sadness to go along
    with that, well, sometimes a bit of sorrow is necessary to make the
    happiness seem that much more valuable.

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

    SPAG is a non-paying fanzine specializing in reviews of text adventure
    games, a.k.a. interactive fiction. This includes the classic Infocom
    games and similar games, but also some graphic adventures where the
    primary player-game communication is text based. Any and all text-based
    games are eligible for review, though if a game has been reviewed three
    times in SPAG, no further reviews of it will be accepted unless they are
    extraordinarily original and/or insightful. SPAG reviews should be free
    of spoilers, with the exception of reviews submitted to SPAG Specifics,
    where spoilers are allowed in the service of in-depth discussion. In
    addition, reviewers should play a game to completion before submitting a
    review. There are some exceptions to this clause -- competition games
    reviewed after 2 hours, unfinishable games, games with hundreds of
    endings, etc. -- if in doubt, ask me first.

    Authors retain the rights to use their reviews in other contexts. We
    accept submissions that have been previously published elsewhere,
    although original reviews are preferred.

    For a more detailed version of this policy, see the SPAG FAQ at
    http://www.sparkynet.com/spag/spag.faq.

    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

               Thank you for helping to keep text adventures alive!

Click here for a printable, plain text version of this issue.