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ISSUE #22 - September 15, 2000

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

                             ISSUE # 22

               Edited by Paul O'Brian (obrian SP@G colorado.edu)
                         September 15, 2000

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

    SPAG #22 is copyright (c) 2000 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 ----------------------------------------------------

    * Dennis Jerz looks at PICK UP AX, an IF-oriented play by Anthony Clarvoe
    * Joe Barlow interviews Scott Adams

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

    Adventure
    All Alone
    Arthur: The Quest For Excalibur
    At the Bottom of the Garden
    Augmented Fourth
    The Cove
    Curses
    Dark Mage
    Dragon Resources Stories
    Dragonlord
    For A Change
    The Frenetic Five vs. Mr. Redundancy Man
    Galatea
    Guilty Bastards
    Rans
    Rematch
    Return to Pirate's Island II
    The Spatent Obstruction
    Spiritwrak
    The Town Dragon
    Winchester's Nightmare

    SPECIFICS
    =========
    Spider & Web

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

    Along about August 15, I was starting to feel mighty nervous. Two months
    had passed since the last issue of SPAG was published, and in that time
    I had received only two submissions for the next issue: Adrian Chung's
    critical analysis of "Spider and Web" for SPAG Specifics, and Nick
    Patavalis' take on "For A Change". This paucity of reviews was a new and
    worrying trend -- in all previous publishing cycles, I had received
    several reviews per month, on a fairly regular basis. Oh sure,
    submissions tended to pick up after I made the formal request for them
    on the newsgroups, and the week before the deadline was often
    submission-heavy, but I never felt before that I needed to *rely* on
    those things in order to have a publishable issue of SPAG on my hands.
    This time, though, was different. In response, I posted a rather
    desperate-sounding plea on the IF newsgroups, begging shamelessly for
    reviews and stopping just short of wondering aloud if I was witnessing
    the death of SPAG.

    I needn't have worried.

    The response to my message was truly remarkable. Greatly heartening
    numbers of people emailed me with reviews, commitments to review, and
    questions about what needs to be reviewed. Francesco Bova took on the
    entertaining project of reviewing as many games about dragons as he
    possibly could, catching in his sweep Dragonlord, The Town Dragon, and a
    couple of entries in the recent Dragon-Comp. Nick Montfort sent me an
    interesting review of Dark Mage, an 8K piece of IF written for the Atari
    2600 and allowing no more than 12(!) characters per line. Mark Musante
    offered up what may be the most thorough, funny, and complete analysis
    of an AGT game ("The Spatent Obstruction") ever to appear in SPAG. And
    of course, Duncan Stevens came through, as he always seems to, with
    lucid and articulate opinions on a wide range of recent IF.

    But there was even more! I received reviews from first-time reviewers,
    more reviews from veterans, encouragement from subscribers, and, perhaps
    most amazing, actual *articles*, completely unsolicited by me but
    offered by ambitious writers. SPAG has never been much of a home for IF
    articles, not least because for many years XYZZYNews covered that
    territory so completely and so well. XYZZYNews has been dormant for a
    little while now, but I haven't talked with Eileen about its future, so
    it may well be ready to race into action once again. Either way, I'm
    open to seeing a few more articles in SPAG, although I'd still like the
    zine to remain primarily dedicated to reviews. Certainly this issue's
    articles, Dennis Jerz's response to an IF-oriented play and Joe Barlow's
    interview with Scott Adams, were wonderful treats to receive, and I'm
    proud to include them in SPAG. If you'd like to submit an article,
    please query me first before you write it, so that I can tell you
    whether there's a place for it in the upcoming issue.

    Anyway, far from seeing SPAG wither and die, I feel like I've been
    awarded the exceptional privilege of shepherding it through an amazing
    period of strength and vitality, and that wouldn't be happening without
    the time, energy, and skill of all the writers who continue to submit
    their work to SPAG. I'm continually amazed at how much high-quality work
    is done by members of the IF community for no compensation whatsoever,
    and SPAG reviews are certainly no exception. The most wonderful thing
    about it is that everybody benefits from work freely given, and once a
    critical mass of such work is achieved, it generates its own positive
    feedback loop, encouraging others to volunteer their efforts, and
    spurring them to give those efforts a higher and higher level of
    quality.

    The purpose of this editorial, then, is twofold: First, I want to offer
    a heartfelt *THANK YOU* to everyone who has contributed to SPAG. This
    magazine owes its existence to you, and I personally appreciate your
    time and effort very deeply. Second, I'd like to offer some guidance for
    those who are interested in contributing to SPAG. One of the biggest
    questions I get is which games I want and don't want to see reviewed.
    The answer's more complicated than you might think. There *are* certain
    things I'll hesitate to accept. Naturally, games that aren't text-based
    are "out of scope" for this zine. In addition, I'd rather not have any
    more reviews of things that have been reviewed at least three times
    already in SPAG. (Luckily, this is only a handful of games -- see the
    "Issue" section of the scoreboard for which ones.) And finally, I'd like
    to see SPAG retain its healthy mix of attention to the past and the
    present. I wouldn't mind having an issue that focused on all current
    games (indeed, the annual competition issue fulfills this criterion by
    definition), but I'd be wary of putting out an issue that focused solely
    on games that were more than 10 years old. However, don't let that stop
    you from sending in a review of such a game. Even if for some reason the
    entire pile of submissions lurches towards nostalgia, I'll probably just
    put them all out in a "special issue" format and call it "SPAG Classic"
    or some such.

    Lest I appear too negative, let me hasten to add that outside those two-
    and-a-half caveats lies a universe of games. If you're still at sea as
    to which game to review, I'll always feature ten games that I'd really
    like to see reviewed in the SPAG 10 Most Wanted list. Beyond that, any
    and all works of IF are eligible for review, and I'll be delighted to
    get well-written, intelligent reviews of even the most forgettable
    games. SPAG 23 will be the annual competition issue, so I'll be looking
    eagerly for good, thorough reviews of Comp games, and will still happily
    accept reviews of non-comp games for SPAG 24. Oh, and reviewers, one
    more piece of advice: you don't have to wait until I announce a plea for
    reviews on the newsgroups. I'll accept them any old time.

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

    From: James V. Anderson

    I'm glad to see that the text adventure movement is alive and thriving!

    I was an avid fan of both Scott Adams' text adventures and Infocom's in
    the 80's--played on my trusty Atari 800xl... I appreciate the service
    your community provides.

    I have a question: I would like to write my own interactive fiction
    titles. What is the best program used to do this? Please send me any
    Url's or programs to get me started.

    [James, the first place I'd suggest you look is the raif (rec.arts.int-
    fiction) FAQ. It's at http://www.davidglasser.net/raiffaq/. That FAQ
    will tell you not only about IF creation systems (in Part 4,
    "Programming IF"), but also about lots of other nifty things available
    on Usenet and the web. --Paul]

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

    YOHO, YOHO, IT'S BACK TO PIRATE'S ISLAND WE GO
    Scott Adams, one of the forefathers of text adventuring, has returned to
    the form at long last with a new game, "Return to Pirate's Island 2".
    Daringly, he's selling it commercially for $19.95. Check his website at
    http://www.msadams.com for information on the game, blurbs from users,
    and lots of other fun Adamsy stuff. Speaking of fun Adamsy stuff, we not
    only have a review of RTPI2 in this issue, but Joe Barlow has also
    contributed an interview with the man himself!

    NEW GAMES
    Scott Adams wasn't the only one putting out original IF over the past
    few months. New game releases have been a little less than usual, no
    doubt because many authors are working diligently on writing and testing
    (I hope) their competition games, but we still saw some noteworthy
    announcements:
       * All Alone by Ian Finley
       * Rematch by Andrew Pontious

    SOMETHING ABOUT LEVEL 9
    Many players, especially those who lived in the UK and Europe during the
    80's, wax nostalgic about the classic works of IF produced by Level 9,
    games like Knight Orc, Silicon Dreams, and Gnome Ranger. One of the
    unique features of Level 9's games was that they often included a
    novella-length piece of static fiction to set the mood for the game,
    introduce the setting and characters, and add a handy bit of copy
    protection. Now Jeremy Alan Smith has gathered all those novellas into
    one place, along with several other pieces of game-related static
    fiction -- it's the Retro Reading web site at
    http://members.netscapeonline.co.uk/jeremyalansmith/level9/. In
    addition, the level 9 novellas have been uploaded to GMD and are
    available in the directory if-archive/level9/novellas.

    A TOAST... TO MELBA! ER, MARK!
    Why is it that the sillier the premise of a mini-comp, the more
    successful that mini-comp tends to be? Hmmmm... Well, who cares? Let's
    play games about toasters! Yes, Mark Musante (who incidentally makes his
    debut as a SPAG reviewer in this issue) took it into his head one day to
    organize a mini-competition whose central theme was the humble toaster.
    The only rule was that the game had to feature a toaster, and that the
    toaster "should have a lever on it (to push down the bread) and a slide
    or dial to set the toastedness to." From this simple concept arose a
    dizzying array of games, all of which are available on the
    toaster-comp's home page at
    http://www.ministryofpeace.com/if/toaster-comp/, or on GMD at
    if-archive/games/mini-comps/toaster.

    BEHIND THE PROMPTS: DITCH DAY DRIFTER
    For those of you who played Mike Roberts' seminal game "Ditch Day
    Drifter" and wondered about things like the history of Ditch Day and how
    the term "stack" came about, now you can read an essay by Roberts
    himself, expounding on that very topic. Neil Cerutti has obligingly made
    this essay available to the world at
    http://homepages.together.net/~cerutti/ditchday/history.html. Why not
    cut classes one day and read it?

    WE NEED MORE REVIEWS... THE MORE, THE BETTER. YOU DIG?
    As always, I'm providing this helpful list for those who really want to
    review something, but don't know where to start. Also as always, this
    list is arranged alphabetically, not by priority!

    SPAG 10 MOST WANTED LIST
    ========================
    1.  Above and Beyond
    2.  The Adventures of Helpfulman
    3.  Bad Machine
    4.  Crobe
    5.  Dangerous Curves
    6.  Dr. Dumont's Wild P.A.R.T.I
    7.  Gateway 2: Homeworld
    8.  The Mulldoon Legacy
    9.  Toaster-Comp games (any, some, or all!)
    10. Westfront PC

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

    It's quite rare that SPAG features articles, but this time around, two
    opportunities presented themselves, and they were simply too good to
    pass up. The first article is by Dennis Jerz, an Assistant Professor of
    English at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire who has an abiding
    interest in IF. Dennis sent me this review after reading the script for
    PICK UP AX, a play by Anthony Clarvoe that mines the metaphorical
    potential of IF as a medium and as a cultural artifact.

    From: Dennis G. Jerz

    PICK UP AX (1990), by Anthony Clarvoe (Broadway Play Publishing, 1991;
    70pg; about $8).

    PICK UP AX is not interactive fiction at all; it is a three-character
    stage play, set in Silicon Valley around 1980, in which the characters
    play an "Adventure" clone. Much as Shakespeare might allude to mythology
    or appeal to floral symbolism in order to make a point about human
    nature, playwright Anthony Clarvoe uses IF as a vehicle to show the
    audience who his characters are and what they want out of life.

    Those who are familiar with Brenda Laurel or the Oz Project will already
    know that theatre and IF share some common ground: both are about what
    happens to YOU as you sit in the theatre or type at the keyboard, rather
    than what has happened to somebody else (as is the case with narrative
    prose). According to Clarvoe, "The action is driven by struggles for
    power fought out through language" (ix).

    The play was first produced in San Francisco in 1990, and (according a
    blurb on the book) was anthologized in "Burns Mantle Best Plays
    1989-90," which suggests that the American Theatre Critics Association
    thought highly of it. Shortly afterwards, Clarvoe was
    playwright-in-residence at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in
    Washington, D.C. I learned of this play a few years ago, when my wife
    mentioned that she had seen it at a Dallas-area community theatre around
    1990. An Internet search shows that it is still being performed here and
    there; go see it if you get the chance. In the best tradition of Harold
    Pinter, the dialogue is rich with shifting allegiances, language and
    power games, and (pause) tense moments.

    To recreate the feel of 1980, the script calls for a box of 5-1/4" disks
    and sound clips from the likes of The Rolling Stones and Led Zepplin.
    Fans of such pop-culture treasure chests as MST3K, Pop-up Video, and the
    Shatner-as-Shatner comedy Free Enterprise will enjoy the casual
    references to Star Trek, Star Wars, Lost in Space, How the Grinch Stole
    Christmas, et al. [Not to mention the fact that all three characters are
    named after members of the Stones. --Paul] The script calls for only
    three characters, but plenty of lighting and sound effects; these
    factors would make it an excellent choice for a black-box drama student
    project. Overall, PICK UP AX is worth reading (or attending, or
    producing) not merely for its IF references, but because it is a
    well-written, funny, and thought-provoking treatment of this vanished
    era of Silicon Valley history. In the hands of a skilled director and
    accomplished actors, a production could be very satisfying.

    Explicating the play's two IF scenes will necessitate a few spoilers,
    but I shall give away neither the ending nor the major plot twists that
    precede it. Keith is a 27-year-old computer nerd who tries to think as
    little as possible about the real world. The play opens with Brian, the
    same age, but more business-minded, realizing that a critical business
    deal is collapsing. Keith, meanwhile, describes a booby-trap that he
    sprang on a reckless player during a recent D & D session. Even though
    Brian has more serious matters on his mind, he is nonetheless impressed:
    "You run a mean dungeon, Keith." Keith's response to the crisis is to
    boot up the computer, presumably to work, but in actuality, to immerse
    himself in IF:

       (KEITH taps a few keys and waits for a program to boot up.)
       BRIAN: That's my boy. (BRIAN comes around to read over KEITH's
          shoulder.) "You are standing in a forest clearing near a small
          stone cottage...." Keith, you're playing Adventure?
       KEITH: Different game, same idea. It's where I used to get away to
          think.
       BRIAN: Exploring an imaginary maze?
       KEITH: Some people pace.
       BRIAN: Okay, whatever breaks you out of the slump. (9)

    Brian immediately recognizes what Brian is doing on the screen. He has
    obviously had some exposure to "Adventure," since he mentions it by
    name. Some quibbles: 1) considering how close these two men are, I find
    it a little surprising that Brian doesn't already know the title of his
    friend's favorite game -- unless, of course, this is a part of Keith's
    life that he has not shared until now; 2) Brian shouldn't have had to
    guess what the game was called, since the title would almost certainly
    have been printed along with the opening text (although it is certainly
    plausible for an IF game to lack the usual title page). From a
    theatrical perspective, however, having Keith explain the game to Brian
    is a convenient (and necessary) plot device; the playwright wants to
    make sure that the audience will understand the nature and purpose of an
    IF game.

    Brian describes IF as "[e]xploring an imaginary maze," an assessment to
    which Keith (and playwright Clarvoe) seems to assent, although plenty of
    RAIF netizens will have a problem with that definition. Since Keith is
    both a dungeon master and a software genius, it is sensible to wonder
    whether he is actually building his own IF game. He might, of course be
    exploring his own maze, but the dialogue suggests that he is merely a
    player.

    The scene continues, with Brian resisting Keith's invitation to try the
    game.

       BRIAN: I've hated this past-time since high school.
       KEITH: You'll get it one of these days. Every time they kill you, you
          get right up again. Come on, it's highly educational.
       BRIAN: Educational, if we did business with swords, I'd learn all
          kinds of useful stuff.
       KEITH: Help me, Obi-wan Kenobi, you're my only hope. Help me, Obi-wan
          Kenobi, you're my only hope. Help me, Obi-wan--
       BRIAN: Keith! I'm in a crisis here! Okay. Maybe I haven't made it
          clear. This company, legally, is a person. Right? A character, like
          in Dungeons and Dragons? Out there, other people are fighting our
          character. Hack and slash. They're trying to kill it, and if they do,
          it'll never get up again. . . . If the company dies, you and I and
          your bright ideas go on down to scrapheap town. Now do you see where
          we are?
       KEITH: We are standing in a forest clearing near a small stone
          cottage. (9-10)

    The play presents Brian as Keith's protector and father figure, somewhat
    like Obi-Wan; yet in the world of games, the situation is reversed:
    without Keith's guidance, Brian is powerless -- as we shall see in a
    moment. But first, another quibble: PICK UP AX is "an historical play
    set in 1980, give or take a year or two" (ix). If Brian is 27 in the
    year 1980, he would have been around 20 when Willie Crowther created
    Adventure. It is therefore unlikely that Brian could have "hated this
    pasttime since high school" -- unless he was in high school at 20, or
    unless he is not referring to interactive fiction when he says "this
    past-time." He may mean that he dislikes computer games in general, but
    elsewhere he describes meeting Keith in an arcade; further, he is a
    regular D & D player. In light of these details, Brian's dislike of
    interactive fiction seems contrived, although it does give Keith and
    Brian a reason to talk about IF.

       (Pause. BRIAN looks at the screen.)
       BRIAN: "You are standing in a forest clearing near a small stone
          cottage. Suddenly a dwarf carrying a stone ax runs out of the woods.
          He drops the stone ax, opens the cottage door, runs through, and
          slams the door." Okay. Go through door?
       KEITH: You sure you want to do that?
       BRIAN: I hate it when you say that! Leave forest clearing, go to Taco
          Bell? I don't know.
       KEITH: What do you have?
       BRIAN: A clearing, a cottage, a door, a disappeared dwarf.
       KEITH: A stone ax.
       BRIAN: Aha. Pick up stone ax.
       KEITH: It doesn't know "pick up." Try "get."
       BRIAN: You see? Complex, exotic, pathetically limited. "Get stone ax.
          Enter." Okay. "The stone ax says, >Command me, O Master.'" Now we're
          happening.
       (Blackout)

    Brian may simply be one of those people who doesn't "get" IF; but more
    specifically, the scene quoted above shows Brian's frustration with the
    parser. We have already seen that Brian is a talker, not a doer -- he
    makes telephone calls, stages a press conference, and delivers boardroom
    speeches. Recall that Clarvoe described the events depicted in this play
    as "struggles for power fought out through language." Brian's dislike of
    the computer game suggests that, rather than adapting his methods to fit
    the requirements of the system, he resents the system for not responding
    to his preferred methods. After Keith manages to direct his attention to
    the magic weapon, he seems more enthusiastic; but without the advice of
    a human guide, Brian would rather "Leave forest clearing, go to Taco
    Bell." (Note: The title of the play, "PICK UP AX" would not be
    understood by the parser running Keith's game -- Brian must rephrase his
    command because "It doesn't know 'pick up.'")

    Keith says that he turns to his adventure game in order to "get away"
    from his problems; thus, his suggestion that Brian play the game too may
    seem like an effort to cheer up or relax his friend. Nevertheless, the
    virtual lesson of the ax in the forest clearing teaches an important
    real-world lesson: don't venture into unknown territory unless you are
    well armed. Since Brian has already likened the world of corporate
    politics to a different kind of game (D & D), the symbolism is clear and
    effective.

    The lights go out immediately after the magical ax offers its services;
    when the lights come up again, Mick enters. He knows nothing about
    computers, yet he recognizes that executives at all the other companies
    -- including those founded by former members of Keith and Brian's D & D
    group -- are making under-the-table deals. While Brian sees Mick as
    another kind of magical ax, Keith seems to recognize that Mick -- a
    survivor and a problem-solver who is skilled at reading and manipulating
    his surroundings -- also has all the attributes of a successful
    role-playing character. He puts his suspicions to the test:

       KEITH: Well, as long as it's booted up.... Do you know this?
       MICK: (Reading the screen) "You are standing in a forest clearing."
          What is this?
       KEITH: Sort of a game. What would you do?
       MICK. Get the ax, go through the door. So?
       (KEITH looks at MICK)
       (Cue up: Wild Thing)
       (Blackout)

    Whereas Brian uses language to postpone or work around problems, and
    thus distracts himself from self-preserving actions (such as getting the
    ax in the first place), Mick thinks in precisely the same blunt,
    pragmatic, problem-solving terms that the game demands.

    While the second act does not return to IF again, Keith does find two
    additional ways to apply to the real world the mastery he has achieved
    over the gaming world. One method is the "mood room" -- a corner of
    Brian's office, consisting of sensors that measure a person's vital
    signs, a computer that translates the vital signs into emotional data,
    and a multimedia system that produces an assortment of theatrical
    effects (light, sound, fog, etc.) based on the sensory data. In an
    earlier scene, Keith had imagined using this system for a high-tech
    theme park: "a building full of offices like this, or a labyrinth of
    cubicles, all in motion, each with a different character, it would be
    like -- think about it -- it could be like Dungeons and Dragons. It could
    be this paradise" (13). While Keith desires yet another escapist
    fantasy, Brian sees its potential as a consensus builder that could aid
    corporate negotiations. Mick is skeptical, since he says he already
    knows how to read people's body language and get them to do what he
    wants; further, he has a trick of pretending to be enraged in order to
    gain power in business negotiations ' a "mood room" would actually cause
    him to lose power. Once again, the playwright uses a technological
    artifact to illustrate and comment upon power relationships acted out on
    the stage.

    The second method by which Keith applies the lessons of the gaming world
    involves melding his own software genius with Mick's tactics. I won't
    say anything further on this subject, because that would give away the
    ending. I'll just say that, after reading this play, I now look very
    differently at one of the icons on my desktop.

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

    Our second article in this issue is an interview with Scott Adams,
    author of games like "Adventureland", "The Count", and the Questprobe
    series. Adams is one of the early pioneers of interactive fiction, and
    has recently come back to the genre with "Return to Pirate's Island II,"
    reviewed in this issue. And in case you're wondering, no, he doesn't
    draw "Dilbert."

    From: Joe Barlow

    "YOHO" Strikes Again! -- The Second Coming of Scott Adams

    [Few interactive fiction authors are as well-known as Scott Adams, the
    creator of "Adventureland" and more than a dozen other classic two-word
    parser games. During the late-seventies and mid-eighties, the software
    charts were dominated by the works of Adams and the company he founded,
    Adventure International; unfortunately, the game-buying public's gradual
    shift toward action games forced the company to close its doors in 1985.
    August 20th marked the release of Adams' "Return to Pirate's Island II,"
    his first text adventure in over fifteen years, and Mr. Adams was kind
    enough to talk to SPAG about his new game, his many fans, his current
    whereabouts, and his thoughts on I.F. in general.]

    Q: Hi, Scott. So tell us, what have you been doing since Adventure
    International closed up shop?

    A: Well, for three years I worked at a company called SDG (Software
    Design Group) in Orlando, where I designed a 4gl language for use in the
    insurance industry. For the last twelve years I have been working at
    Avista, Inc. in Wisconsin as a senior programmer. I mostly create
    Windows C++ applications for Fortune 500 firms, but I've also done work
    in embedded systems for avionics.

    Q: "Return to Pirate's Island II" is the first Scott Adams adventure to
    hit the market in over fifteen years, and it's already earning high
    praise from many players. What prompted you to create the game, and why
    did we have to wait so long for it?

    A: The combination of closing a business after eight years, going back
    to work as a full-time programmer, and my divorce all helped to abort
    any interest I had in being creative. Then I remarried, moved and
    settled down, and life didn't look so bad any more! It was time to see
    if the creative juices still flowed.

    Q: How long did it take you to write the game?

    A: I started working on "RTPI2" around 1995 or so. [There were] a couple
    of false starts while I tried to decide whether to build on previous
    BASIC source code or do all new work in C++. After starting in C++, and
    realizing that it would be a long time before I could actually start
    writing the game, I switched to an old code base and started updating
    that instead.

    Q: Intriguing! Does this mean that "Pirate's II" is actually an aborted
    adventure that was recently completed? I was under the impression that
    it was a completely new project.

    A: I actually meant the engine itself. "RTPI2" is an evolution from a
    previous two-word parser game that was released only for the TI-994/A.

    Q: Tell us more about the development of the game.

    A: "RTPI2" was a part-time project over the years. Finally in 1998 I
    took some vacation time and made a major advancement on the game. Then
    work and life intervened and the game sat again. In the fall of 1999 I
    started putting some serious time in on it. I also started a beta test
    group from fans who have written me over the years (many hundreds and
    hundreds of emails!). I actually hoped to finish by winter of 1999, but
    one of the beta testers, Andrew, opened my eyes to the less than stellar
    quality of the text and interface, and, facing the music, I decided to
    do it right. This took another 8 months but at least I had something
    worthwhile.

    Q: How did it feel when you were done? Were you wary of releasing a new
    game after such a long absence from the adventure scene?

    A: I was very nervous. I felt sure it would be bad-mouthed for being an
    old out-of-date text adventure game. Then the emails started coming in,
    and I felt a great weight lift. People were playing it and enjoying it!
    What a wonderful feeling.

    Q: Is "RTPI2" a one-shot deal, or will there be additional Scott Adams
    text games in the future?

    A: If enough fans bug me, I'll do another. Otherwise I'm not sure yet.
    :)

    Q: You mentioned that you've received "hundreds" of pieces of fan mail
    over the years, and that you assembled your beta-testing team from this
    pool of correspondents. What has your in-box been like in recent years?

    A: I've received an average of 4-5 pieces of fan mail per week since
    1995 or so. That's another reason I wrote a new game. So many people
    were asking when I was going to do something! Another interesting side
    note is the high number of emails I have gotten in the last five years
    from people who say they are in the computer field one way or another
    because of my games. There are a number of present day (some very well
    known!) game designers who have thanked me for my influence on their
    career choice!

    Q: Do you still get a lot of requests for hints now that you've
    generously released your "classic" adventures as freeware?

    A: Most of the hint requests I get now are from people who have not
    downloaded the classic games hints. "RTPI2" has a built-in hint system,
    and so far only one person has written for a hint.

    Q: I don't recognize the "RTPI2" software interface. What's it called,
    and why did you choose to program the game with this system, rather than
    an established platform like Inform, Tads or Hugo?

    A: The engine I am using is the SAGA [Scott Adams Grand Adventure]
    system, which I developed. There's more info about it on my website
    (www.msadams.com), in the FAQ section. I used SAGA because I knew it,
    and developed it long before TADS and INFORM. I can easily expand/update
    it as I need to, which I did in "RTPI2."

    Q: You mention on your website that you are considering the possibility
    of releasing the SAGA game compiler as shareware. With so many game
    systems (Tads, Hugo, Inform, Alan, etc.) already available as freeware,
    do you think there is a market for a purchasable game creation engine?
    Does SAGA offer programming features that aren't available anywhere
    else?

    A: It's a totally different style. It's more compact than the 'C' style
    languages like Inform. I also think the Scott Adams name does add value
    to the product. I do not know whether SAGA will be well received as a
    game creation system, and I am not totally sure yet if I'll release it
    or not.

    Q: There's been much debate on the interactive fiction newsgroups about
    whether text adventures will ever be commercially viable again; indeed,
    the only modern publisher of commercial interactive fiction, Mike
    Berlyn's Cascade Mountain, closed its doors after shipping only two
    games. Yet here you are, selling a new adventure on your website. How
    are sales? Are they meeting your expectations?

    A: The game has only been out for one week at the time of this writing,
    and actually they are. But perhaps I simply have low expectations!
     One nice aspect of web publishing is that my overhead and
    production costs are cetainly low! Of course, so is my exposure, since I
    have no retail shelf space. It is amazing that for a long time the best
    selling game in the country was "Deer Hunter" and then later, "Who Wants
    to be a Millionaire?" Neither of these really got the average gamer very
    excited at all!

    Q: Speaking of gamers and excitement, I understand that one of the
    projects you were working on at the time of Adventure International's
    demise was an "X-Men" game. How far into the development process did you
    make it before the plug was pulled?

    A: Preliminary design of the game and some playability. It was to be a
    very special maze and, once done, the shape of the maze would be part of
    the game's final puzzle.

    Q: With the recent "X-Men" film (and the nation's subsequent "X-Mania"),
    have you considered releasing the unfinished game to the Interactive
    Fiction archive, as a historical interest piece?

    A: Since I no longer have the license with Marvel, I unfortunately can't
    do this.

    Q: "X-Men" would have been the fourth installment of your Questprobe
    series, a collection of games based on Marvel Comic superheroes like
    Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk. How successful were these games in
    relation to your other adventures?

    A: They were popular. The comic tie-in was good for sales. In general,
    though, my other adventures sold more. But this may due to Commodore
    taking on the publishing rights of the games and then not following
    through at all. They had to pay both Adventure International and Marvel
    a large fee because of their failures.

    Q: How did the Questprobe series come about in the first place? Was
    Marvel's head-honcho Stan Lee a fan of your work? Were you a fan of his?

    A: I met Stan only once, though I always enjoyed both Marvel and DC
    comics. I thought it really neat to be able to write adventures for
    Spidey and the rest. At one point I was receiving every comic Marvel
    published, and I read them all. Most of my dealings with Marvel were
    with a marvelous fellow by the name of Joe Calamari, who was actually
    running things. He was always looking for good tie-ins for Marvel
    products. He had a big closet full of tie-in samples that he liked
    giving out to people.

    Q: Forgive me for bringing this up, but I simply have to know: an
    oft-repeated rumor has it that you were something of a workaholic back
    in the Adventure International days -- so much so that your wife once
    baked all your floppy discs in the oven to force you to slow down! Clear
    it up once and for all: is there any truth to this so-called "oven"
    story?

    A: Alexis, my wife at the time, did hide my disks in an oven and
    threatened to burn them unless I stopped programming so much. Like many
    programmers, I tend to tackle a problem and not want to let go of it
    until it is solved! One idea was to let her try and write a game with
    me. The result was "Voodoo Castle." Many of the elements in that game
    came from her, though I actually wrote it.

    Q: What's your procedure for designing a game? Do you have everything
    mapped out in advance, or do you make it up as you go along?

    A: I first pick a theme. I then put in locations and items that fit the
    theme. I then start making puzzles with the items or locations I have. I
    also like to let others play-test my game and see how they react in the
    environments I create, and whether the game can handle things that they
    may want to do. I include a few "signature" type things, too. One
    example is that you can almost always dig somewhere in my game and find
    something. I also want my games to always be G-rated, with no violence
    or profanity. I have had many parents tell me they appreciate a game the
    whole family can play together. I try really hard to make my puzzles
    logical and self consistent.

    Q: Do you enjoy playing text adventures now? Are there any contemporary
    I-F games or writers you particularly like?

    A: I actually haven't played any text adventures since Zork. I am always
    afraid of accidentally copying puzzles or ideas.

    Q: One final question: you're widely considered to be one of the
    founding fathers -- or at least a "popularizer" -- of text adventures,
    as yours were some of the first on the market; indeed, Adventure
    International was, according to some reports, the industry's first major
    computer game publisher. Does it surprise you to learn that these games
    are still so popular today?

    A: People haven't changed much in that time. Readers still enjoy the
    works of Mark Twain, and he wrote over 100 years ago. No, I'm not really
    surprised that people can still enjoy my games.

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

    Consider the following review header:

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

    When submitting reviews:  Try to fill in as much of this info as you can.
    If you choose, you may also provide scores for the games you review, as
    explained in the SPAG FAQ. The scores will be used in the ratings
    section.  Authors may not rate or review their own games.

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

            ftp://ftp.gmd.de:/if-archive/magazines/SPAG/
     and at http://www.sparkynet.com/spag

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

    From: Alex Freeman

    Name: Adventure
    Author: Willie Crowther
    E-Mail: I don't know
    Date: Mid 1970s
    Parser: Two-word
    Supports: A lot
    Availability: Free
    Version: Original 350 pts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Characters: 0
    Puzzles:    1.8

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

    From: Duncan Stevens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From: Walter Sandsquish

    NAME: Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur
    AUTHOR: Bob Bates
    DATE: 1989
    PARSER: Infocom Advanced
    SUPPORT: Z-Machine
    AVAILABILITY: Secondhand Retail/Auction (Out of Print)
    URL: Possibly
    VERSION: Release 74

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

    Yeah.

    Remember ... uh, remember ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    But everyone should take a look at the dragon.

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

    From: Francesco Bova

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From: Duncan Stevens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From: Duncan Stevens

    TITLE: The Cove
    AUTHOR: Kathleen M. Fischer
    E-MAIL: mfischer5 SP@G aol.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/Cove.z5
    VERSION: Release 3

    The growing trend away from puzzle-based IF toward--well, toward
    non-puzzle-based IF, which has taken a variety of forms--has meant that
    an author's ability to convey a scene has become more important. IF fans
    have always put a premium on good writing, of course, but in the era of
    puzzle IF the point was generally to set the scene and get out of the
    way; the writing in many canonical IF games--Zork I and Planetfall, for
    instance--was distinctly on the terse side. Now, when simulation is more
    prized, writing that does more than convey the basic relevant
    information is needed, and Kathleen Fischer's The Cove, an example of IF
    whose setting is the raison d'etre rather than an excuse for some
    puzzles, nicely illustrates the importance of effective writing.

    The Cove won Best Landscape in Marnie Parker's Art Show in the spring of
    2000, and the landscape really does take center stage: there are only a
    few locations, but all of them are packed with things to experience. In
    fact, your score increases not with problems solved, but with things
    seen (or heard, or smelled, or felt), though exactly which ones give you
    a point and which don't feels rather arbitrary. Interestingly, much of
    the interaction is purely sensory--there aren't many objects to
    manipulate, and you can't really affect your surroundings much, though
    you can certainly be affected by them. The scene itself--a seaside
    cliff, a beach, a cave--is familiar, but there are enough unexpected
    elements--a sea lion, an otter, tidal pools--to make it feel fresh, and
    the game oozes attention to detail. An example:

       Long ribbons of seaweed strewn across the shore mark the leading edge
       of the surf at a quarter of the way up the beach. Additional clumps,
       dried and full of sand, lie tangled amongst the rocks at the base of
       the cliffs -- a warning of the sea's intentions.

       >examine clumps
       Ripped from their holdfasts during heavy seas, the long strands of
       seaweed are pushed along by wind and tides until they are at last
       flung up upon the shore. There they form tangled mophead heaps, a
       haven for the small flies, crabs, and the like who feed upon the
       decaying fronds.

    Seaweed you might expect in a beach scene, but not every game would
    think to point out what sorts of things eat the seaweed. (Okay, flies
    don't really eat the seaweed as such, but that's a minor detail.)
    Likewise, the note that the placement of the seaweed indicates the
    high-water mark is an effective detail, even if the "warning" is a touch
    more obvious than it needs to be. Again, it's not the sort of thing that
    rewards extensive poking and prodding--there's nothing you can actually
    do with the seaweed. The point is to appreciate the details and recreate
    the scene in your imagination, and the game does a good job of giving
    your imagination plenty to work with.

    The writing, likewise, is quite good. There are some misspellings and
    mechanical errors that prove a little distracting--arguably more so than
    in your average game, because the descriptions aren't here to be
    skimmed, as they sometimes are. But there are also lots of effective and
    well-placed images--the "tangled mophead heaps" of seaweed above are one
    example, as is this: "A long legged plover chases after the waves,
    pecking at the sand as it goes." The scene is littered with small but
    vivid details--the cliffs are described as "fractured granite," for
    instance--and the author takes care to use verbs rather than adjectives
    whenever possible, usually a sign of better-than-average writing.
    (Example: "The leading edge of the storm clouds reaches the cove,
    blotting out the sun.") The verbs are often passive, muting their
    effectiveness somewhat, but it's a minor sin.

    Unfortunately, the landscape isn't the only thing here; there's a plot
    of sorts involving a dead lover and a pressured marriage and such that
    owes much to cliché and adds very little to the game. One of the verbs
    that you're encouraged to use is REMEMBER, which tells you the emotional
    significance of this location or that sensation in rather, well,
    heavy-handed ways. It's not a great choice, on the whole, simply because
    it's not easy to identify with someone else and take on her memories
    when you've only been in that character's shoes for a few minutes--and
    the game is short enough that you can't really put in any more time than
    that. It's not impossible, of course, that the landscape element of the
    game would be enriched by a story that goes with it, but the nature of
    this particular story, and the clichés underlying it, make it difficult
    for it to work as planned. Part of the problem is that the author's
    skills appear to lie more in sensory description than in conveying your
    emotions--at least, the former is more effective; perhaps, had the
    author given us an actual flashback that would permit us to experience
    the relevant past events for ourselves, we would feel them a little more
    keenly. As it is, when the focus turns from the present to the past, the
    player tends to feel a bit shut out. It's for this reason that the
    ending of The Cove--which has more to do with the plot than with the
    landscape-isn't quite as involving as what's come before. It says
    something about the current state of IF, I suppose, that the author felt
    compelled to add the plot elements rather than merely providing a
    landscape to explore-there's not really much precedent for IF that's
    both plotless and puzzleless. But there's no inherent reason, to my
    mind, why such a thing can't work.

    At any rate, The Cove does demonstrate the potential of "art show"
    IF--the landscape aspect makes for an absorbing IF experience, well
    worth the download. That the story doesn't add much illustrates, in a
    backhanded way, the potential of the form.

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

    From: Nick Patavalis

    NAME: Curses
    AUTHOR: Graham Nelson
    EMAIL: graham SP@G gnelson.demon.co.uk
    DATE: 1993
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code v5 (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Free
    URL: http://www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/

    A couple of days ago I solved Graham Nelson's Curses. Before this, my
    recent Interactive Fiction experiences were with small and mostly
    "experimental" games like "For a Change", "Shrapnel", "Hunter, in
    Darkness", "9:05", etc. I was worried that next to these games Curses
    would seem somewhat archaic and dusty or even superficial. (Something
    like jumping directly from reading Joyce to reading Homer)

    Early in the game my worries seemed to materialize: I am asked to play
    the role of an English gentleman (an aristocrat, as will shortly become
    evident) looking for a map in my mansion's attics. Not a special map,
    not a secret map, not a treasure map; just an ordinary tourist map of
    Paris. Why am I, the player/character hybrid, then going through all
    this trouble? Aren't there any traveler's bookstores open nearby? It's a
    Thursday in June 1993 after all! OK, exploring the attics, browsing
    through all these forgotten objects of the past brings back memories,
    but does this justify plotting against my aunt Jemima just to steal her
    gardening gloves? Where is my sense of proportion? Why am I putting
    myself in danger going up and down the cellars in rusty old elevators?
    Why is it so big a problem to find a fresh battery? Why, after all, am I
    playing this game?

    But I did keep playing the game.

    And before I realized it I was seriously hooked: I started drawing maps,
    taking detailed notes, reading carefully, line by line, word by word,
    the biographies of the members of the Meldrew family. I even restarted
    the game several times, not because I got stuck in a puzzle, but because
    I wanted to reread the text to make sure that there was no detail I had
    missed the first times through. Slowly and masterfully, Nelson starts
    unwinding a strange story, taking you back and forth in time and
    speaking about supernatural phenomena, about magic, about ancient
    curses, about greek mythology and decay. It does so in such a beautiful
    way, always keeping the game open and making the player the center of
    the game-world, so that it is the player who writes the story; it is he
    who synchronizes the unbelievable chain of events. The writer has
    created a beautiful universe, has defined its rules, has filled it with
    treasures and miracles and invited you to come and explore it. He
    doesn't drag you by the nose with a linear plot. He doesn't even confine
    you in the bodycast of a strongly characterized alter-ego. This is not a
    novel. This is not a movie, nor a painting: it is an Adventure Game!
    Nelson shows this clearly from the very first moment by making the early
    puzzles so obviously distanced from the story: There's no doubt about
    it, you've turned on your computer to play and Adventure Game. Either
    enjoy it or switch it off and do something else.

    As the game evolves, the puzzles get more and more woven into the story,
    up to the point where they actually become part of it. Solving the
    puzzle becomes part of the plot. Overcoming the obstacle carefully
    planted by the ingenious author becomes integral part of the
    exploration. It is one of the few games where the puzzles and riddles
    actually enhance the atmosphere and enrich the dramatic content of the
    narative than threaten it. Even the hint-system is nicely embedded in
    the game-world. Ocasionally, though, one will find the author devilishly
    smiling between the lines as he playfully puts the most impossible
    object (like, for instance, a beach-ball) in the most improbable place!

    There are some difficult puzzles here, puzzles that will trouble even
    the most experienced adventurer. Almost all of them, though, are logical
    and staged in such a way that the player will receive enough hinting.
    Curses is not a game to be solved in a couple of hours. It is a game to
    be enjoyed for weeks. It is a game to create obsessions. If you are of
    the type of player that has a walkthrough by your side as you play, then
    perhaps Curses is not for you. Running through the scenes of the story,
    instead of slowly and carefully exploring, will I fear ruin the effect.
    In this game you must stumble, you must retreat, you must visit every
    place several times, read the text carefully, read it again, look for
    hints everywhere, become suspicious. This intricate little world is for
    the explorer, not the tourist!

    To cut a long story... long, the more I played the game the more I
    enjoyed it. It had "become a matter of pride now not to give up", to
    solve it without resorting to hints or walkthroughs. It wouldn't be
    untrue to say that the month I spent with Curses included maybe the most
    exciting adventuring moments I had since I first played Zork back in
    1988.

    Curses is a classic, and it must be treated as such. Nelson has studied
    the great Interactive Fiction tradition from as far back as "ADVENT" and
    collected the elements that define the medium. He then blended and used
    them in a skillful way to create a masterpiece. Curses is not
    experimental. Curses is conclusional. It does not try to explore the
    vague borders of the medium; it stays well behind the trenches, ploughs
    the rich soil and collects the harvest that feeds the experimentalists'
    armies. Experimentation without games like Curses is sterile. If works
    like "Shrapnel" and "So Far" expand Interactive Fiction (and they do),
    then games like Curses prove it.

    I would like to close this review using a quote that appears on the
    first page of Nelson's essay on if-authoring:

       Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful
       objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill
       gives us modern art.
             -- Tom Stoppard, Artist Descending A Staircase

    If there is something you cannot blame Nelson about, it is lack of
    skill. If there is something you cannot blame Curses about, it is lack
    of importance. The rest is ALSO a matter of personal taste!

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

    From: Nick Montfort

    NAME: Dark Mage
    AUTHOR: Greg Troutman
    EMAIL: unknown
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: N/A - written in assembly
    SUPPORTS: Atari 2600
    AVAILABILITY: Software is freeware. Cartridge for sale for $25.
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/atari-8bit/dm.bin

    Dark Mage is a unique work. Using bank-switching to achieve the needed
    resolution, it is a complete implementation of an original text
    adventure within an 8k Atari 2600 program. The creator has gone on to
    release a graphical Atari 2600 game, This Planet Sucks. When I tried
    Dark Mage a few years ago using an emulator, the emulated display was
    the thing that sucked. It was so nauseatingly flickering that even those
    with a strong stomach for fuzzy, flickering text would have trouble.

    For those who wish to play Dark Mage, I strongly recommend using an
    actual Atari 2600. It can be played using the Starpath Supercharger, a
    device which fits in the cartridge slot and can be loaded with new games
    via a 1/8" audio jack. (The Supercharger originally was used to load
    games from cassette tapes.) Sound files in .wav format are available
    from non-IF-Archive sources online, ready for use with the Supercharger.
    Also online are the .bin ROM image and (again, at other sites) the
    source code for an early 4k version of the game. The other way to play
    Dark Mage on the 2600 itself is to purchase a cartridge for $25, from
    Hozer Video Games. [http://www.netway.com/~hozervideo --Paul]

    Any screen of text displayed in Dark Mage, either responding to actions
    or to describing an area, can have at most nine lines. Each line can be
    at most twelve characters wide. Before the first room description
    appears, there is a four-screen introductory sequence:

    AS JESTER
    TO KING
    ROLAND THE
    INSANE,
    YOU'VE KNOWN
    BETTER DAYS

    -

    BANISHED!

    -

    JUST BECAUSE
    YOU HAD TOO
    MUCH TO
    DRINK

    -

    AND LOST THE
    BLACK ROSE
    OF THE REALM
    IN A CARD
    GAME AGAINST
    NEONORE,THE
    DARK MAGE...

    Then the player is greeted with:

    YOU ARE ON A
    HILLTOP

    There are few possibilities at this point. The rubber-coated black
    joystick can be manipulated to indicate a direction or (if left in the
    center) "LOOK" for a longer description. After LOOKing, there are an
    additional few actions possible: GO (returning to the directional
    options), TAKE, GIVE, USE, TALK, INVENTORY. TALK is not transitive, and
    neither is TAKE. GIVE and USE allow the player to choose objects from
    inventory. Often the actions are not productive or fun, and when they
    succeed it is often in an unexpected way. This unexpected success of
    commands can sometimes frustrate, but it works to the advantage of Dark
    Mage at times. In one memorable case, a very funny Hitchhiker's Guide to
    the Galaxy reference unexpectedly appears.

    The final solution to the game is a good one, appropriate to the jester
    protagonist. Even with screens smaller than a haiku, Dark Mage shows
    that it is possible to create puzzles that work with the accompanying
    story elements and reinforce the overall tone of the work.

    Having contemplated doing IF works for the GameBoy, a powerful platform
    by comparison, Dark Mage was of special interest. The game did reveal
    that (aside from the technological strong-man freak-show value of an
    endeavor like this) there are at least a few pleasures to be had in an
    extremely spare form. These stemmed mostly from the unusual replies,
    with less thrill provided by puzzle-solving. In many places, the
    quickest path through solution space may be the exhaustive search
    approach: simply doing everything in every location to try to advance.
    The occasionally witty subversion of my action into something wacky
    provided a good moment here and there, but it was not enough to make
    Dark Mage a really fun experience overall. It remains of interest as a
    retrocomputing curiosity -- and, to some extent, as a way to learn about
    the essence of IF by looking to the least ornamented, most simple
    examples.

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

    From: Francesco Bova

    NAME: Dragon Resources Stories
    AUTHOR: Peter Berman
    EMAIL: pbmath SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: TADS
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://www.iflibrary.org/mcp_dragon.gam
         or included in the zipped archive at
         ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/mini-comps/dragon/DragonComp.zip
    VERSION: 1.2

    Did you know that an interviewer makes something like ten judgments
    about you in the first five seconds of an interview? It's probably not
    surprising to find that interviewers make judgments on lots of
    potentially obvious things like your age, cultural background and
    gender. What is surprising, is that they also make judgments on things
    like your morals and the income that you made in your previous job.
    These assumptions can often lead to one of two things happening (unless
    you find an extraordinarily objective interviewer): a halo effect or a
    halo error. A halo effect happens when you've made a favorable
    impression on an interviewer and he grades your answers in a more
    positive light. A halo error is just the opposite and occurs when a poor
    impression is made and those same answers are graded on a harsher scale.
    Suffice it to say that impressing an employer during an interview has
    far less to do with your knowledge than it does with your personal
    presentation style, charisma, and luck (no one wants to be interviewed,
    let's say, by a person who's wife left him that morning).

    As a result, interviews are one of the worst indicators of future job
    performance. Interestingly enough, interviews don't make for
    particularly riveting interactive fiction either.

    Dragon Resources Stories (DRS) is a spoof on the last place finisher of
    the 1998 comp Human Resources Stories (HRS), which was essentially a
    multiple choice style interview that gave you a grading and salary scale
    based on the answers you chose. As interactive fiction, HRS rated
    poorly, and that's to be expected. As a simulation of an interview
    however, it also rated poorly, because we never get to see any of the
    reactions from the interviewer. Interviews are all about two-way
    communication and it's just as important for an interviewee to be
    knowledgeable and well prepared as it is for her to be astute enough to
    read the interviewer's verbal and non-verbal signals, and adjust her own
    communication style accordingly.

    DRS takes HRS one step further with a very active interviewer that gives
    you some verbal and non-verbal feedback after each of your answers,
    thereby letting you know if you're on the right track or not. To make
    the premise even more interesting, you're an aging dragon looking for
    work. The interview contains some direct competency based questions such
    as:

       "So, as a dragon, do you use GOTO?"

    Some behavioral questions:

       "You're about to eat a virgin when it begs for mercy, promising aid
       from a powerful family member. What do you do?"

    And some nonsensical ones:

       "Do you think this feather in my helmet makes me look less
       threatening?"

    The interviewer's responses to your answers, although often exaggerated
    to implausible extremes, illustrate just how important it is to create
    that halo effect. There's everything, from some subtle non-verbal
    feedback like the interviewer perking up "slightly but perceptibly", to
    full blown rambles about how your answers remind him of how much he
    loves his daughter, to the interviewer criticizing you for contradicting
    something in your resume. The astute interviewee will pick up quickly on
    the interviewer's preferences after playing once or twice and should be
    able to achieve an optimal score (an A-rating on both the leadership and
    technical scale).

    DRS doesn't finish with the interview, however. It smartly takes the job
    screening process one step further for those interviewees lucky enough
    to make that good first impression.

    Your final challenge is a practical test of sorts (incidentally,
    practical tests are very good indicators of future job performance),
    where you have a finite amount of time to save yourself and the mountain
    you stand on from destruction. It's a puzzle that makes you follow
    through on one of your answers from the interview and screams out,
    "Leave your glossy smile, cheap bravado, and inflated ego at the door.
    Let's see what you can do, when it really counts!"

    The game at this point breaks away from the multiple choice, decision
    tree-style nature of the game and let's the player try a whole host of
    dragon-related things to save himself. There are a few possible endings
    depending on your actions and each one is implemented well.

    Another little bonus in the game is a homage of sorts to the brilliance
    behind HRS and the whole decision-tree style of communicating in IF.
    It's funny, maybe a little too congratulatory, but in the end correctly
    states that, "HRS is no Photopia".

    Other than that, the dialogue is witty and entertaining and particularly
    funny for anyone who's been on an interview or ever given one. This game
    is a fun 5-minute romp for most of us, and a must play for any career
    strategists out there.

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

    From: Francesco Bova

    NAME: Dragonlord
    AUTHOR: Mark Silcox, et al.
    EMAIL:  marksilcox SP@G sprynet.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Home-brewed, Windows-based
    SUPPORTS: Win 95/98/NT
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://www.users.uswest.net/~gainaz/
    Version:  3.8

    Dragonlord is a new point-and-click type game from the creators of a
    company called 4830 Games that uses their Win 95/98/NT executable
    homegrown text adventure engine as an interface.

    Let me just start off by saying that I think it's very commendable when
    an author (or in this case a team of programmers) tries to not only
    write a story on his/her own, but also create their own text-adventure
    interface. It's one thing to be able to say something interesting when
    you already know how to speak the language, but it's another thing
    entirely when you have to create the language first before you can
    speak. Unfortunately, as with most home-brewed-parser-type games, the
    results are mixed, and understandably so; it's very difficult to produce
    a gaming language as polished as Inform or Tads (considering both game
    engines have been in development for years) on your first try, and that
    will always reflect on the overall quality of the game, regardless of
    how good or bad the writing, puzzles, storyline, etc. are.

    Dragonlord, with its structured style, reminded me a lot of the Fighting
    Fantasy choose-your-own-adventure-style books by Steve Jackson and Ian
    Livingston in that you have a description of your situation followed by
    one or two alternative paths you can follow. So, not surprisingly, it
    rates very high in terms of its story but very low on interactivity. In
    most cases there are only one or two options you can pursue, and on many
    occasions there are the dreaded <> transitional
    options which the author uses to break up longer paragraphs. Here is a
    typical example of the game's structured style:

       Some militaristic interior decorator really went nuts in this area.
       Endless numbers of weapons, indecipherable coats of arms and a great
       big suit of armor standing over in the far corner. The suit of armor
       seems to be clutching a pretty huge, sharp-looking battleaxe. You've
       never used one of these babies before, but you can't help but feel
       that it might come in handy.

    CLICKABLE OPTIONS:

       Get axe?

       Head back outside?

    I can think of a few other things I might like to do in this situation
    including examining the axe, putting on the armor, and trying to
    decipher the coat of arms, but such is the nature of a point-and-click
    interface. You just don't have much in the way of player freedom.

    Although it's fairly obvious that Dragonlord is very structured in its
    layout, it was interesting to find that it wasn't as linear as I had
    initially thought. The author allows the player to revisit certain
    sections of the game so that missing a special item or important piece
    of information the first time around doesn't mean you've rendered the
    game unwinnable. It was also surprising to see that there were alternate
    solutions to different puzzles that were put together quite creatively.

    The game features a role playing, hit point-style system where you lose
    hit points every time you're injured (although damage is based on the
    paths you choose and not random injuries that occur throughout the
    course of battle), and a button you can press that lists your inventory
    items (although you have no ability to manipulate those items once you
    get to the screen). There is also a quit button you can press that
    brings you to an intro screen, which allows you to restart, load, and
    save games.

    OK. I've talked enough about the game's engine and interface so let's
    move onto Dragonlord as a literary and playing experience. Well to start
    off, the plot is pretty much standard adventure fare. You're the chosen
    champion who has to defeat the fearsome dragon and while on your way to
    the dragon's cave, you must also conquer some obligatory,
    unrelated-to-the-ultimate-goal-type hurdles. Unfortunately, this
    particular storyline isn't very novel. We all know that the dragon genre
    has been beaten to death around here so trying to do something different
    with it is much more difficult than it would be with other storylines
    that haven't had as much exposure. The "surprise" ending is well
    telegraphed in advance so the ending isn't really the shocker that the
    author may have intended it to be. The writing isn't world class
    (although some of the characters like the contemporary dragon and the
    troll have their comical moments), but a plus was that there were few
    grammatical and spelling mistakes when I played through it.

    There are also a few little rough spots here and there with game logic
    and ideas that could have been implemented better. For example, the PC
    isn't able to read, but plaques, signs, etc. are written in almost plain
    English (almost plain, meaning an extra vowel added here, or a missing
    consonant there) so what ends up happening is that the player can
    understand the message and act on it, even though the protagonist
    technically shouldn't be able to. There are a few instances where there
    is death or injury without warning (i.e., entering a relative's home --
    which I as a player would have assumed was a safe haven -- resulting in
    your relative throwing you out and a loss of hit points because of a
    previous argument that the player has no idea about), and furthermore a
    few instances that were completely counterintuitive (i.e., approaching
    characters you assume are friendly and then getting attacked or moving
    in directions that sound dangerous and finding out differently). In
    fact, it almost got to the point that when I felt something was
    counterintuitive it probably was the correct thing to do, and I was
    usually right.

    Although Dragonlord's plot isn't necessarily novel (as I've mentioned,
    it doesn't really broaden the scope of the fantasy/dragon genre), I
    still think it's an excellent piece to get beginners started on.
    Whenever I've tried to introduce friends to interactive fiction, they
    always seem to get hung up on the parser and its limited vocabulary. So,
    lately I've been trying to find good story driven games to start people
    off on like Photopia and A Moment of Hope. These games require very
    little guess-the-verb and fairly simple commands to achieve a result.
    Although maybe not as good as the two aforementioned games, I would
    definitely include Dragonlord as a game I would recommend for beginners
    (especially younger ones, as Dragonlord's theme and storyline aren't
    especially deep) as a way to get them used to playing something
    text-based.

    Overall, Dragonlord is a pretty good first attempt and like I mentioned
    earlier, I'm always impressed when someone creates a text adventure game
    with their own text game engine. There is an upcoming sequel that has
    been promised and I'm looking forward to seeing what game design and
    game engine improvements Mr. Silcox and his team have in store.

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

    From: Nick Patavalis

    NAME: For a Change
    AUTHOR: Dan Schmidt
    EMAIL: dfan SP@G dfan.org
    DATE: Sept 1999
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code v5 (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Free, Competition 99 entry.
    URL: http://www.dfan.org/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Conclusion: It is a must-play.

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

    From: Francesco Bova

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

    Hah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From: Duncan Stevens

    TITLE: Galatea
    AUTHOR: Emily Short
    E-MAIL: emshort SP@G mindspring.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/Galatea.z8
    VERSION: Release 2

    The history of NPC interaction in IF is not overly glorious; it says
    something about the development of this area that the XYZZY Award for
    Best NPC a few years ago went to a character with whom the PC could only
    interact by saying "yes" and "no." (The character was richly developed
    in other respects, of course, but the award highlighted the extent to
    which authors have chosen to develop NPCs by means other than direct
    interaction with the PC.) It's that history that makes Emily Short's
    Galatea, the Best of Show winner in Marnie Parker's Spring 2000 Art
    Show, all the more startling: it's not only a remarkably detailed and
    intimate portrait of an unusual NPC, but it's one without any parallel
    in the annals of IF.

    Granted, no other work of IF in memory has been structured like this
    one. Essentially, it's a reworking of the myth of Pygmalion--which
    involved a sculptor who fell in love with his statue, which then came to
    life--but done from the statue's perspective; moreover, the time frame is
    translated out of ancient Greece right past our own time, to a time
    where fully animate and intelligent creations aren't considered
    revolutionary. You're viewing the former statue, which is on display in
    an exhibition. That's the premise, but the heart of the game is the
    statue herself--her views on being put on a pedestal, on the artist, on
    the show, on you--and the underlying mythology is important only insofar
    as it bears on her psychology. In other words, the NPC is the story, and
    there's virtually nothing in the game that isn't interaction with the
    NPC. Not surprisingly, then, there isn't a way to win as such--there's a
    wide variety of endings, some of which the player is likely to consider
    better than others, but the game studiously avoids making any ***you
    have won*** sort of judgments.

    Interacting with Galatea--or, at least, understanding your interactions
    with her--involves gauging some highly subtle psychological reactions,
    many of which couldn't easily be guessed in advance. This, in itself, is
    fairly novel, considering that the preexisting state of the art
    generally limited NPC psychology to the crudest of reactions: gratitude
    if given something, anger if provoked, etc. Here, the player must
    calculate (or, again, understand) how Galatea will feel when touched in
    certain ways and in certain places, when asked about her relationship
    with the sculptor before and after certain other questions, when told
    about the nature of the exhibit, and in many other situations. To be
    sure, the average player probably won't get all the connections, and is
    likely to elicit some reactions without realizing what buttons he or she
    pushed, so to speak--but that also means that there's always more room
    for understanding. In one sense, then, this is puzzleless IF--it's
    certainly not puzzle-solving in the usual sense--but in another sense,
    there are multiple puzzles, and it's impossible to encounter all, or
    even most, of them in a single session. (On a side note, this game also
    vindicates those who advocate ASK/TELL as the best conversation system
    for IF, since that's the way you speak with Galatea--and the game
    translates your ASK ABOUT and TELL ABOUT into natural sentences, so that
    you don't sound like a caveman. It's difficult to imagine any other way
    to implement such a complex system of interactions that allows so much
    freedom.)

    Okay, a novel premise; is it done well? Yes, in my book. Admittedly, the
    nature of the beast makes it difficult to say that the author has done
    it wrong--who are you to say that a given response shouldn't have
    followed a certain stimulus (within reason, of course)? That aside,
    though, the personality that emerges from the playing of Galatea is both
    complex and realistic, and it never feels like the author is being
    deliberately obscure. If it's initially difficult to get her to open up,
    realism demands as much--since you're trying to win her trust--and your
    options for interacting with her are varied enough that you're unlikely
    to hit a roadblock as such. (Though she comments on the disconnect if
    you run out of things to say about one topic and jump to an unrelated
    one.) It's sometimes hard to keep track of where the conversation has
    been, though (especially if you've restarted multiple times), and though
    the latest release implements THINK (which reminds you about the state
    of conversation) and THINK ABOUT (which reminds you of roughly what
    she's said about a given topic), they're partial solutions at best. (She
    also turns toward and away from you at certain points, though the motion
    doesn't really function as a gauge of how she's feeling, as such;
    mostly, it opens up different possibilities.) The best approach to
    making sense of her reactions to different combinations of inputs is
    probably making a transcript and poring over it, admittedly rather
    tedious--but, on the other hand, this is one NPC that rewards such
    careful study.

    Moreover, even if it's frustrating, the ability to close off paths by
    doing certain things or asking certain questions is part of what makes
    the character realistic. After all, one of the main defects in an
    unrestricted ASK/TELL system is that you can move freely from harmless
    banter to intrusive probing without the character noticing, seemingly,
    and while not every conversational leap is policed here, the game
    certainly tries to restrict wildly erratic questioning. Certain topics
    yield responses at some times but not at others, for instance, and
    sometimes the game just gives you some variant on "Better not ask about
    that right now" when a given topic would be inappropriate.

    While Galatea is an admirably thorough job of NPC creation, the built-in
    biases of IFers make it difficult to see it as a complete work in
    itself. One of the hardest things to shake for IF players is
    goal-orientation--finding that treasure, etc.--and when faced with as
    hard a nut to crack as Galatea, it's easy to become obsessed with
    finding every last reaction, reading every last bit of text. (At least,
    so it seems from the newsgroup traffic: several people have posted to
    ask for lists of solutions and such.) Moreover, it's hard to ask for
    help as such if you're not getting anywhere, since you don't really know
    where you're going, and a result-oriented approach ("I found ending X,
    and here's how you can do it too") is at odds with the feel of the game.
    Probing to see how the character reacts is one thing, but probing
    because you want a specific reaction is another. The author has put up a
    (partial) list of endings and how to get to them on her page, but
    perusing that is a spoiler in itself. The best way to go about it, I
    think, is to keep experimenting until you've found some endings that
    make the interaction feel complete, and then to look at what you missed.
    (That, or find someone to give you some nudges, if you really can't get
    anywhere.) Starting from a list of endings makes the character a little
    too much like a gumball machine.

    Is Galatea a model for future NPC creation? Maybe--her already immense
    complexity is limited by her relative immobility (at least, she's
    confined to one room) and by not having to interact with other NPCs. A
    300K-plus Z-machine file that essentially consists entirely of one
    character should give any designer pause, if that's the standard for
    realistic NPC design. It 's unquestionable, though, that this character
    represents a quantum leap--in intelligence and in vividness of
    personality--and that the author did it with essentially the tools that
    every author has. Designers, consider the goalposts moved.

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

    From: Jason Compton

    NAME: Guilty Bastards
    AUTHOR: Kent Tessman
    EMAIL: general SP@G generalcoffee.com
    DATE: August 1998
    PARSER: Hugo (graphics/sound enabled Hugo parsers highly recommended)
    SUPPORTS: All modern Hugo interpreters (graphics/sound capability
    recommended)
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://www.interlog.com/~tessman/guilty.html
    VERSION: Release 2.09

    Good detective games are hard to write, because the author not only has
    to create a tightly wound mystery, but has to leave enough logical loose
    ends, and enough reasonably plausible ways to pull them, to allow a
    player to experience the story. Kent Tessman's entry, Guilty Bastards,
    although certainly written in an affable tone, is not the parody or
    joke-laden romp it might appear to be from the trailer: "One of these
    four idiots is a killer." Although all of the subjects are indeed people
    you might consider dorks in real life, it's not a Keystone Kops-level
    story.

    You're a down-on-your-luck private investigator in the City of Angels
    who has just come off the latest in what seems to be a string of rotten
    cases with welching clients. But today may be your lucky day. It
    certainly wasn't someone else's--a Hollywood starlet has been offed, and
    the studio boss wants you to find out whodunnit fast. It's your job to
    discover who the "four idiots" are, each of whom has some reason for
    wanting the deceased to stay that way. (Why isn't the studio boss, who
    after all has the key to her apartment in his pocket, considered a
    suspect? Presumably because the customer is always right!)

    Perhaps I'm biased by the crime magazine and smattering of period
    dialogue from Witness, but I like to feel the role of the detective, and
    apart from a brief introduction that establishes that I, the player
    character, am a down-on-his-luck PI with a gambling problem, I just
    didn't feel very much a part of the story. Suspects in general seemed
    far too accessible and easy to interrogate. It didn't help matters much
    when trying to live my character by asking my client what he was going
    to pay me turned out to be extremely unsatisfying, as the game doesn't
    understand the words "money", "pay", "payment", etc...

    There are relatively few puzzles, as Guilty Bastards is mostly a game of
    exploration, and figuring out which clue will evoke the necessary
    response from which suspect, or provide the next clue to show to the
    next suspect. Although there is some freedom of movement, the plot
    advances in an essentially linear manner. The puzzles all have pretty
    straightforward solutions, and some of the sub-optimal outcomes contain
    a clue as to how to better solve the problem the next time around.
    Tessman's built-in hints are satisfying and adequate, written very much
    in the Infocom Invisiclue style, red herrings and nasty "caught you
    peeking!" messages included. Watch for a couple of Infocom tributes in
    the story as well.

    Guilty Bastards is remarkably light on text for an investigative
    story--it was a rare occasion indeed when the [MORE] prompt appeared.
    This makes a multimedia Hugo interpreter very important, as Tessman has
    included pictures of all of the major locations, characters, and some of
    the important objects, along with a soundtrack of sorts. The pictures
    appear to be scanned photos that have been run through a watercolor
    effect filter-which probably keeps the file sizes down, although after a
    while you wonder if your eyes are going blurry. The soundtrack sets the
    mood initially but turns out as gimmick, although the disco theme is
    good for a chuckle.

    In addition to the sparse text, there are a lot of objects that don't
    have any sort of description. I don't mind that, but my problem with
    such selective description is that, inevitably, the player is lulled
    into a false sense of security. After being told "you don't need to
    refer to that" time after time about scenery objects that would seem to
    be important to a murder investigation (like the sidewalk and balcony
    outside the victim's apartment), you start to think that perhaps you
    won't need to examine each and every noun in the game, and should focus
    in only on obvious objects instead. Then you reach a stage of the game
    in which practically every scenery object can and must be manipulated to
    move the story along. Frustrating.

    From a technical standpoint, I was surprised at the amount of curious
    parser misfires I encountered... when the author of the gaming language
    writes a game, he is held to a higher standard. In a trash dumpster, for
    example, "search bags" doesn't work, while "search bag" moves you
    along... but when presented with many bags, it seems reasonable to start
    looking in the aggregate. The omission of the "where?" question seems
    rather unfortunate for a detective game--especially because there's a
    suspect that never seems to show up to be investigated!

    I was not very pleased with the way Tessman mixed the use of compass
    directions and the "go location" command. In my opinion, authors need to
    pick one and use the other in extremely limited circumstances, not
    create numerous situations in which seemingly normal locations (like
    trying to get to an alley behind a building) cannot be done with compass
    directions. Another smirk-inducing design flaw includes the game asking
    "didn't you read the sign?" when the command "read sign" doesn't work
    there.

    Guilty Bastards is a pleasant ride in which the goal is to solve the
    game, not connect on a personal level with the situations and
    characters. No special insight or puzzle-solving skills are needed to
    reach the solution, and some of the hints hold back just enough to at
    least let you make the final logical connection. The murder plot and the
    ending of the game are extremely Hollywood, but hey, that's what you
    signed on for.

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

    From: Duncan Stevens

    TITLE: Rans
    AUTHOR: Bob Reeves
    E-MAIL: rreeves SP@G unm.edu
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/rans.zip
    VERSION: Release 2

    The combination of good writing and good programming that IF requires
    doesn't simply mean that authors need to both be able to put sentences
    together and write and debug code; an author needs to be able to both
    tell a good story and design the game so that the story comes across to
    the player effectively. Rans, by Bob Reeves, illustrates how important
    both elements are: it's an interesting story that, suitably designed,
    might have been highly involving, but it's told in such a confusing way
    that the player has a hard time getting as involved as he or she might.

    It seems you're an author trying to complete a novel, and as the writing
    progresses, you're repeatedly transported into the world of the novel
    for inspiration. That is, when you're in the novel, you act to propel
    events forward, and you later record the way those events happened. It's
    an interesting spin on the fantasy-coexists-with reality genre, and the
    novel itself, while conventional fantasy, is reasonably
    interesting-there's certainly enough to it that it doesn't feel generic.
    The problem is that there are so many characters that are never, how
    shall I say, formally introduced that it's awfully hard to follow what's
    going on in the novel's world, and readers are likely to end up
    consulting the hints a lot. Likewise, the game seems to assume that you
    understand the significance of various events and connections when you
    don't necessarily; at least, if there was some bit of text earlier on
    that would have explained them, it's all too possible to miss that bit
    of text. The problem, in other words, is not that it's a bad story--it's
    just not developed in a way that introduces the player to it at the
    proper pace.

    Exacerbating the confusion is the difficulty of the puzzles, which is
    extreme. Some of them simply involve major intuitive leaps, one calls
    for some highly tedious mapping and trial and error (along with more
    intuitive leaps), and a few are simply guess-the-verb puzzles. True,
    some of them are difficult simply because they require that you've been
    following along with the story, hardly a given, but many are just
    obscure or gratuitously annoying. (The first puzzle in the game--you're
    drunk, so you need to make coffee to sober yourself up--is particularly
    irritating and doesn't contribute much to the game.) They're not bad
    puzzles (with the exception of the guess-the-verb problems)--some of
    them are clever and use multiple objects in creative ways. There just
    isn't enough there to clue the player into what's going on.

    The way that fantasy and reality interact gives rise to another problem,
    namely that it's never really clear what you're supposed to be doing
    when you flip back to reality (besides adding to the story), so you're
    reduced to wandering around until you find whatever it is that will send
    you back to the novel, to which there's no apparent rhyme or reason.
    Whereas the plot in the novel segments sort of drives itself--at least,
    there are obvious challenges to face or problems to solve--the real-life
    portions just feel aimless, and the course of wandering hither and yon
    trying to figure out what to do next can be frustrating, to say the
    least.

    And yet Rans is still a very good story, assuming that you can find your
    way through it. The endgame ties together the loose ends in a
    surprisingly creative way (at least, it was more creative than I was
    expecting). The unfinished-novel conceit--often, when exploring the
    fantasy sequences, you're told that you haven't fully fleshed out some
    element of the book--is a brilliant device; in a sense, you see the
    story come together as you play the game, and you see what shaped the
    author's choices. There are some howlingly funny moments as well, this
    one in particular, when you encounter a lantern: "It's a battery-powered
    brass lantern. You can't conceive how it wound up in a fantasy story."
    In short, there are more than enough good ideas here to make a
    first-rate game-it's just that the game design details aren't all worked
    out as well as they should be. Were the game design at the same level as
    the writing and world-building, this would be a first-rate game.

    Rans is a little too uneven to be a truly successful game, sadly, though
    it certainly has its moments; if you can overlook the frustrating parts,
    it might be worth a try.

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

    From: Duncan Stevens

    TITLE: Rematch
    AUTHOR: Andrew Pontious
    E-MAIL: [removed at author's request. See game for email address.]
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/tads/Rematch.gam
    VERSION: Release 1.0.4

    Attention, attention, seasoned IFers, we have a new genre on our hands.
    Sam Barlow's Aisle was taken as an only-works-once experiment when it
    first appeared (at least, by me), but now we have a second entry in that
    category that expands considerably on what Aisle did. The category, of
    course, is one-move games, games whose exploration consists of figuring
    out the many and varied things you can do with your one move, rather
    than building on your explorations through a series of moves. You might
    think that would be limiting, since generally it wouldn't allow for
    multi-step tasks, but Andrew Pontious's technical wizardry in Rematch
    overcomes those limitations, and the result is memorable indeed.

    The primary difference between Aisle and Rematch is that, while the
    former was purely about exploration of the main character, the latter is
    really a puzzle: something happens after your move, and it will happen
    again and again unless you manage to avert it. What you do is not at all
    simple, and you're likely to spend several hundred moves figuring out
    how to do it--but it's a rewarding several hundred moves, and well worth
    the time. Part of the reason it's difficult is that there are several
    things to set it in motion, as it were, and figuring out what and where
    they are and how they interact takes some exploring (one move at a time,
    of course). As such, in one sense, it's the ultimate
    learn-by-screwing-up game--like Aisle, of course, since in Aisle you drew
    on the knowledge you accumulated to explore your character further, but
    here the game depends much more on your ability to draw on past lives.

    The puzzle you solve is complicated, and as such the action that you
    perform to solve it is fairly complicated as well, and the author has
    accordingly hacked the TADS parser somewhat to accommodate more complex
    input lines than most IF can handle: by my count, the Rematch parser can
    handle five nouns in some syntaxes, whereas the Infocom parser (on which
    neither Inform nor TADS nor any other freely available authorship
    system--had improved, to my knowledge--at least, not in terms of
    complexity--until now) could generally only handle three (HIT THE DOG ON
    THE HEAD WITH THE HAMMER). The expanded parser isn't perfect, but it's
    generally good enough; the real challenge, for the experienced player,
    is realizing that the parser has abilities beyond the usual. Once that
    hurdle is overcome, however, it's a marvelously liberating feeling to
    enter highly complex commands and see them executed more or less
    faithfully (in much the same way, I suspect, as the first players of
    Zork felt when they realized that they were no longer living in a world
    of two-word parsers). It's an impressive technical feat, in short, and
    while such complicated inputs might not be necessary in most
    games--since games that last longer than one move generally allow the
    player to accomplish quite intricate things by spreading them over
    multiple inputs--a perfected parser of this scope might well push the IF
    experience ever closer to mimesis, always a worthy goal. Larger
    possibilities aside, that technical breakthrough greatly enhances the
    experience of playing Rematch; indeed, the one-move game as puzzle
    wouldn't work nearly as well without it. (At least, it would have to be
    a whole lot simpler.)

    The puzzle itself is well put together, though it's rendered more
    difficult by some enticing red herrings--i.e., there are some things
    that seem to be useful when they're not, and the game doesn't do much to
    suggest that they are, in fact, red herrings. Likewise, it's initially
    tempting to do directly what the game wants you to do indirectly, and
    there aren't many hints about the more indirect methods. There are a few
    in-game hints, but they're fairly general; if you spend a while trying
    to figure out the puzzle on your own, chances are you'll already have
    figured out what the hints have to say before you consult them. Not
    major sins, but they do increase the difficulty of the puzzle
    considerably, even if the solution ultimately proves logical; if you're
    not a puzzle maven, you may want to consult a friend or find a
    walkthrough.

    Rematch highlights the real strength of one-move games, in that they
    make it easy for the author to provide for absolutely everything the
    player could come up with (since the combinatorial factor--objects being
    combined in unexpected ways--is limited). In giving you multiple views
    and variations on the central event of the game (not revealed here,
    since the surprise of it is part of what gives Rematch its impact), the
    game enhances its mimetic qualities: you can try just about anything
    logical, and the parser will handle just about anything you type. The
    AMUSING section at the end is well populated, and in fact there are many
    things worth trying that don't, in fact, show up in that list. It may be
    objected that limiting the player's freedom to one move is a sort of
    backwards--looking way to achieve mimesis, but we take it where we find
    it, I guess, and Rematch is plenty immersive even in its one move.

    There's an odd disjunction in the playing experience, though. It can
    fairly be said without spoilers that the event at the heart of Rematch
    is rather grim--it's certainly not something to joke about, and indeed
    it's fairly shocking when read for the first time. Some of the various
    events that you harness to solve the puzzle, however, can only be
    considered absurd, and they would probably fit a little better in a more
    lighthearted game. The disjunction isn't as stark as it might be, I
    suppose, because the shock of the main event dissipates as it happens
    again and again and again, and after a while the player likely sees it
    as something to avert, not something grim or tragic. Still, there's a
    split personality there, and it's especially acute if the player happens
    upon the sillier aspects of the game early in the exploration process.

    That aside, though, Rematch is an absorbing experience that in some ways
    goes beyond what the seasoned IF veteran might be expecting. Though the
    PC's exploration of the the environment is limited to some extent, it's
    still a richly interactive game.

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

    From: Joe Barlow

    NAME: Return to Pirate's Island II
    AUTHOR: Scott Adams
    EMAIL: msadams SP@G msadams.com
    DATE: August 2000
    PARSER: S.A.G.A. (full sentence)
    SUPPORTS: Windows 95/98/NT/2000  (Mac/Unix ports being considered)
    AVAILABILITY: Commercial (US $19.95)
    URL: http://www.msadams.com

    Unlike many text adventure fanatics, I didn't grow up with the games of
    Scott Adams. By the time I discovered interactive fiction, Infocom had
    already established itself as the undisputed king of the genre, with
    detailed room descriptions and state-of-the-art parsers the norm rather
    than the exception. As such, the idea of playing "simpler" works did not
    appeal to me -- two-word inputs were far too limiting after years of
    using Infocom's elegant full-sentence engine, and I gave a wide berth to
    these (perceived) lesser offerings.

    I'd heard of Mr. Adams, of course: ads for his games lined the pages of
    every available computer magazine, and I knew that he had produced some
    of the genre's most commercially successful offerings, including
    "Adventureland" and "The Count." I acknowledged and respected him as a
    computer game pioneer, but to actually *play* a Scott Adams adventure
    was, for me, an exercise in frustration: the terse room descriptions and
    the minimalistic parser -- which at times verged on "sadistic" -- were
    not enough to overcome the admittedly brilliant puzzles and intriguing
    story lines ("Voodoo Castle" was the lone exception; to this day, it
    remains the only Scott Adams game I have ever solved). What a pity, I
    thought, that these clever games were mired in such a poor play system.

    Well, Mr. Adams seems to have read my mind: with his first new text
    adventure in over fifteen years, the just-released "Return to Pirate's
    Island II," he has gone to great lengths to correct many of these
    problems. "Pirate's II" contains a number of Scott Adams firsts,
    including digitized sound effects, lengthy (and occasionally quite
    eloquent) room descriptions, and, best of all, a full-sentence parser.
    Will long-time fans be delighted or dismayed at these changes? To a
    large extent this still remains to be seen, although the game has
    generated positive buzz from many of its early players.

    The story's enjoyment does not stem from the plot, which is so thin that
    it borders on non-existent: the player's mission is to collect treasures
    and deposit them in a safe place. It's a tried and true formula, having
    been used in the original Crowther/Woods "Adventure," Infocom's "Zork
    I," and many of Mr. Adams' own previous offerings. This game, like the
    ones just mentioned, is strictly a puzzle-fest: there are no NPCs to
    speak of, nor any character development... nothing but good old-
    fashioned treasure hunting. In that respect, "Pirate's II" feels like a
    homecoming: many interactive fiction fans have bemoaned the recent trend
    toward experimental "literary" games (like Adam Cadre's "Photopia"), and
    these players will no doubt welcome the nostalgic feeling which
    permeates this work.

    It's clear that a lot of time and effort has gone into "Pirate's II":
    Mr. Adams has injected his famous sense of humor into the story at every
    opportunity (the opening puzzle appears to be a sly jab at Infocom's
    "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," for example), but the resulting game
    is nonetheless a mixed bag. While the puzzles are quite clever, and
    although the work contains the richest text descriptions ever to appear
    in a Scott Adams adventure, the negative traits are unfortunately strong
    enough to offset the positive.

    One significant drawback to "Pirate's II" is the text. For a game that
    had such a large group of beta testers (sixteen, according to the
    website!), the work contains a surprisingly large number of typos and
    grammatical errors (the use of "to" instead of "too," incorrect use of
    ellipsis, etc). It's not that big a deal, but considering the game's
    $19.95 purchase price -- and its creator's status as a text adventure
    brand name -- I expected a little more attention to detail. It's
    particularly frustrating since many of the room descriptions are
    otherwise quite lovely.

    Another major obstacle is the program's troublesome installation
    routine, which is just as difficult to "solve" as many of the game's
    puzzles. (I had to install "Pirate's II" three times before I was
    actually able to run it. The documentation admits that the user may
    encounter error messages, and that he or she should simply ignore these
    warnings if they appear). A little more attention to detail would really
    have helped the professionalism of this package, but I suppose I should
    be thankful that I can play the game at all: "Pirate's II" runs on Mr.
    Adams' own Windows-based engine, the S.A.G.A. (Scott Adams Grand
    Adventure) system, which leaves a lot of non-Windows users out in the
    cold. Mac and Unix ports of the S.A.G.A. interpreter are reportedly in
    the planning stages, however, so non-Microsoft adventurers may be able
    to play the game in the near future.

    My remaining quibble is more the fault of the S.A.G.A. engine than the
    game itself: boy, is it ever *slow!* On my 486dx/100, the machine I use
    for all my text adventure excursions, there is a pause of approximately
    three seconds after I hit the ENTER key before the game prints the
    results of my actions; I was reminded of my days playing "Zork I" on my
    trusty Commodore 64 back in the late '80s. I refuse to believe that
    *any* text adventure needs a Pentium processor to run optimally, and I
    hope that Mr. Adams will tweak/optimize the S.A.G.A. engine for slower
    systems when and if he releases another game which employs it.

    But I don't wish to sound overly harsh. "Return to Pirate's Island II"
    is not a bad puzzle game, and marks a welcome return from one of
    interactive fiction's founding fathers. The gameplay and interface will
    feel familiar to anyone who enjoyed earlier Scott Adams adventures, with
    many of the game's features (the lovely room descriptions, the
    full-sentence parser, the "Lurking Horror"-style sound effects, and the
    built-in hints system) being impressive achievements indeed. But such
    innovations should not come at the cost of performance -- the agonizing
    slowness of the S.A.G.A. engine, coupled with the alarming number of
    typos in the text, may ruin the fun for many questers. Die-hard puzzle
    fans will find much to like, but casual admirers of Mr. Adams' work will
    have to decide if the game is worth its $19.95 asking price.

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

    From: Mark J. Musante

    NAME: The Spatent Obstruction
    AUTHOR: Chris Canavan
    EMAIL: ???
    DATE: November 1992
    PARSER: AGT
    SUPPORTS: AGT ports
    AVAILABILITY: GMD
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/agt/spatent.zip
    VERSION: 2.55

    Never volunteer. That's what they say in the army, or so I'm told, but
    I've failed to follow that particular pearl of wisdom on many occasions
    and, at least this time, I would have been better off for it.

    This particular volunteering on my part was brought about when Carl
    Muckenhoupt was looking for people to help him put together his "Baf's
    Guide to the IF archive". In the course of that assistance, I came
    across this game. The title intrigued me. What was a Spatent? What was
    obstructing it?

    It turns out the first obstruction was that the game was written in AGT.
    Now the problem with AGT is that, while it's easy to write a game using
    it, it's hard to write a GOOD game. Why? Because you have so much more
    work to do to get the parser to behave the way you want it to.

    Allow me to illustrate with an example. One of the first main puzzles in
    this game is trying to take a taxi to the airport. In order to tell the
    driver to take you there you have to give him your ticket so he can see
    where to go. You can't use
       > DRIVER, AIRPORT
    nor can you use
       > SAY "AIRPORT"
    Instead, you just give him the ticket. Unfortunately, if you haven't
    given him money first (and I'm willing to accept that I'm in a universe
    in which you pay the driver before he takes you anywhere), the game
    prints out the confusing
       Don't know how to give here...
    Of course the 'give' verb does work... it was expecting 'give money'
    first and THEN 'give ticket.'

    The fault of this lies in the fact that each eventuality must be
    carefully coded for in any AGT game. For TADS or Inform or any
    object-oriented development system, there's an easy way to put in a hook
    for 'player trying to get ride without having paid first'. In AGT, each
    additional combination causes a multiplicative increase in the number of
    'commands' that must be written. As a result, AGT appears easy to write
    games for but is actually extremely difficult indeed.

    While I'm at it, I may as well flag another problem with this game: that
    of adjectivitis. Most, if not all, IF authoring systems have the ability
    to add adjectives to objects, but it's a peculiar habit of AGT authors
    to add adjectives to every object. The canonical example of this is the
    legendary Detective's "wooden wood." So we're stuck with gold doorknobs,
    and white mailboxes, and wrapped money, and signs tacked up everywhere
    of every color imaginable.

    One last thing I'll mention that seems to be a hallmark of an AGT game:
    room descriptions tend to be devoid of any mention of ways out. Instead,
    you must, as a player, remember to type 'show exits' at each location.

    When I sat down to play this game, I knew full well that these sorts of
    things would probably be present. I bring them to your attention in this
    review in case you've heard an undercurrent of disgruntledness about AGT
    games but no clear explanation as to why. Rest assured I'm leaving out
    many other problems.

    So let's ignore the difficulties and quirks of the AGT gaming system and
    concentrate on what makes adventures fun: writing, puzzles and story.

    THE WRITE STUFF

    One thing I clearly remember when playing early (pre-1985) Infocom games
    was that it would be really cool to create a game like this myself. I
    think many players would like to become authors, just like many actors
    would love to direct some day.

    Since it's so simple to slap together an AGT game, many people try it,
    regardless of writing ability. Canavan is able to get the point across,
    but his use of English could do with grammar- and spell-checking.

    However, even that wouldn't be enough. Here's a sample room description:

       Ahhh, the kitchen.  Its beautiful plastic floors and wooden
       cabinets make it look so beautiful.  You remember late night snacks
       and reading the paper on the kitchen table.  It is a very beautiful
       place indeed!

    The best that can be said for it is the unintentionally amusing bits and
    pieces. When you get a sentence which starts, "He grabs you under your
    legs...", it can't help but bring a smile to your face. While these
    phrases are rare, they occur often enough to mitigate some of the
    deleterious effects of the rest of the writing. It's not in every game
    that you see a "forst of lush green ivory" or learn that a robot can
    shut himself down "for an infinite number of years with no damage."

    Expectedly, this game lacks implementation of detail. In the dining
    room, Canavan is very careful to point out that there's a vase on the
    table, and nothing on the desk. However, the game doesn't recognise
    'vase', 'table' or 'desk' as objects. Early games, pre-mid-1990's did
    this because of lack of resources, so it's forgivable. Those more used
    to modern games in which you at least get a response along the lines of
    "that's not important" would find it to be just another source of
    frustration.

    FOR PUZZLES' SAKE

    Many beginning authors wonder how to put puzzles in a game. Where do
    people come up with their ideas? This question appears often enough in
    the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup and most of the time the response is
    along the lines of story-integration: make sure the puzzles make sense
    in the course of the story. In other words, don't put a 15-puzzle in the
    middle of the road and then prevent the player from walking any further
    until the puzzle is solved.

    In The Spatent Obstruction, Canavan decided to make the living room of
    your house dark. So naturally the player explores a bit looking for a
    light source of some kind. When I found my way to the backyard and saw
    one lying there, I was amused by the fact that Canavan provided an
    explanation:

       This is your back yard.  You are totally surrounded by woods, which
       makes this an appealing sight.  Green light plays through the
       leaves of the surrounding trees.  A small deck and barn are the
       only real things that mark the otherwise perfect grass.  The only
       exit to this area is back through the small, almost invisible,
       path you came from.
          There is an oil lamp here.

       > X LAMP

       This is an old, rusted, oil lamp.  You doubt that it would even
       wortk except for the fact that there is still old oil sitting in
       the bottom.  You remember leaving this here when you cleaned out
       your barn.

    However, the next time I started the game, I went to the backyard to get
    the lamp and found out that the lamp wasn't there. This caused me to be
    stuck for many minutes until I figured out that the lamp only appears
    there after you open your mailbox and read the airline ticket which lies
    therein. Moreover, you must be holding the airline ticket when you read
    it or you will remain lamp-free.

    This is a good example of how not to make a puzzle.

    This game seems to have been designed with these sorts of puzzles in
    mind. You must perform task A before object B will magically appear.
    Several puzzles are time-based in that you only have a few turns to
    complete a particular part of the game before the game whisks you off to
    a new location. If you haven't completed everything you need to (and
    there's no real way of telling, save experience), it's time to restore
    and try again. In the words of the game, "death is a very possible."

    Oh, the game has a maze, but an easy solution, so it's not bad at all.

    STORYTIME

    The game starts innocently enough. You were at a party last night and
    your friends helpfully brought you home and left you on your driveway to
    sleep off the effects of the alcohol. With friends like these, who needs
    Spatents?

    The good news is that you've won a free ticket to France. Now all you
    have to do is get past a homicidal taxi driver. After working your way
    to the airport and hitting on a flight attendant, you suddenly find the
    world has changed, and you've acquired a robot sidekick named Lexter.
    This is all quickly explained by an expository scientist who never stops
    running around.

    Apparently you've blorped through time and you need something called a
    Spatent Obstruction to hold open a time rip long enough for you to get
    back. But, and here's the spice which thickens the plot, they're
    illegal. And that's when things get confusing.

    The game takes you through a few twists and turns and, at one point, I
    was surprised to find myself in the enemy computer room. I was relieved
    to discover that it was "the room your supposed to run to if an enemy
    attacks." But relief turned to depression when I learned that the enemy
    (detection) computer was "about three inches bigger than you are". How
    immodest.

    The most disappointing part was when I learned that a bug caused me to
    get stuck about 80-90% of the way through the game. If someone is aware
    of a walkthrough that works around this bug, I'd be very interested in
    it.

    AND NOW LET'S GO OVER THE FILMS WE'VE SEEN ON TODAY'S SHOW

    I've been sitting here thinking about whether this game could have
    anything worth recommending. As you might have noticed, the "feature" I
    liked most about this game was the unintentionally funny writing. The
    puzzles weren't very clever, nor were they integrated into the game.
    They ranged from "read the author's mind" to "I'm supposed to do
    WHAT?!?".

    Once the game's bug stopped me from progressing any further, I used a
    program called 'agtout' to decompile the game's text. At least I got to
    read the ending if not actually participate in it. Canavan is nice
    enough to set up for a sequel which includes finding your robot sidekick
    again and, apparently, recruiting an alien crew to help you fly around
    outer space and blow stuff up.

    Much to my disappointment, France seems to have been left as a permanent
    unresolved plot thread.

    I have to come to the unfortunate conclusion that this game really isn't
    worth playing. There is nothing here that stands out as fun or
    enjoyable. The plot is too basic, the puzzles too obscure. The best that
    we can hope for is, if Canavan does write a sequel, he learns from his
    mistakes.

    Bottom line: thumbs down.

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

    From: Duncan Stevens

    TITLE: Spiritwrak
    AUTHOR: Daniel Yu
    E-MAIL: dsyu SP@G holonet.net
    DATE: 1996
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/spirit.z5
    VERSION: Release 3

    It's hard to discern what accounts for the enduring popularity of the
    games set in the Zork universe; that it was the first commercially
    available full-parser interactive fiction probably has something to do
    with it, but it's still remarkable that a game released in 1980 should
    still be inspiring sequels. For Daniel Yu's Spiritwrak is certainly a
    sequel--the magic system is suspiciously reminiscent of the Enchanter
    series, and the humor captures the Zork style. It's a well-crafted
    homage, sufficiently so that, if you liked the originals, you'll almost
    certainly enjoy this.

    The plot, in true Enchanter-series style, is save-the-world crossed with
    collect-the-objects: you have to retrieve the four pieces of an ancient
    rod to defeat an evil demon-type fellow. Just as typically, you don't
    set out into the world knowing where to look for the pieces; you just
    start solving puzzles and let things fall into place. The puzzles are
    unrelated to the plot, naturally; some of them are classic logic puzzles
    cribbed into the game (including a variant on the old
    some-statements-are-true-and-some-are-lies bit), and some are mechanical
    puzzles (the best of them is an elaborate seesaw), and others are just
    apply-the-clues or apply-the-magic. There's a twist in the plot toward
    the end, but it's not an especially remarkable one--partly because the
    plot has so little effect on what you do. Changes in the storyline
    barely affect how you tackle the game, after all, so the surprises don't
    impact gameplay. One nicely done touch, however, is the fragments of a
    manuscript that you find scattered through the game, some of which hint
    at the eventual direction of the plot, some of which just impart
    background information. The likely sequence of the fragments develops
    the story well, unfolding it bit by bit. For a largely irrelevant plot,
    in short, Spiritwrak develops it well.

    The game design doesn't fare so well. The layout is wide, in design
    parlance, meaning that, fairly early on, lots of puzzles open up, so
    there's lots to work on at any given moment--though not all the puzzles
    you're working on may be solvable at that time. Moreover, there's a
    transportation system that requires coins, and coins are a finite
    resource, so it's possible to simply run out if you spend a lot of time
    trekking around experimenting with puzzles. There are significantly more
    coins available than you need, of course, but they're not all available
    right away, and it's not at all unlikely that you'll have to go back to
    an earlier save position because of the coin problem. It's also just a
    nuisance to use the transportation system to travel between areas of the
    game. There are other problems as well--for instance, your inventory is
    limited, and while there's a rucksack-type object, you'll run out of
    inventory space long before you encounter that object. Several other
    puzzles involve mind-reading of one form or another, and one logic
    puzzle simply doesn't work (fortunately, there's a walkthrough on GMD).
    In most respects, the game is forgiving; it's difficult to render the
    game unwinnable without realizing it (other than wasting coins, of
    course). But it's also player-unfriendly in some ways that were somewhat
    more acceptable in 1996 than they are now.

    On the other hand, player-unfriendliness along those lines was fairly
    standard in the early '80s, and it's not only in that respect that
    Spiritwrak follows Infocom's example. Rather than a spell-casting
    system, you have a prayer book with prayers that you intone after first
    learning them--which almost precisely recalls the approach of the
    Enchanter trilogy, and the names of the prayers are suspiciously
    familiar. (Along with GNUSTO, FROTZ, and ESPNIS, lots of silly spells
    mentioned in the Enchanter trilogy--like FOBLUB (glue audience to seat)
    and TOSSIO (turn granite to pasta) are included.) The place names (Gurth
    City, Borphee, etc.) are taken from the Zork universe, and to some
    extent the same casual blending of fantasy-medieval and modern goes on
    (though the modern element has the upper hand here). Absurdist and
    fourth-wall humor abounds, occasionally in ways that recall Infocom--at
    one point, for example, you have to get past a guard by baking a
    cake--and there's even a self-referential Implementor appearance. Not
    all the jokes work, and the world-building is sometimes shaky--it's
    often obvious that a scene or character was patched in for the sake of a
    puzzle. But the whimsy and the gonzo humor are captured nicely, enough
    so that this works well as a nostalgia trip.

    Expect to spend plenty of time with Spiritwrak--it's long, many of the
    puzzles are difficult (and a few are just tedious), and the
    aforementioned game design problems may have you backtracking more than
    you'd like. If you didn't grow up enjoying the Zork and Enchanter
    universe, there's no reason to try Spiritwrak, really; it was a fair
    game in 1996, but the IF scene has changed considerably since then, and
    there are much better things out there. But the game does succeed more
    often than not in recreating the Infocom feel--usually, though not
    always, a good thing--and I'm confident it'll push the right buttons.

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

    From: Francesco Bova

    NAME: The Town Dragon
    AUTHOR: David Cornelson
    E-MAIL: dcornelson SP@G placet.com
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/tdragon/tdragon.z5
    VERSION: Release 2

    The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition has added some notable titles
    to the annals of the greatest works of IF ever. There are games like
    Sunset over Savannah, Photopia, and Babel, which are just as popular
    today as when they were first entered in the competition. These classic
    games notwithstanding, however, the annual competition is typically a
    place where new authors can experiment with new game ideas and
    programming languages on a small scale with a guarantee of roughly 20
    reviews (at least that's been the norm of late). The Town Dragon by
    David Cornelson is a traditional fantasy game from way back in the 1997
    IF Competition that features a veritable plethora of fantasy clichés
    surrounding dragons, kidnapped daughters, and corruption. It is
    apparently a first time game for the author, one that unfortunately
    suffers from a few game design mistakes that undermine the
    well-intentioned plot and puzzles.

    The goal of the game at first glance seems fairly simple and
    straightforward: you must kill the town dragon and save the distressed
    damsel, in this case the mayor's daughter. And, as is typical,
    recovering the mayor's daughter is a bit more complex than walking in
    through the front cave entrance and demanding her return. The problem
    here is that even with a fairly small map, it's very difficult to get
    focused on where you should be heading. There isn't much linearity in
    the game, which is typically a good thing (in fact you can enter the
    dragon's lair without facing any obstacles if you really want to) but
    this lack of focus, and more specifically a lack of "markers" to guide
    you, is actually a detriment to this particular gaming experience. I
    found myself halfway through the game with a short inventory list of
    items and no idea what to do next. The puzzles are not easy or logical
    (although there was a nice bit with some mirrors) and there often is no
    incentive for doing certain things that are apparently fundamental in
    obtaining a successful outcome. Unfortunately, the game just doesn't
    proceed either intuitively or reasonably from one section to the next.
    You know you have to save the mayor's daughter, you just have no idea by
    what means you should save her.

    The game has a fairly small time limit that's set up in a novel enough
    way. You begin the game standing in a line of "volunteers" where one of
    you has to put your foot forward to rescue the girl. The unlucky
    volunteer who elects to save her will get killed by the dragon in
    roughly seventy-five moves or so, after which the mayor spirits you back
    from wherever you are to stand in the center of town with the rest of
    the volunteers so that another volunteer can be chosen. Being whisked
    away while you're in the middle of puzzling something out (like let's
    say the mapping of one of the game's 2 mazes) was especially
    frustrating, and broke up the flow of my thought process on many
    occasions. This happens about 3 times after which you are automatically
    chosen as the volunteer and you have roughly seventy moves or so before
    the dragon comes after you. There are a few ways to prolong the dragon's
    assault, but time really is of the essence here. You want to waste as
    little of it as possible.

    I got the impression while playing The Town Dragon that the author put
    this piece together in relatively little time (which is true of many
    pieces released during the annual competition). The writing is not the
    greatest I've seen in a piece of IF, with many grammatical and spelling
    errors (although, I believe these have been corrected in later versions
    of the game). There seems to also be a problem with the way the words
    flow, and the scenery descriptions seem disjointed in their structure.
    Here is an example of a typical room description:

       South Road

       This road enters the town to the north and leads to a cavern to the
       south. There are rising cliffs on either side of you. It is rumored
       that a dragon resides in the cavern.

    Not a big deal, but both pieces relating to the cavern could have been
    put together I think.

    The author does incorporate a good sense of humor in a few places
    however, and a typical mimesis-breaking technique that the author puts
    to good use occurs when the player tries to head in a direction where
    there is no possible exit. Here was a typical (albeit longer) example.

       >ne
       You found a secret passage!!!

       [Your score has just gone up by one hundred points.]

       >Full
       You have so far scored 120 out of a possible 140, in 48 turns

       A group of interactive fiction auditors appear and begin tallying up
       your adventures.

       "According to our records, you were to have found a secret passage at
       some point and time. Hmmm...", one of them peruses various documents
       and looks up at you, "Nope. It was a hoax performed by the author.",
       and they all look at each other shaking their heads. "You'll have to
       return the 100 points given to you under false pretenses."

       The auditors gather up their paperwork and walk away....with of
       course, your extra 100 points, earning you the rank of Dragon Snack.

       [Your score has just gone down by one hundred points.]

    This leads to a little brevity and also a little relief, as it's fairly
    obvious that the author never intended the game to be taken too
    seriously. Unfortunately, it also accentuates some of the problems with
    the game. There are a few secret directional pathways to be found, and
    the constant comments you receive about "not being able to read the
    description sceneries properly" when moving in an inappropriate
    direction provides the player with some negative reinforcement when it
    comes to trying alternate pathways. There are similar problems with
    alternative solutions to some of the easier puzzles. Why is it a certain
    NPC will accept payment in one type of currency, but not in a more
    expensive type of currency? Why is it physical deformities or important
    articles of clothing that should be immediately visible on certain
    characters take repeated searching attempts to discover?

    I had actually deemed the game unwinnable until I read another review of
    the game in SPAG and realized that there was a built-in walkthrough I
    could use if I wanted to. Having given up hope of ever solving the game
    on my own, I used the walkthrough and I'm glad I did. In my opinion, the
    game is unwinnable without it, and the intuitive leaps the author
    requires the player to make are very unreasonable. Here's an example of
    some of the "intuitive leaps" the game's puzzles depend on: The player
    realizing that people like to take naps after they eat; the player
    looking up something in a newspaper without knowing why, when the actual
    action of reading the newspaper gives no clue that there's something
    relevant inside it; non-standard Inform actions that have to be
    initiated without any idea why. It's a real pity too, because through
    all the jumble, there is a pretty good story in there somewhere and some
    of the puzzles could be rated top notch, provided they were clued a
    little better.

    Unfortunately, as it stands, the guess-what-the-author's thinking
    routine gets a little frustrating by about halfway through the game and
    if it wasn't for the built-in walkthrough, I don't know if I would have
    wanted to finish it. I'm sorry to say that as a result, The Town Dragon
    is not recommendable.

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

    From: Duncan Stevens

    TITLE: Winchester's Nightmare
    AUTHOR: Nick Montfort
    E-MAIL: nickm SP@G media.mit.edu
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/zcode/winchest.z8
    VERSION: Release 2

    I confess I hadn't heard anyone argue that the various bits of shorthand
    that IFers have become accustomed to--one-letter compass directions, Z,
    X, G, and such--inhibit realism, but Winchester's Nightmare is a game
    built, among other things, on that thesis. Beyond that, the game
    emphasizes the exploratory aspect of its world to the point where you
    can go very far indeed without encountering any puzzles as such. The
    result isn't exactly a roaring success, though it has some interesting
    moments.

    You're Sarah Winchester, wife of the gun manufacturing mogul, and you're
    struggling, in terms more figurative than literal, with your conscience
    and your family's legacy: specifically, you're wandering two parallel
    landscapes, one of them relatively pristine and one, it seems, scarred
    by a more violent age. The wandering is the high point of the game,
    really, since the author avoids making judgments for you: to what extent
    the "after" landscape represents progress or decay, to what extent
    you're complicit, and to what extent you can do anything about them are
    all left fairly vague. The images are evocative, and the contrasts often
    done rather subtly--compare this:

       Sarah is at this island's edge. The wooden platform she stands upon
       runs out from eastern bank, into the Great River, at the brink of New
       City's cluster of buildings.

    with this:

       Sarah is at this island's edge. Concrete runs out from eastern bank,
       into the Great River, at the brink of New City's cluster of
       high-rises. A few rusted pieces of rebar jut out, dimly lit from
       nearby streetlamps. South along the water is the entrance to a
       warehouse.

    Here, things look like they've taken a turn for the worse, but not
    everywhere: some locations move from deserted and bleak to populated and
    thriving, suggesting that the game isn't interested in simplistic
    judgments. The game's world is full of locations freighted with symbolic
    significance--a church, a government complex, an oil field, an armory, a
    university--but, again, the game doesn't take it upon itself to connect
    the dots. In that respect, Winchester's Nightmare is almost akin to a
    painting that incorporates two scenes side by side: there's much to be
    observed in the contrasts, and hypothesizing about the significance for
    the central character of each aspect of the paintings. Cut-scenes of
    sorts, involving characters who appear, say something cryptic to you,
    and disappear again, heighten the disjointed feel, but the whole thing,
    given some thought, rewards analysis.

    As interactive fiction, however, Winchester's Nightmare isn't quite as
    successful. For one thing, the author has replaced the > prompt with
    "Sarah decides to," again presumably in the service of realism; it's not
    quite as confining as the disabled abbreviations, but it's still
    jarring, and, more importantly, it reduces the comfort level for the
    experienced IF player. It's true that, from a strictly literary sense,
    the > and the various abbreviations mutilate the flow of the narrative a
    bit; the transcript doesn't read nearly as well that way. But the flow
    of the story in the player's mind--the feeling of immersion that's
    produced when the player can do what comes naturally (and for veteran
    players, X and G do come naturally) without thinking about the mundane
    details of having to type in commands to prod the program to output
    text--is lost. Others may not feel this way, of course, but the danger
    of the approach adopted by Winchester's Nightmare is that it lets form
    get in the way of content, and risks dragging the player out of the
    story every time the game reminds him or her that one-letter commands
    aren't allowed.

    A separate but just as damaging problem with the painting aspect is that
    you don't have much more interaction with the game's world than someone
    viewing a painting; there are a few simple objects, and you can examine
    most things, but there's very little that you can manipulate in any real
    way. I suppose that's inherent in what the author is trying to do-this
    is supposed to be a dream landscape-but still, when you wander through
    room after room that doesn't permit any action more dynamic than
    EXAMINE, it's easy to feel more like a spectator than a participant.

    The real problem, though, is that the game has to go somewhere after
    you've been wandering around, and the author's way of making it go
    somewhere is pretty difficult to figure out; moreover, even once you've
    figured out the basic contours of what you're trying to do, actually
    doing it is much more difficult than it should be, and you're likely to
    be reduced to wandering through the game looking for random objects,
    exploratory mood utterly shot. (You do need to gather some objects, and
    there's not a lot of rhyme or reason to where you find them.) You may
    get lucky and hit on the puzzle solutions immediately, but if you don't,
    the game's strongest point--the complexity of its setting, and the
    number of rooms that are there simply to fill out the landscape--becomes
    a major nuisance, since you'll be wandering through dozens of rooms that
    aren't useful for puzzle-solving purposes. It would have been better, in
    other words, if this particular story had abandoned puzzles entirely, or
    at least minimized their difficulty; having to turn to object-hunting,
    after spending so much time just absorbing your surroundings, is a major
    wrench. In a way, the puzzles that you solve aren't otherwise
    inconsistent with the feel of the game: they're heavily steeped in
    symbolism and they involve somewhat nonlinear thinking. Moreover, it
    would arguably be a lesser game with no conflicts to overcome, and
    puzzles are probably the best (and only) of creating real conflict in
    IF. The trick, here, is to give the player a sense of conflict without
    impeding the flow of the story, and it doesn't really work here;
    perhaps, if you had a strong hint early on in the game about what you're
    supposed to be doing and how you 're to go about it, the player could
    combine his or her exploration with puzzle-solving in the first place.

    There are lots of good ideas floating around in Winchester's Nightmare,
    including some rather intriguing ones about ways to explore the
    psychology of the PC. (Even if the game doesn't supply much of the
    content outright--again, you have to fill in a lot of blanks--the
    character of Sarah is far from simple.) They're hampered, however, by
    some unfortunate game design choices, and the end result works better
    from a purely literary standpoint than as interactive fiction--an
    experiment worth trying, perhaps, but not all that satisfying for the
    player.

    READERS' SCOREBOARD -------------------------------------------------------

    The Readers' Scoreboard is an ongoing feature of SPAG. It charts the
    scores that SPAG readers and reviewers have given to various IF games
    since SPAG started up. The codes in the Notes column give information as
    to a game's availability and the platforms on which it runs. For a
    translation of these codes and for more detailed information on the
    scoreboard's format, see the SPAG FAQ. This FAQ is available at the
    ftp.gmd.de IF-archive or on the SPAG web page at
    http://www.sparkynet.com/spag.

    Name                    Avg Sc    Chr     Puz # Sc  Issue Notes:
    ====                    ======    ===     === ====  ===== ======
    9:05                      6.2     0.5     0.5    6     20 F_INF_GMD
    Aayela                    7.4     1.2     1.5    5     10 F_TAD_GMD
    Above and Beyond          8.9     1.8     1.6    1        F_TAD_GMD
    Acid Whiplash             5.3     0.6     0.2    3     17 F_INF_GMD
    Acorn Court               6.1     0.5     1.5    2     12 F_INF_GMD
    Adv. of Elizabeth Hig     3.1     0.5     0.3    2      5 F_AGT_GMD
    Adventure (all varian     6.2     0.5     1.1   12   8,22 F_INF_TAD_ETC_GMD
    Adventureland             4.5     0.5     1.2    4        F_INF_GMD
    Adventures of Helpful     7.0     1.3     0.9    2        F_TAD_GMD
    Afternoon Visit           4.1     1.0     0.8    1        F_AGT
    Aisle                     6.6     1.4     0.2    7     18 F_INF_GMD
    Alien Abduction?          7.5     1.3     1.4    5     10 F_TAD_GMD
    All Quiet...Library       5.0     0.9     0.9    6      7 F_INF_GMD
    Amnesia                   6.9     1.5     1.3    4      9 C_AP_I_64
    Anchorhead                8.7     1.7     1.5   23     18 F_INF_GMD
    Another...No Beer         2.4     0.2     0.8    2      4 S10_I_GMD
    Arrival                   8.1     1.3     1.5    4     17 F_TAD_GMD
    Arthur: Excalibur         8.0     1.3     1.6    44,14,22 C_INF
    Augmented Fourth          7.1     1.3     1.4    3     22 F_INF_GMD
    Aunt Nancy's House        1.3     0.1     0.0    2        F_INF_GMD
    Awakened                  7.7     1.7     1.6    1
    Awakening                 5.6     0.9     1.1    2  15,18 F_INF_GMD
    Awe-Chasm                 3.0     0.7     0.7    2      8 S_I_ST_GMD
    Babel                     8.7     1.8     1.3    8     13 F_INF_GMD
    Balances                  6.6     0.7     1.2    8      6 F_INF_GMD
    Ballyhoo                  7.3     1.5     1.5    6      4 C_INF
    Bear's Night Out          7.1     1.2     1.3    5     13 F_INF_GMD
    Beat The Devil            5.5     1.2     1.1    4     19 F_INF_GMD
    Beyond the Tesseract      3.7     0.1     0.6    1      6 F_I_GMD
    Beyond Zork               8.0     1.5     1.8    9  5, 14 C_INF
    BJ Drifter                7.0     1.2     1.2    4     15 F_INF_GMD
    Bliss                     6.3     1.1     0.8    4     20 F_TAD_GMD
    Bloodline                 7.2     1.7     1.2    1     15 F_INF_GMD
    Border Zone               7.2     1.4     1.4    7      4 C_INF
    Break-In                  6.1     1.1     1.4    3     21 F_INF_GMD
    Broken String             3.9     0.7     0.4    4        F_TADS_GMD
    BSE                       5.7     0.9     1.0    3        F_INF_GMD
    Bureaucracy               7.0     1.5     1.4   10      5 C_INF
    Busted                    5.2     1.0     1.1    1        F_INF_GMD
    Calliope                  4.7     0.9     0.8    3        F_INF_GMD
    Cask                      1.5     0.0     0.5    2        F_INF_GMD
    Castaway                  1.1     0.0     0.4    1      5 F_I_GMD
    Castle Elsinore           4.3     0.7     1.0    2        I_GMD
    CC                        4.2     0.4     1.0    1        F_ALAN_GMD
    Change in the Weather     7.6     1.0     1.4   11 7,8,14 F_INF_GMD
    Chaos                     5.6     1.3     1.1    2        F_TAD_GMD
    Chicken under Window      6.9     0.6     0.0    3        F_INF_GMD
    Chicks Dig Jerks          5.2     1.1     0.7    9     19 F_INF_GMD
    Chico and I Ran           7.2     1.7     1.1    1        F_INF_GMD
    Christminster             8.2     1.6     1.6   16     20 F_INF_GMD
    City                      6.1     0.6     1.3    2     17 F_INF_GMD
    Coke Is It!               6.2     1.0     1.0    2        F_INF_GMD
    Coming Home               0.6     0.1     0.1    1        F_INF_GMD
    Common Ground             7.2     1.6     0.4    2     20 F_TAD_GMD
    Commute                   1.3     0.2     0.1    1        F_I_GMD
    Congratulations!          2.6     0.7     0.3    1        F_INF_GMD
    Corruption                7.2     1.6     1.0    4 14, 21 C_MAG
    Cosmoserve                7.8     1.4     1.4    5      5 F_AGT_GMD
    Cove                      6.5     0.9     0.5    1     22 F_INF_GMD
    Crypt v2.0                5.0     1.0     1.5    1      3 S12_IBM_GMD
    Curses                    8.0     1.2     1.7   18  2, 22 F_INF_GMD
    Cutthroats                5.7     1.3     1.1    9      1 C_INF
    Dampcamp                  5.0     0.8     1.1    3        F_TAD_GMD
    Danger! Adventurer...     3.2     0.3     0.7    1        F_INF_GMD
    Dangerous Curves          8.6     1.5     1.6    1        F_INF_GMD
    Day For Soft Food         6.8     1.0     1.3    5     19 F_INF_GMD
    Deadline                  6.8     1.3     1.3    8     20 C_INF
    Death To My Enemies       4.4     0.9     0.7    4        F_INF_GMD
    Deep Space Drifter        5.6     0.4     1.1    3      3 S15_TAD_GMD
    Deephome                  4.0     0.5     0.9    2     21 F_INF_GMD
    Delusions                 7.9     1.5     1.5    5      14F_INF_GMD
    Demon's Tomb              7.4     1.2     1.1    2      9 C_I
    Detective                 1.0     0.0     0.0    9 4,5,18 F_AGT_INF_GMD
    Detective-MST3K           5.8     1.1     0.1    9 7,8,18 F_INF_GMD
    Ditch Day Drifter         6.7     0.9     1.7    4      2 F_TAD_GMD
    Down                      6.0     1.0     1.2    1     14 F_HUG_GMD
    Downtown Tokyo            5.7     0.8     0.9    5     17 F_INF_GMD
    Dungeon                   7.1     1.0     1.7    2        F_GMD
    Dungeon Adventure         6.8     1.3     1.6    1      4 F_ETC
    Dungeon of Dunjin         6.0     0.7     1.5    5  3, 14 S20_IBM_MAC_GMD
    Edifice                   8.2     1.5     1.8    8     13 F_INF_GMD
    Electrabot                0.7     0.0     0.0    1      5 F_AGT_GMD
    E-Mailbox                 3.1     0.1     0.2    2        F_AGT_GMD
    Emy Discovers Life        5.0     1.1     0.8    3        F_AGT
    Enchanter                 7.3     1.0     1.4    9   2,15 C_INF
    Enhanced                  5.0     1.0     1.3    2      2 S10_TAD_GMD
    Enlightenment             7.1     1.3     1.6    2     17 F_INF_GMD
    Erehwon                   6.2     1.2     1.5    4     19 F_TAD_GMD
    Eric the Unready          7.8     1.5     1.6    4        C_I
    Everybody Loves a Par     7.0     1.2     1.2    3     12 F_TAD_GMD
    Exhibition                6.2     1.4     0.3    6     19 F_TAD_GMD
    Fable                     2.0     0.1     0.1    3      6 F_AGT_GMD
    Fable-MST3K               4.1     0.7     0.1    2        F_AGT_INF_GMD
    Fear                      6.3     1.2     1.3    3     10 F_INF_GMD
    Fifteen                   1.5     0.5     0.4    1     17 F_INF_GMD
    Firebird                  7.2     1.6     1.2    3     15 F_TAD_GMD
    Fish                      7.5     1.3     1.7    4 12, 14 C_MAG
    Foggywood Hijinx          6.2     1.2     1.3    3     21 F_TAD_GMD
    Foom                      6.6     1.0     1.0    1        F_TAD_GMD
    For A Change              7.7     0.9     1.4    5 19, 22 F_INF_GMD
    Forbidden Castle          4.8     0.6     0.5    1        C_AP
    Four In One               4.4     1.2     0.5    2        F_TAD_GMD
    Four Seconds              6.0     1.2     1.1    2        F_TAD_GMD
    Frenetic Five             5.3     1.4     0.5    3     13 F_TAD_GMD
    Frenetic Five 2           6.6     1.5     1.0    3 21, 22 F_TAD_GMD
    Friday Afternoon          6.3     1.4     1.2    1     13 F_INF_GMD
    Frobozz Magic Support     7.2     1.2     1.5    3        F_TAD_GMD
    Frozen                    5.5     0.7     1.3    1        F_INF_GMD
    Frustration               5.7     1.1     0.9    1     21 F_TAD_GMD
    Galatea                   7.0     1.9     0.5    2     22 F_INF_GMD
    Gateway                   8.6     1.4     1.8    6     11 C_I
    Gateway 2: Homeworld      9.3     1.8     1.9    3        C_I
    Gerbil Riot of '67        6.3     0.7     1.1    1        F_TAD_GMD
    Glowgrass                 6.9     1.4     1.4    4     13 F_INF_GMD
    Gnome Ranger              5.8     1.2     1.6    1        C_I
    Golden Fleece             6.0     1.0     1.1    1     21 F_TAD_GMD
    Golden Wombat of Dest     6.3     0.7     1.1    1     18 F_I_GMD
    Good Breakfast            4.9     0.9     1.2    2     14 F_INF_GMD
    Great Archeolog. Race     6.5     1.0     1.5    1      3 S20_TAD_GMD
    Guardians of Infinity     8.5             1.3    1      9 C_I
    Guild of Thieves          6.9     1.2     1.5    4     14 C_MAG
    Guilty Bastards           6.9     1.4     1.2    5     22 F_HUG_GMD
    Guitar...Immortal Bard    3.0     0.0     0.0    1        F_INF_GMD
    Gumshoe                   6.2     1.0     1.1    7      9 F_INF_GMD
    Halothane                 6.6     1.3     1.2    4     19 F_INF_GMD
    HeBGB Horror              5.7     0.9     1.1    2        F_ALAN_GMD
    Heist                     6.7     1.4     1.5    2        F_INF_GMD
    Hero, Inc.                6.8     1.0     1.5    2        F_TAD_GMD
    Hitchhiker's Guide        7.4     1.4     1.5   14      5 C_INF
    Hollywood Hijinx          6.5     0.9     1.6   11        C_INF
    Holy Grail                6.2     0.9     1.2    1     21 F_TAD_GMD
    Horror of Rylvania        7.2     1.4     1.4    5      1 F_TAD_GMD
    Horror30.zip              3.7     0.3     0.7    2      3 S20_I_GMD
    Human Resources Stori     0.9     0.0     0.1    2     17 F_INF_GMD
    Humbug                    6.9     1.6     1.4    3     11 F_I_GMD
    Hunter, In Darkness       7.6     0.9     1.5    5     19 F_INF_GMD
    I didn't know...yodel     4.0     0.7     1.0    5     17 F_I_GMD
    I-0: Jailbait on Inte     7.7     1.5     1.2   16     20 F_INF_GMD
    Ice Princess              7.5     1.4     1.6    2        A_INF_GMD
    In The End                4.9     0.6     0.0    2     10 F_INF_GMD
    In The Spotlight          3.2     0.2     1.0    2     17 F_INF_GMD
    Infidel                   6.9     0.2     1.4   13      1 C_INF
    Informatory               5.5     0.5     1.3    1     17 F_INF_GMD
    Ingrid's Back             5.6     1.6     1.2    1        C_I
    Inheritance               5.0     0.3     1.0    3     20 F_TAD_GMD
    Inhumane                  4.4     0.4     1.0    3  9, 20 F_INF_GMD
    Intruder                  6.7     1.3     1.1    4     20 F_INF_GMD
    Jacaranda Jim             7.9     0.9     1.0    2        F_GMD
    Jacks...Aces To Win       7.1     1.3     1.2    3     19 F_INF_GMD
    Jewel of Knowledge        6.3     1.2     1.1    3     18 F_INF_GMD
    Jeweled Arena             7.0     1.4     1.3    2        AGT_GMD
    Jigsaw                    8.1     1.5     1.6   17    8,9 F_INF_GMD
    Jinxter                   6.1     0.9     1.3    3        C_MAG
    John's Fire Witch         6.5     1.0     1.5    9  4, 12 S6_TADS_GMD
    Jouney Into Xanth         5.0     1.3     1.2    1      8 F_AGT_GMD
    Journey                   7.2     1.5     1.3    5      5 C_INF
    King Arthur's Night O     5.9     0.9     1.0    4     19 F_ALAN_GMD
    Kissing the Buddha's      8.0     1.8     1.4    5     10 F_TAD_GMD
    Klaustrophobia            6.4     1.1     1.3    6      1 S15_AGT_GMD
    Knight Orc                7.2     1.4     1.1    2     15 C_I
    L.U.D.I.T.E.              2.7     0.2     0.1    4        F_INF_GMD
    Lancelot                  6.9     1.4     1.2    1        C_I
    Land Beyond Picket Fe     4.8     1.2     1.2    1     10 F_I_GMD
    LASH                      8.5     1.4     1.0    2     21 F_INF_GMD
    Leather Goddesses         6.9     1.3     1.5   10      4 C_INF
    Leaves                    3.4     0.2     0.8    1     14 F_ALAN_GMD
    Legend Lives!             8.2     1.2     1.4    4      5 F_TAD_GMD
    Lesson of the Tortois     7.1     1.4     1.4    4     14 F_TAD_GMD
    Lethe Flow Phoenix        6.9     1.4     1.5    5      9 F_TAD_GMD
    Life on Beal Street       4.7     1.2     0.0    2        F_TAD_GMD
    Light: Shelby's Adden     7.5     1.5     1.3    6      9 S_TAD_GMD
    Lightiania                1.9     0.2     0.4    1        F_INF_GMD
    Lists and Lists           6.3     1.3     1.1    3     10 F_INF_GMD
    Little Blue Men           8.2     1.4     1.5   10     17 F_INF_GMD
    Lomalow                   4.6     1.0     0.6    3     19 F_INF_GMD
    Losing Your Grip          8.5     1.4     1.4    6      14S20_TAD_GMD
    Lost New York             7.9     1.4     1.4    4     20 S12_TAD_GMD
    Lost Spellmaker           6.9     1.5     1.3    3     13 F_INF_GMD
    Lunatix: Insanity Cir     5.6     1.2     1.0    3        F_I_GMD
    Lurking Horror            7.2     1.3     1.3   15    1,3 C_INF
    MacWesleyan / PC Univ     5.1     0.7     1.2    3        F_TAD_GMD
    Madame L'Estrange...      5.1     1.2     0.7    1     13 F_INF_GMD
    Magic Toyshop             5.2     1.1     1.1    5      7 F_INF_GMD
    Magic.zip                 4.5     0.5     0.5    1      3 S20_IBM_GMD
    Maiden of the Moonlig     6.4     1.3     1.5    2     10 F_TAD_GMD
    Matter of Time            1.4     0.3     1.4    1      14F_ALAN_GMD
    Mercy                     7.3     1.4     1.2    6     12 F_INF_GMD
    Meteor...Sherbet          7.8     1.4     1.5    7 10, 12 F_INF_GMD
    Mind Electric             5.2     0.6     0.9    4    7,8 F_INF_GMD
    Mind Forever Voyaging     8.2     1.3     0.9   12   5,15 C_INF
    Mindwheel                 8.5     1.6     1.5    1        C_I
    Mission                   6.0     1.2     1.4    1     21 F_TAD_GMD
    Moist                     6.8     1.4     1.2    4        F_TAD_GMD
    Moment of Hope            5.0     1.3     0.3    3     19 F_TAD_GMD
    Moonmist                  5.9     1.2     1.0   14      1 C_INF
    Mop & Murder              5.0     0.9     1.0    2      5 F_AGT_GMD
    Mother Loose              7.0     1.5     1.3    2     17 F_INF_GMD
    Mulldoon Legacy           7.4     1.2     1.8    1        F_INF_GMD
    Multidimen. Thief         5.6     0.5     1.3    6    2,9 S15_AGT_GMD
    Muse                      7.9     1.5     1.2    4     17 F_INF_GMD
    Music Education           3.7     1.0     0.7    3        F_INF_GMD
    Myopia                    6.1     1.3     0.6    2        F_AGT_GMD
    Mystery House             4.1     0.3     0.7    1        F_AP_GMD
    New Day                   6.6     1.4     1.1    4     13 F_INF_GMD
    Night At Computer Cen     5.2     1.0     1.0    2        F_INF_GMD
    Night at Museum Forev     4.2     0.3     1.0    4    7,8 F_TAD_GMD
    Night of... Bunnies       6.6     1.0     1.4    1        I_INF_GMD
    Nord and Bert             5.9     0.6     1.1    8      4 C_INF
    Not Just A Game           6.9     1.0     1.3    1     20 F_INF_GMD
    Not Just... Ballerina     5.3     0.8     0.9    3     20 F_INF_GMD
    Obscene...Aardvarkbar     3.2     0.6     0.6    1        F_TAD_GMD
    Odieus...Flingshot        3.3     0.4     0.7    2      5 F_INF_GMD
    Of Forms Unknown          4.5     0.7     0.5    1     10 F_INF_GMD
    Offensive Probing         4.2     0.6     0.9    1        F_INF_GMD
    On The Farm               6.5     1.6     1.2    2     19 F_TAD_GMD
    Once and Future           6.9     1.6     1.5    2     16 C30_TAD_CMP
    One That Got Away         6.4     1.4     1.1    7    7,8 F_TAD_GMD
    Only After Dark           4.6     0.8     0.6    4        F_INF_GMD
    Oo-Topos                  5.7     0.2     1.0    1      9 C_AP_I_64
    Outsided                  2.5     0.7     0.2    2        F_INF_GMD
    Pass the Banana           2.9     0.8     0.5    3     19 F_INF_GMD
    Path to Fortune           6.6     1.5     0.9    3      9 S_INF_GMD
    Pawn                      6.3     1.1     1.3    2     12 C_MAG
    Perilous Magic            4.9     0.9     1.1    1     21 F_INF_GMD
    Perseus & Andromeda       3.4     0.3     1.0    1        64_INF_GMD
    Persistence of Memory     6.2     1.2     1.1    1     17 F_HUG_GMD
    Phlegm                    5.2     1.2     1.0    2     10 F_INF_GMD
    Photopia                  7.5     1.5     0.6   19     17 F_INF_GMD
    Phred Phontious...Piz     5.2     0.9     1.3    2     13 F_INF_GMD
    Piece of Mind             6.3     1.3     1.4    1     10 F_INF_GMD
    Pintown                   1.3     0.3     0.2    1        F_INF_GMD
    Planetfall                7.2     1.6     1.4   12      4 C_INF
    Plant                     7.3     1.2     1.5    4     17 F_TAD_GMD
    Plundered Hearts          7.3     1.4     1.2    8      4 C_INF
    Poor Zefron's Almanac     5.6     1.0     1.3    3     13 F_TAD_GMD
    Portal                    7.0     1.8     0.0    2        C_I_A_AP_64
    Purple                    5.6     0.9     1.0    1     17 F_INF_GMD
    Pyramids of Mars          6.0     1.2     1.2    1        AGT_GMD
    Quarterstaff              6.1     1.3     0.6    1      9 C_M
    Ralph                     7.1     1.6     1.2    3     10 F_INF_GMD
    Rematch                   7.9     1.5     1.6    1     22 F_TAD_GMD
    Remembrance               2.7     0.8     0.2    3        F_GMD
    Reruns                    5.2     1.2     1.2    1        AGT_GMD
    Research Dig              4.8     1.1     0.8    2     17 F_INF_GMD
    Reverberations            5.6     1.3     1.1    1     10 F_INF_GMD
    Ritual of Purificatio     7.0     1.6     1.1    4     17 F_GMD
    Sanity Claus              7.5     0.3     0.6    2      1 S10_AGT_GMD
    Save Princeton            5.6     1.0     1.3    5      8 S10_TAD_GMD
    Scapeghost                8.1     1.7     1.5    1      6 C_I
    Sea Of Night              5.7     1.3     1.1    2        F_TAD_GMD
    Seastalker                5.1     1.1     0.8   10      4 C_INF
    Shades of Grey            7.8     1.3     1.3    6   2, 8 F_AGT_GMD
    Sherlock                  7.0     1.3     1.4    5      4 C_INF
    She's Got a Thing...S     7.0     1.7     1.6    3     13 F_INF_GMD
    Shogun                    7.0     1.2     0.6    2      4 C_INF
    Shrapnel                  6.8     1.3     0.5    5     20 F_INF_GMD
    Simple Theft              5.8     1.3     0.8    1     20 F_TAD_GMD
    Sins against Mimesis      5.5     1.0     1.2    3     13 F_INF_GMD
    Sir Ramic... Gorilla      6.0     1.2     1.2    2      6 F_AGT_GMD
    Six Stories               6.3     1.0     1.2    4     19 F_TAD_GMD
    Skyranch                  2.8     0.5     0.7    1     20 F_I_GMD
    Small World               6.2     1.3     1.1    3     10 F_TAD_GMD
    So Far                    8.0     1.2     1.5   11     12 F_INF_GMD
    Sorcerer                  7.2     0.6     1.6    7   2,15 C_INF
    Sound of... Clapping      7.0     1.2     1.3    7      5 F_ADVSYS_GMD
    South American Trek       0.9     0.2     0.5    1      5 F_IBM_GMD
    Space Aliens...Cardig     1.5     0.4     0.3    6   3, 4 S60_AGT_GMD
    Space under Window        7.2     0.8     0.4    5     12 F_INF_GMD
    Spacestation              5.6     0.7     1.1    1        F_INF_GMD
    Spellbreaker              8.5     1.2     1.8    8   2,15 C_INF
    Spellcasting 101          6.7     1.0     1.3    2        C_I
    Spellcasting 201          7.8     1.6     1.7    2        C_I
    Spellcasting 301          6.0     1.2     1.2    2        C_I
    Spider and Web            8.4     1.6     1.7   15      14F_INF_GMD
    SpiritWrak                6.7     1.2     1.3    6     22 F_INF_GMD
    Spodgeville...Wossnam     4.3     0.7     1.2    2        F_INF_GMD
    Spur                      7.1     1.3     1.1    2      9 F_HUG_GMD
    Spyder and Jeb            6.2     1.1     1.4    1        F_TAD_GMD
    Starcross                 6.6     1.0     1.2    7      1 C_INF
    Stargazer                 5.4     1.1     1.1    1        F_INF_GMD
    Stationfall               7.7     1.7     1.6    6      5 C_INF
    Statuette                 3.7     0.0     0.1    1        F_INF_GMD
    Stiffy                    0.6     0.0     0.0    1        F_INF_GMD
    Stiffy - MiSTing          4.7     1.1     0.4    5        F_INF_GMD
    Stone Cell                6.0     1.1     1.0    3     19 F_TAD_GMD
    Strangers In The Nigh     3.2     0.7     0.6    2        F_TAD_GMD
    Sunset Over Savannah      8.7     1.7     1.4    6     13 F_TAD_GMD
    Suspect                   6.0     1.2     1.1    7      4 C_INF
    Suspended                 7.5     1.5     1.4    7      8 C_INF
    Sylenius Mysterium        4.7     1.2     1.1    1     13 F_INF_GMD
    Symetry                   1.1     0.1     0.1    2        F_INF_GMD
    Tapestry                  7.1     1.4     0.9    5 10, 14 F_INF_GMD
    Tempest                   5.3     1.4     0.6    3     13 F_INF_GMD
    Temple of the Orc Mag     4.5     0.1     0.8    2        F_TAD_GMD
    Theatre                   6.9     1.1     1.4   12      6 F_INF_GMD
    Thorfinn's Realm          3.5     0.5     0.7    2        F_INF_GMD
    Time: All Things...       3.9     1.2     0.9    2 11, 12 F_INF_GMD
    TimeQuest                 8.0     1.2     1.6    4        C_I
    TimeSquared               4.3     1.1     1.1    1        F_AGT_GMD
    Toonesia                  5.8     1.1     1.1    6  7, 21 F_TAD_GMD
    Tossed into Space         3.9     0.2     0.6    1      4 F_AGT_GMD
    Town Dragon               3.9     0.8     0.3    2 14, 22 F_INF_GMD
    Trapped...Dilly           5.1     0.1     1.1    2     17 F_INF_GMD
    Travels in Land of Er     6.1     1.2     1.5    2     14 F_INF_GMD
    Trinity                   8.7     1.4     1.7   16    1,2 C_INF
    Tryst of Fate             7.1     1.4     1.3    1     11 F_INF_GMD
    Tube Trouble              4.2     0.8     0.7    2      8 F_INF_GMD
    Tyler's Great Cube Ga     5.8     0.0     1.7    1        S_TAD_GMD
    Uncle Zebulon's Will      7.3     1.0     1.5   12      8 F_TAD_GMD
    Underoos That Ate NY      4.5     0.6     0.8    2        F_TAD_INF_GMD
    Undertow                  5.4     1.3     0.9    3      8 F_TAD_GMD
    Undo                      2.9     0.5     0.7    4      7 F_TAD_GMD
    Unholy Grail              6.0     1.2     1.2    1     13 F_I_GMD
    Unnkulian One-Half        6.7     1.2     1.5    9      1 F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Unventure 1     6.9     1.2     1.5    8    1,2 F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Unventure 2     7.2     1.2     1.5    5      1 F_TAD_GMD
    Unnkulian Zero            8.4     0.7     0.8    21,12,14 F_TAD_GMD
    Varicella                 8.2     1.6     1.5    9     18 F_INF_GMD
    Veritas                   6.6     1.3     1.4    4        S10_TAD_GMD
    Vindaloo                  2.9     0.0     0.4    1        F_INF_GMD
    VirtuaTech                6.1     0.0     1.2    1        F_INF_GMD
    Water Bird                5.0     1.1     0.8    1        F_TAD_GMD
    Waystation                5.5     0.7     1.0    4      9 F_TAD_GMD
    Wearing the Claw          6.6     1.2     1.2    5 10, 18 F_INF_GMD
    Wedding                   7.4     1.6     1.3    3     12 F_INF_GMD
    Where Evil Dwells         5.1     0.8     1.1    1        F_INF_GMD
    Winchester's Nightmar     6.9     1.5     0.5    1     22 F_INF_GMD
    Winter Wonderland         7.6     1.3     1.2    7     19 F_INF_GMD
    Wishbringer               7.4     1.3     1.3   13    5,6 C_INF
    Witness                   6.5     1.5     1.1    9  1,3,9 C_INF
    Wonderland                5.4     1.3     0.9    2        C_MAG
    World                     6.5     0.6     1.3    2      4 F_I_ETC_GMD
    Worlds Apart              7.6     1.7     1.4    8     21 F_TAD_GMD
    Your Choice               5.5     0.0     1.1    1        F_TAD_GMD
    Zanfar                    2.6     0.2     0.4    1      8 F_AGT_GMD
    Zero Sum Game             7.2     1.5     1.5    3     13 F_INF_GMD
    Zombie!                   5.2     1.2     1.1    2     13 F_TAD_GMD
    Zork 0                    6.3     1.0     1.5   10      14C_INF
    Zork 1                    6.1     0.8     1.4   21  1, 12 C_INF
    Zork 2                    6.5     1.0     1.5   12  1, 12 C_INF
    Zork 3                    6.5     0.9     1.4    8  1, 12 C_INF
    Zork Undisc. Undergr.     6.0     0.9     1.1    2      14F_INF_GMD
    Zork: A Troll's Eye V     4.4     0.6     0.1    3     14 F_INF_GMD
    Zuni Doll                 4.0     0.6     0.9    2     14 F_INF_GMD

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

    The Top Ten:

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

    Well, the SPAG scoreboard has received 120 more votes since last issue,
    and far and away the biggest surprise in this issue's top 10 list is the
    sudden and amazingly strong showing by a couple of early 90's games
    produced by Legend Entertainment: Gateway and Gateway 2: Homeworld. Both
    of these games are based on Frederik Pohl's classic Heechee Saga, a
    series of sf novels that began with a novel called "Gateway," about
    humanity's discovery of a station full of spaceships left by a
    mysterious race called the Heechee. Legend's Gateway games were one of
    the best adaptations of previously extant source material into IF form,
    and for some reason SPAG readers have spontaneously decided to recognize
    that achievement. Perhaps all members of the Pohl fan club recently
    subscribed en masse?

    1.  Gateway 2: Homeworld  9.3   3 votes
    2.  Sunset over Savannah  8.7   6 votes
    3.  Trinity               8.7   16 votes
    4.  Anchorhead            8.7   23 votes
    5.  Babel                 8.7   8 votes
    6.  Gateway               8.6   6 votes
    7.  Losing Your Grip      8.5   6 votes
    8.  Spellbreaker          8.5   8 votes
    9.  Spider and Web        8.4   15 votes
    10. Christminster         8.2   16 votes

    As always, please remember that the scoreboard is only as good as the
    contributions it receives. To make your mark on this vast morass of
    statistics, rate some games on our website
    (http://www.sparkynet.com/spag). You can also, if you like, send ratings
    directly to me at obrian SP@G colorado.edu. Instructions for how the rating
    system works are in the SPAG FAQ, available from GMD and our website.
    Please read the FAQ before submitting scores, so that you understand how
    the scoring system works. After that, submit away!

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
     ___. .___    _    ___.     ___.
    /  _| |   \  / \  / ._|    /  _|
    \  \  | o_/ |   | | |_.    \  \
    .\  \ | |   | o | | | |    .\  \
    |___/ |_|   |_|_| \___|    |___/ PECIFICS

    SPAG Specifics is a small section of SPAG dedicated to providing in-
    depth critical analysis of IF games, spoilers most emphatically
    included.

    WARNING! SPOILERS BELOW FOR THE FOLLOWING GAME:

    Spider & Web

    PROCEED NO FURTHER UNLESS YOU HAVE PLAYED THIS GAME!

    THIS IS NOT A TEST! GENUINE SPOILERS TO FOLLOW!

    LAST CHANCE TO AVOID SPOILAGE!

    From: Adrian Chung

    NAME: Spider and Web
    AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin
    E-MAIL: erkyrath SP@G netcom.com
    DATE: 1997-8
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GMD)
    URL: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/infocom/Tangle.z5
    VERSION: Release 4

    This is not a review. I'm writing this for SPAG Specifics, a section
    inspired by IF authors' expressed need for IF *criticism*. There are
    already many excellent reviews of S&W (see SPAG 14 and XYZZYNews 16).
    Instead, I shall give a personalized critique of why this game worked
    for me, with the hope that by its deconstruction, the many talented IF
    authors out there may build upon its successes and avoid any of the
    potential pitfalls.

    I managed to complete S&W without the aid of a walk-through. This is
    quite an accomplishment when you consider that, prior to 1999, the last
    time I played an adventure game the Cold War was still on. Having a bad
    Net connection probably helped to motivate my perseverance. With
    broadband, downloading a walk-through would be all too tempting. In
    fact, I'm of the opinion that a walk-through, any walk-through, would
    ruin the experience entirely. So much so, that when recommending this
    game to a friend, I'd implore the player ask me for hints when stuck.

    Starting the story with a blatant locked door puzzle leads one to
    believe that S&W is a pretty standard get-X-to-open-Y adventure. How
    many games begin with a locked or boarded up door in the very first
    location? The premise of an ongoing interrogation is revealed to the
    player a few turns later, however. There is a recent trend in IF to mask
    the underlying game concept in more classic adventure game structures
    (treasure hunts, trollfests, amnesiac walking up, etc.); the true nature
    being revealed only after the PC has amassed much wealth and slashed
    several creatures along the way. The risk is that seasoned IF players
    will conclude that there is nothing original to be seen and retire
    early. S&W avoids this.

    The use of IF interaction to depict an interrogation is quite original.
    In absence of this plot device, one would have to implement the entire
    exchange via an ASK/TELL interface. In contrast, using a forced
    flashback sequence liberates the player and avoids the problems of the
    one-room adventure. The story does not go into details of the technology
    used, but it is assumed that most players would by now be familiar with
    the various virtual reality concepts that often feature in sci-fi. One
    fills in the blanks as necessary. This vagueness plays a role in how
    different players eventually solved the award-winning "escape from
    chair" puzzle. More on that later.

    The mechanics of the interrogation, as well as the motivations of the
    protagonist character(PC), are introduced in stages. One of my pet
    peeves in IF is the tediously uninteractive infodump. In S&W, the locked
    door puzzle is given a fresh face, while at the same time the player
    familiarizes oneself with the main premise in an incremental manner. One
    learns the PC is a spy, has been caught, is being interrogated by the
    enemy, originally possessed a lockpick and possibly other gadgets to aid
    in the mission, and that most if not all his equipment has been
    confiscated. All this over the period of several turns that involve a
    variety of actions from the player. This story is well paced.

    Since the VR-sim style is adopted for interrogation, the need for a
    complicated ASK/TELL interface is mitigated. Almost all dialogue by the
    main NPC is designed to accommodate this. Reduction of one's speech to
    single words is further reinforced by the voice activated equipment in
    one's inventory. This style risks conditioning players to believe that
    any and all dialogue with the interrogator is completely irrelevant. I
    often just waited through these "interludes". I later found that I was
    mistaken.

    Once in the building the inventory suddenly overflows with all manner of
    secret agent gadgetry. I was overwhelmed at this point because huge
    inventories imply a large combinatoric solution space. I also was under
    the mistaken impression that there was some sort of time pressure at
    this point. In the previous scenes the PC's captor grew impatient with
    my lack of progress all too easily, and I naturally assumed the same
    rules would apply throughout. In fact, the interrogation had now adopted
    "Groundhog Day" rules -- repeat the current scene until you carry out
    what is required, with hints courtesy the PC's captor. My initial panic
    had been subdued but only after playing around with the equipment. The
    sudden change of pace could have been softened more, I feel.

    There are many clues that litter the game, many revealed only through
    non-fatal mistakes. S&W encourages exploration and experimentation,
    which is good. Many relevant events occur at the "Corner At Doors". The
    treasure seeking players would surely try collecting every item found
    lying around. An inviting metal wrench satisfies this need, and helps
    drive home the point about the metal detectors not allowing weaponry
    deeper into the building.

    My personal game play was influenced by watching too many episodes of
    the original Mission: Impossible series (that classic 70's Cold War TV
    show that often had Greg Morris' character crawling around in
    ventilation ducts). The gap in the ceiling prompted me to attempt
    crawling around up there with the minilamp. Enough hanging around
    yielded:

      Your fingertips ache dully. And a nearby ventilator grille seems to
      be hissing directly into your ear.

    and later, in a different font:

      The ventilator grille isn't important.

    The font helped differentiate this message from the standard "That's
    just scenery." type library message. I'm sure that many other players
    might have missed these important clues. It is a pity that the M:I
    franchise has been corrupted by Hollywood.

    In the following scene the second key hint is easier to encounter:

      The metal door to the north isn't important.

    again in a different font. This reliance on font differentiation, to
    highlight a crucial piece of information, poses an interesting the
    question: how does one's choice of Z-interpreter client influence game
    play? If S&W were played on a client of very limited text formatting
    ability, would the player have dismissed these hints? Hard to say, but
    the author has made sure that none of the innocent library responses in
    any way resemble "The ... isn't important.".

    The scene with the lab door serves two roles:

      * to give the player more opportunities to play with the gadgets,
        especially the acid pack and blast tab. The player should now
        realize that the blast tab would have breached the door yet
        didn't.

      * to give the player further doubts as to what was really going on.
        The interrogator even helps out here, but I suspect that many
        players, including myself, did not explore the effect of answering
        the interrogator unwisely.

    The PC shows that his blast tab would blow open the lab door. The
    interrogator reveals and inquires why this sequence of events did not
    occur. Answering, "No. Yes.", tips off the enemy and leads to an instant
    death. The clue here is blatant but most players would have avoided it.
    (I am only encountering it on the second play through.)

    The "Security Annex" scene is a point about which the whole game pivots.
    The previous scenes all prepare the way for it in more ways than one. If
    the incident with the lab door fails to ignite one's curiosity, then
    experiences here will surely make up for it. I am not in the habit of
    keeping multiple saved games, yet sufficient subtle hints kept me,
    perhaps subconsciously, from overwriting my snapshots beyond this point.
    Among the clues:

      * Entering the "Interrogation Chamber" and confirming this fact with
        the captor.  An instant death that is easily UNDOable.  Denying
        the fact also reveals limitations of the interrogator and his
        technology, prompting the player to question his assumptions
        regarding the trustworthiness of the narrative.

      * Examining the pedestal in the "Interrogation Chamber"

      * Lots of metal around (locker, cabinets, and chair) for
        experimenting with the acid pack.

      * Multiple solutions for getting by the scan web, though the timer
        is difficult enough to master that most players would use the
        scrambler with the voice module.  Familiarity with this important
        piece of equipment is thus ensured.

      * Multiple rooms to visit. One room apparently just a red herring,
        at the very least, and an interesting diversion, at the very
        most. Indeed the term "red herring" takes on a new meaning in this
        game.  Which room was really the red herring and to whom?

    I consider this part of the game the most important area to explore
    properly. If a first time player keeps getting killed in the chair and
    asks me for the solution, I'd first inquire how this scene was played
    out. A walk-through would just spoil it. Had I resorted to a
    walk-through to get out of the chair, I would have skipped the "Security
    Annex" part and read only the solution relevant to the immediate
    problem, completely missing out on the whole point.

    Subsequent actions at the "Dead End" bring the ventilation grilles to
    the attention of all concerned, especially to the player who might have
    missed this detail during the first encounter at the "Corner At Doors".
    The final clue is the actual inventory of tools found in the vent. The
    passing of time is carefully implemented to allow careful examination of
    contents on the desk, but the PC has just one chance to speak.

    On first play, I managed to solve the chair puzzle with only a fraction
    of all the clues and hints mentioned in this article. The author has
    cleverly accounted for many different ways one might infer the solution.
    I did have to replay the "Security Annex" scene to pick up sufficient
    clues. The "Eureka!" feeling that swept over me was truly unparalleled.
    A common complaint made by players on raif is that the ventilation
    grilles should have been made more obvious. My enumeration of most of
    the in-game hints has convinced me that this is unnecessary. The grilles
    are revealed on examination of the walls though this is implied detail.

    The game rules change after effecting the escape. One must now
    reconstruct a new sequence of events using all the evidence at hand:

      * what the interrogator thought he knew of the PC's actions
      * "The ... isn't important." messages
      * the current state of the PC's tools

    The last point is further exploited to lend credibility to the story.
    Spy gadgetry that works perfectly as seen in Hollywood films is an
    ill-afforded luxury. The timer fails. The remote detonator malfunctions.
    All plausible occurrences that support the underlying plot twist.
    Another pet peeve I have with major non-linear plot twists is that they
    must not overextend credibility. I've seen this fail all too often in
    movies (e.g. "The Game"). In S&W the plot is completely plausible:

    The PC is aware that waltzing unarmed into a well guarded laboratory is
    certain to fail, but cannot get his gun past the metal detectors. He
    hides it in a vent by the hole in the ceiling, planning to retrieve it
    once he's disabled the scan webs via remotely detonated explosive.
    Things start to go wrong. He loses hold of his lockpick when planting
    the blast tab. The PC must hide inside the Wiring Closet when the guards
    retrieve the pick outside. Change of plan: heads for Security Annex to
    find something that might help to open the lab door. Uses the scrambler
    with timer to search the adjacent rooms, planting the acid tab as a
    precaution. The timer fails before entering the office, and the voice
    module lies irretrievable in the Interrogation Chamber. He attempts to
    cut the power but the transmitter fails also. Tries to make an escape
    and is caught at the Dead End.

    All very consistent. The post-escape text in S&W includes vestiges of
    events that aid in this reconstruction:

       You slide hastily through the closing door. This time, you are
       careful to keep a firm grip on your lockpick.

    The reward for being so clever? A tension-filled shoot out and access to
    the lab -- the end game. I have one minor quibble regarding the well
    thought out, superbly designed, tightly integrated chair-escape puzzle
    -- the end game seems an anticlimax in comparison. The lab puzzle is
    somewhat standard: fiddle with unfamiliar machinery and get it to work.
    Even the actions of the guards are dumbed down; some of the dialogue is
    more in line with the clownish antagonists in "Home Alone" movies -- at
    least that's the impression that I got.

      "I bet their equipment never fails just when it's needed,"

    Confirmation at least that equipment malfunctions are unbiased.

    The original innovations in S&W open up several avenues of exploration
    by future works of IF:

      * The use of deceptive, misleading or ambiguous narratives to set up
        a non-linear turn of events.  As mentioned previously, there is a
        recent trend in this area. (To mention examples here would yield
        spoilers beyond the scope of this article.) S&W is unique in that the
        reason for the deception is not contrived, but intertwined in the
        story.  The narrative is, in effect, being eavesdropped with full
        knowledge of PC and player -- a tapped conversation, that lies.

      * The already ill defined relationship between PC and player is
        further muddied, defying all attempts of classification.  The PC
        seems to know more than the player.

      * Use of IF interaction in place of ASK/TELL for long periods of
        questioning/interrogation.  One possible avenue of experimentation is
        to use this gimmick in genres that are traditionally unfriendly to the
        IF format.  Questioning witnesses in a court room drama, or prolonged
        inquiries in an Agatha Christie style mystery could, in theory, be
        tackled this way.

    The basic ingredients of adventure games should not be downplayed
    however:

      * inclusion of in-game hints tied to the story

      * allowing the player to explore and learn from mistakes (even fatal
        ones)

      * proper pacing of new information

      * ordering newly acquired information so that particularly hard
        puzzles are not forced upon the player prematurely.

    Even at this very basic level S&W excels.

    In the HELP message the author writes "In a certain sense, this is my
    first conventional game." "Conventional" is perhaps one of the last
    adjectives that came to my mind on completing S&W. An ingeniously
    designed masterpiece. A landmark game whose innovations raise the bar
    for all authors of IF. It will be difficult to equal, and a tough
    challenge to surpass.

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